On the slow novel.
Why some books are read in sixteen sittings, and how that reading is a different act, with different weather, than the one we keep calling reading.
I have been reading The Magic Mountain since November. It is now early April. I am roughly two-thirds of the way through. I am, if you ask me on a given Tuesday, prepared to admit that I may never finish.
The standard read of this admission would be that I am a slow reader, or a bad one, or that the book itself is at fault — too long, too dense, too German. I do not think any of those are true. What is true is that I am reading the book at the rate the book wants to be read at, which is approximately twelve pages a sitting, with several days between sittings, in the small hour that arrives after a meal and before sleep.
This is not a complaint. It is a description of a kind of reading I had almost forgotten was possible.
The weather of a book.
Every novel has a weather. Some books are bright noon — you sit down at ten, you finish at four, the whole world the book describes has been crossed in a single light. Other books are autumn weeks. They want to be returned to in the way one returns to a season: changed by small accumulation, never quite the same room twice.
What I learned this winter, reading Mann at twelve pages a night, is that the second kind of book is not slower than the first. It is the same speed. The reader is just at a different scale. The book of which you read a hundred pages in a sitting is being skimmed; the book of which you read twelve is being walked.
The resumption.
The technical problem of slow reading is the resumption. When you set down a book for three days, you forget where the characters are. Most of contemporary publishing has decided that this is a defect — the book should be designed so that one can pick it up at any moment without effort. Which is why most contemporary novels are also, suspiciously, under three hundred pages.
Mann does not solve the resumption problem; he refuses it. The Magic Mountain is built on the assumption that you will, between sittings, hold the entire sanatorium in mind as a place — the dining room, the deck-chairs, the snow — and that you will return not by remembering plot but by remembering the building. This is how one returns to a city, also.
What it is for.
The slow novel rehearses, in private, the muscle that a reader needs to do the rest of the work Aravien is for: returning. Returning to a region, to a pathway, to a writer one read twenty years ago and who has, in the meantime, become a different writer because one is a different reader.
I will probably finish The Magic Mountain by August. Or I will not, and I will start it again in the autumn at the bottom of the mountain, knowing perfectly well what is at the top. Either reading is the right reading. Neither is a failure.
Next month, on the corridor scene from In the Mood for Love. I have been waiting for April to write it.
— M.