He is apparently similarly disinterested in puzzling out his novel's central enigma: 'I don't know about Gaby,' says Harry, 40 pages from the end.
In his nonmusical writing, the teasing, puzzling, half-nonsensical "novel" "Tarantula" pales in strangeness next to the matter-of-factly autobiographical "Chronicles".
Coincidentally, James is the subject of Hollinghurst's hero's lackadaisical thesis, and the inspiration for David Lodge's latest novel, a puzzling omission from this year's longlist.
He claims that, once everyone is reading online, individuals will no longer have to struggle with a text alone: You'll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage's true meaning.
In the familiar version of the novel, a puzzling line appears during a scene, late in the book, in which the State's Attorney tries to intimidate Bigger by letting him understand that he has information about other crimes and misdeeds Bigger has committed, including, he says, "that dirty trick you and your friend Jack pulled off in the Regal Theatre".
Many of Laxness's books long ago made it into English, and the long delay in translating so marvelous a novel seems puzzling, though I gather there were some commercial worries that the book, with its connections to saga conventions and its late-17th-century setting, might be "too Icelandic".
This brings the novel to a puzzling conclusion.
They offered eyefuls of people and nature that seemed at once familiar and novel, conventional and puzzling.
A solitary reader, brooding over an obscure contemporary novel, or slowly puzzling out a page of "Finnegans Wake," is suddenly not so solitary.
