Books That Are Masterpieces But Few Managed to Finish

They say we have to read them because they are the best. And we, brave ones, tried.

One hundred and thirty million. It is more or less the number of literary works published throughout our history. A disheartening fact for those who have plans to read everything in life, as it would take 250 years. And that is if you have the superhuman ability to devour each book in a minute.

Perhaps that’s why some writers consulted for this article have no problem recognizing that they accumulate a lot of abandoned copies while reading on their shelves.

With this panorama, it is advisable not to waste time with fruitless readings.

A book should not be faced as a challenge. The reader places himself in a position of debt to the author and is unable to leave him with the word in his mouth. And we forget that sometimes it is precisely the writer who is selling us a pig in a poke. Charles Bukowski himself acknowledged of his books: “I work well for a bottle and a half of wine. Afterwards, I’m like any old drunk in a bar: repetitive and boring”. Interestingly, when he was diagnosed with leukemia, he realized that he was able to write brilliantly without alcohol or tobacco. He only had a year to prove it, before he died in 1994. But that’s another story.

There are an awful lot of damn works that many do not have the patience to read to the end, nor the courage to acknowledge it. Before facing the list, a Kafkaesque advice to optimize time and not to worry about the millions of copies that we will never get to leaf through and, even less, finish. “We shouldn’t read more than books that itch and bite us. If the book we read doesn’t wake us up with a punch to the skull, why continue?”. This was said by one author, Kafka, who is prolific in works that many have left unfinished.

Ada or Ardor, by Vladimir Nabokov

Typical case of a work of art applauded by critics and misunderstood by the public. The brilliant author of St. Petersburg wrote so well that he wrote his most famous novel, Lolita, in English, which was not his mother tongue (although he had mastered it since childhood, due to the efforts of his aristocratic family and his teachers). The germ of Ada or Ardor came after becoming world famous with the story of the widowed teacher obsessed with a teenager: soon after Lolita, he set out to create his masterpiece (he was not yet aware that he had already written it), and Ada or Ardor (1969) was born from two different projects, two chronicles of life that ended up being drawn in such a way that he decided they deserved to become a single novel.

Perhaps that is why it took more than nine years to write it. Nabokov always said that he wanted to be remembered for this work, although its twisted narrative, full of semantic acrobatics, allusions and double meanings imperceptible to a reader of average intelligence, did not achieve the universal place it had hoped for. The poet Manuel Astur lives a contradiction with this book: “Nabokov is one of my masters, the great inspiration for my books. But this is a novel that resists me no matter how hard I try.”

The Game of Amarelinha, by Julio Cortázar

The Argentine writer defined his masterpiece “O Jogo da Amarelinha” (1963) as “contraromance”. Through the story of its protagonist, Horacio Oliveira, it traces, in more than 156 chapters, a complete life, but with structures that escape from conventionalism to enter the surrealist. And not only in what counts, but above all in how it does it. It invites the reader to share its chaos and gives them several options for reading the novel: there is the “normal” one, from beginning to end. Also the “traditional”, only up to chapter 56, dispensing with the rest. Also the “anarchic”, that is, the order that the reader wants.

And, finally, the proposal by Cortázar, as a game, with a defined sequence in the “direction board” shown on the first page, as a kind of primordial Excel. It is a grid in which the reader begins in chapter 73, and then jumps from one to the other in no apparent order, ending in 131. Many are those who say they have not gone beyond the page as it is. But this confession must be followed by the inevitable question: in what order did you read it? It’s just that The Hopscotch Game is the only book that, if left unfinished, could mean you’ve practically finished it.

In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust

The Parisian writer wrote this work of more than 3,000 pages between 1908 and 1922, the very year he died, possibly exhausted by such an odyssey.

Many recommend reading Proust’s biography first, because In Search of Lost Time it ultimately consists of reflections on your life. But let’s go back to page 80: “It’s a very complicated novel due to Proust’s very complex syntax, the absence of dots in very long passages in which he joins different ideas and it’s easy to get lost. But when you play the cookie episode, your brain gets used to the way it writes, and it’s ready for the rest, which, if you understand, it ends up devouring,” says Lazcaray. Her case is not normal. Few can say that they have read the seven volumes (“it is one of the thorns that I have been driving”, says Manuel Astur), and much less twice, like the philologist: “The first time for pleasure, when I had started university; the second, because it was my end-of-career project. And I discovered many new details. I recommend”. Whoever is willing to imitate it, should dedicate a few more months.

The Songs, by Ezra Pound

It’s a long, very long poem, even more for the time it took to be written than for its length. Nearly half a century, from 1915 to 1962, the American poet Ezra Pound took his time to finish his 116 songs. They are considered by critics one of the most important works of modernist poetry of the 20th century, at the same time, one of the most complex. In its almost a thousand pages, many trampled ideas circulate that jump from one to another abruptly, in which appear his admiration for Confucius, his anti-Semitism, his affinity with the Mussolini regime, geographical references that cross Europe, Asia, the United States and Africa, temporal somersaults, and multiple languages, including Chinese characters.

Christ versus Arizona, by Camilo José Cela

Nobel Prize winner Camilo José Cela was another allergic to dots, at least in this first-person experimental western: there’s only one, the final dot. We are ushered into the Wild West to sidestep the famous duel that faced the Earps with the Clantons and the Franks in October 1881 at the OK Corral. Everything is an excuse to concatenate small reports without a defined direction.

The few who manage to get to page 238, where the long-awaited point is, actually get an accurate x-ray of a society marked by violence and sex, described with that veneer of humor and lack of prejudice that, irrefutably, is Cela in pure state.

Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce

From James Joyce we could have chosen Ulysses, but it seemed too obvious. When the reader complains about the effort required to read Finnegans Wake (1939), keep in mind what it cost the author to write this novel for nearly two decades. The intriguing thing is that he began right after completing his monumental Ulysses (1922), a work that, in his own words, had left him “spent”. Of course, the Irish writer drew strength from somewhere, because Finnegans Wake has 628 pages, for which he had to give up almost 15,000.

He used an invented language, mixing lexical units of English with neologisms, and filled him with puns that make it really difficult to understand him. The structure is of little help: it is not linear, but, as he called it, “spherical” where everything that is told about the Earwicker family and their environment is both the beginning and the end of the story. The few who managed to finish it (and understand), like writer Anthony Burgess, claim that they “died laughing on every page.” Congratulations, Mr Burgess.