Somehow I feel books need time, like pickles. A little bit of sun of years, time and distance - either in space or of time. Space is becoming similar amongst the new writers across the world. Unless they herald from a very different life of a very different times than modern readers, the world unfolding in a novel is too close to the lived reality of a reader. And for me, somehow that doesn't work very well. I can read it, I can enjoy it too, but the satisfaction that sometimes comes on finishing a book from a different time and place - part of it is the difficult joys of literature, part of it is just displacement and the rich reward of a new world - is quite sublime.
Distance provides the frame to hold more than proximity does. Makes the unfurling world rich in detail and narrative, and at times, wholeness, which because the current modern world is still too close, still resolving itself into patterns which can become clear only after an age has passed by, somehow miss out on the deep dark ripe fruits of time. In the reader's mind perhaps, because a writer is always the same, writing from a point in time, sometimes at a remove, sometimes from the thick midst of story. So it must be the reader that brings time to the table, time and distance, to stories of a time and place, a world apart from the one the reader lives in.
One learns new things about oneself as one grows. I sort of find this again and again about myself, at the closure of every book. The depth of joy is different with books of different time periods, and more so from a different life. Guess the joys of modern fiction will be preserved for future readers, for us, at least for me, the two millennia and more that have passed and have left their works like seashells on a seashore are joys plenty.
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