How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read [Paperback]

As I was reading this book I was agreeing with a review I had read that suggested that its content was far more serious, more profound even, than its provocatively silly title implied. By the time I had finished I was veering back towards judging the book by its cover, or more specifically its title. On further reflection still - and this book has provoked my continuing attention - I am back somewhere between these two positions.

Bayard is a French Literature academic and he has written a playful treatise into the nature of reading, illustrated by examination of a number of very disparate texts. He asks the seemingly simple question `What does it mean to say one has read a book?' and follows this up by presenting a number of challenges to the most obvious answers. If we have `read' a book but have forgotten everything about it, maybe even forgotten that we have ever had any contact with it, then in what sense do we mean that we have `read' it? Conversely, if we have, say, read a detailed review of another, or heard it discussed somewhere, or if it is among those publications that have seeped into so many crevices in our culture, and we are perhaps therefore conversant with many of its features, in what sense can we be said `not to have read' it, especially by comparison to the first, forgotten volume?

"The uncertainty of the border between reading and not reading will lead me to reflect more generally on the ways we interact with books" Bayard states in his Preface and this he then does wittily and, for me, for the most part, engagingly for the best part of 200 pages.

The book is divided into three main sections - `Ways of Not Reading', `Literary Confrontations' and `Ways of Behaving' and, within each, four chapters (with titles like `Books You Have Heard Of', `Encounters With Someone You Love' and `Not Being Ashamed') flesh out, sometimes a little repetitively I felt, Bayard's main arguments. Each chapter examines a particular text for illustrative purposes and these range from books I personally was not aware of, through those like Graham Greene's `The Third Man' to even include discussion of one film, `Groundhog Day'.

Bayard's central thesis is that to be able to talk about books, to be able to live the `literary life,' to be considered `well read', one has to appreciate where any particular book is located within the immense library of all books that have been written. It is this sense and knowledge of place - of genres, traditions, innovations, similarities and contrasts - rather than a detailed knowledge of the book's content, wherein one may become hopelessly lost, that constitutes a cultured and cultivated approach to the world of books, a life that Bayard argues is essentially social rather than solitary.

Far more than a bluffer's guide to literature, this book takes an argument that could probably have been delivered within an extended essay and embellishes major points with a playful tour of familiar and obscure works. Aimed perhaps more at those - academics, students, critics - for whom talking or writing about books is a career requirement, this idiosyncratic little book should however also interest and challenge the general reader prepared to tolerate the whimsical and the profound being shelved adjacently in her or his own `interior library'.

If Pierre Bayard is to be believed then I am the ideal person to review this book. I've only read just over half of it and, what is more, I read the original French version not the English translation. Whilst I am almost bilingual (I freely admit to the "almost") I would not claim to have appreciated all of the author's nuances (if any there be).

Bayard, by reference to other books, identifies situations in which someone has to talk about a book he has never read. One example from Graham Green's "Third Man" concerns an author of Westerns who finds himself in front of an audience having to talk about the works of a more intellectual writer with the same surname. He also presents the problem of discussing his colleagues' publications without having read them. (One example he does not give, at least as far as I have got, concerns books one has read in a foreign language which one does not perfectly understand.) He uses these examples to launch an examination of what "to have a read" a book actually means.

It is true that even immediately having finished a book few of us could summarise concisely the plots and sub-plots of a novel or the events and dates described in a history book. With time ones memory of a particular book will fade, perhaps even the memory of having read it. This then raises the question "Why read the whole book if you will only remember part of it.?"

It depends on why you read it. I was once in a bar in Eastern Europe with a group of people (two British, one Bulgarian and one Dutch) discussing Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment", as you do. All of us had read the book and each of us had a different view as to the main thrust of the novel. None of us had read it as part of our occupation (we were engineers and scientists). Had we been "professional" readers (and I flatter students by including them in that category) we would have gone on the internet, read a few critics and rehashed what they had said, and copied out enough quotes to teach or to pass an exam. In fact, all Bayard's examples, relate to "professional" readers; he ignores those of us who read for pleasure.

It is illuminating to compare the fate of Bayard (64,000 Google references) with that of Eric Ringmar (169 Google references) a lecturer at the LSE. He was reported (in The Spectator, 9 January 2008) as having been sacked for, among other reasons, admitting in his blog to not reading a book he was supposed to be teaching. It's not for nothing that the French have a word for "poseur" and the English do not.

For a more readable and equally thought provoking book on the meaning of reading I suggest "The Uncommon Reader" by Alan Bennett.

Post script. I've now finished the book. In the part I had read the author had introduced two concepts: the "interior library", of books an individual was aware of, and the "collective library", the corpus of literature which one might be expected to be aware of. In the latter part of the book he introduces a third concept: the "virtual library", those parts of the interior libraries of two people which overlap.

In the final chapter he develops his main thesis which is in order to talk about books you have not read it is necessary to draw on creative reserves within yourself and having done so you are well on the way to being a writer: of books people will talk about without reading perhaps!

More than a practical guide, this is a meditation on reading impeccably translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. Drawing on sources from Gustave Flaubert and Oscar Wilde to Umberto Eco and David Lodge, the book is insightful, scholarly, shocking and profoundly convincing. This is a must for any bibliophile's holiday stocking and a source of great comfort for those of us who have never got through Proust. A magnificent tour de force.