Perils of reading a big, fat book

There are several reasons why you should be wary of picking up any novel that's fatter than 500 pages (let us call it a "Big Read", for the purposes of this article). The first, obviously, is time: are you positive that you will be able to devote a chunk of your life to this book for the next two to three weeks? Most people my age, I know, cannot commit to anything for more than a day, unless it's pizza coupons, in which case they wished they had a machine that printed 'em. This constraint is, of course, predicated on the need for closure. If you're one of those people who can shun a book halfway without a shred of remorse, go pick up that Big Read right now. I speak here for neurotics; patients such as myself, who have trouble with unfinished business.

The time factor almost stopped me from discovering Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, a German novel that first appeared in 1978, more than three decades after the author's death. The English translation runs into more than 1,100 pages. Musil's masterpiece was recommended to me quite a few years ago, but I only ended up reading it last year. I thought I was unlucky, but not as starved of luck as the author himself. Consider this: Musil started writing the book in 1921, and it quickly became a bit of a vanity project. The thoughts, emotions and motivations of the protagonist Ulrich, a 32-year-old mathematician, began to mirror Musil's own worldview.

What's more, the novel just refused to finish: Musil would spend the last 22 years of his life trying to complete the digressive, never-ending narrative. The book had, by then, forced the author and his family into a life of penury.

This is the second great risk of picking up a Big Read: the "vanity project blues", by which I mean a generally over-indulgent air found in certain novels: the result, typically, of dozens of drafts and endless rewrites; literary overcooking, as it were. One got more than a strong whiff of "vanity project blues" from 1Q84, Haruki Murakami's 1,300-page (in paperback) monster that was published in English in 2011. Now, Murakami-mania is typically a noisy affair, but even by his lofty standards, this book scored high on the hype chart. Even the back cover blurb seemed to be written like those ominous-sounding trailers favoured by Hollywood science fiction blockbusters. "This is the real world. There is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons under the sky. In this world, the fates of two people, Tengo and Aomame, are closely intertwined. They are each, in their own way, doing something very dangerous. And in this world, there seems to be no way to save them both. Something extraordinary is happening."

In this regard, a novel that I thoroughly enjoyed last year was Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, an almost 900-page whopper that ended up winning The Pulitzer. Tartt isn't a prolific writer by any standards. This is her third novel in a nearly three-decade-long career. The last one, The Little Friend, was published in 2005. They've been getting steadily fatter as well; The Secret History was around 500 pages, The Little Friend was 600-odd pages long, and The Goldfinch is by far her longest. More importantly for her fans, Tartt's writing has matured over the years, without losing its trademark energy and acuity of insight. If The Secret History is touted as one of the most thrilling literary fiction titles of the '80s, the same can be said of The Goldfinch and this decade so far.

The Goldfinch was the first Big Read that I'd read for a while, and it reminded me of the pleasures of immersing yourself in a parallel universe for prolonged stretches of time. In the rare Big Read where everything falls into place - plot, characters, tone, linguistic felicity and so on - you find that the book has changed you in a way that's easier to understand than to articulate. Even as your wrists hurt, you'll find yourself worrying more about the rapidly shrinking mass of pages to the right of your thumb. For me, this happened with Roberto Bolaño's 2666, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, the most famous Indian Big Read of all time. It's a heady feeling; one, I dare say, that cannot quite be matched by the most perfect little novella in the world.