Caught under a spell at the cabin

EXTRACT:Over the course of a year, Literary Correspondent EILEEN BATTERSBYre-read classic novels of the past. In an extract from her book, 'Second Readings', due out next week, she explains how she found the experience

WHY DO we read? More importantly, why do we re-read? It is difficult to say. Perhaps it’s comfort, the pleasure of re-engaging with old friends who aren’t going to pull any nasty surprises because we already know what those surprises will be. We read a book and then return to it because we loved it the first time round; or maybe we didn’t quite get it? Could it be we just weren’t ready to read it? Was the timing wrong? But it’s more likely that we go back to a book because we want to know if it is still as good as we remembered; has it changed? More to the point - have we?

Perhaps we first turn to a book because it meant a great deal to someone else and now it’s our turn to discover a specific time and a place, or meet a character that we think we might like, or identify with and help explain us to ourselves. And once that connection is established with a novel, we return to it. All of this is far removed from the traditional question that makes stories so compelling, that urgent “and what happened next?”, or “what did she do? “Did the hero get the girl?” or “did the bad guys get him?”

It’s intriguing how the novelist relies on story and yet is equally able to bypass it, by concentrating on feeling, romantic passion, love of country or an abiding belief in justice. Novelists tell stories, but they do a great many other things as well. They create characters we believe in, even maybe want to know, or think we know, having experiences we’d like to share, or are mighty glad we’re not sharing. Novels tell us what happened to people who rebelled against dictators or how a king bullied his subjects or how an eccentric old Spaniard took to the road with his ancient horse and servant on a quest to discover God knows what. There’s the nervy mother in a rush to marry off five daughters to men with good fortunes; there’s a poor boy made good by dubious means who wants to win back his lost love. Or how about observing a Russian aristocrat so apathetic he wants to stay in bed all day as it’s so much easier than thinking? What would it be like to be living in the barren beauty of Newfoundland’s harsh landscape with interwoven stories about your Scots ancestors alive in your head?

Imagine St Petersburg in the nineteenth century? Or visit Berlin in confused stagnation during the Weimar years? Think yourself to Shanghai in 1941 where the menacing Japanese forces of occupation interpret the slightest movement as a gesture of defiance? Or observe Edwardian Dublin on a hot June day? Do we empathise with the man trapped in a Berlin boarding house waiting for the arrival of his lost love who is now another man’s wife? Why not share the thoughts of that young German soldier who carries his wounded friend on his back for miles through the mud to a medical station, only to be told on reaching it that his friend is already dead.

Story is important, no doubt about that. But often the complications go far beyond “what happened next?” When I was child we used to go to a cabin in a pine forest in the mountains in California. It was the sort of place that always seemed to have a skunk lurking by the meal stores, snakes hiding beneath the logs. You had to lock, not just close, the kitchen door because a dextrous racoon knew how to push up the handle and execute speedily efficient raids.........

It was there, outside our cabin, staying very still in the musty old canvas hammock for fear that I would tip out of it, that my 11-year-old self began to read Moby Dick(1851) and figured out pretty quickly that this was a story about a lot more than a crazy old sea captain trying to kill the white whale that had torn off his leg. Pride and Prejudice(1813) had been easier to understand; even at 10, I had reckoned that Elizabeth Bennet liked Mr Darcy, and had noticed that grown-ups tended to run around in circles for a while before they got friendly with each other. At night in the cabin, as the moths crashed into the mesh screens over the open windows and the wooden floorboards creaked after the heat of the day, it was time to catch up with calculating Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair(1847), to find out if she was ever going to get what she wanted. And way in the distance, that eerie cry? That was a lone wolf howling and that was definite; once you had read The Call of the Wild(1900), you knew.

To a child in the mountains, reading brought you over those mountains, to the high seas in Treasure Island(1883), to Paris during the French Revolution, to the squalor of Fagin's dirty old lair. Far closer to home was to live the story of Steinbeck's red pony. Years later when reading Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses(1992), I remembered that red pony.

Lying rigid, straight-legged in that hammock like a Norman knight in his tomb, I imagined being David Balfour in Kidnapped(1886); even better, you could be Huck Finn and I was; we didn't have a river but we had a lake so big you could only imagine what was on the other side. All you needed was a raft. Huck Finn was miles better than pain-in-neck Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye(1951), although sometimes I wished I was Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird(1960), as she was possessed of a logical turn of phrase and her dad Atticus was the sort of calmly wise father I wanted to have instead of a golf pro with a hands-off jazz collection. The haunted shack up near our ridge was just as spooky as the Radley place, although we didn't suspect any real person was actually living in it. Instead, we guessed a heart had been buried under the floorboards, just like the one in Poe's story, and of course it pounded loudest at night.

Just because you already know the story it doesn't spoil the re-reading; you still cry when Ginger dies in Black Beauty(1877), the shadows still dance in the flames at the end of Jane Eyre(1847). On the second or third reading the mechanics of the writing begin to assert themselves; this is when the language is tested, the imagery is deconstructed, additional symbolism appears. Novelists know the tricks, and describe the characters, summon the images, evoking mood and atmosphere. They tell the story but they also make their point and Tolstoy made many.

It is odd how we accept being lectured to by a good writer telling a story; Dickens and Orwell attacked society and power, but they didn't allow the message to obscure the story. If we don't feel sorry for Meursault, it is because the outsider isn't capable of feeling and is about to die because of his failure of emotion. Camus is concerned with exploring our perception of right and wrong. Although Emily Brontë may not be trying to instruct us in Wuthering Heights(1847), she does teach us all about the power of story when it is driven by an ungodly, destructive passion.

The more we read the more we want to read, need to read and re-read. Reading is the well that never runs dry, the list that keeps growing. One novel begets a further 10. The world is full of books, many of them great, and time is short. There is also the fact that for every writer who wrote only one book, many more produced large bodies of work. How grateful we should be to the mighty Dickens who despatched more words in English than any other published writer. Not only does he tell complex, bustling tales, he also conjures up a world, 19th century England and, in particular, 19th century London. English social history is contained within his stories, as is Paris in the works of Hugo and Zola. I always cringe on hearing a book being dismissed as “only a novel”. Great fiction helps the historian to teach us about the past because at its best, it recreates it. Beyond the historical facts, it calls up a specific place; the sounds, the preoccupations and the people.

II

Readers are greedy, and this is a reader's book written by a reader, not a writer, and readers make no apology; walking into a library or a book store is the equal of walking into a chocolate factory. Part of the excitement is fuelled by sheer panic, the avid reader's compulsion to read everything. I once pretended to have a sore throat to stay at home from school to read War and Peace(1863-69); it was the best lie I ever told. People read at night, on the train, on the bus, at work, at school, maybe not in church, but at meals, in restaurants, on the beach, when waiting for the washing machine to empty, for the bread to bake, for the mechanic to service the car, for the windows to somehow manage to wash themselves – and all because there isn't enough time to read all we want to.

The 52 novels gathered here are a mixed bunch of random wonders. There is no agenda, no definitive claims being made that they are the divine elect, although I think they're pretty good. It is not an absolute selection. How could there be one? All these 52 novels have in common is that they are, in my opinion, great. Some are famous, others are not. Some of the authors included are more famous for other novels. Everyone appears to have read Animal Farm(1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four(1949), but far fewer are familiar with Orwell's engaging Coming Up For Air(1939), one of the first great novels I read. I remember finding a Penguin paperback edition in a coffee shop. It had a smooth white cover splashed with a water colour illustration and was looking abandoned, the sole book on a stand packed tightly with postcards and stationery – just waiting for me and that's how I first made the acquaintance of George Orwell. Much the same happened with Aldous Huxley. I read Point Counter Point(1928) and his best book, Antic Hay(1923), before reading Brave New World(1932) which I was disappointed with, because, by then, I had already read Yevgeny Zamyatin's riveting We(1921), a tale about living as a dehumanised number.

When I suggested doing a series in The Irish Timesabout great books, titles danced into my mind, a world to revisit. I had not read Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker(1771) since my second year at university. Would it still make me laugh? It did and louder. Returning to Hermann Hesse's cult quest Steppenwolf(1927) proved mortifying; I couldn't believe I had ever read it in the first place. It made me wary of re-reading The Glass Bead Game(1943), but I will, just not yet. I picked up Nausea(1938), a novel I had loved at 13; how bad would this be? Re-reading it was wonderful; it is brilliant, even better than I remembered. And yes, it's in this selection, as is Nabokov's Mary(1926), his beautiful first novel which looks so intently to the Russian tradition. Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich(1962) is as convincing as ever. VS Naipaul's finest achievement, The Enigma of Arrival(1988), a haunting, evocative work, presented a claim for inclusion that was strong, but not strong enough........

When writing the original series in the newspaper, time as well as space, and of course, who to include, became the enemy; 52 is very few, too few. A book seemed to offer far more freedom. Even as I write this I still can't figure out what happened to The Portrait of a Lady(1881). Günter Grass's masterpiece The Tin Drum(1959) argued its case, and won. There it was, as relentless as a drum beat, and in the magnificent new translation that Grass has sought for more than 30 years. But I still got to re-read The Portrait of a Lady, stately, deliberate, chilling and relentlessly accurate. Yes, this is how people conduct themselves.

So, no Henry James? If defeated by numbers he is present throughout this selection. Where are so many favourites? William Trevor? John Updike? John McGahern? John Cheever? Absent, along with Chekhov, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant and Tobias Wolff, are they all, but for a good reason; they are all masters of the short story. Updike could well have got in with Roger's Version(1986), or Rabbit at Rest(1990), or Towards the End of Time(1998) but the fact remains his greatest achievement is the remarkable, quasi-autobiographical short story, "A Sandstone Farmhouse" (from The Afterlife, 1994). Updike, as with Trevor, is a supreme short story writer.

Similarly with John McGahern. I once said to him that I thought his greatest work was the long short story, “The Country Funeral”. McGahern thought for a moment and replied, “Yes, I like that.” And writer to reader it was John McGahern who alerted me to a gifted, though neglected American writer, John Williams, who wrote four novels including the 1973 National Book Award-winning Augustus, and a subtle masterpiece, Stoner (1965). It is the story of a farmer’s son who becomes a college professor. It is about love and about work, responsibility. McGahern was a great writer; he was also a great reader.......

III

No doubt about it, this selection could have been dominated by great Americans. The more I wandered among my book cases, it could easily have been a selection of 19th century Russians and 20th century German-language writers, or only Russian writers, from Pushkin to Bulgakov; from the tsarist Gogol of the doomed Dead Souls(1842), to the post-revolutionary Andrey Platonov (1899-1951) and The Foundation Pit(1929-30), which was not published in Russia until the late 1980s, and Andrei Bitov's subversive summation of a nation's literature, The Pushkin House(1978). The Russian achievement is overwhelming whether you are reading Turgenev or Solzhenitsyn. Tolstoy tells great stories and deals in epic truths, his personal contradictions retreating to the background because he knows all about people in crisis. However widely one reads world fiction, it is impossible to shake off the psychological influence of Dostoyevsky. Is he the giant at everyone's shoulder? From Hamsun to Kafka and Conrad and beyond.

Mention of the Russians introduces one of the most contentious issues facing literature, translation. While some of us can summon sufficient French, or German or Italian or Spanish, far fewer can claim good reading Russian. You hear purists announce that they only read in the original, but unless they read Russian, they are missing out on wonders the rest of us have enjoyed thanks to translations. The greatest friends readers have, aside from the writers, are the translators who open the doors of great books.

Thanks to translation we are now beginning to benefit from the wealth of recent Chinese and Japanese fiction; novels such as Ma Jian's Beijing Coma(2008), or Gao Xingjian's profound odyssey, Soul Mountain(1990), Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem(2004) as well as Saiichi Maruya's Singular Rebellion(1972) – which was not translated into English until 1988 – and the lively and the ever-expanding ouevre of the prolific Haruki Murakami.

There was another extraordinary body of national literature threatening to take over the selection: novels written in German. Kafka, the enigmatic Czech, raced into the selection in the company of Thomas Mann with The Magic Mountain(1924). Mann's unhappy son Klaus had also been included in the original series with his satirical indictment of Nazi evil, Mephisto(1936). But on a more practical level, with the introduction of individual author essays, Klaus's sad personal story is closely bound to that of his father.

Joseph Roth is in the selection; The Radetzky March(1932) was one of the first novels I reached for; his rival, fellow Austro-Hungarian Robert Musil, is not, although I can boast of reading The Man Without Qualities(1930-32) twice, (the second time to review a new edition), and enjoyed it both times. Roth surpasses Musil's admittedly magisterial if cold opus. Ultimately, the self- absorption of Ulrich, Musil's anti-hero, is a barrier to the book despite Musil's irony and genuine perplexity at the chaos of human emotions.

Viennese Hermann Broch, who shared his first English language translators, the Muirs, with Kafka, is one of my most glaring omissions; how I fretted over The Spell(1935), The Death of Virgil(1946) and the Sleepwalkerstrilogy. The only consolation for leaving out the Dutch-born but Austrian-bred Thomas Bernhard is that his finest book is his autobiography, Gathering Evidence(1985).

German language fiction has extraordinary range from Goethe and Theodor Storm to Walser and Koeppen and the Austrian Stefan Zweig, to another of my absolute heroes, W. G. Sebald, who through magnificently singular works such as The Emigrants(1993), Austerlitz(2001) and his exceptional meditation, The Rings of Saturn(1995), introduced his admirers to the glories of the 18th century novel of ideas.

Sebald understood the relentlessness of memory; his work is difficult to classify but its relevance is monumental and its artistry inspirational. He is a vital element in the extraordinary mosaic created by German writers such as Thomas Mann, Hans Fallada, Wolfgang Koeppen, Gert Ledig, Gert Hofmann and Grass, who at time of writing, is still at work.

Post-communist Central and Eastern Europe continues to unearth revived classics and new writing. The translation in 2002 of rediscovered Hungarian Sándor Márai's Embers(1942) was a cause for celebration, as was the subsequent 2007 translation of The Rebels(1930). The past continues to live and always war, in particular, the second World War, remains as important to writers as the enduring themes of love and death and truth...........

Stories are told and continue to be told. Language moves around the world, narrative seduces and informs. The reader has no choice. Nor is there a better one, than to select a volume and clamber back into the hammock for the next adventure - to experience, relive, share and remember by reading and re-reading.

Second Readings : From Beckett to Black Beautyby Eileen Battersby is published next week by Liberties Press, €14.99