Phantoms on the Bookshelves (6 page)

To own books without reading them is like having a painting of a bowl of fruit.

DIOGENES

“And have you read all of them?” No, of course not! Or maybe not. Actually, I don't know. It's complicated. There are some books I have read and then forgotten (quite a lot of those) and some which I have only flicked through but which I remember. So I may not have read them all, but I have turned their pages, sniffed them, handled them physically. After that, the book might take one of three possible directions (I'm speaking now of books I have chosen or acquired, that is in some way selected, rather than of books received). They may be read immediately, or pretty soon; they may be put off for reading later—and that could mean weeks, months and even years, if circumstances are particularly unfavorable, or the number of incoming books is too great—in what I call my “to read” pile. Or they may go straight on to the shelf. Even those books have been “read” in a sense: they are classified somewhere in my mind, as they are in my library. They will serve their turn one day, I don't know when or what for just now, but they're not sitting
there by chance. Books that deserve a mention here are those we have read, but did not appreciate, or those we will never get along with because, written by geniuses though they might have been, they don't say anything to us; books that need a second reading to be absorbed properly; books we might want to re-read purely for pleasure; and ones we will probably never open again but don't want to lose sight of; finally there are all those authors whose complete works we promise ourselves we will tackle one day, and others we should like to discover. And so on. (“The truth is that a library, whatever its size, does not need to have been read cover to cover to serve a useful purpose”—Alberto Manguel.) Seneca, however, considered that the vast numbers of scrolls in the library at Alexandria amounted to so many “dining room decorations.”

“Then you must have some method for fast reading?” Yes, I do, of course, but only one. For the last fifty years I have spent a great deal of my time reading all kinds of books, in all kinds of circumstances and for all sorts of purposes. And as with any activity which has become familiar, whether manual, artistic or sporting, you do acquire a kind of special relationship with the object in question, in this case the printed word. (“Years of work are required before the cerebral mechanisms for reading, if regularly oiled, finally become unconscious”—Stanislas Dehaene.) The important thing is not so much to read fast, as to read each book at the speed it deserves. It is as regrettable to spend too much time on some books as it is to read others too quickly. There are books
you know well, just from flicking through them, others you only grasp at second or third reading, and others again which will last you a lifetime. A detective novel can be read in a few hours, but to prepare a lecture on the few pages of
The Waste Land
demands several days. The most extreme imbalance between the time one can spend on a text and its actual length might be to write an essay on Apollinaire's famous one-line poem: “Et l'unique cordeau des trompettes marines” (“And the single string of the tromba marina”). Writing a review of a book which has just been published means—at least in my case—reading it twice: once to discover the book as an innocent reader, and once more to put some order into one's impressions and ideas. And in the end, you forget a great deal of what you have read. In
How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read
, Pierre Bayard has written brilliantly about how all of us can find ourselves talking knowledgeably about books we have only heard about. A bit too brilliantly indeed, since the mass of assimilated reading matter that can be glimpsed behind his argument flagrantly contradicts what he says! He also remarks on the oblivion into which most of the books we
have
read will fall. “In the first place, it is hard to be quite sure if one has read a book or not, since reading is such a transitory thing.” Even when the book really has been read and absorbed well enough to have a specific place in our minds, what we recall is often a memory of the emotion we felt while reading it, rather than anything precise about its contents. (Years later, you give this title as a gift to someone because you remember having loved it long ago, but
you are quite unable to discuss it with the recipient because the details have disappeared beyond recall.)

In
Reading in the Brain
, Stanislas Dehaene shows how singular an event the coming of reading was for human evolution. It is a fairly recent activity for the human brain: the Babylonian invention of writing occurred about 5400 years ago, and the alphabet was created about 3800 years ago—too recently, in other words, for our genome to have time to alter to develop brain circuits adapted to reading. (“How was it that the cerebral architecture of a strange two-legged primate, which became a hunter-gatherer, adjusted so minutely in a few thousand years to the difficulties raised by recognizing writing?”—Stanislas Dehaene.) This faculty, which to the individual feels like magic is, therefore, also an improbable event in the story of human evolution and one of the most surprising aspects of brain function. Reading, which started originally as a way of receiving information (probably no more than tabulated accounts for goods, trade and transactions), made it possible to move on to noting less obviously instrumental thought processes, then to transmitting them over distances—and by leaving them for future generations to find, encouraged the accumulation and constant enrichment of written artifacts. With writing, and therefore reading, humanity did not just make a quantitative cultural leap, it completely changed the scale of human thought. Humans became complex thinking beings. (
“Homo sapiens
is the only primate capable of pedagogy, in the sense that this species alone can pay attention to the knowledge
and mental state of others for teaching purposes. Not only do we actively transmit the cultural objects we deem useful but—and this is particularly noticeable in the case of writing—we deliberately perfect them. So over five thousand years ago, the first scribes discovered a hidden capacity of the human brain, that of learning to transmit language through the eyes”—Stanislas Dehaene.)

It is hardly surprising that reading should be experienced as a unique activity, and in my own case, there is always the euphoria of being able to put a reality behind the name of an author or the title of a book. (“I read without selecting, just to get in touch”—Walter Benjamin.) Until it has been read, a book is, at worst, a jumble of signs on the page, at best a vague, perhaps false image, arising from what one has heard about it. To pick up a book in your hands, and discover what it really contains is like conferring flesh and blood, in other words a density and thickness, that it will never lose again, to what was previously just a word. For example, to someone who has not read Knut Hamsun's novel,
Pan
, that word will just be a set of three letters, usually denoting one of the divinities of nature. Once you have read the book, it will be forever linked to the scents and sounds of the forest behind the cabin in Nordland where Lieutenant Thomas Glahn lived with his dog Aesop, and where Edvarda, the daughter of the trader Mack, would sometimes come to find him; and to the two wild duck feathers which the lieutenant “with the blazing eyes of a wild beast” would receive two years later, folded into a sheet of paper embossed with a coat of arms. Or, to change countries, what would someone who
has not read them make of the names of Kaf
Å«
Nagai (1879–1959), the melancholy and sarcastic poet of the venomous charms of
La Sumida
(The [river] Sumida), set in the red-light district of Tokyo, or Osamu Dazai (1909–1948), the tubercular and desperate author of
Setting Sun
and
No Longer Human
? Once they have been discovered, the works of these two writers will remain indelibly imprinted on the mind of the reader.

Every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it. Yes, that's exactly it: the frantic reader is like a burglar who has spent hours and hours digging a tunnel to enter the strongroom of a bank. He emerges face to face with hundreds of strongboxes, all identical, and opens them one by one. And each time the box is opened, it loses its anonymity and becomes unique: one is filled with paintings, another with bundles of banknotes, a third with jewels or letters tied in ribbon, engravings, objects of no value at all, silverware, photos, gold sovereigns, dried flowers, files of paper, crystal glasses, or children's toys—and so on. There is something intoxicating about opening a new one, finding its contents and feeling overjoyed that in a trice one is no longer in front of a set of boxes, but in the presence of the riches and the wretched banalities that make up human existence.

Just imagine a man who has all day, and if he feels like it, all night too. And the money to buy every book he wants. There are no limits. He is at the mercy of his passion. And
what is it that passion most wants? If you will allow me an observation […] it wants to discover its own limit. But that's no easy matter. Brauer was a conqueror, more than a traveller (Carlos Dominguez,
The Paper House
).

Yes, undoubtedly, the compulsive reader is a conqueror. And he considers the acres of print offered to him as fully equal to those conquered by Alexander, Genghis Khan, Tamburlaine or Napoleon—and at least as fascinating—and in any case calling for less futile devastation, cruelty and bloodshed.

The title of a book you have read (conquered?) has nothing in common with what it represented before. The book will now pursue its own life in your memory. Often, it will fall into oblivion. But it also happens that it develops of its own accord: the plot transforms itself, the ending has nothing to do with the one written by the author, its length can be radically altered. It was with surprise that I noticed, on picking up Silvio D'Arzo's
House of Others
again, after many years, that it has only sixty-five pages, whereas in my memory it had acquired another hundred over time. And I would never have imagined that when I re-read
Anna Karenina
twenty years later, I would feel more touched by the lot of Alexey Alexandrovitch Karenin than I had been inflamed, on first reading, by the passionate feelings of the lovely Anna for Vronsky. Not to mention the books of which one wonders, second time round, how one could ever have liked them. I had this disagreeable sensation a few years ago, on taking up again a book by Paul
Morand—either
Ouvert la nuit
(
Open all Night
) or
L'Homme press
é (The man in a hurry) or
Hécate et ses chiens
(
Hecate and Her Dogs
)—I have now forgotten which. His lively style had enchanted me at the age of twenty, but now I felt oozing from his prose—still admittedly brilliant—a social disdain, a feeling of haughty superiority, a pompous self-satisfaction, which I found intolerable. So all that is left to me now of Morand is his
Ode to Marcel Proust
(“A shade/rising from the smoke of your fumigations/your face and voice consumed by your night watches/Céleste with her gentle rigor drenches me in the dark marinade of your chamber/ smelling of warm cork and the ashes in the grate”). Here he was speaking as a friendly witness—and the subject of the poem made Morand's later anti-Semitism a paradoxical absurdity.

“And how do you read your books? And where?” Anywhere, and in any position. I am at any rate very far from the refinement of Guarino, of whom Anthony Grafton tells us that he “liked to read a text while out in a boat, his book on his knees. This way he could enjoy the pleasures of reading simultaneously with the sight of the fields and vineyards.” Seated, standing, walking—why not? But the ideal is to be lying down, as if the position allows the text to enter the body more easily. Reading has enabled me to shorten the longest journeys, not to notice the hours I have spent waiting in airports, and for two decades to put up with meetings as futile as they were interminable, but which I could not escape. There remain strongly fixed in my memory books so absorbing that they seemed to make time stand still: Lawrence Durrell's
Alexandria
Quartet
, which I read in May 1968, since “the events” permitted me to devote myself to them full-time;
War and Peace
, which I finished in the back of a car between Paris and Marseille; Musil's
The Man without Qualities
, which I read with wonder, while walking, one spring in the early 1970s, toward Caesar's tower on the road between Les Pinchinats and Aix-en-Provence;
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, which I began one afternoon and to continue reading which I cut short a dinner-party invitation, finishing it in the early hours of the morning;
Moby-Dick
, some pages of which I re-read on the whaling island of Nantucket, where I noticed on several letter-boxes the surname Coffin, which figures in Melville's novel. I am lucky enough to be able to read no matter how noisy it is around me, in crowds or even surrounded by conversations of no interest. I am capable of reading all day, and carrying on late into the night, and to find it restful after a busy day. Reading tires me out as little as it tires fish to swim or birds to fly. I sometimes have the impression that I have really only existed through reading, and I would hope to die, like Victor Segalen in the forest of Huelgoat, with a book in my hand.

I write on my books, in pencil, but also with felt pens or ball-points. In fact I find it impossible to read without something in my hand. This is no doubt a habit arising from years of correcting proofs: the book for me is more of a tool of the trade than an object to be respected. Like other people who have worked in publishing or printing, I can't stop myself from correcting typos, grammatical errors or misprints in the books I am reading (and when
I happen to know the publisher or the author, I feel obliged to send him or her the corrections to incorporate in any new edition, and I have appreciated the few people who have done the same for me). To write on a book helps my reading, but it also helps me to remember the book and to come back to it later. I can hold in mind for months the approximate visual image of the place in the book where the passage occurred that struck me: top or bottom of the page, left or right hand, beginning or end—or else I note at the end of the book the page numbers to which I will have to return.