The Flickering Light of a Book

The recent news that Kindle owners will now be able to download library books into their electronic reader seemed like a positive blow for booklovers and readers everywhere.

It might be. But it makes me nervous.

Brier Dudley, business commentator for the Seattle Times, sounded a cautionary note in his column this week. The deal between Amazon and public libraries may be the turning point at which the latter make a massive shift away from the print to digital media, he wrote. The historically egalitarian nature of libraries may erode as larger portions of public library collections become accessible only to patrons who can afford to own e-books and computers.

He adds that Amazon gets another opportunity to advertise every time someone downloads a book. Most ominous, Amazon still isn’t paying taxes to local governments for sales it closes with residents of a given locale. The company has been fighting California’s efforts to collect such revenues, with some success.

I don’t own a Kindle. I don’t expect ever to own one . . . but there is one in my home.

If anything qualified as the must-have holiday gift for grownups in 2010, it probably was the Kindle. In 2009, 2.9 million Amazon Kindle e-readers were sold, and Bloomberg analysts projected sales of 5 million the following year. By December 31, however, sales of Amazon’s e-book had beaten that figure handily: the company sold 6 million in 2010.

Apple iPads outsold Kindles in less time—an estimated 7.46 million flew out of stores between their April debut and September—but something tells me there were a lot more teenagers in that group, whether they spent their own money or their folks’, than there were among Kindle purchasers. I have to wonder how many of those teen iPad users are reading books on their screens.

Because she had requested it, I ordered my wife Carole a Kindle in late November for one of her holiday gifts. Since the beginning of December (Chanukah was early this year), I’ve been hearing about its manifold delights. I can make notes she tells me, and download them into our home iMac later; I can look up the dictionary definition of any word on the spot. I can carry multiple books in my purse, and when I finish one -- or even in the middle of one -- I can switch to another.

That’s nice, I think to myself, but you’ll never get me to want one of those. I love the heft of books, the smell of them, the physical reality of each one. I grew up carrying a stack of books to and from school (I was infamous for this among my classmates), and I expect to carry pleasure reading in printed form -- nearly always a clothbound copy, as well, not a paperback -- until the day I die.

The cover art and the weight are integral parts of a book’s character: I just finished a 1300-page translation of Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don, and the 4.3 pounds it weighed will always be part of my memory of the experience of reading it. That wouldn’t have been the case if I had read it on the same electronic device I could read any cheap paperback thriller.

Part of the achievement of having finished Proust or Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow is finally putting that sucker down. How does Joyce or Pynchon feel any different from Agatha Christie, Danielle Steel or Stephen King when they’ve all weighed and even looked the same in your hand?

If you drop a printed book in the tub, or in a puddle, you’ve damaged one book. If you drop a Kindle, you’ve lost several, maybe even hundreds, of books. Amazon will let you download the ones you’ve already paid for again, on another machine, but you do have to buy another machine. You can even still read a wet and muddy book, but I imagine a dead electronic reader won’t give you a single digital word.

My fear is that the more public libraries are drawn into Amazon’s commercial agenda, the fewer choices we’ll end up enjoying. I’ve seen this pattern with almost every technological “advance” that’s come down the pike over the course of my life. Some of the 33-1/3 vinyl LPs I owned as a kid never became available on cassette. Something similar happened with the switch from VHS tapes to DVDs: obscure favorites of mine like Kobayashi’s “Harakiri,” which took forever to find on tape, took even longer to find on disk.

CDs have stayed around long enough and are sufficiently inexpensive to manufacture that most of the obscure albums and even vinyl bootlegs by Gentle Giant, King Crimson, and even the Banana Splits that I owned as a teen eventually got reissued. (No sign of Catfish Hodge’s solo “Boogeyman Gonna Get You,” however.) Even my friends, personal and Internet based, have turned out their solo and band recordings on CD. The faster technology moves forward, though, the fewer choices we tend to have, because manufacturers can only afford to turn out product that has mass appeal: lowest-common-denominator entertainment, from Stephen King and Britney Spears to the “Transformers” series and degraded remakes of finer original flicks.

It was a disappointment in college when I discovered some of work of writers I wanted to read had not been translated into English and might never be (e.g., the Danish journalist and feminist Suzanne Broegger, and the Polish existential novelist Witold Gombrowicz). Now I have to worry that the library may only order some books in electronic form, or not at all, because only a handful of readers -- including me -- might care to read them.

This is how corporate-driven consumerism actually gives us less choice, makes us less free, in a supposedly democratic society.

P.S. I am currently rereading Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities for one of my three book discussion groups, about to open Peter Carey's Parrot & Olivier in America for another one, am reading Henning Mankell's final Kurt Wallander thriller The Troubled Man for my own pleasure, and am making copious notes about Joseph Heller's Catch-22 for the extensive profile I'm writing for the Book Drum website, where I have already profiled Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes and Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. So you'll see me carrying one or more of the first four books on the streets of Portland over the coming week . . . .

My Year of Proust, part 2 - David Loftus

No question, the word for À la recherche du temps perdu is monumental.

Unlike other sprawling works that intimidate readers (say, Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow), Proust’s masterpiece does not range across vast fields of knowledge. You won’t encounter tons of geography, history, or the sciences (although there’s a bit about music, literature, and medicine, since Proust’s father was a renowned physician). The author’s not putting that kind of erudition on display.

Rather, Proust takes a microscope, in effect, to a particular era and place (Paris and the northwest coast of France -- Normandy, mostly) in the last few decades of the 19th century, and the mores and inner lives of mostly upper-middle-class and aristocratic folks in that milieu. He also gives us a vivid, specific, and detailed peek into the thoughts, judgments, fears, notions, and insecurities of his narrator -- a person very much like the author but not exactly him.

The narrator will take pages and pages to describe the delicate sparring of attendees at a cocktail party; his goofy relatives of a still earlier era; the time it takes him to make this or that decision, and all the thought processes that went into it; and above all, the excruciating jealousy he feels about the behavior of his lower-class mistress (and similarly painful affairs between other men and women -- and some men and men -- of his acquaintance). Proust takes you deeply into a different world, peopled by folks who nevertheless make the same mistakes of love, judgment, gossip, self-contradiction, and social insecurity that you do.

But you have to adjust to a different pace of reading: rich, luxuriant, and leisurely. It is as if Wagner’s Ring Cycle had been composed by Debussy. Even a reader like myself, who has never cracked a Tom Clancy, Danielle Steele, Dan Brown, or Twilight novel, can find his mind wandering if he doesn’t concentrate steadily on Proust’s complicated, meandering, digressive sentences.

I often catch myself having to back up to reread a long sentence, paragraph, even a whole page -- more than once. (Just so you know what you’re up against, I counted the words and punctuation marks in a sample sentence in vol. 3: with the help of 15 commas, 4 em-dashes, 1 semicolon, 1 colon, and 1 parenthetical, Proust rattles out a 338-word sentence … in English translation, of course, but I assume the translating team mimicked his style.)

Every once in a while, something crackles. It may be an Oscar Wilde- or Mark Twain-like maxim:

·      … the regularity of a habit is often in direct proportion to its absurdity.

·      Like everyone who is not in love, he imagined that one chooses the person that one loves after endless deliberation and on the strength of diverse qualities and advantages.

·      There is a special kind of look, apparently of recognition, which a young man receives from certain women—and from certain men—only until the day on which they have made his acquaintance and have learned that he is the friend of people with whom they too are intimate.

·      Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.

·      It would be untrue to say that she was a fool; she overflowed with a kind of intelligence that I had no use for.

·      One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

·      Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art.

·      We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

·      … theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life.

·      … in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice: I preferred not to see them… .

·      “Love?” she had once replied to a pretentious lady who had asked for her views on love, “I make it often but I never talk about it.”

·      We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

Or it may be an extended passage that reminds me of a deeply emotional experience, or complex thought or desire, that I’ve had in my own life. The other day, I read a passage where the narrator says that once he suspected his lover had been physically intimate with a notorious lesbian, “I should have liked, not to tear off her dress to see her body, but through her body to see and read the whole diary of her memories and her future passionate assignations.”

Somehow, this reminded me of a similarly impossible wish; what might qualify as a Proustian desire: to go back and relive my first meeting with my future wife and the memorable women before her. Not to live in that time, but just to re-experience what I could not have known then was a momentous encounter in my life, and, this time, see what I can see in it, knowing what I would come to know and feel later. Could I perceive how vital this particular woman would come to be for me in time? Would I recognize certain deeply cherished tics in her (or in me) when things were still so casual and tentative? I think it would feel a little like the anticipatory joy one experiences when rereading the opening pages of a favorite book, or watching the first scenes of a beloved movie one has already seen many times.

I was also a little surprised, given my expectation that I would read about effete parties and passionate affairs and the behavior and furnishings of a distant time … how honestly and regularly Proust brings it all back to why he sought for decades to recapture the past, in memory and on the page: because he feared death, just as I do, and just as anyone who has any self-awareness should, in order to guide one’s choices during the brief time we are alive. Love, beauty, and memory make it almost bearable.

That’s what it’s all about, really.

See part 1, In Search of Proust Time

In Search of Proust Time - David Loftus

I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna finish Proust this year.

Last night I started “The Captive,” volume 5 of the 7 volumes of what has long been known in English as Remembrance of Things Past. For those of you who did not major in either English lit or French, the more literal translation of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu, is In Search of Lost Time, but the first English translator, a Scot named Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, cribbed a phrase from the second line of Shakespeare’s sonnet 30 for the title of his version in the 1920s. There was no other English edition (or corrected title) for nearly 60 years.

The work is 3,200 pages long (4,300 in the Modern Library version I’m reading) and contains more than 2,000 characters. Proust labored over it for most of the final 13 years of his life. Graham Greene called Proust “the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth,” and Maugham called this book “the greatest fiction to date.” Given that his health had not been good since childhood (he was a severe asthmatic) Proust may have been lucky to get even three of the seven volumes published before he died of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in 1922, at the age of 51 (my age, in fact!).

Many of my friends have expressed admiration that I have tackled the thing -- more than one has called me brave -- but it’s been a long time coming. (And I know people who have read it multiple times, some even in the original French, which is far beyond me . . . * sigh *.) I think I first attempted to read Proust the summer after high school graduation, and didn’t get much beyond the first volume. Several years later, I got through two or three books. I didn’t finish because I had to return them to the library in Coos Bay, Oregon because the summer was over and I had to get back to college. As recently as three or four years ago, I had another bash, with the comfort of having purchased paperback copies of the first three volumes and therefore fearing no time pressures. I raced through “Swann’s Way” (the first volume) for the third or fourth time, and then wandered off again.

2010 would be it, I told myself toward the end of last year. I got a running start by opening “Swann’s Way” a couple days before Dec. 31, and managed to whip through the first three books in January and early February. But things got especially slow in the middle of volume 4 (despite the racy title on that one, “Sodom and Gomorrah”), and it didn’t help that I was memorizing lines and rehearsing for a production of “King Lear.” I wandered off (literarily speaking -- I was still reading dozens of other books) yet again.

But with the calendar ticking away, I figured I’d better get moving again or fail yet again. So a week ago I picked up volume 4 (the bookmark was still tucked where I’d stopped) and was off to the races. Tomorrow, I’ll describe a little of my experience of Proust, so far.

Go to part 2, My Year of Proust