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I’m about seven pages away from finishing Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas, one of the books I’m reading this year along with my slow wade through the verbal mud that is Finnegans Wake.  My plan was to read some books during the times I was taking my break from the Wake.  Of course, my other plan was to read 13 pages of the Wake a week, which I did for a while, then stopped doing, then played catch up over the summer allowing me to now be ahead of schedule, slightly.  We all know that making plans is the surest way to make god laugh.         

Dublinesque seemed an ideal book to read during this my year of the Wake.  It focuses a lot on Joyce, Dublin, Beckett, and, mostly, the state of publishing.  Still, I am not very excited by this book.  I do love other books by Vila-Matas, though my fondness for them alternates. Bartleby & Co. is fantastic.  I immediately followed it up with Montano’s Malady, which I found rather dull.  A few years later, I decided to give EVM another shot and read Never Any End to Paris, a great read that got me excited for Dublinesque.  And here I am blogging instead of reading seven pages that will allow me to begin a new book and more the hell on. 

To be fair, Montano’s Malady and Dublinesque are fine books, certainly worth reading.  They, like all of the Vila-Matas works I’ve read or read about, are very much for literary geeks, springboarding from the works of others.  (Savvy readers will recognize that “Dublinesque” is the name of a poem by Philip Larkin.)  They are certainly a lot of fun in that regard, though my ambivalence for some of his books may stem from this nagging feeling I’m having lately that interesting, cerebral ideas are not always enough to really make a book sing.  And I want to hear music. 

Finnegans Wake is the goddamn top example of a wild idea brought to its most extreme conclusion, the grandest instance of the infinite possibilities of the novel.  I dare say that even detractors have to admire the audacity of the thing.  Considering my admiration, awe, and, I’ll say it, love for this book, other literary experiments by other writers should be as pleasing.  But, of course, these other writers are not Joyce. 

I applaud ambition.  Many of my favorite books are wild and maddening and require a degree of patience.  These books—Three Trapped Tigers, Vilnius Poker, The Obscene Bird of Night, The Master and Margarita, The Sound and the Fury—are “difficult” in the sense that they break from linear story telling or are comprised of multiple narrators or they rely heavily on linguistic tomfoolery and couldn’t care less about plot.  But… I have to admit that there’s a lot to be said for straightforward books with engaging stories and well developed characters.  Writers like Pynchon and Perec are fantastic when they are fantastic, but (and this feels like a shocking confession) I find the ideas that drive their books to often be more interesting than the books themselves.  Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are larger than the conceptual underpinnings that have made them famous.  One gets the idea behind Ulysses pretty early: It all takes place on one day, the thoughts and experiences of these Dubliners are as epic as Homer— okay, fine, but that alone wouldn’t sustain readers for 700 and some pages.

I think Finnegans Wake is spoiling me.  It’s a challenge but the rewards make it worthwhile.  I may only comprehend the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg, but every page has provided amusement as well as bemusement.  It’s more than a well-executed experiment; it is a total work of art, an all-encompassing book with no beginning and no end.  And it has forced me to read in a way that no other book has, showing me my own possibilities.  Subsequently, rather than look for another book along these lines, I feel compelled to read more conventional books, as no other literary experiment will ever match the Wake.