László Krasznahorkai’s recent Nobel Prize win has reignited the continuing debate about “difficult literature”. Krasznahorkai, if you don’t know, is famous for writing very long, dense books—as sometimes hundreds of pages long-Sentence. The kind of books that a certain type of reader takes as a challenge and another type of reader (or at least social media posters who identify as readers) consider fundamentally fraud because the books are supposed to be fun and the world is so horrible why would you want to suffer and anyone who would read such a book would be a pretentious, fake Broderanist snob! Obviously, I think the latter position is foolish. It’s fun to challenge yourself. Difficult tasks are enjoyable. Isn’t the whole purpose of life to learn new skills and try new things? Or at least a good part of the issue.
Perhaps this is an old-fashioned approach. last week, on michel santiago cortes cut it was a disappointing article About how people are using ChatGPT not only to skip school work or cheat on people – understandable if unethical use occurs – but also to cheat on hobbies and leisure activities. Using ChatGPT to leave puzzles in escape rooms or posting AI-generated crocheted items that you didn’t crochet created the subreddit. I have no doubt that some people use LLM to fill out their crosswords or Sudoku puzzles while sipping their morning coffee. Perhaps one thing AI is highlighting is that a certain percentage of the population has no real interest in doing, learning, or enjoying anything. oh ok. Takes all kinds. To each his own. Sometimes. Maybe the world needs shrunken slug people too.
Back to the books. I think “difficult” books are suitable for providing you with a challenge to conquer, but it’s good to remember that difficulty is not the point. Books that differ from storytelling norms in style, structure, or form provide different reading experiences. Excessively long sentences, awkward syntax, unusual structures, etc., exist not to punish readers but to provide other aesthetic experiences and different types of stories. The story never detracts from the execution. The so-called difficult books cannot be made easy books without destroying them. You can’t turn Krasznahorkai into a book to be read on the beach by adding a few hundred paragraph breaks and periods. You will change the whole experience.
Your novel should be like Moby-Dick
I also find it strange to worry about “pretentious” readers or “Brothernists” who are excited to read some new, huge tome (Schattenfroh This is the season (it seems) in an era when very few people read anything. Reading a very long book always requires some dedication, some challenge. So what? This is good and often beneficial. moby-dick Perhaps this is the best reading experience of my life. Anyway, quite a few critics have defended long and difficult books. So, I thought I’d write about the joys of it Small And difficult books.
Last week as I was headed to the airport I picked up a little book from my to-read pile: The art of asking your boss for a raise By Georges Perec. I’ve been a fan of Perec for a long time but didn’t really know anything about this specific novel. When I opened it, I discovered it was Krasznahorkian, with the entire novel being a single sentence. The sight of dense, punctuation-free prose made me want to reach for my phone. But when I actually started reading, this feeling soon went away. art of asking An enjoyable and quick read. Actually only 80 pages. Single sentence structure is not a random choice but an integral part of the themes and the overall project. The 1968 text apparently originated with IBM’s invitation to writers to create computer-inspired creations. Perec’s novel is structured as a computer program’s argument about how an office drone employee can request and receive a pay raise, written to “impose recursive repetition on the reader” rather than choose their own adventure. All The steps that an imaginary computer would take when executing the instructions contained in the program” (as translator David Bellos says in the introduction). The result is much more fun and human than it seems. But without this single-sentence logic loop form the text would be something entirely different.
It got me thinking about what other books might fit the idea of short and tight novels. (I will admit that I read a lot of short books because of my phone and Internet-brainwrecked attention span. But that’s not the only reason. I read to teach and short books are easier to teach because students are more likely to read the whole thing and read again to prepare.)
A subcategory of this non-genre would be Olympian projects. Perec’s book fits here, because he was a central member of the group that used constraints to generate new kinds of literature. The most famous example is the translation of a different Perek book. Avoid It was written entirely without the letter E. Oulipo co-founder Raymond Cuneo has a book to include here called exercise in styleWhich deliberately repeats a simple story 99 times. Most are only one page, so the book is short, although many readers will have difficulty with there being no real plot or characters and only 99 retellings in a variety of styles. But, if you’re a writer it’s inspiring to see how genre changes a story and what endless variations you can create from even the most common anecdote.
I would have to include Italo Calvino’s Olympian novel invisible cityBecause it’s a foundational text for me. The book has no real characters or plot – so it is challenging for some readers – and instead contains 55 descriptions of mostly fictional cities. Two other formally weird books I like: Alejandro Zambra’s multiple choiceStructured as a standardized test, for example the chapters on open-ended questions, and Olga Revan’s Employee It takes the form of a staff interview transcript on a spacecraft that has encountered strange alien life. We might call these novels that are difficult in form, written in unusual ways to tell stories without a traditional series of characters moving through a linear plot.
Then there are smaller books whose style is difficult. The prose itself is the source of difficulty. Short books by challenging stylists are often a good entry point into their works. Actually, my first Krasznahorkai was very small The Last Wolf and Herman Although those are two stories, not a novel. Thomas Bernhard uses few punctuation and few paragraphs, but also writes dense and structurally unusual novels. Most of them are basically preaching monologues by misanthropes, while the current action plot is reduced to almost nothing, such as a guy cooking on a wing chair while looking around at a party. they are fantastic. You can’t go wrong with shorts the loser As an introduction to Thomas Bernhard. Brief description of Toni Morrison Sula,reissued with a new cover This Month is one of his best works and a great introduction to his lush and lyrical style. I don’t really consider Morrison difficult per se, but I do remember that minor controversy when Oprah said she needed to re-read passages to understand them and Morrison responded, “My dear, that’s called reading.” Due to which people got angry. Cormac McCarthy’s children of god This is the perfect introductory book to check out if you enjoy McCarthy’s maximalist prose and haunting images before committing to a longer work. blood meridian(If you’ve only read his later novels, skip novels like road And all the beautiful horses What you might not know is that McCarthy’s early books were written in a very different and denser style.)
Then you have books whose difficulty lies in storytelling – by which I mean books with confusing events, surreal dream logic, and elliptical plotlines. Many readers find unrealistic writing difficult, although personally I eat it up. Some excellent short novels that fit this include the haunting and fantastic novels of Juan Rulfo pedro paramo, Surrealist prose poetry novel by Stanley Crawford Log of SS Mrs. Unguentine, Leonora Carrington’s only truly surreal novel hearing trumpet, Kafka’s incomplete-but-masterpiece testsPhilip K. Dick’s mind-bending science-fiction novel Ubik, John Hawkes’ experimental novel lemon sprig, and the poetic noir novel of Christina Rivera Garza taiga syndrome,
I’m also looking forward to adding a category of short books that are difficult because of their subject matter – for example, Yukio Mishima’s Erotic Poems for Seppuku. patriotism-But I fear this could become dangerous rapidly. So, I’ll end it there. The above are some short, perhaps difficult, but definitely brilliant novels that I love and would recommend if you want the occasional short reading challenge.
Of course, countless more could be listed. Feel free to do so in the comments.
my new novel metallic zone Available to buy! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Sir), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Eli), “a complete explosion” (Chicago Tribune), “essentially smart and inventive” (hideout), and “blatantly wonderful” (book listMy previous books are science fiction noir novels The Body Scout And genre-bending story collections honest animalIf you enjoy this newsletter, you’ll probably enjoy one or more of these books, too,
