Spending time with a difficult novel — an anti-page-turner, if you like — can be infinitely rewarding. But which ones? Photo / 123rf
Many of our great works of literature are admired rather than read. But which justify the hours spent slogging — and which can be skipped?
It has taken them 28 years, but a US book club has finally conquered Finnegans Wake. The reading group, based in Venice, California, has made it to the end of James Joyce’s final and most bewildering novel after wading through it at the rate of one or two pages a month.
“Most people go, ‘Why would you do that’?”, club member Bruce Woodside admitted. “It’s 628 pages of things that look like typographic errors.” It seems unlikely, then, that many book clubs will follow suit and start debating the intricacies of the late Joycean style between glugs of chardonnay.
But it would be well worth their while if they did: spending time unpacking a page’s worth of Joyce’s allusions and puns can be soothing to the spirit. Why do we feel the need to rush through a novel, when reading is meant to be a respite from the frenetic pace of modern life? And besides, Finnegans Wake is half the price of The Mindfulness Colouring Book on Amazon.
In a speech in 2018, the writer Howard Jacobson lamented a prevailing mimsy quality when it comes to difficult novels: “Strange that when everyone’s running marathons and otherwise raising sweat for the hell of it, working hard at a novel is thought to take the fun away … Concentration and enjoyment are not opposites.”
Spending time with a difficult novel — an anti-page-turner, if you like — can be infinitely rewarding. But which ones? For some readers, exploring the depths of War and Peace, Moby Dick, Ulysses or The Brothers Karamazov can be invigorating; for others, suffocating. Some books are difficult for difficulty’s sake: difficulty can be a means of concealing hollowness, as well as a pathway to a new level of enlightenment. So here are the classics that repay effort — and a few that really don’t.
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913-27)
Proust’s seven-volume magnum opus, which begins with the taste of literature’s most famous soggy cake awakening the narrator’s childhood memories, is not for everybody: Evelyn Waugh judged the author “mentally defective”. But if you are prepared to follow Proust’s labyrinthine sentences wherever they take you, you may sometimes end up a little lost and confused, but more often with a sense that here is a writer who truly captures the texture and sheer strangeness of being alive.
The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
H.G. Wells was not intending to be complimentary when he likened James to “a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost … upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den”. And yet once you become attuned to James’s storytelling method, it becomes addictive. There is something noble about his single-minded attempts to pick up that pea of condensed truth, and it’s exhilarating when he succeeds.
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (1988)
Very few of the protesters who burned copies of Rushdie’s novel read it, and to be honest, one can sympathise: it’s a knotty tapestry of mythological and pop-culture references, much harder to get into than the more accessible Midnight’s Children. But stick with the uncompromising, allusion-stuffed sentences, and stand your ground while apparently realistic scenes suddenly melt into dreams and nightmares. Get on Rushdie’s wavelength and you’ll discover that, yes, post-modernism can be tremendous fun.
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)
There was a time when no literate American under 30 could be prevented from regularly quoting vast chunks of this digression-ridden novel, but the faction that holds it to be overblown and pretentious has gained a lot of ground in recent years. In my view, it’s a gem: a cross between Don DeLillo and Geoff Dyer, it tackles subjects such as the enervating American addiction to entertainment and the “stomach-level sadness” of Wallace’s generation (he died by suicide, aged 46, in 2008). It constantly entertains even while dazzling you with its ambition.
The Castle by Franz Kafka (1922)
It’s often said the shortcut to writing a “difficult” work is simply to withhold from your reader or audience a lot of the explanatory material you’d normally establish at the start. In Kafka’s final, posthumously published novel, you never know who the protagonist K really is, why he comes to the village in the shadow of the castle, and why he is so desperate to succeed in his fruitless mission to meet with the castle authorities. But this is not just a gimmick: the novel is almost unbearably unsettling in its portrayal of the power faceless bureaucrats, and other less-identifiable forces, have over our lives.
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
Woolf aimed to represent the way the human mind works, but as you race hither and thither following Clarissa Dalloway’s grasshopper musings, you start to wonder if they’re worth pursuing. “I want to keep saying, ‘No, he didn’t’, ‘No, that isn’t what he thought’, ‘No, that’s just what she didn’t say’,” was Kingsley Amis’ verdict on reading Woolf; and it’s true that the deeper you are taken into Mrs Dalloway’s mind, the less believable she seems.
Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford (1924-28)
Ford’s style was a literary equivalent to the impressionist school in painting, capturing his characters’ subjective experiences of life. Many admirers of his masterly novel The Good Soldier race on eagerly to tackle the Parade’s End tetralogy, only to find Ford’s suggestive and elliptical narrative method ends up as merely confusing over the course of these four volumes. The suspicion arises that if Ford told the story of cuckolded clever-clogs Christopher Tietjens only straight, the reader might notice it isn’t all that interesting.
The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer (1979)
Mailer’s Pultizer-winning novelisation of the life and horrific end of the murderer Gary Gilmore, whose death by firing squad in 1977 was the first judicial execution in the US for a decade, became a key text in the American capital punishment debate. However, Mailer’s dense, would-be lyrical style ensures the book’s 1088 pages do not slip down easily. In striving to give the seedy story the resonance of an epic, Mailer bogs the reader down in portentousness.
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605-16)
Some books are difficult because of sheer length rather than unorthodox style or preoccupations, and in this very fat novel, a very enjoyable short story is screaming to get out. The idea of the dotty knight tilting at windmills is charming, but as each episode of comical misunderstanding succeeds the last, the joke soon gets old. “Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative,” groaned Martin Amis.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)
Poor old Clive James was monstered on Twitter a few weeks before his death for daring to suggest that “the most overrated books almost all emerged simultaneously from a single genre: magic realism”. And yet many of us who shared James’ view cheered him to the rafters. The blend of realism and fantasy that works brilliantly in a short story by Borges seems, in Marquez’s lengthy chronicle of seven generations of the Buendia family, interminably and fatally fey.
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