What I'm reading

I'm currently struggling through Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil. The book has been on my shelves for around fifteen years now, and I have made several attempts to read it. All have so far been defeated at approximately the point that I've now reached. Why? Well, let me quote you one sentence more or less at random (and please feel free to skip to the end of it):

The unmastering, once having taken place, leaves nothing behind to be mastered, and the great life-bearing tides of enkindling and extinguishing, absorbed by the vast silence of the perception-drained, law-drained ignominy, these too were silenced; likewise the tides of beginning and ending, the tides of blazing perturbation and mildly trickling reassurance, their mutual regeneration, that turns one into the other, were silenced; the universal entity, having forever lost its breath, its substance, its movement, its cohesion, was now stripped down to a silent glance amidst the universal silence, was now stripped down to an encompassing view of pure nakedness in its visible invisibility, stripped to its glanceless-glancing, unalterable, final non-existence; stony the staring eye above, stony the staring eye below, oh, now it had come, the long-awaited, the always-feared, it had come at last, now he beheld it, now he must look into the namelessly inconceivable, into the inconceivable namelessness, for the sake of which he had fled through a lifetime, for the sake of which he had done everything to prepare for a premature ending of this life, and it was not into the eye of night that he looked, for the night had vanished into the petrification, and it was not fear, not horror, for it was greater than any fear or any horror, it was the eye of stony emptiness, the torn-open eye of a fate, which no longer participated in any occurrence, neither in the passing nor in the annulling of time, neither in creation nor in discreation, an unparticipating eye in whose glance there was no beginning, no ending and no concurrence, released from subsistence and survival, bound to subsist and survive only through the threat and the looming suspense, only by the element of time in the waiting intervals that still continued, reflected in the continuing existence of the threatened one and in his threat-fearing glance, the threat and the threatened cast out to one another in the dregs of time.

The paradox is that a sample, even at this extravagant length, is not that bad because you get to read it out of context, but damn me if there aren't some 120 pages of this stuff, endlessly run on and endlessly self-repeating, and they have defeated me time and again. Expletives rise, undeletable, to my lips - but I persevere. I am determined to get through it this time, even at the price of skipping the odd few dozen pages now and then. Once past page 199 (!) the going gets much easier, the remaining 230 pages are written in a very different style. I shall have to try to find a German-language copy, to see whether this unfelicity is Broch's fault or that of the translator, Jean Starr Untermeyer.

The story is interesting and well told: The poet Virgil realizes, on his deathbed, that he has wasted his life and prostituted his talents in rendering unto Caesar that which should have been Art's. Those parts of the book where Broch dispenses with fevered inner monologue and condescends to a little dialogue or even, whisper it, conventional narrative, are very well written indeed.

The book was praised by people whose judgement I respect (George Steiner in particular) and is said to be one of the greatest books of the previous century (don't you love saying that?). Well, I too have read Joyce and Proust, and I don't think that this is in their league. Perhaps the remaining 310 pages will change my mind.