I have never been afraid of
long novels or large-scale reading projects.
I have read Samuel Richardson’s
Clarissa. I have read all of Marcel
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time,
albeit in translation. I have read the three volumes of Alan Walker’s immense biography
of Liszt.
And, of course, I have read
long nineteenth-century novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Charles Dickens’ Bleak
House, and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina.
The pleasure of starting a
large reading project is not one of intellectual or cultural snobbery. There is
no intrinsic correlation between the number of pages a book has and its
quality. Nevertheless, there is a joy there.
I have been dreaming recently
of other reading projects. One common idea is to set out to read all the works
of one author in the order they were published. You could, for instance, plan
to read all of Agatha Christie’s 'Poirot' novels in sequence. I suspect, though,
that repetition might doom this particular quest for many.
In the last week I have read
two stories by Honoré de Balzac: ‘Sarrasine’ and ‘A Passion in the Desert’.
I am now half way through the novel Eugénie
Grandet.
This last forms part of the
author’s great sequence, Comédie humaine or
The Human Comedy. This run of connected narratives amounts
to ninety or so texts in total.
Such a fact suggests a
stunningly immense project: to read all of the novels that form La Comédie humaine. This project would be
the work of a lifetime (just as it took Balzac his lifetime to write the
books). I suspect it would also be largely impossible. It would certainly be
extremely difficult to find English translations of all the novels.
I won’t be starting this
reading project. Nevertheless, the very idea of it appeals.
Perhaps I will re-start
the Poirot books after all.
