Some Words

Last night I found myself 48 pages away from the end of the Cairo Trilogy. It was a bitter sweet feeling. As I had first started in on the novels, I had been frustrated at almost every turn. I only liked one character, and he was barely a character by the start of the second novel.

It’s a long slog, 1,313 pages in the Everyman edition, and while I pride myself on not giving up on novels, at around page 350, I have to admit I was thinking about it. Then, something happened around page 800. I had made in through 450 pages that I didn’t hate, but didn’t really love. Suddenly, I found myself rethinking the entire book. I came to love it. I started worrying about the characters. I hadn’t felt this involved in a character’s hopes and dreams for years.

I have harped on the values of keeping narratives short. Even at 350 pages, a novel is long enough that a movie must condense it. That is is good. A novel exists to give form to narratives so long that they cannot be contained in any other form. More than any other form, the novel is allowed to sprawl.

Yet, the Cairo Trilogy does not sprawl, not really, and for once, I think that was what frustrated me from the outset. As the novels grew and more characters were introduced, the scope of the action opened up. Large portions of the first novel take place in a single house. As the work continues, greater and greater portions of Cairo are opened up. Likely the feeling of place is greater in Arabic, but eventually I did get a feel of the world that the characters were in.

And over the course of those thirteen hundred pages, I came to care about the characters who annoyed me. I couldn’t avoid them, so we made peace. By the end, I was thinking of starting over from the beginning again, which I don’t think I’ll do. But I’ve surprised myself by thinking I may come back to this book.

And so I was left with a feeling I had not felt in a long time. I had read a novel over 800 pages, and didn’t feel like I had wasted my time. It was almost enough to make me rush right into the Brother’s Karamazov. I think I’m going to pace myself though, so I settled for David Copperfield divided into 411 discrete chunks… I’ll probably be grumbling about it by around 21.