Giving up on and sticking to books

It's only the last five years or so that I've discovered the advantages of reading more than one book at a time. When I was younger, I used to be more disciplined and doggedly stuck to one book until I'd finished it. (How I survived while plowing through Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game I still don't know.) I also rarely gave up on books. Even with ones I didn't like, I "wanted to know how it ended". I still remember the exhilarating feeling when for the first time in my life I - gasp - checked the solution at the end of a crime story so I wouldn't have to read it through. I was seriously out of sympathy with the author's moralising tone, and laying the book aside felt liberating. I've not looked back since. It's still a wrench to give up a book altogether, but when it happens, in most cases, the feeling of relief will tell you you've made the right choice. In order not to give up to easily on tough reads which you suspect will be worth it in the end - Les Mis, say, or Strindberg's The Son of a Servant which I'm trying to get through at the moment - parallel reading of something more lightweight is invaluable.

Parallel reading has its flaws, though. You can have the bad luck to get stuck in both books at roughly the same time. This is what happened to me, which is an explanation why so few blog entries lately have been book-related: besides Strindberg, I decided to read yet another Tudor novel, this time about Lady Jane Grey. However, the book proved plodding and exposition-heavy, so in my spare time I was faced with the alternatives 1) reading Strindberg 2) reading a plodding novel on Lady Jane Grey 3) finding other forms of reading matter or doing something else entirely. Needless to say, I returned again and again to alternative number 3). Finally, last night, after some sneak peeks to make sure it wouldn't suddenly take off and get dramatically better, I took a deep breath and laid the Lady Jane Grey novel aside. Free at last! Now I'll start on the novel several Swedish book bloggers seem most obsessed about instead - Donna Tartt's The Secret History. I bet that whatever it is, it isn't plodding.

But I will get through Strindberg as well. It's not as if he wasn't good. He writes with great verve and deserves his status as a classic author. But - and this is about as original as saying that Thomas Hardy is depressing - he can be very tiresome. It's strange to think that his contemporaries found him tiresome as well, though probably for somewhat different reasons. Strindberg would perhaps have been saddened to know that his ideas, which he himself quite clearly thought of as cutting edge, still have a tendency to provoke - or at least make you roll your eyes - a hundred years after his death. Or else he would have been absolutely thrilled.

The Son of a Servant nearly lost me at the beginning - the first chapter is entitled, in true misery-memoir style, Hungry and Afraid. As Strindberg's alter ego's family get wealthier and the hero himself grows up, however, Strindberg lightens up. What may surprise people who mostly associate him with doom-laden plays about toxic relationships is that he has a sense of humour, and sometimes even enough self-irony to make fun of the grand designs of his alter ego Johan. Though mostly Johan gets off lightly. Quarrels with his family, fallings-out with his friends, academic failures, career changes as frequent as Richard Carstone's: they never seem to be his fault. Other scapegoats are found - mostly good old society, once more taking the rap for a young man's disappointments.

Strindberg has great powers of observation - it's when he starts to analyse his observations and make them into Grand Ideas that the trouble starts. There are enough memorable scenes along the way to make persevering worthwhile (quite apart from the fact that giving up on Strindberg would be a far graver thing than giving up on a historical novel or crime story). Still, I wish I'd picked something a little shorter by Strindberg to read - something about 200 pages long, say. This, unsurprisingly, is how far I've got with The Son of a Servant.