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Literary Review
Books loved and lost
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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The essays in Lost Classics are brief, precise, elegant. Many of them are not more than two pages; some are just a page. But all of them summon up a book, once loved and lost, almost magically.
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"A certain class of objects, very rare, that are brought into being by hope."
Borges
WE all have them: a favourite book that we feel has been overlooked or under-read. A little known book (or books) that we admire so much, we find ourselves urging other book lovers to discover it. Lost Classics, edited by Michael Ondaatje, Michael Redhill, Esta Spalding and Linda Spalding, invites 73 contemporary writers to write on books loved and lost, unavailable, stolen (!) or extinct. "A book that we love haunts us forever; it will haunt us even when we no longer find it on the shelf or beside the bed where we must have left it," write the editors in their introduction. "And so lost books — books that have gone missing through neglect or has been forgotten in changing tastes, or worst of all, gone up in a puff of rumour — gnaw at us. Being lovers of books, we've pulled a scent of these absences behind us our whole reading lives, telling people about books that exist only on our own shelves, or even just in our own memory."
This strange but essential book about books "investigates many versions of lostness". There is the book that disappears from the house during a divorce, and a lost manuscript that becomes a cult classic, a writer who commits suicide after finishing his work, and a reader who exhumes it from a second-hand bookstore. In one case, a book that a writer has only heard about infects his imagination so much that he spends years looking for it. And then steals it. Lost Classics begins with Margaret Atwood picking out an out of print Swedish novel first published in 1905 called Doctor Glass by Hjalmar Söderberg. "This short, astonishing novel about sex and death arrived in the mail a couple of years ago," she writes, "sent by Swedish friends who ferret in second-hand bookshops in search of books which they think I might like. They were spot on with this one." The book turned out to be one of the most remarkable books she had ever read — and yet no one she knew had even heard of it.
"Any novel," writes Murray Bail introducing his lost book, The Fish Can Sing by Halldor Laxness, "which has as its first sentence `A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its father' immediately stamps the author as one above the ordinary." This Icelandic novel has been out of print for nearly 30 years. Christian Bök writes of an otherworldly encyclopaedia called Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini. "I have never before seen such a wilfully quixotic picture book", he writes, "an illuminated manuscript with surreal objects in cartoonish landscape: eyeball eggshells hatching into eyeglasses; serpent shoelaces latching onto ankleflesh, an automobile melting into white stick gum, covered with houseflies and two lovers embracing, fused slowly together, until they formed a crocodile, crawling off the bed. I opened the book to discover a florilegium of pastel images, all of them captioned by an alien genre of cursive writing — meticulous arabesques."
Githa Hariharan picks All About H. Hatter by G.V. Desani, a book she discovered in 1974, "emerging from the safe portals of Bombay University's Sophia College... my friends and I took to ransacking the lost-and-found bookstalls...and then I came across a strange and wonderful book." Pico Iyer's choice is The Saddest Pleasure by Moritz Thomsen, a strange travel book that is, in effect, "a journey towards extinction." John Irving swears by Richard Hawley's The Headmaster's Papers; first published in 1983 and now available only with the small independent publisher who brought it out. "This is an epistolary novel so heartbreaking that no one is likely to surpass its emotional effects in a letter form", writes Irving. It is entirely composed of one suffering headmaster's letters to friends, students, parents and his own son. He writes in one letter; "Imagine a good man whose props have fallen away." The last letter is a suicide note: "This is not a tragedy. I am used up." But it is a tragedy, says Irving. And a fine one.
"Curiously, it is a book I haven't read," says Laird Hunt of Lafcadio Hearn's Some Chinese Ghosts. "I saw a copy once: a dark blue, leather bound Modern Library edition that sat unread on my girlfriend's uncle's shelf. It was all I could do (i.e., my girlfriend said, No!) not to steal it." Since then Hunt has been searching used bookstores for the book but has never found it. But he feels strongly that "somewhere out there, Some Chinese Ghosts, the one that I had hoped for, exists. I just have to put my hands on it again." The Salt Ecstasies is a breathtakingly beautiful collection of poems by a little-known American poet called James White. Jim Moore who brings it to our notice, tells us that White, who died in 1981, lived alone and with very little money in a modest apartment. He knew he was dying and wrote these 22 poems on death.
Classics Revisited by Kenneth Rexroth is seldom mentioned by today's academic critics, points out Brian Brett. A pity since this is the most "delicious outline of a literary canon" he has ever read. The essays are "cheeky, loopy, opinionated and diverse." Rexroth on the style of "Julius Caesar": "The simple nouns and verbs carom off each other like billiard balls." And his legendary remark on the prose of Tacitus: "a style like a tray of dental instruments." Capital of Pain is a book of surrealist poetry by Paul Éluard that has been virtually forgotten even by poetry lovers. "It's a tall, narrow white book that never fits on my shelves properly," writes Natalee Caple. "I was poor. So I bought it because it was beautiful, to cheer myself up. I took it home and read it for the first time in my bed. I was wearing my green pyjamas. My black cat lay asleep on my chest with her head on my shoulder, and my tortoiseshell cat lay over my legs. It was in the middle of the afternoon. And this is what I read: `I no longer move silk over the ice / I am ill flowers and pebbles / I love him most inscrutable to the clouds.'"
The book ends with a "Lost List", which tells you how and where you can find these lost books — if they are in print or out of print. The essays in Lost Classics are brief, precise, elegant. Many of them are not more than two pages; some are just a page. But all of them summon up a book, once loved and lost, almost magically.
Write in your list of fave under-read books to: pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
Lost Classics, edited by Michael Ondaatje, Michael Redhill, Esta Spalding and Linda Spalding, Anchor Books (distributed by Westland), paperback, p.284, $10.50.
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