Who Has Been The Most Challenging Author That You Have Read Or Attempted To Read?

I just bought a copy of Love by Toni Morrison. This will be my 3rd attempt in trying to read one of her novels. I read Jazz years ago and it left me cold. I tried Song of Solomon and didn't finish it. I'm just realizing she has been one of the most challenging authors to read. The other really challenging author I've read over the years has been the science fiction writer, Gene Wolfe.

Who has been the most challenging author that you have read or attempted to read?

Marion

Challenging can be interpreted different ways.

I think the most difficult read I'm currently failing at finishing is The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein.

The most challenging to fully understand author I've read might be Jorge Luis Borges. The list of books I'd have to read to understand his stories is probably more then I'll read in my life time.

Or I could go the insurmountable cultural differences route and pick someone like Aristophanes, or pick from a large selection of poets whose poems I don't understand.

I could also pick a book I didn't like , and argue the author was challenging because I spent the most mental energy forcing myself to finish their book.

I gave up on Terry Pratchett after a couple of pages. I forget the name of the book.

The most challenging author I have read, recently, is Francis Schaeffer. He wrote about philosophy, which I have never studied before, and much of what he wrote is fairly deep...I have found myself rereading passages in order to understand more fully what he was trying to convey. I really like his books, but they take a lot of work! :)

Despite the enormous love from all, I cannot get into Neil Gaiman, American Gods in particular. And I also gave up 100 pages in, a few times over, with Infinite Jest. I'm okay with a little work, but not utter excavation.

>5 CarolynSchroeder: LOL, love it...

>5 CarolynSchroeder:

I just bought an eBook copy of American Gods and you are the first person I've read with that opinion of the novel. Hmmm...I will have to keep that in mind when I finally get around to reading it.

I totally agree with the last sentence of your post about reading. LOL!!

>5 CarolynSchroeder: and >7 Kammbia1: I have just been relaxing by re-reading Gaiman, whose books I generally love, and passionately. That being said, I could not get into American Gods at all; I find its popularity inexplicable.

I've never managed to get through even the first chapter of anything by Henry James, and have given him up as a lost cause. My many attempts to understand the admiration of Gabriel Garcia Marquez have also proven futile. I find him so slow, it's like reading treacle on a cold day. Garcia Marquez is my elder daughter's favourite author; she lived in South America for a time, and says that things go at a slower pace there, and that the books remind her of the languid days she spent teaching in the Ecuadorian Andes.

I didn't get too far into Les Miserables by Victor Hugo and would love to give it another try, but honestly I couldn't take the rambling on and on.

I also had difficulty with Gabriel Garcia Marquez about 10 years ago when my book club selected One Hundred Years of Solitude. Perhaps I just don't love Magical Realism.

I'm not proud to admit these 2 authors gave me trouble!

Speaking of slow, I had to read James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers in high school. There was so much description, it dragged on and on. Since it was an assignment, I did finish reading it, but have had no desire to reread it.

The Deerslayer was much better. I recently tried to read Last of the Mohicans, but lost interest. :(

8> I agree that Henry James can circumlocute with the best of them, and it took me years to get to grips with him. However, I was impressed by The Aspern Papers, The Bostonians and some of the short stories. James gets inside his characters like no other 19th-century author I have read.

9> I'm sorry you couldn't get into Les Miserables, Zumbanista - it's my favourite novel, though I admit it took a few chapters to get going.

I tried two separate books by Samuel Beckett this year, but didn't get very far on either. He's way beyond my capabilities as a reader!

I'm reading Consider the Lobster, my first David Foster Wallace. He was brilliant, but what a dense read!

>11 cappybear: If you were going to recommend a Henry James novel to someone who finds him impossibly inscrutable, which one would you suggest? I'd be willing to give him another try.

>14 ahef1963: The one that won me over was The Aspern Papers, which isn't very long either. My edition came with The Turn of the Screw which is also well worth reading. Good luck!

I don't want to equate 'challenging' with 'dull.' So, I'd say -- off the top of my head -- Eco, Rushdie, Douglas R. Hofstedter, Adam Johnson (The Orphan Master's Son), and Virginia Woolf.

>8 ahef1963: Reading treacle on a cold day? Hilarious!
I stalled out on Henry James, too. I was trying to read The Awkward Age. I don't remember actually deciding to stop reading it; I just petered out on it maybe 30 pages after I began. I've thought ever since that it's probably a good book; I just can't get through it... so far.

>17 Coffeehag: I abhorred reading Henry James in school, and with so many books to read in an infinite amount of time, I don't feel a need to try him again.

>1 Kammbia1: et al.: Are we limiting this question to authors of fiction?

>19 Meredy:
I'm interested. What is the most difficult nonfiction author you've read?

>20 Settings: It would be Hegel, probably, or Heidegger, and not very big doses at that. Nietzsche likewise. I didn't actually read much of Kant, just extracts and summaries and restatements, or I'm guessing he'd have had them beat. Compared with them, Camus and even Sartre was a piece of cake, and Kierkegaard went down pretty easy.

>19 Meredy:

Yes just fiction.

Oops, sorry. Francis Schaeffer is non-fiction.

>23 fuzzi:

No problem Fuzzi. I just wanted to keep it to fiction.

I've just read an interesting article on the subject of difficult fiction, by Jonathan Franzen, here:

http://adilegian.com/FranzenGaddis.htm

He talks about two types of fiction: the Status novel, which is a work of art that requires the appreciation of a connoisseur, and the Contract model, which an audience reads for pleasure and a sense of connectedness.

Two quotes from the article:

The prose came in page-long paragraphs in which oxygen was at a premium, and the emotional temperature of the novel started cold and got colder.

and

(In fact, the work of reading Gaddis makes me wonder if our brains might even be hard-wired for conventional storytelling, structurally eager to form pictures from sentences as featureless as "She stood up.")

I was led there by a link on the William Gaddis "legacy author" page
http://www.librarything.com/profile/WilliamGaddis
which I found through a post by a member with that username, even though this author is apparently deceased.

Anyway, I thought Franzen's views on difficult fiction were of interest in relation to this thread.

I'm still pondering my own answer.

To me it seems like the breakdown of "challenging" authors here is 1) authors/writing styles I don't like and 2) authors whose books I have found worthwhile but who take work/perseverance to read.

1) Authors/styles I don't like: I will add my name to the list of Henry James dislikers. I had to read several of his novels for a grad school class. Spit it out, Henry! Spit out, already! I agree with the person here who said the James really gets inside his characters' heads like no other writer of his day. He was really a pioneer along those lines, which is part of what makes him so important to modern literature. My problem is that he gets you inside a character's head, and then he goes off and leaves you there. God knows where he's gotten to while you're stuck in there listening to some dolt go on and on about what society is likely to think if he eats the red pepper instead of the radish. Even though he really likes red pepper better. He loves red pepper. But it just wouldn't do. What if his cousin, Hortense, sees him munching on a red pepper and decides that he therefore would not make a good partner in marriage for her ward, Josephine, who knows what it means for a gentleman to eat red pepper in public? Henry! Come back! Get me out of there! (I do like James' short stories much better.)

I will also toss into the ring, here, the novels of D.H. Lawrence. Had to read a couple for an undergrad literature course. Self-indulgent, in love with the sound of his own voice. All I can think of his Dana Carvey's Church Lady. "We like ourselves just a little bit, don't we?" (I do like Lawrence's short stories and even his poetry better.)

2) Authors whose books I have found worthwhile but who take work/perseverance to read: I guess Thomas Pynchon/"Gravity's Rainbow" comes to mind first, here, for me. Beckett's "Malone Dies" is a recent entry. Also, "Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages" by Manuel Puig. I'm sure others will occur to me but those are the first few that came to mind. Unlike others, here, I devoured "One Hundred Years of Solitude" so didn't consider that challenging, but Marquez's "The Autumn of the Patriarch," whew, that was a challenge but extremely memorable and worthwhile for me.

3) I'll also add an additional personal category of "challenging" books: these are books that are extremely well written, even compelling, but very hard to get through because of the subject matter. The top of this list, for me, is The Executioner's Song, Normal Mailer's fictionalized account of the Gary Gilmore story. Amazing writing, impossible to put down, but relentlessly depressing at the same time. Books like that are definitely a challenge for me.

>26 rocketjk: those are some interesting thoughts.

I tried to read The Fight by Norman Mailer, but abandoned it quickly. I was extremely irritated with his writing style (reminds of the current "selfie" obsession) and have NO interest in ever attempting another one of his works!

#27> I've never read The Fight. Mailer's works are a mixed bag, for sure, and he could be but at his best he was stupendous. I personally feel it's a mistake to write him off entirely due to the one misfire you read. He did win two Nobel Prizes for Literature (The Executioner's Song and Armies of the Night) as well as a National Book Award (The Armies of the Night). If you have any interest in war fiction, his very first novel, "The Naked and the Dead" is great. Bat that all a "to each his/her own" decision, though, of certainly.

26> Interesting thoughts indeed.

27/28> I love The Fight and have read it time and again: each to their own, I suppose. I was an avid boxing fan in years gone by and had many books on the subject. I gave them all away, except for The Fight and Jose Torres's excellent Sting Like A Bee. I haven't read anything else by Mailer, though.

25> As interesting as Franzen's article is, Meredy, I could not disagree with him more regarding his stance that William Gaddis was an allegedly "difficult" author. His quote, "The prose came in page-long paragraphs in which oxygen was at a premium, and the emotional temperature of the novel started cold and got colder, " could just as easily (perhaps even more appropriately), be applied to Infinite Jest, by his late best friend, David Foster Wallace; yet Franzen, by all accounts, had no problem with it. In fact he admired it. "Difficult" or "challenging" are, of course, relative, evolving terms, prone to arbitrary transitions in cultural politics or taste, as has already been mentioned. I'm frankly floored that no one has yet mentioned Ulysses, by far the most intentionally obfuscating, drivel-ridden, challenging or difficult novel i've ever attempted. God, how I hated it, absolutely loathed it. And yet so many readers adore it.

Meredy, you might be interested in another so-called "difficult" writer's -- Ben Marcus' -- negative critique of Franzen's essay and take on Gaddis, right here: http://www.williamgaddis.org/marcus.pdf

>28 rocketjk: and >29 cappybear: indeed, we all have different tastes. I really wanted to like The Fight, but Mailer's switching of first to third person narrative while telling the story got under my last nerve. However, I will keep your recommendation under consideration. :)

David Foster Wallace as a fiction writer. B/w the footnotes, his vocabulary (no other author makes me resort to the dictionary more) and the structure of Infinite Jest, he's a tough read. OTOH, IJ has permeated my cognition more than any book I've read in the past twenty years.

>14 ahef1963: I agree with cappybear that The Aspern Papers is a fine choice for a James novella. Add to that his short story, Brooksmith, his novelette The Marriages and his novel, The Portrait of a Lady, and you'll have a masterpiece at every standard fiction length.

"and you'll have a masterpiece at every standard fiction length."

Well, if by "you" you mean someone who isn't me. I hated The Portrait of a Lady. :)

I remember one of Chip Delany's was pretty tough. I think it was Dhalgren. I expect to do some work when I read--I love The Book of the New Sun, for example--but there needs to be something comprehensible.

8> 11> 14> 15> 17> 18> 26> 33> 34>

As part of a literary odyssey too obscure (or dull) to go into here, I am about to re-read The Aspern Papers. I'll let you know if it's as good as I remember it.

It was.

>37 cappybear: Given the implacable rejection my earlier pro-James post elicited, I'm glad to see a little positive energy for my favorite American writer. For those who are afraid of him, and want to get over it, there are so many fine short works, from tragic to funny, to help get you over the hump.

Nonfiction:
Aristotle, Plato, Hegel

Fiction:
Henry James, Herman Melville, Gene Wolfe