A Reader on Reading

In 1969, having decided not to follow a university career, I left for Europe and did desultory freelance work for a number of publishers. The pay was abysmal, and I seldom had enough money for more than a few meals a week. One day, I heard that an Argentinean paper was offering a five hundred dollar prize for the best short stories. I decided to apply. I quickly wrote, in Spanish, four stories that were readable, formally correct, but lifeless. I asked Severo Sarduy, whom I had met in Paris and who wrote in a rich, exuberant, baroque Spanish that resonated with literary allusions, to read them over for me. He told me they were awful. “You use words like an accountant,” he said. “You don’t ask words to perform for you. Here you have a character who falls and loses one of his contact lenses. You say that he lifts himself ‘half blind’ from the floor. Think harder. The word you want is ‘Cyclops.’” I obediently wrote Cyclops in the story and sent the lot off. A few months later, I heard that I had won. I felt more embarrassed than proud, but was able to eat properly for a couple of months.

Still I would not write. I scribbled a few essays, a few poems, all forgettable. My heart wasn’t in it. Like someone who loves music and tries his hand at the piano, I undertook the experience less out of passion than out of curiosity, to see how it was done. Then I stopped. I worked for publishers, I selected manuscripts and saw them through the press, I imagined titles for other people’s books and put together anthologies of different kinds. Everything I did was always in my capacity as reader. “David was talented and knew how to compose psalms. And I? What am I capable of?” asked Rabbi Ouri in the eighteenth century. His answer was: “I can recite them.”

I published my first book in 1980. The Dictionary of Imaginary Places was the result of a collaboration with Gianni Guadalupi, an inspired editor whom I had met when we were both working for the same Italian publisher. The idea for the book was Gianni’s: a serious guide to fictional countries, for which we read more than two thousand books, with an energy that one only possesses when one is young. Writing the Dictionary was not what I would today call writing: it was more like glossing the books we read, detailing the geography, customs, history, flora, and fauna of places such as Oz, Ruritania, Christianopolis. Gianni would send me his notes in Italian, I would write my own and translate his into English and then recast the lot into dictionary entries, always sticking to our preestablished Baedeker style. Because we use words for a vast number of things, writing is easily confused with other activities: recounting (as in our Dictionary), scribbling, instructing, reporting, informing, chatting, dogmatizing, reviewing, sweet-talking, making pronouncements, advertising, proselytizing, preaching, cataloguing, informing, describing, briefing, taking notes. We perform these tasks with the help of words, but none of these, I am certain, constitutes writing.

Two years later, in 1982, I arrived in Canada. On the strength of the Dictionary, I was asked to review books for newspapers, talk about books on the radio, translate books into English, and adapt books into plays. I was perfectly content. Discussing books that had been familiar to my friends when I was young but were new to the Canadian reader, or reading for the first time Canadian classics that mysteriously mirrored others from my past, I found the library that I had begun when I was four or five kept growing nightly, ambitiously, relentlessly. Books had always grown around me. Now, in my house in Toronto, they covered every wall, they crowded every room. They kept growing. I had no intention of adding my own to their proliferation.

Instead, I practiced different forms of reading. The possibilities offered by books are legion. The solitary relationship of a reader with his or her books breaks into dozens of further relationships: with friends upon whom we urge the books we like, with booksellers (the few who have survived in the Age of Supermarkets) who suggest new titles, with strangers for whom we might compile an anthology. As we read and reread over the years, these activities multiply and echo one another. A book we loved in our youth is suddenly recalled by someone to whom it was long ago recommended, the reissue of a book we thought forgotten makes it again new to our eyes, a story read in one context becomes a different story under a different cover. Books enjoy this modest kind of immortality.