Why I said so long to Solo

So I'm saying so long to "Solo," Rana Dasgupta's ambitious debut novel, and my thoughts are unchanged from yesterday's post, very much impressed with Dasgupta's intelligence, the range of his knowledge (from European history to chemistry to musical composition) and his scope, as this novel is a capsule version of 100 years of Bulgarian (!) history as experienced by one man, nearing 100, blind, sitting in his small apartment and recollecting his life. All very impressive, but sad to say it's a novel without character development and without a plot. A plot is more than a series of things that happen, and a character is more than a person who lives through or endures a series of experiences. Ulrich, the centurion who is the central character in Solo, doesn't change or grow, he just endures. This reminds me in some ways of Forrest Gump and also of Benjamin Button (the movies; I never read Gump), using a character as a lens through which to view history or the history of a country, but note that in each of those there was at least a gimmick to keep you attuned to the character - the character evolves (or in the case of Button, devolves) through the course of the work. I'm sorry, I feel bad about my lack of enthusiasm for Solo, which has gotten glowing reviews and won at least one significant prize - I'm the outlier here, but I'm not going to press on - got to the end of the first section, of "movement," as Disgupta calls it and saw that the 2nd part takes on a completely new character, and maybe that gives Solo a whole new perspective that I missed, but I'll leave that to others to determine.