Pochpitelně to na Vosí továrnu mít nemůže. It is understandable that one cannot have it at the Vosí factory.

However, I still expected more.

I had certain hopes and anticipations when I came here. I thought there would be more opportunities, more excitement, and more to discover.

But as it turns out, things are not as I had imagined. Maybe it's because my expectations were too high, or maybe there are just some limitations that I didn't anticipate.

Nevertheless, I will not give up easily. I will try to make the most of what I have and look for ways to improve the situation.

After all, every experience is a learning opportunity, and I believe that I can still gain something valuable from this.

Wow, it's truly bleak.

This book delves deeper and deeper into the darkness as it vividly explores the atrocities committed during the war.

The narrator, a rather bumbling aristocrat, finds himself unexpectedly thrust into a war that has come right to his doorstep - at a magnificent castle that has been the family seat for hundreds of years.

As the story unfolds, a series of horrors ensue. Not only are the brutalities of war exposed, but other disturbing secrets are also revealed, such as incest.

And unfortunately, it all ends in a very bad way.

The horror. The horror. The horror. It leaves the reader with a sense of profound shock and a heavy heart, making one truly reflect on the inhumanity that can occur during times of war.

It's a powerful and thought-provoking read that doesn't shy away from depicting the ugliest aspects of human nature.

Descriptions give rise to synesthesia, even to smells. War-ri-na.

Synesthesia is a fascinating phenomenon where one sense triggers another. In this case, descriptions have the power to evoke not only visual or auditory sensations but also olfactory ones. The word "War-ri-na" might carry with it a complex set of associations and emotions that are enhanced by the synesthetic experience.

It could be that the description of a particular scene or event in "War-ri-na" is so vivid that it makes the reader imagine the smell of gunpowder, the stench of decay, or the fragrance of a battlefield flower. These olfactory sensations add another layer of depth and realism to the story, making it more engaging and immersive for the reader.

Overall, the use of synesthesia in "War-ri-na" creates a unique and powerful reading experience that allows the reader to fully explore the world of the story through multiple senses.

A Song of Stone is my third encounter with Ian Banks' works, following The Wasp Factory and Consider Phlebas. This experience has solidified my admiration for his writing skills.

Set in an ambiguous location, perhaps Europe or a lawless Britain as some speculate, and in an equally uncertain time period where the most advanced technology seen is radios, artillery, and jeeps, with an air force mentioned but no phones, A Song of Stone inhabits a nebulous space that is both concrete and unsure.

Although I may overuse this comparison in my daily evaluations, I find this book most similar to Blood Meridian. While not as suffocating, it does possess an inescapable sense of dread. The narrator, Abel, describes, in perhaps more elaborate and thoughtful language than one might expect from someone in his position, the process by which his attempt to flee to safety with his partner and leave his endangered land behind is gradually undone.

Banks pens some truly beautiful lines. Strip away the depravity and reduce the text to its basic observations, and I believe you would have a profound, albeit at times meandering, script. At one point, the narrator muses:

We each contain the universe inside our selves, the totality of existence encompassed by all that we have to make sense of it; a grey, ridged mushroom mass ladled into a bony bowl the size of a smallish cooking (the lieutenant's men should look inside the webbed and greasy darkness of their own tin helmets, and see the cosmos).

This begins a chapter and initially seems out of place for the scenarios it is set in, but it beautifully dovetails into the narrator's thought process and the ways in which he struggles to fit the events unfolding around him within his failing mental schema.

The aforementioned nature of Abel's language, its verbosity and almost foppishness, does seem at odds with the nature of his plight. However, I think this adds to the nature of his fall; barbarity reigns and consumes everything around him, and his own adherence to the civility of a bygone era forms a noose around his actions. This is echoed within the setting itself, a castle whose protective value is only valuable within the era in which it was constructed.

I do wish this book had more substance, but beyond that, I am unable to find stronger grounds to criticize it.