Nonrequired Reading

In her brief introduction to Nonrequired Reading, Wislawa Szymborska, poet and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, lays out her credentials as a civilized human being:

“I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.”

Nonrequired Reading is unlike conventional collections of reviews in that the books she chooses, with few exceptions, are unabashedly unliterary. For decades Szymborska has written about books for newspapers in her native Poland, but she chooses her subjects from the sad stacks of rejects that accumulate in a book editor’s office – popular science and how-to books, celebrity biographies and volumes with titles such as The Encyclopedia of Assassinations, Wallpapering Your Home and The Private Lives of Three Tenors. Szymborska says she tried writing conventional reviews: “…that is, in each case I’d describe the nature of the book at hand, place it in some larger context, then give the reader to understand that it was better than some and worse than others.” Then, happy woman, she realized she had little interest in or gift for such writing.

Rather, she learned that “basically I am and wish to remain a reader, an amateur, and a fan, unburdened by the weight of ceaseless evaluation. Sometimes the book itself is my subject; at other times it’s just a pretext for spinning out various loose associations. Anyone who calls there pieces sketches will be correct. Anyone insisting on `reviews’ will incur my displeasure.”

Szymborska writes a species of feuilleton, reminiscent of the Viennese master of the form, Peter Altenberg. Her tone is typically gentle yet tough-minded, unruffled but without swagger. On occasion, she hardly mentions the book. Ostensibly reviewing a translation of Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales, she writes:

“Anderson took children seriously. He speaks to them not only about life’s joyous adventures, but about its woes, its miseries, its often undeserved defeats. His fairy tales, peopled with fantastic creatures, are more realistic than whole tons of today’s stories for children, which fret about verisimilitude and avoid wonders like the plague.”

Compare this to a passage from “Retrospective Introduction to My Book Marchen des Lebens,” by Altenberg, another admirer of Anderson:

“We relegated fairytales to the realm of childhood – that exceptional, wondrous, stirring, remarkable time of life! But why rig out childhood with it, when childhood is already sufficiently romantic and fairytale-like in and of itself? … Everything is remarkable if our perception of it is remarkable!”

Szymborska’s buoyancy has been tempered by a history Altenberg never knew (he died in 1919). Altenberg has a child-like streak; Szymborska, never. At least in translation, however, both refer to “wonder,” a key category for evaluating reality for both writers. The lines from Altenberg, by the way, come from one of my favorite books of the last several years – Telegrams of the Soul, translated by Peter Wortsman and published by Archipelago Books.

In her review of a book with the seemingly oxymoronic title of Introducing French Humor, Szymborska gives us a clue to her method, both as a poet and reviewer, which is also a clue to her characteristic stance before the universe:

“Humor is sobriety’s younger brother. There’s constant sibling rivalry between them. The earnest senior sibling patronizes little humor, and humor thus feels inferior, and longs in his heart of hearts to be as sedate as sobriety, but, luckily, he can’t pull it off.”

The same tug-of-war is at work in Szymborska. She even writes a “review” of a wall calendar for 1973 – a ridiculous premise that quietly turns into a meditation on mortality:

“The calendar is doomed to gradual liquidation as its pages are torn off. Millions of books will outlive us, and a considerable number will be ridiculous, dated, and badly written. The calendar is the only book that has no intention of outlasting us, that does not lay claim to a sinecure on the library shelves; it is programmatically short-lived. In its humility it does not even dream of being pored over page by page, but its pages brim with texts just in case.”

Speaking of humility – always rare but virtually non-existent among poets – Szymborska writes, in the middle of a review of a Serbian poet’s prose:

“Something irritates me about the ease with which poets write about poetry. They write as if poetry still held some secrets absolutely inaccessible to other genres. Poets have always been disposed to treat poetry as if it were the alpha and omega of literature, and of course there have been periods that confirmed this conviction. But it’s old hat today. Poetry lives on, and it’s certainly not a minor genre. It seems tactless to me, though, to grant it some kind of indisputable superiority in perception and feeling vis-à-vis literary prose or drama.”

Szymborska’s humility is touching. At 83, she is a poet of great delicacy, humor and the sort of veiled moral gravitas that never turns earnest or self-righteous. She is, by nature, and despite all that her nation has endured, a poet whose first instinct is to celebrate – even second-rate but perfectly readable books. In a poem titled “Reality Demands,” from The End and the Beginning (1993), she writes:

“There is so much Everything
that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.”