Why I'm giving up on The Sleepwalkers

Sorry but I'll be saying good-bye soon to Hermann Bloch's The Sleepwalkers (19380, and readers of these posts will see an all-too-familiar arc, as I started this book with great enthusiasm - it had all the qualities I usually like from the superficial (an handsome vintage international edition) to the name-checks (comparisons with Mann, Musil, and Joyce, recommended by astute fellow blogger Ted Gioia), to the essential (literary fiction, suitably obscure, suitably antique - thought it would be a real discovery) and in fact the book started off uite well, with a lot of promise, some really good passages, quirky characters, odd observations and actions, homages to literary forebears, with added advantage that this is an artifact from a vital and terrifying period of world history - prewar Germany - but honest 250 pages into this dense book the many strands are not really pulling together nor in fact are they spreading out - in other words, a vast book like this can either be a unified vision with many facets (e.g., Ulysses) or a vast canvas on which an entire society is portrayed (Canterbury Tales, Underworld, Gravity's Rainbow) - but what I'm getting here is one plot element after another, many of them reasonably intriguing enough but it's a long way to go with no sense of an ending - I'm now at a point where, at last, the protagonist of part 2, Esch, is developing an animosity toward the owner of the company he just quit, whom we know to be one of the characters in book one - but there is no conflict between these two characters, in fact we haven't even seen them face to face and we haven't seen the factory owner since part 1 - in other words, the plot here is a rambling affair with many digressions. That would be OK if there were other qualities to compensate - and there may be, for some readers - Bloch gives us some of his unique observations of society along the way - for example, the discussion of the importance to society and commerce of the split panties in the women's wrestling match - the bare flesh they show for a moment is the source of the impresario's fortune; he also has some memorably weird and disquieting descriptions of sex - in fact, the section I've just finished, when Esch travels with an older woman to visit a wine auction and the end up as lovers is a great example, a sexual encounter that is so devoid of feeling and beauty: Bloch was ahead of his time in his openness about sexuality - something we don't seen in his contemporary modernists Mann, Proust, et al. - but his sex scenes in Sleepwalkers are nonsensual: the odd description of a woman's face as a landscape, in part 1, for example. There's material in this long book for a great novel, but I don't think this is one and I don't the gains are worth the pains of the journey.