Anti-literature

When I go to the library or a book shop, I have a really hard time finding a book I could bear with. Mabye I don't like literature. Or maybe there are just so many books out there that I have zero interest for. Does that sound arrogant? Well, that's because I am.

1. For starters, I have a very limited tolerance for storytelling bravura. "That's a book with an interesting story." OK, I will avoid that one, then. That is, if I am not told anything about the way the story is told, from what perspective, etc. "An epic story about three generations of women..." Sorry, I'm very anti-humanist when it comes to levnadsöden (a very Heideggerian Swedish word, it's not easy to come up with an English translation... "Life story" does not really capture it.). In addition to boring me to death, these "epic stories" take for granted an outlook on life I'd like to call, for lack of other words, heterosexist. I have in mind stories that in some sense revolve around Reproduction, the "fate of the generations", a fate built on the attraction "between male and female", each equipped with their set of ideosynchrasies. There is a certain branch of literature which is fond of looking down on humanity as simply a bunch of "interesting stories". One hundred years of solitude is the paradigm of Epic in this sense. As I remember the book, Márquez' style alters between contempt for humanity in general and an even greater contempt for the particular human being, who is always reduced to a foolish type/psychological tic.

2. "Literary descriptions". Let me provide you with an example, from The Prussian Officer, a short story by my nemesis Nr. 1, DH Lawrence:

The captain was a tall man of about forty, gray at the temples. He had a handsome, finely knit figure, and was one of the best horsemen in the West. [...] The captain had reddish-brown, stiff hair, that he wore short upon his skull. His mustache was also cut short and bristly over a full, brutal mouth. His face was rather rugged, the cheeks thin. Perhaps the man was the more handsome for the deep lines in his face, the irritable tension of his brow, which gave him the look of a man who fights with life. His fair eyebrows stood bushy over light blue eyes that were always flashing with cold fire. He was a Prussian aristocrat, haughty and overbearing. But his mother had been a Polish countess.

Here, Lawrence grabs onto the idea that our appearance tells something about the persons we are. This is not completely ill-founded, but it is more the use to which he puts descriptions I have problems with here. Thus, I have no qualms with descriptions of physical appearances per se. But when layed out like this, disattached from the rest of the story, as a prolegomena to it, a disengaged introduction, then the desccription has already killed my imagination and I start to feel that there's nothing left to reveal, the "character" of the persons have already been circumscribed. The characters are easily flattened out because of this. At this point, the author has simply to fool around with his predestined puppets a bit, and they may perhaps change a bit, depending on the things that bump into their set of character traits.

It's another matter altogether if physical appearance is described from a particular point of view (by another character, for example), in a context where it is relevant. Not as a presentation of puppets.

3. Love stories are very rarely interesting to me. I've read a few, and appreciated a few. But usually not.

4. Detective stories. I don't get this genre at all. As a kid, I read some sleazy Swedish author who re-wrote the same story about the detective who drinks too much, has trouble with the womenfolk etc., etc, a thousand times. Only the crimes varied, but there was not much variation there, either. Why did I keep reading? The satisfaction of recognizing familiar patterns. "Whodunit"-stories simply don't have the force to engage me. I am unmoved by them and I can't even muster up enough energy to follow the story. So I stop reading.

5. If a book is presented as a "historical novel" on the blurb of the book, I am immediately turned off. It's not that I crave for the Contemporary. But I don't like novels whose only charm is the author's industrious historical research.

--- That leaves me with almost no books. But there are a few. Now, I am reading Léonora Miano's L'intérieur de la nuit (Inside the night). I got interested in the book when I read that her style of writing is inspired by music, jazz. Her novel unravels a series of horrendous events in a fictional African country. She depicts, in raw details, what happens to people who parttake, or witness, cruelties. At the same time, social interaction is described vividly, not without irony or humor, but always with compassion.

--- And, yes, I shouldn't complain so much. But I can't help myself...