If you can't finish a book, hurl it down BIBLIO BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
One day, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, a book lover asleep in the shadow of her books, woke up and asked herself the classic addict's question: "What has reading done for me? What do I have then, after years of indulgence? A feel, a texture, an aura: the fragrance of Shakespeare, the crisp breeze of Tolstoy, the carnal stench of the great Euripides. Are they worth the investment of a life?" Schwartz's Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books is a fiercely intelligent, unsentimental meditation on reading. She never really answers the question she raises, except to say that no girl's life was ever ruined by a book, nor saved by one either. Don't, she warns, look at fictional characters because even the best of them "travel in confusion and come to a bad end." And this, Schwartz informs us, is precisely why their lives are worth inventing. So that the reader can counsel them: "do this, do that, don't forget to mail that letter, don't get on that plane, divorce him, marry her, look over your shoulder for heaven's sake - but to no avail."
Schwartz is one of a handful of book lovers willing to admit that not all books can and must be read. Books can clutter your mind and your bookshelf. If you can't finish a book, hurl it down, she says. Because a book must give you what you crave: "ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything, readers are thrill seekers". For Schwartz there are many kinds of reading as there are many kind of loves, not all them of them intoxicating. Books are compared to lovers and husbands; reading to love affairs and marriages. "Since childhood I had a thought of reading as holy," she writes, "and like all sacraments, it had acquired a stiff halo of duty. My cavalier throwing over a book midway may arise form the same general desacralisation as does the notable increase in divorce, marriage also being a sacrament, and once entered upon, a duty. There are after all so many delectable books in the world. Why linger with one that doesn't offer new delights? I feel detached from the book in my lap much as the disaffected husband or wife feels detached from the body alongside and asks, why am I here, in this state of withness? In a marriage, one hopes it may be a transient feeling — but in the case of a book, why not be abandoned, and abandon?"
Those of us who with unread and unfinished books languishing on our shelves will grin in recognition at the reasons she offers for why books on her shelf go unread. "Some of these books", she points out, "were bought because friends said I must read them (but it was they who had to read them), or because the reviews throbbed with largesse of spirit (but it was the reviewer that I loved; I should have bought the reviewer's book). Others were just too gorgeously packed to resist." Schwartz sweetly confesses that she could never lie about reading because "a remnant of holiness still clings" to the act. She can — and has — easily abandoned even the most "sanctified or stylish" literary masterpiece. She began to read at an early age and soon reading took over her life. "It didn't replace living, it infused it," she writes. For the most part, Ruined by Reading is a memoir of her childhood reading. She mourns the loss of certain books now that she is an adult. Books read as a teenager do not feel the same anymore.
Tender is the Night won her eighteen-year-old heart: "seductiveness is Fitzgerald's chief talent, and 18 year olds are eminently seducible". Some 20 years later she decides to revisit his work and finds, "The Great Gatsby happily unaltered but a strange sea change had overtaken Tender is the Night. It had become a babble of silliness. It wasn't, of course, only I had lost the exaggerated romanticism required to read it. I hope exaggerated romanticism still thrives somewhere."
As an adult, reading gave her stability, it became the constant backdrop to her life; a seduction to return home to after work. It was because she read so passionately that she discovered she wanted to be a writer. There were books she wanted to possess even more intimately than by reading. She would clutch them to her heart, and long to make them part of her. At eight she had read Little Women several times and began to copy it, sentence by sentence, into her notebook. Only later did she realise that she had wanted to write Little Women. "Since then I have had the urge to copy certain books: Middlemarch, Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, a paean to the act of reading, in all its richness, infused with the tenderness to readers, a novel whose narrative thread is drawn by the needle of reading. There are equally fine books that, much as I admire them, I would not have wanted to write, indeed have been relieved I didn't need to write: Madame Bovary, The Idiot, Mrs. Dalloway, Dubliners. Too difficult, too impossible to sustain such crushing moods and temperaments."
Even if all your books were to vanish, she writes, you would still have them somewhere — if you have read them attentively enough. "What we read is what we are", she says. "Or what we are becoming, or desire". The most important thing reading does for us, she concludes, is to give us a sense of our true selves, to reclaim us from the world. And we need to be reclaimed because as children we live our lives for others — we learn what adults want us to learn and we do it to please them. "All the reading I did as a child, behind closed doors, sitting on the bed while darkness fell around me, was an act of reclamation. This and only this I did for myself. This was the way to make my life my own." Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris might be more charming but Schwartz's "slender rhapsody on the joys (and snares) of reading" is more stylish, passionate and provocative.
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