Books have been
a true constant in my life, a safe, unfailing refuge from the demands and
frustrations of everyday life. I find myself returning to it in times of
uncertainty, when life throws me a curveball or does not yield, if life can be
said to yield at all, the hoped-for dividends. Literature in particular has
been like oxygen for me, and my relationship with it was in my mind this past
weekend, prompted, I suspect, by my efforts to dig out one specific book from
the 30 crates or so which, having run out of shelve space in my home, occupy
one-fourth of my study. As I sought that particular book I felt I was
journeying back in time; the idiosyncratic scents, above all, teasing the parts
of my brain that are closely associated with memory.
My lifelong
encounter with books has its own narrative, a series of impressions anchored in
time, like biographical red flags. It goes something like this.
Oddly, I have
very few memories of the books that I read in my childhood — not the
French-language ones, that is. Sure there was some science fiction (the
Anticipation series which a cousin collected) and whatever it is that we were
force-fed in primary school, but none of these can be said to have affected me
in any meaningful way. I do remember repeatedly flipping through the pages of a
French translation of Solzhenitsin’s The
Gulag Archipelago in my parents’ collection, but its sheer size was too
daunting and I never plunged in.
For reasons that
I still cannot fully understand, my emotional connection with books, and with
literature in particular, was sparked when I started reading English. I had
been reading H. P. Lovecraft in French translation for a while, but only when I
acquired the English originals, the Del Rey paperbacks with the macabre covers
by Michael Whelan, did I feel like I was plunging into a forbidden universe. It
was only then that I got the frisson. I’ve long outgrown Lovecraft, but the
smell of the ink is something that I still associate with late evenings in bed,
turning the page to “The Horror at Red Hook” or “The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward.”
From that same
period, I associate the Dragonlance series with long summer afternoons, Stephen
King’s The Stand with efforts to read
in class and not get caught, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings with Christmas, upstairs at my uncle’s house,
unwilling to leave behind the hobbits and other creatures which inhabited that
expansive universe.
My first contact
with “real” literature occurred during college — at St. Lawrence College in
Quebec City, to which I had applied, as a francophone, to improve my English. It
was tough going at first; not so much the reading but the writing, until one
professor warned me that if my writing did not show improvements fast I might
have to leave the college. Needless to say, this was a warning that I took
seriously, and I did what was necessary to avoid expulsion.
But I digress.
College was my first brush with Shakespeare. Richard III, King Lear and Macbeth
in particular I found enthralling, but admittedly I felt lost at first, only
getting part of what was going on. I did fall in love with iambic pentameter,
though, and for years afterwards would try to mimic the metering. What else do
I associate with that period? Thoroughly enjoying my first Graham Greene (A Gun for Sale), Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea and Steinbeck’s The Pearl, and strangely having to read
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in English
translation in a class run by a professor I did not particularly like but who,
a quarter of a century later, I still associate with leather skirts and high
boots. I still fondly remember Lorne Coughlin, who would walk into the
classroom with his inevitable “good morning to you too.” It was Coughlin who
first introduced me to another C — Joseph Conrad. He’d often mention Conrad
even though he wasn’t on the reading list. So I jumped in on my own with Heart of Darkness. Coughlin seemed
mightily pleased when he saw me reading it, as if he’d scored some secret
victory. We also did Beowulf, which I
remember reading from that unwieldy bible-papered Norton anthology, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot, poetry by Wallace Stevens (“The Snow Man”) were also highlights during that period. There were several others, but this is what had the greatest effect on my young mind, at least that can remember.
There was, at
the time, a particular sense of magic associated with books that with age has
dissipated somewhat. I still get a thrill when I first open a book (which I
find much more enjoyable than finishing one), but it’s not the same. Age, I
assume, does that.
My move to
Montreal in the summer of 1994 is also a period that I associate with an
intense engagement with literature. It brings to mind Steinbeck’s East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath in my bedroom, writing down every word I
didn’t understand and memorizing the definitions; Michael Moorcock on the bed
in the guest room at my mother’s house when I visited on weekends; long magical
summer afternoons in the park near the Olympic Stadium reading Conrad’s Nostromo and Lord Jim, and Conrad again in winter with Under Western Eyes and The
Secret Agent; winter is also Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment; Dickens’ A
Tale of Two Cities in my bed, one of the rare books that actually made me
cry; Mann’s short stories; Ralph Ellison’s Invisible
Man with late-night reading disrupted by a phone call from the police informing
me that the front window of the store where I worked part time as an
undergraduate had been smashed by a brick; Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which we were not required to read in whole
but that I did; Nabokov’s Lolita,
which totally fascinated me; Joyce’s Ulysses,
which I felt once in a lifetime was more than enough; Jane Austen bores me; Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart; Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, which I’d reread
years later and think of as a completely different novel; Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day moves me, and I
skip several classes to read The
Unconsoled at the university library; Mann’s The Magic Mountain I associate with several things: an internship
at CBC Newsworld in Calgary, breathlessly awaiting 5pm whereupon I’d head for
the park and continue reading, ducks in the river, a performance of
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
on the green grass, and several typos in the Modern Library edition. It was on
that same trip that I bought my first of many biographies of Conrad. Returning
from that trip I stopped by the bookstore where I worked before heading home,
as I’d received a large shipment of books from the Everyman’s Library — pretty
much the entire collection of Dickens. Mann’s Doctor Faustus brings to mind summer, coffee, sitting by the
balcony and Gustav Mahler while my girlfriend was on a trip with a cousin. Oscar Wilde (not Dorian Gray, which I had read years earlier) is lying on the carpeted floor of my second apartment in Montreal, the ceiling fan circling above my head, before the furniture had arrived. Montreal is James Jones’ The Thin Red Line and From Here to Eternity, which when I finally saw a copy at the bookstore (reprinted to coincide with the release of Terrence Malick’s film version of Thin Red Line) literally made me jump in place, to my mother’s (and another customer’s) amusement. Montreal is also Michael Crichton, devouring his thrillers outside the classroom, just before class, while my classmates talked among themselves. For quite a while I wanted to be the next Crichton and began reading every copy of Scientific American and Discover magazine for the next science-based novel plot.
My Signet
Classics paperback copy of Hamlet
gets devoured, literally, by a friend’s dog. Golding’s The Lord of the Flies is an Irish pub and a dark-haired man, much
better looking than me and slightly older, competing for my girlfriend’s
attention late one evening, when he asked me why I would ever bother reading
such a book. How could I not, was my indignant response. Eco’s The Name of the Rose in paperback, Foucault’s Pendulum, which I enjoyed
even more, in hardback. Naipaul at a coffee shop near McGill University, long
afternoons and evenings; Nabokov again late at night at a different coffee
shop, literally stunned by the brilliance of his prose; Thomas Harris with
summertime (Red Dragon with a
splitting headache). I read almost everything by Polish journalist Ryszard
Kapuscinski during that period; Imperium
and Shah of Shahs are standouts; Hess’ Steppenwolf; Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum, accompanied by Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3.
Edward Said
comes in at this point; so does Carl Sagan, whose ability to articulate science
for a general audience had, I believe, a strong impact on my own writing; his
novel Contact makes me think of the
Montreal subway and wormholes. Oliver Sacks also makes his appearance; Awakenings moves me deeply.
Graham Greene
and John Le Carré came later, after I had moved to Ottawa in 2003. Greene I
associate with heartbreak after a failed attempt to convince a Japanese woman
to come live with me in Canada; on the way back from Tokyo I decided to spend a
week in Vancouver, where I devoured many of Green’s novels; Our Man in Havana stands out from that
period and is, in my opinion, one of the funniest novels ever written. More
Greene (Comedians, Honorary Consul, Quiet
American) after I return to Ottawa, sitting outside at a coffee shop near
the Byward Market. Mishima, Murakami and Tanizaki also enter into my life
during that period as I tried to make sense of the Japanese mind and perhaps
discover the key to A—’s heart (no success there; she was already married);
Murakami’s South of the Border, West of
the Sun on the plane back from Tokyo; Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat with too much Cuban rum and Elliot Goldenthal’s Frida soundtrack; several failed
attempts to read the Peruvian author’s The
War of the End of the World, which I’d only complete years later in Taipei during a cold January spell and boy was that a great novel; Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate is sitting on the floor of my first apartment in
Ottawa before my furniture came in; the other novels come later, with A Flag for Sunrise and Dog Soldiers coming much later; I meet
Stephanie due to Nabokov’s Pale Fire;
Yu Hua’s To Live is in a car between
Ottawa and Toronto. Robert Littell’s The
Company and William Shawcross’ The
Shah’s Last Ride are intimately associated with the thirteen-month
recruiting with CSIS. As my brief career in the intelligence world was coming
to a painful close it’s Koestler’s Darkness
at Noon, Huxley’s Brave New World,
and a lot of Le Carré (the Karla trilogy, The
Night Manager, and The Little Drummer
Girl, which I finished on the beach in Cuba, along with Greene’s The Power and the Glory). Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation, about the war in
Lebanon, has a marked impact on me; I give a copy as a present to the
intelligence officer who accompanied me during my field training in Toronto; I
also give a copy of Greene’s The Heart of
the Matter, which I associate with heartbreak in New York City, to another
friend at the intelligence agency; New York also brings back memories of Ivan
Klima (Love and Garbage).
My work in
intelligence makes it nearly impossible for me to take spy novels seriously;
only Greene, Len Deighton, Eric Ambler, Furst (on his best days) and Le Carré succeed in making me suspend disbelief;
the others I give up after a few chapters.
Taiwan is
Mishima, more Le Carré (earlier works during my first months on the island; A Most Wanted Man I associate with our
decision not to attend the Dec. 31 fireworks at Taipei 101 and instead a very
cold night at home under the blankets), some Greene, Waugh (Black Mischief and Scoop had me laughing to tears), Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (second attempt after a first one, back in
Ottawa, had brought back painful memories due to its associations with
terrorism) and Shame, Camus, J. G.
Ballard, Anthony Burgess (at long last!), DeLillo (slightly overrated in my
opinion), Victor Serge, Ismail Kadaré (in French), Akutagawa during a particularly violent afternoon thunderstorm, Paul
Bowles; finally a successful attempt to finish Vasily Grossman’s monumental Life and Fate, also finally reading
Naipaul’s excellent A House for Mr.
Biswas; Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The
General and His Labyrinth is, to my memory, sitting on a bench in Daan Park.
There’s a lot
more, for sure, and I have barely mentioned all the non-fiction that I read. But
this gives an idea of the invisible thread that runs through those years
joining books with places, people, coffee, and life experiences. I often
imagine myself being asked the typical question, If you were sent to a deserted island and were only allowed five books,
which ones would you bring along? My initial response would be, Only five? Ok, if I must…
1. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
2. Joseph
Conrad, Nostromo
3. Mario Vargas
Llosa, The War of the End of the World
4. Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
5. Vasily
Grossman, Life and Fate
I “pray” that I
will never be asked to make such a choice and that my collection of 3,000 books
or so will always follow me, wherever I end up.
