I have a number of books I bought at the same used bookstore. I assume these books were all owned by the same person, though they may have come from the collections of several similar people. In my mind, though, it is one person, someone whose taste in books I can trust, who is also a heavy smoker, and someone, too, who reads all his (in my mind it’s a he) books through slowly, carefully, with a lit cigarette centimeters away from the pages. When I open one of these books to read it, it still smells of smoke, somewhat stale but still strong, on every page. If I’d ever been a smoker, perhaps I’d have an experience like the one with Proust’s madeleine, but since I never was, what is evoked in my memory is the other books that I’ve opened to similar effect, a kind of secret library catalog of excellent books that has been formed for me by someone who didn’t even know he was doing it, and who certainly didn’t do it for my benefit. It’s the particularity of my own reading experience—in this case, a particularity tied to smell—following on the heels of someone else’s reading habits, that creates the tentative, shimmering connections between those books. And because I tend to share the taste of this imagined reader, when I open a book and smell cigarette smoke, it now comes with a promise that the book is going to be good.
In other words, some of the satisfactions of my reading certain used books are based on smells that allow me to construct a narrative or a story about whom a book belonged to before, to imagine someone reading something slowly and carefully, a cigarette between the yellowed fingers of one of the hands holding the book open, the book interesting enough to him that he forgets to raise the cigarette to his lips.
II.
From a pile of books bought for a few dollars, I seem to have created an affable imaginary man in the process of smoking himself to death, and my reading continues to be haunted by the person I imagine him to be.
Yet within books, beings created from books are rarely so benign. In Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness, the main character, Franz, an alcoholic writer obsessed with the occult, sleeps on a bed covered with piles of books and magazines, which, over time, take on a roughly human shape. He begins to think of the pile as his “Scholar’s Mistress.” Eventually he begins to talk to the pile as if it is an actual woman, and near the end of the book the Scholar’s Mistress comes to life, “her thin, wide-shouldered body … apparently formed solely of shredded and tightly compacted paper.” Then she attacks. “The dry, rough, hard face pressed against his, blocking his mouth, squeezing his nostrils; the snout dug itself into his neck. He felt a crushing, incalculably great weight upon him.”
Michael Cisco’s first novel, The Divinity Student, opens with its eponymous hero being struck by lightning. Once he’s dead, they “dump his contents cooked and steaming on the floor, and bring up stacks of books and manila folders, tearing out pages and shuffling out sheets of paper, all covered with writing, stuffing them inside, tamping them down behind his ribs and crushing them together in his abdomen. What pages they select and what books they tear are of little importance, only that he be completely filled up with writing, to bring him back, to set him to the task.” A moment later, after a kind of parodic baptism, he comes back to life, a man of words wrapped in skin.
In our imaginations, even after the reading experience has ended, books begin to take on a life of their own, continuing to evolve and develop, to limp on into some continuing life. I remember, back in my early twenties, describing what I liked about Beckett’s Molloy to a friend only to have him inform me that what I was describing wasn’t actually in the book. Going back to reread it, I realized that what I’d picked up on was a certain vector or directionality, a promise or suggestion of something that was only partially fulfilled. It wasn’t exactly that I was misreading Molloy; it was that I hadn’t stopped reading it after I’d closed the book, that, in some nebulous and even mystic fashion, I’d read far beyond the final page.
I read Molloy for the first and second time in an unlovely Grove Press mass-market paperback that contained all three books of Beckett’s trilogy, with yellowed pages and crowded gutters. It was a translation from Beckett’s original French, done by Patrick Bowles and Beckett himself. The third time I read it, I read the original French version in a copy from Editions de Minuit. The curious thing about the English translation is how rigorous it is, how insistent it is about maintaining the French version’s syntax and word order, to the degree that that can be done and still sound like English. As a result, I felt less of a difference between the English and the French versions than I normally do between a translation and an original.
But what I did feel, and can still vividly remember, was the difference in format—the ample gutters of the Editions de Minuit copy, the precision of the stamp of the words, the effect of having a larger font, all of which added to the feel of the text. It was similar to the effect that one gets when one has read issues of a floppy comic book and then reads it later gathered as a graphic novel: Not only is the appearance different, the work seems changed.
Since then, I’ve read the English version of Molloy in the collected Beckett and had a still different experience with it: A mass-market copy of a book positions a reader in one way, a hardback collected works positions you in another. The story is still the same, but the way in which I’m being solicited to take it in is different, and the way that my reading is being facilitated is different as well. It’s not exactly like you’re reading a different book, but it’s not exactly like you’re rereading the same book either. All these different formats mostly overlap but don’t quite, and each of them has a different feel that I’ve taken away with me.
You can experience something similar if you start reading a book in one format and shift to another, going from a mass-market paperback to a well-designed first-edition hardback, for instance, or from a print book to an e-book and back. It’s strange how disorienting those shifts can be. The words are all the same, but the reading experience is definitely not.
In reading physical books especially, one takes in a sort of residue, some of it intelligible, some not. The reading experience is partly about learning to ignore this residue, to not care overly much about the font or the yellowing of the pages or the size of the print. On one level (there are, of course, exceptions—for instance, William H. Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife), reading is about seeing through such things, pretending the window we’re looking through isn’t changing the view.
But even if we largely ignore that residue, it still affects us, in the same way that the chair we choose to read in, the quality of the light, and so on remain associated with a given book.
In a used book, this residue suggests another person. The previous owner’s name might be signed inside the cover. The corner might be turned down on several pages. There might be passages underlined or notated. There might be marginal notes, or even a bookmark with a few page numbers jotted on it. As we move through our own reading of a used book, that sense of proceeding down someone else’s path and either following it or diverging from it—while at the same time paying heed to the story with most of our attention—can be one of the great joys or frustrations. We experience a one-sided engagement with how we imagine another’s previous reading to be.
There is marginalia when you read in phone and e-readers as well—it’s relatively easy to take notes, leave bookmarks, highlight passages, and so on. Yet that engagement doesn’t tend to be solitary or passed anonymously from one reader to another as it is through a used copy. On a Kindle, for instance, you only look at someone else’s marginalia under two circumstances that I’m aware of. The first is if I “loan” you the virtual copy of a book I have bought, which means that I don’t have to imagine a reader: I know who loaned me the book. The second is stranger: Occasionally when you’re reading a digital book through Kindle you’ll hit an underlined passage that will say, for example, “Twenty-seven other people highlighted this passage.” You don’t know who these people are or why
they highlighted that passage, but you know there are twenty-seven of them. Which makes you feel like you should probably pay attention to it. Marginalia in this case is less an engagement with one other person’s reading and more a kind of pressure to conform.
Fifteen years ago I bought a used copy of Jorge Amado’s Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon and took it home to find it had a letter tucked in its pages as a bookmark, a letter that had never been opened. It’s still in that copy of that book, though a few years after buying it I opened it and read it. It doesn’t matter—or doesn’t matter to you in this context at least—what the letter said: It was an ordinary letter, not unlike any number of unremarkable letters, subdued expressions of love, a plea to write. What was extraordinary about it was that it was postmarked the same year as the book appeared in English (1962) and had apparently been in the book since before I was born. I was much less interested in the letter than in why and how it had ended up in that book, and in the person who had either put it there and forgotten to open it, or had made a conscious choice not to open it, or had been unable to open it because they had died.
I have never been able to bring myself to read that copy of the Amado novel, though several times I’ve taken it on trips with me, intending to read it, and I suspect if I’m ever to read it I’ll have to get a different copy. Sometimes the residue is too much for us even before the scanning of words on a page actually begins.
III.
Alessandro Baricco’s Mr. Gwyn is a book about a writer who deliberately stops publishing books. Instead, he decides to be a “copyist,” which, over time, he comes to understand as meaning that he will write “portraits” of people.
What this means is hard for him to explain. He rents a space, gets hold of lightbulbs timed to go out after a relatively precise length of time, and then his subjects come and pose nude in the space for a little over a month. They can do anything they like—walk around the room, sit, sleep, etc.—as he unobtrusively watches them, sometimes jotting notes. Once all the lightbulbs burn out, he writes up a verbal portrait that captures who they are. He makes only two copies. One he gives to the person who sat for the portrait, for his or her eyes only, after the person has signed a declaration pledging “the most absolute discretion, on the pain of heavy pecuniary sanctions.” The other he keeps in a drawer for himself.
These portraits are not character sketches, at least not in the way we typically think of them as being. Instead, according to the first person he portrays, Rebecca, he writes “a piece of a story, a scene, as if it were a fragment of a book.” Stories aren’t portraits, suggests another character, to which Rebecca responds, “Jasper Gwyn taught me that we aren’t character, we’re stories … we are the whole story, not just the character. We are the wood where he walks, the bad guy who cheats him, the mess around him, all the people who pass, the color of things, the sounds.”
Here it’s not that the books are coming to life, but that the close and careful observation of people reveals something about how they can be translated into words, and those words serve in turn as a mirror for what they are. It’s not the characters in the story that serve as our mirror, but the story as a whole.
We, as tangible material creatures, read in a way that asserts our sense of being material creatures reading, that reminds us in subtle, repetitive ways of our role in making the book come alive. This seems as if it should stand in the way of the reading process, should keep us always at a distance from the worlds reading creates.
And, yet, books come alive nonetheless, and they bring us alive with them.
The Knowledge Gallery
Joanna Scott
I.
“You saved nothing?” I asked, unable to contain my disappointment. I’d been hoping that a woman of her advanced age would have a diary or two in a drawer, maybe index cards or even notes scrawled on the backs of those old envelopes used for Baronial Cards.
She idly tapped the tassel on the window blind to set it swinging. “My dear, multiply two by zero and it would be nothing. If, rather, you mean anything, then yes, the last of it went into recycling when I moved here.”
“You have no manuscripts? No letters?”
She observed me, then lifted her head to direct her gaze downward, through the bottom half of her bifocals. “I see you’re writing with a pen. On paper. The old-fashioned way. But surely you haven’t forgotten that until quite recently, paper was discouraged as an indulgent, poisonous consumption. The taxes on a single ream … who could afford it? And if you could afford it, you didn’t want your enemies to know. My generation was particularly suspect—thus the public statute requiring accreditation from EcoGreen before we could receive Social Security. Writers, of course, were notorious. Have you heard of Olivia Gastrell?”
I scribbled the name, adding it to a list that was growing ever longer with each writer I interviewed. “Gastrell—with two l’s?”
She reached for a glass of water on her bedside table and took a sip. “You haven’t read her? Surprising, given your interests. She came late to fiction, published her first novel, Fortunate Odyssey, when she was fifty-two. She would have won a Hermes with Say What You Mean, but she skipped the ceremony and thus forfeited the award. Not that she needed honors to buck her up. My dear friend Olivia. She was nearly eighty when she hired movers to transfer her papers to a storage unit. Two hundred and five pounds of cellulose pulp—that was two hundred pounds over the personal legal limit. The movers were obligated to file a report. The authorities seized and destroyed everything. She had to pay a fine … I don’t remember how much, but it was significant.”
“Is she still alive?”
She sucked in her lips as she considered her response, then looked toward the door, seeming to will the interruption that came a moment later, the sharp knock startling me to the point that I bounced up from my seat, then fell back.
“Come in!”
The nurse, a bald little man lithe as a dancer, entered holding a paper cup. “M&M time!” he announced, rattling the pills deposited inside the cup. “You need more water, hon?”
“I have plenty, lovey, thank you.” She picked out the pills and tossed them both in her mouth, then made a show of taking a swig of water from her glass. “This young lady has come for a chat. So if you’ll excuse us …” She nodded in the direction of the door.
The nurse hesitated. “You’ll let me know if you need anything …”
“Absolutely, sweetheart. Now go, shoo, shoo.” She waited until he had closed the door behind him, then leaned over, opened the drawer of the table, and extracted a box. Cracking the lid, she removed the two pills that she had craftily pretended to swallow and added them to a substantial collection of pills in the box. “Don’t tell,” she said. Her imperious smile was clearly designed to remind me that I was a minion beholden to her goodwill. “Now where were we?”
“Olivia Gastrell.”
“Ah, yes. She once told me that she had an ancestor who chopped down a mulberry tree that was said to have been planted by William Shakespeare. To this day, the name Gastrell is banned in Stratford-upon-Avon.”
“And Olivia, is she—”
“Fort Worth. I’ll let her know you’re coming.” Suddenly her gaze was harsh, boring into me, daring me to react. I didn’t know what to say. I was embarrassed and resentful at being forced into extending my inquiry yet again. Didn’t she realize that I was there to preserve the reputation of Eleanor Feal? But in the evasive manner that I’d come to realize was typical for the writers I’d tracked down so far, Eleanor Feal didn’t want to tell me about herself. She wanted to tell me about Olivia Gastrell.
It was the same outcome, interview after interview. I aimed to reconstruct a writer’s work from scratch but ended up being directed by each of them to the beginning of someone else’s story. After six months and twenty-seven separate interviews, I had failed to recover a single book
.
II.
There was a welcome coolness in the breeze that skimmed the river. As I crossed the pedestrian bridge, I saw the sleek back of a beaver swimming toward the shore, pushing a newly felled branch that looked like a rack strung with pieces of green silk. In the shallows, a magnificent heron stood patiently, as if awaiting its delivery. The beaver drew nearer, still pushing the branch, changing its course only at the last moment, swimming upstream to some other destination.
I leaned against the iron rail and watched for several minutes. The heron remained stock-still, the current swirling around its legs, its yellow eye unblinking, the blue plume extending from the back of its head like a pomaded spike of hair. I was hoping the bird would rise into the air—I wanted to see the slow beat of its wings as it flew overhead. But it just stood there, so I walked on. Hearing a splash, I turned just in time to witness the heron lift its dripping head from the water and with a deft movement drop the fish that had been clamped in its beak headfirst into its gullet.
There in the heart of the city, the natural world was thriving. Along the path curving across campus, chipmunks scampered ahead of my footsteps. It was early May, and the air was redolent with the fragrance of lilacs. Petals from the magnolias flitted like butterflies in the breeze. The sun, as if summoned by the carillon chiming in the bell tower of the Knowledge Gallery, peeked shyly out from behind a flat-bottomed cumulus cotton ball.
I was in good spirits that day, contemplating the lovely campus and the equilibrium of a planet that had fully recovered from its long fever. The climate was healthy again, thanks to the ingenuity of our scientists. We were like angels dining on wind and light and water. Life itself seemed infinitely renewable.
I was sorry to have to go inside, but I had research to do, and the Knowledge Gallery was scheduled to close early, as it often did, for a special administrative function. The building, a five-story former library with sloping floors that spiraled around a hollow interior, seemed to be more useful as a party house than a location for scholarly research. Still, the resources were vast, with thousands of databases that could be accessed by anyone with a VPN account. There were technical advisers on hand to resolve any problem with a device. Numerous work spaces were furnished with white boards, televisions, self-service espresso machines, and more Macs than there were students enrolled in the university.
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