Why Read collects some of Will Self’s essays from 2001 to 2021, most containing a literary angle, but some are about random topics like Self’s personal history with Australia, a trip to the haunting modernist ruins of Chernobyl and the ongoing environmental crisis. It’s a decent collection that’s got some stuff I enjoyed, some stuff I didn’t, and some stuff that was a bit of both!
His Literary Hub pieces - Why Read?, How Should We Read?, What to Read? and Reading for Writers - that give the book its name, were mostly underwhelming. For all his deployment of syntactical obfuscation - dammit, now I’m doing it! - I mean, big words what sounds right clever but ain’t as hard as it finks it is, the points of these essays range from underwhelming to obvious.
His conclusions to the above questions: it’s freeing to enjoy books whenever, wherever (Shakira 4eva), we should read indiscriminately and often, don’t be afraid of new tech (Kindle), and to read widely. All of which is, well, duh - to me anyway. Though How Should We Read? does explain why Self deliberately uses complex language: he believes it’s important to challenge yourself with books that take you out of your comfort zone in order to experience life and the art form in its widest possible sense, as well as developing yourself intellectually. That is, to read as a gourmand rather than a gourmet - read fun, easy reads, but also read demanding, tough books too. And I do agree with Self in that sense, and, while the messaging is banal, he makes his points in a not-unentertaining way.
(If you’re unfamiliar with Self’s famous wordiness, here are some examples of words I noticed in this book - be honest: how many do you understand immediately, without looking them up? Banjax, pullulating, velleity, epiphenomenal, vermiculated, a “Dionysian timpani”.)
Some bookish essays cover simply uninteresting topics like Self’s essay on how shelves are becoming less relevant now that digital book sales are booming, or, in A Care Home For Novels, how serious literary novels will continue to be written albeit read on a smaller scale. Some essays are just a title - Being a Character, Literary Time - where I can’t recall a thing about the content.
That’s a repeated problem I find with Self. His essays are often meandering and unclear as to their point which makes them difficult to grasp while reading them and makes them next to impossible to remember afterwards. Perhaps that’s a point he hasn’t considered in his complex approach to writing: clarity of prose, while “easy to read”, also leads to more impactful material on its audience?
His non-literary essays are my least favourite. I didn’t care for reading about architecture or skyscrapers in Isenshard (conflating Isengard from Lord of the Rings with the London structure, the Shard), or at least the way Self writes about them, or his time down under in Australia and I.
He repeatedly returns to the subject of the internet and the shift of book sales from the classic bookshop to online hubs like Amazon, eBay, and digital libraries. None of which I found particularly noteworthy, except for his repeated use of the weirdly sexual sounding BDDM - his abbreviation for Bi-Directional Digital Media, that is the assemblage of computers, the web and the internet. The only technological-tinged essay I enjoyed was The Last Typewriter Engineer, where Self talks about his brief fling with writing on typewriters and had me google image-searching all the models he mentioned - some are pretty swish.
His Playboy article on Chernobyl was decent, written around the time of the Fukushima disaster. He walks the deserted ruins and it’s an eerie tour. It’s also a little depressing how many times humans continue to cause environmental disasters like this. There are also elements of his environmental crisis essay, Apocalypse Then, which are engaging.
My favourite essays were when he focused on a particular work or author. His introduction to Junky (William S. Burroughs’ best book) is superb - Self is also a former heroin addict - and I liked reading his thoughts on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, particularly as I’ll probably never read it (I remain Conrad-phobic having endured Heart of Darkness too many times in my youth - not because the story was traumatic but, good lord, Conrad’s prose; the tedium, the tedium!). He also praises, in a rather backhand way, Orwell in St George for the French.
Even in his longer, more convoluted pieces, there are snippets I liked such as learning about Kafka’s life in Kafka’s Wound, seeing Self’s criticism of Karl Ove Knausgard’s autobiographical My Struggle series (I also don’t like them) in On Writing Memoir, and his comments on Bernard Schlink’s The Reader (overrated) in Absent Jews and Invisible Executioners.
If you’re a bookish person like me, you’re probably bound to get a fair amount out of Will Self’s Why Read, even if - as everyone always says about every collection, fictional or non - it’s a mixed bag. It’s a cliched statement for a reason!
If you’re in the mood to sample a smaller offering by this author, and if, like The A-Team, you can find it, check out The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker instead, which is a fun little book collecting Self’s food review columns where he eats at and evaluates everyday establishments like McDonald’s and KFC.
No comments:
Post a Comment