There are precious few things David Mitchell’s latest opus The Bone Clocks isn’t about. Across centuries and continents, Mitchell works the literary magic that has earned him a unique place in contemporary fiction—an author unbound by genre or expectation. The Bone Clocks was birthed onto bookshelves already longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, a daunting pedigree for a novel to embrace on its publication date, but Mitchell is already thinking two books ahead. Like the Horologists that feature in his new book, he can’t be bound by the constraints of time. Mitchell has authored six novels, and each one is a puzzle of narratives, characters, and plot. These elements leap between texts, taking minor roles in one novel and major turns in the next. The world of David Mitchell’s prose is immense. Speaking with him in person before a stop on his recent book tour, I decided to play Royal Geographic Society explorer and map out the vast expanses of his latest fictional universe.
The Millions: Do you see a book like The Bone Clocks or Cloud Atlas in part as an exercise in story architecture—dovetailing narratives, time jumps, callbacks, and so forth. How many blueprints do you need to draft before you build the final versions of your novels?
David Mitchell: An exploratory blueprint is to the finished book what a doodle might be to an oil painting, but you need somewhere to start. A vague, rough, approximate, sprawling, first something. From that you get an idea of how many parts there’s going to be—you’ve got to break it down into parts—six, in this one. Then once you know what the parts are, I draw a herringbone diagram, a horizontal line with limbs coming off it, and each limb is where I write ideas down. Each limb is essentially a scene, so you get to see all the scenes in the part and in the right order. More lines can come off the subspines—it gets quite hairy—and then a column of dialogue goes off in one direction and then another one underneath because there’s more space down there and then I might draw the face of a character because I’m stuck for a bit. That is the blueprint for what I write. What I end up writing may conform to that blueprint, or it may vary from it, but at least you are not dealing with a void. The blank screen is the enemy. You can’t improve on nothing. You have to improve on something, however bad, and patchy, and incomplete it is. Once you have something, you begin to work.
TM: The Bone Clocks deals with Atemporals, who are beings that either reincarnate or never truly die. In creating the Atemporals, you either appropriated or invented words like “scansion” and “psychosoterica”. What is the etymology of this vocabulary?
DM: Some Jung. Some what I imagine might be Greek, but I don’t speak any, so it’s only an imagined Greek. Some 21st century West Coast computer talk—some IT terms. “Redact” is probably a mid-20th century term. I see it in the Cold War sense: the redacting of documents.
TM: It immediately conjures an image of thick black lines on legal papers.
DM: Exactly. “Psychosoterica” I thought about long and hard. It is a relatively modern version of an old occult practice in the cosmology of the book. The Anchorites have fallen into a branch of the occult called The Shaded Way and the Horologists have followed a less predatory version called The Deep Stream. I made those terms up. I suppose there are echoes of how western Buddhism names the various branches of Buddhism, of which there are many. It is not a religion of the text, or a single book, that lays down the rules. It has morphed in many parts of the world into contradictory sets of beliefs in many areas, such as what happens to us after we die. A Sri Lankan Buddhist would give a very different answer then a Zen Buddhist. The thing I like about it is…that’s ok. No one has a real problem with it; they don’t go to war with each other about it.
TM: Your book features five narrators across six distinct novellas, with each section leaping forward a decade or so from the last. How did you decide what not to include from the missing years between each section?
DM: What would have skewed the novel. That’s what I left out. What would have stopped the novel taking off. I omitted what would have bent it out of shape. Watching what you’re making is what informs you about what you can and can’t include.
TM: A novelist, Crispin Hershey, narrates the third section of The Bone Clocks. In writing the character, did you gift him any of your creative leftovers like rejected book titles or abandoned story ideas?
DM: No, I think made everything up just for him, because he isn’t me. Well,he is me in terms of where the raw material comes from, but he’s a slave to his vanity in a way I try not to be. And that’s what generates, say, book titles I wouldn’t choose for my own. He’s a fictional creation and his oeuvre is tailored for him. It’s a bespoke oeuvre with him in mind.
TM: Holly Sykes is the heroine of your book, appearing in some form in each of its six segments, beginning in 1984, and stretching to 2034. How do you keep a character’s voice consistent across that time span while still allowing it to evolve with age?
DM: You are right in identifying a technical challenge. You do have to do that. The nature of the challenge changes a little big depending on what decade of her life she’s in, and what decade of the world’s life she’s in as well. First in the 1980s, you have to include a few 80s-isms and make sure that no recent developments in English slip into what Holly is saying. For example, “that’s so not what I’m going to do Mum.” We didn’t say that in the 80s. “So” was not an adjectival modifier in that sense. You make it decade appropriate. And you do that for all of the characters, of course. I factored in that at some point Holly got an education—a degree in Psychology—that would’ve upped her register away from demotic and more towards the hieratic. She learns to speak posher. That gives her a greater eloquence later in life. I needed her to be a writer, or at least a memoirist. I needed to enrich her relationship with language from the 1980s Holly. Alongside her own story, and in parallel to it, is the story of her relationship with language, which gets a bit richer the older she gets. She’s still using “sort of” to the very end; those are the last words of the book. I think it’s there in the first sentence as well. There are a few of those verbal tics, no matter how acrobatic with language we become, that stay with us. It’s hard to get it right, but it’s my job to get it right. If I got it wrong, it would endanger the fictional credibility of Holly, and then I’d have a broken book. So you think about it.
TM: The sixth and final portion of The Bone Clocks imagines a frighteningly possible near future in which an Endarkment has, in so many words, reset the world into barbaric times. Did any specific sources inspire your vision of how the world may look in twenty years?
DM: Any copy of a relatively highbrow newspaper will do it. I can’t remember exactly which news stories—it’s been a lousy summer for news, with Palestine and ISIS and Ukraine—just monstrous this year, but I’m sure there were equivalents last year too that bled into it. Actually, I read a really good book published in the 1950s called The Death of Grass, where a killer virus doesn’t kill us, humans, as they do in many contemporary stories, but it gets the crops we eat. That’s more interesting to me. Wholesale zombie apocalypses in six days makes for a few good scenes in movies, but we’ve seen those films already. But when food becomes scarcer and scarcer, and it’s moving closer and closer to your part of the world, and first rice goes, but it’s ok, because we’ve still got wheat, and then wheat turns into a brown mush in the fields, and then barley, and then oats, and then everything? Christ, what are you going to eat? What are you going to feed the animals? It gets very serious very quickly, but not so quickly that you can’t have interesting metaphysical discourse along the way. Another book, the one that Holly is reading to the kids in the last section, is The Eagle of the Ninth series by Rosemary Sutcliff. She was an English, wheelchair-bound classicist in the 1950s who wrote about the Romans leaving Britain and the collapse of Roman civilization. The series focuses on the power vacuums a collapse of that magnitude leaves, and how the innocents always end up having to pay more then the soldiers. Those books are colossal. They are fantastic. In the third book of the trilogy, The Lantern Bearers, the best of the three, there is a scene where the Roman ships leave the shores of Britain for the last time, and they know it’s the last time. What are they leaving behind? What’s going to happen to these people? That’s what was at the forefront of my mind—really how our world will look to my daughter as she grows—as I was writing that last section. What do you think, am I too gloomy, or might it happen?
TM: What scared me most was how possible it seemed to me, especially the idea of everyone trusting their devices to digitally store the history of their lives: their writing, their photographs, their memories. Everything that we think is safely stored on servers and drives is gone in an instant.
DM: It’s like a cyberstroke. And what about scientific research? What about the Hadron Collider stuff? Is anyone printing that out onto pieces of paper? I rather doubt it. Our grandchildrens’ lives are going to be a whole lot rougher then ours if I’m right. Let’s hope I’m wrong.
TM: Does the book on your bedside table often influence your works in progress?
DM: Yeah, usually, because I’ve chosen it to do just that. I read a book called The World Without Us about what would happen if humanity ceased to exist, and how long it would take to recover itself. Not long! I learned all sorts of things, like there is still a river flowing right through New York—there always was—but now it gets pumped out, except when it rains. But it just takes those pumps being stopped for 48 hours and there would be a river running down Fifth Avenue. I find that strangely comforting. The only problem is our plutonium dumps and deposits of radioactive material. We’ve damned ourselves to needing power grids to keep those cool and safe. When those go, you get what’s happening in Japan, in Fukushima. That would be the only disaster for nature if humans stopped existing. What a legacy to leave to our kids. How dare we. How dare we. Just so we can have our air conditioning and patio heaters. How dare we.
TM: So is it fair to say you choose reading material that vibes with what you’re writing at the moment? Some authors prescribe the opposite approach.
DM: Well I do sometimes go the opposite, because you find stuff there as well, serendipitously. And sometimes you just read great fiction to remind yourself of how high the bar needs to be. Halldór Laxness’s Independent People is a book I devoured. No tricks, just an old-school, somewhat intergenerational novel. It’s set in the poorest possible zone in the world, novelistically: Iceland. But it’s not Reykjavik. It’s Northeast Iceland. And it’s not in a town in Northeast Iceland, it’s in a valley where a farmer is trying to bring an abandoned farmhouse back to life. I was trying to work this out: what’s the most impossible thing to write about and make it interesting? There’s this particular section set in a boy’s head, a half-hour in real time, where he wakes before everyone else, in winter, and nothing could possibly happen. It’s the purest nothing I’ve ever seen encased in prose. But it’s a brilliant, fascinating scene. Laxness is a magician. That’s another reason why I sometimes choose to read something with no connection to what I’m working on. Although, it is Iceland, and Iceland makes two appearances in The Bone Clocks: Crispin Hershey goes there, and it appears not in the last section, but past the last section. That’s my one real moment of self-indulgence in the book. I hacked it down from six pages to about three, but it’s a three page essay on not thinking about Iceland. My editor said, “are you sure?” and I said “yeah, I want one place where Crispin isn’t being a jerk.” This is what he does, this is how he thinks. It lends him some credibility.
TM: The cultural phenomenon of Easter eggs—hidden references inside of books, films, etc.—permeates The Bone Clocks in the form of appearances from characters from your past novels and references to their worlds. What inspired their inclusion?
DM: They’re just the right people for the job. It’s not really inspiration—it’s that they fit and can bring good stuff with them. Hugo’s cool. He’s in a thirteenth of Black Swan Green as Jason Taylor’s obnoxious, precocious cousin. When I wrote that, and I’m sure when readers read it, you don’t think you’re ever going to see him again. He’ll just stay in that book and he’s done. But then here he is in The Bone Clocks as the joint second major character with Marinus. If anything inspires me, it might be that moment when a reader encounters a character they were sure they would never hear from again.
TM: Can readers hope to see any of the characters that were in The Bone Clocks in your future works?
DM: Yes. I’m going to do a book mostly about Marinus in the future, about what happens once she gets to Iceland, and to link that to Meronym, who’s a character at the center of Cloud Atlas. They call themselves the Prescients. That’s how she introduces herself when she arrives in a fusion-powered ship to the post-apocalyptic times and the think tank the surviving Horologists have set-up in Iceland. I’m going to do Hershey’s father as well, the filmmaker. I’m doing something short now, but my next major book, I’ll start that next year.
TM: Short like your recent Twitter story?
DM: Five Twitter stories. They won’t be on Twitter, but five stories of that length. And they’re linked. The first one is the Twitter story. That’s part one, and then two, three, four, five. Really short book. Marinus will appear in the fifth story, in her Iris Marinus form.
TM: You don’t define the title of your book until late into the story. Was this choice an exercise in delayed gratification?
DM: It’s cool, when you’ve forgotten that the title is a puzzle, to then have it explained. Delayed gratification. Ambushed gratification really.
TM: At the point where it is defined, in the fifth section I believe, there’s so much else going on that the last thing you’re worried about is the title, and then you gift it to readers right in the middle of a major action scene.
DM: That inspires me to utter an evil villain type “mwahahaha!”
TM: The Bone Clocks also has more then a few history lessons embedded in its pages. Did you opt to place Marinus and other Atemporals in areas of history that particularly appealed to you, or was the where and when secondary to the character development those scenes afforded the story?
DM: I chose them with thought. I needed Esther Little to be more ancient then the Horologists. Archeological evidence points back—I think the last time I looked it was 80,000 years—to indigenous Australians being the first inhabitants. There are few places as unaltered as Australia, so for deep time, it was good to give her that neck of the woods to call home. The Horologists that can’t chose their hosts, the ones that get reborn according to the laws of demographic probability, are most of the time Chinese. The Chinese population has always been a high fraction of the Earth’s population. Marinus is Chinese in the incarnation before she is Iris, when she’s the doctor who happens to be in England in time to treat Holly. It was almost a process of elimination, that one.
TM: Horology is defined as the art or science of measuring time, and is the name adopted by the group of Atemporals that Holly Sykes encounters early on in her life as well. Do you consider The Bone Clocks to be an extended definition of horology—an examination of an abstract concept that toes the line between science and art?
DM: There’s certainly an academic in Los Angeles who thinks that, Paul Harris, a member of the International Society of Time. Inadvertently, yes. That isn’t where I started though. Character development and narrative. Start there, and then the ideas will appear, like spores turning into mushrooms. I think time is a default theme of all novels. As is memory, as is character, as is identity. You can spot this when editors don’t know what to put on the jacket copy, so they put “a mesmerizing mediation on time and identity”. How can you write a novel that isn’t about those things? Maybe that’s a notch too high, because I needed to show time passing by, on the large-scale temporal arcs that plot the novel.
TM: Your novel reminded me in a small way of Richard Linklater’s newest film, Boyhood, where in the course of three hours, the audience watches a single actor go from adolescence to adulthood. Like Holly in your novel, you see this person at the end of their journey, and you know they’re the same character from before, but they’re nothing alike, not even physically.
DM: Realism, when done well, is more fantastical than fantasy. And you can’t dismiss it, because its happening in your own cells, in your own lives, in your own families. Reality is the ultimate trip.
Previously: In the Edges of the Maps: David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks
There will, doubtless, be those readers who look scornfully on our choices (“Psh. These aren’t that hard, you’re just not smart enough to read them“). Indeed, for myself, that is probably true. And to those so brilliant that not a one of these tomes challenged or vexed them more than a People magazine, we tip our hats. This list is for the mere mortals among us—who have found themselves reading and rereading the same paragraph of James Joyce’s Ulysses to no avail, who have been reduced to tears by Faulkner’s one-line chapter, “My mother is a fish,” in As I Lay Dying, who may have spitefully broken the brittle spine of her first used copy of Tristram Shandy, who use a volume of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a doorstop and eye it with a wary distrust when she walks past it (for it is fond of stubbing toes).
William Gass’s The Tunnel is just brutal, but the people I know who have finished it claim that it’s one of the best things they’ve ever read. Go figure.
I’m one of those people, Saul. I think that should be the front cover blurb: “Just brutal.”
most frustrating and difficult book for me was Women and Men by Mcelroy, i was never able to crack the code and enter the world. Most challenging books to me are like a maze or like learning a new language, with sustained effort i can usually sort of solve it or start to understand it’s rythms and then it flows pretty well, but Women and Men just completely eluded me. Only Revolutions was a little like that for me too but i didn’t try as hard, the whole structure thing i found annoying, i don’t really want to have to put in manual labor while reading.
I found My Name is Red, for all its richness, an incredibly difficult book. The most brutal book I’ve ever read, however, remains the slim Narrative of Sojourner Truth.
What about something by Heidegger? Being and Time? He really makes Kant and Hegel look easy.
After forcing myself to read Ulysses about a dozen years ago because of all the best-book-of-the-20th-century hype I decided slogging through a long book that you are not enjoying is stupid.
So, after about 50 pages of Infinite Jest I decided it was the new Ulysses and unceremoniously put it down.
The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch. I have read the English translation, which “unfolds” the German into a confusing hypnotic and intoxicating reading. Very difficult and quite rewarding.
I found _Women and Men_ though it took a year to finish it, a novel that has grown on me over time, and it changed the way I looked at how sentences can be written. McElroy’s humanity and compassion, attributes not easily spotted amongst Usian or other post-modernists, are evident in this book as he tries to show his characters living on multiple levels, just like we do in our daily lives. Forster’s “only connect” came repeatedly to mind as I read this book, and his most recent, _Actress in the House_, which is similar but easier to understand.
Difficult? Yes. Readable and eventually comprehensible? Also yes. It requires patience and interest. McElroy’s not for everyone, perhaps, but few writers are.
Nice to see Gass mentioned, though if anyone ever wanted a reason to read Burton, Woolf, Gaddis, Musil, Kant, Joyce, (and authors not on the above list), Alfau, O’Brien, Elkin, Mann… ah, the list goes on, Gass’s books of loving criticism are a good place to start.
And the Tunnel is amazing. Wish there was someone of Gass’s abilities to speak for the Tunnel.
I think Michael Brodsky is probably the most demanding novelist I’ve read, followed closely by Robbe-Grillet, Gaddis, early Beckett and Malcolm Lowry. I recommend cleansing your palate in between difficult books with Richard Yates, whose style is so limpid that it almost feels like you’re not reading.
Tristram Shandy is laugh aloud funny. I picked it up a few years ago with no prior knowledge–just wanted a novel from the 18th C. It’s a real treat. At one point, Sterne gets 8 pp. out of a piping hot chestnut falling into a guy’s breeches. This is lofty stuff.
As for difficult, I nominate JR by Wm. Gaddis. Seven hundred pages, virtually all dialog with no attributions. You have to pretend you’re sitting in a dark room with headphones on, listening to unidentified voices–but soon you recognize who’s talking. There are also, on the Web, guides that will break it all down into scenes by page. This book is a hoot. You just have to let it have its way with you.
At Swim -Two -Birds was unscalable for me. I’ve climbed Ulysses, The Recognitions, Gravity’s Rainbow, Tristram Shandy and enjoyed them all, but O’Brien leaves me gasping.
For sheer length, Richardson’s Clarissa should be a contender here. It’s supposedly the longest book ever written in English.
And though it wasn’t difficult to read, the 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell should also qualify. It took me from November 2007 until June 2009 to get through the whole thing, but I took some long breaks from it.
I must second the nomination for Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. When I first started it, I thought I would never finish. It is now my favorite book and I have read it many times. For cunning, wit, pure wickedness, and above all, charm, few villains in English literature equal Robert Lovelace.
Add to your list (or reading list): Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.Difficult, wonderfully bizarre.
Though I love all of his stuff, it will do many readers a service to take a look at The Master’s last three: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and especially, The Golden Bowl. Pages would go by and I would not have known what he was saying.
“Mulligan Stew” by Gilbert Sorrentino was just about worth the read with some wonderful jousts with language. The sum greater than the parts? Probably not.
Clarissa isn’t that challenging – it’s essentially a bodice ripper dressed up as moral improvement. But it is loooong. That’s the trouble, right there.
Hands down has to be The Waves by Virginia Woolf. Utterly, totally and completely batshit crazy and baffling from start to finish.
Don’t forget Patrick White. Murky, baroque, and baffling, with flashes of brilliance that keep you reading in the hope that all will eventually become clear…which it never does.
I found Fredric Jameson “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” to still be a little out of my reach a few years back. I am getting ready to try it out again… It should be a bit more accessible in light of the understanding I have gained since my last whack at it.
All books by Gerald Murnane, if you can find them, are fascinating. Obscure and fascinating. One feels as though the grit in one’s reading eye has been thoroughly cleaned out with…something. They are fictions, sometimes_about_ the act of writing, in many cases, though not always.
He has a newie, Barley Patch, available from Giramondo Press in Australia, that opens, “Must I write?” As my kids might say, intense.
Carlyle’s a good suggestion. And how about Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren? Still working on that one…
If we’re chucking in works of philosophy (Kant, Hegel, et al.), surely Wittgenstein’s Tractatus goes flying in at the top? Head-in-the-microwave hard.
During my late teens I devoured ‘Wolf Solent’ by John Cowper Powys, identifying powerfully with the author’s depiction of the protagonist’s inner world. Subsequently I choked on Cowper Powys’ magnum opus, ‘A Glastonbury Romance’ and the various other Cowper Powys doorsteps over which I attempted to clamber with increasing dispmay. I now have a modest collection of John Cowper Powys first editions, none of which I have read beyond their indigestible first few pages.
For something modern I suggest Theroux’s Darconville’s Cat.
thank god someone else mentioned the difficulty of as i lay dying! i thought I was the only one. i’d also like to nominate the man without qualities, and for something more contemporary, 2666. I read the first four books and just couldnt bring myself to finish the fifth.
Kirk, please give Infinite Jest five or six weeks of your attention – it’s a rich, rewarding book. Just keep three bookmarks inside it (one to mark your place in the text, one for the endnotes and one for words to look up). I finished it last weekend and haven’t been able to pick up anything else since. Nothing I’ve read describes entertainment or addiction so clearly and thoroughly.
May I suggest “The Decline of the West” by Oswald Spengler?
Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is one of the few books I’ve ever thrown across a room from frustration. I picked it up and continued, threw it across the room again, picked it up again … and now it’s my answer to anybody when they ask me my favorite American novel. As with so many “difficult” books, once you figure your way in, once you begin to get a foothold, then the magic starts.
William Gaddis’ “JR” is indeed difficult and wonderful but even more complex, and again all dialogue with no character identification was his next one, “A Frolic of His Own,” which takes on the American’s craze for suing one another to the nth degree.
But for sheer intensity of writing, I suggest “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling” by Marguerite Young, two volumes (Dalkey Archive Press), 1300 pages of paragraphless prose poetry and essentially plot-less. It’s that aspect that allows you decades to finish it (it took me four).
It also happens to be one of Anne Tyler’s favorite books, which she says she dips into during episodes of writer’s block. The book even had a few seconds of fame in the film version of her “The Accidental Tourist.”
Looking at the list of Difficult Books covered so far, it looks like they are going in chronological order. That means Ill have to wait for my favorites: Vollmann, Gass, and DFW.
@Otto At Swim-Two-Birds harder than Ulysses?!? You must be joking. Without the footnotes, I never would have stood a chance with Ulysses. I never even felt the need for footnotes with O’Brien (and At Swim-Two-Birds is far and away his toughest book).
‘apologies for getting all epistemological, but “hard” is really (really) subjective in this context…..
I read Ulysses at age 15, and I don’t regret it.
Now I’m 16, and on to Gravity’s Rainbow.
The Cat in the Hat really blew my preconceptions away.
What is it with that tall, anthropomorphic, mischievous cat, wearing a tall, red and white-striped hat and a red bow tie.
I have a few white whales that I will dominate. Did I miss it in the comments? Did no one mention Proust? I’ve read Swann’s Way, but I feel uncomfortable making that statement. I just don’t feel like I paid enough attention. Oh also, Auerbach’s Mimesis. Maybe one day, I’ll figure that one out.
Sorry I just realize my previous first sentence made no sense. (I call the books that truly challenge me white whales…usually in my best grizzly old sea captain voice.)
I’m 2/12 on that list. I’ve read both Paradise Lost & Ada. Tristram Shandy is next on that list, but not for some while. I just spent an entire summer blogging my way through Ada with a good friend: http://readingardor.tumblr.com
Have read 2/12: Moby-Dick and Paradise Lost. I have to say that, for me, both are superseded in difficulty by Bronte’s ‘Villette’. It’s long, jumps in and out of French during speeches, and has a very devious narrator — the reader has a task to work ahead of her.
If “House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski is not on this list when its done, it cant be taken seriously…
Ashamed to say I’ve read not a single one on that list…BUT (I saved a lot on my car insurance) I DID make it through The Royal Family by William Vollman. I’ll choose waterboarding next time.
Several books by the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Or Kant.
i am surprise that the bible is not number one , very difficult to read and everybody have a different interpretation
it have all murder ,mystery, science fiction , mass murder ,jealousy ,erotic poems ,magic.
plus not many have read it covert to covert , one problem though no jokes !
I’ve read (and felt I understood) quite a few difficult philosophers like Derrida, Heidegger, Hegel, Adorno, Baudrillard and even Lacan, but nothing could get me through Being and Nothingness, by Sartre.
Great project, sweet feeling of investment paying off when you have suffered through some entry on the list.
If the flood gates are opened to french philosophy, well, there are many… but Lacan and his Écrits should definitly be considered. Derrida just need a friendly explanation, but Lacan never intended something as mundane as being understood. Even Zizek admits it: unreadable.
I second two books: Darconville’s Cat-moreover, you
reach the point of increasing returns.
And Oswald Spengler’s Decline-the 2 volume unabridged set with fold-out
charts will make for instant discombobulation.
Also Laura Warholic by Theroux.
I loved “Moby Dick” when I read it in the 1980s, but that was because I had the now out-of-print Harold Beaver edition from Penguin with its 300 pages of notes telling you what you need to know.
I have loved the first 3 pages of “Ulysses” each and every time I have read them.
Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus”, ugh.
Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus” is actually supposed to be funny, rather than impenetrable. Melville was inspired by Carlyle but lightened up the prose.
Wright’s “Arabic Grammar” (Dover reprint) is easily the best Arabic grammar I know, but the author assumes the reader already reads Arabic, as well as German, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic and Ethiopic, so people who had trouble with Spanish …
My nominee is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Clarissa is a walk in the park compared to this.
And of course the unpublished Chiliad by Simon Otius at unhappened [dot] com.
I’d nominate Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, and The Illuminatus Trilogy, by Robert Anton Wilson and Shea. The former due to its postmodern and semi-experimental semiotics; the latter due to its length. The people I’ve met who have abandoned these works far outweigh those who have completed them.
Cloud Atlas, however, is a higher achievement. Amazing work.
i guess the books were too difficult to complete the list.