Longing to Read What I Cannot

On shelves in various rooms of my home are more than a thousand unread books. I want to read them all, of course. I also want to read the catalogues from the art exhibitions I visit, the programmes from my opera outings. Then there are the journals I can’t do without: The White Review, PN Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction. The weekly TLS, which these days arrives late, three or four issues at once. I skim the FT on my iPad each morning, glance through the Guardian, Daily Mail, New York Times, Washington Post.

In an average year I manage around sixty-five books. If sentenced to literary house arrest, I have material for at least fifteen years. Slightly less, perhaps, if I cannot resist social media. I’ve also decided to develop what I generously call my film literacy, so if I’m diligent with catalogues and programmes, twenty years may be possible.

Still, surrounded by unread books, unwatched films, and with the galleries of London within reach, the writers I most want to read remain beyond my shelves, untranslated, and for now, unreadable.

One of this year’s more thrilling moments was the delivery of Roberto Bazlen’s Notes Without a Text. I’ve been translating fragments for over a decade from the Biblioteca Adelphi edition. More recently, Maria Gabriela Llansol’s Geography of Rebels trilogy has become a fixation. Translating from Portuguese is enjoyably difficult, but progress is glacial.

This week I’ve been reading Alejandro Zambra’s Not to Read, drawn again to the exactitude and generosity of his essays, translated by Megan McDowell. The book gathers short pieces from the culture section of a Chilean newspaper, notes on reading, on books, on writing. It has sparked new longings for Josefina Vicens’s elusive novels, and the journals of Paul Léautaud and Raúl Ruiz.