Can you be unworthy of a book? Halfway through Bernhard’s Frost I thought I was – and now, 60 pages into the new Handke, I wonder again. I began instead Coetzee’s Slow Man – a quick read, pages turning rapidly, plenty of white space on the page, each exchange in a conversation taking a new line; I’m 150 pages in; I’ll finish it today.
But Crossing the Sierra del Gredos with its small font, its large pages, its bulk sits beside my bed, a pencil keeping my place on page 60. I’m unworthy of it, I think to myself, I cannot give it enough time – cannot, that it is, let the time of reading find me, the time of the book, its time, as it changes the time of my days. Cannot give it my time then, offering myself up to the strong arms of a book, or to the pages that turn as if it were the sky turning, of events that slowly change like the weather.
And beyond that, before that, Frost – I’m halfway through. Halfway, and – stalled? No, not that. But I felt my reading could not press deeply enough into its pages; that the gorge I should cut was but a furrow. Oh to open a valley by my reading! To tear open the closed earth of the book! And Slow Man? Coetzee-by-the-numbers to start with, as if he could hardly be bothered. And then the interposition of Elizabeth Costello and the book becomes an exercise.
I need it to finish. To close the book so as not to be closed by it. And in the meantime the halfread Frost – ghostly book, begun months ago, unfinished, calmly blue in its duskjacket – stetches me across the sky. And Crossing the Sierra del Gredos … is the earth upon which I look down.
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