Bookshelves in private homes can go either way. Sometimes they are very cheerful collections, known and loved: there for a reason. To be ready to hand at the beck and call of a moment's whim, whether to be re-read again, or thumbed through for a well-cherished passage or quotation. Or even, lent to a dear friend (oh! but bring me back).
Other times...you can just tell, the books have set in place. There's no dust, they are being cleaned, but they may as well have been furniture-polished over. No one is reading these books. They've been sentenced to a suffocated existence, pages pressed together jammed tight cheek-to-jowl with their downcast fellow prisoners. As I browse idly by, as nonchalant as possible, their silent cries ring out. Their silent cries, and their stories:
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai: "Get us out of here!"
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood: "Even the hell of the bookstore is better than this living death of never being read!"
On Beauty by Zadie Smith: "I was read once, or partly - a third of the way through, stuck the bookmark in, then put me up here. That bookmark lies inside me lodged at pg. 96 like a stab-wound, a knife never removed."
Life of Pi by Yann Martel: "I've never been opened once. Nothing inside me has seen eyes. Straight from the bindery to Borders, waiting on the shelf for months - when they chose me I was so happy! The inside of the plastic shopping bag was heaven, nestled up against the receipt - proof of my worth! But since then - this. Straight to the shelf. I was bought to fill a gap on the shelf, as far as I can tell."
Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: "We may as well be an art installation on the topic of how erudite these people used to be, or wanted to seem at least."
To these books, abandoned in plain sight, I come as a liberator.
2 comments:
Ha! Yes, I have a few with stories to tell.
Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy: "You bought me 10 years ago, and you've never even peeked inside! My author won the Novel Prize!! Do I deserve this shabby treatment?"
Yes, but the Nobel Lit Prize is more a sort of a "lifetime achievement award" than an endorsement of any particular work...
Now, the books up in my post above might be horrified after all my sympathetic advocacy (and hinted rescue missions!) to see me now assisting you, with justifications and rationalizations!
But it's okay guys - Bee's a real reader. I'm vouching. Some people just skim you - is that what you want? When she reads you, you've been read.
That's what all books want!
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