Good point. With the different narrative styles available today, perhaps the most modern novels are more difficult - certainly compared to the linear narrative novels of the past.
Good point. With the different narrative styles available today, perhaps the most modern novels are more difficult - certainly compared to the linear narrative novels of the past.
From stylistic point of view, yes. But content wise, the 19th century novels are more majestic in scope and oceanic in depth.Originally Posted by Paulclem
The scope may be true, but I don't necessarily agree on the depth. A work doesn't have to be long to be profound.
I think Hilary Mantel's use of first person narrative to describe the subtleties of Henry VIII's court in Wolf hall is both stylistically sophisticated and innovative whilst providing a fascinating blend of fictional biography and historical accuracy.
Apparently A Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes, is both profound and beautiful. Perhaps i should get that onmy Kindle next to see. yes - I think I will.
Of course length doesn't equal profundity. Even so, 19th century novels are generally deeper, even the short ones. Notes From Underground, for example, is very short; Hadji Murat may have been Tolstoy's greatest work and it's about the same length as the former.
Speaking about Joyce, he might have been the biggest innovator of the 20th century prose, but his subject matters are uninteresting and seem trifling to me. Perhaps Proust is the only one who is more boring.
Joyce's works, more than anyone's in opinion, exemplify style for the sake of style and difficulty (obtuseness, even) for the sake of difficulty.
I'm not sure that's true anymore about Joyce. Certainly he's the more well known and celebrated, and we'll all be on catch-up with newer novels. Will Self's new book, Umbrella, is apparently self consciously modernist. I haven't read it, but reviews suggest that the narrative style is demanding with narrative changes within the same sentence. Of course i'm not saying it's better, or even more demanding - I don't know yet, but it is certainly self consciously crafted. The review I read says that it deals with a woman who has the sleeping sickness after WW1 and wakes in the 70s, the literary implication being that she starts in one narrative genre and wakes into another that she struggles to understand. Neat metaphor if it pans out thus.
The problem is we're in a poor position to evaluate the current with the past because we've got the old weight of lit crit against new and unexplained novels. Interesting to find out though.
Generally deeper? Like Ivanhoe right? Seriously that is unfounded. As for Joyce's subject matter, that is just to you. There is plenty In there. More so than in The Mill on the Floss.
Sweeping generalization is silly.
I read To The Lighthouse whilst doing my A levels, and it really had a positive effect upon me, though I had, at that time, nowhere to channel what it did. I think that reflects the limitations of the Eng |Lit course at that time. I may well have followed it up with more relevant reading if I had understood its import.
I also enjoyed The Gulag Archipelago, though I know, due to my ignorence of much of Russian history at that time, that I didn't get as much out of it as I might have. It is one of the few books I intend to re-read.
I read Sartre's Nausea and Iron in the Soul when I was in my twenties, and I felt that I didn't fully understand the implications of it due to my ignorence of the philosophy. These were difficult books for me, as I was aware that I wasn't getting them.
These three paragraphs of Paul's really struck a chord with me. But unlike Paul it is a situation I accept for the moment.
It means I rarely find a book difficult. Boring, yes. Incomprehensible, yes. But I am prepared to finish it and be satisfied with an incomplete understanding of the author's intention. I read at a lower level than JBI, and ok, I do sometimes get a feeling I've missed out somehow. However, I still get pleasure in the prose and the story and the philosophy, but I read with the attitude that if I don't completely "get It" it is a shame, but it is the author who has been found wanting in his ability to get the message across.
ay up
Yeah, I'm reading War and Peace right now and it's not really that difficult of a read.
I don't know if it was because I was young or what, but I remember The Picture of Dorian Gray was a bit difficult for me.
Took my batteries out my mysticism and put em in my thinking cap
War and Peace is easy to read and I might even say that it's a page-turner while at the same time being a literary heavyweight. Although it's heavily descriptive, the prose flows from sentences to sentences quite well and that, for me at least, lends it a certain lucidity not found in many of its fellow 19th century novels.
Nonetheless, I don't mean to say that the book has no muddled parts, as it certainly has, like the few digressions on human history that interspersed the the book, alongside the two famous yet needless epilogues devoid of narrative.
At the micro level, namely phrasing and syntax, War and Peace is hardly culpable for smothering difficulty. Sure, there are some awkward syntax and long winded sentences, but they are graspable after some cursory mull.
Looking at it at macro level, War and Peace is anything but easy, though that's not to say that it's exceeding difficult either. At this level, the difficulty is merely impressionistic, that is, it arises because of the length and size of the book, not unlike its contemporaries.
Finnegans Wake, without doubt. I also found Aristotle's Metaphysics heavy going.
Interesting that one of the articles in the OP mentions Great Expectations:
but who among us hasn’t struggled with a book or poem that failed to capture our attention? If that’s you, then congratulations. I have a near-mint copy of “Great Expectations” you can read while the rest of us go through this list.
I read Great Expectations concurrently with Neuromancer by William Gibson. Neuromancer often turns up on lists of influential books, although it is science fiction. I had few problems following Great Expectations. I could not make head or tail of Neuromancer.
I have to admit I had some trouble working out what was going on with Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov towards the end. I also had difficulty with The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. I read it, but afterwards would have had a problem telling you what it was about. I was surprised when someone told me it was a classic.
According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
Charles Dickens, by George Orwell
Uh.... I found that harder to read than Tolstoy..
Took my batteries out my mysticism and put em in my thinking cap
The Guardian Book Club recently discussed Iain M Banks' "Use of Weapons", and his complex use of flashback. I read "Surface Detail" last year, (and intend to do a book review of it still), and that too is a multi-layered book and very effective. There's scope in them both for the entertainment reader, but there is also a literary element to them. I'm not saying they are fantastically difficult, but there is more than space opera at work.
Not at all, no.
Moby Dick - Melville focuses too much on whaling techniques and too little on the plot . I haven't finished it yet and if I have a hard time going to sleep, I read this one.
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