What to Read and Why by Francine Prose Review
Extract: 'What to Read and Why' past Francine Prose
In an age divers by hyper-connectivity and constant stimulation, Francine Prose makes a compelling case for the solitary act of reading and the slap-up enjoyment it brings. Written with her abrupt critical analysis, wit, and enthusiasm,What to Read and Why is a commemoration of literature that will give readers a new appreciation for the power and beauty of the written give-and-take.
Extract from What to Read and Why by Francine Prose
Reading is among the most private, the most solitary things that nosotros can do. A volume is a kind of refuge to which we tin can go for the assurance that, as long as we are reading, nosotros can exit the worries and cares of our everyday lives backside u.s.a. and enter, however briefly, some other reality, populated by other lives, a world distant in time and place from our ain, or else reflective of the present moment in ways that may assist u.s. see that moment more than clearly. Anyone who reads can choose to enter (or not enter) the portal that admits u.s. to the invented or observed world that the writer has created.
I've frequently thought that ane reason I became such an early on and passionate reader was that, when I was a kid, reading was a style of creating a chimera I could inhabit, a dreamworld at once separate from, and part of, the real 1. I was fortunate enough to abound upwardly in a kind, loving family unit. But like most children, I recall, I wanted to maintain a certain distance from my parents: a buffer zone betwixt myself and the adults. It was helpful that my parents liked the fact that I was a reader, that they approved of and encouraged my cloak-and-dagger ways of transportation out of the daily reality in which I lived together with them—and into the parallel reality tha t books offered. I was only pretending to be a little daughter growing upward in Brooklyn, when in fact I was a privileged child in London, guided by Mary Poppins through a series of marvelous adventures. I could manage a disarming impersonation of an ordinary quaternary-grader, but actually I was a pirate girl in Norway, all-time friends with Pippi Longstocking, well acquainted with her playful pet monkey and her obedient horse.
I loved books of Greek myths, of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales, and novels (many of them British) for children featuring some element of magic and the fantastic. When I was in the eighth class, I spent most of a family unit cantankerous-country trip reading and rereading a dog-eared paperback copy of Seven Gothic Tales, by Isak Dinesen, a writer who interests me now generally because I can so clearly come across what fascinated me about her work then. With a clarity and transparency that few things provide, least of all photographs and childhood diaries, her fanciful stories enable me to see what I was like—how I thought—as a girl. I tin still call up my favorite passage, which I had nearly memorized, because I believed it to contain the near profoundly romantic, the most noble and poetic, the most stirring view of the relations betwixt men and women—a subject about which I knew nothing, or less than naught, at the time.
The passage comes from a story entitled "The Roads Round Pisa." Augustus, a Danish count, is traveling in Italy, where he meets a young adult female disguised as a male child. He admires her confidence and forthrightness, and he realizes that he has, all his life, been looking for such a woman. Their flirtation culminates in the following conversation, heavy with suggestion as information technology delicately euphemizes and maneuvers its way around its existent bailiwick, which is sexual activity:
"Now God," she said, "when he created Adam and Eve . . . arranged it so that man takes, in these matters, the role of a guest, and woman that of a hostess. Therefore man takes dear lightly, for the honor and dignity of his house is not involved therein. And you lot can as well, surely, be a guest to many people to whom you would never want to be a host. Now, tell me, Count, what does a guest want?"
"I believe," said Augustus . . . , "that if we do, every bit I recollect nosotros ought to here, leave out the rough invitee, who comes to be regaled, takes what he can get and goes away, a guest wants first of all to be diverted, to go out of his daily monotony or worry. Secondly the decent guest wants to smooth, to expand himself and impress his own personality upon his surroundings. And thirdly, perchance, he wants to find some justification for his being birthday. But since you lot put it so charmingly, Signora, please tell me now: What does the hostess desire?"
"The hostess," said the young lady, "wants to be thanked."
The hostess wants to be thanked? What does that even hateful? Is that—to respond Freud'south question—what women desire? A polite expression of gratitude? What about pleasure, kindness, loyalty, respect . . . ?
And still, decades subsequently, I tin meet how this poetic discussion of the erotic, with only the almost vague and delicate proposition of the mechanics of sex, would accept appealed to me at 13. How I longed to meet a man someday who would courtroom me with language merely a few steps removed from that of the medieval troubadours; how divine information technology would be to experience a seduction that would verge so closely on poetry. And how I wanted to be the sort of young adult female who could travel on her own, charm a man with my courage and independence, and come up up with the perfect dial line to respond his mannerly disquisition on what the sexes want from each other.
I can still run into the charm in the passage, even though information technology seems quaint, artificial, hopelessly old-fashioned. What'due south more important is that reading it functions, for me, like a kind of time machine, transporting me to the back seat of our family automobile, crossing the Arizona desert, existence urged to just await at the Grand Canyon while I was somewhere else: near Pisa, in 1823, listening to a man and woman have the type of conversation that I hoped to have someday with a handsome (and preferably aristocratic) stranger.
All of which seems to suggest: reading is not exactly like being alone. We are alone with the volume we are reading, but we are too in the more than ethereal company of the author and the characters that writer has created. There I was in the car, with my parents in the front seat, my younger blood brother beside me, and Isak Dinesen, Count Augustus, and the brave fiddling cantankerous-dresser all floating around in my consciousness.
We may find ourselves surrounded by dozens, fifty-fifty hundreds, of imaginary people, or deep within the mind of the man or adult female whom the narrator has designated to stand at the center of the action. We tin can close the book and conduct these characters around with us, much the mode a kid can ship whatever number of imaginary friends from place to place. And considering they are imaginary, we can always stop reading without hurting their feelings, a transaction far less complicated than nigh of our dealings with flesh-and- claret man beings.
Lately it'southward been noted that this privacy has been at to the lowest degree partly compromised when we read on electronic devices that are able to monitor how much of a book we read, where nosotros stop, and what we reread. Information technology's disconcerting to recall about, and yet (particularly if nosotros are every bit engrossed in a volume as we wish to exist) information technology's possible to forget almost these invisible watchers, who at least aren't talking on—or checking—their phones. And of course nosotros tin always read a "physical book," which volition never disclose the secrets of our reading habits.
Reading and writing are lonely activities, and withal there is a social component that comes into play when nosotros tell someone else about what we have read. An additional pleasure of reading is thatyou can urge and sometimes even persuade people you know and care almost, and even people y'all don't know, to read the volume you lot've only finished and admired—and that you think they would like, likewise. We tin can talk about books to our friends, our colleagues, our students. Nosotros tin can form and bask communities that we wouldn't have otherwise had. Read Proust and y'all have something in common with other readers of Proust: not only the thrill of experiencing a marvelous and complex work of fine art, but the fact that you and those others now have, as your common acquaintances, his enormous cast of characters. Yous can gossip about people you lot know in mutual. Can you believe what happens to the Baron de Charlus by the finish of the novel?
Almost twenty years ago, the novelists Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard put together an anthology entitled You've Got to Read This, to which a grouping of writers contributed an introduction to a favorite brusque story of their own choosing. (I wrote about Isaac Boom-boom'south "Guy de Maupassant.") I've ever thought that every book almost reading and about books should be chosen You've Got to Read This. In fact, I might have chosen this book that had the wonderful Hansen-Shepard anthology not already been sitting on a bookshelf in the written report in which I am writing this. I've besides thought that "You've got to read this" should be the first line of every positive book review. The essay about Roberto Bolaño's great novel 2666, first printed in Harper's magazine and included here, begins with a description of that impulse, of the desire to say just that, to directly mag readers toward a great novel.
I've ever been delighted when an editor asked me to write an introduction to a archetype that is being reissued in a spiffy new edition with a stylish, handsome new encompass. Considering what I am doing, basically, is proverb: You lot've got to read this—and here'due south why. I feel the same way nigh certain book reviews that, to me, are a manner of telling people—strangers— most something terrific I think they should read. Drop everything. Outset reading. Now.
Some of the essays collected here are introductions to republished classics. Others are reviews of books that I particularly admired and enjoyed. Mixed in are a few essays that attempt to grapple with the social and political conditions that inform our reading habits and the judgments we make about books. Others ("On Clarity") address problems that showtime writers may observe themselves facing. Still others are less about reading in specific than most art in general, simply have then much to do with what I think virtually literature that I have chosen to include them. It'due south why I decided to put "10 Things That Art Can Practice" at the start of the book; in my view, the ideas, thoughts, and observations in that essay inform everything else.
The essays gathered in this book incorporate reading suggestions and imprecations, records of enthusiasms, pieces that beginning with item books and motion toward the larger subject area of how and what and why we read: why books can transport and entertain and teach us, why books can give us pleasure and make us think. Ultimately, what I am writing about here are the reasons why we go along to read swell books, and why nosotros go along to care.
Keep reading:What to Read and Why by Francine Prose
In this brilliant collection, the follow-upward to herNew York Times bestsellerReading Like a Author, the distinguished novelist, literary critic, and essayist celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers she admires above all others, from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to Jennifer Egan and Roberto Bolaño.
In an age defined past hyper-connectivity and abiding stimulation, Francine Prose makes a compelling case for the solitary act of reading and the bang-up enjoyment it brings. Inspiring and illuminating,What to Read and Why includes selections culled from Prose'due south previous essays, reviews, and introductions, combined with new, never-before-published pieces that focus on her favorite works of fiction and nonfiction, on works by masters of the short story, and fifty-fifty on books by photographers like Diane Arbus.
Prose considers why the works of literary masters such as Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Jane Austen have endured, and shares intriguing insights virtually modernistic authors whose words stimulate our minds and overstate our lives, including Roberto Bolaño, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jennifer Egan, and Mohsin Hamid. Prose implores us to read Mavis Gallant for her marvelously rich and meaty sentences, and her meticulously rendered characters who reveal our flawed and complex human nature; Edward St. Aubyn for his elegance and sophisticated humor; and Mark Strand for his gift for depicting unlikely transformations. Here, too, are original pieces in which Prose explores the arts and crafts of writing: "On Clarity" and "What Makes a Short Story."
Written with her sharp critical analysis, wit, and enthusiasm,What to Read and Why is a celebration of literature that will give readers a new appreciation for the ability and dazzler of the written word.
Posted on July 18, 2018 by
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