What Book…
…are you reading now?
I’m just finishing War And Peace, in the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky. I took it with me when I was travelling by train and ferry to Ireland, because I knew it wouldn’t fail me; I never take an unknown book on a journey, in case it lets me down.
I decided not to care that it was a very heavy hardback. What an inexhaustible wonder novel this is: thrilling and heart-nourishing and heart-wringing and truthful.
I hate reading about war but in this book I can bear it, I’m even hungry for it. It’s as if Tolstoy scrapes aside all impediments to vision and sees through plainly to the heart of things. Nature thrums in every line too – the weather, the birdsong, the landscape, dogs, horses, a hare in a field.
…would you take to a desert island?
Of course now I’m in danger of just wanting to answer War And Peace to every question. On the other hand I would want to have something written in English, for sheer love of the language. So here’s another long-journey book: Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy Parade’s End, rich with Englishness and irony and history.
Having said I hated reading about war, I seem to have chosen another war book; it’s the best fiction I know about 1914-18. I suppose what I really feel is that I can’t bear to read about war unless the writing is so good that it can do justice to the truth of it.
I love Valentine Wannop in Parade’s End, suffragette and passionate pacifist, complicated, forceful. And I love it that she defeats femme fatale Sylvia Tietjens, magnificent in her way, but belonging to the old world.
…first gave you the reading bug?
I’M going to choose a small blue and white children’s book by Lois Lenski, about a small and incredibly ordinary family called the Smalls. The Smalls are actually American but I didn’t know that when I read it first. The book was only a vague untitled memory until a clever editor on a podcast found it for me, and now I actually have a copy. Turning the pages is like chasing ghosts of my child-self.
…left you cold?
Obviously I’m going to choose someone dead. Who wants to make enemies? I’ve never really got on with Philip Roth’s books, although some of the later, shorter ones – Everyman, say – are scorching. But I couldn’t finish Sabbath’s Theatre which people say is his masterpiece.
This post was originally published on here
