The World's Most Difficult Books?

[Galatea92]

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.

I'd second Liam and encourage you to read her. You won't find any novels more beautiful than To The Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway - really, really astonishing prose - it's sometimes like reading a tightrope walker, you read with your mouth open, thinking, 'Oh my God, she's going to fall off!'

And in a way, both books are about the first world war. One of the main characters of Mrs Dalloway is a shell-shocked veteran. And the two halves of To The Lighthouse take place either side of the war, so that it forms a kind of abyss at the heart of the novel.

[Flint]

One of the main characters of Mrs Dalloway is a shell-shocked veteran.

(Yeah, the one who hears birds talk in Greek).

Absolutely agree with you, Mr Galatea: Woolf is a must.

[Eric]

I don't think that war and peace have much to do with the style of a great writer. What did you expect her to do, enlist?

This is a big problem nowadays when novelists in order to sell their books, get obsessed with telling stories about, for instance, Iranian women's rights, things that could be much more informatively told in works of non-fiction. But some people have not yet discovered works of non-fiction, if they are not books about trolls. Some people are unable to distinguish between reportage and fiction - they have different aims.

Good style, like Woolf, Lispector, Nothomb, and lots of male writers too like Barnes, is a matter of refinement, not blurting out undigested opinions about big issues in fictional form.

[Peeping Tom]

I had pretty much the same experience with The Sound and the Fury that others here had, but after re-reading, it instantly became clearer, and has since become one of my all-time favorite novels. Also, I don’t understand why To the Lighthouse is on that “Difficult” list. It’s pretty straight forward, an exceptional novel, no problem with me.

The novel I would nominate for the hardest to read is Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. It has always made the lists of best science fiction novels, but what it is especially known for, and what made it difficult for me, is its language. The story takes place two thousand years after a nuclear disaster has devastated the world, leaving the surviving humans in a primeval state. Among other things, Hoban imagines what the English language has evolved into. Words have changed meanings, are spelled differently, new words have been added, and grammar has changed. For me, I simply could not get past the language, so I never finished the book. It was like reading Chaucer, only here it was in the future, many more years in the future.

It’s interesting to note that David Mitchell was obviously influenced by Riddley Walker when he wrote the “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After” chapter in Cloud Atlas. I had no trouble with that chapter, perhaps because it includes Hawaiian pidgin in its mix, which I am very familiar with. But I know for other people, it was a problem.

[Stiffelio]

It’s interesting to note that David Mitchell was obviously influenced by Riddley Walker when he wrote the “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After” chapter in Cloud Atlas. I had no trouble with that chapter, perhaps because it includes Hawaiian pidgin in its mix, which I am very familiar with. But I know for other people, it was a problem.

That chapter of Cloud Atlas was rather challenging but, thanks to Mitchells's clear narrative thrust, I managed to read it pretty comfortably.

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

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

I agree. As simple a device as resorting to capitalize nouns like in eighteenth century literature may be off-putting to the modern reader until you get used to the old format.

[Flint]

I think we can agree to define a "difficult book" as one requiring an extra effort on the part of the reader.
Of course difficulty is relative. The same book may require more effort on the part of some readers than others. In a book forum I once came across a person who claimed it was no effort for him to read Joyce's Ulysses; well, I needed Harry Blamires' guide to get through it.

English writer Jenny Diski once wrote scathingly about those who shirk 'difficult' books and are only after 'a good read':
"'A good read' is a sorry phrase which means unambitious and not requiring any mental effort".

Too radical, perhaps. If someone wants to relax and have an easy time, they're quite within their rights to look for that kind of literature, aren't they?

On the other hand, another English writer, Martin Amis, in one of his essays in The War Against Cliche ('Great Books'), calls Joyce a 'non reader-friendly writer', and says that in Ulysses he (Joyce) writes not for the reader but for himself, which I suspect is not far from the truth.
But then he goes on to claim that novels should be of such length that they can be read in one sitting, and therefore -so Mr Amis claims- Cervantes' Don Quixote is an 'unreadable' book.

That's surely going too far, isn't it? I wonder what he thinks of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Mann's The Magic Mountain, or Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Did he read Bleak House in one sitting?

[Liam]

novels should be of such length that they can be read in one sitting

I thought that was the function of short stories, . Novels were specifically designed to be long, sprawling narratives able to give much pleasure to the reader, day after day after day. Some were long (Robinson Crusoe, 1719), some were VERY long (Clarissa, 1748) and some were short (La Princesse de Clèves, 1678). But I think once a novel becomes a short story it defeats its own basic purpose.

[Flint]

Careful how you quote, man. Looks like it was me said that - it was Mr Amis.

(By the way, are you a very early riser or are you having a late night?)

[Eric]

Personally, I would not want to read a novel (as opposed to a short-story) at one sitting, because I like to savour the book, rather than gallop through it to notch up my hundredth book that week on my bedpost.

I continue to believe that Shakespeare's language makes him a very difficult writer. If you removed all those footnotes and endnotes, and only had a modern dictionary to look up words in, you would be utterly lost.

Take "The Taming of the Shrew", a comedy. You've got to "get" the jokes in a comedy, otherwise you sit there stultified in the theatre, and even when reading the text carefully. My Wordsworth Classics edition has a seven-page introduction, 178 endnotes, and a glossary of frequently occurring words over 12 further pages. All that, so that the modern reader might understand and laugh at a few of the jokes. Words and phrases like afied, anon, argosy, balk logic, banes, bate and beat, be-mete, bottom, breeching, chapeless, copatain hat, groom, halt, junkets, masquing stuff, rail, scrivener, shrewd, shoulder-shotten, trot, vilde, woodcock. How many such terms do you know the exact meaning of? Don't be fooled by words you think you know like bottom, groom, halt, shrewd, etc. They do not mean, in that play, what they mean today.

Is that not the sign of a "difficult" book, at least for the 21st century reader?

[Mystic Melody]

beware of Vikram Seth's Lyrical novel "The Golden Gate".....i gave it halfway....

[Liam]

@ Flint, #38:

Sorry, of course I was aware that you were quoting Amis.

And yeah, I was having a somewhat late night yesterday and went to bed with the sunrise, .

[nagisa]

I'd nominate Pierre Guyotat's "Prostitution". Apparently, it's a day in the life an Algerian boy prostitute, rendered entirely in pidgin French mixed with phonetic retranscription of Algerian slang. According to wiki: "Guyotat's novels deal with a new kind of illegibility and obscenity. The fictions still explore the unthinkable possibility of worlds structured by sexual slavery and transgression of fundamental taboos. But French language is now unrecognizable, estranged by an extreme grammatical, syntactic and lexical creativity. Ellipses of letters or words, neologisms and phonetic transcriptions of Arabic speaking utterances make it difficult to understand. In the 1987 re-edition of Prostitution, a 120 pages appendix - resume, glossary, "grammar" and translations - is added to the actual fiction and help the disoriented reader."

Guyotat's other fiction is difficult as well (I've read "Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats", Tomb for Five Hundred Thousand Soldiers, which is 500 pages of no-paragraph text about the invasion of a fictional city in the old colony of an equally fictional state — transparent allegory of the Algerian War — and every single demented thing one can do with violence, sex, and/or bodily fluids to one's fellow man in the course of war), but "Prostitution" is quite simply illegible.