It's natural to assume that long books are, automatically, difficult books. Yet the truth is that some massive novels are pretty quick reads. (In my opinion at least, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's imposing One Hundred Years of Solitude and Boris Pasternak's monumental Doctor Zhivago fall into this category.) But today, I'd like to talk about a different exception: short works that are unexpectedly, incredibly difficult to get through.
So what are a few things that can make a short piece of writing such a challenge for its readers? For one, a short work can challenge the assumptions that we readers make--and slow us down in the process. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino only runs to about 150 pages. But it is a remarkably difficult work because it is so radically unlike most traditional short novels. You won't have much luck finding a traditional dialogue, character, or plot in Invisible Cities. What you will find is pages and pages of elaborate, dreamlike, confusing description.
Other authors create other difficulties. Fiction writers like Kafka and Gogol mix everyday events and wild fantasies in disorienting ways. Reading them, you often have to stop and say "Wait, what on earth did I just read?" Then there are authors, like Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, who use even their shortest works to explore huge moral and philosophical questions. It's not enough to skim them. You have to think, and think pretty hard, as you're reading through.
What are some of the hardest short stories, short novels, or short poems that you've ever read? And what makes the works on your "Short List" so difficult? And, please, excuse a terrible pun like "Short List." I just couldn't help myself.