How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

by Pierre Bayard

  The younger and physically slighter of the two authors, Jean-Rémi Dochin, seems manifestly ill at ease during the broadcast:

  Dochin, for his part, seemed more and more to be falling asleep, completely out of it. He seemed to be having trouble following. Before the cameras, he seemed hesitant, uncomfortable, almost never completing the few sentences he managed to say.3

  It turns out Dochin has an excellent reason to appear, in the narrator’s words, “more than at sea”4 on the subject of his own book. He has been dispossessed of the book that he has supposedly cowritten by Gastinel, who is as physically imposing as his companion is slender, and who has forced his own name onto the cover with Dochin’s.

  Originally approached by the writer Dochin as a possible publisher, Gastinel read the manuscript and immediately became convinced he had a huge success on his hands; he became determined to put his own name on the book as coauthor, despite not having written a word. To force Dochin to consent, Gastinel decided to blackmail him. With this goal in mind, he seduced a girl at a dance, then took her to his country house along with Dochin, whom he got drunk. After raping the young woman and running her over with his car, he filmed Dochin bending over her corpse, on which he had discreetly planted the writer’s ID.

  Based on a tape closely guarded by Gastinel, Dochin is thus under constant threat of being accused of a murder he didn’t commit, but which he allowed to happen without intervening. He finds himself forced to abide by the wishes of his blackmailer, who has, in exchange for his silence, appropriated the right to be credited as coauthor of the book and to pocket half the royalties.

  Though neither laying claim to another writer’s manuscript nor committing a murder seems to pose much of a moral problem to Gastinel, he is nonetheless uncomfortable at the thought of speaking about the book to a large audience. He has therefore exacted a pledge from the program’s host not to mention the contents of the book, a promise of which Gastinel reminds him as soon as the questions get specific enough to present a threat:

  “Don’t forget the little deal we made before the program. Dochin and I do not in any way want to give away the plot of our novel. So, if you don’t mind, let’s talk about the authors instead. At bottom, I think that’s what your viewers are interested in anyway.”5

  Gastinel’s behavior is even more surprising in that he is quite eloquent on the subject of the duo’s follow-up book, the as yet unwritten sequel to La Java brune, to the point of publicly recounting several of its episodes. What is clearly out of the question, at least in the presence of Dochin, is for Gastinel to speak about Dochin’s work.

  As it turns out, Gastinel’s discretion is completely justified. That he prefers not to speak about the book is not due to not having read it, like many other characters we have encountered; it is because Dochin, who is nevertheless the book’s author, has not read it. In effect, Siniac’s novel constructs an unlikely situation in which one supposed coauthor is speaking about a book he has read without having written it, while the other is speaking about a book he has written but hasn’t read.

  To truly understand the situation in which the two characters find themselves during this first scene, the reader must know that Dochin is not the victim of just one trap— Gastinel’s blackmail to appropriate royalties—but of two, the second of which is revealed only in the novel’s final pages and which illuminates it retrospectively. Whereas the first trap explains Dochin’s strange attitude, only in discovering the second one do we come to understand Gastinel’s.

  While he was working on the manuscript of Java brune, Dochin, who at the time had no permanent address, was taken in by Céline Ferdinaud, the madam of a seedy hotel. Having barely begun to read the text, Céline was overcome with enthusiasm and urged Dochin to complete and publish it. She even offered to help on a practical level, by retyping the poorly typed pages that Dochin gave her each day.

  The problem is that Céline seized the opportunity of this secretarial work to write a completely different novel, which she gradually substituted for Dochin’s, retaining only the title, the period during which the story took pace, and the first names of the two child protagonists. Day by day, she replaced Dochin’s poorly written and unpublishable pages with a much more carefully composed text of her own.

  What is the point of this stratagem? The name Céline Ferdinaud is in fact an alias for a notorious collaborator in the Occupation, Céline Feuhant. With an eye to blackmailing a number of prominent fellow collaborators who had peacefully resumed their lives, Céline had decided to publish her fictionalized memoirs. But at the Liberation she had agreed, in exchange for a promise of impunity, to desist from calling attention to herself. Unable to publish the book as it was lest she be recognized, she discovered her lodger’s third-rate manuscript and hit upon the idea of publishing her own book under his name, without the author—if we can call him that—realizing it.

  Thus two texts bearing the same title continually circulate throughout Siniac’s novel, each by turns substituting for the other. Dochin, like the reader, fails to understand how his own text—which he quite rightly judges to be execrable— could have aroused the enthusiasm of the entire critical community, which has, in fact, been given the other manuscript, written by Céline. For the duration of the ruse, then, Gastinel, who is in on the plot, is inclined to remain as vague as possible when speaking of the book in Dochin’s presence, so that Dochin will not find out that the book causing all the excitement is one he has never read.

  Dochin thus finds himself in the position of having to speak about a book that is unknown to him, although he believes himself to be its author. Unlike Rollo Martins, who knew that he was not speaking about the same author as the members of his audience, Dochin has no idea he is participating in a dialogue of the deaf, since Gastinel is doing his best (failing to give him a copy of his book, among other measures) to prevent Dochin from discovering that La Java brune is not La Java brune.

  It is essential for Gastinel—who has read the same book as his audience, but who must at any cost prevent his partner from being too explicit, lest the host’s reaction tip Dochin off to the substitution of the manuscript—that the comments made during the broadcast be as ambiguous as possible. One of his solutions is to insist on speaking of something other than the text, such as the lives of the authors or their next book.

  Another option for Gastinel is to make sure that the discussion touches only on the few superficial aspects of the text that are shared by the two books. This is the case for the Occupation period that serves as a backdrop for both works, as well as for the two child heroes, Max and Mimile, whom Céline has made sure to retain in her version of La Java brune:

  [The host] came charging back: he was dying, it was clear, to talk about the novel. Gastinel rebuffed him, then consented, all the same, after emitting a declamatory sigh, to say two or three words on the work [ . . . ] It was thus agreed to say two or three little things—which were not at all compromising, there was still this obsession with not giving away the plot—about the Max and Mimile characters, whereupon the portly author directed the discussion authoritatively, as though he himself were the host of the discussion, to the Occupation in Paris in general, the raids, the restrictions, the lines in front of the poorly stocked shops, the curfew, the lists of hostages posted on the walls, the anonymous denunciations, and the entire litany of daily miseries of those four interminable years. There was nothing inappropriate in doing so, besides, since this oppressive, lugubrious atmosphere was the constant backdrop for the book.6

  For Gastinel, these generalities about the two children or the setting shared by the two works are the only safe territory. On the few occasions when the conversation does become less vague, incomprehension starts to blossom between Dochin and the program host, and Gastinel is obliged to intervene, offering comments that are ambiguous enough to set both parties at ease:

  “You’re going to make yourself enemies.”

  “So much the better—we love a good fight
. In any event, since our success we’ve already had our share. We’ve even turned away a few.”

  “The references to . . . certain people in prominence at the time . . . go pretty far, at moments . . .”

  “That’s not at all my opinion,” said Dochin. “You must have misread.”

  “We never really attack people,” said Gastinel. “No more than, say, a few discreet jabs.”7

  The problem facing Gastinel is that he has to find phrases simultaneously befitting the book Dochin has read—the one he wrote—with which the program host is unfamiliar, and the book that the host has in his hands, whose existence is unknown to Dochin. Whereas Dochin’s manuscript shows no interest in complicating matters for newly respectable ex-collaborators, Céline’s is a full-blown attack on her former accomplices. The expression “discreet jabs” is a compromise formation, in the Freudian sense, between the two books being discussed simultaneously on the program. So it is that live, in front of millions of viewers, Gastinel finds himself compiling fragments of a joint book that might offer an acceptable reconciliation to both parties, within which each reader will be able to identify his own text.

  But the television host is not the only one experiencing difficulties in having a coherent conversation with Dochin. The same holds for Céline and for other critics, who talk to him constantly about a book in which he finds it hard to recognize himself.

  If Céline, to her misfortune, is familiar with Dochin’s book, having been obliged to type it out daily, she can’t tell him what she really thinks of it and is forced to talk to him about an imaginary book that he has difficulty superimposing onto his own. He is stupefied by Céline’s wildly enthusiastic observations during the period when she is transcribing the manuscript, remarks that understandably seem a bit off the mark to him in that she is really addressing herself:

  “Frankly, this is a lucky time for me. It’s so hard to find a good writer, especially these days. All the great ones have taken leave . . . and never returned! ‘I leave you my books—enjoy!’ Céline . . . Aragon . . . Giono . . . Beckett . . . Henry Miller . . . Not to mention Marcel [ . . . ] And when I think that there are crossed out sentences that can no longer even be deciphered because you’ve drenched everything with strokes of your pen! When by some miracle I manage to read what you’ve slashed out, I’m dumbfounded. You’ve eliminated true gems! I start wondering what you could possibly have been thinking when you got rid of all that.”

  The smile beginning to form on my lips must have expressed an outraged skepticism.

  “One small question: are you sure you read my manuscript?”8

  What is being described in this passage to the point of caricature is an experience familiar to all writers, in which they realize that what is said about their books does not correspond to what they believe they have written. Every writer who has conversed at any length with an attentive reader, or read an article of any length about himself, has had the uncanny experience of discovering the absence of any connection between what he meant to accomplish and what has been grasped of it. There is nothing astonishing in this disjuncture; since their inner books differ by definition, the one the reader has superimposed on the book is unlikely to seem familiar to the writer.

  This experience is unpleasant enough with a reader who has not understood your book’s project, but it is perhaps paradoxically more painful when the reader is well-intentioned and appreciates the book and grows passionate when he begins talking about it in detail. In his enthusiasm, he resorts to the words most familiar to him, and instead of this bringing him closer to the writer’s book, it brings him closer to his own ideal book, which is so crucial to his relation to language and to others that it is unique, and not transcribable into any other words. In this case, the author’s disillusionment may be even more pronounced, since it arises from the discovery of the unfathomable distance that separates us from others.

  It might then be said that the chances of wounding an author by speaking about his book are all the greater when we love it. Beyond the general expressions of satisfaction that tend to create a sense of common ground, there is every likelihood that trying to be more precise in our exposition of why we appreciated the book will be demoralizing for him. In the attempt, we force him into an abrupt confrontation with everything that is irreducible in the other, and thus irre- ducible in him and in the words through which he has attempted to express himself.

  In Siniac’s book, this painful experience of incomprehension is heightened by the real dissociation between the book the writer believes he has written and the one the others believe they have read, since in this instance there are two materially distinct books. But beyond the surface intrigue, it is indeed this crisis of impossible communication between the writer’s inner book and those of his readers that is played out here, in an almost allegorical manner.

  It’s unsurprising, therefore, that the question of the double is such an obsession in Siniac’s novel. Dochin is a participant in a process of doubling in that he does not recognize himself in what others say about his book, just as other people’s comments often make writers feel that they are dealing with a text that is other (which is effectively the case). The doubling is produced by the presence in us of the inner book, which can be transmitted to no one and superimposed on no other. For the inner book, the manifestation of everything that makes us absolutely unique is the expression within us of the incommunicable itself.9

  What, then, are we to do when facing the writer himself? The case of the encounter with the author of a book we haven’t read at first seems to be the thorniest case, since the author is assumed to be familiar with what he wrote, but it is revealed in the end to be the simplest of all.

  First, it is far from evident, despite what you would expect, that the writer is in the best position either to speak about his book or to remember it precisely. The example of Montaigne, unable to identify the cases in which he is being quoted, serves as evidence that after we write a text and are separated from it, we may be as far from it as others are.

  But second and most especially, if it is true that the inner books of two individuals cannot coincide, it is useless to plunge into long explanations when faced with a writer. His anxiety is likely to grow as we discuss what he has written, along with his sense that we are talking to him about another book or that we have the wrong person. And he is even in danger of undergoing a genuine experience of depersonalization, confronted as he is with the enormity of what separates one individual from another.

  As may be seen, there is only one sensible piece of advice to give to those who find themselves having to talk to an author about one of his books without having read it: praise it without going into detail. An author does not expect a summary or a rational analysis of his book and would even prefer you not to attempt such a thing. He expects only that, while maintaining the greatest possible degree of ambiguity, you will tell him that you like what he wrote.

  1. SB+. UB-.

  2. UB

  3. Pierre Siniac, Ferdinaud Céline (Paris:Rivages/noir, 2002), p. 18.

  4. Ibid., p. 20.

  5. Ibid., p. 11.

  6. Ibid., p. 17.

  7. Ibid., p. 23.

  8. Ibid., p. 81.

  9. The author of neither the book he wrote nor of Gastinel’s crime, Dochin will also end up taking responsibility, under duress, for the murder of Céline, committed by the French secret service.

  VIII

  Encounters with Someone You Love

  (in which we see, along with Bill Murray and his groundhog, that the ideal way to seduce someone by speaking about books he or she loves without having read them yourself would be to bring time to a halt)

  CAN WE IMAGINE two beings so close that their inner books come, at least for a while, to coincide? Our last example of literary confrontation brings up quite another kind of risk from that of appearing to be an impostor in the eyes of a book’s author: that of being unable to seduce the person you have fallen for, because of
not having read the books he or she likes.

  It is a commonplace to say that our sentimental life is deeply marked by books, from childhood onward. First of all, fictional characters exert a great deal of influence over our choices in love by representing inaccessible ideals to which we try to make others conform, usually without success. But more subtly, too, the books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.

  One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is, if not to have read the same books, to have read at least some books in common with the other person—which means, moreover, to have non-read the same books. From the beginning of the relationship, then, it is crucial to show that we can match the expectations of our beloved by making him or her sense the proximity of our inner libraries.

  It is a strange adventure indeed that befalls Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray), the hero of Harold Ramis’s film Groundhog Day.1 The star weatherman of a major American television station, Connors is sent in the dead of winter, accompanied by the program’s producer, Rita (played by Andie MacDowell), and a cameraman, to cover an important event of American provincial life, Groundhog Day.