It's always difficult when you're reading a book that is more or less, begrudgingly, keeping your attention, but you know with that sinking feeling in your heart that you don't want to read any more, that it just isn't doing it for you, and it's a purgatory to continue. It's not the same as when you read something that you take an instant dislike to in a few pages and then put it down - I'm talking here about having put some considerable investment in the reading, maybe a quarter of the way through maybe even a half way through, and although its "OK", although the writing is "good" you know that you don't want to continue any more. Especially now - sixty years old, so many more books to read, maybe not even enough time to reread all the re-reads that you want to encounter again. So it is with Will Self's Book of Dave. I've tried to read it twice now. Twice! I'm giving up this second attempt before I even got as far as I did in the last one. It's because I just haven't got the interest in the story . He is a great writer, his language bounces off the page in satisfying nuggets, but I just don't care for the narrative, I really don't care that much what happens, there isn't a hook pulling me through. I guess I'm still stuck in the ordinary novel, stuck in dreamy reading where you are transported into something.
So I'm re-reading War & Peace, the quintessential big novel, for the third time - why? Well the TV series obviously. And because there was probably so much that I missed last time, and I can't remember any of the detail - I mean I first read it in the Pyrenees in 1978 in a long indian summer turning to autumn, underneath an almond tree, on the alternate days when I wasn't picking grapes on the mountainside. And the second time? I can't remember, probably twenty years ago - maybe the late nineties? So I finished the first volume (I've got an old Folio edition, different from the Constance Garnett translation that I still have in the original paperback from the 1970s, although the only thing I'm noticing is that the German characters are depicted as talking in "foreign accents", a kind of "vat do ve have veer" touch that I don't really appreciate)). It's still breathtakingly good. It is weird reading it after watching the new TV series as all the pictures in my head are from the TV, but then I kind of drill down into the detail of the sentences and get something different - a more fine grained intelligence perhaps, or a difference in emphasis.
Essentially I am ending up with a bastardized complex mish-mash of the interpretation of the TV series, my interpretation, the translation. Tolstoy seems to survive this mangling but it make me think about how much our surroundings and our feelings permeate and filter what we take from what we read. Is that what makes a great novel - something that can withstand all the interpretive pressure we bring to it and stil stand out on its own? And maybe that's why I can't finish The Book of Dave, I'm too caught up in wanting to have it my way, to get some kind of self-regarding sustenance and wisdom out of the book without being pushed too far.
No comments:
Post a Comment