Maybe You Can Judge a Book by its Cover
“There is more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all.” Thus begins Pierre Bayard’s witty and provocative meditation on the nature, scale and necessity of non-reading. It’s the latest sort of business book tell-all tale; how to seem like a reader without really reading.
Posted by: Economist.com
| How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read By Pierre Bayard. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman  Bloomsbury; 208 pages; $19.95. To be published in Britain by Granta in January Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk |
The first section explores the four categories of unread books, into at least one of which Mr Bayard places every book he mentions. These are the “books unknown to me”, the “books I have skimmed”, the “books I have heard about” and the “books I have forgotten”. No exceptions are admitted, even for books he himself wrote.
Each category is illustrated with an example from literature. The librarian in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities explains that reading any particular book distracts from what is truly important: the relationship between all books. Paul Valéry, who eulogised Marcel Proust despite brazenly admitting he had only skimmed the writer’s work, claimed this critical distance better enabled him to comment on it. Umberto Eco structured The Name of the Rose around a lost book which none of the characters had read, but about which each nonetheless had strong views. Montaigne, who was so forgetful that he took to annotating each book he read with a brief summary, felt that this passage to oblivion was an essential part of making a book’s contents his own.
The second section describes social encounters during which it becomes essential to talk about unread books. Mr Bayard, who is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris (his book was a bestseller in France earlier this year), says airily that he must often talk about books he has at best skimmed, at worst not even opened—sometimes even with the books’ authors. Should you happen to meet the writer of a book you could be expected to have read, you might find useful the advice proffered here: “While maintaining the greatest possible degree of ambiguity...tell him that you like what he wrote.”
The third and final section contains the book’s meat: the “various means of extricating ourselves from these situations with grace”. The first requirement is a lack of shame; the second is the courage to impose one’s own ideas on books. Then there is the most radical of all: to revel in one’s freedom as a non-reader to recreate each book to one’s own ideal. In any conversation about a book, says Mr Bayard, both parties are talking about different texts, “caught up in an endless process of inventing books”. Someone who finds the courage to embrace this process will find that “in that moment, he becomes a writer himself”.
Your reviewer’s mind wandered, as she explored ways of not reading this book. Surely, she thought, books are like people, who can be unknown to us, or heard of, or “skimmed” (perhaps met) or forgotten, but never truly known? But that is to leave out love — for people and for books.
