Size Does Matter

Sobre quem gosta deles grandes.

I’m not suggesting that gigantic books are useful only as an excuse for avoiding responsibility. No, those who read them also reap the psychic benefits of being admitted to an exclusive club, like Icelandic rodeo queens or American presidents whose administrations did not end in disaster. Those who have read the unabridged “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” and “Remembrance of Things Past” and “Man Without Qualities” belong to a very special group because at any given time there are no more than a few hundred such people on the face of the earth, and none of them live in Tarrytown.
This is a far more exclusive group than those who have read “War and Peace” or the complete works of Jane Austen. Lots of high school kids have bluffed their way through Tolstoy, whose masterpiece is daunting but not insurmountable, and polishing off Austen is a snap because Austen is sassy and mean, and only one of her novels is more than 400 pages long. What’s more, you can always see the light at the end of the tunnel when you’re reading Austen and Tolstoy. You can never see the light at the end of the tunnel when you’re reading “The Man Without Qualities” because the author himself never saw it. Even though he spent his entire adult life working on the book, it remained unfinished at the time of his death.
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In fairness to her, I must admit that the week I spent not reading “The Man Without Qualities” was a revelation. With no excuse for my indolence, I rearranged my LPs, repaired the back of the CD rack, got a carpenter to fix a rotting beam, threw out a bunch of old clothes, bought a fax machine, restrung my guitars and figured out how to operate my digital camera. I also made a vat of spaghetti sauce and visited my mother. So I could see how different life could be without Gibbon and Proust gumming up the works. But then my wife came in and said that in addition to buying a new car, she wanted to talk about refinancing our house. At which point I threw up my hands and went back to Musil. Now I’ve assured her that we can discuss the mortgage just as soon as I’ve finished the greatest Austrian novel of them all. But something tells me that before I get around to the mortgage, I’ll first gain admission to an even more exclusive club: people who have read the Big Three of the 20th century — “Ulysses,” “Remembrance of Things Past” and “The Man Without Qualities” — and then read them again. I wonder what those folks are driving.