When do you stop reading a bad book?

They were right: you can't judge a book by its cover. Or by its first page. I read a full ten pages of Infinite Jest before buying it. The next 990 (including 150 pages of endnotes) I read out of bloody-mindedness. Those ten pages were surely going to be redeemed. But they weren't, at least for me (I know that there are some who would zealously disagree). But in the case of this book, I'm not sure I'm going to repeat the same mistake of sinking more hours in when I'm 90% sure I'm not going to get back to liking this book (hm, it just occurs to me that this sounds a lot like what I was saying in the last post about Proust; I am a bit of a quitter by nature).

The book currently in question is called A Game With Sharpened Knives (by Neil Belton), a title which strikes me as hovering between just okay and kinda cheesy, but it didn't dissuade me. It's a historical novel about Erwin Schrodinger, who interests me (I like reading pop science). And I liked the first paragraph, which begins:

It was nine sharp. The secretary who had summoned him the day before had announced the hour of his appointment as though she were giving an order to open fire. After three weeks the most ordinary conversations had taken on a military snap, and manic urgency had become the new politeness.

That's okay, right? Funny, clear, actionful. And the next few pages are okay, all about how Schrodinger is forced to leave the university where he's teaching in Austria because the Nazis have just invaded and they don't like him. Anyhow, then the thing degenerates into just horrible long, confusing paragraphs in which theories are alluded to but never explained (it's hard to know but I think if you didn't already know quite a lot about the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, important parts of the book would make no sense at all).

And Schrodinger is depicted as this incredibly self-indulgent and lame boring guy.  I think part of the badness of the writing comes from Belton's need to explain every detail of Schrodinger's thought process, how he's scared, why he's scared, what he thinks about his wife, why he wants her to comfort him in this way and not that way. What he thinks about the people living across the street from him. I guess overwriting anything kills it. Schrodinger has a lot of affairs, which could make for interesting plot, but it's in a really childish and silly way and not sexy at all. He just goes on and on about how his libido can't be controlled. Anyhow, maybe Schrodinger was really boring, I don't know, but if he was, then you shouldn't write a novel about him. I've read 90 pages and I'm giving up.

My long journey in Proustland

I've just finished Part I Du côté de Guermantes and started Part II. Guermantes is the third volume of À la recherche du temps perdu which I've been reading for years now (not like two years, more like six or seven). It really feels interminable, and in the last year (by which I mean, during the time it took me to read Part I of my current volume) I started thinking maybe I wasn't into it anymore, or that at least I might switch to reading it in English (which would be less like hard work, more like entertainment). Du côté de chez Swann is one of the best things ever created on earth, but all this talk in the last few hundred pages about different levels of nobility and who is too good to show up at who's tea parties and so on, it was starting to feel like it wasn't my thing. Now though, it's back to the domestic scene, with his grandmother having fallen ill, and it's amazing again. He's really the best writer of prose ever.

At this rate, I'll be finished just before my fortieth birthday.

Lives and Deaths of the Rich and Literary

I've just finished Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography, by Hermione Lee (2005). I read her biography of Virginia Woolf and liked it, so I thought I'd try this. It's a fun little book, not overly serious, about the pitfalls of biography writing, which mostly consist in being seduced by myths surrounding the subject, or just being generally melodramatic. She looks at a few death scenes and quotes some pretty funny passages in which the biographers guess at the interior monologue of the dying person, often trying to use words from the person's poetry or novels to describe their poignant feelings.

Lee writes interestingly on public perceptions of famous figures in different eras, looking particularly at the book The Hours and its film adaptation, which gave a popular, but distorted, image of Virginia Woolf's suicide and of her nose (which was made pretty ridiculous by its imitation in the form of a prosthetic on Nicole Kidman). She tells some good anecdotes and the book did make me think about how hard it must be to write biography, to create an orderly account of someone's life (usually dealing with large gaps of information) and to make it interesting without inventing meaning where none exists.

"a wandering people with a passion for gigantic bedsteads and massive refrigerators"

I went to one of my local second-hand bookstores (Welch's on St. Viateur near Jeanne-Mance) a few days ago with my sister. I wanted to buy five new books so I'd be stocked for a little while, but Rachel got impatient to go after I'd only chosen one, so I picked up two more books and contended myself with three instead of five.

One of the two semi-randomly chosen books is John Cheever's Oh What a Paradise it Seems. I had never read any Cheever before. I was looking for more recent fiction, which this wasn't -- it was published in 1982. But I like a short book and this was an even hundred pages.

As I started the book I was reminded of Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, which starts:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller. Relax.

It goes on that way for several pages, and then returns to the second person metafiction for every other chapter throughout the book. Oh What a Paradise it Seems begins,

This is a story to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night. The dogs are asleep and the saddle horses -- Dombey and Trey -- can be heard in their stalls across the dirt road beyound the orchard.

The fact of the horses being named and insisted on and then never referred to again even obliquely also reminded me of the Calvino book. And Cheever's third chapter starts off with the narrator telling us he wishes he were writing a war novel. They're overall very different books with different emotional content, but there was some kind of echo for me. If on a winter's night was published in Italian in 1979 so maybe they share some ineffable worldwide feeling of an era, too.

Oh What a Paradise is about an old man, we aren't told how old but his age is insisted upon, who has an affair with a beautiful woman (she is appraised by the old man as between 35 and 40), has a rebound affair with her doorman, and mounts a campaign to save a skating pond. I have a long-standing distaste for fiction about old, undistinguished men who wander around effortlessly seducing young and beautiful women. Actually old is just an exacerbating characteristic, the genre bugs me when the men are undistinguished and middle-aged, too. In this case it's beautiful women and men, which is a bit of a twist, but doesn't lessen my irritation which is something to do with male writers who think that they're the best thing ever and think that everyone else thinks it too. But I told myself that this book wasn't exactly aiming at realism, and on that basis I calmed myself (not entirely successfully, you might think).

What is it aiming at? I would not want to assert that every novel has an overarching theme or moral, but this one seemed to. Something about the sadness of industrialization and a plea to reverse the destruction of natural oases, and (as a corollary?) the sadness of growing old and possibly losing those movie-perfect romantic moments one had in one's youth. It was published the year Cheever died, and more than six months after he was diagnosed with cancer, so the nostalgic tone has good claim to being genuine. The New York Times Book Review called it "perfect Cheever" (and added "it is perfect") but on the other hand Wikipedia, that unimpeachable source of information, says it wasn't one of his best and was charitably reviewed because they all knew he was dying. I guess I'll have to read something else of his before weighing on that. The book has some great lines (like the one I quoted part of in this post's title), but I didn't finish it wishing it was more than its 100 pages.