While I’m not sure I understood the premise, Under the Eye of the Big Bird was a lyrical contribution to the dystopian canon. Many thousands of years in the future humans exist only because their population is carefully managed in isolated groups under the eye of a cloned cadre of “Watchers”. Conflict has been eliminated from society but there is the occasional threat of violence that bewilders people who are more child than adult. Thousands of years of breeding has resulted in some humans having empathic and other powers we’d consider super-human. The fate of any given character, to whom we are introduced even a hundred or thousand years apart, is of little consequence as the entire species follows its arc. I’m a careful reader but found the novel occasionally frustrating as its premise spools out across the pages, but with the barest of plots the non-linear work should probably be read more as poetry than fiction. If you’re not bilingual you never know if the translator has fully captured the author’s intent and language, but the voice in Big Bird was a cool spring unlike anything I’ve read recently. 4/5.