The World's Most Difficult Books?

[Liam]

I wonder why so many on the list are in English... Apparently the Chinese never managed to produce anything complicated, . And whoever thought Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse was one of the most difficult books ever written deserves to be hanged from a branch by his testicles as a warning to all imbeciles wherever they may hide. To the Lighthouse is probably the best piece of fiction in the English language ever written (and that includes the Middle Ages).

[Eric]

I don't think that Virginia Woolf was dangerously complex, with maybe the exception of "The Waves". But she worked on her prose style.

I think that "Finnegans Wake" must surely rate highly as being a difficult (read: unreadable) book. A lot of university students like to namedrop this book. But if you need a huge concordance, compiled by an obsessive pedant no doubt, to actually read the book, and not for reasons of history, allusion, or reference, simply because of a manic surfeit of puns and portmanteau words, then what sort of book is it beyond an interesting one-off experiment in wordmixamatosis? I'm waiting for the Esperanto translation to come along.¨(The Dutch one already exists.)

Maybe another one is "The Anatomy of Melancholy" by Robert Burton. Have any of you ever tried to read it? Anthony Powell did, while working as an editor at Duckworth's publishing house. He must have had a lot of time on his hands, in the days when publishing was a gentleman's affair, not a mad scramble for profits.

Or what about the books by Robberechts and Hojholt, the type of people who eschew punctuation and paragraph breaks and write what is, in effect, one long sentence? Some experimental and postmodernist, avant garde and Dadaist books is more readable than others. And what about Perec, with his missing letters?

I don't think Chinese translators are any criteria for judging whether a book in English is "difficult". It is a question of culture and a meeting of minds. Has Chinese literature, hidden from us for the most by the language, anything itself that we could find difficult, I wonder? We simply cannot tell whether Chinese Dadaists or postmodernists exist, because no one has managed or bothered to translate such books into European languages. And the climate in the country at present is hardly conducive to a Chinese Pynchon or Barth.

We in the West live in the lap of luxury with regard to difficult literature. It can be produced with little censorship, can be published by small presses or on the net, and can be freely translated and distributed, without quotas or political interference. But you must also have near 100% literacy. When I heard that author form Sierra Leone say that there was 70% illiteracy in his country, what hope does even the most straightforward literature have there. He said that those who were literate preferred to read lightweight things from America or Europe.

Ultimately, we must distinguish between complex and sophisticated, and difficult for difficulty's sake.

[Nahoj]

I recently attempted Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves but gave up halfway through. He tried way too hard to be clever and convoluted, like a drunken teenage Borges.

[Flint]

In my experience, a novel can be hard to read for three reasons:
-cultural content
-narrative structure
-use of language.

-When a novel is set in a cultural context you are not familiar with, or contains allusions to cultural referents you don’t know, then you’re going to have to make an effort. That’s why I had to read Joyce’s Ulysses with Harry Blamires’ guide at hand.

-When a novel is told using a narrative technique you are not used to, that’s going to take an effort too. That’s what happened to me the first time I read Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros). At first I had trouble following the intertwining narrative time-lines – actually I wasn’t really at ease with the book until I read it for the second time (then I’ve read it like four of five more times – it’s an extraordinary novel).

-When a writer uses a highly complex language, either on the structural level – long, complex phrases/clauses/sentences – or on the semantic level – an abundance of metaphors, similes, metonymies ... – it may require an extra concentration effort on the part of the reader. One example: John Banville’s The Sea.

For me, in all three examples mentioned, it was worth making that extra effort.

[Stiffelio]

This is an excellent explanation of the different kinds of difficulties encountered when reading a book. I couldn't have put it better! One writer, or at least some of his books, that I found quite challenging on all three counts is William Faulkner. In The Sound and the Fury (e.g. the Benjy chapter) you have (i) thematic or cultural idiosyncracies (i.e. Southern USA, poor whites) that are hard to grasp on a first reading, (ii) a permanent skipping to and fro in terms of narrative points of view, combined with changes of timelines, (iii) regional use of language, even invented Yoknapatawpha words, complicated by the deliberately faulty syntax used by the narrative voice of a retarded youth. It is not in vain that Faulkner titled his novel appositely after Shakespeare's Macbeth's soliloquy about the meaning of life:...it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But with a bit of effort and subsequent readings you finally come out of the tunnel and find your bearings in Faulkner's wonderful masterpiece.

[Hamlet]

I've had similar reading experiences with The Sound and the Fury....

... and although it seems that there's now a viewpoint around that we are able somehow to more easily assimilate it nowadays because we are used to the fractured narratives approach found in cinema etc... I disagree.

I had to read and reread Faulkner's masterpiece, and in the end in a way just let go, by that I simply mean, because the writing mirrors the movement of the human mind, memory, experience, I feel a reading where you let it flow over you, or even into you, is as good an approach as any... and it may still .... wait.... will confuse.

But repeat reads reward! (please forgive the alliteration!))

The "cultural content" aspect of Flint's list above is a big stumbling block, it was for me at least and is with Faulkner generally I feel? It's not just the whole southern gothic thing, it's the times and struggles (now quite distant and localised), the attitudes in the south during that era and this is especially pertinent with sectiojns of The Sound and the Fury . A bit of b.g. on Faulkner's south, the politics and plight of the old southern families, etc, was very useful for me. Without that - the motives and writing can be a obscure.

As I Lay Dying is another structural masterpiece. I read it pretty much in one sitting, and what I love about Faulkner is the endless experimentation, something that I was initially put off by with Joyce, whom I still struggle with, but wasn't there with Faulkner whom I also struggle with of course.

Nb, I have read some Chinese literature, and although it's in translation, "The Story of the Stone" for example, and some shorter anthol pieces, I think that supported by some small effort at assimilation of a little history and Chinese culture *WE* are easily able to appreciate it, and I can't be bothered to explain why, we just do this well as human beings, frighteningly well at times.

[Liam]

what I love about Faulkner is the endless experimentation

Yes, I feel the same kind of tenderness for Virginia Woolf, starting with Jacob's Room, through the "mature" novels of the 1920s, and ending with The Waves and Between the Acts.

[Flint]

What Stiffelio said about Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury reminded me, mutatis mutandis, of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, where the use of dialect might make it hard for readers not familiar with it to follow the book.

[Hamlet]

Yes, I feel the same kind of tenderness for Virginia Woolf, starting with Jacob's Room, through the "mature" novels of the 1920s, and ending with The Waves and Between the Acts.

I've dipped into Woolf, following your recent posts on here Liam and I'm determined to read a lot more of her, I'll only be banned in any case if I don't read Woolf, hey, it must be a kind of prerequisite around here, and all of that....

[Flint]

Beware of birds who speak in Ancient Greek.

[Hamlet]

What Stiffelio said about Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury reminded me, mutatis mutandis, of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, where the use of dialect might make it hard for readers not familiar with it to follow the book.

I've never read the novel.

Hoping to see the film again, and soon, as I always thought, in an uncanny way that I find very tricky to explain, that it's the film that most exemplifies the mood of the 90s.

And bizarrely that's not because of the content, but just something about the whole vibe.

I'd be interested to see if that holds up to that view, so hopefully it'll crop up on TV again soon!

But yes, I imagine its a bit of a tough nut to crack.

[Hamlet]

Beware of birds who speak in Ancient Greek.

I gather she was a bit of a miserable creature, Greek aside, and I've read some disparaging comments in a WW1 history recently on the Bloomsbury set, hiding out pruning roses whilst all hell was going in in Flanders, and at the Somme, and so forth.

Hmmm, it's a tricky one, but I suppose like Byron's views of the Lakeland poets, hiding away up there.... if you look too closely at the writer, and not just at the work (and with Woolf, it's easy for us to forget the context, the times....) sometimes it's very easy to go off them.

[Liam]

Woolf was often ill throughout her life, so it would be a mistake to think that she and Leonard lived comfortably while the rest of the country was going up in smoke. Despite a small inheritance from her aunt, she also had to struggle for money most of her adult life, which is why she agreed to be a professional reviewer; when Orlando became a bestseller and a media-darling (of sorts) she was very glad because it meant that, for once, her financial woes were over.

I strongly encourage you to read A Writer's Diary, Hammy: she really unravels herself in that one. Amazing, amazing writing.

In terms of difficulty, her two "really" difficult novels are Jacob's Room and The Waves. So perhaps you ought to save them for later.

Mrs. Dalloway is not difficult. To the Lighthouse is not *really* difficult. And Orlando, Flush, The Years, and Between the Acts are immensely readable.

What I find so priceless about Woolf is how she was able to reinvent herself with each new book, and how fully she succeeded in each of her experiments.

*Anyway, my bottom line is: No one should be afraid of Virginia Woolf, .

[Flint]

Now you mention WW1, in one of Woolf's novels, Mrs Dalloway, there's a character who has just returned from the war and, shell-shocked, suffers from hallucinations, among them birds talking to him in Greek.

Whether she was or not an easy person to interact with (anyway who cares about writers' personalities?), she was a very intelligent person and a great writer - not just her fiction: her essays make very very good reading.

[Eric]

I found "Jacob's Room" a sophisticated read, while "The Waves" was a bit too much. But I do not regard Virginia Woolf, as a whole, as a "difficult" writer because she still adheres to the conventions of a non-obscure vocabulary, and syntax that makes sense, even when her ideas may be tinged with the mental illness that she periodically suffered. I don't think that Joyce was affected by mental illness, but his "Finnegans Wake" is certainly damned hard to get through.

[Hamlet]

Duly noted. I'll be wolfing down some Woolf very soon.

@Flint, yes, I was tongue-in-cheeking, over Virginia, just reporting back one perception and times were rough back then, as we know, 50,000 dead on the first day of the Somme, alone. It even places the struggles Liam notes into perspective.

[Eric]

I think that trying to read "Finnegans Wake" is trying to run before you can walk, especially if English is not your mother-tongue. As I have said, Woolf tends to stick to standard syntax, however fragmentary her sentences, while Old Riverrun (yes, I got that far) is making multipuns every third word and throwing in Norwegian phrases and even Finnish numbers just to show he was educated (didn't see any Slovene, though). Psyching the plebs is what that activity should be called. As I happen to know Finnish and Norwegian (though not Slovene), I spotted this stuff when flicking through. But what is the point of being so obscure that only the odd linguist understands the pointless and out-of-context words being bandied about? This is Dadaism taken to a verbose extreme.

I am eagerly awaiting the Esperanto translation of "Finnegans Wake", which should be out next year, with the Nora Batty Press, Endpiece, Dublin.

[Stiffelio]

Anybody read Adam Thorpe's first novel Ulverton? It was quite successful and controversial when it was published in 1992. It roughly tells the 300 year history of a fictional town in northern England as told in different chapters by different narrative voices and literary styles. I remember that some passages were nearly impossible to understand as not only were they written in flow-of-consciousness but they were disseminated with regional vocabulary.

[Eric]

For those of us that just happen to come from northern England, Yorkshire dialect is familiar. One very popular book with large chunks of dialogue written in Yorkshire dialect (usually called Broad Yorkshire) was "The Good Companions" (1929) by J.B. Priestley, which is over 600 pages long. It must have been one of the first times that Yorkshire dialect was used in a sustained way in a serious novel. Of course, those from southern England (e.g. London) will probably have turned their noses up at this book, but many people in northern England (e.g. around Leeds and Manchester) will have enjoyed seeing their own way of speaking, or similar, in print.

[Eric]

Difficulty is relative and can depend on several things, for example:

- the language (e.g. dialect or regional usage, as in Irvine Welsh's "Trainspotting");

- the way it is narrated and sequence of events (many modern novels avoid straight chronology);

- characters that merge and separate again (this is surely a problem in "The Waves");

- the psychological consistency of characters (e.g. in a "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" situation);

- punctuation and paragraphing (like those novels that are, in effect, one long sentence with commas but no full-stops);

- old-fashioned and dated use of language where many terms are no longer used in speech (look at Shakespeare!);

- local factors and allusions that the reader from outside cannot be expected to guess;

- breaking with political or religious norms, when the norms are vastly different to those of the average reader.

And so on. So it pays to analyse why a novel is difficult (or impossible) to read, and which of these, and other factors come into play. Because most authors want to connect with their readers, but it depends whether they are writing for local or international consumption, and, indeed, how easy their novels are to translate.