Sunday Salon: The books I didn't finish

It is very rare for me to start something and not finish it; and particularly rare for me to pick up a book which I don't finish. I usually push through until the end, even if I have decided halfway through that I'm not thrilled by it. It might take me longer to read it, I might take a break and read other things in and around a book I'm struggling with - but I almost always come back and finish it eventually.

Having said that, there are a small number of books that I will list here, which I stopped reading partway through and am unlikely to ever go back to. For some reason this occurred to me recently, and I've been thinking about it ever since.

Mainly, the subject makes me wonder whether the books I don't finish reading say anything about me as a person. So let's see...

1. D. B. C. Pierre - Vernon God Little

A book by an Australian writer which won the Booker Prize in 2003, Vernon God Little is about a teenager in Texas who is scapegoated at school when his best friend commits suicide having killed 16 classmates in a shooting spree. He then goes on the run to Mexico.

I know that last bit of my synopsis only by reading summaries on other sites. I never got deep enough into the novel to know what happens to the protagonist.

Why did I pick it up? There was hype around this book, and it won the Booker. People raved about it.

Why did I put it down? Quite honestly, I couldn't get past the narrator's voice. I know, I know - it's meant to be clever and original and John Carey, Merton professor of English literature at Oxford University, said that "reading Pierre's book made me think of how the English language was in Shakespeare's day, enormously free and inventive and very idiomatic, and full of poetry as well."

Well, I found it contrived, difficult to read, and filled with anger and hate in a way that made it difficult to sympathise with any character sufficiently to inspire me to put the effort in to get past the roadblock of the language.

Interestingly, Pierre's second book was not well received, and one of the objections critics had was the language. Ludmila's Broken English is apparently written in broken English - but not deliberately. I'm not saying his Booker for Vernon was not well deserved, but perhaps the unusual narrative voice Pierre adopted for it hid a host of sins. Or maybe he was just less focused the second time around, who knows.

What I do know is that this book did not feel like it was written by a nice person. I didn't want to spend any time with the narrator, the protagonist, the author - and that is not something that is ever likely to change. This is the book I feel surest about - I will never go back and finish it. And I'm also fairly certain that if I ever met D. B. C. Pierre in person, we would not get along.

2. Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

This makes me wonder whether I have an aversion to reading about mass shootings, at least from the perspective of the perpetrator or the perpetrator's friends / family. Because here is another book about a school massacre, written in the wake of Columbine.

Why did I pick it up? Again, this is a book that was met with enormous critical acclaim. It won the 2005 Orange Prize. Unlike Vernon God Little, however, I feel badly about not having finished this one. It is often raised and discussed, and I think the premise is fascinating. This story is told from the perspective of the mother of a boy who kills his father and his sister before opening fire on classmates and a teacher at his school.

The intriguing question explored here is whether a killer is made or born. The mother has felt throughout her son's life that he is antagonistic towards her. The readers are given information throughout which could be interpreted in two ways: Kevin is an innate sociopath, or Kevin's mother has never loved him properly, which has caused him to exhibit sociopathic tendencies. Kevin's father, Francis, believes in his son throughout because Kevin behaves differently in front of him. I think - though I don't know from firsthand reading experience - that the readers are kept wondering about the truth until the very end of the novel, and even then there is room for interpretation.

Why did I stop reading this one? I find it harder to express my aversion to this book than I did with Vernon. I like Shriver's writing. But I didn't sympathise with Kevin's mother. I was uncomfortable with the feelings she had about her son, and felt that she was a cold person - and this was before I myself became a mother. I have a feeling it would be even harder for me to read this now, having become the mother of a young boy since first laying it to rest.

On a plane last year I saw the first half of the movie that was made of this book, starring the amazing Tilda Swinton, and it was incredibly chilling but also 100% absorbing. Unfortunately the plane landed before I could watch the end of the film and I would actually like to see the rest of it one day - in lieu of reading the rest of the book, perhaps.

3. Lionel Shriver - The Post-Birthday World

And... weirdly, another Lionel Shriver. As I said, I like her writing - so this is odd. I think she just makes me feel uncomfortable, though I'm not sure whether that is because she picks difficult subjects to write about or because of the way she chooses to write about those subjects.

Why did I pick this up? My mum was reading it and I thought it looked interesting. This is a very original book, written in a bi-fold manner, about a woman who has been married to the same man for a long time and contemplates an affair. Alternating chapters tell the story of what happens if she does have the affair, and what happens if she doesn't have it - a kind of Sliding Doors scenario.

Why did I stop? I got about halfway through this and then had to stop because it made me feel very depressed. It resonated with me on a personal level and it was written in such a real way that I found it confronting. The relationship between the protagonist and her husband reminded me of a relationship I had experienced in the past, which ended badly, and reading this was like going back to that time - it brought back all of the feelings from that time and, having moved on, I really didn't want to have to deal with those feelings again.

I suppose you could say this is a real strength of Shriver's storytelling, that I found two of her books so confronting, though in very different ways, that I had to put them down. But here, like in We Need to Talk About Kevin, part of the problem was that I didn't very much like the narrator, and so there was little reason to go back to the book when the story was getting me down.

Conclusions?

So, are there any conclusions I can draw from this trio?

If there is a commonality, it appears that lack of sympathy with the narrator is the most likely cause I will stop reading a book. There must be other problems with it too, but if on top of those issues I also do not feel bonded to the narrator for one reason or another, I probably won't go back to read the rest of the novel.

When I say lack of sympathy let me clarify: I don't have to love a narrator. I am all for tragic flaws. But something about them must compel me to want to hear their voice, to live with that voice in my head for a few days. And if that's not there, well - unless there are other compelling reasons for me to keep reading, it is awfully tempting to put the book aside in favour of another. There is so much to read, after all!

What about you? Are there any books that you have given up on, or do you always push through to the end? Can you find a common cause to your unfinished reads?

Hermann Koch - The Dinner

This book was recommended to me by a friend (thanks Amy!) and I'm so glad I read it. But I wish I hadn't read the last few pages in darkness, at night, when the rest of the household was asleep.

In all honesty, I don't think I have ever been as disturbed by any book, save for The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan. When I finished that book I was alone, and it was night (again - glutton for punishment, I guess), and I had to hide the phyiscal book under a pile of magazines so that I was unable to even glance by accident at the cover, so visceral was the fear it provoked in me.

The Dinner starts slow. It takes place over the course of a few hours, during a dinner at a posh restaurant  attended by two brothers, Paul and Serge Lohman, and their wives, Claire and Babette. Paul, the narrator, is a retired school-teacher (well - he has been placed 'on non-active', which we eventually find out is something entirely different from voluntarily retiring) who is put off by the self-interest he perceives in his brother's political ambitions. Serge is a politician on top of his game, likely to become the next Prime Minister of The Netherlands.

As the dinner progresses from aperitif to first course to main course etc, we learn more about the characters and, importantly, about their children. Much of the story is told by Paul as back story and his narration is therefore vital to our understanding of the relationships at play. It is only midway through the book that we start to doubt the reliability of his voice.

Conversation gradually turns to the issue that is central to the book, a violent act perpetrated by the 15 year old sons of each couple, and the different ways in which each couple wants to deal with the consequences and ramifications of this act.

About the plot, it is hard to say more without revealing spoilers. Other reviewers have compared this novel to Christos Tsolkias' The Slap, and We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, because both similarly focus on parents dealing with the actions / reactions of their children. What becomes clear during the course of The Dinner, and what is also dealt with in both of the above-mentioned books, is that it is the parents whose actions we should be concerned about, both because they are often in and of themselves abhorrent, and because they inform the conduct and belief systems of their children.

But The Dinner is chilling on an entirely different level. Without giving too much away, I will say that there is a particular part of this book that I am trying to forget because remembering it disturbs me so profoundly it will haunt me for weeks to come. I had recommended this to my mother, when I was about two thirds of the way through, but I am now going to withdraw that recommendation - I do not wish upon her the same nightmares I am suffering.

Pros: Hermann Koch writes well and with admirable restraint, and this is a tightly drawn novel that unfolds with great subtlety. The darkness central to it emerges ever so slowly, and the disturbing realities revealed at the end are all the more powerful because they were initially so unexpected.

Cons: In the first half I felt that some of the descriptions of the restaurant and the dinner itself were deliberately drawn out in an exaggerated way, to enable the device of framing the entire novel within the various courses of a single meal. That device sometimes felt contrived. As the novel progressed, however, I became drawn in to the story sufficiently that these issues ceased to bother me. Some readers will find it difficult, I imagine, to finish the novel once it becomes clear that none of the characters are particularly likeable (some are simply morally reprehensible) - but again, for me the story itself was by that stage developed enough and absorbing enough to overcome that problem. Perhaps of deepest concern for me was the fact that - because the story is being told by a terribly unreliable narrator - some of the most pronounced injustices in the book are inadequately addressed. Given the way the story was told there was probably no way for Koch to avoid this, and I appreciate that it adds to the unsettling nature of the ending, but it also left me a bit cold.

Overall assessment: three and a half stars out of five, verging on 4. It is a brilliantly conceived book, but whilst many reviewers have bandied about the word 'chilling' in relation to this work, I would go further than that, almost classifying the ending, at least, as horror; and that is not really my bag. I still want all of you to read it though - it's one of those books that gives rise to discussion.