I suspect we all have a handful of books on our shelves that we’re tried to read on a number of occasions, but which, no matter how determined we are when we open them for the fifth, sixth or even seventh time, always defeat us. These are the books we wish we had read, but simply lack the determination to get through.
James Joyce’s Ulysses is at the top of my list (never got past page 100, desperate several determined attempts- I suspect I’m not alone). Bleak House is close behind (I managed to get 300 pages in last time, but swore it would be my last try). My wife is currently reading The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, and I had somehow managed to convince myself that I’d eventually got through it – but a quick flick through it this morning revealed that I’d never actually passed the finishing line. As for classical literature, The Aeneid’s the one that has always defeated me – The Iliad, the Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (after one or two attempts) Dante’s Inferno, no problem, but poor old Virgil - no (maybe I need a new translation).
Of course, there are plenty of other classics I’ve tried to read and failed – but I’ve generally adopted the Homer Simpson approach: “If at first you don’t succeed, give up”.
What is even more guilt-inducing is to realize that there are a large number of authors whose books I’ve serially failed to complete – i.e. I’ve tried to read several of their novels, hoping that this time it would be different, but have never managed to complete a single one.
Here’s my shameful list (rendered even more embarrassing by the fact that it’s only partial):
John Updike (only non-fiction), Saul Bellow (let’s hope Martin Amis never finds out), William Faulkner (apologies, DM), Philp Roth, Italo Calvino, Virginia Woolf, iris Murdoch (I’ve tried – I really have!), Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood.
There, I’ve admitted it – and I feel slightly better for it.
In my defence, let me point out that there are many distinguished writers whose books I have never failed to finish – but that’s a pretty lame excuse.
There’s an awful lot of Americans on that list – and I’m generally very pro-American, and I love American genre writers - crime, science fiction and horror - but literary novelists more often than not fail to click. I wonder what my problem is!
Conscience pricked, I really must give each and every novelist on the list one last try - millions of sensitive, intelligent readers have loved their work, and I feel I’ve somehow failed to measure up. (However, I might drop Doris Lessing and, especially, Margaret Atwood from the list on a permanent basis - the thought of trying to read The Golden Notebook or A Handmaid’s Tale again has brought me out in a cold sweat!)
If I had the gift I would perhaps try to seduce you, as the French say, into reading William Faulkner with a wry parody of him.
ReplyDeleteBut I’ve got another idea.
A competition for your literary society.
1. Name one other book than Faulkner’s The Reivers in which a sardine figures prominently.
2. Find me a better opening paragraph than that of Absolom, Absolom!
3. The husband and father in As I Lay Dying is lazy and scheming and self-righteous and irresponsible. All that, but still he accedes to his wife’s wish to be buried among her own. Her wish which, it must be admitted, happens to coincide with certain of his own wishes. Name any author who has produced a husband/father made of crookeder timber -- “The shirt across pa’s hump is faded lighter than the rest of it. There is no sweat-stain on his shirt. I have never seen a sweat-stain on his shirt. He was sick once from working in the sun when he was twenty-two years old, and he tells people that, if he ever sweats, he will die. I suppose he believes it.”
4. Who else has a homosexual door-to-door sewing machine salesman called Vladimir who travels the country in a converted paraffin van painted with flowers and drawn by a mule in his novels? (It’s the van or cart that is drawn by the mule, not the flowers.)
Faulkner has two credentials that cannot be discounted. (a) he was so heroically drunk when he made his acceptance speech for the Nobel prize for literature that it was incomprehensible and had to be re-recorded later. And (b) he is credited with the screenplays of To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. (Not to mention Land of the Pharaohs, 1955, starring Joan Collins. Rude to ask but just how the hell old is she?)
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
...[Ever’body know that Gavin Stevens is the cleveres’ man in Yoknapatawpha County but even he cant hold ere a candle to that there falasafa writer Professor Scruton up North in Virginia. What people feel bound to in the end is the land, says Scruton, and, like he also says, great writers don’t write falasafa they kinda just do it, like Faulkner does, with dust. Why he allus writin’ ‘bout dust? Because our lives and our dreams all gwine turn to dust but the lives and the dreams both are still in the dust and anyhow what you think the lives and the dreams made of in the first place ‘cep the dust they all gwine be one day shortly. But it’s our dust. Not jus’ the white man and the black man and the Indian of the South – and he remembers that day in Dublin now six years ago when he was at the ambassadah’s mansion and the ambassadah’s mansion was built by a high-livin’ Irishman who came home from New York City with his Injun bride right around the turn of the twentieth century and he mention’ this to the ambassadah’s good wife an’ she prackly faint and quickly say “native American” like if she could only jus’ say it quick enough and guilty enough wouldn’t nobody a’ heard him say “Injun” so he wouldn’t a’ said it a’ tall –, but the animals’ dust, too, and ain’t nobody never written more unnerstandin’ly ‘bout the relationship between man and horse than ol’ WF, not to mention man an’ dog, an’ man an’ bear, an’ unmentionably man an’ cow, but all these critters and the land belongs together in one piece an’ the violation when they all is a’ Intruder in the Dust is a sacrilege. Or a carpet bag-totin’ Yankee of a guvverment inspector. Which is worse than a sacrilege. An’ they ain’t no shame if all these prods don’t hit no nerve-endin’ in you, we all got that ‘sperience, like me an’ them two transplantated A-mericans Eliot and James why, I jus’ re-read The Turn of the Screw, it’s still offal, an’ if I re-read them Bostonians, like I did 30 year’ ago, I reckon they still wouldn’t find no nerve-endin’s to prod ‘cos I just ain’t got no place there, an’ maybe Scott don’t have a WF place to prod, an’ he knows we know they ain’t no shame in that an’ we know he know’ it, so why he say it? He know no-one nohow who unnerstands English cant say he badly-read. I reckon he say it to provoke a dee-bate ‘bout how some folks gotta place there an’ some folks gotta place someplace else an’ the authors one likes the other ain’t never gwine be able to like an’ thasser fac’]
ReplyDeleteWednesday, November 3, 2010 - 04:17 PM
Okay, already - Ill try again!
ReplyDeleteWhen did you start reading Faulkner, and when did it turn into an obsession?
Thursday, November 4, 2010 - 08:28 PM
Interesting. That's taken some pressure off. I do actually consider myself as not being very well read [though not as bad as the great glistening chocolate blancmange with the helium voice].
ReplyDeleteThe Leopard was the first serious novel I ever read [13-years old], but the subsequent film with Lancaster ["helmed" by Visconti] induced a serious coma.
One problem with serious novels is that they always contain a foreword which can sometimes stretch to 50-60 pages and usually written by professor from a West Texas university. For some reason, I always have to read this foreword which always presupposes that you are familiar with the novel in the first place [so it is gobbledegook]. When I have completed the foreword I have lost the will to read the actual work.
These are the "soi-disant" great authors I have never read and which I will now never read [but have read the forewords]:
Dante, Goethe [tried], Cervantes, Rabelais, V. Hugo, Henry James, James Joyce [OK - Dubliners and Portrait etc - both excellent], Zola, Flaubert, Proust [if somebody claims to love Proust he is a low-down Yankee liar], PGWodhouse [yes, true], Strindberg and Kipling.
These are some authors which frankly I wish I had never heard of, but have spent hours wading through:
Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos, Norman Mailer, Sir Walter Scott [unbelievably tedious], Niko Kazantzakis, Phillip Roth [he was very unkind to Clair Bloom], John Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams [he is simply one big mincing joke] and his very short friend, W.Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe [the Look Homeward Angel author], Thomas Mann, Gunther Grass, G. Eliot, Alberto Moravia, P.Levi, Borgas and H. Melville. A good rule of thumb is if a novelist comes from one of the four Southern Hemisphere rugby playing countries take a pass.
I once had a friend in Copenhagen [I noted on the radio yesterday that Lord Prescott of Hull has re-christened the city "Cocohape"] called Claus von Pein who said that all novels are crap apart from Dicken's "Hard Times". "Novels teach you nothing. Life's too short," he was wont to say as he scarfed down his Elephant beers and Aalborg aquavits. Very clever man,Herr von Pein.
Friday, November 5, 2010 - 11:49 AM
I realized, reading your comments, SDG, that I’d missed Madame Bovary off the list. It came on, as a radio play on BBC 7 the other day and I couldn’t even bear it in that format! Very odd. Moby Dick’s another one I’ve struggled to finish several times – I got almost halfway through it last year, and that may prove my final attempt.
ReplyDeleteI have occasionally fingered Swann’s Way, as it were, but I’m saving Marcel for my old age.
I agree on Forewords – I now never read them until I have finished the book. If I don’t finish the novel, the foreword remains unread.
Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up, placing his (endless) handwritten pages in a vast pile on top of his fridge.
I’ve read most of George Eliot, and would happily read it all again, but I might give Daniel Deronda a miss next time round.
As for Henry James, I’ve read, and appreciated, quite a few of the earlier works and some of the later short stories, but the last three great novels – the ones he wrote after he started dictating – have always proved impenetrable: not being able to see the next full-stop or paragraph end tends to sap one's will to slog on.
I actually enjoy Borges’s short stories.
A British passport-holder – even one who has lived abroad for long periods – who hasn’t read P.G. Wodehouse should have their passport confiscated.
Saturday, November 6, 2010 - 12:11 PM