Many of the longest and fattest books ever written are not essential reads – not even for someone in quarantine for the rest of their life. No offence to L Ron Hubbard, whose Mission Earth comes in at 1.2 million words, but there are more worthwhile choices to consider for those moments when you have a bit of time on your hands.
Published in 1862, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (around 655,000 words) became an instant bestseller and impoverished readers even pooled their resources to acquire a copy. Told in five volumes, the trials and tribulations of Jean Valjean and his adopted daughter Cosette play out in easily digestible scenes. Although not recommended to anyone who is easily offended by extraordinary coincidences, it lends itself well to the wider themes thrown up by our current predicament. As Hugo said: “Wherever men go in ignorance or despair, wherever women sell themselves for bread, wherever children lack a book to read or a warm hearth, Les Misérables knocks at the door and says, ‘Open up, I am here for you.’”
Dubbed by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for grownup people”, George Eliot’s “study of provincial life”, Middlemarch (880 pages) was published in the 1870s and features a giant cast of characters. A novel all about compromise and people trying to do the right thing in impossible circumstances – I know! – there are a few mentions of outbreaks of cholera that might be pleasing for readers of a dark disposition and at a strict 50 or 60 pages at a time is well-suited to a 14-day self-isolation. Give or take.
Rebecca West’s 1942 “epic masterpiece” of non-fiction, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (approximately half a million words) is widely regarded as an essential meditation on the mood of prewar Europe and one of the most profound travel books of all time. The author called it “a wretched, complicated book that won’t interest anybody”. Why not prove her wrong?
Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (871 pages) was written in 1960 in secrecy and Grossman died thinking nobody would ever read it, especially after the KGB raided his flat and destroyed everything including his typewriter ribbons. A friend smuggled a manuscript to the west and it depicts Grossman’s memories of the frontline during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. If you like it, the even more sprawling 900-page prequel, Stalingrad, came out in translation in English for the first time last year.
The pseudonymous Elena Ferrante has said that she would like her Neapolitan quartet (1,700 pages) to be read “as a single novel”. It tells the story of the friendship between Lenu and Lila, looking back from 2010 to their 1950s Naples childhoods and meticulously (and beautifully) cataloguing every societal development and life event over seven decades. The intensity of the relationships is widely thought to be one of the most accurate depictions of women’s emotional lives in fiction.
• Viv Groskop’s Au Revoir, Tristesse: Lessons in Happiness from French Literature (Abrams) is published in June.
