Dreaming of Reading Projects

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.

A ‘long’ decade – the 1870s

I have recently written about the gravitational pull that certain decades seem to exert on us at times. I remarked upon the curious coincidences in my reading  - suddenly, the 1870s seemed to loom large. However, the more I think about it the more I think that my calculations were slightly wrong. I actually think that my equations omitted one or two key factors which would have been evident if I had paid closer attention to my own reading trajectories.

It is now a cultural, historical and literary-critical commonplace to refer to the ‘long’ nineteenth century, meaning (roughly) the time from the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s The Lyrical Ballads through to the beginning of the first world war (or at least until the death of Queen Victoria in 1901).

It is completely absurd but my reading in my capacity as The Literary Critical Detective seems to have orbited around a ‘long’ decade, a long 1870s.

Here are some of the key events that I might be inclined to pick out.

1869 - Amy Fay arrives in Germany and begins to study piano with Tausig

1869 - Alphonse Daudet, Letters from my Windmil

1870 - Death of Charles Dickens

1871 - Birth of Marcel Proust

1871-72 -  George Eliot, Middlemarch

1873 - Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days published

1873 -  Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina published

1880 - Amy Fay, Music-Study in Germany published

1880 - Emile Zola, Nana published

1883 - Death of Richard Wagner in Venice

 

The pull of this long decade has been strong and for the time being I continue to be held by it. I wonder what I will find at its centre. Will I find a kind of singularity? And if so, will this act like a passage to some other place and time? After penetrating to the heart of this historical moment will I suddenly find myself in another decade entirely? In Paris in the 1890s? In inter-war Britain, the moment of the classic whodunit novel? Maybe. I might just start back at the beginning of Dame Agatha’s oeuvre.

The books that remain ‘To be read’

It is customary for writers of blogs such as this to discuss the books that remain languishing on their shelves – the novels that they bought but have never quite got around to reading. More precisely, they discuss their ‘to be read’ pile.

I have always been very conscious of the books that I haven’t read.

I don’t actually own a vast number of texts myself as there isn’t much space in my study. Even here, though, in my own limited library, there are many volumes that I have never opened. Walking into a large well-stocked reading room or even a local second-hand bookshop can be an intimidating experience at times.

With this in mind, I have decided that I may well start to read some of the texts that remain, for me, ‘to be read’. In the coming weeks I expect to read some, but probably not all, of the following books, none of which I have worked my way through before:

Ngaio Marsh, Off With His Head

Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days

Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations

Agatha Christie, Cat Among the Pigeons

Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes

Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

Leo Tolstoy, The Sebastopol Sketches

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Written down like this, the list strikes me as one of great diversity. It is, of course, this very diversity that is so essential if one is to read fully. And now to begin.

Agatha Christie and Plato in the sunshine:

For a short while this morning the sun burst through the clouds. I was quite taken aback. A beam of light suddenly beat its way through my half-drawn curtains, lighting up the section of my book shelf devoted to classic whodunits. There, to my left, the spines of my Agatha Christies shone out brilliantly, the titles glinting in the unexpected radiance.

Sadly enough, my first reaction to this sunlight was to pull the curtains shut – the spines of the books on my shelves are already damaged enough. Then, I started to wonder whether I should take this as a reminder to re-read these (mostly) brilliant novels.

Reading in the sunshine can often be difficult. The light can glare off of the white page in such a way as to make it impossible to focus on the words. Sometimes it can be too bright.

I have, as it happens, read Agatha Christie’s books in the bright light of the Mediterranean sun. Several years ago I had the good fortune to travel to Greece. My reading on that occasion was incongruous to say the least: the Dame’s Hallowe'en Party and Mrs McGinty’s Dead. But, what would have been more fitting? If I had read Plato?

Actually, about a year ago I can remember reading Book VII of Plato’s The Republic in the English autumn sunshine. The light glared and I found myself slightly dazed. It was as though I had myself just stepped out of the cave of the famous allegory.

It has clouded back over now. I’ve opened the curtains once more. I no longer run the risk of being dazzled.

Approaching the final furlong…

I am now reading the final stages of the novel Nana by Zola. I am inclined to say that I am in the final furlong as I’ve just read the amazing sequence set at the Grand Prix de Paris horse race at Longchamp. This occasion is a crucial turning point in the novel as it marks a high-water mark in the eponymous hero’s social ascent. Moreover, the horse that bears her name comes home first in defiance of the odds, a result which eventually leads to the death of her lover, its owner, Vandeuvres.

This sequence is wonderfully written (I should say that I’ve read it in translation). It is an exhilarating piece of prose that manages to capture the thrill of the occasion whilst simultaneously offering a devastating social portrait. During the depiction of the race itself I actually found myself caring about which horse won.

This sequence reminded me of an equivalent scene in an even more brilliant novel – namely, the horse race in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which was published just three years earlier. Tolstoy’s prose is, in this passage, viscerally exciting and filled with danger.

Now I’m trying to think of other great sporting scenes in classic literature. I’m thinking here of texts that are not explicitly sporting texts. There is, of course, the great Poirot novel by Dame Agatha Christie, The Murder on the Links.

Can you think of any others?

Some rushed thoughts on narrative pacing…

I have started thinking about the question of narrative pacing or, to phrase it another way, literary rhythm and tempo. This rhythm is at work at the level of the sentence, the paragraph and the text as a whole. It is vital to the success of any piece of writing.

The best texts show an awareness of this. Just think of the way that the rhythm of Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘condition of England’ novel Mary Barton (1848) markedly changes in its final third. Here, we find a kind of literary accelerando as the characters set off on a river chase. Think, too, of something like Proust’s modernist masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27), which, despite its immense length, manages to engage with the reader every subordinate clause. For the mature Marcel, of course, this was simply a question of style.

Classic murder mystery texts can be a little one-paced at times. Whilst there is an inevitable speeding up of events as we approach the great detective’s gripping dénouement, the tone is too often too even, the beat just a little flat. From the opening line clues are scattered in front of us. Everything is important, even the unimportant red herrings. And, let's admit it, in this genre the writing is usually quite workmanlike. Neither Dame Agatha Christie nor Dame Ngaio Marsh were great prose stylists. Description is often left at the door.

It is for this reason that certain texts stand out. Take, for instance, the last book in the Poirot sequence (although far from being the last written), Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (published 1975). This has an altogether different structure and pace. This is a murder mystery that for the most part lacks a murder. This a text of foreshadowing and nostalgic reminiscence.

For all that I love the classic mysteries I often wish that they were more stylish.

A Blog Post a Day: A Project for June

It is so hard to think clearly, with subtlety and deftness. It is even harder to articulate one’s thoughts in a nuanced manner.

When I’m working on a new literary critical case it sometimes seems as if the books that line my study walls are leering down at me like so many grotesques, mocking me and my meek efforts. The more I try to think, the more the thoughts form an impenetrable fog in my mind, a fog that gets everywhere, even in this muggy, muddy English summer.

In order to extricate myself from these difficulties I have made a rash decision. Yesterday evening, having posted my review of Agatha Christie’s ‘The Big Four’, I promised myself that I would update this online journal everyday until the end of the month – and possibly even beyond.

I hope that by setting myself the task of writing something new on a regular basis I will disperse the critical and creative torpor that hangs over me and, it would seem, this whole building. Moreover, I hope that I will instigate a new practice of writing.

I bumped into Thistleton yesterday. He expressed some kind thoughts about the project, although he doubted the possibility of engineering creative insight through practice.

I would really appreciate it if you, dear Reader, were able to support me in my endeavour by following this blog (click the button on the right) and by checking in each day to see what I’ve written.

à demain…

On reading and not reading an Agatha Christie novel

I have recently finished reading Agatha Christie’s The Big Four – one of the early Poirot novels (it is actually the fifth book in the sequence).

It is easy to devour The Dame’s murder mysteries in one or two sittings: on a Sunday afternoon, perhaps or, as is more likely in my case, shut up in the peace of my book-lined study. The prose is simple enough and the plots well-constructed enough that you can read them very quickly.

My reading of The Big Four was slightly different. Instead of reading it at home I worked my way through the text in that most Christie-like of locations: the train. The book accompanied me on a series of research trips that I recently took by rail.

And what a delight it was. The sun streamed in through the carriage windows and, as we sped past, the countryside seemed to unfurl itself before us. The book itself was great fun. It is an intriguing, entertaining and occasionally absurd novel. What is more, the characters are placed in serious jeopardy on a number of occasions, which is actually quite unusual for a Poirot novel.

The nature of my rail journeys meant that I was forced to read The Big Four in several sittings. I was able to mark off the chapters by the stations at which we stopped.

Strange to say, though, that whilst I enjoyed reading the novel immensely, I was actually a little reluctant to pick the text up at the beginning of each of new trip. Having put the book down I felt no compulsion to pick it up again. This despite the desire to know what would happen, to learn how it would turn out, and to discover how Captain Hastings would extricate himself from his latest scrape. And I ask myself: Why?

One obvious and well documented fact is that, outside of the main detective characters, the participants in murder mystery novels are only functions of the plot, counters moved around in a board game of motives. As a reader I hadn’t invested in the development of the characters’ story arcs.

Then there is the fact that The Big Four reads like a series of short stories. It is very episodic – perfect for reading between railway stations but not conducive to sustained reading over a long stretch of time. It is also a surprising book. It is a novel that reads more like a spy thriller than a classic country house whodunit in the typical Christie mould. It is a book that defeats generic expectations.

In the end, it was worth reading to the end of The Big Four. And if you expect to travel by train anytime soon I would heartily recommend it as your travel novel.