Diary

I started to read the latest Krasznahorkai book but gave up after several attempts. It consists of short chapters and stories, and I couldn't be bothered with it, since no clear narrative jumped out and I had to put up with a lot of stylistic nonsense that had no appeal to me. There is a conceit about writing and the role of the writer that occasionally makes writers seem ludicrous. I have found this on several occasions when I've delved into the works of critically acclaimed authors. If a fiction writer is considered important, the presumption is that he or she will sit at a desk and churn out masterpiece after masterpiece, but the reality is that they will be lucky if they can produce two good books, and the rest are likely to be marginal at best. This is generally true of the main fiction writers I've investigated as an adult: Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Cormac McCarthy, David Lodge, A.S. Byatt, László Krasznahorkai, Patrick Chamoiseau, Michel Houellebecq  and Lorrie Moore. While they may manage to maintain a roughly consistent level of quality, they all have human limitations, which makes it impossible for them to produce an unbroken sequence of masterpieces. In some cases their celebrity goes to their head, thus Flaubert's Salammbô, which was written between Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education, was well-received initially in France but is widely ignored today. A writer's perception of his or her strengths may be completely at odds with the perceptions of their readers, and their idea of a superior work may be off-putting to the reading public. In my experience, novelists tend to produce their best works in early-to-mid-career, and toward the end they usually stick to tried-and-true formulas, slyly succumb to market forces or experiment beyond their writing capabilities. George Eliot was more consistent than most: her last novel, Daniel Deronda, is at least as good as most of her earlier ones, but she also delved into poetry, which no one reads today. Krasznahorkai, in my opinion, has a genuine writing talent, but it seems to me that he is stuck in a style that has limited flexibility and makes it impossible for him to convey some of the realism and social observation that I find indispensable to fiction.

My criticism of fiction has become one of the major themes of this blog, and, in order not to appear arrogant, I have refrained from saying that my problem may be that I know more than the authors do, and that they have little to offer me. This may not be true in an absolute sense, but I think I deserve some credit for having walked the planet longer than most of the above-mentioned authors, and before it's over I may have lived longer than all of them. Good fiction may not be synonymous with knowledge or experience, but you certainly wouldn't expect sixteen-year-olds to write good novels, no matter how talented they were. For undiscriminating readers who consume fiction in much the same way that they watch soap operas – as light entertainment or background noise – this may not apply, but I tend to be serious in everything that I do, and I react when I notice qualitative deficiencies and gimmicks. Besides this, as I've said, writing programs seem to have the opposite effect of their intended purpose, often producing polished gibberish in the place of raw gibberish, and the commercialization of fiction in an era of sophisticated marketing tends to support formulas known to sell well to specific audiences; if you don't happen to fit a market profile, you're probably out of luck as a reader.

Therefore, I am going to suspend reading fiction for the time being, and I'm looking for some good nonfiction at the moment. I find this challenging too, but the universe of nonfiction is much larger than the universe of fiction, and there are sure to be books out there that I'll appreciate. For example, the biography of Milosz, which I recently stumbled upon, was quite satisfying to me. In a way, I am starting to find writers more interesting as case studies in human life than as artists producing impressive works; their books become points of departure in the exploration of their psyches and lives, and this has the potential to result in a greater revelation than any writer is capable of offering in a creative work. Thus, I think memoirs and biographies have more potential than novels or short stories. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be many good memoirs or biographies, but I'll continue to look. My fallback will be other forms of nonfiction, such as popular scientific books and book-length essays.