Toy Stars, Real Stars

There are books you have to stoop to read; you can't stand up straight. Kafka's aphorisms, say. Late Mandelstam poems. Tsvetayeva 's long poems. Books that are their own law, their own religion. That seem to press further into themselves, and all the same to have reached something – a solitary point, burning alone in the sky. A star that burns into itself, falling endlessly into its own idiom. And separated from us in so many ways, not least the great, burning catastrophes of the twentieth century. But it is not as if you have to part veil after veil to find them – learning German, learning Russian, learning the history of Prague, or the history of St. Petersburg. They burn through all veils and that is the point. They reach us somehow, and as themselves, absolutely themselves. 

Laughter. What nonsense! As though you could gather the 'treasures of world literature' around you like gems. As though that gathering, the act of looking for 'literature' – or the pretense that it actually came to find you, shining through all the veils - was not a horrible kind of acquisitiveness. Some books you have to lose to find. Some books will not tolerate being placed alongside others on the shelves. Nothing worse than a collector of books, than a sniffer after old editions. Nothing worse than the literary fantasist who dreams the classics burn around him like the toy stars on a child's bedroom ceiling.

Toy stars, real stars. I'm not sure what kind of constellation my bookshelf collects. Fake or real? What am I looking for as I read? What do I want to find?

Between Parentheses

How many books should you read at once? A reading opens within a reading: on the bedroom floor, Pincher Martin, an old edition, 50 years old, lies face down and open at page 100 (or thereabouts). Then A Bend in the River with its broken spine, with a batch of pages come away from its centre, face down at page 100 or so. And I open another reading within the reading of these two books, one which should feel yet more secret, whispered, as between closed parentheses, but does not: Cixous' Reveries of the Wild Woman, in one of those Northwestern University Press editions, about 80 pages long (the French editions look more substantial). Because it is not a quiet book. It does not lie on its back in some pool.

Do I like it? For a while, I press myself through the paragraph, a whip at my back. Read quickly, I tell myself; this is a book that is supposed to swallowed all at once. But as I read, I know I'm waiting for something – what?; that I am reading in search of some kind of rest, that I want the book to lie down and to lie down quietly with the book, as on a hot afternoon. But it marches on. Marches and through long paragraph after paragraph, and the format of these Northwestern book doesn't help: a thousand words on each page, it seems. Words crammed in, line after line. Protagonists, in the book, familiar from Cixous' other books (her mother, her brother; The Day I Wasn't There). Ordinary conversations dipped into myth and coming up shining. An epic prose, surging along, sure of itself, confident in its own powers, and isn't that the problem (my problem)?

It's not what I'm looking for, in this secret reading furled within other readings. I want a respite, not another strong voice (and this voice is stronger than what I find in Golding, in Naipaul – stronger, and more insistent, more clamorous). What foolishness! I flick through the book, from end to beginning. It does not change. It does what it does, and clamorously. It surges along – it is still surging, there at the end. It batters me. It holds a club over me. Onto an online bookshop then. Order another book, and let it come soon. Now's the time for that edition of Ungaretti, I tell myself. His tiny, limpid poems. Tiny poems like specks of light in the waves, and not the forward surge of the waves themselves. Ungaretti, I tell myself, in him I'll find that secret point, the looked-for repose at the heart of my reading.

Who drew a moustache on the phoograph of Cixous in my edition of the Cixous Reader? Still, even then, I want to say that there are books that ask you to place a veil over your head as you read. Sacred books that keep their own distance, that push everything else away.