Today, I'd like to talk about a part of my job that appears simple and completely straightforward, but is really nothing of the sort: writing summaries. If you've checked out any of the study guides on Classic Literature in Translation, you've noticed that the first thing I always provide is a brief overview of the book at hand. Plot, format, setting, characters: all of these go into one of my summaries, without any hyper-complex analysis or opinion. Sounds straightforward, right?
Wrong. A good summary isn't a laundry list; it's a smart, selective synopsis of a book's most important parts. And it should give you (yes, even in 500 words or so) a firm sense of that book's style, subtleties, and big ideas. It's quite a challenge to summarize a complex short story like Kafka's "A Hunger Artist", a novel of ideas like Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, or an intricate monologue like Albert Camus's The Fall. Yet somehow, I've summarized them all.
What, to your thinking, are some of the books that are hardest to summarize? Sometimes, the scope, size, or ambition of a work makes summary difficult. For instance, I've summarized Anton Chekhov's "A Boring Story". There are plenty of interesting episodes and psychological twists that I couldn't fit into my summary. Now imagine tackling a longer Russian work, like Tolstoy's War and Peace.
But there's another reason why a book or story can baffle even the best summarizers. A few of the works I've summarized (Calvino's Invisible Cities, Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote") aren't dauntingly long. Yet they use strange formats: formats that can require pages upon pages to adequately consider and analyze. And summarizers, alas, don't get pages upon pages.
So think this over, write in, and let me know which books (from your own experience) defy any attempts at summary. Who knows, maybe I'll do study guides for a few your picks. I'm always up for a challenge.