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Big or Small? A Note on Book Sizes

Occasionally, we have serious discussions about the length of books. In the 19^th century, when often people were paid by the penny, writers tended to write awfully long books. These days new fiction tends to hover around the three-hundred-word mark, or not even reach that. I myself rarely read a modern book that is longer willingly, unless I am sure I will enjoy it. But because I am busy with exams, I thought I would take a slightly simpler topic for this post, one that gets less attention, but which is still fun to think about – not the length of books, but the size of them!

I remember my surprise at first seeing a French book someone at school was reading – it was so small! I soon learned that what we have in the United Kingdom (and I presume, in the United States as well) is not a global book-size-format but rather, like the non-metric system we use, a size pretty much unique to us. Studying German and Russian I have been exposed to books of various sizes, including those academic books which for no good reason are bigger than everything else on my shelf – I am looking at you, Princeton University Press.

In general the books we find abroad are smaller than the ones we have here. German books from Fischer or dtv are only slightly smaller than their English translations would be, while the lovely little bright yellow Reclam editions are tiny! Russian books are more formulaic, at least if you are looking for literature, with Azbuka and AST the two main editions. However, I also have a few books from the “little library of masterpieces” series, which are about the same size as the Reclam books, but they are hardbacks and generally longer, being single-volume collected editions or long novels.

I have my final exams right now, so my desk is adorned with the books I will be writing about. On the left are my Russian books. You can see how much smaller they are then the Oxford World’s Classics Chekhov near the top. The blue book is my Gogol – it has all of his stuff in, pretty much, from the early Ukrainian tales, to the Petersburg tales, to Dead Souls and even his plays. Not half bad for such a small book!

What are the advantages and disadvantages of these smaller sizes? One of the clearest benefits is portability. You don’t tend to notice the size of your Penguins or Oxford World’s Classics until you try to put them in a jacket pocket. They do, of course, fit into rucksacks and satchels, but you will look rather silly if you try to put them anywhere else. A thick book will remain thick – or indeed, get thicker – when its size is reduced. But for those shorter books the added thickness is nothing compared to the convenience of actually being able to fit them in one’s pocket.

Short wordcount books look rather out of place in big-sized books as well. A hundred pages in an English-size book generally makes me feel cheated or ripped-off, but when the book is smaller, I tend not to mind. Indeed, the smaller size often allows for smaller texts to be given their own book. The Reclam editions are great for presenting readers with one or two novellas, where an English edition would no doubt demand a whole crowd of them. A small size, then, also helps us focus on what we are reading – it gives each story its due.

I feel more motivated to read smaller books too. Shorter books by wordcount motivate us because we get to finish them quicker. But books of a smaller size achieve the same effect by letting us turn the pages more. Anna Karenina is 1052 pages in my Russian edition, but because the pages were so short, I raced through it. And it was a confidence boost too – I felt like I was a master of Russian because of it! For those of us who are not masters at foreign languages deciphering a long page can often take several minutes – and be hugely demoralising – so smaller page sizes can offer a useful counterweight.

My modern German books. You can see how they are just slightly smaller than the English ones in the centre of the pile. Quite a few of these have appeared in past posts – Cat and Mouse, The Emigrants, Three Women, Some Mann, and Else.

Small books are definitely more suitable for certain types of content, too. The main thing that benefits from a smaller size is poetry. In England we do have the Faber “selected poems” series, and the Everyman poetry hardbacks, but mostly our poetry books are just as big as the rest. Has anyone actually read a poetry book cover to cover? I’ve read Leaves of Grass, my favourite book of poems, like that once and it was a dreadful experience. Poetry needs to be dipped into, and that demands a book size that can be carried with you until the right moment arises. That’s why I have two very small copies of Whitman’s Song of Myself. It lets me carry one around all the time, and then whip it out whenever inspiration strikes.

The main problem of smaller books is that they often also have smaller fonts. However, it’s worth noting that English books are guilty of having small fonts too, or even showing no respect to their margins. My copy of Penguin’s Portable Emerson is particularly guilty of this. German books, which are smaller than their English counterparts, often have larger font sizes than they do, something I very much appreciate. Russian books are more unpredictable on that front. In any case, when it is dark, or we are tired, it’s hard to be grateful for a shorter book when that shortness is achieved by making it harder to read.

The Reclam editions are particularly bad for this. I have a love-hate relationship with them, truth be told. They are so convenient, so portable, but at the same time can be a real struggle to read. And I do find they look ridiculous when they contain big books – my copy of Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation is, at just over seven hundred pages, reasonably sized compared to some of the monsters I have, such as Heine’s collected poems, which go well over one thousand pages. With that kind of length, you often have the feeling that by the time you’ve actually reached the end of the book you’ll need a new pair of glasses.

In the end, though, I do come down firmly on the side of smaller books, even my Reclams. Their portability, and the increased page-turning , just makes reading them that bit more pleasant. I only wish they were written in English, but I suppose I must just get used to that not being the case! Now, there is one area where I think we in the English-speaking world are particularly lucky with our books, and that is in the notes and annotations which most of our serious literature comes with. The Germans are quite good at this as well, but the Russians are absolutely awful. Often their books don’t even have an introduction, let alone a set of notes. Some of my Russian poetry books don’t even have a table of contents! While I don’t always make use of them when they are there, I’d much rather have them than not.

Anyway, readers, how do you like your books? Rare, medium, well done? Big, or small, or somewhere in between?

Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness

Introduction

Heart of Darkness is a novella by Joseph Conrad – you’ve probably heard of it. Based, at least in part, on his own experiences, Conrad’s tale tells the story of a sailor, Marlow, who rides up the Congo river towards the end of the 19^th century in search of the mysterious Kurtz. One evening much later, while waiting for the tide to change on a boat with his friends, Marlow tells his story. The horrors of what Marlow finds – Imperialism at its very worst – have inspired countless works of art, including the film Apocalypse Now! and the game Spec Ops: The Line.

But this book does not need adaptation. It remains, even now, a frightening, monstrous, and brilliant story in its own right. And this time, my third time reading it, it shocked me more than ever.

Kurtz

Kurtz, the head of the farthest station along the Congo River, is at the centre of Heart of Darkness like Nostromo is at the centre of his own novel. But if anything Heart of Darkness is the more adventurous work when it comes to characterisation. We hear of Kurtz slowly, as Marlow heads up the Congo river. “Oh, he will go far, very far” we hear from one man. “He is a prodigy,” we hear from another. Once or twice we hear Kurtz himself, from a year ago, his words filtered through someone else. At first positive, later on the reports grow more concerning. It is impossible to know what to believe. What is impressive is the way that we are led, initially, to expect to see in Kurtz the model colonialist. It makes the revelation that he has gone mad all the more horrific.

We find a report, written by him, filled with the hope for positive change that others had so confidently placed in him. He writes that we “must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings – we approach them with the might of a deity”. “By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded”. But Kurtz, ultimately, does not exert his power for good. Perhaps he is too taken by the power itself. In a wonderful image, we find that at the bottom of his report he has scrawled the words “exterminate all the brutes!”. It is a wonderful image because we go from the sensible, measured, and hopeful report to the brutal world that Kurtz actually encountered – or made for himself.

Loneliness

“We live, as we dream – alone” Marlow’s words stand at the centre of the book, of its feeling. That Heart of Darkness is not a cheery book is no surprise, but that its bleakness takes the form of loneliness is nonetheless surprising. Marlow’s time in the Congo is marked by his dislocation from other human beings. The other people on the steamer he commands – black and white – have no connection to him. The whites are disgraceful looters, ready to shoot at the slightest excuse and steal without a moment’s thought. As for the blacks Marlow, prejudiced as most of us were back then, has no desire to speak with them, whatever his sympathy for their suffering.

He is alone, and I think it is loneliness that destroys us far from home, not anything else. Kurtz has left “civilization”, yes, but he has also left people: “Being alone in the wilderness, [Kurtz’s soul] had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you it had gone mad!” To the Africans he is a God, not a man – he and they can have no dialogue. The images Marlow uses to describe Kurtz are characterised by their suggestions of distance and isolation. “I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines”. The way that people describe him also distances us from the real man. It’s so hard to see who he really is because we are eternally filtering him through other people’s ideas, and then finally through Marlow’s own increasingly cagey narration.

Conrad’s Style

Conrad’s style, I now realise, contributes greatly to this feeling of loneliness and detachment. Yes, it is turgid, swampy – Conrad is guilty of never leaving a noun without a grave and lumpy adjective. But it is precisely this feeling of swampiness that slows the narrative down, and allows it, at times, to stop altogether, presenting simply an image in all its horror:

“There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match flared, and Marlow’s lean face appeared – worn, hollow, with downward folds and dropped eyelids, with an aspect of concentrated attention; and as he took vigorous draws at his pipe, it seemed to retreat and advance out of the night in the regular flicker of the tiny flame. The match went out.”

Perhaps horror is not right word. Marlow here is frozen apart from us, the only light in the darkness of the boat where he narrates his story. We see him, but even though the image of the face is a close-up, we feel that the distance between us and him is unbridgeable. So it is, Conrad seems to say, between any of us. A photo, a snapshot, is necessarily limited – though we see something, there is no life in it. And there is no way of putting life in it, short of the imagination. And imagination is always personal, subjective, and therefore a lie.

Work

What is it that destroys us? That is the central question of Heart of Darkness. Chinua Achebe might say that Conrad, the “bloody racist”, saw an Africa-made-other and Africans-made-savages to be the source of Kurtz’s decline and Marlow’s teetering. But the truth is certainly more complicated than that, if that is the case at all. I think work, and an idea of work, fits into this. Towards the end of the novella’s first part Marlow says “I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself.” His at this point is a naïve view. It mistakenly assumes that the self we find in work is necessarily our “true self.” It allows Marlow to be sucked into the same admiration of Kurtz as many other characters are guilty of.

Kurtz gathers a great deal of ivory – he is, by some measure, a great worker. But he is also, in Marlow’s sense, himself. His life has an apparent authenticity that Marlow’s hesitant, questioning life does not. The constant reverence with which others talk about Kurtz’s ideals only emphasises this. Kurtz is a thinker, a philosopher. Everyone expects great things of him. The belief he inspires is dangerous because for those who have no beliefs, he is someone to be envied, followed, or perhaps even worshipped.

It is only later that Marlow begins to see the full meaninglessness of all that work – when he comes to find Kurtz’s spoils – “Ivory? I should think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting with it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above or below ground in the whole country”. The goal has been achieved, the ivory gotten, and yet we are still in a mud shanty, and Kurtz is ill. And all the dead Africans will never get their lives back.

Early on, in the stations closer to the coast, Marlow encountered people without ideas of their own, simply scheming and hoping to gain money. There is nothing noble in that either. What Heart of Darkness does quite well, perhaps without realising it, is demonstrate the sheer bankruptcy of the colonial project. Kurtz, the idealist, becomes a monster and forgets whatever mighty aims had once motivated him in favour of slaughter, while the rest are so concerned only with enriching themselves that they care not for what happens to the Africans around them, so long as they get paid. Both Kurtz and the others ultimately come to see people as means, rather than ends.

Marlow

And Marlow? Marlow can only observe, report back to us. He is overwhelmed by the world he discovers – by the strangeness of Africa and its people, black and white. He achieves nothing at all except his own survival, and even that is tainted in its way by his own complicity in Kurtz’s world. Heart of Darkness simply ends. Marlow meets Kurtz’s intended wife and hands over his final papers, but he fails to tell her the truth of his life in the Congo. His final action in the story is one of cowardice – or perhaps of kindness. In not telling her of Kurtz’s breakdown or challenging her ideas of him Marlow continues to let the myth of the noble colonist survive to destroy further lives.

Towards the end I kept coming back to Yeats. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity”. What is frightening about Heart of Darkness for me, an educated Westerner, is the paradox of those lines. Everyone truly believes that Kurtz is a great man with a great future before him. His passion, his beliefs, are contagious. And yet this man, who should be the best, turns out to be the worst of us. And if he is the worst, where does that leave the rest of us? Useless, weak, able only to not do evil ourselves, we have not the strength to stop it. We are the bankrupt heirs to a bankrupt world.

When I look inside myself I see very little to cheer me. Hatred, violence, and despair are at the heart of my soul. I do not know another’s heart upon this earth; I feel the sheer loneliness that Marlow’s story speaks of. So in the end I can only assume that others are just the same, constantly engaged in the battle for their own souls, restrained from committing horrors only by their flagging willpower and fear of the shame that comes from turning away from civilisation and their fellows. It is not a pretty picture. I am perhaps being dramatic. But also, in a way, honest too.

Conclusion

“Droll thing life is – that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope for is some knowledge of yourself – that comes too late – a crop of unextinguishable regrets.”

On this blog, unconsciously perhaps, I prefer to write about books and stories that are less well known. With many books, I have a feeling that everything has already been said. Heart of Darkness is certainly such a book. But I have felt this book. It is really quite extraordinary how, the third time through, Conrad’s story has affected me. Chinua Achebe lamented that Conrad had turned all Africa into “props for the break-up of one petty European mind”. If I wanted to argue with him, this post would look very different. I have a petty mind, a petty European mind. I cannot say whether this book speaks to others as it does to me. But for me it has been like a bolt of lightning, a frightening horrific flash of knowledge. But in that that horror – of all I am, of all I may be – there is something else:

There is joy. Heart of Darkness is absolutely fantastic literature and I can’t wait to read it and love it again.

For more Conrad, I have a piece on Nostromo. For another book which also looks at our inner darkness, John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing is great too.

Two Years of Mostly About Stories

Mostly About Stories has been going for about two years now. I was tempted to give a little summary or whatever at the end of the year, but on balance doing it now makes sense. At the end of any year, and especially one such as that which has just passed, there’s so much to go over that the development of a little blog really has no claim to anyone’s attention.

But what is exciting is that this blog is no longer just a little blog at all.

I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. The blog has grown, massively, in relation to itself. As far as its relation to other book blogs goes, I have not the faintest idea of whether I’m doing well or badly here. Well, actually, I have the most recent version of the same survey that I mentioned when I posted one year ago. According to this, in some respects I’m doing quite well indeed.

One year ago, last January, I had 1078 views on the blog for that month, which worked out as 35 views a day. This month, still unfinished, sees me already at 2738 and with an average of 111 per day. This would put me in the top quartile by pageviews according to the survey. Last year, with the exception of a dip in February, every month was larger than the last. Things just built up, slowly but surely. As they should.

I shouldn’t worry about views, but I do enjoy thinking that people read my blog. Last year I had one follower – a friend. This year I have almost twenty, and almost all of them are unknown to me. The same is true of comments. I now have a few. Not a huge amount, but enough to be excited about. Engagement is what I’m after, really, with this blog. I want a place where people read and want to have their say.

Identity

But it is difficult, because the identity problems I mentioned last year are still present. What exactly is Mostly About Stories? I have long analyses, such as my pieces on Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” (still the most popular piece by far), short poems such as this one by Baratynsky, pieces focusing on a particular aspect of a novel like my thoughts on character in Nostromo, and more general pieces, like this one on Misotheism. It is perfectly reasonable for a blog to be varied in its contents. Just as Borges declared that Kafka created his own precursors, so too do I create my own readers. But that tension between a blog that’s a mess and a blog that’s held together by a unity – some stance, or perhaps my own character – is one that I’ve not resolved.

Even so, this year has been good for the blog’s “intellectual” development. I wrote some long pieces I had wanted to for a while, such as my thing on late Tolstoy, and some shorter more conversational pieces, like my thoughts on how many books to read. I wrote on books that I enjoyed, and on books that I studied, as usual. I do still struggle with knowing what to write. With a book that I’m studying, there’s always an element of teaching involved. I want my readers to learn something, and since the books can be obscure or not available in English, they perhaps do. But when it’s a book that everyone is familiar with, or a book that is long, I’m left flummoxed. Last year I read both War and Peace and Wuthering Heights and I had absolutely no idea what to say about them. Everything’s been said already.

This possibly reflects bad reading habits on my part. I’m not sure I quite “got” Wuthering Heights, though I did have stuff to say about it. But I think it also reflects an unwillingness to write shorter pieces. One thing that I’ve been somewhat adamant about in the past is that Mostly About Stories is for longer pieces, of around 1500 words or more. Yet sometimes I don’t have that much to say, or I want to focus on something small. I wanted to write about education in Wuthering Heights but didn’t know how to make it into a good enough size.

This is an idiotic stance to have. People’s attention drops off rapidly at about 1500 words anyway. Why force people to read more? Perhaps in the future I should aim for something like 1000-1500, but ensure the content is good and tight. Or perhaps I should just let each piece take its own length. All of these ideas have merit.

Reading

Last year, which I spent mostly in Russia with a little time in Cambridge at the end, was a good year for reading. John Williams’ Augustus and Butcher’s Crossing, Marilynne Robison’s Gilead, Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March and Job, Richard Holmes’ Footsteps – all of these are books that have left their mark on me, by authors who were mostly new to me. Then there was Sally Rooney, who is exciting even as I’m somewhat ambivalent towards her work.

This year promises more discoveries. My degree at Cambridge finishes in the summer, leaving me for the first time in a very long time completely free to read whatever I want. It is a great opportunity, as well as a great burden. I am confident I will find something to read. I already have a lot of things I want to. Much more befogged lies my future beyond this blog. Do I get a job, do I do a master’s degree, do I run away into the mountains and become a full-time writer? All of these are possible, as are some less pleasant variants. Only time will tell which fate has decided for me.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Come again.

Here’s a dreadful poem for your time:

I’d Rather (by Konstantin Balmont)

I wouldn't want to be a storm, 
There's too much thunder brewing there. 
I'd rather be the dew at dawn, 
Whose quiet peace knows no compare. 

I'd rather be a little flower, 
The kind whose bloom you barely see, 
The kind that spurns the thunder's power
To have its happiness, to be.