Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books

by Tim Parks

Their uncoupling from national literatures tells us that it’s the reputation of the prize that counts, not nurturing writers in a given community.

The tired jargon is enough, the tendency to confuse studies of literature with exercises in cultural history.

My own feeling is that the old ‘he’ was always understood to be impersonal and without gender while the ‘he or she’ formula is fussy and inelegant, constantly reminding readers of a problem that isn’t really there.

People tend to use stories of whatever kind to bolster their beliefs, not to question them.

The only way we can understand words like God, angel, devil, ghost is through stories, since these entities do not allow themselves to be known in other ways, or not to the likes of me.

Here not only is the word invented – all words are – but the referent is invented too, and a story to suit. God is a one-word creation story.

The more words we invent, the more we feel reassured that there really is something there to refer to.

Like God, the self requires a story; it is the account of how each of us accrues and sheds attributes over seventy or eighty years

novels are intimately involved with the way we make up ourselves.

it is precisely this illusion of selfhood that makes so many in the West unhappy. We are in thrall to the narrative of selves that do not really exist, a fabrication in which most novel-writing connives.

One can only encourage a reader like this to learn not to attach self-esteem to the mere finishing of a book, if only because the more bad books you finish, the fewer good ones you’ll have time to start.

the wonderful Christina Stead.

Often one skims as heightened engagement with the plot reduces our attention to the writing as such; all the novel’s intelligence is in the story, and the writing the merest vehicle.

Yet even in these novels where plot is the central pleasure on offer the end rarely gratifies, and if we like the book and recommend it to others, it is rarely for the end.

The Italians have a nice word here. They call plot trama, a word whose primary meanin...

I wonder if, when a bard was recounting a myth, after some early Athenian dinner party perhaps, or round some campfire on the Norwegian coast, there didn’t come a point when listeners would vote to decide which ending they wanted to hear, or simply opt for an early bed.

In our own times, Alan Ayckbourn has written plays with different endings, in which the cast decides, act by act, which version they will follow.

Perhaps it is time that I learned, in my own novels, to drop readers a hint or two that, from this or that moment on, they have my permission to let the book go just as and when they choose.

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging everything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience.

My heirs can own my house for ever, but at a certain point the product of my mind will be turned over to the public domain.

Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding wordplay and allusion, to make things easy for the translator.

Barbara Pyms or Natalia Ginzburgs.

Indeed, what I’m suggesting is that the kind of slippage we see in translations is probably indicative of an even greater slippage among many readers who are not of course considering the text as closely as the translator does.

De gustibus non est disputandum?

It’s a central tenet of systemic psychology that each personality develops in the force field of a community of origin, usually a family, seeking his or her own position in a pre-existing group, or ‘system’, most likely made up of mother, father, brothers and sisters, then aunts, uncles, grandparents, and so on. The leading Italian psychologist, Valeria Ugazio further suggests that this family ‘system’ also has ‘semantic content’; that is, as conversations in the family establish criteria for praise and criticism of family members and non-members, one particular theme or issue will dominate.

family members tend to manifest the qualities, positive and negative, around which the group’s conversations revolve.

As the youngest of three, I found my own adolescence shaped by constant parental pressure to choose between my ‘bad’ brother and my ‘good’ sister who played the guitar in church and dressed with exemplary propriety.

pusillanimous

What I’m suggesting then is that much of our response to novels may have to do with the kind of ‘system’ or ‘conversation’ we grew up in and within which we had to find a position and establish an identity.

Even today there is a subtle tension in my reading between the desire to free myself from the immediate community with its received ideas, and the desire to share what I read with those around me, those I love.

Georgette Heyer

Over the past year or two I’ve realised how much this organisation of the books in my childhood home still influences my reading and reviewing.

Identity is largely a question of the pattern of our responses when presented with a new situation, a new book.

Perhaps it’s the books that very slightly shift an old position, or at least oblige you to think it through again, that become most precious.

you cannot resign from the Academy. It’s a life sentence.

greatest novelists and/or poets of the day on the international scene? They call on scores of literary experts in scores of countries and pay them to put down a few reflections about possible winners. Such experts are supposed to remain anonymous, but inevitably some have turned out to be acquaintances of those they have nominated. Let’s try to imagine how much reading is involved. Assume that a hundred writers are nominated every year

He suggested that those post-war writers in Africa and India who had chosen to write in English and French for the international community have not only given us a superficial and easily consumed exoticism; in doing so they have made it less likely that a Western public will make the effort to read those working in the local languages and offering something that would be genuinely ‘other’ to the Western novel package we are used to.

What I found fascinating, as this discussion bounced back and forth, was that no one seemed to accept the idea that it might be enough to address one’s own community, that perhaps it was not strictly necessary to appear in this global space or contribute to its formation.

When you learn a language you don’t just pick up a means of communication, you buy into a culture, you get interested.

these people had learned excellent English and with it an interest in Anglo-Saxon culture in their school years. They had come to use their novel-reading (but not other kinds of reading) to reinforce this alternative identity, a sort of parallel or second life that complemented the Dutch reality they lived in and afforded them a certain self-esteem as initiates in a wider world.

For most of us, the set of behaviours we call personality or self forms initially in a family of three, four, or five individuals, then develops as it is exposed to the larger worlds of school and, in our teens perhaps, our town, our country.

This is an argument not for staying at home, but for having a home from which to set out.

Barbara Pym,

many of my students have read so disparately that they have little awareness of a body of texts tackling their own culture and within which they can place their writing.

Perhaps the problem is rather a slow weakening of the sense of being inside a society with related and competing visions of the world to which writers make their own urgent narrative contributions;

Henry Green,

his work had been absolutely crucial in forming my sense of the pleasures that might be had from literature.

Barbara Pym,

Pym’s wry genius,

But I believe Pym and Green to be finer writers than many a worthy Nobel laureate taking in the grand questions of the century.