Nero and Sporus

I’ll be honest: *Nero and Sporus* is not for the faint of heart—or the patient. Somtow’s prose is dense, drenched in classical allusions and sensory overload, and the virtual narration doesn’t soften the blow. There’s no hand-holding here; you’re dropped into a world where incest, arson, and artistic rapture are treated with the same weight as a senator’s political maneuvering. The audiobook’s production is stark—no music, no ambient noise, just the AI’s measured cadence, which somehow makes the horror feel more *documentary* than dramatic. It’s a bold choice, and it works… mostly. At times, I wished for a human narrator who could lean into the campier moments (and there *are* campy moments) with a wink, but the flat delivery ultimately serves the novel’s theme: history doesn’t care about your comfort. The story’s structure is its own kind of spectacle. Somtow fractures time like a mosaic, jumping between Nero’s reign and the doomed love story of Sporus, his castrated boy-bride. The transitions can be jarring, but they mirror the disorientation of living in a world where art and atrocity are indistinguishable. My biggest critique? The middle act drags—deliberately, I think, to mimic the suffocating weight of imperial excess, but it tests endurance. Yet when it lands, it *lands*: the scene where Nero sings as Rome burns is less a historical moment than a surrealist nightmare, and the audiobook’s unadorned presentation makes it haunt you long after. This isn’t a ‘fun’ listen, but it’s a *memorable* one—like witnessing a car crash painted by Caravaggio.