Big or Small? A Note on Book Sizes

Occasionally, we have serious discussions about the length of books. In the 19th 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.

My Schopenhauer. Chekhov for scale.

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?

A Question of Guilt – Dostoevsky’s “A Gentle Creature”

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella “A Gentle Creature”, also translated as “The Meek One”, makes for unpleasant reading. We are immediately thrust into the aftermath of a suicide, where the surviving partner of a marriage attempts to come to terms with why his young wife chose to end her life. In times of grief, we can often blame ourselves for things that under the lens of cold reason are not our responsibility. But in “A Gentle Creature” the situation is far less innocent. Our unnamed narrator is as repulsive as any a man Dostoevsky created, and as he explores his memories it is impossible to avoid the fact that he is responsible for his wife’s death. Theirs was an extremely abusive relationship, one which remains as fresh and horrible today as it was then.

In “A Gentle Creature” Dostoevsky uses this setup, of a man trying to evade his own guilt, to create a brilliant character study. The relationship and its decline are thematically rich, making us think about the nature of moral responsibility and fate, about money and power, and finally about the written word itself. Beneath the story, which I found painful to read at times, there is much of value to discuss.

Quotations are from the translation by Ronald Meyer, but as I prefer the title “A Gentle Creature”, I will refer to the story using that name.

“A Fantastic Story” – the Narration of “A Gentle Creature”

“A Gentle Creature” has the subtitle “a fantastic story”, and before the story begins Dostoevsky explains his strange word choice. Though it is “realistic in the highest degree”, it has an element of fantasy in how Dostoevsky takes us along the memories and turmoil of the narrator’s heart as he tries to make sense of what has happened. We meet our narrator shortly after his wife’s death. “…Now as long as she’s here – everything is still all right”. Such an opening thrusts us in media res, as if we’ve suddenly been plugged in to our narrator’s thoughts. Our own disorientation reflects his own. Though the narrator tells us that “the horror of it for me… [is] that I understand everything”, half a page later he admits he keeps getting muddled.

The narrator is our only guide to the story, but he is not reliable at all. As he goes through his memories, he also interprets them. When he comes across badly, he gets defensive – “you see, I wasn’t badly brought up and have manners”. Though he claims to portray “pro and contra” impartially, he also blames his wife for her suicide. It’s not hard to see the games he’s playing. Just as he describes his relationship with his wife as a game, so too is his description of the past a kind of game. We are drawn into his world, a world with almost no dialogue, so that we are almost suffocated by his solipsism. But he still needs his readers. He addresses them from time to time, appealing for moral support. He wants them to justify his actions. His addressees are male – perhaps he hopes they’d be biased.

The Plot

Our narrator is a pawnbroker, Dostoevsky’s favourite profession. One day he notices a repeat client, a young girl of about fifteen or sixteen. She keeps bringing him things, and seems to be growing increasingly desperate. The narrator becomes interested, and decides to learn about her. It turns out that her parents are dead, and she lives with her aunts. These women are preparing “to sell her”, and a merchant has been chosen to be her husband. She doesn’t want this, but this is the 19th century and she’s a poor woman and can’t easily defend herself. She uses the money she gets from pawning things to put adverts in the papers, hoping someone will hire her, as a governess for example.

The narrator decides to marry her instead. Compared to the shopkeeper, who has already beaten to death two wives, he must seem to the poor girl “a liberator”. She agrees to marriage. And here begins the horror of the story. The narrator, who first only had monetary power over her, now gains marital power. And as the story progresses, his power and his desire for control only grow.

“She should have appreciated my deed”.

From the very first, he expects her subservience and her respect. But this is a one-way street. He does not expect to have to offer anything to her in return. To her love – “she would throw herself at me with her love” – he presents silence. He enjoys the thought that he is “a riddle”. He creates “a complete system” for controlling her, and eventually the two of them stop talking altogether. Why does the narrator act this way? It’s both easy and difficult to say. At one point he claims to be aiming at a higher happiness for both of them, one that can only be reached through suffering. At another moment, he seems to think he’s Mephistopheles, using evil to work good.

In all of his decisions, there is no respect for what the girl thinks. In “A Gentle Creature” we hardly ever hear her speak. When she does speak, the narrator dismisses her through misogyny – “these outbursts were unhealthy and hysterical”. The narrator does not even let her go outside on her own. In all his planning, the narrator not only displays a desire for control connected with his profession as an accumulator of money, but he also shows an unwillingness to respect or acknowledge the variety of human experience, and the essential dignity of his young wife.

The girl is kind – at first she does her best to love him. But through his coldness, the narrator attempts to reform her into a different person entirely. The fifth part of the first chapter in the story is called “The Meek One Rebels”, and there’s a degree of irony in it. The narrator has tormented her so much that she can no longer be herself. But then we might also think about suicide in connection with this. For many people, the decision to kill themselves comes as the consequence of losing their sense of identity. The narrator demands she break with hers. Her rebellion consists with an attempted liaison with one of the narrator’s old comrades (they were both in the army together), but the liaison does not work out. She is too morally pure, even then.

But the narrator still punishes her. He forces her to sleep on a different bed, behind a partition. The marriage is over. He makes her feel guilty for what he has driven her to. Later on, she declares that she is “a criminal”, even though she’s done precious little wrong.

Guilt and the Limits of Knowledge

Throughout “A Gentle Creature” we are asking why the poor girl killed herself. In some sense, it’s trivially simple. The narrator hurts her, abuses her, forces her into silence, and crushes her sense of self. But at the same time, it is still worth thinking about questions of responsibility as we read the story. The narrator may be an idiot when he suggests “I was forced to act as I did then”, as if he can simply excuse himself by invoking fate, but there might be value in questioning how far he is to blame, or at least, how he ended up in that position. I think the main problem is a failure of imagination on his part, coupled with the way that he refused to acknowledge her individual dignity.

 Why imagination? He makes plans, but finds she doesn’t fit into them because he is unable to plan enough. That’s at least one level to the problem. But it goes further than that. Under the surface of “A Gentle Creature” there is a lot of pent-up feeling. The narrator is a bad person in action, but not at heart. He really is aiming at a kind of happiness, and I think he did love his wife. But he was unable to express that love. Whenever he wanted to, it came into conflict with his desire for control and the lack of respect for his wife caused by his misogyny.

As a result, instead of being kind, he was silent. Instead of talking about his feelings, he tells us that it is impossible, “what would she have understood?” The narrator blames her for dying when she did. If only she’d waited a little while longer, then things would have worked out. But he is at fault for driving her to suicide, and whether she did it earlier or later the important thing is that he drove her to it in the first place.

In the end, though, as much as we condemn the narrator, we can’t avoid thinking about how we determine responsibility to begin with. After all, in “A Gentle Creature” we only hear his side of the story – we never learn hers, and never will. And though he hardly portrays himself well, he’s also suffering from shock and grief, and isn’t thinking clearly either.

Why is the Narrator as he is?

Comparing the narrator of “A Gentle Creature” to that of “Notes from the Underground” is a sensible decision, as both, though talkative, never seem to get anywhere with their thoughts or with their lives. They seem trapped in small places, like characters from something by Samuel Beckett. But more than that, both of them are in a sense poisoned by their era. The girl in “A Gentle Creature” is from a different generation to her husband, and where he is cold and cruel, she is idealistic and hopeful (until he’s had his way with her). The narrator is someone who also clearly once had his own ideals, but failed to live up to them. When he was younger, he was a soldier, but he was forced from his regiment after failing to participate in a duel. He tries to call his actions courageous, but it’s hardly convincing.  

He takes out his shame on her. He makes her feel ashamed of her own actions, above all for her love. But there is more to him than damaged pride. The end of “A Gentle Creature” is particularly difficult to read because the narrator finally seems to come to terms with his guilt. His worldview is spoiled, and he feels completely isolated. “I am alone with the pledges”. What had earlier given him power, even a sense of self – his money – now weighs down on him. He becomes aware of the emptiness of his life, and we have a feeling as he cries out with fear at the prospect of his wife’s body being removed from the house that perhaps his own suicide is not far off either. “People are alone on this earth” he thinks. That is his conclusion after so much suffering – both his and his wife’s. Fun.

Conclusion

“A Gentle Creature” ends bleakly, with a sense of terrible isolation. To be fair, it is bleak throughout. We watch a kind, hopeful, loving girl be destroyed in an abusive relationship, unable to express herself and controlled wherever she goes. There is, as with all suicides, a pervasive and nauseating feeling that if only we had a little more time, perhaps things would have been different. But for all the gloom, the story is still worth reading. The narrator is, in the Dostoevskian mould, perhaps a little too evil in thought, but his actions are believable and well-described. And however uncomfortable following his thoughts is, the twists and turns as he tries to justify himself remain fascinating.

Compared with The Double, “A Gentle Creature” is far more psychologically interesting, and (surprisingly for Dostoevsky!), a good exercise in concision. It is not as enjoyable as Crime and Punishment, in part because it has little positivity, and no Sonya waiting at the end. But that’s no reason not to give “A Gentle Creature” a chance the next time you have an hour free. It certainly won’t disappoint you.

Chopping Down the Bourgeoisie – Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters

I am not, on the whole, a fan of what I would call “closed-box novels”. Those torturous first-person narratives which Beckett and Murnane and so many others like to write, where our main character is generally floating in space, very rarely lucky enough to be trapped in a small box. From within this cramped environment they ramble, complain, whatever. But given how far detached from our own world theirs is, I get very little from them. Such narratives neither bring us closer to our fellows, nor do they ever appear to have any positive message to impart at all. Just pessimism and cynicism. If I wanted that, I’d go outside.

Thomas Bernhard’s novel Woodcutters is in some sense one of these closed-box mysteries. The main character spends most of the narrative sitting in a chair at a party, reminiscing or else thinking ill of those around him. A little later he has a bite to eat, sits and listens to an actor discourse, and finally goes home. What action there is lies within his mind until very late in the story. Though it is unparagraphed, and though it has a certain peculiar disconnection from human life that reminds me of Beckett, I ended up enjoying the novel. There was some light within its caverns, and the writing is also (trans. David McLintock) far funnier than I had expected.

I suppose I would like to open the box, and explain briefly what value to us in the real world this novel might have.

Plot Introduction

Woodcutters is set in Bernhard’s native Austria, in the Vienna of the 1980s. Our narrator is a writer, temporarily back in his homeland from England, where he appears to be in self-imposed exile. While in Vienna he accidentally encounters the Auersbergers – a married couple and old friends from the 50s, whom our narrator now despises, and they give him an invitation to “an artistic dinner” that he somehow fails to decline. He also hears of the suicide, by hanging, of their mutual friend, a woman called Joana. The action of Woodcutters takes place during this dinner, the same day as Joana’s funeral – first as our narrator sits alone on his chair, then during the dinner itself. The guest of honour is an actor from the Burgtheater, the most important Viennese theatre, but he is running late. Among the various guests is also Jeannie Billroth, another writer who the narrator despises.

Joana

The narrator’s treatment of his old friend’s suicide is rather ambiguous. As with most of the people in Woodcutters, Joana had once had a great impact on the narrator’s life, but since been abandoned by him. She had had a hard life, coming from the countryside to Vienna to be an artist but then ending up simply doing movement classes with actors. She married, but then Fritz, her famous fabric-making husband, ran off to Mexico without her. And so she drank, and drank, and the narrator is more surprised to hear that she had recently still been alive than that she had died. Why exactly she ended her life is unclear – what final thing brought her to go to the countryside and hang herself. But the narrator says he had always known she would hang herself, because she had dreams and dreams are not fit for this world.

Joana had been the narrator’s friend, and he had taken no interest in her these past ten or twenty years. Whether or not there is any guilt there is hard to say, but the cynicism of the narrator shouldn’t be confused with authority. At the funeral, which takes place in the village where Joana grew up and died, the narrator encounters John, Joana’s companion. At first he hates him, considering him an ill-educated peasant, but as he recollects the funeral his opinion changes, and he realises that in comparison with the bourgeois trash that were also there, John was actually a good man. He had organised the funeral, he had done his duty and looked death in the face in the way that the endlessly posing Viennese never had. And that, of course, is better than nothing.

Auersberger

Just now looking through the German Wikipedia page for Woodcutters I discovered to my surprise and, I think, horror, that these characters all have quite clear analogues in the real world. In many cases Bernhard did not even bother changing first names. That is a surprise because Woodcutters is full of characters with changed names. Joana was originally Elfriede, for example, and Auersberger’s name has also been pruned by him to make it sound more aristocratic. Everyone here is trying to be someone other than themselves.

The Auersbergers, “Auersberger” and “his wife”, are the hosts of the party. They have not changed in the thirty or so years that the narrator has had the misfortune of knowing them. The man is a composer, from the school of Anton Webern; his wife is a singer. Auersberger had promise, had genius perhaps, but now he is simply considered one of Webern’s many successors. He has a drinking problem, and occasionally goes for drying-out cures.

Their marriage is not happy – none in the book is. They are sustained by her money and these social events. They are, to quote our narrator, “perfidious society masturbators”. They have destroyed an entire village – the source of her wealth – by their indolence. As they do no work, they are forced to gradually sell parcels of land from her inheritance, which leads to land development. And no doubt by not working they are also doing a lot of damage to their souls. Everything about the Auersbergers is fake, dishonest. I particularly enjoyed the several pages where the actor talks about The Wild Duck, the play by Ibsen that he had been in, and not one person save Jeannie and the narrator has actually seen it. But in addition to the fake names there are fake books, fake libraries, fake relationships. Their whole world is false.

Auersberger, though, is terribly funny. He has drunk far more than he should and his wife keeps trying to force him to go to bed, whereupon he kicks her. But the best line in the book, I thought, comes when the discussion turns to suicide’s prevalence among the Austrians at that time.

“The Styrians are rather prone to suicide, said Auersberger, who by this stage was just about totally drunk and had become highly agitated. He told the actor that he was surprised that so few Burgtheater actors killed themselves, since they had such good reason to do so. Saying this he burst out laughing at his own remark, though the others merely found it embarrassing and glared at him.”

This gives a good idea of the humour in Woodcutters. It is cruel, but it is also shockingly funny. Yet I cannot leave Auersberger like this, because his particular character goes too far. The narrator is cynical, is brutal. But Auersberger – at least to me, reads as someone far more sinister, considering the context of politically unrepentant Austria in postwar period. When he starts talking about how “the human race ought to be abolished”, or “we should all kill one another”, it suggests a kind of unreformed Nazi nihilism, at least to me. So too does his destruction of chairs and wineglasses. He is good for a laugh, but not when you start thinking about him.

Jeannie and the Actor

Considering it is a broadside against Viennese bourgeois society, art naturally enough sits at centre of Woodcutters. Our narrator time and again refers to the way that Vienna consumes talented artists and turns them into mediocrities – Joana and Auersberger are but examples of this. Only Fritz and – we presume – the narrator, were able to escape the Austrian capital’s pernicious influence, and then only by fleeing abroad. Jeannie Billroth, who the narrator once served as lover, is one who has not escaped Vienna’s clutches. Styling herself as the Viennese Virginia Woolf, she is in the narrator’s eye a phenomenal mediocrity. Her days, he suggests, are spent pandering to politicians to secure pensions and prizes. After all,

“Artistic life in Austria is a road built by state opportunism out of people’s baseness and mendacity, paved with scholarships and prizes, lined with decorations and distinctions, and leading to an honoured grave in the Central Cemetery”.

If Jeannie is as untalented and inauthentic as everyone else at the party, the actor is almost the opposite. He arrives incredibly late, pays decorum no heed, but though he is for the most part boring, he is nonetheless himself. When Jeannie asks him, not once, not twice, not even three times but repeatedly until he cannot ignore her any longer, whether he could say, “at the end of his life, that his art had brought him fulfilment”, he at last snaps. He hates the party, hates the people there, and hates Jeannie above all. What he wants, what he truly wants, is “to go into the forest, deep into the forest… to yield oneself up to the forest” and be a woodcutter.

The actor, who had described to the uninterested listeners how he had holed himself up in a mountain shack in order to learn his lines and truly feel his role, is the real artist. Of course, he is as petty as the rest of them in many ways, and he does appear slightly ridiculous. Here is the wonderful description of him eating. It is truly amazing how Bernhard manages to convey the rush of the artist’s spooning in his language:

“Ekdal, he said, spooning up his soup, has been my dream role for decades. And then he went on, interrupting himself after every other word to spoon up more soup, Ekdal—pause for a spoonful—has always—another spoonful—been my—another spoonful—favourite part, adding, after two more spoonfuls, for decades.”

Truth-telling and Cynicism

Why mention the spooning? Because it makes the actor look ridiculous. It undermines him, and Woodcutters as a whole is about undermining people. It is about, in some sense, telling the truth.

“For years, perhaps for decades, we may have wanted to tell someone the truth to his face, the truth that he has never heard because no one has dared to tell it to him to his face, and then at last someone does it for us.”

It is only, obliterated by another person, that we can ever reflect upon ourselves honestly and turn away from the incorrect path that we are on. Sometimes, not even that is enough. In another moment that had me write “big oof” in the margins the narrator turns to a very drunken Auersberger, quite randomly after the dinner, and say

“that he had made a mess of his life and dragged his genius in the dirt for the sake of a rich wife and high living, that he had destroyed himself in the process and made drinking the be-all and end-all of his life, that he had exchanged one misfortune, that of his youth, for a second misfortune, that of old age, that he had sacrificed his musical genius for his revolting socializing, and intellectual freedom for the bondage of wealth.”

Big oof indeed.

Can we ever break out of the cycles that we are in? Are we condemned to them until at last, confronted with the sheer awfulness of other people, we finally snap? The cynicism of the narrator is not without its purpose. There is at least a kind of hope, if only for himself, that life can be better than an artistic dinner in Vienna. And as the novel ends he runs – literally runs – determined to make something of his experience that isn’t just a complaint. There is something to be valued here.

Conclusion

Woodcutters is the first work of fiction by Bernhard that I have read. I remember once starting Frost and stopping, but after Woodcutters I have already ordered another novel. Woodcutters is not quite the closed-box I thought it was. It is hilarious in a way that is relevant to us all, living as we do in a bourgeois cultural milieu (you are on this blog, after all). It is not too long either, and easy to read. Bernhard’s style has his narrator constantly going in circles, searching for perfect barb with which to pierce his old friends’ bubbles. And these barbs are not the end. There is a sense, a limited sense, that underneath the cynicism and the misanthropy there is a good world and a good life to be found, just not the one we live in and not the one we’re living.

But that’s what we have books for. To show the way to something better.