It’s not that I’m biased… or, rather, my biases pull me in two directions. On one hand, I greatly admire the new journal n+1 – its moral seriousness, its elegant writing, its stewardship of the Frankfurt School legacy. On the other hand, I regularly contribute reviews to the blog on which this post is appearing. And so, while part of me wants to sneer along with n+1‘s backhanded compliment to literary bloggers – that they represent “the avant-garde of 21st Century publicity” – another, better informed part of me rebels. The current issue of n+1 raises many legitimate questions about the transformation of consciousness and culture we are (proximally and for the most part unreflectively) undergoing. I am myself suspicious of the Infotainment Revolution, and it seems peevish to dismiss an entire critique in order to defend a scrap of turf. But when n+1 stoops to the kinds of gross generalizations and straw-man-thrashing we are accustomed to seeing on the covers of the newsweeklies, it threatens to undermine its own mission. A little background…The Winter 2007 issue of n+1 – “The Decivilizing Process” – concerns itself with technology and the culture industry, and if its unsigned, front-of-the-book essays are polemical, they are generally justified in being so. The spirits of Marshall McLuhan and Theodor Adorno hover in the background like a beyond-the-grave odd couple, the former insisting that media are only as good or bad as the uses to which people put them, the latter asserting that those uses are likely to reinforce the worst tendencies of the capitalist world-order that birthed them. Thus one writer points out that silence, a hard-won legacy of literate civilization, has, in the age of “Whenever Minutes” begun to disappear. (No doubt some enterprising corporation will soon be marketing “silence spas” or “silence earmuffs” – selling back to us what we once had for free.)In a short piece called “The Blog Reflex,” n+1 extends its critique to the blogosphere, suggesting that reflexive antagonism and an imperative for speed have undercut the much-hyped democratic potential of the blog:Yet criticism as an art didn’t survive. People might have used their blogs to post the best they could think or say. They could have posted 5,000 word critiques of their favorite books and records. Some polymath might even have shown, online, how an acute and well-stocked sensibility responds to the streaming world in real time. But those things didn’t happen, at least not often enough. […] The language is supposed to mimic the way people speak on the street or the college quad, the phatic emotive growl and purr of exhibitionistic consumer satifsfaction – “The Divine Comedy is SOOO GOOOD!” – or displeasure – “I shit on Dante!” So man hands on information to man.Not least among the problems with this premature obituary for the blog is that it is, in many small ways, accurate. Anyone looking for an Ebert-style thumbs-up or thumbs-down on Dante will no doubt find one on the internet. Google will even tell you how long the search took. Blogs both reiterate and catalyze the coarsening of the culture… the dumbing-down, the, uh…whatever. (Tocqueville knew that democracy tends to aim toward a B-minus.) And for reasons too complex to go into here (I’m intentionally trying to illustrate one of n+1’s points) the blog as an instrument of kulturkritik may be as compromised as those other artifacts of industrial capitalism – film, the photograph, the short story, jazz, rock n’ roll… even (gasp!) the magazine.Yet, depending on one’s degree of fatalism about world history, the medium may not doom the message. Some of us on the American left believe that Jean-Luc Godard, Walker Evans, Donald Barthelme, Archie Shepp, and The Clash managed to transcend the limitations of their respective media, to push some kind of shake-up in the system, to preserve a space for free movement in an increasingly die-cut, cast-iron (or, later, iPod-sleek, powered-by-Intel) landscape. If n+1 took Adorno’s suspicions about mass culture more seriously, why would its editors seek to penetrate the citadels of Random House and Doubleday? Why would they run ads for HarperCollins? Why would they continue to publish? (Why would they demand 5,000 word critiques of favorite records? (Why, in Adorno’s case, did bourgeois high-culture continue to matter?)) Obviously, some accommodation with the system has been reached, and more power to n+1 for continuing to fight the good fight. But to call out others for their own accommodations is to devolve to the level of intellectual pissing match. Or maybe King of the Hill is more apposite.Lit-bloggers “represent a perfection of the outsourcing ethos of contemporary capitalism,” we are told.Why should publishers pay publicists and advertise in book supplements when a community of native agents exist [sic] who will perform the same service for nothing and with an aura of indie-cred? In addition to free advance copies, the blogger gets some recognition: from the big houses, and from fellow bloggers. Recognition is also measured in the number of hits – by their clicks you shall know them – and by the people who bother to respond to your posts with subposts of their own. The lit-bloggers become a self-sustaining community, minutemen ready to rise up in defense of their niches. So it is when people have only their precarious self-respect. But responses – fillips of contempt, wet kisses – aren’t criticism.Just for clarification, dear reader: this isn’t a fillip of contempt. It’s a fusillade. (Flame on!)Here we must grapple with the anonymous writer’s rhetoric: call it the Argument contra Fortiori. He or she proceeds from the premise that “I shit on Dante” is the alpha and omega of lit-blog discourse. But just as the lazy researcher can Google up coprophiliac reductions of il divino poeta, he can also easily find the sorts of long essays n+1 values – the kinds of essays (not incidentally) at which n+1 excels. For example, Scott Esposito’s Quarterly Conversation, an extension of his excellent blog, recently ran the most considered critique I’ve yet read of William H. Gass’ The Tunnel… and I’ve read many of them. The Lit-Blog Co-op, mixing old-fashioned boosterism with serious discussion, helps to bring overlooked novels, many of them progressive and anti-capitalist, to the public’s attention. The LBC does it not for the publishers, little enterprises like Minneapolis’ Coffee House Press, but for the authors, and for the readers. Ed Champion’s recent round-table on Against the Day, meanwhile, offered readers much-needed context for that profoundly leftist novel.Many of us engaged in this work feel that the institutions that might have done it in the past have vanished or sold out (the book club), refined themselves into impotence (the salon), or abdicated their critical instincts in favor of precisely the kind of PR-flackmanship n+1 lays at the feet of the literary blog. I won’t make the case that my own writings for The Millions are anything other than superior versions of newspaper-supplement reviews, but I do know that serious literary bloggers see themselves as an antidote to a vertically integrated media sector and a closed-circuit publishing industry.There is merit in n+1‘s attack on the hyperlink ethos of the blogs. In lieu of critical writing, a list of links can easily decay into an endorsement of an industry’s buzz about itself. Does tracking down links count as journalism? An interesting question. But, given that many of the lit-blogs least vulnerable to charges of thoughtlessness link to one another, and given that these blogs are quite popular, it seems to me startling that n+1 didn’t manage to stumble across them in its internet divagations. Indeed, I seem to hear the call-note of territorialism sounded beneath n+1‘s write-off of the literary blog. (Note the way “their clicks” shades into “your posts.”) The “aura of indie cred” paired with recognition “from the big houses”… once upon a time this intersection might have been the exclusive province of literary journals. But the best literary blogs, free from the economic vicissitudes of the print journal, have begun to encroach. What can editors who have “only their precarious self-respect” do but fire a warning shot? “So much typing, so little communication…” In this summary dismissal, I learn more about n+1‘s own anxieties than I do about the potential of the blog as a medium for “the free activity of the mind.”But perhaps I’m inferring too much. In any case, n+1 has little to worry about. Its editors are prodigiously gifted, respected, drowning in “indie cred,” and despite (or because of) such stimulating missteps as “The Blog Reflex,” the journal provides a much-needed antidote to the inanities of consumer culture. The biggest danger would be for n+1 to fall through the trap-door of elitism, around which Adorno himself danced. Communication requires both speakers and listeners, and by making common cause with like-minded bloggers, n+1 might swell the ranks of the enlightened, rather than going the genteel way of the salon. To that end, its introductory essaylets would do well in the future to forgo simplistic binary code – Literary Blogs: Thumbs Up Or Thumbs Down? – in favor of sustained, thoughtful analysis.See more about n+1‘s “The Decivilizing Process” here. “The Blog Reflex” is, unsurprisingly, not currently available online.Update: If you’re not tired of this yet, see the follow-up post: Love: A Burning Thing.
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.