Trying to Read Novels Again

I used to read novels by the bucketload. From around sixteen to my late twenties. Hesse, Camus, Undset, Hamsun, Boll, Vidal, Vonnegut, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Greene. I lvoed them. They told me ways of seeing life.

But the attraction waned. I don't know why. Maybe my four years of travelling and working my way around the world replaced novels as a way of seeing with seeing sites and meeting people as a way of seeing life. Maybe my subsequent settling down to full-time work, marriage, and parenthood did likewise, though I know many people who devour novels despite or because of these duties.

Anyway, periodically I try to reignite the passion, perceiving that I'm out of touch with contemporary fiction, and that all literature is a "good thing".

As an aside the one writer who managed to break through my disapointment and lethargy about novels was - maybe still is, as I haven't read him in the past five years or more - Somerset Maugham. Not the most fashionable of novelists and short-story writers but generally still held in high esteem by some.

So a week ago I bought, not by design but simply because I saw it there, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. Nobel Prize Winner as recently as 2018. I quite liked it but not enough to continue past page 58. It had interesting moments, speculative writing and views which drew me, but overall my mind weighed up the use of time reading it with the use of time exploring more directly the existential issues we all face, and found it the lesser subject.

Ultimately I couldn't really care what the woman narrator eventually experiences or finds out about Big Foot, the neighbour who was found dead in his house. Or Oddball's life or his son's, the policeman. Not even the narrator's compassion for animals or her non-conformist belief system that so unsettles traditional Catholics in real life - not sure if any similar issue occurs in the novel.

It's not Tokarczuk's fault as a writer. I can hardly claim superior insight into literature than the Nobel Committee who gave her the grandest of literary honours, nor do I doubt their ability to do so, as some more opinionated critics have done.

I'll give the book to a charity and hope someone else really does enjoy it and find something meaningful or challening in it. But for me, after between a fifth and a quarter way through it I ran out of fuel. The fuel being the passion to read out, find out more, glean something special from it.

Novels don't seem to give me that any more. Which is, through nostalgic lenses, a real shame, but through the lens of mindfulness, just how it is, and I move on, using my time in other ways hopefully more productive and useful to me and to those around me.