What do we come away with when we read not merely a masterpiece but a masterwork of literature? The distinction between the two, masterpiece and masterwork, I take to be in favor of the latter, for a masterwork is not necessarily perfect of its kind, as a masterpiece ought to be, but of a significance beyond the question of mere (some “mere”) perfection. Usually large, often sprawling, always the product of monstrous ambition, a masterwork is a key book, one that defines a historical era, or the culmination of a form, or a national literature, or Western thought itself. Robert Musil, in The Man Without Qualities, set out to produce a masterwork, but, despite his great brilliance, failed. Nothing short of genius is required to bring it off. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, The Divine Comedy—such are masterworks. Closer to our own time, books that qualify as masterworks, I should say, include War and Peace, Ulysses, and Remembrance of Things Past.

One of the qualities that mark a masterwork is the inability of readers ever to feel that they have quite grasped it, or at any rate grasped it in its entirety, its wholeness. Almost all masterworks fit into that select category of works that probably shouldn’t be read for the first time; they are works, in other words, that call for being not merely read but reread, two, three, maybe more times, for even the most percipient reader