Really tried, but stopped reading Drndic's novel EEG

I really did try to read the late Croatian writer Dasa Drndic's last novel, EEG (2016) but after two days of desultory reading through the first 100 or so pp I just can't give this novel any more of my time and attention. Yes, it's unconventional - it seems at times to be a straightforward narrative about a man's recollection of various episodes in his peripatetic life - but there are so many digressions (e.g., a long chapter detailing the many attempts by Nazi and Soviet agents on the lives of famous chess players) and so little attempt to present the back story in any coherent and consistent manner that this book demands more than I'm willing (able) to give it. It's a novel that flaunts its own significance: DD admirably documents that horrors of the 20th and early 21st century in Europe, in particular in her war-torn region in the former Yugoslavia. Reading these accounts of barbarity, fascism, ethnic cleansing, anti-Semitism, political purges feels like a journey through a chamber of horrors; noble goals - yet why is this novel so off-putting? We don't (at least through the first 1/4th) identify or even understand any of the characters; compare this, for example, to the great account of the horrors of WWII, All for Nothing, that presents its frightening information through a great narrative about a family facing the advance of Russian troops near the end of the war. Maybe it's not fair to judge this novel by what it isn't, but DD leaves herself open to that charge by denigrating the work of some of her peers, notably KO Knausgaard: Why write a book (let alone 6 volumes) about one's own life?, the narrator asks. Why not just keep a diary? Well, maybe so, but at least what KOK writes is accessible, unlike this novel that poses narrative difficulties and interminable digressions (to be fair, KOK did the same in his disappointing 6th volume, when his own story seemed to get away from himself). News flash: Readers like plot and character, even within the scope of experimental novels and novels on painful, disconcerting topics. Call me a philistine, but good luck to anyone who tries to read EEG (I have no idea about the title, btw.)