!VAR HAGENDOORN

Big Books

I'm considering making 2009 the year of the Big Book. There are currently several Big and VERY BIG books gathering dust on my bookshelf: Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon (1220 pages), Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1079 pages) and 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (912 pages, depending on the edition). If I were to include all 600+ page books, there would be several more: The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins (629 pages), Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (614 pages) and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (607 pages) to name but a few.

Two years ago I read all three volumes of Spheres by Peter Sloterdijk, which comes in at a total of about 2400 pages. It took me several months, but it was well worth it. The thing with Big Books is that, instead of one Big Book, no matter how brilliant it may turn out to be, you could also read two or three equally brilliant smaller books, one of which may just be a little more brilliant, so that the total satisfaction you get from the three books is greater than what you get from the Big Book.

But why do Big Books look daunting when a pile of small books doesn't? One reason may be that when you see the Big Book in your imagination you also see the author writing away for several years. When you look at a pile of small books you don't see several authors in front of you each writing their own book. I think Harold Brodkey countered the criticism that his book The Runaway Soul took so long to read by saying that it took him years to complete, so don't expect to read it in a few hours.

It's also the feeling of being stuck with the same characters for many hours of reading that makes a Big Book both enticing and daunting. It's the same with tv-series on DVD. I don't have tv, but occasionally I buy a dvd set. The Sopranos is supposed to be one of the best tv-series in contemporary history. But all series together you're talking about something like 80 hours of television, if I'm not mistaken. But why watch 80 hours of The Sopranos if you can read 2666 or Infinite Jest?

When I studied for my MA in Literature I had a poetry professor who liked to say that he only read poetry because he always doubted authors who needed 400 pages to say what they had to say when 400 words will do. But with poetry you need to take the time to weigh every word, to ponder every line, punctuation marks included, for which I often lack the patience.

By the way, a sure way to lose your interest in literature (or dance/theatre/art) is to study it at university. You are required to read novels and watch performances not for fun and not because for some reason you felt like reading or seeing it, but because someone else considered it an Important Work of Art. For my class in comparative world literature we had to read one book per week. Some books were great, others tedious, but you still had to read them. At least, if you took the course seriously. Thankfully there were no Big Books on the list. We only had to read the first volume of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.