Books nobody has read

There's one of those in a lot of languages: Cervantes' "Don Quijote" in Spanish, Joyce's "Ulyses" in English, Proust's "A la recherche..." in French; in their countries, everybody would claim they are the best books ever written in their long literary traditions, but if you ask who has actually read them, I'd bet there are very few people.

"Don Quijote" is not very difficult, it's quite amusing, clever and funny, but it is long very long, gigantic. So long it is not mandatory at school. Besides it's in movies, at TV, even cartoons, some of the chapters are well-known. Who feels in need of reading it?

"Ulyses" is very hard to read, it's written in a kind of own English with a mixture of French, German and Dutch. Not mandatory at school, how could it be, since it is so demanding and arduous. However, lots of British people have the book at home.

"A la recherche..." is probably marvellous and well written, but somehow pedantic, arrogant and pompous. Also very long, but 100 pages are enough to bore you to death. Who has read it in France, I don't know.


Similarly, there's philosophers hardly anybody has read. Kant has been such an influential thinker in the modern West, after him nobody dares to discuss about metaphisics anymore (that is, from a phylosophical point of view). Wittgenstein wrote his Tractatus, which nobody understands, and nowadays it is mentioned even in a recent movie, a thriller.

Maybe common people like me, more or less educated, are simply not able to grasp such a complex stuff. It would be as if somebody with no technical background wanted to understand let's say how a nuclear bomb is build. And the bomb has changed the world also, the way people think.

Another possibility is that some good ideas overwhelm us, the arguments backing them being so sound and clever, and we can only repeat them and repeat them again. And I guess it's ok. I feel so lost I'm reading a book on history of philosophy these days, as if I was going to find somebody telling me Kant was not right. As if I was going to find somebody say "El Quijote" is not such a good book.