'He Himself Makes Up the Rules of the Game'

The late David Myers insisted I was a critic and just as vigorously I would deny it. I think David couldn’t imagine someone not wanting to be a critic, a job he loved and was born into. I have no interest in theory and my analytical skills are feeble. My approach to books is strictly intuitive and pleasure-driven. I’m confident in my literary tastes and keep up with regular maintenance on my bullshit detector. I like to read and like to write, and therefore I write about what I've been reading. If I have a model for this sort of thing in the back of my mind, it’s the essay not the review or critical manifesto. I’m with Joseph Epstein who writes in his introduction to Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing (1985): 

“If literary critic I am, I seem to have fallen into the job, in a largely unplanned way, the way most people fall in love. What I do think of myself as being is a reader; not someone who merely takes pleasure in reading—though I do take passionate pleasure in it—but someone for whom reading has been one of the main experiences in his life.”

 

Along with being a poet, Wisława Szymborska was an occasional book reviewer. Nonrequired Reading: Prose Pieces (trans. Clare Cavanagh, 2002) is a collection of reviews she wrote for the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborczaby. The books she selects are “unappreciated, undiscussed, unrecommended.” Purposely she chooses unfashionable books ignored by other reviewers. Szymborska even rejects the job description “reviewer” and says, instead, “basically I am and wish to remain a reader, an amateur, and a fan, unburdened by the weight of ceaseless evaluation.”

 

Szymborska’s reviews are often funny and always free of dogma and pretentiousness. Her touch is light though she’s unafraid of the heavy. So many reviewers seem to be operating from the upper slopes of Mount Sinai. Not Szymborska: “Sometimes the book itself is my subject; at other times it’s just a pretext for spinning out various loose associations. Anyone who calls these pieces sketches will be correct. Anyone insisting on ‘reviews’ will incur my displeasure.” She stands in as the reader’s surrogate:

 

“Homo Ludens with a book is free. At least as free as he’s capable of being. He himself makes up the rules of the game, which are subject only to his own curiosity. He’s permitted to read intelligent books, from which he will benefit, as well as stupid ones, from which he may also learn something. He can stop before finishing one book, if he wishes, while starting another at the end and working his way back to the beginning. He may laugh in the wrong places or stop short at words that he’ll keep for a lifetime. And, finally, he’s free—and no other hobby can promise this—to eavesdrop on Montaigne’s arguments or take a quick dip in the Mesozoic.”

 

Szymborska was born on this date one hundred years ago, on June 2, 1923, and died in 2012 at age eighty eight.