How to explain this?

One of the positive things about having to take bed rest (besides making my back feel a whole lot better) is that I read a lot. At one point I had read all the books I have, all but one. That one came with a bunch of Dutch books that were on sale for a local charity. It is called 'De Waterspuwer' in Dutch, but the original title is 'The Gargoyle'. It is a book from 2008, written by Andrew Davidson. According to the cover it is "The International Sensation" and the blurb promises a good read, but as the saying goes: never judge a book by it's cover!

I started reading it while waiting at the hospital for one of my daily physiotherapy sessions and within a few pages I felt like throwing it in the bin. I didn't like the style, I didn't like the subject and I disliked the main character too. I closed it and stared out the window and then opened it again and continued reading. I had several of those episodes over the next few days, but somehow I continued reading. Why?
I finished it in four days and was sorry it ended. Why?

I can't tell you why, I can't even tell you exactly what the book is about...

The main character, the narrator, is a man. He is a, drug using, porn star, who gets severely burned in a car crash (and looses he penis, Ha). In the hospital he gets a visit from a schizophrenic and manic, woman from the psych ward. They become friends and she claims she has known him for a long time, since she was a nun in the Middle Ages in fact, and starts telling him stories of her life and his (he gets burned in every one of his lives).

There is not a lot that makes sense about the book and yet there is a lot that does... To me the book is about as schizophrenic and manic as the female character. There are some beautiful stories and some horrible ones. I never got to like any of the characters in the book and usualy the characters are what makes me want to read on.

I have read the whole book (all 475 pages of it) and I haven't thrown it in the bin when I finished  it, it is back in the book case. Why?

Somehow it has affected me and made me want to continue to read it, that has to be a compliment for the author. It can't have been that bad and it wasn't really, but I didn't feel at any moment like I liked reading it...

How to explain that?

The Gargoyle: the mesmerizing story of one man’s descent into personal hell and his quest for salvation.
On a dark road in the middle of the night, a car plunges into a ravine. The driver survives the crash, but his injuriesconfine him to a hospital burn unit. There the mysterious Marianne Engel, a sculptress of grotesques, enters his life. She insists they were lovers in medieval Germany, when he was a mercenary and she was a scribe in the monastery of Engelthal. As she spins the story of their past lives together, the man’s disbelief falters; soon, even the impossible can no longer be dismissed.