Posted on 03/09/2007 11:22:35 PM PST by Blind Eye Jones
What is the most convoluted, opaque, impenetrable book you ever read?
It took me a while with Catch 22. I'd heard so much about it being a great book, but tried several times to get into it without result. Never got past the opening pages about the guy wrapped in bandages.
Then a light dawned when I got to the part where the nurse took the drip from his urether and put it into the drip into his arm. This was satire and very funny stuff.
The Sound and The Fury--Faulkner
LOL. I forgot about that one. I gave up when I couldn't tell who was who in all the stream of consciousness.
I read it and did not feel it was that demanding, other than the usual translation/structural problems common to Russian-English.
Dostoevksi's Crime And Punishment, etc. illustrate that his style has always been the despair of translators, but still readable.
Something about these translations of Russian authors makes me think that if it were a song, it would be in some Minor key.
==Don't say that! I bought it at a book sale because it was written by Solzhenitsyn and haven't read it yet.
It's nonsense. I read all three volumes two or three times. Very good reading.
LOL. The best selling unread book ever. My copy is sitting in a closet somewhere. I think I might have read the title page.
There is no kind way to say it...But if he were healthy it would not have been printed. I felt it was a "So What?" book, with no blinding revelations, just some different insights.
I agree that Dune is a masterpiece, but the first chapters where Herbert sets the scene on Arrakis and introduces some of the players are tough to get through. Building a fictional world, peopled by all sorts of semi-humans, non-humans, and protohumans takes a little time.
Well worth it though when you finally begin to comprehend a little bit of what's going on.
Then I read Falkner's explanation of what it was about. I was even more confused.
Then one night at a party, at my sister's house, I met a woman who taught the damn thing in college. I said, "You're not leaving here tonight until you tell me what that thing's about." So for the next few hours we sat on a sofa, and she explained it all to me in great detail and answered my questions.
Then I re-read it, and it was very clear, but I was so depressed I kinda wished I hadn't.
However, it did make a big impression on me and influenced my outlook on life. I now like The Sound and the Fury very much.
My sister, who read constantly and loved Falkner, also put me onto Absolam! Absolam!, which is less difficult. I loved it. It also had an impact on me.
I doubt that I would have liked William Falkner if I had known him, but he was certainly a genius.
I like explanations of things. I like it when artists explain or try to paraphrase their work. Great art cannot be paraphrased. However, I like some guidance.
If I spent ten years on Hamlet, I'm sure I'd figure it all out on my own, but I don't want to spend ten years on Hamlet. I like for someone who has spent ten years on it to give me some information so that I only have to read it once to understand it and can then read it as much as I want for the pleasure of it.
I loved Michael Woods' explanation of Shakespeare's Sonnet XXXIII. After he explained the multiple layers of meaning, the connections to the Incarnation and Resurrection and how Shakespeare wrote this beautiful poem only shortly after the tragic death of his only son, his beloved Hamnet, after he suggested that the poem may have been written when Shakespeare was 33 years old and that Jesus was thought, probably by Shakespeare anyway, to have been crucified at age 33, et al., I memorized it and found those and many more deep meanings and messages in it.
Great art's like that.
Agree. I couldn't even get through it.
Magic Mountain was especially tough if you don't speak French since long passages are in that language. It was in a Lit course I took in college and I'd never read all the syllabus going into finals week. I 'read' it in one day without stopping. It was agony.
The Zen book came to mind for me also - I read the book four times, trying to penetrate the impenetrable forest of quality.
I agree the Gulag is well worth reading. I read all three volumes when they first came out in paperback ('73-'74?). They made me finally understand what socialism was all about. They were slow reading, but OK once you got absorbed in them. I read them during the Cold War, and left wing, pro-Soviet proganda in the US was very intense. Gulag set me straight on the Evil Empire, years before Reagan's speech.
Of course, Uncle Sam had sent me to a cold artic place, and I didn't have a whole lot of other things to do for a year!
I gotta rate Finnegan's Wake as most boring and impenetrable. Atlas Shrugged is up there with it, but I have been able to read and remember several whole pages of Rand's book. Joyce's book, not so.
I didn't have to even read it, I just paged through it at the book store and was immediately sick to my stomach.....
"An Inconvenient Truth" Al Gore.
Many of my friends have remarked on this also. Sometimes someone has to live before being able to enjoy certain writings. I know someone who read "Through the looking Glass" as an adult and was amazed at the different perception of it.
Moby Dick is one of my all-time favorites, though the chapter on cetology seems to be a price to be paid, kind of like a root canal.
There is of course Local Flavor for me, being familiar with the area, so the identification takes some of the curse from the (at times) laborious style.
"Goldilocks and the Three Bears"
Magister Ludi by Hesse. I've read every one of his works (at least twice over the last thirty years)and thoroughly enjoyed them but Ludi (aka 'The Glass Bead Game') is like trying to understand quantum physics. I've started it no fewer than five times and given up every time.
It's not very good in English either. I wonder how many times Das Kapital make it into the top ten list.
Had it occurred to any of the folks attempting to "read" the books they describe as "unreadable"....just to PUT THEM DOWN...???
After reading a number of the entries, I think this thread should be "explorations in self-torture through literature"....!!!
I have also never gotten anything out of Ernest Hemingway. I'm sure it's just me. I couldn't even get through the audio tapes of For Whom the Bell Tolls, and I found The Old Man and the Sea so boring that when I finished it I couldn't remember enough of it to reflect on.
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