This weekend, I started reading “Madame Bovary” just for the hell of it. I know; it’s such a willful, loose-cannon thing for someone to do. I’m so rebellious.
And I will say. Even though I’m not finished with it yet, I’ve been enjoying it far more than I thought I would. “Bovary” is just one of those books that seems permanently embedded in the history of world literature; any appreciation of it is severely briefed by its status.
But I was surprised. I was really surprised. Granted, I don’t think it’s the best book ever written, but I was not expecting it to be great. I’ve only dabbled briefly in Gustave Flaubert; I read “Three Tales” shortly after I read Yann Martel’s “Beatrice and Virgil” because one of the tales, “The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier,” is an important signpost in the story.
The stories seemed fairly quotidian to my high school mind, which (I guess) relished more in fantastic flights of fancy, either in story or vocabulary. Nonetheless, it turned me off Flaubert… until “Madame Bovary” came along.
Maybe this is horribly boring, but as someone deeply invested in reading as a main pastime, finding a book that is not only great, but whose greatness surprises you, is itself a feat. It’s like surfing cable at four in the morning and finding some old TV show or movie that you’ve never heard of, but it’s so good that you wonder how you never heard of/realized that such a thing could be. It’s like getting a CD from the bargain bin because it looked cool/weird and it ends up becoming one of your favorites.
I’ll give a few more examples.
Over the summer, I kindled a love for the works of Thornton Wilder—he wrote “Our Town,” for all you college kids drawing a blank on his name—and I’ve been steadily working my way through his oeuvre. I picked up “Theophilus North” on the whim that it was a Wilder novel, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so great.
Good God! One minute Theophilus—aka “Teddy”—is ingratiating himself into a venerable New England household in order to extricate a befuddled patriarch; the next he’s making custom cork bullets to shoot out automobile tires; after that he’s saving an Edgar Allen Poe devotee from the clutches of a sinister counterfeiting organization; then it turns out that he might have magic hands—but not “those” kind of magic hands. The book swirls, pulses, vibrates, pounces.
Another book that surprised me was “The Waves” by Virginia Woolf. Woolf, of course, is a great author who has written great books (“Mrs Dalloway,” “Orlando,” etc.). But “The Waves” is so different from her other works that it absolutely floored me when I was reading it. So lush! So magnificent!
It’s a hell of a read and I don’t recommend it to anyone who isn’t at least considering an English degree or doesn’t have gobs of time/sanity in reserve.
“The Mezzanine” by Nicholson Baker was such a surprise to me. Although I got a most rhapsodic recommendation to read it, based on my own gleaming of the plot off of Wikipedia—man goes on lunch break and thinks about milk cartons and bendy straws, with plenty of footnotes—I thought that, at best, it would be good. I was a fool.
Goddamn, I still don’t know how, but “The Mezzanine” is one of the funniest books I have ever read. Its style is miraculous, its pacing is flawless. It’s a short read, just over 100 pages, which means you can read it again and again and again. I probably need to soon, now that I’ve remembered that it exists.
It helps that I came to these books without any great expectations. I had an idea that “Theophilus North” would at least be good, that “The Waves” would be up to snuff, that “The Mezzanine” was well liked by someone I admire. It even helps that I didn’t expect to like “Madame Bovary” because of its reputation.
In the end though, the message to be gleaned from this is that, in most cases, it’s better to let your cultural guard down and let things through. You’d be amazed at what sticks.
Have you ever had a book surprise you? Let Sean know at sreichard@wisc.edu.
