The Story Begins: Essays on Literature. By Amos Oz, trans. Maggie Bar-Tura. Chatto & Windus. 118pp, £12.99 in UK
As anyone knows who has ever sat down to write a letter, a book review, or a last will and testament, beginning is the hardest bit. Here is how it goes. You know exactly what it is you want to say, you have marshalled your material, your pen is poised - why, the thing is practically written already, you can see the Platonic ideal of it standing complete and pure in its bright space in your imagination. Then suddenly a chasm yawns before you. Where exactly to start?
In particular, apprentice novelists, as well as old hands who find their knuckles frozen by writer's block, know the feeling well. The enormity, the sheer variousness, of what is to be expressed is utterly disproportionate to those first few black marks that must be put down on that bare white page. The subject stands before you like a gigantic, tightly wound ball of string, from which a myriad loose ends protrude; which one to pull?
In this odd, endearing little book, the distinguished Israeli novelist Amos Oz analyses of the openings of 10 works of fiction, ranging from Theodore Fontane's classic novel Effi Briest, through Gogol's eerie tale "The Nose", and Kafka's even eerier "A Country Doctor", to Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patri- arch and Raymond Carver's heartbreaking short story, "Nobody Said Anything". The essays, many of them no more than half a dozen pages long, are perceptive, shrewd, illuminating, and above all enthusiastic; Oz's intention is not to show how clever he is, or how theoretically respectable his judgments are - indeed, he sets his face firmly against Theory, as propounded by, as he darkly puts it, "some of the literati", who "analyze everything ad nauseam" - but simply to remind us of the pleasure of reading.
In his witty introduction, "But What Actually Existed Here Before the Big Bang?", he considers the "ghastly experience" of confronting a blank page, that "whitewashed wall with no door and no window". His father, who wrote scholarly books, envied his novelist son's freedom to write whatever he wished, while the son envied his father the comfort of being always surrounded by sources, not condemned to sit at the bare desk of the imagination. "Beginning to tell a story," Oz fils declares, "is like making a pass at a total stranger in a restaurant." Later, though, he comes up with a better definition: "Any beginning of a story is always a kind of contract between writer and reader." However, as a number of the essays here illustrate, there are deceitful contracts, devious contracts, contracts that seem to take the unsuspecting reader into the contractor's confidence, while in fact he is being tricked, albeit for his own good, or better say, his own pleasure. Fiction is a subtle and a playful business.
The two most impressive pieces are the first one, a six-page analysis of the opening paragraph of Effi Briest, and the passionate - the word is not too strong - account of how Elsa Morante's History: A Novel transcends the sloganeering of its oppressively social-realist chapter openings to portray the pathos of the collision between a young German soldier and a middle-aged woman in occupied Rome, and its tragic aftermath. In the Morante essay especially, the longest in the book, Oz displays a firm commitment to the old-fashioned values of the fiction-writer's art: compassion, humaneness, insight, directness. Few writers on literature nowadays would dare to display their hearts so openly on their sleeves.
The Story Begins is based, Oz tells us, on his years as a teacher at high schools and colleges in Israel, as well as on lectures delivered at Boston University and the Eretz Yisrael Museum in Tel Aviv, and there are moments at which it does show its origins. Some of the pieces are hardly more than introductory sketches, and in some of the abrupt endings one can distinctly hear the school bell sounding, the chalk being set down, the lecture notes put away into their folder.
All the same, these essays, bubbling with enthusiasm, warmth and wit, are a welcome corrective, offered without pretension, to the aridities of much of present-day literary criticism. In his conclusion, Amos Oz argues for a renewed appreciation of the "leisurely pleasure" that reading affords. Dismissing our modern-day predilection for "speed-reading", he offers these "ten glances into the opening contracts of 10 novels or stories" as "the introduction to a course in slow-reading: the pleasure of reading, like other delights, should be consumed in small sips."
John Banville is a novelist, and Chief Critic and Associate Literary Editor of the Irish Times