THE REFUGE OF REREADING

By Leonardo Padura and - - Reprint | | Print |

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HAVANA, Jan 1 2007 (IPS) - If reading a recently published book gives the taste of an encounter with the unknown, returning those one has read many times provides the slightly cowardly certainty of arriving at a safe harbour, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into a ten languages. In this article, the author writes that returning to these old acquaintances also cures us of the deceptions that, echoing through the market, catapult us occasionally into the embrace of books that make us lament the nights invested in their pages, when we know perfectly well the years of our lives are far too few to read everything good and essential written by our fellow humans. Perhaps the most disagreeable of these sensations occurred while I was reading the Da Vinci Code, convinced that to be able to at least criticise it I had to plough through all 600 or so pages: for years and years I have not read anything so miserably written, ill-conceived, and artistically false. The dumb provocation of the establishment devised by Brown was so innocuous and bogus that the publishing industry could swallow it happily and turn it into a sales behemoth sweeping many areas of the market while pushing to the margin, if not beyond it, that which should always be at the front: literature.

In the following months I devoured other Paul Auster works, and in the following years I reread them with a more tempered passion, though without losing the thrill of the first readings. These books have a literary and human density that brought me that which I want most from literature: the ability to face the mysteries that nest in the souls of all people.

In his time, Paul Auster had the ability to bring me that sense of exaltation that twenty years earlier, in the peak of my own literary voracity (which coincided with the so-called boom of the Latin American novel), had spurred me to read Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortazar, Rulfo, and Cabrera Infante, and later Bryce Echenique (of Un Mundo para Julius) and Fernando del Paso (of the wonderful Palinuro de Mexico). These writers, together with their North American counterparts whom I admired –from Hemingway and Fitzgerald to Salinger and John Updike, and of course Hammett and Chandler — constituted a solid cadre of favourites into which it was difficult to introduce a new face (Vasquez Montalban, Milan Kundera) who, if successful at entering, became part of a team of writers read and reread with the same delight we experience eating a favourite meal.

If reading a recently published book gives the taste of an encounter with the unknown, returning to this much-read group is accompanied by the security of revisiting a region one has passed through before and in which, if surprises remain to be discovered, we are moved by the slightly cowardly certainty of arriving at a safe harbour. However, more than anything else, returning to these old acquaintances cures us of the deceptions that, echoing through the market, catapult us occasionally into the embrace of books that make us lament the nights invested in their pages, when we know perfectly well the years of our lives are far too few to read everything good and essential written by our fellow humans.

Perhaps the most disagreeable of these sensations occurred while I was reading the Da Vinci Code, convinced that to be able to at least criticise it I had to plough through all 600 or so pages. As my judgement will in no way affect the popularity and finances of Dan Brown, I can express my opinion without any sense of guilt: that for years and years I have not read anything so miserably written, ill-conceived, and artistically false.

It was worrying that a work that was so clearly feeble had managed to become the ”book” of the moment (a seemingly interminable moment) even generating a vogue that filled me with panic when I noticed that almost all of the twenty or so books on display in a book shop were about angels or demons, templars, holy shrouds and theological adventures with Mary Magdalene at the head of a new book publishing ”star system”.

The dumb provocation of the establishment devised by Brown was so innocuous and bogus that the publishing industry could swallow it happily and turn it into a sales behemoth sweeping many areas of the market while pushing to the margin, if not beyond it, that which should always be at the front: literature.

I remember the lift I received when a few months ago my niece Ambar, after hearing me sing the praises of Dumas’ classic ”The Count of Montecristo” asked her father to buy her the book and began reading it. Ambar, a compulsive reader at ten, was at the time having a passionate romance with Harry Potter. A few days later, almost upset with herself, she confessed to me in a low voice that she liked the Count of Montecristo more than Harry Potter and his magical world. Had literature succeeded in defeating the most slick and devastating publishing propaganda? Was real literature capable of winning even this unsymmetrical combat with angels and demons and self-help prophets?

Today’s publishing market, overpopulated with novelties, had to resort to a wide range of means to guarantee its survival, and, as with other areas of retail sales, it had to offer ”tailor-made books” assembled with great precision that were able to pass as literature but above all to sell and to feed readers’ appetite for escape. Press campaigns, rigged prize competitions, media celebrities converted into (they say) writers, exploitation of religion, sex, and political scandal are imposed as what readers prefer while real literature feels besieged by almost unprecedented marketing aggression.

It would be simply stupid to argue that writing was better in the past than it is today. There are plenty of examples (that I won’t cite) that could prove that writing in the past was abysmal and writing today is excellent. Except for the fact that the bad literature of the past is a part of the past and of oblivion, while the good is with us still today. What is different is that the wretched writing of today, even when destined for oblivion, is propelled by a massive publicity machine with staggering power. Lamentably it also convinced a significant part of the world’s ever diminishing number of readers.

For this reason, given the impossibility of knowing whether a pretty cover hides a jewel or a jackass, I prefer to wait until time sorts things out and see in the detritus of the market those flowers that always bloom. Meanwhile, in my library I have enough fine books to reread to satisfy me for a long while. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)