by Pamela Paul
Did you identify with any literary characters growing up? Who were your literary heroes?
Starting at about eleven, with Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll, I began identifying with the writer—or what I’ve learned now to call “the implicit author”—of a given fiction, rather than with the characters directly. Possibly some would say this explains a deficit of heroes in my stories.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?
An invitation to air one’s limitations? Sure, I’ll bite. Based on other things I like, people keep insisting I read Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Each time I try, I discover an allegory of Russian politics, both labored and coy, starring Lucifer and a black cat—just about what I’d least wish to read in the world.
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
I know I should use my time machine to go deep-canonical, but the prospect of trying to navigate a dinner party with Herman Melville, Charlotte Brontë, and Honoré de Balzac—figuring out what I could say to them, or what they could say to each other—is beyond my capacities as a bon vivant. Instead, I think I’d want to hang out with three guys I just missed out on knowing, a group more “relatable” to twentieth-century me—Don Carpenter, Philip K. Dick, and Malcolm Braly. They’re all, as it happens, semi-outlaw types with Marin County connections, so they’d probably have a good time if thrown together. And I could flatter myself and claim I’ve been implicated in the revival of each of their posthumous careers, so we’d have something to raise a glass or spark a joint to. I’d be thrilled to let them know they’re in print.
What book have you always meant to read and haven’t gotten around to yet? Anything you feel embarrassed never to have read?
In the matter of putting things down unfinished, I’m too old now not to do it all the time, when something’s not working. No harm, no foul, just mutual détente. As for the classics unread, in that too I try to leave shame out of my game. The existence of vastly more great books than I can ever hope to read is a primary locus of joy in this life, and weight on the scale in favor of human civilization. What’s weird is that I’ve already doubled back on myself—rereading those classics to which I gave giddy short shrift in my teenage years, I find them as mysterious as if they were new. What good does it do a fifty-year-old to go around feeling as if he’s read The Red and the Black or Malone Dies when he did it as a high school freshman? I often bear false confidence—I’ll reference these things in conversation, or with students—then open the book and wonder who it was that actually read it. Not me.
What do you plan to read next?
I’ve got a beautiful stack right here: Hilton Als’s White Girls, Tao Lin’s Taipei, Jamie Quatro’s I Want to Show You More, the new compendiums of William Gaddis’s and Italo Calvino’s letters. And Daniel Deronda, which, you know, I always meant to read and never got around to. I hear it’s good.
Jonathan Lethem is the author of Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, Dissident Gardens, and Chronic City, among other books.
Jhumpa Lahiri
What are you reading at the moment? Are you a one-book-at-a-time person?
I’m reading the poems of Patrizia Cavalli, whom I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting in Rome. I adore her personally and I love her poems. She describes desire like no one else. I’m thrilled that a bilingual edition of her poetry, in Italian and English, will be published this fall in the United States. I’m also reading the letters of Cesare Pavese and Pasolini’s Teorema, which was conceived both as a novel and a film. The combination of poetry, fiction and either letters or the diary of a writer I admire is ideal.
What’s the best book you’ve read so far this year?
Lovers, a novel by a French writer named Daniel Arsand. I read it first in the English translation, then in Italian. It’s a harrowing love story with rich historical context. But it’s free of bulk, of weight, of all the predictable connective narrative tissue. I found it incantatory, transcendent. It inspires me to tell a story in a different way.
If you had to name a favorite novelist, who would it be?
Thomas Hardy. Ever since I first read him, in high school, I’ve felt a kinship with his characters, his sense of place, his pitiless vision of humanity. I continue to reread him as often as I can. The architecture of his novels is magnificent, and the way his characters move through time and space is remarkably controlled. The world he creates is absolutely specific, as is the psychological terrain. In spite of the great scope of his work, its breadth and complexity, the prose is clean, straightforward, economical. No scene, no detail, no sentence is wasted.
And your favorite short story writers?
William Trevor, Mavis Gallant, Gina Berriault, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Munro, Andre Dubus. Also Joyce, Chekhov, Cheever, Malamud, Moravia. I recently discovered the work of Giorgio Manganelli, who wrote a collection called Centuria, which contains one hundred stories, each of them about a page long. They’re somewhat surreal and extremely dense, at once fierce and purifying, the equivalent of a shot of grappa. I find it helpful to read one before sitting down to write.
What immigrant fiction has been the most important to you, both personally and as an inspiration for your own writing?
I don’t know what to make of the term “immigrant fiction.” Writers have always tended to write about the worlds they come from. And it just so happens that many writers originate from different parts of the world than the ones they end up living in, either by choice or by necessity or by circumstance, and therefore, write about those experiences. If certain books are to be termed immigrant fiction, what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn’t agree with me. Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction. Hawthorne writes about immigrants. So does Willa Cather. From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.
What kinds of stories are you drawn to? Any you steer clear of?
I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.
Any books we would be surprised to find on your shelves?
Almost all the books I have on my shelves now are in Italian. I have been reading predominantly in Italian for over a year. I read more slowly as a result. But also more carefully, less passively.
Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?
Literature has always been and will forever be my only form of self-help.
Did you identify with any literary characters growing up? Who were your literary heroes?
I identified with orphans, like Anne of Green Gables, or pioneers, like the characters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, or children who slipped in and out of different worlds and dimensions, like the siblings in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. And of course there was the writer, Jo, in Little Women. I loved the brother and sister in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, who run away from home and survive among works of beauty. I never go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art without thinking of them.
What books have you enjoyed reading with your own children? Any you’re especially looking forward to reading together with them?
My husband and I have been reading to our children every night for the past ten years (our eldest is now eleven). We take turns, alternating nights. I love rereading and sharing the books I read and loved as a child, such as the Pippi Longstocking series by Astrid Lindgren and everything by Roald Dahl. And I’ve loved discovering new books with them. Last summer we read a great series together called The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, by Maryrose Wood. These days I also l
ike to read to my children in Italian, which they can now follow. We just read some beautiful fables adapted by Italo Calvino, and another collection of very brief and amusing stories by Gianni Rodari, called Le Favolette di Alice. They’re about a tiny little girl who keeps finding herself temporarily trapped inside of things, like pockets, ink bottles, birthday cakes, and soap bubbles.
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
The idea of meeting writers of the books I’ve read doesn’t interest me. That is to say, I wouldn’t go out of my way. If the book is alive to me, if the sentences speak to me, that’s enough. A reader’s relationship is with the book, with the words, not with the person who created it. I don’t want the author to explain anything to me or to interfere. Still, I wish I’d met Edward Gorey before he died, if only to salute his brilliance.
If you could be any character from literature who would you be?
I’d like to be Sebastian Flyte from Brideshead Revisited, but only during the early chapters, before things start to go downhill. I’ve always wanted to dress for dinner.
What do you plan to read next?
I’m planning to read the travel essays of Antonio Tabucchi.
Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland.
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On Rereading
I tend to think of the reading of any book as preparation for the next reading of it. There are always intervening books or facts or realizations that put a book in another light and make it different and richer the second or the third time.
—Marilynne Robinson
There is so much to read, and time is so short! I am seventy, but I have not yet reached the age when rereading gives more pleasure than the surprise of a new story or a new writer.
—Isabel Allende
Reading is rereading just as writing is rewriting. Any worthwhile book took many, many drafts to reach completion, and so it would make sense that the first time the reader works her way through the volume it’s more like a first date than a one-time encounter. If the person was uninteresting (not worthwhile) there’s no need for a repeat performance, but if they have promise, good humor, hope, or just good manners, you might want to have a second sit-down, a third. The joy of reading is in the rereading; this is where you get to know the world and characters in deep and rewarding fashion.
—Walter Mosley
I’m rereading The Portrait of a Lady, which I do every few years to remind myself that there really is such a thing as elegance, in life and in prose—and to remember how much devastation can unfold around it. I am moved by Henry James’s ineffable sadness, the belief that human experience is full of loss and that high morals don’t stand a chance. I don’t entirely agree with that point of view, but I find it galvanizing.
—Andrew Solomon
I reread [Janet] Malcolm’s Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession just to remind myself how nonfiction is supposed to be done. I love how ominous her writing is. Even when she is simply sketching out the scenery, you know that something wonderful and thrilling is about to happen.
—Malcolm Gladwell
[The book I most like rereading is one] I’ve had for over fifty years called The Armed Forces Officer. It was written by Brigadier S. L. A. (Slam) Marshall. After World War II he was commissioned to review the actions of our soldiers and provide a historically based book of guidance for army officers. It is one of the finest leadership books I’ve ever read and was given to every officer back then. It was always with me and is right in front of me now. It once went out of print, and I was able to persuade the Pentagon to reissue it with a new cover and an update. The book has received more updates and can now even be found on Amazon. Right next to it is The Professional Soldier, by Morris Janowitz. It was published in 1960, two years after I became an officer. It is a sociological analysis of the military officer at that time. I learned that the average senior army officer was white, a West Pointer, rural, and an Episcopalian from South Carolina. I nailed one out of five. In my early years in the army, my focus was on learning about and understanding my chosen profession. I was studying to be a good lieutenant. And, of course, the Bible.
—Colin Powell
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Richard Dawkins
What’s the best book you’ve read so far this year?
I’ve been reading autobiographies to get me in the mood for writing my own and show me how it’s done: Tolstoy (at one time my own memoir was to have been called, at my wife’s suggestion, Childhood, Boyhood, Truth); Mark Twain; Bertrand Russell; that engaging maverick Herb Silverman; Edward O. Wilson, elder statesman of my subject. But the best new book I have read is Daniel Dennett’s Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. A philosopher of Dennett’s caliber has nothing to fear from clarity and openness. He is out to enlighten and explain, and therefore has no need or desire to language it up like those obscurantist philosophers, often of “Continental” tradition, for whom obscurity is valued as a protective screen, or even admired for its own sake. I once heard of a philosopher who gushed an “Oh, thank you!” when a woman at a party said she found his book hard to understand. Dennett is the opposite. He works hard at being understood, and makes brilliant use of intuition pumps (his own coining) to that end. The book includes a helpful roundup of several of his earlier themes, and is as good as its intriguing title promises.
Who are your favorite contemporary writers and thinkers?
I’ve already mentioned Dan Dennett. I’ll add Steven Pinker, A. C. Grayling, Daniel Kahneman, Jared Diamond, Matt Ridley, Lawrence Krauss, Martin Rees, Jerry Coyne—indeed quite a few of the luminaries that grace the Edge online salon conducted by John Brockman (the Man with the Golden Address Book). All share the same honest commitment to real-world truth, and the belief that discovering it is the business of scientists—and philosophers who take the trouble to learn science. Many of these “Third Culture” thinkers write very well. (Why is the Nobel Prize in Literature almost always given to a novelist, never a scientist? Why should we prefer our literature to be about things that didn’t happen? Wouldn’t, say, Steven Pinker be a good candidate for the literature prize?)
You have written several books on science and secularism. What other books on the subject would you recommend?
Look at the list of those who obsessively attack Sam Harris and you’ll get an idea of what a dangerously effective writer he is: clear, eloquent, penetratingly intelligent, suffers no fools. Much the same could be said of Christopher Hitchens, and the attacks on him have increased now he is no longer around to fight back. Less well known, but very good in their different ways, are J. Anderson Thomson’s Why We Believe in God(s), a psychologically informed analysis of what J. L. Mackie called “The Miracle of Theism,” and Sean Faircloth’s Attack of the Theocrats!, a chillingly well-researched unmasking of the contemporary political threat to America’s noble secular tradition.
You were born in Kenya and spent your early childhood there. What kinds of books did you read while growing up in Africa?
The greatest novel to come out of Kenya is, in my admittedly limited opinion, one of the great novels of the English language, and it is lamentably neglected by literary connoisseurs: Elspeth Huxley’s Red Strangers, a saga sweeping through four generations of a Kikuyu family, based on the author’s sympathetic and lifelong familiarity with that tribe. Beginning before the coming of the white men, she takes us readers into the Kikuyu world and mind so successfully that when the British finally arrive, we find their ways as quaint and alien as if they were invading Martians. We feel at home in an economy pegged to the goat standard (as I put it in my introduction to the Penguin reprint of the book), and we share the tribal indignation that rupees cannot, as promised, be “changed into goats.” Huxley’s descriptive powers rival Steinbeck’s, with the added subtlety that her metaphors and imagery are drawn from the Kikuyu mind. The pasture “gleamed like a parrot’s win
g.” A felled tree “tottered like a drunken elder.”
I was much too young to read this literary tour de force during my African childhood, though I have read it many times since and am proud of my achievement in persuading Penguin Books to restore it to print. However, just as Elspeth Huxley immersed herself in Kikuyu life to produce her masterpiece, Geraldine Elliot listened to the folk tales of the Ngoni people further south (where I lived after my family moved from Kenya), and she produced a beautiful series of children’s books which I adored. The Long Grass Whispers, Where the Leopard Passes, and others are fables of animal wiles and trickery, a kind of African Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox. Kalulu the rabbit is the cunning hero of most of the stories, perennially outwitting Nkandwe the jackal, Fisi the hyena, Nyalugwe the leopard, and others. The names of the characters are actually species names in the local family of languages, one of which I knew as Chinyanja, so that was an added bond.
Did you identify with any fictional characters as a child? Who was your literary hero?
I didn’t know children were expected to have literary heroes, but I certainly had one, and I even identified with him at one time: Doctor Dolittle, whom I now half identify with the Charles Darwin of Beagle days. This gentle, kindly naturalist, who could talk to nonhuman animals and commanded godlike powers through their devotion to him, is nowadays unfashionable—and even banned from libraries—because of suspected racism. Well, what do you expect? Hugh Lofting was writing in the 1920s, and the ubiquitous racism of England at that time can be seen in so much fiction, including Agatha Christie, Sapper (Bulldog Drummond), and many other popular writers for all ages. This is not to excuse it, but Lofting’s racism was paternalistic rather than malign and, in my opinion, sufficiently outweighed by the admirable anti-speciesism of all his books.