There was once a time of drifting between books of poetry and fiction without regard for the writer. The next book followed not from a plan or a towering unread stack, but from the reflective waves left by the last, or whatever caught the eye while browsing the shelves of a nearby bookshop.
In time, a different structure emerged. Certain writers came into focus. A pattern established itself: read everything, even the minor works, which often held keys to the thousand questions posed by the major ones.
Once, a list of best books was made, a so-called personal canon, though it proved to be a shot-silk list, too unstable to hold. What does it mean for a book to be best? The Canon? Or those books that, once read, remain vivid in memory, crystalline and unforgotten? What of the evanescent favourites, where only an atmosphere or a single character lingers?
Now, writers take precedence over individual books. The choice aligns with what Anthony Rudolf in Silent Conversations called “magical thinking, talismanic identifications and ghostly demarcations.” Some writers are simply always there, part of the permanent conversation: Samuel Beckett, Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, Charles Baudelaire.
Others are read closely for the way they think or see, even when the reasons for this affinity remain obscure: Peter Handke, Gerald Murnane, Dorothy Richardson, George Oppen, Clarice Lispector, Christa Wolf, Mircea Cărtărescu, Enrique Vila-Matas. Time will decide whether these writers remain in the future’s reckoning.
And then, the stranger category: writers only sampled, but deeply compelling. Maurice Blanchot, Ricardo Piglia, Marguerite Duras, Hans Blumenberg, Laura Riding, Arno Schmidt. These fascinate as much for the shape of their lives as the shape of their work. The intention always exists to read more deeply.
Books are read to find the writer. To see, for a moment, into a mind. In doing so, something becomes clearer: reading is part of becoming. The more reading is contemplated, the stranger it seems. Certainties recede. As the prose grows deeper, the sense of inclusion within another’s thought grows stronger. Reading becomes less an acquisition of knowledge, and more an act of quiet participation.
I empathise with the idea of a personal canon falling by the wayside – I suspect my attempts at building such a thing over the years have failed because I changed as a reader. Some books and authors survived that change, and some didn’t. But I appreciate your list of authors of whom in ideal circumstances you would read everything – a good number of which I have in common with you. In one case (Woolf) I have read everything bar the essays. I sometimes wish I had had two lives – one in which I lived, and one in which I did literally nothing but read!
If I was forced to spend the rest of my time reading just one writer, it would be Woolf, but I am nowhere near your achievement. Woolf is the writer I reread most, a handful of novels, yet I’ve not finished the diaries, essays or letters.
Sinking myself into her novels and letters and diaries was one of the joys of my 20s. One day I would like to finish the essays!
Interesting your view! I have said somewhere that referencing various authors to try and make a point about some idea I have is really futile. Because, even though I am a very slow reader, over my time, the number of books and the number of authors is nearly infinite. From Philosopher’s, two fiction, to science fiction, to essays, two blogs.:. to mention any number of authors would be essentially incomplete for what it is I would be trying to say, and if I was saying anything about a specific author, ultimately it would be informed by the plethora in near Infiniti of otter author is that I have read and their influences going into reading that one author. 😛
So it is interesting to me that you are able to, it seems, isolate particular authors. I would say I probably only have four authors but I respect. But I wouldn’t really be able to name them, because it soon as I would say one, then another one would come up, and it would probably lead to a list much larger than four. Lol.
Such lists are always slippery and also firmly tongue-in-cheek. These are the writers that given no constraints I’d read to completion: minor works, letters, diaries including and probably at least one major critical work. There are many, many other writers I read for a single, or small number of works.
What intimately related lists we draught. Thank you for this expression
Having read what you think about Piglia, I wonder how come you are not fascinated bu Juan José Saer. Many of his novels have been translated into english, “Glosa” (oddly translated as “The Sixty-Five Years of Washington”), maybe his best (and for many, the greatest argentinean novel of the last fifty years), among them. I would love to read what you think about it.
I don’t know his work, though of course I’ve heard the name. I’d got the impression that his work was too plot-driven (too much story!) for my taste, but that might be a misapprehension. I’ve ordered the one you suggested and will report back. Thanks.