Abridged books can make you read worthy but unreadable classics that you would otherwise keep aside. Pradeep Sebastian takes a look.
A book that a few friends and I repeatedly read in college (it's too embarrassing now to say which one, but some may recognise it) had a gimmick in it that tickled us no end. The plot, the author informed you right at the start, was a retelling of a famous adventure book about pirates, swordfights and true love. Except the author was going to tell us only the 'good parts' version. That was his term for it: the good parts, which meant cutting to the chase, keeping all the action in and leaving out the boring bits. This inspired us to play a little literary game of our own which we (naturally) called the Good Parts Version: each of us would pick a hefty classic and show the others what a good parts version of the story would read like.
Such as leaving out all the chapters about whaling in Moby Dick, the pages and pages of agrarian reforms in Anna Karenina, thick descriptions in the books of Eliot, Thackeray, James, nearly all of Ulysses except a few chapters, all the drawing room customs and rituals from Austen, and several characters from Dickens while keeping only Alyosha's story in The Brothers Karmazov. (Some of us went as far as doing this with film, re-recording our favourite movies on VHS with only the good parts left in). I was pleasantly surprised, then, to recently discover that some publishers are thinking of bringing out compact versions of classics. The idea, they say, is not to cut as much as weed out. They promise that the books will be "sympathetically edited".
An abridged classic is nothing new, but these publishers would like adult readers to consider the compact version as a worthwhile edition to read and own. I think a lot of contemporary novels can benefit from slimmer editions. After all, we do enjoy movie adaptations of classics that reduce the book to half its length. A compact version of all Thomas Pynchon and James Michner novels, for instance, will make it possible for us to finish the book that we started and put down. I'm not sure I would be tempted to read Stephen King even if he was trimmed down to 50 pages, but I'm certain his overwritten novels could use the axe. And I'm quite sure there is a lot of non-fiction out there that could be more to the point.
Long after my friends had abandoned the 'good parts version' game, I continued amusing myself with it, except this time I picked on contemporary fiction. Modern classics and bestsellers I've always taken to be sacrosanct and untouchable such as Remembrance of Things Past, Lolita, 1984, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Tropic of Cancer, The Naked and the Dead, The Lord of the Rings, Atlas Shrugged, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Watership Down, Gravity's Rainbow, and Midnight's Children.
I also realised that it's not just fat books that need paring down, but thin ones too. I would certainly welcome compact versions of these modern books, and urge those who've given up on reading literature to give these a try. They just might find the length inviting enough to begin, say, Lolita, and actually finish it. If they really admired the 'good parts version', they can always go back and read the complete text.
There are, however, some books that should stay bulky. Because that's their purpose. I'm thinking of the same book, too: A Suitable Boy. Seth wrote it with an intention to draw readers back to one of those leisurely 19th century narratives. The idea is to let you immerse yourself in the story and not hurry up. The reader's wish halfway through the book for it to move faster won't work here, defeating the purpose of beginning a novel like this one. He wants you to take as much pleasure reading it as he had in writing it. Charles Palliser offered the same sort of reading experience in The Quincunx.
A colleague never tires of telling me of how suspicious she is of books that are gripping and move too quickly. "I want a book that I can wallow in," is her lament. How often do you hear that? I sort of understand that, though. It reminds me of something I read in a Pauline Kael movie review once. I forget which movie she was talking about, but at some point she digresses to tell us that the highs in a book can really be experienced as highs only after a lengthy period of lows. As an example she points to Levin's transformation in Anna Karenina. He goes off to live with the farmers and then we get some 40 or so pages of agrarian reforms. The reader is tempted to skip it and get to something eventful. But Tolstoy is in no hurry.
If you stick with the agrarian reforms though, you will suddenly encounter at the end of it, Levin's radiant moment of transformation. And, says Kael, it feels radiant and gives a reader such a buzz because you patiently waded through all those even, uneventful passages. Like life- an exhilarating moment after a flat period, made all the more interesting because life had been so mundane until then. So, that's your reward for letting the book take you where it wants: it suddenly lights up.
Personalities 
A book that a few friends and I repeatedly read in college (it's too embarrassing now to say which one, but some may recognise it) had a gimmick in it that tickled us no end. The plot, the author informed you right at the start, was a retelling of a famous adventure book about pirates, swordfights and true love. Except the author was going to tell us only the 'good parts' version. That was his term for it: the good parts, which meant cutting to the chase, keeping all the action in and leaving out the boring bits. This inspired us to play a little literary game of our own which we (naturally) called the Good Parts Version: each of us would pick a hefty classic and show the others what a good parts version of the story would read like.
I also realised that it's not just fat books that need paring down, but thin ones too. I would certainly welcome compact versions of these modern books, and urge those who've given up on reading literature to give these a try. They just might find the length inviting enough to begin, say, Lolita, and actually finish it. If they really admired the 'good parts version', they can always go back and read the complete text.
