One of the later lessons of a reading life is to think not in terms of writers but of books. By instinct a collector, it is easy to read a fine book and immediately set about acquiring multiple earlier works by the same author. With some, this fervour is rewarded: Clarice Lispector or Samuel Beckett both offer work that grows more concentrated when read chronologically. With others, such as Iris Murdoch, the early works tend to expose recurring foibles that detract from the whole. It would have been sufficient, perhaps, to stop at The Italian Girl. This lesson applies doubly when reading poets and poems.
The urge to build collections is tempered by the desire, at a certain stage, to travel more lightly. Libraries are thinned: old books unlikely to be reread, whimsical purchases whose fascination has faded. There is a certain clarity that comes from carrying fewer burdens of obligation, literary or otherwise.
Recent reading included a return to Albert Camus’s The Outsider in Sandra Smith’s translation, and Marguerite Duras’s The Garden Square, in an older translation by Sonia Pitt-Rivers and Irina Morduch. Both works sustained earlier readings, unlike J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron, revisited only in part. Though much of Coetzee’s writing remains fine, the prose is often burdened by weary metaphors: “have our two hearts, our organs of love, been tied for this brief while by a cord of sound?” or “huge bull-testicles pressing down on their wives, their children, pressing the spark out of them.”
Alas, I still haven’t learnt that lesson and tend to think in terms of a writer’s whole oeuvre instead of specific books. Although I find that with living ones, I do go ‘off’ them if I feel they are just repeating themselves (Murakami, for example).
It’s taken me a surprisingly long time to realise this about writers and their books, whereas with poets I’ve always known it to be true.
Sorry to hear you’ve been slain, if mildl, by the dreaded bug… But thinning is a useful exercise and I definitely need to try to adopt that mindset that stops me wanted to collect everything by a writer. So often the other books are a disappointment…
Thank you. Half the tension with coronavirus is the anticipation, wondering how severely one is to be struck. But, yes, I’ve been very fortunate.
“One of the lessons learned late in my reading life is to think in terms of not writers but books.”
Nabokov imparted me this wisdom; it’s a pity that I misplaced the source of where he said that he went by book, not by writer. Indeed it’s remarkable how much writers, even good writers, fluctuate from book to book.
Please do let me know it the source comes to mind.