How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read: Amazon.co.uk: Pierre Bayard: Books

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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars How to review books you haven't finished reading, 4 Feb 2008

By	R. E. Manley "Traveller" (Ukraine and UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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!

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How to speak about books you have not read., 16 Dec 2007

By	Dr. Geoffrey Rivett (England) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: How to Talk About Books You Haven'T Read (Hardcover)

Now in translation, I bought this on amazon-france. It is clearly written and I could cope easily with the French. It is short and both profound and funny. It makes one feel better about the gaps in one's knowledge, and helps to de-bunk the more pretentious amongst us. Only for those who can laugh at themselves and can put up with the scorn of others. A best buy.

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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Taking the man at his word, 13 Jan 2008

By	Alan Coady (Edinburgh) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Oscar Wilde (the last refuge of the aphorist) once recommended six minutes as the ideal time to spend reading a book prior to reviewing it and, elsewhere, the slightly less charitable total of zero: "I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so." So, I've decided to see whether it was possible to pull off what many suspect of unscrupulous reviewers - to write a review based entirely on existing reviews.

Bayard, a psychoanalyst and professor of French Literature, seems keen to question some givens:

1. that there exist certain "must read" books
2. that they must be read in their entirety
3. that one must have read a book before being qualified to talk about it

Some of these givens seem weakened by other considerations:

1. can one claim more right to talk about a book one has read but forgotten than someone who has not read it?
2. is it necessary to have read an entire book to have some idea of its place in history, of the preoccupations and stylistic tendencies of the author and of their influence on other writers?

The more Bayard quotes I came across in the reviews, the more I sensed that he might be offering liberation from a perceived culture of oppression and guilt:

"All education should strive to help those receiving it to gain enough freedom in relation to works of art to themselves become writers and artists."
"In order to . . . talk without shame about books we haven't read, we should rid ourselves of the oppressive image of a flawless cultural grounding, transmitted and imposed [on us] by the family and by educational institutions, an image which we try all our lives in vain to match up to. For truth in the eyes of others matters less than being true to ourselves, and this truth is only accessible to those who liberate themselves from the constraining need to appear cultured, which both tyrannizes us and prevents us from being ourselves."
"I want people to learn to live with books."

Seems fair enough to me.

N.B. Since writing this in complete ignorance, I have purchased a copy of the book - I haven't read yet though.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Why not avoid reading books that aren't worth talking about?
There is one gem of wisdom here, but it comes almost at the end of the book.

"In the end," writes Bayard, "We need not fear lying about the text, but only lying... Read more

Published 3 months ago by Ms. P. Waugh

3.0 out of 5 stars A curate's oeuf of a book!
A strange book - my verdict using the author's own rating system would be SB+ (Book I have skimmed, and have a positive opinion of). Read more

Published 17 months ago by Annabel Gaskell

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely splendid
More than a practical guide, this is a meditation on reading impeccably translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. Read more

Published 24 months ago by Jonathan Miller

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