I recently finished The Children’s Home by Charles Lambert, and I did not get it. I mean, it seemed like it was lumbering along to some sort of big reveal, but…I didn’t understand most of what was going on in the last 1/4th of the book. I do not feel bad about this, though, because from the reviews on Amazon and Good Reads, most people felt the same way.
So, I’m curious about what the last work of written fiction to leave you baffled was.
And, do you find that not understanding a book leaves you unable to like it, too? I definitely do, which is a bit odd considering there are so many songs I don’t really understand but still really like (like this one). Maybe it’s because I expect stories to make sense in a way that songs and even poems don’t need to - perhaps due to the length of time one invests in books vs. a song? Hmm.
The Sound and the Fury. I try again every year or two, but never get more than 1/4 through. I can’t think of any book that I’ve actually read all the way through and didn’t understand.
The Final Encyclopedia by Gordon Dickson. It’s the grand culiminating finale of the whole Dorsai cycle…and I am just bodgered if I can see what the point was supposed to be.
(Oops; unfair to the premise of the thread; I read this when it came out. My flub.)
I read and enjoyed Anathem by Neal Stephenson. Since I’ve got a mathematics education, I got a lot of the math in-jokes. But, ultimately, I don’t think I understood the book.
In the not understanding because I could tell I wasn’t smart enough category: Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar.
In the not understanding because I didn’t understand how this was actually a book that someone felt the need to publish: the Patrick Melrose series by Edward St. Aubyn.
The ending of The Difference Engine was a bit puzzling, to me, when I read it a few years back.
I’ve also read a couple of novels that baffled me as to how they could ever have gotten published, not the least because of the state of editing, but that’s really a different ballpark entirely.
I finished Declare by Tim Powers, but damned if I can explain what it was about. It’s a Le Carre-ish Cold War spy novel with fantasy elements. Mount Ararat was involved somehow. The novel won some awards so apparently I was the only one who didn’t get it.
Well, I’ve never had anything I couldn’t understand, but I’ve had some which I was sorry I bothered to put myself through.
Triton, by Samuel R. Delany was certainly one of those. I read it when it was new, back in the late seventies, and found it misleading, boring, and ultimately depressing in an oh-so-very-seventies way. To me, that whole decade was themed “we know we are in the right track, because we think everything sucks.” Had we not been rescued towards the end by Star Wars, I think I may well have turned psycho.
I read The Heart is A Lonely Hunter as a standard reading requirement in school, and had a similar experience. Forcing me to suck that mess into my head through my eyes was a sure way to get me to refuse to go anywhere near that novelist’s work again.
I never tried to get through anything like James Joyce, infamous for stories that require the reader to do lots of extra credit homework, just to make it through a chapter. Chances are I might have found that mystifying.
Of course, it could just be egotism. Maybe when I think I despise and author, what’s really going on, is that I don’t “get it,” and I’m blaming the writer for my ineptitude as a reader, but I don’t FEEL that’s true.
That one was murky! I liked it, but, yeah, it was damned hard to say what exactly was going on in it.
I have a friend who refuses to read anything by John Varley, because Varley wrote “Titan” which sounds like “Triton” and he hated Triton to the burning pits of hell. Now that’s hatred!
The only Delany I’ve ever read was “The Einstein Intersection” which also didn’t make any sense, but at least it was kinda evocative. The image of “Kid Death,” the magical/mythic gunslinger remains with me.
I’m about two thirds through Alice in Wonderland (or whatever the actual book is called) and though I understand it well enough, I’m not sure I understand it.