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shewhomustI read enthusiastic reviews of How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read when it was published in English, and promised myself that I would find a copy of the French language original - I don't read as much French as I'd like to, and - outside the comics section - never know where to start looking in a French bookshop. Towards the end of our holiday in Brittany, I tracked down a copy in a religious bookshop in Dinan. (Small digression: I was struck by how many independent bookshops we saw, selling both new and second-hand books - Quimper alone, with a population of around 62,000, seems to have nine).
So, even before I'd read this book, I had certain ideas of what it would be like: I knew it was a philosophical discussion rather than a bluffer's guide, and I expected it to be clever, witty, abstract.
Appropriately enough, the book itself was not entirely unlike the book I had anticipated, but it had an entirely different flavour: it was more structured, more concrete (that is, constructed around actual examples), more - well, more French. The book is in three sections: different ways of not reading, different situations in which you might find yourself talking about a book you haven't read, advice about how to behave in these circumstances. Each section has four chapters: the different ways of not having read a book, for example, are knowing absolutely nothing about it, having skimmed through it, having heard other people talking about it, and having forgotten it - and each of these chapters is illustrated with an example taken from a book (one per chapter, from Montaigne's Essais to Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose).
It's hard to know how seriously to take this. At one level, not at all: the book is published in a series called 'Paradoxe', and there's a large element of jeu d'esprit in relying on examples from books to demonstrate that you never read books - and another twist in this argument is revealed towards the end of the book. Illustrations from Groundhog Day or an anthropological study of reading Hamlet with the Tiv of West Africa are not realistic models of everyday conversations about books. I'd been struck, in the reviews I'd read beforehand, by the example of whether you can truly claim to have read a book about which you have forgotten every last detail; I have, for example, read the whole of Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu - but it was a long time ago, and I don't suppose I know any more about the book than if I had simply read about it in a Guide to Great Literature. But Bayard doesn't cast any extra light on this issue by taking at face value Montaigne's declarations that he doesnn't read, only skims, remembers nothing - yes, and the quotations with which the Essais are larded, they just crawled in there of their own volition, did they?
There is a neat device whereby each book mentioned in the text is, on its first appearance, labelled with the particular way in which Bayard has read it, and either one or two plus or minus signs to express his opinion of it: Hamlet, for example, is a book he has skimmed through, and heard others talk about, and he thinks it is very good; the book that he himself published about Hamlet, though, is a book he has forgotten, and of which he has a moderately low opinion. This is entertaining, but makes it absolutely clear than every book is an unread book. The four categories cover every book, no book falls outside them as a book he has read. In real terms, I don't accept that I didn't read Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus? - it was a couple of months ago, and it is fading now, turning into a book I have forgotten, but at the time I read it intensely, arguing every step of the way. Even within the terms of the argument, if it is impossible to read - or to have read - a book, then the category of books that you haven't read becomes meaningless: they are just books, like all the rest.
Bayard is going somewhere with this: all the individual paradoxes are leading towards a paradoxical conclusion. I'm not sure how seriously he's proposing it, whether he suggests it just for the pleasure of the paradox or whether he really is so misguided as to believe what he says. (We all know that I'm not good with humour, right?) But because he is pursuing his own line, about how it is both perfectly all right and, indeed, inevitable to talk about books you haven't read, because he claims not really to enjoy reading, he doesn't explore the areas I wanted to discuss.
For example, there's a whole other category of unread books which are the books we have read in translation. You don't have to look any further than the title of this book, which in the original French asks a question, and in the English translation promises an answer. Can you claim to have read a book if you haven't actually read a single word of what the author wrote? I'm currently reading Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; only I'm not, I'm reading Reg Keeland's translation of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. If I find the style clunky (and I did, at first, though by now I'm getting used to it), whose style am I reacting to?
This is not the sort of question that Pierre Bayard deals with. Normally I would think it completely improper to compare the book I'm reviewing to the one I wish the author had written, but on this occasion it seems entirely appropriate: if an author urges me to talk about books I haven't read, it's a natural next step to talk about the book he hasn't written. Which is, of course, the book I haven't written - but that brings me closer than I like to being reconciled with Bayard's conclusion.
It may not be obvious from this that I found Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus? enormously entertaining, and quite thought-provoking. I was frustrated that my convesration with it was so one-sided.
So, even before I'd read this book, I had certain ideas of what it would be like: I knew it was a philosophical discussion rather than a bluffer's guide, and I expected it to be clever, witty, abstract.
Appropriately enough, the book itself was not entirely unlike the book I had anticipated, but it had an entirely different flavour: it was more structured, more concrete (that is, constructed around actual examples), more - well, more French. The book is in three sections: different ways of not reading, different situations in which you might find yourself talking about a book you haven't read, advice about how to behave in these circumstances. Each section has four chapters: the different ways of not having read a book, for example, are knowing absolutely nothing about it, having skimmed through it, having heard other people talking about it, and having forgotten it - and each of these chapters is illustrated with an example taken from a book (one per chapter, from Montaigne's Essais to Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose).
It's hard to know how seriously to take this. At one level, not at all: the book is published in a series called 'Paradoxe', and there's a large element of jeu d'esprit in relying on examples from books to demonstrate that you never read books - and another twist in this argument is revealed towards the end of the book. Illustrations from Groundhog Day or an anthropological study of reading Hamlet with the Tiv of West Africa are not realistic models of everyday conversations about books. I'd been struck, in the reviews I'd read beforehand, by the example of whether you can truly claim to have read a book about which you have forgotten every last detail; I have, for example, read the whole of Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu - but it was a long time ago, and I don't suppose I know any more about the book than if I had simply read about it in a Guide to Great Literature. But Bayard doesn't cast any extra light on this issue by taking at face value Montaigne's declarations that he doesnn't read, only skims, remembers nothing - yes, and the quotations with which the Essais are larded, they just crawled in there of their own volition, did they?
There is a neat device whereby each book mentioned in the text is, on its first appearance, labelled with the particular way in which Bayard has read it, and either one or two plus or minus signs to express his opinion of it: Hamlet, for example, is a book he has skimmed through, and heard others talk about, and he thinks it is very good; the book that he himself published about Hamlet, though, is a book he has forgotten, and of which he has a moderately low opinion. This is entertaining, but makes it absolutely clear than every book is an unread book. The four categories cover every book, no book falls outside them as a book he has read. In real terms, I don't accept that I didn't read Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus? - it was a couple of months ago, and it is fading now, turning into a book I have forgotten, but at the time I read it intensely, arguing every step of the way. Even within the terms of the argument, if it is impossible to read - or to have read - a book, then the category of books that you haven't read becomes meaningless: they are just books, like all the rest.
Bayard is going somewhere with this: all the individual paradoxes are leading towards a paradoxical conclusion. I'm not sure how seriously he's proposing it, whether he suggests it just for the pleasure of the paradox or whether he really is so misguided as to believe what he says. (We all know that I'm not good with humour, right?) But because he is pursuing his own line, about how it is both perfectly all right and, indeed, inevitable to talk about books you haven't read, because he claims not really to enjoy reading, he doesn't explore the areas I wanted to discuss.
For example, there's a whole other category of unread books which are the books we have read in translation. You don't have to look any further than the title of this book, which in the original French asks a question, and in the English translation promises an answer. Can you claim to have read a book if you haven't actually read a single word of what the author wrote? I'm currently reading Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; only I'm not, I'm reading Reg Keeland's translation of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. If I find the style clunky (and I did, at first, though by now I'm getting used to it), whose style am I reacting to?
This is not the sort of question that Pierre Bayard deals with. Normally I would think it completely improper to compare the book I'm reviewing to the one I wish the author had written, but on this occasion it seems entirely appropriate: if an author urges me to talk about books I haven't read, it's a natural next step to talk about the book he hasn't written. Which is, of course, the book I haven't written - but that brings me closer than I like to being reconciled with Bayard's conclusion.
It may not be obvious from this that I found Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus? enormously entertaining, and quite thought-provoking. I was frustrated that my convesration with it was so one-sided.
