A Final 2018 Reading Note: Finish What You Started?

I heard it just today from a member of my parents’ generation: “Finish what you start.” You may have been admonished with a similar maxim when you were growing up.

For many decades, I rarely set a book aside without finishing it. I considered it my duty, my obligation: finish that book!

DNF

Horse racing aficionados study the past performance charts to determine which horses to wager on. Sometimes the acronym “DNF” indicates a horse “did not finish” a particular race.

I overcame my lifelong compulsion to FINISH and marked three books on my reading list “DNF” this year. I’ll review them in brief, primarily as invitation to you: Do you have a different opinion of any of them? It’s likely I missed something. I welcome your comments.

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, 1927

I’ve set out to read all or nearly all of Ms. Woolf’s novels in chronological order. I read a number of them decades ago, primarily in college. I’m a different reader now, with a different perspective on what was happening in English-language literature at the time she wrote them. I began with The Voyage Out (1915) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925), both of which I mentioned in previous summaries of my 2018 reading. Click on the titles to see those articles.

I admire Woolf’s style, her approach to storytelling and her evocation of character. I found those qualities again in Lighthouse, but I didn’t finish. Maybe I simply overextended my Woolvian exposure over a relatively short span. Perhaps there were too many other distractions at the time. I’ll come back to it and try again in 2019.

Has that ever happened to you? — found yourself unable to continue a book, even though it fundamentally appeals to you?

The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante, 2013

This is the second of Ferrante’s four enormously popular “Neapolitan Novels.” I enjoyed the first, My Brilliant Friend. The characters caught my attention and the harrowing descriptions of neighborhood and the culture were arresting.

A third of the way through this book, Ferrante lost me. Maybe I failed to grasp what Ms. Ferrante was doing, perhaps my male perspective limited my ability to empathize with the narrator, Elena, and her brilliant friend, Lila, and their fraught relationship.

I grew weary of the unrelenting dreariness and oppression of their environment, rarely relieved by humor or pleasure of any genuine sort. The dire struggles of the large cast promised never to end, nor did I find any of them worth caring about. Nor was I taken by the writing — although I hasten to admit I was reading the English translation, and perhaps that didn’t resonate with me.

I never found anyone — including the beautiful and forceful Lila — whose future arc beckoned me to continue. Nor was I curious enough to discover how the series would reveal the mystery behind the framing device that opens the series to keep going. I simply didn’t want to know any more about any of those people, most whom were vicious, cruel, corrupt, manipulative or weak and ineffectual.

I’m in a minority on this one. I invite you to enlighten me: What did I miss?

A Question of Upbringing, Anthony Powell, 1951

Marking “DNF” to this first title in Anthony Powell’s massive A Dance to the Music of Time is what prompted me to write today’s blog post. It’s been on my reading list for decades. Finally opening it, I closed it again after trudging through the first 75% of this first of 12 books with little appreciation for or enjoyment of the story, the characters, the narrator or the prose.

It was a surprise — the only surprise the book afforded me. I was finally reading this monumental work that’s commonly listed among the great achievements of 20th century literature, sometimes acclaimed the greatest of all, by an author some have dubbed “the English Proust.”

No one else is Proust, including Powell. I don’t hold that against any writer. There’s only one.

Powell does adopt an approach similar to Proust’s: the steady accumulation of quotidian events which — once they’re all recounted and synthesized — serve as the foundation of the author’s goal, conveyed in memorable language by an insightful narrator.

Everyone knows at least one such example from Proust: the scent and taste of that madeleine dipped in an infusion — one of the most famous scenes in literature. It’s not the event that matters, though — any more than it’s Proust’s tireless documentation of thousands of incidents in his home life, on the boulevards of Paris, in salons and drawing rooms and at balls or on the footpaths by the river near his boyhood home: the point is how Proust welds them into a whole. They all amount to something — something sublime and significant. The result is worth reading more than 1.2 million words to acquire — in my opinion.

Powell does something similar, but his examples are so petty and amount to so little that they’re irritating and — for me — weren’t worth pursuing. Not only did he fail to make them telling details, he did so in unremarkable and — 65 years after he wrote — dated prose.

None of Powell’s characters struck me as compelling or even particularly interesting. Worst of all — in my view — his convoluted and artless sentences sounded stiff, arch, and not at all like something a first-person narrator would say or think. They were contrived, artificial and didn’t resonate. That dance to the music of time became a trudge, then a slog.

I put Mr. Powell aside, and may not pick him up again. What say you? What did I miss? I welcome your comments and will give them fair consideration.

I hope you’ve had a marvelous year of reading, with few DNFs. I wish you great joy with your books of 2019.

© Brad Nixon 2018