She was twelve or thirteen, a girl in a hooded sweatshirt seated beside a woman I assume was her mother. She sat on the aisle two rows ahead of me. The cabin of the plane glowed with screens while she was reading Andrew R. MacAndrew’s 1961 translation of Dead Souls, the Signet paperback edition I read when I was a year or two older than her – my first Gogol, with a foreword by Frank O’Connor. What a lift it was to see. I always pay attention to people reading in public, especially ink-and-paper books. That the reader was young boosted my silent celebration.
I was reading Buried But Not Quite Dead: Forgotten Writers of Père Lachaise by Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple), published this year by Criterion Books. The premise is irresistible. He profiles not the well-known writers who inhabit the Paris cemetery – Balzac, Proust, Oscar Wilde -- but the unknown dead worthy of reanimation. It’s a brilliant book. I hadn’t heard of any of the eight writer profiled by Daniels.
Among them
is Marie-Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé (1848-1910), who
served as secretary to the French embassy in Saint Petersburg. Daniels tells us
the most famous book of this no longer famous writer is Le Roman Russe (1886) -- The
Russian Novel, though never translated into English. In Vogüé’s day, it was
credited with introducing Russian literature to French readers, a role perhaps comparable to Constance Garnett’s in English. Daniels writes:
“The book is
still an admirable introduction to Russian literature, and in choosing to write
mainly about Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, Vogüé
showed remarkable literary judgment. It is easy enough for us now to see
that these were great writers, but Vogüé was the
younger contemporary of three of them (all of whom he met), and four years old
when Gogol died . . .”
Daniels/Dalrymple
is always fond of using the past to examine the present, usually to the latter’s
detriment. He goes on:
“If asked to
name four writers today who will still be read in 150 years or more, how confident
would we be that we could do it? Perhaps this might be because there are no
writers of such stature today or because literature does not have the vital importance
that it once had, or simply because too many books are published; or it might
be because we are lacking in the acute judgment that Vogüé had.”
Judgment not lacking, I trust, in that girl in the hoodie flying between Cleveland and Houston.
3 comments:
Glancing at the current NYT top ten fiction bestsellers, Tintin seems like a pretty good choice to me.
Paper books are fine in their place. As are e-books. I’m 76 with diabetes affecting my eyesight to the point where there are paper books I can’t read very easily. But I can read them on my e-book readers. I can read on a e-book reader much more easily than a paper book when I am in bed. In certain small rooms, paper is the way to go. There are paper books which use fonts which I find too small or otherwise uncomfortable, and there are paper books which have a physical form factor that I find displeasing. Yet some paper books just work perfectly I’m not sure I’d read less were there no e-readers, but I am sure that I read more comfortably overall, given both.
And I read this blog entry on my BOOX Tab Mini C using the Readwise Reader app, and just borrowed Dalrymple’s book from Everand to read on the same device.
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