The Blog

There's a way in Russian of saying that you've read something without specifying that you've completed it. Think about how nice a distinction that would be to have at one's fingertips! Did you read that book? Yes, I did. (Da, chital, which, I suppose, if you want to get technical, would mean something like, "Yes, I engaged in the activity of reading," without particular reference to one stage of it or another, especially its completion.) Would being able to say that to others and to oneself make it any easier to stop reading something before the end, I wonder? I've often been surprised at the--sometimes quite elaborate--rules people come up with for how much of a book or essay or story they are allowed to read before moving on to something else. Allowed by whom?

Like music, stories have dynamics. There are the louder and the softer moments, the crescendos and the rests, and the author achieves these expressive elements through a careful mix of tone, language, and plot elements. It’s difficult, in literature, to pull off an abrupt dynamic shift—unlike, say, in rock music, where it can be enough for the Pixies to launch from a whispered verse to a chorus’s gut-rupturing yell. Much literature thrives, rather, on dynamic tension, on elevating “quiet,” mundane events, to an unexpected forte, and on the containing of the louder moments of human existence—murder, betrayal, loss, violence—within focused, poetically precise language.