/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20154071]

Post the most difficult novels you've read relative to the number of pages.

360 pages, mind boggling. probably harder than Being and Time.

[Anonymous No.20154111]

The Suspended Vocation, Roberte ce soir, The Baphomet

[Anonymous No.20154124]

>>20154071
This book is poetry in prose form. It is supposed to convey a feeling, not make total sense

[Anonymous No.20155718]

>>20154071
Naked Lunch and Ubik are quite hard, even tho they're popular.
Yo El Supremo, The Leopard and all of Alejo Carpentier's works are also quite difficult in my opinion.

[Anonymous No.20155795]

>>20155718
>Ubik is hard
What?

[Anonymous No.20155906]

>>20155718
I’m what language you read Carpentier in. I’ve read The Chase and Kingdom of this World in English and I don’t recall finding them particularly challenging. Not trying to shit on you btw, I just don’t see him brought up a lot so I’d like to hear an anon’s thoughts

[Anonymous No.20155911]

>>20155906
shit, mean to say “I’m curious what language you read”

[Anonymous No.20156010]

>>20154071
The ghost stories were comfy and fun

[Anonymous No.20156074]

>>20154071
The Unnameable is at most 150 pages long but Beckett is the most unforgiving cunt of the 20th century. He’s also a genius

[Anonymous No.20156085]

>>20154071
Murphy by Samuel Beckett.
It's a relatively short book, less than 250 pages, as are all of his books, but this one was completely impenetrable to me. I read the whole thing on a camping trip and then realized I had no clue what I'd read.

[Anonymous No.20156108]

>>20155718
Why did you find the Leopard difficult? I've been meaning to read it.

[Anonymous No.20156134]

>>20156085
I thought Murphy was pretty digestable compared to some of his plays and dream of fair to middling- I felt like I was reading gibberish with that one. I think watt and murphy are his best tho

[Anonymous No.20156140]

>>20156074
>>20156085
hivemind

[Anonymous No.20156156]

>>20154071
doesn't get harder than this. read the unabridged if you want to play on expert difficulty

[Anonymous No.20156188]

>>20156156
wow did you platinum it??

[Anonymous No.20156241]

>>20155718
>Naked Lunch
glad I'm not the only retard that couldn't figure it out

[Anonymous No.20156408]

>>20156085
>>20156074
I find almost all of Beckett almost completely impenetrable. I know I ought to be getting get because I'm allegedly not an idiot, but it goes so far over my head I don't even see the chemtrails.

[Anonymous No.20156443]

>>20154071
Beyond good & evil is short and i've read it numerous times and I have no fucking idea what's it's about, really. <img class="xae" data-xae width="32" height="31" src="https://s.4cdn.org/image/emotes/6ec0dd2c_pepoRope.png">

[Anonymous No.20156503]

>>20156408
The best way to approach Beckett is through his plays first. They encapsulate everything great about his singular artistic vision in a much less indigestible way, and it’s far easier to pick up on the fundamental elements of style, tone and technique that reoccur constantly throughout his work. Try reading one of his plays while watching an adaption on YouTube. One of my personal favourites is Rough For Theatre 2.

[Anonymous No.20156524]

>>20156074
>>20156085
>>20156408
If most people who read something say it doesn't make sense, maybe it's nonsense. Or doesn't communicate anything of value. Just saying.

[Anonymous No.20156532]

>>20156085
my favorite book. it took me a year to read it the first go round, not necessarily due to its difficulty, but rather because every time i read a few pages, it drove me to despair that someone had come along to write the masterpiece that *I* wished to write. Essentially, reading Murphy nullified any pretense I had to writing. Everything I could possibly have to say had been offered up, better than I could ever muster. The wit, the erudition, the *prose*, the themes, it's all there. All of it.
>>20156134
Watt had nearly the opposite effect on me, it nearly broke my ability to read, to enjoy literature. I think the work is actually a curse in the form of letters. some evidence for this is that it was written during WW2, while he was either enciphering or deciphering code for the allied forces (i can't recall which), but the entire work seems to be an exercise in futility which reveals a sort of bereavement, of loneliness, of dejection and separation from trifles like plot or meaning. the work wore me down, in my influential state (i rarely can read a book without becoming so immersed that i fail to adopt the idiosyncratic texture or even the attitude of the author rather than the characters) so it was possibly one of the most depressed periods of my life. it is an anti-novel if there ever has been one. Anyway, Beckett, to me, is nonpareil. he is the true genius of literature. not even Joyce had his density, his power.

[Anonymous No.20156540]

>>20156532
impressionable, not influential

[Anonymous No.20156548]

Not a novel but I "finished reading" Faust, Part 2 recently and I definitely feel like I got filtered by it. I had to read a summary before each part just to have a basic comprehension of the plot points and even with the annotations provided by the norton critical edition I don't feel like I got very much out of it. Part 1 was great, though.

>>20156074
>>20156134
>>20156408
>>20156532
Hm, interesting. The Unnameable doesn't have a lot in the way of concrete characters, plot points, etc. but I really enjoyed it and didin't necessarily find it "difficult" (although it was very slow going). Murphy is hilarious and amazing, as is Watt (perhaps even more so imo).

[Anonymous No.20156616]

>>20156548
no question that Murphy is hilarious, but Watt is something else. Not funny, I can see a fairly deep reading of it being considered funny, but there is something venomous in it. something seeping out of Beckett's wounds into those pages. I can't put my finger on it, the oblivion, maybe? at first it's merely ridiculous, and one can giggle at that, out of confusion or even just good nature, but as it goes on, and on, as you read, and do not gloss over the places where repetition begins to blank your mind, begins to attack your logical structures, a sort of transformation occurs. somewhat like the slow shift from satire into horror that takes place in catch-22. it grows, the miasma widens, it swallows up the good nature and it doesn't kill it, but sends it into a purgatory (definitely a theme of beckett's). it wrenches the spirit of meaning from what is "the novel", and obliterates it in front of you. it is a breathtaking example of a man's pain being mistaken for wit, having the veneer of comedy, but truly being the nadir of his self-pity and alienation.

[Anonymous No.20156631]

>>20156156
It's long but fairly straightforward and accessible. Great book.

>>20156443
The aphorisms make it tough. Just focus on the more consistent points. Genealogy of Morals helps.

For me, the hardest books I've read are Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, particularly the preface, and Whitehead's Process and Reality.

Real doozies:

>The life of God and divine intelligence, then, can, if we like, be spoken of as love disporting with itself; but this idea falls into edification, and even sinks into insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative. Per se the divine life is no doubt undisturbed identity and oneness with itself, which finds no serious obstacle in otherness and estrangement, and none in the surmounting of this estrangement. But this “per se” is abstract generality, where we abstract from its real nature, which consists in its being objective, to itself, conscious of itself on its own account (für sich zu sein); and where consequently we neglect altogether the self-movement which is the formal character of its activity. If the form is declared to correspond to the essence, it is just for that reason a misunderstanding to suppose that knowledge can be content with the “per se”, the essence, but can do without the form, that the absolute principle, or absolute intuition, makes the carrying out of the former, or the development of the latter, needless. Precisely because the form is as necessary to the essence as the essence to itself, absolute reality must not be conceived of and expressed as essence alone, i.e. as immediate substance, or as pure self-intuition of the Divine, but as form also, and with the entire wealth of the developed form. Only then is it grasped and expressed as really actual.

[Anonymous No.20156632]

>>20156532
You made a very strong and personal case for the book. I'll read Murphy next.

[Anonymous No.20156644]

1600 pages of the dry unfinished ramblings of an autistic austrian (but genius and rewarding)

[Anonymous No.20156667]

>>20156632
i usually avoid talking about it because i'm jealous of it, in both senses, jealous of it in the sense of exclusivity, and ownership, as well as envious of its mastery. i doubt you'll be disappointed, but if you are, don't blame beckett, but me instead for overhyping it.


not entirely related, but i did want to say something about the prose of english speakers who know french as a second language. they have an unmistakable quality of prose and syntactical nuance that cannot be matched. i notice it most powerfully in henry james and beckett, but i'm sure there are others. oftentimes reading the ambassadors i had the impression that henry was mentally translating french into english to capture an effect, to emphasize Strether's encounter with the cult, not culture, of paris. anyway, Beckett definitely translated back and forth between the languages and his prose is just dynamite. i peg it on his genius, sure, but likewise on his mind oscillating between french and english.
unfortunately i don't know the language, but the snippets i've come to grips with at the higher points of my concentration have confirmed this sentiment.

[Anonymous No.20156698]

>>20156524
>the only things worth saying are things which require no effort to be heard
This is a thread about intensely difficult, short reads- don’t be surprised when people mention Beckett since he’s incredibly well-known for creating these dense, highly compressed texts.

>>20156532
Just a little reminder from one Beckett obsessive to another- How It Is is one of the strangest things I’ve ever read and it is absolutely worth reading, despite getting a lot less attention that the celebrated “trilogy”.

Protip: try and read it out loud really fast. See how fast you can read it. Really try and get yourself out of breath while reading it so you start to feel faint. Beckett is purposefully a writer of exhaustion in more ways than one.

[Anonymous No.20156720]

>>20156698
sounds like a blast. it's in my stack. its consumption is all but assured. i barely have it in me to be the lens to witness the old salt though. a cracked glass! i feel like the gentleman in an act without words I just as the noose is pulled away.

[Anonymous No.20156769]

I'm gonna say pale Fire By valdimir Nabokov. Maybe it just because I'm no good with poems.

[Anonymous No.20156796]

>>20155718
You are just too tonto, Ubik was too easy and shit as well, please do not include it in the same sentence with Yo El Supremo and Alejo Carpentier <img class="xae" data-xae width="32" height="32" src="https://s.4cdn.org/image/emotes/b06b1566_REEeee.png"> <img class="xae" data-xae width="28" height="25" src="https://s.4cdn.org/image/emotes/25086889_FeelsSpecialMan.png">

[Anonymous No.20156816]

>>20154071
For me? Anything by Rene Decartes. I'm just a brainlet

[Anonymous No.20156909]

Trying to read Gogol when my Russian wasn't even good enough for children's books
>>20156074
It's interesting but not genius. Molloy is genius
>>20155718
Naked Lunch was weird. I totally "got" all the other cut-ups, but I almost wanted to throw NL across the room. Seemed like it had no point the others didn't already do better

[Anonymous No.20157014]

i'm esl and i could feel my mind disintegrating

[Anonymous No.20157056]

>>20154071
I thought Kant's Prolegomena was pretty tough.
It's probably one of the few times since I was a kid that I had to break sentences up into clauses and assess each one.

[Anonymous No.20157358]

>So you haven't memorised the layout of The Holy Land and how each landmark connects to biblical events? I'm afraid I can't allow you to continue anon

[Anonymous No.20157367]

>>20156644
>1600 pages of the dry unfinished ramblings of an autistic austrian (but genius and rewarding)
I honestly found it easy to follow. It is a slog in some parts & it's hard to explain to normies.
Definitely wish I knew others like it

[Anonymous No.20157764]

Extinction by Bernhard. Fucking hated so much.

[Anonymous No.20157869]

>>20154071
224 pages. I’ve read some hefty philosophy texts and yeah those are hard but idk something about stream of consciousness just fucks me up. I also haven’t read much fiction in general though.

[Anonymous No.20157933]

>>20157869
>t. fellow who won't get past "g"

[Anonymous No.20158059]

>>20154071
How do you read a book you find hard to follow? what is your strategy to read more? I usually read 2 hours a day but sometimes when i find hard to follow a book I usually quit reading and start doing something else, however in this sub it seems you are used to reading heavy books, how do you do it?

[Anonymous No.20158101]

>>20158059
Keep pushing through, reread if you have to. stop and think. let it ruminate, try to do it on your own as well so the ability is trained. if it gets really bad or you're reading difficult poetry you can even go word by word to see where your getting lost and try to resolve it

[Anonymous No.20158289]

>>20158101
thanks

[Anonymous No.20158320]

>>20156156
It was long but it felt like an easy and accessible read to me.<span class="xae" data-xae="flex">💪[/spoiler]<img class="xae" data-xae width="28" height="32" src="https://s.4cdn.org/image/emotes/a9f848d3_SeetheWojak.png"><span class="xae" data-xae="wind">💨[/spoiler]:umaruCry::baw:

[Anonymous No.20158321]

Ok. I seriously want to read Kant like actually getting to know what's his philosophy is all about. Do I have to start with the Greeks?

[Anonymous No.20158496]

>>20158321
That’s what I am doing and it’s taking a long time.

[Anonymous No.20158502]

>>20158321
I read Kant without reading Hume or Aristotle or whatever and I understand it better than most people on this board. You either have what it takes or you don't.

[Anonymous No.20158837]

>>20158502
It’s not about other people. You would surely understood Kant better if you first understood Hume.

[Anonymous No.20158958]

>>20157764
Literally my favorite novel... What was wrong with it? Bored by the ramblings and lack of paragraph breaks? I never considered it particularly dense I'm genuinely curious.

[Anonymous No.20158974]

>>20158502
That's a shame because Kant is a step down from Aristotle and completely misinterpreted many ideas given by Aristotle. He is intellectually lightweight in comparison.

[Anonymous No.20159653]

>>20156644
Dry doesn’t mean hard to read though. Plus Musil is actually hilarious.

Try Lezama Lima’s Paradiso for truly hard fiction.

[Anonymous No.20159734]

>>20157869
If you ever revisit this, which I hope some day you do, pay close attention to the repetitions. Every time a word is repeated it is important, often because she repeats these words in short succession but in different contexts.
When you get to Time Passes, read it in mind of the first world war, and pay close attention to how "Nothing" is presented.

[Anonymous No.20159920]

>320 pages
Hardly a difficult book in any objective sense, it's written at a high school reading level, but it's the first novel I read cover to cover in a foreign language. In that sense, it's the biggest challenge I've overcome so far as a reader.

[Anonymous No.20160372]

>>20154071
how is reading hard? you just read one word and then the next

[Anonymous No.20160617]

>>20156796
>>20155795
>>20155718
Ubik is a great book but it is NOT hard to read at all lmao
I finished it in 2 days

[Anonymous No.20160648]

>>20154071
1000 pages of long chapters, a plethora of words I was unfamiliar with, rapidly shifting between different characters, lots of religious and historical references (especially within the context of the Catholic church).
I'm not ashamed to say I used an online reading guide, reviewing their summary of every chapter once I had finished reading through each in order to ensure I understood what was going on in the plot-line and didn't lose any important pieces in the process.

[Anonymous No.20160657]

>>20154071
they just take Egon Schiele's self portrait and slap it on a book? Little disrespectful.

[Anonymous No.20160661]

>>20160657

[Anonymous No.20160727]

>>20159920
Light novels are hard. I read Ningen Shikkaku without too much difficulty, but Konosuba was a real challenge. Ningen Shikkaku uses long, full sentences more similar to English. Konosuba is written like spoken Japanese, that is to say it's just a bunch of incomplete phrases that my mind has to provide context for.
The hardest book for me was Hataraku Maou-sama, because it's a bunch of incomplete phrases about how to navigate Japanese bureaucracy.

[Anonymous No.20162024]

ancestral bump

[Anonymous No.20162257]

>>20160648
This book was the biggest slog ever. I want to give away my rare edition for free

[Anonymous No.20162309]

>>20162024

The best version

[Anonymous No.20162374]

I found pic rel to be an absolute pain to read and comprehend. I’ve read some other Faulkner and somewhat enjoyed it but that was not the case at with absalom absalom.

>>20156769
You should absolutely reread pale fire. Once you are in on the joke the text opens up in amazing new ways
>>20160648
What guide did you use? I was considering trying to tackle this book later in the year?

[Anonymous No.20162378]

>>20162257
It's a book where it's a slog for quite long periods but then you come to a bit that's so good you keep on going.

[Anonymous No.20163005]

>>20162374
I used this site
https://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/trguide.shtml
>>20162257
Can I have it?
I really enjoyed the book despite it's difficulty

[Anonymous No.20163068]

>>20156644
>(but genius and rewarding)
I hate bookfags so much. Be honest this book was dry and shit and you wasted hours reading it. No it was not rewarding, rewarding is fucking your 18 year old next door neighbour, while her dad is sleeps in the next room.

[Anonymous No.20163081]

>>20158059
>how do you do it?
If you're really forcing yourself just stop. No point in forcing yourself to finish a book you clearly don't like or find it hard to read. You realise it's pointless in the end, you should enjoy what you're reading.

[Anonymous No.20163084]

>>20158321
>Ok. I seriously want to read Kant
Why? Do you want to read him or do you want say I read him for internet brownie points? He won't say anything you don't already know from whatever youtube modern philosopher fag.

[Anonymous No.20163093]

Whats the appeal of reading difficult books?
Because the internet says so?

[Anonymous No.20163178]

>>20163093
There’s a fine line between finding a book too difficult/obtuse and being too ADHD to read an actual book.

Despite loving reading as a kid, once I returned to reading literature post-highschool it took considerable effort just to get through the first & relatively short book I started with.

[Anonymous No.20163196]

>>20163093
>Pure challenge
>Bending your mind so you sink into the text
>Sometimes, a unique viewpoint on life.

[Anonymous No.20163698]

>>20156631
>Being is Form and Actuality, two faces of the same coin, one must view both simultaneously in order to apprehend Being-itself.

[Anonymous No.20163778]

>>20163068
Holy filtering

[Anonymous No.20163862]

>>20156156
It's only hard in the sense that 99% of the book is the most boring kind of soap opera and completely disinteresting to anyone who doesn't enjoy gas station romance novels and/or depictions of 1800's russia.

[Anonymous No.20163960]

>>20154071
1. Harry Potter e la pietra filosofale
2. Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen
3. Harry Potter et la pierre philosophale

that's my top 3 in terms of difficulty. all of them were my first completed books in the respective languages, so they were the toughest

[Anonymous No.20164026]

>>20163960
I think The Sorcerer's Stone is more to your taste

[Anonymous No.20164097]

The Death of Virgil. Really interesting and fun book but it’s incomprehensible

[Anonymous No.20164841]

>>20154071
I actually had a lot of trouble with Blood Meridian. Something about McCarthy's prose just doesn't mesh well with my brain.

Genealogy of Morals was a bit tricky, as well as some stuff by Kierkegaard. I find that it's sometimes necessary to read denser passages out loud to really understand exactly how these philosophers are presenting their thoughts.