A Reader on Reading

“Unimportant, of course, I meant,” the King hastily said, and went on to himself in an undertone, “important—unimportant — unimportant—important—” as if he were trying which word sounded best.

Some of the jury wrote down “important,” and some “unimportant.” Alice could see this, as she was near enough to look over their slates; “but it doesn’t matter a bit,” she thought to herself.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 12

For Connie Rooke

I WASN’T GOING TO WRITE. For years the temptation kept itself at bay, invisible. Books had the solid presence of the real world and filled my every possible need, whether read out loud to me at first, or later read silently on my own, but always repeating their assurance that what they told me would not change, unlike the rooms in which I slept and the voices heard outside the door. We traveled much, my nurse and I, because my father was in the Argentinean diplomatic service, and the various hotel rooms, and even the embassy house in Tel Aviv, lacked the familiarity of certain pages into which I slipped night after night.

After I learned to read, this story-land homecoming no longer depended on my nurse’s availability, weariness, or mood, but on my own whim alone, and I would return to the books I knew by heart whenever the fancy or the urge took me, following on the page the words recited in my head. In the morning, under one of four palm trees set in a square in the walled embassy garden; during the car drive to the large wild park where wild tortoises crept along the dunes planted with oleander bushes; especially at night, while my nurse, thinking I was asleep, sat at her electric knitting machine and, suffering from mysterious stomach pains that kept her agonizingly awake, worked until well past midnight, I read. To the metronomic rasp of her machine, as she rolled the handle back and forth, in the dim yellow light that she kept on to work by, I would turn to the wall with my open book and follow an Aladdinlike hero called Kleine Muck, the adventurous dog Crusoe, the robber bridegroom who drugged his victims with three-colored wine, the ill-fated Kay and Gerda, and the wicked Snow Queen.

It never occurred to me that I might add something of my own to the books on my shelf. Everything I wanted was already there, at arm’s reach, and I knew that if I wished for a new story, the bookshop only a short walk from the house had countless more to add to my stock. To invent a story, impossible as the task then seemed to me, would have felt like trying to create another palm tree for the garden or model another tortoise to struggle across the sand. What hope of success? Above all, what need?

We returned to Buenos Aires when I was seven, to a large, dark, cool house on a cobblestoned street, where I was given my own room perched on the back terrace, separate from the rest of the family. Until then, I had spoken only English and German. I learned to speak Spanish, and, gradually, Spanish books were added to my shelves. And still nothing prompted me to write.

Homework, of course, did not count. “Compositions,” as they were called, required one to fill a couple of pages on a given subject, keeping always closer to reportage than to fiction. Imagination was not called for. “Portrait of Someone in Your Family,” “What I Did on Sunday,” “My Best Friend” elicited a sugary, polite prose, illustrated in colored pencils with an equally cordial depiction of the person or event concerned, the whole to be scrutinized by the teacher for accuracy and spelling mistakes. Only once did I diverge from the imposed subject. The title given to us was “A Sea Battle,” the teacher no doubt imagining that his students, all boys, had the same enthusiasm for war games that he had. I had never read the books on airmen and soldiers that several of my schoolmates enjoyed, the “Biggles” series for instance, or the abridged histories of the world wars, full of pictures of airplanes and tanks, printed on spongy, coarse paper. I realized that I completely lacked the requisite vocabulary for the task. I decided therefore to interpret the title differently, and wrote a description of a battle between a shark and a giant squid, no doubt inspired by an illustration from one of my favorite books, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I was surprised to discover that my inventiveness, instead of amusing, angered the teacher who told me (quite rightly) that I knew very well that this was not what he had meant. I think that this was my first attempt at writing a story.