Just finished reading "The Cunning Man" by Robertson Davies. It took me almost 2 months to read the 514 pages. Let me give you a sense of what reading this novel is like. Imagine trudging through 20 pages of the most pretentious, over-educated, self-important, could-never-possibly-occur-ever dialogue, just to get to a shiny kernel of truth revealed in 3 sentences. That's what this novel was like. Although it has wonderful subtleties, it is overall not an enjoyable read, but that said it has the deeper touches that make it "literary", at least in a Chapters/Indigo kind of classification.

An example just off the top of my head, the story tells the story of a man's life, from childhood through to old age. And the childhood seems to be full and rich, while the intervening years speed up quickly. This mirrors most people's experience of life, childhood and youth seeming to take so long, while our lives rush us older through the next years.

And the characters are all "failures." There are no heros in this novel. When you get to the end, when everyone is old, all anyone can see is what they didn't do. It doesn't end on some artificial high. As the saying goes, "Every man's life is a tragedy."

It's not recommended reading unless you're going to be in a bomb shelter for several weeks and you need something that'll get you through hours of nothingness.