Alastair Harper writes about literary novels being so difficult.
We read books that were clearly quite brilliant, if only we could understand them. They might, as we never admitted to each other, baffle us now, but hopefully we’d come out the other side stronger, better people for the experience. Maybe one day we’d even impress some girls.
He closes the article asking for recommendations and warnings on difficult book. Which ones are worthwhile; which ones are worthless?
While the prose style of many 19th century authors was somewhat laborious, men like Charles Dickens had an understanding of the human condition that we lack today. He knew the corruption of the old Adam and the need for redemption. Modern politically correct thinking denies corruption of the human heart, instead attributing corruption to external systems. Thus they see no need for external redemption, instead looking for internal meaning created by the individual rather than imposed by the creator.
As my wife and I were driving to our Friday night card game with some elderly folks, I spied a cloud of little white spots hovering over the blacktop some distance away. Not knowing what I was heading for I slowed a tad bit. The white spots got larger and larger as we approached closer. The hovering – more and more frantic!
Suddenly, we were through it. The cloud, whatever it was was behind us. But,we had hundreds of apparent insect splats all over the windshield!
We got to where we were going…I got out and discovered hundreds of dead honey bees stuck to my car!
It seems this cloud of hovering white spots was really a swarm of bees out looking for a new home.
I have felt really badly since.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s early books were very hard hitting tales about life in the Soviet prisons. He wrote them in prison, memorizing them as he wrote them since he had no paper or means of storing them in safety. After he got out it was an easy thing to write out A Day In The Life of Ivan Denosivich, First Circle and Cancer Ward. For The Good Of the Cause applied the same method of a simple story touching on complex issues to community life in the Soviet Union. Even though the Gulag Archipelago stretched to three volumes, it was really a compilation of many simple stories illustrating the dark underbelly of the Communist regime. Later, when he had the leisure of writing on a more epic scale, his books lost their punch. His later works, such as August 1914 ended up as complex stories about simple issues.