What the Swedes Read: Claude Simon

Sometimes I find difficult books too easy. I think it’s because I’m not doing it right. I can make my way through thickety prose, untangling a thorny, hovering clause to find its proper antecedent, or mentally bookmarking some stray phrase until the other shoe drops a few sentences later and the meaning is plain. That’s one kind of difficult book, and although it means I can’t sip any whiskey while I’m reading it, I know how to proceed— it’s a tough hike, but the path is clear enough, and as with hiking, even when the view isn’t great, the exertion alone can be exhilarating.

But then there’s the other kind of difficult book, when the task is not one of untangling but of becoming entangled. The sentences might be perfectly clear, or so wild that to sort everything out would be to ruin the whole game. The meaning isn’t obscured by words; it’s made of them. I like these books a lot, and love the feeling of surrender when the grasping mechanisms of my mind come loose in the language— whiskey helps here, not hinders—and the book washes over me. But then I think, Am I doing it right? I go back to being twenty-one, studying Ulysses in a classroom. Everybody found the last chapter, Joyce’s famed, unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness soliloquy, to be challenging. I found it a delight. After head-scratching through hundreds of pages of mythological references and wacky puns, there was nothing to pin down or look up. Molly Bloom was sleepy; she was hungry; she was horny; she was dreamy. I thought it was easy.

Maybe I’m not supposed to be swept away, though. Maybe in the rush of language of, say, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, my grasp should be tighter, not looser, than when I read Henry James. I read The Making of Americans over the course of many drowsy summer evenings, and I loved it. But I must also admit that I can barely tell you a thing about it, so blurry and effervescent was the experience. What Maisie Knew, on the other hand, is another book I loved reading, and it’s firmly ensconced in my brain. It should be. I read it wide awake, parsing each tricky phrase like I was picking up grains of rice from the floor.

The Georgics, one of Claude Simon’s most celebrated novels, was described by the Nobel folks as one of the author’s “richly decorated compositions which, with sensuous perspicacity and linguistic invocation, conjure up an extremely complicated...