Literary Cowardice

No matter how much I chastise myself or how often I remind myself of Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, I find it virtually impossible to abandon a book once I start it. Sometimes I take a LONG break (Donna Tartt's The Little Friend still has my bookmark 158 pages in from a vacation two years ago, and I'm still interested in what happens. I've just been more interested in other things since then.), but rarely do I just give up entirely if I have any interest at all in how things turn out. If I'm 50 pages in and don't care two pins about what happens, that's another story....

So yesterday I started Karin Fossum's The Indian Bride. When we were on vacation, I noticed an interesting woman reading it, and judging both the person and the book by their covers, I thought it was worth a try. I actually started with her first book translated to English, Don't Look Back, and thought it was okay. I was a little disappointed, because she's Norwegian, the book's set in Norway, but really, there was absolutely no reason it couldn't have been set in a rural area of Iowa. (Just because I'm reading fiction doesn't mean I'm not expecting or at least hoping to learn!) And the translation is more than adequate, but a truly gifted translator is required if a book isn't going to come out with a slight woodchip quality to the writing - precise, bland, stiff. (I'm still not sure if Carlos Ruiz Zafón is a literary genius or if Lucia Graves is - go read The Shadow of the Wind right now, and develop an appreciation for why your college professors demanded a certain translation of Dante.) Still, it was okay, and when we stopped in the library over the weekend, The Indian Bride, her fourth book, was available so I snatched it up.

The story is that a confirmed Norwegian bachelor decides to get married, heads to India, finds a wife, and on the day she's to arrive, due to an accident, he's not able to meet her at the airport and she's later discovered beaten to death not far from his home. Small town, few but likely suspects, etc., etc.

I'm not giving anything away here - this all happens within the first thirty pages or so. I know because that's all I read. The bachelor is such a decent, kind man, so earnest and hopeful, and you spend most of the beginning of the book with him, viewing things from his point of view. He's just a nice guy, and knowing what was going to happen to him was enough for me. I felt so kindly toward the character that I just didn't want to see him devastated in detail. Imagining it was enough, so I skip to the end, figured out enough to determine who committed the murder, and put the book down.

I don't believe that's ever happened to me before, but I just couldn't bear it. It seemed sadistic (or masochistic) to stick around and watch him be devastated, watch what I had a vague sense of be writ painfully large, so I just bowed out, opted not to the take the journey. Of course, the character still has to, but somehow, not having a witness seemed better. You know how when you trip, the first thing you do is look around to make sure no one saw you and somehow that's a little bit of saving grace? It seemed to be a little bit like that: if I didn't witness it, then it didn't happen or it was less painful. Odd, but I don't know how else to explain it. Anyway, I'm a chicken or overly empathetic, but I know the end, and sometimes, knowing how things turn out has to be enough.