Halfway through Christa Wolf’s No Place on Earth, I stopped, turned back, and began again. Not from doubt or confusion, but a kind of atmospheric unease: a sense that I had not read closely enough, not lived with it properly. That I had skimmed the surface of something troubled and necessary. The second reading did not clarify. It drew me deeper into that uncertainty, into a correspondence between voice and despair that had not been apparent before. Reading it twice, straight through, changed my breathing. Not metaphorically. I sat differently. I began to anticipate absence where there had once been momentum.
This happens rarely. Usually a second reading comes later, after time has worked on the book, or me. But with Wolf, it felt essential: a refusal of closure. Something in the structure, two writers, lost to their own time, suspended between intimacy and annihilation, begged to be re-inhabited. The book doesn’t develop so much as accumulate. To live with it once is to enter; to live with it twice is to displace yourself.
That dislocation is what I seek in certain writers. Not style, not even thought, but the capacity to rearrange interior space. Some I read to completion: not just novels but letters, marginalia, diaries. To be in proximity to a voice that dislodges. Christa Wolf, yes. Also Dante Alighieri, Denton Welch, Virginia Woolf, Mathias Énard, Roberto Calasso, Doris Lessing, Samuel Beckett, Kate Zambreno, Homer. These are not influences so much as rearrangements. After them, I no longer recognise the coordinates of my own thinking.
Reading nonfiction can do something similar, though it works differently. Without the frame of a character or a scene, the voice meets you head-on. Sometimes it feels like an intellectual friendship: Gilbert Highet’s cultivated generosity, Walter Kaufmann’s irritability in pursuit of clarity, Marcus Aurelius writing as though to himself, Cixous refusing the clean division between knowing and not knowing. They don’t guide so much as accompany. Not always comfortably. But reading them, I’m changed not by what I learn, but by how I listen.
While there may be not only two, but several ways to read a book; I agree with your approach and find myself enchanted and invigorated by the best authors I’ve read. The fictions of Woolf, Faulkner, Mann, or Dostoyevsky are some that inspire my own immersion in their world of ideas. The depth of meaning in the works of these and others rewards multiple readings and results in further contemplation.
Wolf is a good example of a writer I will, time permitting, eventually read to completion. A great writer’s books (novels, diaries, letters etc.) form a single unified body of work.
This was a fascinating post. You seem to be hinting at the possibility that there is a bad form of escapism and immersion associated with reading as well. Have you read G. Dyer’s great essay on the ‘Mir syndrome’?
Yes. I thought it essential to read everything Dyer wrote but, in his case, for reasons I must give more thought to, the fascination faded. I recognise Dyer’s Mir Syndrome; thankfully i don’t suffer from it, as it sounds like a dire ordeal.
I saw this post and tweeted about it last night, but I was on my phone and find it a clumsy tool for writing a comment, so I’m back visiting and rereading this now.
I certainly agree that some writers inspire complete immersion. Although I find that perhaps I had more time and inclination to do it when I was younger, in my teens and twenties – I wonder if I am less likely to be a completist now because I can no longer whole-heartedly endorse all of a person’s thinking, or if I simply lack the time to engage deeply with an author.
I wonder if the ‘spectating from afar’ also includes the reading for entertainment and forgetting quickly thereafter. Books which are escapist but not made to mull over.
I’m the opposite in that I rarely thought about immersing myself in a single writer’s work in my twenties and thirties. It is something that came later, a realisation perhaps that there aren’t that many truly great writers, certainly hundreds rather than thousands.
Of those writers I read to completion, there is as much that interests me in those parts of their thinking I cannot endorse as those that mirror my own thoughts. That’s why these writers end up feeling like friends, of a sort.
That’s a wonderful way of thinking about things – like friends, we can agree to disagree about things.
” thankfully i don’t suffer from it, as it sounds like a dire ordeal.”
Oooh..that was a poor one, but I’ll make a note of it in my diary.
But does it have to be an ordeal? The tree of life, the tree of knowledge?
Reader’s block? I struggled with it for 2 years, and experienced it as an ordeal.
Thank you for introducing me to Zambreno and Denton Welch.
My pleasure. Thank you for letting me know that you discovered both from my blog.