'A Strictly Personal Affair'

Three books are on my bedside table and all I have read before: Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel (trans. David Floyd, 1970) by Anatoly Kuznetsov; The Meaning of Treason (1949) by Rebecca West; In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature 1830-1980 (1999) by Victor Brombert. This doesn’t count the books stacked on my desk or any that I might impulsively pull from the shelf. 

Nothing unusual here. Most of my reading is rereading, not because I’m stuck in the past or claim a principled objection to new volumes but because good books are made to be read again. That is their purpose. They are inexhaustible and we are not the people we were when we last read them.

 

In the Spring 2021 issue of The Yale Review, Victor Brombert published an essay titled “On Rereading: Remaking the World.” It begins with the author reviewing his shelves in the early days of the Covid-19 lockdown. He looks into the Italian text of Boccaccio’s Decameron, set in Florence in 1348 during the plague that devastated the city. Brombert can’t remember having read the book but is surprised to find annotations he wrote in it years before. “But what I was rereading,” he says, “seemed entirely new.” I’ve had that experience many times.

 

Babi Yar I first read not long after the English translation was published, around the time I read Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem with the same title. I read the novel, understandably, as history, which is not a perversion of Kuznetsov’s intentions. I was ignorant and curious about the Holocaust and the crimes of communism. Few novels are as document-dependent, as close to the actual events – the murder by the Germans of more than 33,000 Jews in two days in Kyiv – as Babi Yar. Now that the facts are known to me, I’m rereading it for other reasons. Brombert writes:

 

“[A]n actual rereading can lead to a more complex, more literary, understanding of a text, when the stress is no longer on the what, but on the how, namely the craft of the composition and the quality of the language. And there are surprises. Renewed contact with a novel or a poem can activate the autobiographical curiosity, the search for a better knowledge of the self. The new reading, a form of revision, uncovers the change in us. The newness is not in the text. It is we who have evolved. Every rereading registers this revision, and further provokes it. . . . renewed encounters with a literary work make us feel, on every separate occasion, that we are reading it for the first time.”

 

Precisely my experience. Something similar is happening as I reread Rebecca West’s book. The first time I read it as journalism, a sort of bastardized form of history. Now, after years of reading most of West’s work and concluding that she is one of the last century’s greatest writers, I’m reading to see how she does it. The subject matter, of course – human treachery – is always compelling. Brombert gets a little stuffy and academic but we would seem to agree:

 

“Books can transform us. They can determine a mental landscape, remake our vision of things . . . . transformative readings—experiences after which one is no longer quite the same, and one’s outlook and sensitivity have been significantly altered—could be compared to a psychic rebirth involving the revelation of something new, or perhaps the discovery of what was there already but as yet unrecognized.”

 

In an odd and unexpected way, reading keeps us young. A good writer renews our senses, gives us a new set of eyes and ears. When Brombert asks himself “which writers have determined my view of things, what literary works have helped shape my character," he comes up with three names – Montaigne, Stendhal and Proust. The first and third I understand, though being French-less I know my appreciation is heavily qualified. Sticking only to English-language writers, I might suggest Shakespeare, Swift and Johnson. These are only incidentally qualitative judgments. They are writers I have read consistently since I was young, who never wear out, whose language and thought suffuse me like DNA. They are responsible, in part, for who I am. I can’t say the same of many writers whom I love, enjoy and respect. By the way, I’m rereading Brombert’s In Praise of Antiheroes for his chapter on Italo Svevo, in preparation for rereading his great novel The Conscience of Zeno. Brombert writes near the conclusion of his essay:

 

“Rereading is subject to fortuitous circumstances, and remains a strictly personal affair. But the act of rereading, especially of books that have had a transformative effect, illustrates a wider common experience: the continuous shuttle, or to-and-fro movement, between art forms and lived life. It is a creative weaving, a process by which we are ceaselessly shaped.”

 

As the motto of this blog would have it, “the intersection of books and life.”