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Literary Review
ENDPAPER
Rereading
By Pradeep Sebastian
I HAVE always thought a true book lover is one who rereads. To know one book well than to know many peripherally. It can take the form of revisiting a favourite book or just rereading a favourite passage. (In these very pages of the Literary Review, Ravi Vyas has been doing just that in his column, "Classics Revisited".) It helps to have a bad memory. I often have to reread (or re-see a movie) because I've forgotten the details of the plot (fiction) or the argument (non-fiction). I have friends who recall a book so well that it's useless for them to go back to it. Once, one of them recalled what had taken place in a scene in The Great Gatsby 15 years after she had read the book. I had read the book several times and couldn't.
Living among books
I know at least one friend who reads every book so closely the first time around that she doesn't have to revisit them — and yet she does! If a book is a place you can inhabit, then she lives among these books, making a home of them. In his hunger to possess books he admired, one friend copied down, sentence by sentence into a notebook, entire chapters from a favourite book. When I asked him why he did this, he replied that it might teach him how the author did it, like trying to learn a magic trick by repeating it. When people make train journeys I've noticed they seem to prefer taking along a book they've already read. Like a known companion. Increasingly, it seems to me that what a committed reader has with a book is a relationship. And that it's like most relationships — sustaining, volatile, vulnerable. I know that I have found an entire community amongst books.
The question is — does the book remain the same book the second time around? Are we even the same readers when we revisit these books? I am sure many of you have marvelled at how the same book expands before you, surprising and humbling you with how much you missed seeing on the first reading. We return hoping to reclaim the ecstasy of the first encounter, only to discover it has been replaced by the intimacy of knowledge. Did we change or had the book changed?
Different experiences
It seems to me that our experience alters the book even as the book alters our experience. Sometimes, for instance, you simply aren't ready for a book. You can approach it as many times as you like but it will shut you out. Once you know something about life (or about books!) you didn't know before, then the book opens out to you. I hear people say: "My first reading is to get the plot, the story, out of the way, so on a second reading I can look at more important things like character and detail and style." But I think we always return because we are hungry for the same story, the same plot. Only this time we choose to hear the story differently: emphasising another part of the story, listening more closely to another aspect of the plot. In the best stories in literature, character, style and vision always emerge from plot. Rereading brings a rush of memory — not just of the book at hand or an evocation of a time and place but of being: happiness, heartbreak or that old, tired emotion, humiliation. Revisiting a book from your past is like revisiting yourself — returning through a book to the kind of person you were then. It can be a terrifying and gratifying experience. Well, let's be honest: rarely gratifying.
Revisitings
In Rereadings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), edited by Ann Fadiman, 17 contemporary writers revisit books they love. Pico Iyer on D.H Lawrence's The Virgin and the Gypsy, David Samuel's on Salinger's Franny and Zooey, Vijay Seshadri on Walt Whitman's Song of Myself and Allegra Goodman on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice are some of the re-readings featured here. What informs all the essays is a very personal recollection of how they read a particular book then and how they read it now. What they have to say about themselves — their prejudices, love affairs, political views, family life, literary ambition or childhood — is just as valuable and interesting as their commentary on the book itself. As the editor of the literary journal, The American Scholar, Fadiman (who gave us the delightfully witty Ex Libris some years ago) had the wisdom to commission writers to review not just the latest releases but classics as well. As a book lover she instinctively knew serious readers would take more pleasure in reading about old books than new.
Essential differences
In her witty and perceptive foreword, she lists the essential differences between reading and rereading: "The former had more velocity, the latter had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun, the latter was more cynical. But what was remarkable about the latter was that it contained the former... " Nobody gets to the heart of rereading the way Ann Fadiman can; with her characteristically witty and eloquent style she notes: "If a book read when young is a lover, then the same book, reread later on is a friend. This may sound like a demotion, but after all, it is old friends, not old lovers, to whom you are most likely to turn when you need comfort. Fatigue, grief and illness call for familiarity, not innovation." pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
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