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Monday 1 December 2008

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

Omissions and admissions

Philip Hensher reviews How to Talk about Books

And Bayard avoids the crucial point that, in many ways, we don’t know when we have read a book at all. They are much more slippery things than he presumes. In the case of Proust, with three immensely distinct separate texts in French and three or four major translations into English, when have we actually read the thing? To the English reader, Bayard’s apparent trust in these somehow stable objects to be attained by the wavering, forgetful and lazy reader is shown up when he starts talking about a celebrated American film, Groundhog Day.

This made me pause: I didn’t remember Rita’s interest as being quite so obscure as that. In fact, what Rita actually studies is 19th-century French poetry. The company which dubbed Groundhog Day into Un jour sans fin presumably wanted to spare national feeling in thinking of a totally pointless object of study. When Bayard talks about a Japanese novel, an English novel, an Italian one, what is he actually reading?

The virtue of Bayard’s book with its seemingly jocular premise is to suggest that not- reading-but-talking is quite an important step on the long road towards the goal of actually reading the book. The weakness of it is that he doesn’t see that not-reading is, tragically, the only possible conclusion. Like Achilles and the tortoise, with every step the reader seems to halve the distance between himself and the book. Like the tortoise, a book always remains teasingly out of reach, and ultimately unreadable. You will never get to the end of Proust, though that isn’t a good reason not to make a start.

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