The challenge of reading A Brief History of Seven Killings

Marlon James's novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), which won the Man Booker Prize, is one of those daunting books that may be great but demand an almost unreasonable degree of patience and persistence from all readers. Yes, there probably are seven killings and yes this is their history - but it's not brief! I'm amazed that I literally know no one who has read this novel; usually Booker Prize winners pop up on all sorts of reading lists and comments. Sometimes the demand on the readers is too much and though we may be missing out on great literature we have to put that in the balance against the required commitment and attention (think Gravity's Rainbow, or even Finnegans Wake): Do I really want to spend the next month, at least, reading nothing but this novel? Can't answer that yet, and I will give it at least one more day and maybe will settle down w/ this novel for the long run. So far, it's a 680-page - and these are large pages w/ relatively small point size - with a novel that narrative that takes place in three slots of time, the first being 195 or so, in Jamaica, with the story told by a large number of narrators, each giving a first-person account of events - all of which (so far, about 60 pp. in concern various gangster activities and police brutality loosely arranged around a planned assassination of The Singer as he is called - obviously it's Bob Marley. On the plus side, each of these narrative segments is sharply detailed and feels like authentic language, but on the minus side some of the language is obscure to non-Jamaican readers, the narrators sound alike, and up to this point it's difficult to piece together the overall story line without any type of narrative guidance from a third-person narrator or even an omniscient first person. Sometimes novels like this take shape in our minds gradually, and I'm willing to see if that happens here but so far it's rough going, even as it's obvious that James is a smart and talented and ambitious writer.