I was talking to a friend about comedic / farcical literature the other day, and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller came up. That made me remember - I first read this book when I was about 15 years old. Or rather I read about 80% of it, didn’t quite finish it that time. I forced myself through it because I had heard it was subversive and intelligent and challenging, and I got nothing out of it. I didn’t see the humor, I didn’t get any political commentary, it was just a series of absurd things happening to absurd characters with no rhyme or reason.
I reread that book two years ago and damn near pissed myself laughing on every other page, but then the ending rolled around and it hit so hard. That sudden switch from absurdist comedy to heavy, bleak, depressing, and then he gives you just this glimmer of hope at the end anyway. I found it absolutely brilliant, and yet I kept thinking back to how none of this connected with me when I first read it.
Do you have books like that? Books that just plain went over your head, that you didn’t have the maturity to appreciate, that were too difficult in style or subject matter, and that you’ve come to appreciate years later?
Oh man I am MADE of this trope. It turned me into the twisted little man I am today. I found /lit/ at about fourteen and went headfirst into the big boy canon. I think what I read was less important than my attitude to reading, I was definitely an insufferable elitist dickhead for most of my twenties even though I didn’t understand half of what I had read in my teens. I thought I understood Celine when I was sixteen! Now that I’ve been in the work force for another sixteen or whatever years I have this dual sense of deep empathy for the guy and also a deep hatred and shunning of his entire shit. I will say that the main positive to come out of it was a rigorous need for books to be “good,” like you can’t go from Marquez at age twelve to Rowling at fourteen and have a good time, you just can’t. I dodged entire waves of Young Adult trash and while what I replaced it with wasn’t all good or comprehensible, I think it’s made my internal vocabulary and reference system much more useful and “”“pure”“”. It fostered a lethal allergy to any kind of Joss Whedon Andy Weir kind of writing and when you can’t deal with that you have to go elsewhere so I’ve found some fantastic stuff in my elitist dickheadery.