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Arts & Weekend / Books
'We can only fully appreciate a book by reading it twice'
By Rahul Jacob
Published: May 14 2004 17:24 | Last Updated: May 14 2004 17:24
I am a functioning illiterate. I am reminded of this every time I visit a friend's idyllic island holiday home in Kerala. The bookshelves seem like accusatory question marks, reminding me of several authors I've resolved to read but never get around to: Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy stares accusingly back at me, as do several of Mario Vargas Llosa's novels.
If I rate poorly as a wanna- be multiculturalist, I do just as badly on such stalwarts of English literature as Trollope and the BrontКs.
The problem is not that I don't read, but that I re-read the same books over and over again. The list of books I've read three times or more includes Gabriel Garca MАrquez's Love in the Time of Cholera , Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and a collection of her letters, Congenial Spirits, a heap of books by Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje and V.S. Naipaul, Jan Morris's Destinations, and Joan Didion's White Album. No wonder when I log on to Amazon, I get a message saying that the website has no recommendations for me; in effect there is no order to my reading disorder.
Why I remain a mostly unrepentant serial re-reader is a little easier to answer. When I was young and impressionable, I read a quote of Vladimir Nabokov's that you can never read a novel, you can only re-read it. I understood that to mean that we can only fully appreciate a good book by reading it twice. The first time, we are swept along so fast by the undertow of narrative that it leaves us unable to savour the beauty of the writing. MАrquez's Love in the Time of Cholera still exerts a hypnotic hold on me: one recent morning, I was 25 pages into it and ended up late for work.
Yet my addiction to P.G. Wodehouse seems mild in comparison with New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane, who recently confessed to having re-read a short story by Wodehouse about 200 times.
Re-reading is also a way of reassessing. Like so much of Virginia Woolf, I found To the Lighthouse hard going on first reading. On a subse- quent re-reading of the sections that revolve around Mrs Ramsay, a character based on Woolf's mother, I found the book moving and the dinner party scene one of the best in literature. And I may have taken the underlying message of A Room of One's Own a little more literally than Woolf intended: 10 years ago I bought an inexpensive flat in Delhi, largely because I thought access to the city's libraries and its lower cost of living might make it easier to write a book there than in New York, where I was living at the time. I never wrote the book, though.
I return to certain books depending on the mood I am in. Wodehouse's wordplay and inspired silliness have kept me company through the long flights home occasioned by a parent's illness. Joan Didion's essays, especially Goodbye to All That, her partly elegiac, partly caustic farewell to New York when she moved to California a couple of decades ago, help me make sense of the occasional dislocation that moving - and moving on - prompts.
Nevertheless, re-reading books often seems an unseemly indulgence. At lunch last weekend, I found one friend who took the view that with so much to read and so little time, she could not justify reading a book again. Her husband felt just the opposite. We listen to CDs over and over again when we like them, he responded. Why not books?
He has a point, although his bias is in part because he is writing a novel. Rushdie described readers who want to become writers as people searching for that door that leads them to the other side of the page. To me this quest has often felt more like one of those scenes in a film when inmates of a jail keep alternately tapping and scratching at a wall, looking for the shortest way out. I know that I re-read certain writers - V.S. Naipaul, Jan Morris, Tom Wolfe's non- fiction - because I want to learn from their example. Yet it can have a paralytic effect: worship too devoutly at the altar of literary deities, and nothing you write seems good enough.
In this age of banal internet chat and unreal doses of reality TV, the task of producing a book that people will read, let alone re-read, is harder than ever. I am reminded of the American author Jonathan Franzen's essay on the fate of the American novel in the late 1990s. He receives a letter from the author Don DeLillo who throws out this lifeline: "If the social novel lives, but only barely, surviving in the cracks and ruts of culture, maybe it will be taken more seriously as an endangered spectacle. A reduced context, but a more intense one."
Re-reading books, or engaging more seriously with our favourite writers, is one way of insulating our- selves from the heavy drone of pop culture around us.
rahul.jacob@ft.com
Harry Eyres' column returns next week
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