How to time travel with old favourites

It’s already April, and most readers are likely surveying the remains of their New Year’s resolutions. I broke mine before 2019 was even a few days old, to read no more than four books simultaneously. It was never doable for someone who often flits between that many books just within the hour. But recently, chancing upon an old book (2002 publication date) called Nothing Remains the Same by Wendy Lesser, an American literary critic and author, I have ticked off yet another resolution that I have been meaning to make: to only read works of fiction I have previously read, unless they are needed for an assignment. (No rules for non-fiction.) Being a compulsive but scattered re-reader, I pick up previously read books in between, or along with, other readings; I figured that a list deliberately constructed of already-read novels would give to my reading life some order, direction, coherence, narrative form (just the things most of us generally seek in all aspects of our lives).

Finding the old self

Nothing Remains the Same is Lesser’s account of rereadings of old favourites. It began, she writes, when she picked up a copy of the Henry James classic, The Portrait of a Lady, a book she had read closely when she was an undergraduate, and then as a graduate student of English literature. By this time Lesser was 46, and farther away in age from Isabel Archer, the American heiress who is the book’s heroine, and she found: “I cared less, this time through, about what decisions Isabel made than about how and why she made them. And this, in turn, gave me far more patience with the length and complexity of James’s sentences… I now wanted to saunter through the commas, linger at the semicolons, and take small contemplative breaks at the periods. The book was much better than I remembered it. More to the point, I was a much better reader of it. Both pleasure and understanding came more easily to me.” In other words: “…a simple reading could also be a new reading.”

Lesser decided to make a book of it, altruistically planning to “read on behalf of all of us” who yearn for the time to reread formative classics, but can’t find it. But if reading a book for the first time is somewhat informed by the reviewer’s context, she found that “nothing demonstrates how personal reading is more clearly than rereading does.”

To reread a book is to make a re-acquaintance not simply of the text, the storyline and the characters, it is not simply to be drawn into a process of reappraisal and see how it all stacks up now compared to when the book was read ages ago. It is also a nudge to imagine that person you were when you first, or last as the case may be, read the book.

Deep comparison

And that provides the first caution from Lesser for those of us considering a season of sustained rereading, that the exercise could bring a feeling of vertigo: “There is something inherently dizzying in the effort to look at a still work of literature from a moving position — that is, from two different points in time.” This somewhat disorienting sense, she says, is heightened by a realisation: “The characters in a novel can speak to us but we can’t speak to them — just as our younger selves can be heard and understood by our older selves, but not vice versa.”

Lesser set out certain rules for her project. She had to have first read the book in question when she was “young”, so the arc of personal evolution would allow a deep comparison between the older reading and the present one. For this, she had to remember that first reading. (Though there is a thought here for a reading project, to reread the books we have read but don’t remember.) And importantly, in the context of my resolution, in order to prevent the reading list from lapsing into “escapism”, Lesser made sure she did not stop interleaving her previously read books with books she was reading for the first time.

There it is then, this timely prompt from Lesser. All intensive reading projects need to be situated in a balance to work.

Mini Kapoor is Ideas Editor, The Hindu.

mini.kapoor@thehindu.co.in