Complex Can Perplex or Be as Good as It Gets

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Photo credit: Christine Suewon Lee.

Call them what you will: complex, difficult, intricate, nonlinear, etc. — some novels are not easy reads. They may ultimately be satisfying, or you might want to fling them across the room. I’ll discuss some of these challenging books today.

I just finished reading Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s Bangkok Wakes to Rain. Despite being only a mid-length 357 pages, it took me nearly a month to finish. That’s because I would read maybe a chapter and then just couldn’t go on for a while.

Actually, I liked the novel; it features interesting people, graceful writing, reflections on life, sociopolitical elements, laments about inhumanity, and more. But its frequent switching from character to character and jumping around in time — with the only link seemingly the city of Bangkok itself — made for whatever the opposite of a page-turner is. Still, the individual sections are almost all quite readable.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is also a handful — in the case of that novel, keeping track of many characters and the story’s sweep can be a bit arduous. But the book is pretty much riveting throughout.

Moby-Dick is compelling, too, for most of its pages. What slows the novel down at times is Herman Melville’s periodic straying from the epic plot to discuss all things whale. But Melville’s rich prose and slow march toward tragedy win the day.

Among the many other novels that are not-always-easy reads but VERY rewarding are Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In the fantasy fiction realm, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

The prose in Henry James’ The Ambassadors is also rich — maybe too rich. As defense attorneys might beseech a judge, “Shorten the sentences!” Still, a subtle novel worth reading.

Marcel Proust was of course another prose master with his multi-volume In Search of Lost Time. But it’s almost too much of a word feast; I only read the first volume (Swann’s Way), and opted not to continue.

Other challenging novels have also been problematic for me. I found Umberto Eco’s convoluted Foucault’s Pendulum annoying but struggled my way to complete it because I had loved Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is an astonishing, labyrinthian creation mixing poetry and prose, even as its total lack of warmth makes the book a trial to finish. I did finish it, however.

But some challenging novels can cause some readers to give up before completion. A couple of examples for me were William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life.

James Joyce? I haven’t attempted his Ulysses or Finnegans Wake — those two novels are on my reading list for the 25th century 🙂 — though I did enjoy Joyce’s relatively straightforward Dubliners collection of stories, especially “The Dead.”

Your thoughts on, and examples of, this topic?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about Election Day and more — is here.

137 thoughts on “Complex Can Perplex or Be as Good as It Gets”

  1. The hype around Finnegans Wake made my wife pick it up, but after reading half a page she almost threw it into the dumpster fire. So, just for her, I set up a literary art experiment in which I merged the most beautiful book in English literature (the Kelmscott-Chaucer) with its most enigmatic one (Finnegans Wake). Both books had had issues with their readability – the Kelmscott-Chaucer with the used layout of the text and Finnegans Wake with Joyce’s sibylline prose. After weeding out this defects, this book’s stream-of-consciousness stile still makes it a difficult read, but you don’t have to be an accomplished philologist anymore to read it (or alternately reading a version that contains as many footnotes as actual prose). Right now everyone can decide if this book was the biggest literary hoax ever or the work of a genius (although, admittedly, I dumbed it down a little by eliminating the foreign idiosyncrasies and streamlining Joyce’s prose).

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    • Thank you, Shaharee! A VERY interesting experiment. I decided years ago not to read “Finnegans Wake.” Life is too short, and there are hundreds of other worthy novels on my to-read list (which I never will get all the way through, anyway). 🙂

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      • I can relate to this. When I was reading the Finnegans Wake, it was in the context of a new year’s resolution. Then I forgot most about it till my wife decided to give it a try and got upset. I remembered that I found value into it, but must admit that after ploughing through the novel for a second time to produce a readable version, I came to the conclusion that it resembled much the autobiography of a schizophrenic that was encoded with the help of 64 dictionaries. In other words: a brilliant literary hoax.

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          • The ivory tower people just consider everyone who hasn’t read Finnegans Wake as illiterate. Not to mention that many of them have sacrificed a whole academic career on this one book. For which I’m grateful, because without them I would never have managed to dumb it down to a readable version. I must admit that some of Joyce’s “clever” word plays and riddles went bust in that process. The real Joyce fellowship will probably nail me on the cross for that.

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  2. The most difficult book to get through for me was “The Hunt for Red October” by Tom Clancy. With my NASA background, I felt compelled to memorize every technical acronym! Holy cow! What a ton of them! The book was worth finishing, but totally for me!

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  3. Hi Dave,

    As well as complex novels that I’ve found frustrating, I’m also reading Wilkie Collins’ “The Moonstone”. Oh boy is there a lot going on there! And I must be enjoying it because every time a narrator says they’re going to go off on a tangent, I want to scream No! I don’t care about your romantic life! Tell me where the diamond is!!

    Sue

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    • Ha, Sue! 😂 I know what you mean about novels going off on tangents. That can be wonderful, but it also can be frustrating. I loved “The Moonstone” — early detective novel, and very engrossing!

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  4. Thank you Dave for this post. It presents what I have shamefully felt with some books I must have read. For instance, in spanish one has to read «Don Quixote», but I could not do so. It was difficult for me to understand dialogues written in ancient spanish: my fault. But other one I must mention is «The war of the end of the world» a Mario Vargas Llosa extraordinary book. I began to read it and reach page 100 (I think) and i had to begin again from page one. The second time I did it, reading was fluently and I finished it very quickly, because I enjoyed a it lot. Perhaps one has to give those complex books a second chance. I have not read Ulysses…Thanks.

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    • Thank you, rincondesmendoza! Sorry you didn’t have a better experience with “Don Quixote.” I loved it, probably helped by the fact that I read a modern English translation.

      “The War of the End of the World” sounds amazing! I’ve read just one Mario Vargas Llosa novel: “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” which I liked a lot.

      Yes! Sometimes challenging books need a second chance. I know I liked novels such as “Moby-Dick,” “Middlemarch,” and “The Scarlet Letter” better the second time.

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  5. “Of Human Bondage” was difficult for me. It was a long time ago, but I remember it going on and on and on, and I was still not that far into the book.
    I couldn’t take it, and did not finish the the book.

    On another hand “One Hundred Years of Solitude”was so engrossing, I couldn’t put it down.
    It was not a page turner for me, nonetheless I was driven to keep reading, even when I had to backtrack for clarity.

    “Main Street” by Sinclair Lewis was another non page turner that I read with a steady trudge.
    To this day I’m glad I finished it. I learned a lot about a woman’s place at that time in history, as well as the small town people and politics, which in some ways have remained.

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  6. This is a great topic! I think complex stories can be very entertaining and stimulating, but like someone else mentioned, it can be boring if they are long and drawn out for the sake of trying to be long. I think I prefer stories to be shorter (under 200 pages) if they’re going to be complex. But I’ve read some longer stories when the writing is really engaging.

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  7. Hi Dave, there are three categories of books that are difficult to read. 1. Books written in older English or dialects that make for difficult reading; 2. Long and slow paced books; 3. Books that jump about in the beginning and are thus difficult to get into. I haven’t mentioned books you just don’t like as a reader because those I generally DNF. In the first category, some examples of books I’ve found more difficult reads are The Scarlet Letter, Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. In category 2, I can’t think of any I haven’t liked for this reason. I either liked them enough to continue or I DNF them. 3. Catch 22, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Fahrenheit 451, and Slaughterhouse-Five. I DNF Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (I am going to try again), War and Peace (I can’t stand some of the characters) and Parade’s End (It was so boring). Thanks for this great post, Dave. They are a weekly treat.

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  8. Hi Dave,

    Last month I decided to join a new book club. I’m already in a very successful book club, but we don’t all read the same book and that’s what I was looking for. So in October I met a lovely group of ladies and we had a chat about “The Diamond Eye” about a Russian female sniper (I hadn’t read it, but they made it sound very interesting) and they gave me a copy of the November book and oh was that complex. I won’t mention the title because I really don’t like being so negative about books, but I struggled to follow it. It was also a short novel (around 300 pages) that took a while to finish because I just couldn’t keep track of what was happening. It was set in two different time periods but I think my biggest problem is all the characters had the same voice so I’d have trouble remembering where and when I was. The characters also seemed to drastically change from one page to the next. We’re all having dinner on Thursday and I really REALLY hope I’m not the only person who wants to have a whinge about it!

    Sue 🙂

    Oh, and I don’t often give up on books, but “Ulysses”? I think I was done by about page 40.

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    • Thank you, Sue! Novels in which different characters have similar voices are definitely challenging, especially if there are quite a few characters.

      That said, great you’re now in two book clubs! Hope that members of this new one for you share your misgivings about this book — and that the next book is more to your liking!

      Stopping at page 40 is a good place to give up on a novel that’s frustrating a reader. Maybe one page sooner if one wants to pay tribute to “The 39 Steps” novel and movie. 🙂

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  10. Many classic novels such as “Les Miserables”,”War and Peace”, “Anna Karenina”, and “The Brothers Karamazov” are not difficult to read but they are very long and slow moving so they’re quite boring for someone who’s not interested in serious literature.

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  11. The first book that came to mind was Moby-Dick. The only thing that was worse than reading it was reading the Norton Critical Edition that was about twice as long. I never finished War and Peace…maybe someday. I’ve read several books by Robert Ludlum that are intricate to the point that you almost need to keep notes, but I read them so fast, I don’t have time to think about it.

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    • Thank you, Dan! Novels where one has to keep notes — now always appealing. 😦 (Which reminds me that Junot Diaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is that rare novel with FOOTnotes, and those footnotes are not only informative but entertaining as well.)

      Sorry about your “Moby-Dick” experience(s). I had mixed feelings about Melville’s opus when I first read it as a teen, but liked it a lot more when rereading it in middle age. And the novel is actually quite funny at times — on land, before the Pequod’s voyage begins.

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      • I have plans to reread it, Dave. Both times were as assignments. They funny thing is, I looked up that English class (at WVU). They read many of the same books, but they substituted Billy Budd for Moby-Dick. I don’t think that’s fair 😉

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        • Whoa — that’s a major substitute, and not fair indeed. 🙂 “Billy Budd” is an excellent, thought-provoking work, but “Moby-Dick” is of course much longer and more complex. Hope you like “M-D” better than before if you reread it!

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  12. Thank you once more for making me think, Dave! I read a few of your mentioned books, but Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude “was probably the most dificult one! Maybe I should try again, who knows! I also remember Catch-22 and the US captain from the Army Air Force and the trouble he went to in order to stay alive, as not at all being easy, but I enjoyed it all the same

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    • Thank you, Martina! “Catch-22” is a great mention — yes, not an easy book, but very satirical, enjoyable, and thought-provoking.

      “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is indeed challenging, but I found it rewarding.

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    • HI Martina, I agree that Catch 22 is not an easy novel to get into. I took me a while to get the gist of it and understand what was going on. I think its because the setting jumped around early in the book when I was still gaining an understanding of Yossarian’s character. Another book I found hard to understand initially was Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. My initial difficulties was because of all the characters. Each chapter was told from a different characters perspective and the name of the character wasn’t always mentioned. It took me a while to get the hang of it. Both books were amazing once I’d gotten over the initial struggle.

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      • Thank you, Roberta, for your interesting observations! It seems to me true that at the beginning of Catch-22 there was a kind of dilemma, because of the rule that those, who were sick didn’t have to fly missions, but the negative result was that those who handed in a request were then considered mentally sick!
        You are right, when you say that the many characters in Captain Correlli’s Mandolin make the story more difficult to understand and maybe we shouldn’t forget that we have the Greeks, Italians and the Germans on the other. I think, however, that thanks to these different cultures around her, Pelagia understands that she does not really love the local Mandras!
        It is a pleasure to think again of these wonderful books with you and that perseverance was worthwhile:)

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  13. For me, a lot of Shakespeare is difficult to read, the same with the Bible. It’s the King James English being too archaic for my taste. I think Naked Lunch was a difficult read yet I’ve never been a fan of anything Wm Burroughs wrote. Naked Lunch is more like notes from a fever dream than readable literature, but so much for writing when you’re high as a kite. He could have used semaphores and made more sense. I also found Murakami’s 1Q84 not so much a difficult read as it was a difficult task to complete, I soon lost the energy so it went back on the shelf. Jessica Knoll’s recent book Bright Young Women is great and an easy read, it’s just very sad to since these bright young women were murdered. Even though Knoll wanted to concentrate on the women rather than their murderer (inspired by that freak Bundy) I don’t think a person can ever separate the two and/or killer vs victim since they are inexorably enter twined by fate, circumstance etc. And that’s the gruesome reality of it, though I admire Knoll’s attempts to do so. *sigh* All of the above is strictly my opinion. Nice theme Dave. Thanks Susi.

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    • Thank you, Susi! Yes, Shakespeare can be difficult, especially in its original English. Most of the little Shakespeare I’ve read or watched (six plays) were in modern “translations.” Same for Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.”

      I haven’t read “Naked Lunch,” but, from what I’ve heard, you described Burroughs’ writing well (and colorfully 🙂 )!

      And, yes, a very long novel — even if not complex — can be challenging. Reading time is finite. < An obvious statement. 🙂

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  14. Ah, Dave, great post. Back today to say so after a busy weekend. I am afraid I am a wall thrower when a book just gets too tiresome and i se you mentioned by fav that way. But I also in comments War and Peace, which I read the same way cos I do like Tolstoy’s prose. My Mr has spent years getting through Bleak House. He is still on it. I dod like Joy’ce short stories but alas I had to pack in Finnegan’s Wake.

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  15. Once upon a time I made a New Year’s resolution to read the 100 best books of the World literature and most of the books that you mentioned in this article were included in that reading list. I fully agree with you on Proust: his arrogant and pseudo educational writing style was rubbing me very often the wrong way, not to mention that his main protagonist was a nitwit who could long for a very long time for something, just to abandon his objective once he obtained it. About James Joyce I have mixed feelings: while I consider his Ulysses as a work of genius, Finnegan’s Wake is that of a raving mad man.

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    • Thank you, Shaharee, for the vividly written comment! Your 100-best-books quest was a worthy and ambitious goal!

      “In Search of Lost Time” is both brilliant and, as you found, VERY annoying. One volume was enough for my “bucket list.” 🙂

      Re James Joyce, it’s quite a coincidence that he and another “modernist” author — Virginia Woolf — had the exact same 1882-1941 life span.

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  16. I was in advanced French classes in HS,not sure why, I was lostin translation. I had to read,in French,of course, “Huis Clos” by Jean Paul Sartre, a play on existentialism I couldn’t understand in English much less French!

    Michele, E&P way back.

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    • Thank you, Michele! Reading a hard-to-understand work in one’s non-native language is a double whammy. Funnily stated by you. 😂

      I also had some trouble with French in high school and switched to Spanish, which I found easier. Ironic that I later married a French professor. 🙂

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  17. I was 15. The high school had a library. I read all the major Faulkner, starting with The Sound and the Fury. I can’t say I understood it all. At some point I read Ulysses and some other Joyce. I did struggle with that. Later in life I re-read the major Faulkner, twice, and some of the later work. Reading the Faulkner early IMO, is why I can chase down subject-verb agreement in a complex sentence. I’ve seen younger copy editors who can’t do that. Sadly, about 30 years ago, illness limited my activity and there are many books you mentioned that I have not read. Maybe one day.

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    • Thank you, Leah! Impressive that you tackled Faulkner at 15! Sounds like it had some benefits for you. I didn’t read Faulkner until long after my teens, and did like “Light in August” and “As I Lay Dying.”

      Sorry about your illness and the limits it puts on your activity.

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  18. I have to admit I gave up on One Hundred Years of Solitude. It and I were on different wavelengths or something. And I’ve also concluded that whatever Henry James has to say can’t possibly be worth the labour of reading his prose.
    I don’t mind long books with convoluted plots. I’m more than halfway through Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo and finding it worthwhile.

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  19. Dave, I agree that complex plots can be a challenge that either hold our interest or force us to give up before reaching the finishing line. I’d read a lot of stellar reviews about “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” by Arunhati Roy, a Booker Prize-winning author, but gave up less than quarter way into the novel because of its complex social structure and characterization.

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    • Thank you, Rosaliene! Yes, complex plots can be compelling or frustrating. 🙂

      I haven’t read the Arundhati Roy book you mentioned as not being able to get through (I know that feeling 🙂 ), but did read her debut novel “The God of Small Things” — which I thought was depressingly terrific. Complex, but probably somewhat less so than “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.”

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  20. A most excellent post and follow-up discussion. Over the years, I have been asked why I sometimes prefer non-fiction over fiction. The answer dates back many, many years to when my father gave me Dee Brown’s book, “Bury My heart at Wounded Knee” to read. I was 18 at the time. Dad could see that I had mastered the art of reading fiction and this book, he believed, would allow me to expand my critical thinking. It was a very difficult book indeed, but reading that book exposed me to new perspectives, cultures, and historical periods, broadening my horizon and fostering a deep empathy. But I have not forgotten the difficult fiction books, beginning with the Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy, War & Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, and the Silmarillion. My 2024 project is to read Faust, the tragic play in two parts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

    I have to leave a quote!! This one is from the pen of James Baldwin: “It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

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  22. I guess we’ve just discovered each other’s blogs. Thanks for following mine, and I’m trying to figure out how to follow yours, too. I’m a great fan of literature, philosophy, and history, so have associations to various time periods, cultures, and political happenings that link to them.

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    • You’re welcome, Katharine, and thank you for the follow! Sounds like you have wide-ranging interests! You’ll definitely see some great minds and great thoughts about literature in the comments section here. 🙂

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          • Your blog and commentators thereon have led me to reflect on great literature, including the biographies of some US world-changers in the last couple of centuries. Veterans’ Day spurred me to think about WW I and all the confusion of the early 20th century. Something on your blog prompted me to pull out my college copy of “A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man” by James Joyce, and to read on-line about Joyce’s life. He left Ireland in 1904, and only returned for visits after that. His most famous book was Ulysses. He was quite the linguist, apparently, which impressed me.

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            • You are definitely thinking about a lot! Yes, Veterans Day evokes so much — WWI and other brutal conflicts, all the great literature set during wartime, etc. As for James Joyce, I didn’t realize he spent so much of his life outside of Ireland until reading your comment and looking online myself.

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  24. Interesting topic! Right now, I am reading Marquez One hundred years of solitude, and I agree with you about the characters. I keep mixing all the Aurelianos up and loose track of who did what when… But the language is amazing and I still want to go on reading it – trying to see the book as an experience rather than something I have to understand completely.

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    • Thank you, Thérèse! I hear you about the “One Hundred Years of Solitude” characters. Not only many of them, but some with pretty similar names. But, yes, the prose is incredible, and I love your approach of viewing the novel as an experience rather than something one needs to totally understand.

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  25. Don’t get me started on The Ambassadors. I was assigned it in grad school. I read the novel in fifteen-page intervals because I kept falling asleep. Going After Cacciato might be considered complex because it jumped around in time, but the characters were compelling, and I enjoyed it very much. The Sound and the Fury is the only novel for which I had to use Cliff Notes to understand what was going on–but I was in the ninth grade.

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