Finding nuggets - the rewards of reading widely

 

When conversing about books and reading, a recurring topic tends to be how to balance the amount of available material with the limited time of a human lifespan. There always has to be some kind of balance for purely practical reasons, and how that balance is achieved depends entirely on each individual reader. For me, the decision-making process is largely guided by lists, as I have written about in previous blogposts (here, here, and here).

In my case, there are numerous books that I want to read, many of which I keep putting off for various reasons. It might be that I feel like I do not have the time needed to really delve into the book in the way I want to, which is why I still have not started The Count of Monte Christo, even though I do have an unabridged translation at home in the fjords. Another reason is that I still want to have something to look forward to from that particular author, which is why I have still only read two of the novels by Erik Fosnes Hansen, one of my absolute favourite authors. Or it might be that I simply feel too tired to engage with the book in the way I feel it should be engaged with, which is why I still have not started Hanna Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem.  

Then there are the books that I do not particularly want to read, but that I feel some obligation to read in order to fulfill some kind of personal ambition. In my case, such books are typically found among the Nobel laureates in literature, and there are many of those books I feel no urge to read. But every once in a while, I come to that pleasant place between readings, when the euphoria of having finished a good book and being able to select from the plethora of available options that I feel drawn towards a book that I normally would not prioritise, either because it is not on any of my lists, or because it seems uninteresting or trite (this is sometimes the case for books that are on one my lists as well).  

Two weeks ago, I found myself in this pleasant in-between space that often fuels the mind with a kind of reading-hubris, which leads to choices that would not have been made in sobriety. I was leaving for Oslo after the summer vacation, and I had had a couple of very good reading weeks. And I believe that since I was about to embark on a nine-hour bus ride, my choice fell on a book that I had not paid much attention to in the past years, namely the Norwegian translation of Le Procès-Verbal, the debut novel of J. M. G. Le Clézio, the Nobel laureate in literature of 2008.  

The novel - Rapport om Adam in Norwegian and The Interrogation in English - is not one I would recommend. I found it boring and pretentious, and even by 1963 the stock character of the quasi-intellectual male misfit who shuns societal norms in often violent hypocrisy had outplayed its usefulness. To follow the pathetic complaints of an ungrateful rapist penned by a young ambitious male author is at times gruelling and downright unpleasant. This is a case where even the occasional beauty of the prose is insufficient to make me come away from the experience and look back on it as an overall pleasant experience. 

As many problems as I have with this book, and as much as it has put me off Le Clézio's books for the foreseeable future, reading the novel was also a reminder that even in the most unexpected and unpleasant places, there will be nuggets that make the effort worthwhile. In this sense, The Interrogation also proved ultimately to be worthwhile, because here and there - in-between all the myopic self-centredness and moaning - there were some formulations, some sentences that were remarkably well put, and which I have marked for future use. For instance, for someone like me who researches legends of saints and how the stories of saints are multiplied in the course of the history of a given cult, some reflections about the validity of thousand versions of the same legend - even if this was not about saints' legend - is an excellent starting point for discussing authority and complexity in hagiography, whether that discussion is done in an article, a blogpost, or in the classroom. In short, reading a novel that I found objectionable in many different ways, nonetheless yielded some nuggets that might prove useful, and I was again reminded of the rewards of reading widely - even so widely that it goes beyond pleasure.