(GARY CLEMENT)
Classics for Pleasure
By Michael Dirda
Harcourt, 341 pp., $25
How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
By Pierre Bayard
Bloomsbury, 185 pp., $19.95
I'm sure Pierre Bayard would be quite pleased if I did not read "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read." After all, he's in favor of talking about books you haven't read - even reviewing them. I, however, took a slightly different approach. Call me square, Monsieur Bayard, but I read your provocative little book from start to finish and I think you're really on to something.
An alternate title for this book might well be "What We Talk About When We Talk About Books." According to Bayard, it turns out some of the most interesting things we say are about books we haven't read.
Bayard is out to combat a predicament that vexes book readers everywhere. You know the situation: You're at a party and someone, obviously more diligent, proclaims he or she has made it through that new translation of "War and Peace." And then the shame sets in: Even if "War and Peace" pretty much tops everyone's list of unread books, you're ashamed you haven't tackled it.
A literary Dr. Phil, Bayard wants to rid us of those bad feelings. Though it's sometimes hard to tell if he's writing with a straight face (I suspect Bayard may be winking at us all along), he calls talking about books you haven't read "an authentically creative activity."
For Bayard, reading a book in its entirety is to miss the point. He argues that reading a book word for word presents an obstacle to an important goal - the slow revelation of the self. All those words, he says, just get in the way. "It is only by maintaining a reasonable distance from the book," he declares, "that we may be able to appreciate its true meaning." (Teachers everywhere will blanch at this statement. Do students really need any more excuses to keep a reasonable distance from their books?)
As he points out, we read in all kinds of ways. We skim, we pick up bits and scraps of information from reviews, like the one you're reading right now, or from friends. It's how we use this information that matters. Invoking the likes of Paul Valery, Oscar Wilde, and Balzac, Bayard formulates an interesting theory about the ways we should approach books. For him, it's more important for us to know a given book's relationship to other books, "of being able to find your bearings within books as a system." So, if you know that "Ulysses" is a retelling of "The Odyssey," you're OK. As Bayard would have it, you can judge a book by its cover, for "even the slightest glance at a book's title or cover calls up a series of images and impressions quick to coalesce into an initial opinion."
True enough, but there are times when you feel like you're being had by a clever Gallic intellectual. Still, Bayard makes some valuable observations about the psychology of reading and the ways in which we create little myths about the books we have read. To him, reading is a kind of forgetting. "In the end," he notes wistfully, "we are left with falsified remnants of books." There is a touch of the weary academic (Bayard is a professor of literature at the University of Paris) about all this, of a man, worn down by the drudgery of thinking for a living, who has lost the ability to read for pleasure. He has little to say about why reading a book carefully, straight through from beginning to end, is actually a source of delight and entertainment.
In a nice contrast to Bayard, Michael Dirda stressed these qualities in his latest collection of essays, "Classics for Pleasure." Dirda continues what he began in his massive book of enthusiasms, "Bound to Please," including 90 more brief considerations of books he deems "classic."
Dirda's range is typically eclectic and offbeat. There is a little bit of everything in here. Dirda breezily muses on Bram Stoker - he has a keen appreciation for horror - and Defoe, Kipling and Gibbon, Italo Calvino and S. J. Perelman, plus a generous selection on figures from the ancient Greek and Roman canon - Ovid, Petronius, Cicero, and Plutarch, among others.
The pieces in "Classics for Pleasure" occupy a middle ground between straight-up literary criticism and the standard book review. They are old-fashioned appreciations in the manner of Clifton Fadiman, another eager popularizer and author of the "Lifetime Reading Plan," which is more or less what Dirda has given us in his several collections over the years.
Dirda is a master of the light touch - his tone is invariably cordial and measured. (I'd like to see a list of classics Dirda doesn't like.) He can write a memorable phrase. About Ezra Pound, he says, "Imagine a combination of a carnival barker, a Hollywood super-agent, and the Godfather." Or Louis-Ferdinand Celine, who "refused to write fiction that sounded as if it had been composed in a library with a quill pen."
For Dirda, classics are not "classics because they are educational, but because people have found them worth reading, generation after generation, century after century." Unlike Harold Bloom, Dirda is no stern professor hectoring you about the virtues of literature. His expansiveness, his love of genre fiction like detective novels, gives his writing an approachability lacking in so much literary criticism. Read Dirda's concise glosses, and hit those parties with confidence; you may be talking about books you haven't read for the rest of your life.
Matthew Price is a critic and journalist in Brooklyn.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
