How is it possible that even when I know nothing about a novelist’s life I find, on reading his or her book, that I am developing an awareness of the writer that is quite distinct from my response to the work? I might enjoy a book while feeling a certain dislike or even hostility for the person I take to be its writer, or I might be attracted to both work and author, but in different ways. Philip Roth’s novels are provocative to the point of bludgeoning, the confrontation is invigorating. At the same time I find myself endeared to the writer who needs to do this, who is determined to get away with it. To me he seems attractively vulnerable.

Of course my intuitions regarding the author may be quite wrong, but all the same I have them. It seems impossible, at least for me, to read almost anything without being aware of the person behind it and without putting that person in relation to what he or she has written and indeed to readers of the book, to the point that I sometimes wonder, in the teeth of a literary critical tradition that has always told us the writer’s personality is irrelevant to any appraisal of the work, whether one of the pleasures of literature isn’t precisely this contemplation of the enigma of the person creating it. We know so little about Shakespeare’s life, and yet as we read his sonnets, or watch his plays, we develop an idea of Shakespeare, and we are aware of a continuity of “personality” behind the writing. We have the impression that if someone ever did find the full story of his life, we would immediately recognize the person we had in mind.

It is difficult to pin down where and how this awareness of the writer starts. Like so much of what happens when we read, it has an elusive, shadowy existence. However, over the last year or two, I have found it clarifying to play this game: I try to identify a kind of conversation, encounter, or transaction in a novel that seems to be characteristic of its author, something that recurs frequently; when I’ve established that, I try to think of the reader’s relationship with the writer in the same terms.

First the recurrent encounter, or exchange. An easy example might be the question of loans in Ulysses. An awful lot of the book is about characters asking each other for loans, or favors, errands, and chores, and every request is a little power game. People make demands—Stephen on Buck Mulligan, Buck on Stephen, the Englishman Hine on both and both on him, and others define themselves in the way they respond.

In Dickens, we frequently have powerful figures befriending weaker ones, or appearing to befriend them, offering them help, inviting them to be part of a group that may or may not be welcoming or beneficent. Likewise the person befriended may or may not be worthy and loyal. He may, like Uriah Heep, accept another’s patronage in order to manipulate him and steal from him.

Rereading Antonio Tabucchi’s work recently I noticed that a great deal of it is made up of conversational sparring between strangers, in which one character is seeking information and the other is teasing, both giving and refusing to give what is asked. Often both characters are teasing each other, and always looking for paradox rather than clarity:

“Photographing wretchedness,” Christine replied….

“It’s my job…. Have you ever been to Calcutta?”

“Well, let’s suppose I’m writing a book, for example.”

“A book.”

“Something like that.”

“Oh no,” I said, “it’s just an experiment, my job is something else, I look for dead mice.”