Books I Should Have Finished Reading
I was talking to a young author recently and mentioned that while I had very much enjoyed the first half of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s famous magical realist novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, I hadn’t finished it because it appeared that Garcia Marquez was just making up the rules of his universe as he went along. So, because anything could happen, there didn’t seem much point in sticking around to find out what did happen.
He replied that I had made a big mistake: that Garcia Marquez had at the end pulled together the wildly disparate threads of his multi-generational narrative into a tragic conclusion in which the family can’t escape their genetic flaw.
Later, I said I had also enjoyed the first half of Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical fantasy about the Devil’s visit to Stalin’s Moscow, The Master and Margarita, but hadn’t finished it. Once again he explained why I had chosen wrongly.
In general, it shouldn’t be surprising when it turns out that your unorthodox opinion of famous books, especially books not in English (considering what a handicap that is for achieving fame), turns out to be wrong and what Doctor Johnson calls “the general opinion of mankind” turns out to be right.
One novel I’m glad I finished due to adolescent stick-to-itiveness was Henry Fielding’s 1749 comic picaresque epic Tom Jones. The novel wanders all over for 800+ pages, but then suddenly in the last 20 pages, the entire seemingly ramshackle plot is tied together as deftly as any country house murder mystery. Samuel Taylor Coleridge remarked, “Upon my word, I think the Oedipus Tyrannus [Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex], [Ben Jonson’s] the Alchemist, and Tom Jones the three most perfect plots ever planned.
What are some novels you are glad, to your surprise, that you finished?
I'm glad that I finished The Master and Margarita. I don't know if you did too, but I found the early Pontius Pilate sections really dragged. But now, having finished it, I look forward to reading it again someday.
BTW, I just got my paperback copy of Noticing. As someone who's only been reading you for a few years now I can't wait to get into it.
J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country starts off as an idyllic English countryside summer story with somewhat meandering observations but the ending was very strong, with philosophic reflections about life and death.