Hi Lincoln, love this sentiment, but would you consider crediting translators in your discussion of translated books? It's hard enough to get recognition for the work we do, which we'd like to keep doing more of so more short (or long) little difficult books can make their way into English to challenge and titillate readers. Thank you!
-David Markson's final four novels of fragments, collages of facts about writers and artists assembled to form an oblique argument (Though he does, occasionally, get a fact wrong)
-Padget Powell's The Interrogative Mood, a novel in questions
-Most anything by César Aira
-Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat, which is best read with no knowledge of its contents
I just finished Tom's Crossing by Mark Z Danielewski, a 1200 plus page whopper. With a book of this length you become endeared to the characters. I miss them, what an experience. Perhaps Danielewski's most straitghtforward book, reading this book will be a mile post in your life.
What I love about lists like this is that the inclusion of a half-dozen or so favorites of mine serve as the best possible recommendations for the half-dozen or so that I've never heard of.
I think your subcategories of difficulty are useful, but I would suggest driving them even further apart. I think that *Exercises in Style* and *Multiple Choice* are unusual in format (and of course wonderful), but are they really *difficult*? I'm just not sure the latter is le mot juste.
All right, some recommendations, to go along with yours & some of the earlier commentators:
• Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (and others of his novellas, which today we would often call short novels), famously ambiguous and difficult to parse
• Robert Owen Butler's Severance — combining the amount of time a head is thought to be conscious after decapitation and the number of words thought per minute in extreme anxiety, this is a series of brief monologues of the thoughts of beheaded people, both historical (Cicero, John the Baptist, lots of French revolutionary figures) and mythical (Medusa, the Dragon killed by St George, and the Lady of the Lake), ending with the death of the author himself;
• Also in the Oulipian category, Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa (which starts using only words beginning with A, then goes to both A and B, works up in 26 chapters to all words, and then slowly works back down so the final chapter is again only words beginning with A)
• Albert Camus, The Fall: a dramatic monologue that is a bit difficult in style and very challenging in content, but brilliant
• Marguerite Yourcenar, Alexis—not sure if it's difficult enough, but it's very short and very wonderful and I am sure some people will find it hard. Written in the 1920s, a letter from a man to his wife explaining that he's leaving her because he's gay.
• And while neither are prose novels, I can't let Queneau's fabulous Exercises be mentioned without citing my two favorite of adaptations of it (there are a bunch), Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story (the work is brilliant, the title & cover chosen by misguided publicists) which does for comics what Queneau does for prose, and Philip Ordung's 99 Variations on a Proof, which does it for mathematical proof. Both utter delights, anyone who likes the Queneau should try them, too
Yes it depends on what we mean by difficult. Although from experience teaching both books, I've had some students have a hard time getting through them. Especially Exercises in Style, which does also have some dense/strange/confusing variations in it.
Invisible Cities is incredible! Joey, my husband/substack partner, also introduced me to Cosmicomics, which is my favorite. I told him we're going to meet up again as amorphous blobs one day. At 430 pgs, it can be read in a couple sessions.
Joey says, yes, it's the complete collection that includes T-Zero (153 pg for just Cosmicomics). Your homage to Calvino is impressive in Metallic Realms!
Pedro Paramo forced me to sit up at a table to read - it needed all of my attention, but in a way I found stimulating and, in the end, very satisfying. I'd add Sheila Heti's Pure Colour to your list: strange, circular, perspective-shifting, and deeply emotional.
Another one is A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride, almost no punctuation changes is tense word and letter orders. Wildly challenging, incredibly affecting, deeply moving
I read this a couple years ago and loved it. It is indeed a challenging book. Searing stream of consciousness writing. And it's short too (I doubt it would work as a long book), so fits on that criterion as well.
Books which play with form have an excuse to do nothing else and be called “difficult”. To be clear, I’m referring to the “brodernist” books and the many books you’ve cited which do something quirky for the sake of it, not all difficult literature. After I read it, I feel nothing and it is impossible to take anything from the book. There are countless endeavors which are as challenging but also interesting, and there are even books which are as challenging but also interesting, like any of Gene Wolfe’s, who we clearly both appreciate.
If there is no reason for the book to exist, why write the book? They don’t show the author’s intelligence or that the author even thought about what they were writing, which is one of the motivations for writing such a book in the first place. And if the book doesn’t respect me as a reader, why should I read the book? We have limited time and there are many books to get to. I don’t understand the critical acclaim for books (or movies, for that matter) which are difficult for its own sake.
But some people like the harsh noise genre, so who am I to judge?
Certainly some of this comes down to taste (many people dislike Gene Wolfe and find his books pointlessly obtuse and confusing after all). I certainly agree many books are uninteresting and disrespectful to the reader (or this reader) and rest on some claim of importance. But for myself, I find that to be the case more often with books that are boring and poorly written but which people praise because they have "important messages" or deal with "important topics"... even if the books are just a didactic and unoriginal message that most everyone agrees on. Bullying is bad. Racism is bad. Friendship is good. Etc.
Not that I'd disagree some books rest on a sense of difficulty and nothing else. That said, I think one can make the argument that experimental art in any medium at least has the possibility of pushing the medium forward. Even if one is focused on mainstream, popular work, experimental techniques and ideas often trickle down into mainstream work. So, that is a reason for a difficult book to exist even if it won't ever appeal to many readers.
Not much else to say, I agree with everything you said. I too dislike books which are boring but have “important messages”.
Postmodernism scorns meaning, so it’s clear to me why the ”brodernist” maximalist books exist. They’re the ones who think form, not even with good prose, can hold up an entire book.
I just disagree for now; maybe in the future the common sensibilities will change. Wanted to comment though since I think there are valid reasons to dislike the trend.
As a Native American writer, I’m always aware of the Native American reader. A basic question: Am I writing something that a Native American non-writer is gonna read? I think of my father who constantly read but wasn’t much interested in “literary” fiction. No Updike or Roth for him. And certainly no Willliam Gass or James Joyce! My father was reading mystery, war, spy, and western novels. So a second basic question: If I’m not writing something that Native Americans read then am I writing Native American literature? Or inversely put: Is Native American literature what Natives write or what Natives read? So how Native is experimental Native poetry and fiction? I’ve written stuff that my father would have never read if his son hadn’t written it but I’ve also made a movie, Smoke Signals, that is likely the single more popular work of art in the Native world. So the last point: Like every other writer-professor, Native American writers are writing for all the other writer-professors of whatever identity.
Have you read Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky : Unwitting Street ? translated by Joanne Turnbull 2020
Sigizmund was too radical for the Soviet and struggled to get published.
I liked his Comrade Punt story, the protagonist does not wake up one Moscow morning and dies. However his pants rushes off to work without him. His ambitious pants soon has his own office and secretary.
"books are supposed to be fun and the world is so awful why would you want to suffer and anyone who would read such a book must be pretentious, phony brodernist snob! Obviously, I think the latter position is silly. Challenging oneself is fun. Difficult tasks are pleasurable. Aren’t learning new skills and trying new things sort of the whole point of life?"
I see both sides of this. People have many reasons they read. You could be getting your fill of challenges and difficult tasks by rock climbing or training for a marathon. Perhaps you enjoy trying new foods and you want your books to be comforting.
The people insisting books only be pleasurable are not considering that for some people they find stretching themselves intellectually pleasurable and choose books as the way to stretch themselves. They aren't considering the other reasons people want to read.
Personally, I enjoy both. I read multiple books at a time so I always have a book for the mood I am in. Also, there are books I find easy and a pleasure to read that others find difficult and obtuse and pretentious. And some books I do find pretentious and ridiculous - those same books speak to other readers in a way they don't to me. We are all different and so our reading experiences differ.
I dislike books with little plot and minimal descriptions. I prefer long books with a huge cast of characters and a convoluted plot and pages and pages of descriptions. I don't think one type of book is innately pretentious but certain books do strike me that way and I know for a fact that certain books I gush about have that label.
Ok, so this book is 360 pages long. Not really short, but not a tome either. But Greer Gilman's Moonwise is something I've been reading and dissecting on the weekends this Fall. Beautiful, beautiful writing, with so many things going on.
It feels like you're reading an acorn-eating hermit witch's ramblings, written scratchily on coffee- and tea-stained paper scraps as they sit on cold, wet mornings in their creaky cottage. I mean that in the best way. It's opening my mind to so many intricacies of folklore. And I do want more fantasy novels to be challenging this way.
Hi Lincoln, love this sentiment, but would you consider crediting translators in your discussion of translated books? It's hard enough to get recognition for the work we do, which we'd like to keep doing more of so more short (or long) little difficult books can make their way into English to challenge and titillate readers. Thank you!
Yes, sorry I'm normally try to do that. Will add in now!
🙏🙏🙏 Thank you!! 🙏🙏🙏 Love your substack.
-David Markson's final four novels of fragments, collages of facts about writers and artists assembled to form an oblique argument (Though he does, occasionally, get a fact wrong)
-Padget Powell's The Interrogative Mood, a novel in questions
-Most anything by César Aira
-Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat, which is best read with no knowledge of its contents
-Harry Mathews's Singular Pleasures, non-erotic Oulipian onanism
I just finished Tom's Crossing by Mark Z Danielewski, a 1200 plus page whopper. With a book of this length you become endeared to the characters. I miss them, what an experience. Perhaps Danielewski's most straitghtforward book, reading this book will be a mile post in your life.
Would love to see a fuller take on Pedro Páramo
Seconding this. As a person reading far outside academia, I wished I'd had a class discussion for this one.
What I love about lists like this is that the inclusion of a half-dozen or so favorites of mine serve as the best possible recommendations for the half-dozen or so that I've never heard of.
I think your subcategories of difficulty are useful, but I would suggest driving them even further apart. I think that *Exercises in Style* and *Multiple Choice* are unusual in format (and of course wonderful), but are they really *difficult*? I'm just not sure the latter is le mot juste.
All right, some recommendations, to go along with yours & some of the earlier commentators:
• Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (and others of his novellas, which today we would often call short novels), famously ambiguous and difficult to parse
• Robert Owen Butler's Severance — combining the amount of time a head is thought to be conscious after decapitation and the number of words thought per minute in extreme anxiety, this is a series of brief monologues of the thoughts of beheaded people, both historical (Cicero, John the Baptist, lots of French revolutionary figures) and mythical (Medusa, the Dragon killed by St George, and the Lady of the Lake), ending with the death of the author himself;
• Christian Bok's Eunoia, a series of five univocalisms (texts that use only one vowel, so even more stringent than Perec's lipogram (see here for more: https://stephenfrug.substack.com/p/a-field-guide-to-the-modern-lipogram)
• Also in the Oulipian category, Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa (which starts using only words beginning with A, then goes to both A and B, works up in 26 chapters to all words, and then slowly works back down so the final chapter is again only words beginning with A)
• Albert Camus, The Fall: a dramatic monologue that is a bit difficult in style and very challenging in content, but brilliant
• Marguerite Yourcenar, Alexis—not sure if it's difficult enough, but it's very short and very wonderful and I am sure some people will find it hard. Written in the 1920s, a letter from a man to his wife explaining that he's leaving her because he's gay.
• And while neither are prose novels, I can't let Queneau's fabulous Exercises be mentioned without citing my two favorite of adaptations of it (there are a bunch), Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story (the work is brilliant, the title & cover chosen by misguided publicists) which does for comics what Queneau does for prose, and Philip Ordung's 99 Variations on a Proof, which does it for mathematical proof. Both utter delights, anyone who likes the Queneau should try them, too
Yes it depends on what we mean by difficult. Although from experience teaching both books, I've had some students have a hard time getting through them. Especially Exercises in Style, which does also have some dense/strange/confusing variations in it.
Invisible Cities is incredible! Joey, my husband/substack partner, also introduced me to Cosmicomics, which is my favorite. I told him we're going to meet up again as amorphous blobs one day. At 430 pgs, it can be read in a couple sessions.
Yes Cosmicomics is a favorite too. 430 pages must be the complete Cosmicomics right? With T-Zero and previously uncollected stories added in.
Joey says, yes, it's the complete collection that includes T-Zero (153 pg for just Cosmicomics). Your homage to Calvino is impressive in Metallic Realms!
Thank you!
The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector
Pedro Paramo forced me to sit up at a table to read - it needed all of my attention, but in a way I found stimulating and, in the end, very satisfying. I'd add Sheila Heti's Pure Colour to your list: strange, circular, perspective-shifting, and deeply emotional.
Wonderful essay thank you
Another one is A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride, almost no punctuation changes is tense word and letter orders. Wildly challenging, incredibly affecting, deeply moving
I read this a couple years ago and loved it. It is indeed a challenging book. Searing stream of consciousness writing. And it's short too (I doubt it would work as a long book), so fits on that criterion as well.
Books which play with form have an excuse to do nothing else and be called “difficult”. To be clear, I’m referring to the “brodernist” books and the many books you’ve cited which do something quirky for the sake of it, not all difficult literature. After I read it, I feel nothing and it is impossible to take anything from the book. There are countless endeavors which are as challenging but also interesting, and there are even books which are as challenging but also interesting, like any of Gene Wolfe’s, who we clearly both appreciate.
If there is no reason for the book to exist, why write the book? They don’t show the author’s intelligence or that the author even thought about what they were writing, which is one of the motivations for writing such a book in the first place. And if the book doesn’t respect me as a reader, why should I read the book? We have limited time and there are many books to get to. I don’t understand the critical acclaim for books (or movies, for that matter) which are difficult for its own sake.
But some people like the harsh noise genre, so who am I to judge?
Certainly some of this comes down to taste (many people dislike Gene Wolfe and find his books pointlessly obtuse and confusing after all). I certainly agree many books are uninteresting and disrespectful to the reader (or this reader) and rest on some claim of importance. But for myself, I find that to be the case more often with books that are boring and poorly written but which people praise because they have "important messages" or deal with "important topics"... even if the books are just a didactic and unoriginal message that most everyone agrees on. Bullying is bad. Racism is bad. Friendship is good. Etc.
Not that I'd disagree some books rest on a sense of difficulty and nothing else. That said, I think one can make the argument that experimental art in any medium at least has the possibility of pushing the medium forward. Even if one is focused on mainstream, popular work, experimental techniques and ideas often trickle down into mainstream work. So, that is a reason for a difficult book to exist even if it won't ever appeal to many readers.
Not much else to say, I agree with everything you said. I too dislike books which are boring but have “important messages”.
Postmodernism scorns meaning, so it’s clear to me why the ”brodernist” maximalist books exist. They’re the ones who think form, not even with good prose, can hold up an entire book.
I just disagree for now; maybe in the future the common sensibilities will change. Wanted to comment though since I think there are valid reasons to dislike the trend.
As a Native American writer, I’m always aware of the Native American reader. A basic question: Am I writing something that a Native American non-writer is gonna read? I think of my father who constantly read but wasn’t much interested in “literary” fiction. No Updike or Roth for him. And certainly no Willliam Gass or James Joyce! My father was reading mystery, war, spy, and western novels. So a second basic question: If I’m not writing something that Native Americans read then am I writing Native American literature? Or inversely put: Is Native American literature what Natives write or what Natives read? So how Native is experimental Native poetry and fiction? I’ve written stuff that my father would have never read if his son hadn’t written it but I’ve also made a movie, Smoke Signals, that is likely the single more popular work of art in the Native world. So the last point: Like every other writer-professor, Native American writers are writing for all the other writer-professors of whatever identity.
“If there’s no reason for the book to exist, why write the book?”
An absurd question. What reason would you like to have? What reason does any art have to exist?
i mean, there’s no reason for any book (novel) to exist. art is a squandering and all great artists are squanderers.
Some more genre-ish stuff to go with Ubik:
- The Atrocity Exhibition by J. G. Ballard
- Ice by Anna Kavan
- The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison
- The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
- The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe
- Great Work of Time by John Crowley
- The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem
- The Einstein Intersection by Samuel Delany
- The Singularity by Dino Buzzatti
- Beyond Apollo by Barry N. Malzberg
- The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch
- Past Master by R. A. Lafferty
- One Billion Years to the End of the World by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
- The Fall of Chronopolis by Barrington J. Bayley
- Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree Jr.
- What Entropy Means to me by George Alec Effinger
A lot of great ones here! I almost included Fifth Head of Cerberus but it was slightly over my 200 page limit.
Very cool Lincoln thanks for the references.
Have you read Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky : Unwitting Street ? translated by Joanne Turnbull 2020
Sigizmund was too radical for the Soviet and struggled to get published.
I liked his Comrade Punt story, the protagonist does not wake up one Moscow morning and dies. However his pants rushes off to work without him. His ambitious pants soon has his own office and secretary.
It may be your cup of tea.
I haven't but thank you for the rec!
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon. Still love that book.
Big vote here for Pedro Paramo!
"books are supposed to be fun and the world is so awful why would you want to suffer and anyone who would read such a book must be pretentious, phony brodernist snob! Obviously, I think the latter position is silly. Challenging oneself is fun. Difficult tasks are pleasurable. Aren’t learning new skills and trying new things sort of the whole point of life?"
I see both sides of this. People have many reasons they read. You could be getting your fill of challenges and difficult tasks by rock climbing or training for a marathon. Perhaps you enjoy trying new foods and you want your books to be comforting.
The people insisting books only be pleasurable are not considering that for some people they find stretching themselves intellectually pleasurable and choose books as the way to stretch themselves. They aren't considering the other reasons people want to read.
Personally, I enjoy both. I read multiple books at a time so I always have a book for the mood I am in. Also, there are books I find easy and a pleasure to read that others find difficult and obtuse and pretentious. And some books I do find pretentious and ridiculous - those same books speak to other readers in a way they don't to me. We are all different and so our reading experiences differ.
I dislike books with little plot and minimal descriptions. I prefer long books with a huge cast of characters and a convoluted plot and pages and pages of descriptions. I don't think one type of book is innately pretentious but certain books do strike me that way and I know for a fact that certain books I gush about have that label.
Ok, so this book is 360 pages long. Not really short, but not a tome either. But Greer Gilman's Moonwise is something I've been reading and dissecting on the weekends this Fall. Beautiful, beautiful writing, with so many things going on.
It feels like you're reading an acorn-eating hermit witch's ramblings, written scratchily on coffee- and tea-stained paper scraps as they sit on cold, wet mornings in their creaky cottage. I mean that in the best way. It's opening my mind to so many intricacies of folklore. And I do want more fantasy novels to be challenging this way.