Being in this English
program I am looking forward to reading a lot of books that I don’t want to
read. Sounds backward, but it’s true. I just finished a book by Norwegian author
Per Petterson called In the Wake. I
only had to read half the book, six chapters, but I hated the main character so
much at that sixth chapter that I wanted to see if there was some kind of
redemption for him at the end. There wasn’t. The guy is as much a monumentally
self centered anal sphincter at the end of the book as he is in the middle. I
hate that character and I hate that book, but I am so glad that I read it and
finished it because it made me ask this question; what makes a good book?
Other people loved this book. It got rave reviews. It was
nominated for some big time literary award from Dublin, an award accompanied by
100,000 Euros, and another book by the same author that features the same main
character called Out Stealing Horses won
that award. Some serious people with some serious money who seriously love
books seriously loved this book, and
I want to know why.
In all fairness, it was really well written. There were beautiful
turns of phrase in it such as “…and we paid by Visa cards which were furry with
insurance money,” and “…between him and
me there was a tunnel of silence,” and “…his
brain swaddled in black velvet.” There were a lot of flashbacks and times where
it wasn’t clear if the main character was living in the past or present, but
the bridging sentence could work in both moments. The author was able to
capture bits and pieces of the human experience and explain them in ways that
were new and true. The prose, despite being originally written in Norse, was
entrancingly rhythmic, the structure driving the pace more than the plot. None
of these positives make up for the fact that the main character was relatable
without being likeable, he moved between conversations and actions without
showing any real plot, climax, or falling action, and he gives no evidence of
change in his character by the end of the text; it’s just that the reader knows
him better.
I feel cheated. After all of those stinging metaphors and clever
structure and complex character development (that was really character
stagnation) I was expecting an ending, not just a place where the author
stopped writing. Maybe that was the point. Maybe it was about some people being
jerks and never changing no matter what happens, but the hard thing about this
is that the book is largely autobiographical. The author and the protagonist
share so many traits and history that the protagonist is a fictional surrogate;
the author has admitted as much. Being a poor example of a human being doesn’t
take a lot of nerve, but advertising it to the world does so I believe that he
either doesn’t know he is a terrible person, or he altered the character to be
a more horrible person than he is. Maybe that
is his point; there is a latent jerk in all of us, just waiting to come out
when we get stressed enough.
Maybe the real lesson is neither of these. Maybe for me the
real lesson is that I don’t understand exactly what it is that makes people
like books, and I need to find out. Here’s my question to you, then. What books
do you like and why?
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