Back in 2009, the online literary magazine The Millions began its "Hard Books" series, a section that identifies the hardest and most frustrating books ever written to read. The elements of the writer's style that make reading his works a difficult and complex process are also considered.
The literary magazine's two curators, Emily Colette Wilkinson and Garth Risk Hallberg, have chosen the hardest of the hardest, ten literary works that are veritable Everests that will require a fair amount of courage and perseverance to climb. Although, perhaps, some of them have already submitted to you.
Welsh poet Dylan Thomas has called Nightwood "one of the three greatest books of prose ever written by a woman," but to witness that greatness, you must master Barnes's twisting, gothic prose style.
In his introduction to the novel, the literary critic, Thomas Stearns Elliott, wrote that "it is generally lively prose," but "it demands something of the reader which the ordinary reader of novels is not prepared to give." Nightwood is a novel of ideas, a free collection of monologues and descriptions.
The first difficulty: the abundance of references (more than a hundred) to outdated cultural phenomena and concepts (some already unclear even in eighteenth-century England), as well as the narrator’s personality: an impoverished syphilitic madman who mercilessly cuts into pieces his manuscript and his fellow citizens.
His compulsive deviation is intentionally incomprehensible, but more incomprehensible is his satire aimed at "the abuses and decay of education and religion." Overall impression: the book was written by a conservative Anglican priest who finds nothing sacred in his surroundings.
Do you enjoy a good intellectual read? If so, then Hegel is your man, and this book, a classic of German idealism and undoubtedly one of the most significant works of modern philosophy, is a great place to start.
Hegel's refutation of Kant's idealism, the history of consciousness, and the quintessential explanation of the process of dialectics are too difficult to understand and even more difficult to remember, mainly due to the wide scope of concepts and terminology. The meaning of the book is virtually incomprehensible without good explanations from the editor and reference books at hand.
4. Virginia Woolf “To the Lighthouse”
Thanks to the signature literary device of mixing the individual consciousnesses of the characters, Virginia Woolf's fiction is intellectually and mentally challenging.
Not only is it sometimes difficult to tell who is who: who is speaking or thinking - it is confusing, even nauseating, to be in someone else's mind, with its own rhythms and associative patterns. Sometimes it seems that you have been captured by an alien consciousness.
The trick is to surrender (this works with other high-flying modernists) to let the text pass through you and take you wherever it pleases, without worrying too much about dogmatic understanding of what is happening.
5. Samuel Richardson "Clarissa, or the Story of a Young Lady"
"Clarissa..." Richardson is a heavyweight not only in the physical sense. The physical weight of the novel is part of its complexity, especially since all 1,500 pages are uneventful.
But the poverty of the plot is more than made up for by the psychological depth of the story. Richardson became the first master of the psychological novel, and no one has surpassed him since.
These depths are quite dark and psychically tormenting: Clarice's abandonment and dehumanization of her monstrous family, the sadistic torment she endures at the hands of her savior, who turns out to be a torturer - the "charming sociopath" Robert Lovelace.
Finnegans Wake is a long, dense, and linguistically knotty book that will reward you handsomely if you learn to read it. Doctrine does not mean that you should cling to scientific interpretations of the text. You just need to surrender to Joyce's verbal music.
The meaning of the text here depends more on the effect produced on the reader than on decoding. Try reading 25 pages a day, out loud, in a bad Irish accent. Perhaps you will soon be seized by a slight madness - and for a few days or weeks you will move into the world of Joyce's Ireland.
Literary meaning and philosophical meaning are somewhat different categories, and the latter does not have to be embellished and fabulous. A philosophical text strives to become a new science, the foundation on which scientific knowledge is built.
Heidegger speaks about many things with shocking truth, yet the abstractness and dryness of his book prevent an easy understanding of its secrets and secrets. It takes time to properly comprehend everything.
The difficulty and pleasure of reading Spenser's masterpiece arise from a common source: its semiotic promiscuity. The Fairy Queen is an allegory for the power of allegory itself.
This allegory “dries the mind like sweet wines, dressed in layers of clothing, makes you run through the singing of the Garden of Eden...” The book is full of such crazy images, but this is not the pinnacle of Spencer’s insidious plan (Like Heidegger, he only completed half of his opus).
"The Faerie Queene" is carefully poetically composed: hundreds and hundreds of perfectly composed stanzas. The plot of the novel is quickly forgotten, but the poetic images are not erased from memory for years.
Translation Alexander Yavorsky
If we take into account the frankly pre-modern overtones of the word “canon”, one may get the impression that the very idea of postmodernity looks like a terminological curiosity. Indeed, one approach to constructing the postmodern canon pushes the boundaries so widely (Katie Acker, Philip K. Dick, Grandmaster Mele Mel) that the term becomes meaningless. However, in the narrow circles of literary criticism, it is customary to associate, as a rule, groups of white writers of a certain age with canonical postmodernism: Barth and Barthelme, Gaddis and Gass, DeLillo, Coover and Pynchon.
It is obvious that this canon, like its predecessor, is no stranger to omissions. And yet, in light of literary demographics, it seems doubly puzzling that Joseph McElroy, who turns 79 this year, is so persistently ignored by lists of po-mo masters. Like fellow heavyweight Thomas Pynchon, McElroy is the author of eight novels that are truly encyclopedic in their depiction of modern life. This is what he writes The New York Times:
This book belongs to the maximalist subspecies of the postmodern novel, which includes Gravity's Rainbow, The Recognitions And Underworld. Although, such belonging is akin to belonging Chevy Suburban to the "light truck" automobile class or Andre the Giant to the World Wrestling Federation.
If we can say about other books from the same category that they are cramped in the genre’s patch, then Women and Men it will be crowded in the entire literary parking lot. If other books represent a serious form of literary calculus, then Women and Men- This is chaos theory. And, for that matter, if they are voluminous - Women and Men much more voluminous. At approximately 700,000 words (about 1,192 tightly printed pages), it is one and a half times longer than War and Peace.
The novel came into the hands of advanced readers in 1987 in the form of two 600-page volumes. Reviewer The New York Times I didn’t hide the fact that I only spent a couple of days reading the book. Hence his tone, which mixed recognition of the novel's ambition with poorly concealed annoyance at the fact that he was forced to read it. Typical criticism. Apparently the fiction audience needed little encouragement to ignore the 4 pound hardcover book. AND Women and Men, which reportedly took about 10 years to write, was not a publishing event, but rather a disappointment.
I happen to have a soft spot for outsiders, as well as postmodern mega-novels; Having acquired some free time last summer, I purchased the “unread” first edition Women and Men for something around 10 bucks. I carried this book with me everywhere for six weeks, reading on average about 30 pages a day. And it quickly became clear to me why this book is read so little. And later I discovered that for some reasons it should be so.
Why you need to read this...after the jump.
In addition to the question about the length of the text, I soon came across the question about its complexity. The plot of the novel is plot and conspiracy at the same time, and, it must be said, among the confusing presentation McElroy makes a few concessions, anticipating some reader difficulties. At the plot level Women and Men tells the story of housemates Jim Main and Grace Kimball, who never manage to meet. And the level of conspiracy, in turn, reveals countless connections between them, tracing personal and political intrigues stretching from Pinochet's Chile to the Pueblo Indians of Cape Kennedy in New Mexico.
McElroy chooses to remove the key points of these connections, which means that the plot's most important mysteries remain unresolved - like a closed circuit, both on and off. Moreover, the novel boggles (deliberately, I believe) the reader's memory. It's frustrating at first. However, subsequently, it makes it especially “alive”: closer to the final episodes, every detail mobilized by the writer, literally every word resonates with half-forgotten associations. This is the philosophical method of McElroy's madness. Where postmodern "black humor" postulates the instability of presentation as an attack on truth, McElroy's brand of ecstasy encourages us to perceive truth as the sum of all ways of telling it.
In pursuit of his pluralistic vision, Joseph pushes the boundaries of language. His interludes, somewhat reminiscent of short stories, demonstrate an ability for strict, simple writing, but, by the way, Women and Men swollen with the longest and most intricate maxims ever written in the English language. Their manner is based directly on the matrix of New York dialect and specialized discourses (science, mythology, theology, meteorology, economics). Nevertheless, the known length and McElroy’s “syntactic nesting dolls” require vigilance and patience from the reader.
However, if you can get involved - Women and Men will turn out to be an avant-garde variation on the theme of what good old Henry James dubbed “tangible intimacy.” Behind, between and within the compositionally murderous jungle of information, the novel conveys the indescribably dense texture of life in late 70s New York: how to teach your child to ride a bike in the park, what it's like to wander around Madison Square Garden after dark, and so on. . What's more, McElroy describes the incredible lives of Jim and Grace with great wit, persistence, and a healthy dose of human warmth. It was these old-fashioned virtues that made me read the novel to the end.
They were overlooked by critics in 1987, and the reaction to the novel seemed to expose latent hostility toward McElroy's uncompromising aesthetics. Reaction to his next book, which is much more sophisticated The Letter Left to Me, was not much different from the one with which the dizzying novels of the 70s were greeted. McElroy subsequently parted ways with his longtime publisher Alfred A. Knopf. In 2003 Actress in the House will find its own publishing house in the form of the New York Overlook Press. The publisher has since released paperback reissues of McElroy's first two novels, but Women and Men are still waiting in the wings. Europeans apparently think highly of this novel, and in the States Joseph's work echoes the passage about the composer's work in the novel The Recognitions William Gaddis: "He is still spoken of with great respect, as in his days of fame, although rarely played."
Perhaps it is quite appropriate that Women and Men how the apotheosis of a certain niche of American literature caused, and perhaps developed, ambivalent feelings among readers about the postmodern mega-novel as a whole. Indeed, how you feel about his contemporaries may well be a good indicator of how you feel about McElroy himself. For the reader who finds Gravity's Rainbow heavy novel Women and Men will seem like an unjustified book.
Be that as it may, it seems to me that this detachment stems from the mistaken idea that our job is to decode the work, when all we are asked to do is to be completely immersed in it. This idea was proclaimed by postmodernists as passionately as by their modernist predecessors. Thus, McElroy may be a victim of postmodernism as much as he is a master of it. However, he doesn't seem to care much. He still lives in New York and writes about Steve Erickson for Believer, then about September 11th for Electronic Book Review, then about Gao Xinjiang in The Nation. He may be a lost postmodernist, but he is right under our noses, waiting to be found.
Joseph McElroy
I always think of the child as a girl. What if it’s a boy?
Oh, it couldn't be. .
Martha Martin, Revelations, Diaries of Women
Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me, is matter of profound wonder.
A. Lincoln, Letter to a fellow lawyer, November 9, 1842
My thanks to Alice Quinn, my editor at Knopf, for hours, weeks, and months she spent on this book. Thanks also to Margaret Cheney, the copy editor, who has followed every parenthesis and sentence with the most exacting attention. And thanks to my friend Robert Walsh, a young writer and editor of great gifts, who has read the book several times and encouraged me at every turn to believe in the American heart of its common sense and heartfelt and humorous extremities. And thanks to Chris Carroll for help when I needed it.
My thanks also to the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for grants, and to Queens College of The City University of New York for paid time-off from teaching, and to the University of New Mexico for the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship in San Cristobal, New Mexico.
division of labor unknown
After all she was not so sure what had happened, or when it had started. Which was probably not a correct state to be in, because what had happened made the biggest difference in her life so far. Hours of life that worked her back full to breaking of pain and drained it of its work when the back of her child’s head with a slick of dark hair and its rounded shoulders gave her that last extra push to free its arms still held inside her. She would tell her husband later - she knew she would - and she did tell him. She told her husband and he told others for weeks afterward. Also he had his own side to tell. She loved his excitement.
Pain all in her back worked free of her at the end, dropping away into a void below, and it could almost not be forgotten. This pain had been new and undreamt of. As new as the height of the young obstetrician whom she had never seen until she arrived at the hospital, he stood in surgical green against the ceiling above her head, then at her feet, at a distance down there between the stirrups tilting his head this way and that way between her thighs, and the green cap on his head was as far away as the bright, fairly unmetallic room she was giving birth to her child in, and the young obstetrician's words were the talk that went almost and sharply along with the pain her husband Shay - she was thinking of him as Shay - also in surgical green, could not draw off into the ten-buck pocket watch he'd timed her with (where was it? in a pocket? mislaid? she didn' t care where it was). Her husband Shay’s chin hung close to her; I will always be here, his chin might have said, and his hand out of sight somewhere gripped hers, his hand might have been invisible for all she knew; but then he had to see for himself what was going on at the other end and he moved down to the foot of the delivery table and he peered over the doctor's shoulder as if they were both in it together, and then Shay half looked up from that end against his better judgment she was sure and frowned at her but with love smiled the old smile. He needed a shave, his tan had grown seedy. The doctor stood up between her thighs and said they were getting there.
She was just with it enough to be embarrassed and so she didn’t say she didn’t want Shay down there looking. He was already there. Her baby had changed. It had felt older last week, older than their marriage. One night he had told her with his tongue just what he would do to her when the head began to show, and she didn’t think he meant it but she didn’t tell him. Now he heard her pain. He couldn't see it. She could see it on the blank ceiling, oh God oh blank, and it was coming to birth, that pain, and would always be there like a steady supply of marrow-to-burn mashed out of her from her skull downward.
The men there between her thighs said, “Hey” and “Oh” at the same time (doctor, husband, respectively). They spoke at once, like song.
What's she look like down there? Oh God oh God. What’s she sucking spitting look like down sucking splitting there? Look like? Well, she never really had known, so why should she know now? A saddle of well-worked mutton? A new dimension of Her. Later she was encouraged to recall it all. As if she did.
Afterward she did recall a thought about being an invalid that had escaped her during the pain, the labor, and came back at a later moment of the pain when she was not really trying very hard to recall another, different thing that she couldn't at that moment even refer to (so how did she know there was anything to recall?), it suddenly quite naturally during the pain took the place of the invalid insight and it had to do with Shay moving the way he moved when they were at last in the delivery room and he'd been at her side holding her hand. He moved then slowly away from her head to the foot of the delivery table to look at the very top of the baby’s head (girl head or boy head). But also at the part of her he said opened like an animal looking to be a flower. But now with the baby coming down, she was pushing against what Shay would be seeing, whatever that was, and the thing that had come to she had to do with his moving from one end of her to the other, from the upper part where her eyes were, downward - the way he did it, walked to the foot of the table, and the way this turned her into something but she lost it - had it, lost it, a wrinkle in her mind somewhere stirred like the start of a laugh- and later she found herself recalling this thing about being an invalid: that, here she was perfectly healthy, never more, and healthier than Shay with his sinus; and in order to have this baby she had to become an invalid, and she got the picture again of her recurrent dream she'd never told Shay, of gazing out the endless window of her lab and seeing a man led to execution who she learned had been in the hospital getting better for several weeks until he was able to have the punishment executed on him which then she saw was a thousand and one strokes; then he was to crawl back to the infirmary he had just walked out of: but she saw that her thinking was incorrect and she was not an invalid at all, she was using herself, that was what she was doing, being fruitful. Her husband had hated his first name when he was eleven and had been Dave for a while and then, of all things, Shay, he hadn’t gotten over it, she called him Shay sometimes, hadn’t gotten over what? it sounded like a movie actor. What is the fruit of a cross between an animal and a flower?
The men looking her over, head to toe, were glad to be there and so was she to have them, and so was the nurse and so was she to have the nurse and so were they to have the nurse, and so were they glad to have her and her pain and the baby that she could remember looking ahead to: the truth was not head to toe, it was the men looking when they couldn't see in, until they saw what was coming out to meet them, which was nice, wasn't it.
How did you feel?
It was (she sips the last of her daiquiri which now is not so chilled) the most beautiful experience of my life. No, it was rough, it was painful, but I couldn’t remember all the pain. It was an experience I wouldn’t have missed.
She was glad it was ending, glad Shay wanted to be there with her, she was alone with her pain whittling at her, but no, we are not alone.
Shay and the chin he was hitched to moved away but down and near the foot of the delivery table in the bright delivery room, and he moved politely as if he didn’t want to notice himself moving. She found on his face a pursed-lip fixity sharing her pain, she knew he shared it. It was love. She was glad, so glad. She couldn’t have done it without him, later that was what she was telling everyone again. Having apparently already told them. For how else could there be an again? She heard herself.
And remembering the word for what Shay had made her into when he respectfully moved with a Sunday museum-goer's slowness, from her higher to her lower, from her eyes and dry mouth that he'd kissed and that hadn't changed, to the action down there - she thought of him as Shay during the labor - and he mustn't look back at her, this was what she felt, or felt he felt, as if he could share her labor only by not looking back at her. Well, it wasn’t as if she couldn’t have had a mirror to follow the action. But he, who had been impatient for the baby to come and who had said the time had never gone faster, had looked along her length so that by his slowness she had become a model.
Of what? A model of a woman on a scale not to be sniffed at.
Still, a model. A model woman? In the mouths of others. Scientist, lover, mother of a fetus nearing term, nutritionist at the bar of the breakfast nook, creator soft and trim who'd give you a hand and a thigh, demonstrate relative acceleration, share a birth with you, be tracked by your pocket clock through space to the next contraction (breathing quick and regular, hhh - hhh - hhh - hhh, as she and Shay had been shown at the natural childbirth sessions), while she'd often said (knowing she will often later say) that she must have (later had had ...
When looking for an interesting book, people often turn to various ratings and expert recommendations. Not every reader will be able to master our current top ten literary works. The fact is that The Millions portal published ranking of the hardest books to read in history.
Each of the works that made it into the top ten is distinguished by a decent volume, complex, intricate syllables, strange structure and intricate syntax. After reading one or two books from our list today, you have every right to boast of your intellectual superiority, as well as remarkable willpower.
The American modernist writer's lesbian novel was edited by poet and playwright Thomas Stearns Eliot. This does not make the work any easier, although some literary portals regularly include it as required reading.
9. Jonathan Swift, "The Tale of a Barrel"
The anti-church pamphlet was banned by the Pope himself. The plot of the work is impossible to retell due to its complete absence. The author talks a lot and at length about all aspects of human life, its laws and principles. The individual parts of the pamphlet are logically in no way connected with each other.
8. Georg Hegel, “Phenomenology of Spirit”
One of the philosopher’s main works has three parts, devoted respectively to consciousness, self-consciousness and the absolute subject. Sophisticated book lovers of a philosophical bent will enjoy Hegel’s ideas, innovative for their time, based on the concept of “appearing spirit.” The book is considered a fundamental work in the history of philosophical thought.
7. Virginia Woolf, “To the Lighthouse”
The novel immerses the reader in thoughts about time and the flow of human life. The author builds a real kaleidoscope from scraps of thoughts of different characters. There is practically no plot. Even fans of Woolf's work call the novel controversial.
6. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa
The novel's leisurely plot, extensive analysis of the characters' thoughts and actions, and constant references to earlier events evoke mixed feelings in most readers. Clarissa is considered Richardson's best novel.
5. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
The Irish modernist wrote this comic novel for 16 years. The text of the work is an unpredictable mixture of puns in different languages. The novel, inaccessible to understanding, causes controversial reactions from literary scholars.
4. Martin Heidegger, “Being and Time”
The work had a significant influence on the philosophy of the 20th century. Like every fundamental work on philosophy, “Being and Time” will not seem to anyone an easy and unburdensome read.
3. Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans
The novel was never popular among a wide range of readers. Based on its style, structure and style, the work can be called “experimental prose.”
2. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
The heroes of this allegorical poem were fairies and elves. But the images are far from the fairy-tale characters we are used to. On the contrary, all the characters represent real Englishmen and Frenchmen during the reign of Uther Pendragon.
1. Joseph McElroy, Women and Men
McElroy's novel is a real literary Everest, which not everyone can conquer. By the way, the Los Angeles Times included this book among the classic works of American postmodernism.
Not all writers agree with the statement “Brevity is the sister of talent.” In addition, many of us prefer that our favorite book or story never ends. Below is a list of the ten longest novels in the world, based on estimated word count.
Sironia, Texas is a novel by American author Madison Cooper that describes life in the fictional town of Sironia, Texas at the beginning of the 20th century. The book contains approx. 840,000 words and over 1,700 pages, making it one of the longest novels in the English language. It was written over 11 years and published in 1952. Recipient of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award.
Women and Men is a 1987 novel by Joseph McElroy. Contains 1,192 pages and 850,000 words. Considered the most difficult novel in the world to read.
Poor Fellow My Country is a novel by Australian writer Xavier Herbert that won the Miles Franklin Award. Was published in 1975. Consists of 1,463 pages and 852,000 words. Is the longest Australian piece of fiction ever written. The theme of the novel includes issues of Aboriginal rights, and also describes the life and problems of Northern Australia.
Son of Ponni (Ponniyin Selvan) is a Tamil historical novel written by Kalki Krishnamurthy. It is one of the greatest works of Tamil literature. Tells the story of Prince Arulmozhivarman (later crowned Rajaraja Chola I), one of the prominent kings of the Chola dynasty who ruled in the 10th–11th centuries. The novel was published in the 1950s. Contains 2,400 pages and 900,000 words.
Kelidar is a monumental novel by Mahmud Dowlatabadi. One of the most famous Persian novels and certainly one of the best. Contains 2,836 pages in five volumes, consists of ten books and 950,000 words. Depicts the life of a Kurdish family from an Iranian village in Khorasan province between 1946–1949 who faces hostility from their neighbors despite their cultural similarities.
Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady is an epistolary novel by English writer Samuel Richardson, written in 1748. Consists of 1,534 pages and 984,870 words. Included in the list of the 100 best novels of all time. It tells the tragic story of a heroine whose pursuit of virtue is constantly thwarted by her family.
Zettels Traum is a work by West German writer Arno Schmidt, published in 1970. Contains 1,536 pages and 1,100,000 words. The story here is told in the form of notes, collages and typewritten pages.
Venmurasu is a Tamil novel by writer Jeyamohan. This is the author's most ambitious work, which he began in January 2014 and later announced that he would write it every day for ten years. The total length of the novel is expected to be 25,000 pages. As of December 2017, 15 books have been published online and in print. So far they total 11,159 pages and 1,556,028 words.
In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) is a French epic novel, the main work of the writer Marcel Proust, created by him during 1908/1909–1922 and published in seven parts from 1913 to 1927. Describes the author's childhood memories and teenage experiences in aristocratic France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, examining the waste of time and the lack of meaning in the world. The novel consists of 3,031 pages and 1,267,069 words.
Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus is a French river novel originally published in ten volumes in the 17th century by Madeleine de Scudiri and her brother Georges de Scudiri. In total, the original edition has 13,095 pages and 1,954,300 words. It is considered the longest novel in the history of world literature. The type refers to secular novels (with a key), where modern people and events are subtly disguised as classical characters from Roman, Greek or Persian mythology.
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