Reader’s Block

For me there is such a thing as reader’s block, an awkward state-of-mind wherein none of the unread books to hand (and there may be many of them) seems satisfactorily attractive. At such times, I feel bad ordering yet more books, chiding myself that if I don’t eat the literary greens on my plate, then I surely can’t expect, and don’t deserve, the equivalent of dessert.

I have five unfinished books at my bedside, then, and can’t get into any of them: The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas has been there the longest - I ordered it last summer, and still haven’t advanced beyond page two. I read one other of Vesaas’ novels maybe eight years ago, a magnificent thing entitled The Ice-Palace, the glowing recollection of which, alas, has yet to draw me into the other book.

Then there is vol. 5 of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which I’ve made mention of before: I’m maybe sixty or seventy pages into it. Of the books I bought in Edinburgh last November, only one remains unread: Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, a proto-surrealist work, apparently, and a book viewed as an anticipatory plagiarism by members of the OuLiPo. Its importance notwithstanding, the contents of pages one, two and three have yet to persuade me onward to page four.

I’ve made better progress (maybe eighty pages) into City by Alessandro Baricco. This book was a Christmas gift, and I’ve thus felt some obligation to persevere with it, even though I’ve not really enjoyed what I’ve read thus far. It strikes me that Baricco is trying to conjure up a comic-strip atmosphere, which he succeeds in doing, but, in the absence of pictures, it’s a contrivance that sticks flatly to the page.

Lastly, there is The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai, which I have yet to attack with the momentum sufficient to clear the novel’s first sentence, one that, as the last but one link informs me, is a hundred and seventy-four words long.

By way of consolation, I now have a facsimile of the Mira Calligraphiæ Monumenta to dip into, which is ever a delight. Here is one more image from the book which I’ve found since my last mention of it.