The Perpetual Orgy of Reading and Writing

After five decades of failed novels, it’s time to liberate myself from this grand folly. And in reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s love letter to Flaubert, The Perpetual Orgy, I’ve unearthed a few useful clues to explain my literary shipwreck.

What I’ve learned is that Flaubert didn’t love novels—not the world-building, the character arcs, the intricate plots. To him, all that was humbug, a necessary evil. But he needed those scaffolds to reach his true fix—the lapidary, almost erotic thrill of wordcraft itself.

I get that. I share Flaubert’s delight in sculpting sentences so precise, so gleaming, they feel like they’ve been pried from a pirate’s treasure chest. To witness language arranged with clarity and purpose is a divine experience—a moment where we no longer see the world through a glass darkly, but in all its lucid, dazzling glory.

The problem? Flaubert had patience. I don’t.

For him, painstakingly chiseling a 400-page novel into perfection was ecstasy. For me, it’s the literary equivalent of being handed a toothbrush and a can of Comet and told to scrub the entire Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

That’s the difference. Well, that—and his staggering genius versus my conspicuous lack of it.

As I pondered my crippling lack of patience, it dawned on me that while I love many books, what I might love even more—perhaps a little too much—are the flap copy descriptions wrapped around them like literary hors d’oeuvres.

Take Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, for example. I am obsessed with the novel, but I am no less obsessed with its book flap, which, in a few taut sentences, delivers a hit of pure linguistic euphoria.

One paragraph, in particular, hit me like a lightning bolt:

Shouldering biblical scholarship like a camcorder, Carrère re-creates the climate of the New Testament with the acumen of a seasoned storyteller. In the shoes of Saint Paul and Saint Luke, he plumbs the political, social, and mystical circumstances of their time, chronicling Paul’s evangelizing journeys around the Mediterranean and animating Luke, the self-effacing and elusive author of pivotal parts of the New Testament.

That word—“plumb”—sent a shiver up my spine. A single verb, perfectly placed, evoking depth, mystery, excavation. It gave me the same adrenaline rush that my family gets from riding Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey at Universal Studios. I, however, despise amusement parks. My idea of a white-knuckle thrill ride? Loitering in a bookstore all day, devouring book jackets like a literary junkie.

In this, at least, I share Flaubert’s reverence for language—the obsessive need to get every word exactly right, to make prose sing. What I don’t share is his patience.

Which is why he wrote masterpieces, and I’m still standing in the bookstore, reading the packaging like a man afraid to unwrap the gift.