Quitting on Conrad

Sometimes you just gotta put a book down

I recently borrowed Joseph Conrad’s Victory. I read Heart of Darkness years ago when I was making my way through the cannon but didn’t have nearly enough life experience to understand what any of them were saying. So, I thought it was time to read another Conrad. The edition came with a lengthy introduction from an Oxford academic, pages and pages about editorial changes between editions and even a timeline of world events mapped again Conrad’s written work. Thus the book arrived with plenty of status and expectation.

I struggled on for 100 pages before putting it down. I put a call out on Twitter to see I should keep going. Was it going to come good like I hoped it would? John Purcell (The Lessons) said that he always felt the failing was his when he couldn’t finish a classic. It was reassuring to be in good company. Classic or not, personal taste and opinion should still matter. In every other area of life, I would say that you shouldn’t like something just because everyone else does. But it makes me feel vulnerable and stupid to be out of step with a book or author that is perceived as brilliant. How embarrassing, to not see or enjoy the mastery in a book which everyone lauds. ‘The failing is mine’ is the usual line.

Conrad is obviously good at what he does. It got off to a great start and some of the writing was such a joy to read. Here he is on the sounds of a squeaky orchestra playing in a tropical backwater:

 “The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy. One felt as if witnessing a deed of violence; and that impression was so strong that it seemed marvellous to see people sitting so quietly on their chairs, drinking so calmly out of their glasses, and giving no signs of distress, anger or fear. Heyst averted his gaze from the unnatural spectacle of their indifference.”

 I mean really, this is great! But something happened as the story went on and it all turned a bit melodramatic and the character making these observations disappeared and was replaced by a few guys who were closer to caricature.

I thought I’d already picked a position on all this but it seems that if the book is a ‘classic’ it’s not so easy for me to call time on it. In my blog How Heavy is a Half Read Book I decided that life was too short, time too scarce and my TBR pile way too big to just slog on.

But the sunk-costs habit of investing time in a book and hoping that something will eventually come out of it is obviously not so easily ditched. I blame Middlemarch. I struggled on for 400 (of the odd 900) pages and then something changed and I was so glad that I’d stuck with it. So, for years, I applied the same hope to books and movies and kept going with the belief that things could change and all would be worth it. It says startling things about my ability to endure what I don’t enjoy, or my thoughts that I should have to.

I don’t mind a challenging read but who needs it to feel like homework. When I finally put Victory down, it was such a relief and the next book didn’t feel like a chore at all.

In future, I’ll try and remember John Irving’s advice, “Grown-ups shouldn’t finish books they’re not enjoying. When you’re no longer a child, and you no longer live at home, you don’t have to finish everything on your plate. One reward of leaving school is that you don’t have to finish books you don’t like.”