Shikasta is one of the few books I couldn't decide whether I liked it or not for the most of the time I spend reading it. In a year when I had already read 50+ books, it took me more than a whole month to finish it and I caught myself feeling reluctant to keep reading it quite a few times. Only by the time I reached it's last 100 pages or so, I realized I was thinking more and more about it -in more than one way in fact.

It's definitively a difficult book; by writing it, Lessing set a really challenging task: a) to tell human history on Earth by the perspective of an alien civilization with ambiguous intentions, and b) to do this by giving us fragmenta of this history supposedly written by aliens, humans and aliens in human form that don't exactly remember they are aliens. She succeeds in both at large, but there are times when she obscures, distorts and fragments things so much that it becomes strenuous to follow the story.

Nevertheless, Shikasta is also a clever and deep book; it's, at the same time, a piece of science fiction, post-modernism, post-apocalyptic, a comment on religions, political, a sociological study, alternative history, utopia and dystopia, a patchwork of patchworks.