To finish or not to finish? The dilemma of whether to give up on books we aren’t enjoying or plough on to the end lasts a lifetime, but as we grow older it gets easier. We not only have less time, but also the increased confidence to decide that if a great novel isn’t engaging us, it’s possibly the book’s fault. What does it really matter if Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain defeats us, or Finnegan’s Wake sends us to sleep? We’ve survived much worse than that.
But in youth, such things torment you, and the more highly regarded the novel, the greater your shame in abandoning it. You still labour under the fallacy there are novels and writers out there you have to have read – Sartre, Beckett, the Odyssey, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and even (God help us) Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities – and the workload is crushing. In my teens and twenties, surveying all the famous books out there, I had a fantasy of being locked in an empty room with one volume a week, someone occasionally feeding me M&S ready meals through a slot in the door, so that I could emerge a year or so later feeling like George Steiner. I’m 54 now, and still haven’t read Proust, Les Miserables or Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. And yet I’m still here.
There were key moments in my battle against the tyranny of Great Novels. Cyril Connolly said that if an artwork were widely considered great, you should simply stand in front of it until you began to agree – a noble idea but one to keep you in chains for a lifetime. Thankfully, there were other, less reverent takes on the matter. ‘Eat as long as you are hungry’, said Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer. ‘The moment you are filled, leave the food… There isn’t such a thing as a “must” in literature.’ An American academic I lunched with muttered to me, in his cups, something that delighted me but which, the following day, he angrily denied having said at all: ‘Robin… the classics are boring.’ The late writer Peter Vansittart, a sort of friend, told me one of the reliefs of old age was realising you’d survived quite happily without reading Don Quixote: ‘There are all sorts of famous books which the culture will absorb for you and feed back and that you don’t actually need to read at all. Everyone already knows what the word “Kafkaesque” means.’ On this last point I’m not so sure – one of the disappointments of reading Kafka, when I finally got round to it, was discovering he wasn’t nearly Kafkaesque enough, and that I’d have to look elsewhere.
Alongside the books you have to have read – and often long to discard – are those you genuinely love, which make the ground shake and possess you, often way off the beaten track. Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, which taught me more about thrilling writing than anything I’d encountered. A long autumn afternoon spent with Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth in my early twenties, willing the phone not to ring and break the spell. The last lines – and the near trancelike state they flung me into – of Colin Thubron’s Among the Russians, or Isabel Allende’s Paula. Kundera, for God’s sake – Kundera! These were the books I really loved, and to struggle through Madame Bovary or Dostoevsky’s The Devils, feeling nothing but ennui, felt a kind of insult to it all. Sometimes, discarding a book, I would crawl away in disgrace (Dickens’s Bleak House), sometimes reject the book violently. I still remember the copy of Henry Green’s Caught I hurled from a moving train, worried afterwards it might have landed on someone’s head and that for days afterwards the newspapers would carry the chilling headline ‘Harvill paperback killer – no clues as yet.’
But occasionally soldiering on has been worth it, and I offer the following story as a how-to guide for others who want to finish a work of great literature. Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Mount Everest for bookworms) I embarked on several times, invariably casting it aside around the page 200 mark, and the sense of something uncompleted, still exerting a hold on me, niggled into my mid-thirties. When a week’s holiday from the Spanish language-centre I worked at beckoned, I decided something radical was called for. As I sat invigilating the students in their end of term exams, I wrote out the words ‘I will finish War and Peace’ several hundred times to boost my willpower, and analysed what had stopped me finishing the book before.
There had been the need to pause and digest each page, the distractions of daily life, even the cumbersome weight of the one-volume edition – and I attacked these issues one by one. The diary was kept clear and the phone switched to silent. The huge tome I cut up with a Stanley knife into novella-sized slices, resolving never to ruminate too much over any page (that would do for a second reading, if it ever came) but simply to press on. I also decided to rip out each page as I finished reading it, scrunch it up into a ball and throw it onto a pile – an act of vandalism which will surely upset those rather precious types who bang on about books as sacred objects in themselves, but which helped motivate me as I went (and it was only the Wordsworth edition, after all). As the week flew by, that pile of pages turned into a hillock and then a great mountain, and it was clear that this time – this time – I was going to get to the end.
Sometimes, discarding a book, I would crawl away in disgrace
Was all this hassle worth it? Was War and Peace as great as its reputation suggested? I’m sorry to tell you this but resoundingly, yes. It’s still the greatest reading experience I’ve ever had and the most enveloping. There were sections so transporting that when I described their effect to someone I could only say, rather inelegantly, it had been like ‘snogging God.’ One friend told me of reading Moby Dick, and of entering so deeply into the maritime experience that, when she stood up from her bed, she unconsciously expected the floor to creak and sway like a ship under her feet. And though no one expects to see a snow-bound troika or hoarfrost on the windowpanes in sunny Andalucia, I knew, from that week of Tolstoy, exactly what she meant.
‘There is only one way to read,’ wrote Doris Lessing in her preface to The Golden Notebook, ‘which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those…., skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought… Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.’
Whatever that drunk American academic told me and however true it seemed, perhaps it’s time to go back to Madame Bovary – if she’ll have me – once again.
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