Since I read Helen Oyeyemi’s newest book, Parasol Against the Axe, I’ve been recalling books that confused me, that I didn’t think I fully understood, that I’ve wondered about ever since I finished them. Thinking about these books makes me miss my undergraduate days as an English major, when most of my classes involved talking with my fellow students and professors about the various meanings of whatever we’d just read. We could all bring to bear our experiences and bodies of knowledge to posit new interpretations. And, perhaps even better, we would share when meaning eluded us.
It’s tempting to toss books that are confusing. I’ve stopped reading more than a few, like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, because I couldn’t summon the motivation to keep going against the bafflement. That said, sometimes books that are initially confusing turn out to say amazing things about how stories can be told or reveal profound messages among the images and ideas they play with. What I wrestle with is when to keep going and when to set the book aside. Should I have more patience and plow through? Should I set it aside for another time, when I have more mental bandwidth? Or is the book in my hands too confusing to deal with?
To help us think about these questions, here are some of the most confusing books I’ve ever finished and ended up loving.
- The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton
- The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia, by Max Besora
- Censoring an Iranian Love Story, by Shahriar Mandanipour
- Ibid, by Mark Dunn
- If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveler, by Italo Calvino
- One Hundred Twenty-One Days, by Michèle Audin
- Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis