Finished this a week or so ago and I remember basically nothing from the book except some vaguely connected images:
huffing embalming fluid to learn memories (or maybe it was eating people in the morgue in a dark eucharistic nod to Gene Wolfe?)
driving Fear-and-Loathing-style on a desert road to an ur-city of bad-trip fantasies
"discovering" new words that are really short stories organized like the snippets of sense in The Library of Babel or maybe Invisible Cities
I didn't understand the plot at all and I'm not totally sure if I was supposed to. Loved the feeling of reading it though.