Gonzalo Barr

If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero

Image: Mary Cassatt, “Woman Reading in a Garden” (1880); Source: Marcus Tullius Cicero quote, thinkexist.com

From James Wood, How Fiction Works (2008) –

Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life

Source: James Wood, How Fiction Works (2008), at 65

During Paul Theroux’s long railway trip retracing most of the steps he took to write The Great Railway Bazaar, he stopped in Turkmenistan, where he was asked to address a group. Among other topics, he spoke about the usefulness of books –

“People will tell you, ‘What’s the use? What’s the point of reading novels and poetry?’ They’ll tell you to go to law school or to be an economist or to do something useful. But books are useful. Books will make you thoughtful, and they might even make you happy. They will certainly help you become more civilized.”

Source: Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008), at 63

It is summer again and many people are going away for vacations. Whether you are gone for a few days or an entire month, if you are reading this, chances are you will pack a book or more.  Deciding which books to take is the best part of packing, in my view.

Some books are non-starters as getaway reading: Finnegan’s Wake is one. So is anything by Proust. But just because you are going on vacation does not mean you can’t exercise your mind while you are there.  The French have found a way to have their gâteau and eat it too.

The Cahiers de vacances (Vacation Notebooks) are modeled after work books used by French children to review basic subjects like math and history over summer vacations. They are, however, written for adults from “17 to 117 years.”  The cover of the “official” cahiers that appears above promises to let you review everything you have forgotten while you tan. 

But what do they mean by “everything?” Each book is only 47 pages long.

“Everything” means French grammar, important dates in French history, mathematical equations (quadratic equations anyone?), questions about general culture, and the bane of everyone who speaks a rational and orderly language — English verbs.

The cahiers have been so successful that there is even one dedicated to philosophy.  Nietzsche appears drawn on the cover wearing a swimsuit, lifesaver, and toad green fins.

Le cahier de vacances: Philo covers Plato, Socrates, Descartes, Kant, “et les autres.” No need to mention them, we know who they are… All in 88 pages.

Finally, here’s my chance to cover Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and maybe, just maybe, figure out WTF he was talking about.

I still have my copy of Kant’s Critique. They made me buy it in college. There isn’t a single mark anywhere in the book. And the spine is as smooth as a Beverly Hills face lift.

My post on “Getaway Reading” for 2007 is here.

Source: Charles Bremner’s blog in The Times (July 15, 2008).

“The great sin…is to assume that something that has been read once has been read forever. As a very simple example I mention Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. People are expected to read it during their university years. But you are mistaken if you think you read Thackeray’s book then; you read a lesser book of your own. It should be read again when you are 36, which is the age of Thackeray when he wrote it. It should be read for a third time when you are 56, 66, 76, in order to see how Thackeray’s irony stands up to your own experience of life. Perhaps you will not read every page in these later years, but you really should take another look at a great book, in order to find out how great it is, or how great it has remained, to you. You see, Thackeray was an artist, and artists deserve this kind of careful observation. We must not gobble their work, like chocolates, or olives, or anchovies, and think we know it forever. Nobody ever reads the same book twice. — Robertson Davies, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (1992, Grethe B. Peterson, ed.)

Image: William Makepeace Thackeray, University of Adelaide, Australia Library

If you think a writer’s life is exciting, below is Nick Hornby describing his average day –

AN AVERAGE DAY: ‘I have an office round the corner from my home. I arrive there between 9:30 and 10 a.m., smoke a lot, write in horrible little two-and-three sentence bursts, with five-minute breaks in between. Check for emails during each break, and get irritated if there aren’t any. Go home for lunch. If I’m picking up my son I leave at 3:30. If not, I stay till six. It’s all pretty grim! And so dull!’

Source:  Nick Hornby’s website

El nuevo Herald recently interviewed Cuban writer, Zoé Valdés, author of La nada cotidiana (1995, translated to English as Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada), Te di la vida entera (1996, translated to English as I Gave You All I Had), and other novels and works.

Valdés was born in Havana in 1959. She worked with the Cuban delegation to UNESCO and the Cultural Office of the Cuban Embassy in Paris from 1984 to 1988. From 1990 to 1995, she was subdirector of Cine Cubano magazine and a screenwriter for the state-run film industry, the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC). She wrote La nada cotidiana in 1993-1994, while still living in Havana, and asked a journalist to smuggle the manuscript out of Cuba. Since then, she has been in exile in Paris with her husband and child. Te di la vida entera was a finalist for the Premio Planeta in 1996. Her most recent novel is La cazadora de astros (2007).

Following is an excerpt from the interview in Spanish [translation to English mine] –

¿Cuando recuerdas haber comenzado a leer, y qué leías?…

“…leí muy temprano todo lo que me traía mi abuela, una pieza de teatro para ensayarla con ella, El Mastín de los Baskerville, Las mil y una noche, todo Jules Verne, todo Oscar Wilde, El extranjero de Camus, Shakespeare, la poesía de Victor Hugo, el Decamerón, que a ella le encantaba, Baudelaire en francés, sin entender ni papa; mi madre leyó el Quijote y me lo hizo leer con 12 años, se lo agradeceré siempre…Mi formación es vasta pero caótica.

No tenía estantes para libros ni dinero para comprarlos, guardaba los libros en un tanque de agua, sin agua, claro, me fascinaba meterme dentro, zambullirme en los libros. Vivíamos en un cuarto de la calle Muralla, el edificio se derrumbó, estuvimos dos años en el albergue de Monserrate, al lado del edificio Bacardí. Durante esos dos años viví y me bañé en el cine Actualidades, frente al albergue, porque las condiciones de éste eran terribles, y mi abuela habló con la taquillera del cine para que al menos dejara a los niños bañarse en el aseo de los baños, y nos quedábamos a ver tandas y tandas de películas, soviéticas, coreanas, francesas de vez en cuando…Fué una época inolvidable eso de vivir la mitad del día en una luneta de cine…”

* * *

When do you remember first reading and what did you read?…

“…at a very early age I read everything that my grandmother brought to me – a play that we would rehearse together, The Hound of the Baskervilles, One Thousand and One Nights, all of Jules Verne, all of Oscar Wilde, The Stranger by Camus, Shakespeare, poetry by Victor Hugo, The Decameron, which she loved, Baudelaire in French, even though I didn’t understand squat. My mother read Don Quixote and made me read it at twelve years old. I will always be grateful to her for that. My education was broad, though chaotic.

I didn’t have shelves for books or money to buy them. I stored the books in a water tank that was without water, of course. I loved to crawl inside the tank and bathe myself in the books.

We lived in a room on Muralla street. The building collapsed and we spent two years in the Monserrate refuge, next to the Bacardí building. During those two years I lived and bathed in the theater Actualidades, in front of the refuge. The conditions in the refuge were terrible. My grandmother spoke with the ticket vendor so she would allow at least the children of the refuge to bathe in the bathroom sinks. And we stayed to watch showing after showing of movies, Soviet, Korean, sometimes French movies. It was an unforgetable time for me to live half the day in the orchestra section of the theater…”

Photo: Zoé Valdés, from her website; Sources: El nuevo Herald, Zoé Valdés website

One wall of the study is lined with books. He pauses before them, seeking, until he finds the one which he wants. It is Tennyson. It is dogeared. He has had it since the seminary. He sits beneath the lamp and opens it. It does not take long. Soon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand.From Light in August

Thanks to Leejay Kline for the quote.

Photo: William Faulkner, Carl Van Vechten, 1954, Library of Congress, Wikipedia

Before he published, David Mitchell, author of Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas. was a bookseller –

Before he quit England to teach in Japan, Mitchell spent a year as fiction buyer in Waterstone’s Canterbury shop. It was 1990, the heady days of shop floor power, and he revelled in the role: ‘If I happened to think very highly of Wilson Harris, Guyana’s most famous writer, then I could put his books in the window. I ordered one of every title in Faber and Faber’s catalogue, however obscure.’ Much of his time was spent reading in the shop’s basement.

The BBC interviewed him in 2004 and asked him about reading and writing –

Reading clubs are very trendy in Nottinghamshire at the moment. If you were to recommend five reads – apart from your own books – what would they be?

1. For Esme – With Love and Squalor, by J.D. Salinger.
2. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
3. The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michel Faber.
4. Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain Fornier.
5. The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki.

Writer’s groups are also very popular in Nottinghamshire. Have you got any advice for Nottinghamshire’s budding writers?

1. Take your time.
2. Write your characters’ autobiographies.
3. It’s about people.
4. A quote from Stephen King: “adverbs are not your friends.”
5. Write something every single day, even if it’s just three lines. And it doesn’t matter if it’s any good – just write something every day.

Sounds like good advice to me.

Source: The Book Standard website [no longer in operation], Joe Sinclair, “David Mitchell: The Interview,” BBC (Feb. 2004)

Librosfera, a Spanish literary blog, today published two good quotes about literature and reading.  Spanish (not Colombian, as I had previously reported) writer, Arturo Pérez Reverte, author of La reina del sur (The Queen of the South) said [translation to English mine] –

La literatura es el único consuelo y el único analgésico posible.  No elimina la causa del dolor pero ayuda a soportarlo.

***

Literature is the only possible solace and the only possible analgesic.  It does not eliminate pain, but it helps to bear it.

And from a reader, claurus, who commented on the post, this quote from Argentine writer, Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading –

La lectura es como el sexo, no se puede recomendar, hay que experimentarlo.

***

Reading is like sex.  You can’t recommend it.  You have to try it for yourself.