Somewhere there may very well be—and I would bet there is—a book that only its author likes. But for that reader it may be the very best book, the one book in all the world that says exactly what he thinks and feels. And says it in words he understands. If a hundred thousand or a million people like some other book, that does not make it any better.
People like fictional books for very different reasons. There are even those who say that reading novels, for instance, is mere escapism. But is escapism always a bad thing? Properly used, is it not one of humanity’s greatest strengths, one of our unique gifts? To be, in one’s thoughts, elsewhere for a while. What else is creativity? The inability to step outside one’s box even in play already speaks of a withered soul. History also shows that literature, at its best, can be a great force of influence. Examples exist in embarrassing abundance, so I will mention only the first one that comes to mind.
Let it be Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Its value as testimony and inspiration has still not faded, and we know that it belongs to the literature that Russia’s leader Adolf Putler deeply loathes. That alone says much about the merit of the work. Putler’s fear is not unfounded. Truth and laughter are green kryptonite to a dictator. Even a small dose weakens him; a large one kills him.
Everyone also knows, from personal experience, books that have greatly and positively influenced their own life, whether through their wisdom, humor, audacity, aesthetics, or simply because they received the book as a gift from someone who mattered.
Everyone can and may value books by their own criteria. I find that I judge them more or less automatically in three dimensions. They are Thought, Story, and Style (TSS)—in that order. If even one of them impresses me, that is enough for the book to remain in my mind. If two criteria are met, the book stays with me for a long time, and I may feel the urge to return to it. If all three are met, we may already be on the threshold of a lifelong love affair.
I will not start listing such books here, because my literary taste is no greater truth than anyone else’s, but I will mention just one name, the first that came to mind, simply because my eyes happen at this moment to fall upon it on my bookshelf: Willy Kyrklund’s tiny tale Master Ma. It has been thumbed to tatters, though I myself am no longer entirely without rents and seams either.
And what, then, of bad books? There are no such things, not really. There are only books that make an impression on some particular person, and books that do not. One book that has never managed to light a single candle in my TSS candelabrum is Joyce’s Ulysses. At moments there is freshness in its style, but each time it is soon killed by the off-putting, snobbish stream of consciousness, so fractured that it is pathological: if such a person actually existed, he would be in treatment somewhere. The story is slight. That is not in itself a problem, but the disorder of the stream of consciousness makes too much of that slightness. If you have only a little to say, I find it courteous and aesthetic to say it sparingly. And finally: I have found no thought in the book that is interesting in its originality.
And yet Ulysses is a cult book. Admiring it has been a sign of literary cultivation. A little like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which some years ago it belonged to the image of a cultivated humanist to praise, even if one had never managed to read the book to the end. Not many humanists did. To each according to taste; there is not much more to say.
I have always found it difficult to understand those who, with the deep chest voice of conviction, declare one book good and another bad. Such people have often read a great deal, but at such moments I always feel that literary cultivation has nevertheless failed to come into being. Cultivation is not the same as having read a lot, not even the same as learning. It is rather a state of mind, one that understands, among other things, its own limitations.
Somewhere there may very well be—and I would bet there is—a book that only its author likes. But for that reader it may be the very best book, the one book in all the world that says exactly what he thinks and feels. And says it in words he understands. If a hundred thousand or a million people like some other book, that does not make it any better for anyone else.
The true goodness of a book can be understood only by its author, who knows incorruptibly whether it is exactly what he wanted it to be. For everyone else, it is only a matter of taste. Not even a million flies buzzing around a dog dropping prove that shit is objectively good. But the flies are entitled to their opinion. So am I.
And honestly: my experience of life in general, literature included, is that when I see the flies really swarming somewhere, there is rarely anything there that makes any pleasant impression on me at all.
