A few weeks ago I had a nearly all-consuming desire to reread “1Q84” by Haruki Murakami. The reason eluded me at first. I may have attributed it to the fact that Murakami is one of my favorites, whose books always find their way into the flux of my reading rushes. I may have attributed this to the fact that I had the privilege of reviewing it when it came out in 2011 for this very publication, and thus would have enjoyed both a book and a nostalgic experience. I may have attributed it to the fact that I rather liked “1Q84” and it was due for a reread anyway.
Those were ancillary reasons, sure, but none were the main one. I’ve got it now. I think I wanted to reread it because it’s long, and it’s only until recently that I’ve come around to the fact that long books are worth reading.
I’ll explain. For a while I was enamored of a sentiment Saul Bellow expressed in the intro to “Something To Remember Me By,” a repackaging of three short Bellow works. In essence, Bellow was of the opinion that shorter works were better than longer ones, mainly for artistic/aesthetic reasons.
It’s an interesting example of contrition, considering Bellow’s fame rests mainly on the long books he authored (“Adventures of Augie March,” “Humboldt’s Gift”). He admits as much.
Armed with the examples of books like “The Great Gatsby” and “The Bridge of San Luis Ray,” I suppose I too was enamored of shorter books for the artistry they could espouse. And, having wrecked myself against the cliffs of “War & Peace” and “Les Miserables” in the past, I could sympathize with the merits shorter works proffered.
Now, though, a long book means something very different to me, something I’d attribute to an insight from John Steinbeck.
Steinbeck believed long books were like wedges blasted into someone’s head—they tore things up and, wedded inside the clustered carnage, one had no choice but to let it remain while the wound heals around it.
It’s like the main character in Knut Hamsun’s “Hunger” who imagines inspiration as God’s finger tearing itself through his head, leaving behind a void of severed nerves to torment the artist. It’s fair to say, between Hamsun and Steinbeck, that Steinbeck is the optimist here.
Downplaying the convalescent angle, Steinbeck believed that longer books, rather than the quick pricks of short books, lived longer with the reader, made themselves a part of the reader. A short book may inoculate some germ of wisdom or beauty, but a long book leaves the remembering scar.
I agree, though I may also promulgate rhapsodies in favor of short books as well. Really, what I’ve learned is that I need short books as well as long ones.
A small aside: How does one measure a “long” book? In general, I call any book that has 500 plus pages a long book, with an ideal of 600 or more. Going back to Murakami, “Kafka on the Shore”—at 467 pages—isn’t a long book; “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” on the other hand, at 607 pages, is absolutely a long book, even though the two move at the same pace. Anyway.
It wasn’t until recently that I realized that I stand in awe of long books, for their effort, for their profundity, for their sheer ridiculousness.
Steinbeck believed writing was silly for the attempts it made at depicting life. He called it (I’m paraphrasing) a vain attempt to express the wordless, with seldom “success” in the measure. All the same, Steinbeck was a great writer who wrote one of the greatest long books of all time, “East of Eden.”
If expressing the wordless is one of the greatest problems of writing, then a long book is but one method of doing so, one of which I’ve recently rescinded my rebuke.
But long books are also marvels in their own way. Writing “1Q84,” Murakami said writing a novel that long was like training for a marathon—it’s an enormous exertion of effort and preparation. We talk about books as success or failures, which may undermine the marathon idea until you realize that marathons are not won but performed, experienced.
Long books are performed and experienced too. And while they are not wholly inhospitable to art, they make it hard for art to float about uncontaminated, unscarred.
To art, all those long books are humbling.
Still prefer shorter books over those excessive paperweights one calls “literature”? Tell Sean at sreichard@wisc.edu.
