I am, quite involuntarily, rather selective when it comes to the media I consume. There’s one factor in particular that I look for in every book I read, every movie I watch, and every game I play: immersion. For me, it is the heaviest influence on substance. If the immersion is good, it enhances everything else; if it’s bad, it completely pulls me out of the work.

This is why I struggle so much—despite their immense quality—to watch old films with faded visuals and crackling voices, to play certain older games (for instance, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, which my best friend keeps recommending and which I keep, sadly, declining)... and to read books written in overly simplistic styles.

Of course, the factors that determine a book’s immersion depend as much on the reader’s preferences as on the writer’s style. Generally, I’m satisfied by a mix of incisive dialogue, distinct characters, and fluid, striking descriptions of people and places. Hence my love for Druon and my aversion to Dostoevsky. Druon offers both consistently; Dostoevsky creates incredibly vivid and profound characters but spares far too few words (at least in The Brothers Karamazov and White Nights) for setting the mood and describing the scenery.

Julien Gracq, famously known for refusing the Prix Goncourt, left me rather conflicted. His writing style, laden with syntactic excess bordering on posing (which I’ll address shortly), smothers immersion under mental gymnastics.

The Weight of Posing

Posing is a term I borrowed from my best friend, who is also a writing enthusiast, to describe texts that are overly ornate, burdened with heavy metaphors, yet utterly empty. For instance:

"She stood there, gazing at the garden with ruby pupils: two blazing orbs, burning with a fire nestled in the depths of her grief."

It’s too much. It’s heavy. The syntax isn’t incorrect, the vocabulary is precise, and one might even find a certain poetry in it; yet it is, in truth, terribly hollow—and often indigestible. You can achieve so much more with simplicity, lightness, and fluidity.

I believe posing affects both amateur writers seeking recognition and certain intellectual giants who, isolated in their own company, begin to jerk off over their own embellished turns of phrase. It is the latter case I wish to address here.

The Problem with The Opposing Shore

As an amateur writer, one resource I find immensely helpful is, surprisingly enough, the Wiktionary. I find its definitions accurate and richly illustrated with excerpts from renowned works. While researching the correct usage of the word “crudely,” I came across this sentence that left a strong impression on me:

"The vaporous mist that rolled over Orsenna’s damp forests had given way to a luminous and harsh dryness, where the white, low walls of isolated farms shone crudely in the distance."

An excerpt from The Opposing Shore (Le Rivage des Syrtes) by Julien Gracq, whose name meant little to me at the time. Three months later, I stumbled upon an old edition at a secondhand bookstore and embarked on a rather torturous reading journey.

The problem with The Opposing Shore is that the book focuses more on maintaining a dreamy, timeless atmosphere than on developing a truly gripping plot. I was aware of this before diving in and even thought it was a good thing. I was very wrong.

But that’s not really the issue; the real problem is the pairing of this kind of book with Gracq’s style—a style defined by an over-elaboration of every pebble, sigh, and eyebrow in every scene.

You can read any given paragraph in isolation and find it elegant, rich in meaning, and impressively precise in its metaphors—just as I found the passage on Wiktionary quite beautiful. But it’s just one passage. Such unrelenting heaviness, repeated page after page, drags you into a sort of torpor, compounded by a plot that’s admittedly low on twists. Note, too, that the sentence structures are so convoluted (reminiscent of certain legal texts) that they often require your full concentration and several rereads to grasp their meaning (and beauty). Over the course of a three-hundred-plus-page book, this becomes exhausting.

"What could leap forth from the depths of life, the most hidden and nocturnal, was directed at me from those pupils. Those eyes did not blink, did not shine, did not even look—rather than a gaze, their glistening and stagnant wetness brought to mind the valve of a shell wide open in the dark. They simply opened there, floating on a strange white lunar rock amidst rolling algae. Amid the disarray of hair like a flattened field, the hollow of this calm block opened like a sky full of stars. The mouth too lived, as if under touch, with a retractile tremor, naked like a small crater of marine jelly. It was suddenly very cold. Like linking together the coils of a tangled serpent in astonishment, a bizarre conformation was organizing itself by fits and starts around this Medusa-like head. The head was anchored in the hollow of a shoulder draped in dark fabric. Two arms formed a stole, an inert collar of panting pleasure, digging as if in a full trough at the hollow of her corsage. The whole rose from the depths under enormous pressure, ascended fixedly to its serene sky like a full moon through foliage."

Sometimes, as in the excerpt above, Gracq becomes intoxicated by his own metaphors and produces paragraphs... of posing. Let’s be serious: everything after the third comma in the second sentence is superfluous. This same excess, stretched from the first page to the last, drains the reader and turns a literary journey into one of those confused memories of a dream from the night before. Some might enjoy this. It’s clear that I do not.