‘Why finish books?’

By Rushida RAFEEK

It is in Zadie Smith’s essay titled ‘Fail Better’ where she includes with enthusiasm another writer’s reply to her email asking how they judge their own work: “Never mind critics, what do you yourself think is wrong with your writing? How did you dream of your book before it was created? What were your best hopes? How have you let yourself down?”

In the attempt to create a debate if the answer comes positively lengthy to the latter question above, the struggle for me, then, comes with not finishing a good book. The posed questions by the unknown writer may hand-wave their way to a bad book written, however, I find it absolutely compelling when I ask why something is wrong with a good book that I haven’t finished and what is it that made me leave it hanging like an unfinished sentence to haunt me, more flagrantly- killing the end of it to wait when enough is enough of what has been enjoyed already.

Not that it has failed to carry the reader forward, but the need where one arrives to close the door of many doors the reader opens to their choice that one considers is the closing. And this particular door you chose was neither the last line nor the finale. Given the nature of the fear that the closure may indicate something opposing to my true interest of how it should carve out.

As a reader of introductions, dedications and of course the acknowledgements of any book that qualifies to be picked by me, there are times when one approaches the larger shadow to a knot of quest if the ending is necessary while, some deeply shaken, even approach that as an impossibility. And this lends strength to other questions by and large that either regarding the frustration that allows carrying (a) good book(s) finished on midway in the head, one’s lack of curiosity, the result of one’s laziness and if this does make me bitter in regard to my respect for the author- may as well be judged.

Very simply to bring it down, will I be able to recommend it to another when I haven’t but should have finished? Like Tim Parks asks in his article ‘Why finish books?’ an invitation to provoke all readers which I now quote from: “Do we need to finish them? Is a good book by definition one that we did finish?

Or are there occasions when we might choose to leave off a book before the end, or even only half way through, and nevertheless feel that it was good, even excellent, that we were glad we read what we read, but don’t feel the need to finish it? I ask the question because this is happening to me more and more often. Is it age, wisdom, senility? I start a book. I’m enjoying it thoroughly, and then the moment comes when I just know I’ve had enough. It’s not that I’ve stopped enjoying it. I’m not bored; I don’t even think it’s too long. I just have no desire to go on enjoying it.

Can I say then that I’ve read it? Can I recommend it to others and speak of it as a fine book?”

Part of my experience also lies much in line with Parks– in the assumption that there are books that end well. And there are books that oddly well end you before it does. Perhaps, this is uncomfortable; this repeating habit even after knowing that it is not the taste of the reader that has soured or the will to maintain one long breath to finish it off.

No one can make a book scream like a reader. But as Joan Silber writes in ‘The Art of Time in Fiction’, “the danger is in slowing down at the wrong moment–in any fiction we don’t want to hear about savoring a casual cup of coffee that means nothing”. In this way, there are lines in the middle of a story that gives it more beautifully than endings do.

It carries the fruit you have waited to pluck in a way that the ending sometimes or rather most of the time does not. The weight itself seems fruitful enough by the middle to think about what it all meant of the journey and raises the point of why we need an ending to read when the voice is already to the point of tears I have begun to fall with the story.

Consider the familiar ones; A Suitable Boy for instance. This passes easy as the behemoth of its novel generation regarding the sprain in ones wrists, but beneath which is exemplary. I enjoyed every bit of its exercise in craft, its narrative fluidity, the gleam of polished plot, its skittish suggesting of bleeding many men (suitors?) into the protagonist’s life. But something kept howling at the back of my mind at one point. I was no longer interested to hold hands with Latha, walk under gulmohar trees, sink a few hours into that and watch who might, in the end, take her hand in marriage. Till today I have not strained out for the girl. I do not want to.

Often there are times where I meet the book through the corner of my eye and that too with an itch if I’m missing out something deep and sinless from where I’ve stopped. (Not finishing a book is not a sin either). Or places I might have not gone before, people I might not have met and hints that I might not have rightly felt until the nail of closure.

In fact dropping this book before the end would not stop me from looking forward to Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Girl which will be out by next year or so it is said. But is it wrong that I’m trimming off the flab instead of heading through the end’s page to appreciate what and if I have wholly devoured? Or is the author just playing with the switch in the room when power looks wasted?

Narration

By way of balance, Laura Miller’s reflections in ‘Are longer books more important?’ unfold how writers fail to cut down on a chock full of extended narration thereby keeping a reader wallow by page 899.

This brings me with the struggle of reading 1Q84 which I have never read although I’m still grappling with the idea to nestle down with a copy when disappointed friends very sharply insist that I don’t.

In the face of getting to know why, the taste of the dialogue seemed wooden and the slog lost connection with Murakamian medium of immaturity. After this, if the Nobel Prize in Literature awards a Japanese, then there is something wrong with October that is yet to come.

Let me also point as being informed, that there are no rules in the way one reads a book but then again Zadie Smith deems, “Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing–I really believe that.” In the wake of classics, after reading the letter from Captain Wentworth in Persuasion I pushed my plate away. I was full despite the rest in wait.

Indeed Jane Austen insists on offering more interesting matters of detail. Thus in my humble opinion, Chapter 24 was utterly unnecessary. Then while you lament over Austen’s choice to slow down, comes with the decay of endings looming large in my habit of reading. I, then an adolescent, didn’t like finishing Great Expectations. Still I soldiered on in order to finish it, by what one says, across my boundaries–it became ‘obligatory’ on the surface in part with my O/Levels. Tantrums first.

Then I grew thick with problems engaging with rooms I disliked entering. Something that went soft and blue with the coming of age came, the vanity of punch in the end by means of conversation between Pip and Estella. It lingered within me for a very long time and if I have found the firm to stay on ground since gulping it down, is still a question I keep going back, while to put it equally, how I loved the novel terribly. A marvel almost the pleasure of reading it with great expectations as it calls itself by title.

Recollections

Then there is the Sense of an Ending. Julian Barnes slides into pulling recollections of philosophy carefully listing careless adolescence to construe history’s torment interestingly with a small podium for sentimentality. A lot of questions are asked at life with convulsions and contrivances painful. Whither white is memory and so on. The book was a perennial beauty I thought.

Taking the story forward, plucking the reader forward, up until I arrived with a knot in my stomach at the letter Veronica smacks it on Tony’s table. Barnes could have, if need be, prune the pages followed because quite honestly, the book stopped for me with the severity of the letter itself. The imagery one built bespoke how much and big is enough to inspire me to continue creating? But at the same time it took me a while to be involved with a hope to find out what happens to a character I cared about. We are moving as though with people in flesh.

The dark love behind not finishing good books is a mystery wildly uncontrolled by its pages. One deserves to pick and choose conclusions one wants to hear.

That I believe is a reader’s primitive choice. In my view overtime, whatever provides forward leaves me with feeling that in the words of W.H Auden who argued: “In theory, the author of a good book should remain anonymous, for it is to his work, not to himself, that admiration is due.

In practice, this seems to be impossible.” Impossible even seems bigger in its splash upon arrival when one addresses a group of friends that he/she has not finished a good book these days.