The lure of books

LITERARY CRITICISM: DECLAN KIBERDreviews Second Readings 52: From Beckett to Black Beauty by Eileen Battersby, Liberties Press, 301pp, €14.99

FIRST IMPRESSIONS are lasting, but second readings can transform a person from one imprisoned by an experience to one who can contain and even transcend it. That is a central intuition of psychoanalysis. Revisiting a past moment, at which a life may have got snagged, allows a person to live more fully through the missed elements of that moment and then to move on.

There is another kind of second reading too, which allows us to experience all over again a feeling of unqualified pleasure. If every book is in some way a second reading of a life, then the great novels of the world capture that life most abundantly.

A piece of music can suddenly restore for us the lost world in which we first encountered it, and so also can a book. But to that recaptured experience is added a deeper consciousness of its meaning over time, along with a tender sense of the innocence of our initial responses.

Of nothing may this be more true than of books. CS Lewis once said that a story worth reading at the age of 10 will also be worth rereading at the age of 50. In that later venture, it is our prior selves, as well as the text, that we reread. And what we find is how deeply, at all stages, it has been reading us.

Sometimes, it can be a humiliation to come upon youthful comments scribbled ardently in the margin of a battered old paperback copy of Franny and Zooey. One rapidly becomes embarrassed by all those "how true"s, which might provoke derision in a second reader of the copy, if that reader were not oneself (and, sometimes, even if it were). But then the humbled soul might consider Swift's copy of Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, filled with such comments as "the dolt", "the knave" or "he was drunk when he wrote this", inscribed with a sputtering pen by the Dean himself. They have probably added to the value of that volume in Marsh's Library.

Eileen Battersby has long been admired for the fierce independence of her judgements on contemporary fiction. By nature an enthusiast, she has the reviewer’s happy knack both of describing a book without giving too much away and of telling you exactly what she thinks of it. But she has never been a prey to fashion or easy sentiment, often advancing the claims of unjustly neglected work.

So it's a matter of real interest to have her second take on literary classics from Humphrey Clinkerto Empire of the Sun. And, sure enough, even in such good company, she manages to highlight the claims of some masterpieces which deserve a far higher profile than they now enjoy: the astonishing Dom Casmurroby Machado de Assis which, though written in 19th-century Brazil, foretells the absurdist world of the existentialists; Le Grand Meaulnes, a haunting celebration of rural French youth by Alain-Fournier in the years before the first World War; Joseph Roth's edgy elegy for the Hapsburg Empire, The Radetzky March, written in 1932; or Alan Paton's heart-rending account of the pains of South Africa in the 1948 novel, Cry the Beloved Country.

In all there are 52 books covered, one for every week in a rich reading year (though some might need more than just seven days). In a vivid introduction, Ms Battersby recalls her childhood reading of classics in a canvas hammock on the edge of a pine forest in California. She was always brave enough to check a book against her own life, and wily enough to notice how much she savoured the difference: "sometimes I wished I was Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, 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".

Nevertheless, some of that father's genius must have been passed on to Ms Battersby, who was a gifted sportswoman in her student days and is still a keen horsewoman. She is intrepid enough to include, therefore, Black Beauty(a fine book which not too many boys will admit to liking) as well as The Go-Between, which has a wonderfully climactic account of a cricket match: but I was hoping that, as a proud American and sportswriter, she might also have included Malamud's The Naturalor one of the other masterpieces about baseball (Don de Lillo, where are you?).

Still, here is God’s plenty – not only many classics of English, but also Dostoevsky and Turgenev, Kafka and Doblin, Hamsun and Remarque. Each essay on a text is followed by a lucid entry on the author’s life, which contextualises but doesn’t curtail the preceding analysis.

In a respectful and witty foreword, the novelist Richard Ford admits that “I’m unabashedly quite a ways away from having read all these books the first time”. So it is for this reviewer.

On Ms Battersby's say-so, I will now seek out Nabokov's Mary, Welty's The Optimist's Daughterand Wolfgang Koeppen's Death in Rome.

Richard Ford is gently mocking of a certain type of mid-western professor who seems to have read everything – but, without ever having been a professor, Eileen Battersby has done that trick.

“The more we read the more we want to read,” she explains. “One novel begets a further ten.” Fair enough – and, although she is a voracious reader, she never commits the grave offence of interpreting books by means of other books. She knows that the novel is, in Lawrence’s words, the bright book of life and so, invariably, she refers each back to the world from which it sprang. That is why, I think, she gives the biography of the author after analysing each text.

What is even more admirable is that, unlike so many people who read nowadays solely for exam courses or for other practical purposes, she reads for pleasure – in story, in shaped sentences, in the magic of a word or an image. It’s more than 70 years since Walter Benjamin wondered whether the children of the future would enjoy “the exacting silence of a book”. Since then a whole generation has been turned outward, away from interior exploration, by iPods, Playstations and MTV. Some can’t even contemplate writing an essay without the sound of music or the flicker of images in the background. There is something faintly scandalous and wonderfully anachronistic about Ms Battersby’s pursuit of literary pleasure in a culture too often characterised by a search for mere sensations.

Declan Kiberd is Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at UCD