Writers and readers around the world agree on one thing: some books are harder to read than others. On the web's largest book site, Goodreads, millions of readers share information about books with each other. Based on their reviews, we've selected the most difficult literary works in history and compiled list of the most difficult books in the world.
10. "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad
Genre: novella, adventure.
The list of the most difficult books to understand opens with a story about the protagonist's journey into the wilds of the Black Continent and his own heart. The main difficulty is the allegorical way of narration, its multi-layeredness and abundance of meanings. As well as the author's verbose and lengthy explanations of what exactly he means.
9. "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace
Genre: humor, satire, science fiction.
The book's size (it's over a thousand pages) is a mere "flower" compared to everything else. Readers will find alternate timelines that intertwine and diverge, more than two hundred characters, and a nonlinear narrative structure. And a huge number of footnotes (there are over 388 of them). Many of them have their own footnotes, and so on ad infinitum.
If you decide to test your nerves with Infinite Jest, we recommend that you first find an approximate chronology of the story, a list of characters, and a description of the world in which the book takes place on the Internet. It is not surprising that Infinite Jest was translated into Russian only in 2018, almost a quarter of a century after the book was created.
8. "Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Genre: philosophical novel, crime, psychological realism.
The first (but not the last) book by a Russian-language author on the list of the most difficult books. The hardest part for readers is getting through the first hundred-odd pages, when Raskolnikov wanders around the disgustingly yellow Petersburg in delirium.
And according to English-speaking readers, the hardest part of the book is the names. To a foreign ear, ordinary Russian names are too long and hard to remember. Some admitted that they had to write out the characters on a separate sheet of paper and constantly check it in an attempt to figure out who is who.
7. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Genre: magical realism, family saga, epic fantasy.
Rarely does a book cover such a wide span of time as Márquez's famous novel. It describes the lives of seven generations. And to keep the reader awake, the characters' names are regularly repeated: for example, more than half of the book's male population are called Aureliano. Try to figure out who is who, especially if the book's background is magical realism, where the mundane and down-to-earth are intricately intertwined with the magical and wondrous.
6. "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy
Genre: love story, war fiction, history.
This book made it onto the list of the most difficult to read literary works for one reason only – the number of pages.
If you don't take into account the size of War and Peace, as well as the author's regular attempts at philosophy (which many readers quickly skim), the novel itself is very interesting. It has everything - noble lovers, suicide attempts, bed scenes mixed with pictures of suffering and death, large-scale battles and the morals of various social strata. Many readers, having reached the last page with all their might, exclaim in ecstasy: "This is the best book of all that we have read!"
5. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Genre: satire, science fiction, history.
Quantum mechanics, mass extinction, and speculative metaphysics are not topics for the average mind. The structure of the narrative is no easier: it seems as if Pynchon was trying to write as densely and richly as possible. As if his goal were to cram into 700 pages what another author could not tell in 2,000.
The intensity of the narrative is slightly diluted by musical interludes, when the characters sing, and they do it often and with pleasure. Otherwise, the text is full of hints, allusions and hidden quotes, so when reading you will have to constantly turn to Google and other search engines. The novel was translated into Russian only in 2012, 39 years after its creation.
4. "Moby Dick", Gourmand Mellville
Genre: epic, adventure.
Many readers have two problems with the famous novel Moby Dick.
- First, the book is a bizarre mixture of classic novel, essay, free-floating thought, quasi-scientific passages (like the boring chapter on sea creatures), theatrical monologues and dialogues, and even an industrial drama about the hardships of whale slaughter in the Arctic Ocean. Once your brain is set up for one type of narrative, the action in Moby-Dick takes a sharp turn.
- The second difficulty is the outdated concept of the allegorical novel, which went out of fashion in the 18th century. At the same time, the symbolic language in Melville's book is difficult to decipher. Perhaps this is the secret of its charm.
3. "The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner
Genre: Gothic, modernism, home fiction.
In one of the most difficult literary works to read, the first part is the most difficult. There, the story is told from the perspective of a person with special needs. He has difficulty imagining the passage of time and sometimes jumps from the past to the present and back in literally one sentence.
Many readers have compared the first part of this novel to a journey through thick fog: it is unclear what is happening around, and people, trees and animals are all equally indistinguishable dark silhouettes.
But if the reader is stubborn enough, by the fourth part the fog will clear and reading will become more interesting.
2. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Genre: an experimental "word-creating, mythological and comic" novel.
There is practically no plot in "The Wake". The entire book is a continuous stream of consciousness, in which the author tried to capture in words the complex, fluid matter of sleep.
And to make the reader "happier", Joyce was engaged in word creation, punning and inserting foreign words into the text. Almost a hundred years have passed since the book was written, and literary scholars continue to argue about what all this means. They say that by the end of the book, Joyce himself had difficulty understanding his own work. This is not surprising, because he worked on the book for 16 years and by the end he had completely forgotten what he was talking about at the beginning.
1. "Ulysses" by James Joyce
Genre: modernist novel.
The top spot on the list of the most difficult literary works in history is occupied by another book by Irish writer James Joyce.
It is considered a masterpiece and an example of modernist prose in the "stream of consciousness" style. Ulysses is slightly easier to read than the second place in the rating, Finnegans Wake, despite Joyce's attempts to condense all the days of humanity from the beginning of time to the end of time into one day of an ordinary Dubliner. The novel has a more or less understandable structure and even has a semblance of a plot.
However, in his work Joyce played with the reader from the heart, scattering parodies, allusions and many puzzles throughout the text. Literary scholars are still struggling to solve them.
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