As a young and precocious reader I resented the adult implication/explicit announcement that there were some books I “wasn’t ready for”. As far as I was concerned, if I could understand 50% of the words in a sentence it was fair game, and if actually what I “wasn’t ready for” was filth then that was essentially a red rag in front of a 12-year-old bull (with the result that sex ed classes were v dull after a couple of Ben Eltons). Part of me is charmed by this conviction that there was nothing I couldn’t read, understand and judge; I wish that I could still channel the confidence of a 16-year-old deciding that Dostoevsky is overrated, actually. But one of the pleasures of lifelong reading is discovering that there actually are books that you understand more when you’ve been through more, whether that “more” is life or just a lot of other sentences. This has to be the flip side of teenage obsession: these days I only rarely feel the intensely physical agony of hyperfixation on a novel, but every year or so I am pleasantly surprised to find that a book I wrote off as boring is actually just much cleverer than I was when I last tried to read it. Every word feels fresh, like some sleight-of-hand has slipped new pages into a familiar dust jacket. Here’s my latest magic trick.
I’ve had a copy of Helen DeWitt’s THE LAST SAMURAI on my bookshelf for at least five years; I vaguely remember buying it because someone compared DeWitt to Donna Tartt, then tossing it aside in disgust when I reached the first kanji transliteration table. To be fair, I had a hangover from my undergraduate degree that left me suspicious of anything that could be even gently called postmodern, and DeWitt’s story of a single American in London on a downward spiral because of a stupid, deceased German academic is frequently interrupted by her young, probably genius son’s demands to help him learn Ancient Greek. Stream-of-consciousness?! In my reading safe space?! This time round, the interruptions flowed beautifully into the larger story, and by the time the genius son, Ludo, picks up his pen and starts writing back (to his mother? to me?) I was enraptured.
My wife told me the blurb of THE LAST SAMURAI makes it seem very boring; it is a blurb that cannot be trusted. This book is not really about Ludo on a desperate hunt to find out who his father is. It’s a book about language, and how we learn to ask for what we want, and then it’s about Ludo finding his father and deciding that what he wants, actually, is a better one—and going off to find him (them). The result is a kind of Matryoshka doll of a novel, each section containing a new and lovely short story/man which/whom Ludo rapidly reads, interrogates and judges. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say at the heart of the doll is Sybilla, his mother, who spends every word she has on the page telling you about other people, until you (if you are me) are obsessed only with her. I didn’t cry when I finished this book, but it was close.PAIRS NICELY WITH: another page-turner from my aunt’s box of books, Tie Ning’s The Bathing Women (translated by Hongling Zhang & Jason Sommer). Like The Last Samurai, The Bathing Women suffers from a bad blurb and very British Women’s Lit cover, but it’s much weirder and wilder than either of those aspects give it credit for. Set across thirty years in post-Cultural Revolution China, this book—like The Last Samurai—is secretly all about what your parents make of you, how they carve you into something and then are baffled by your shape. It is also about language, and filled with meandering anecdotes that turn out to be central to the whole story, and it was published in the same year as DeWitt’s. Honestly, what’s going on here?! Are they in cahoots?
CONSIDER ALSO: The lovely knowledge that if there are some books you’re not ready to read yet, there must also be some books that you’re not ready to write yet, and they’ll find you when you are; Natalia Ginzburg’s gently terrifying Family Lexicon, for more parents-and-children; if you’re in the mood for yet another bizarre father, the middle-aged heroine of Chibundu Onuzo’s Sankofa discovers that hers is the dictator of a small West African nation; some of the other books I only Got years after my first attempt, including Middlemarch (someone—maybe Franzen?—said that you should read Middlemarch every decade of your life, because it changes, and they were right), The Goldfinch, and all of Henry James’s oeuvre. And yes, I need to reread Dostoevsky.