On borrowing books

Like almost all passionate readers I prefer to own the books I really love. But since my budget has never been big enough to satisfy my hunger for new books, I often have to opt for the practicality of borrowing books.

Ah, borrowing books - a beautiful but dangerous road if ever there was one. Whenever I borrow a book from a friend, I risk falling into one of two treacherous traps. Either I love the book so much that I can't bear to live without it ever again. In which case I absolutely have to buy my own copy as soon as possible. Preferably even before I return the borrowed book. So much for stretching my budget by borrowing books.

Or, even worse, I enjoy the book so much that I can't possibly return it to its owner because anyone can see that it has been thoroughly enjoyed: caressed; carried around; opened and closed numerous times in numerous places; collecting small scars, slight stains, even faint odours along the way. In which case I simply have to buy a new copy for the old owner. And keep this slightly tattered one for myself. So much for stretching my budget...

Not that I mind the tattered look. I believe books take on a secret life of their own as they are read and reread and borrowed and swopped and sold and shared. To me reading is not an abstract intellectual or emotional experience, but a physical, sensual adventure in which the look and feel and even the smell of the book offer as much delight as the words and wisdom it contains.

Therefore I prefer not to borrow books in a pristine condition. It's a little like sleeping with a virgin, I imagine. One doesn't want to spoil the pleasure by feeling guilty afterwards. No - rather lend me a book that has obviously been loved by someone before me.

Every once in a while, though, I fall for a 'virginal' book on someone else's shelf, a book that the owner has not had the time or inclination to read, and then I start perusing, perhaps even reading a few pages, and before I know it, I'm hooked. I have to - absolutely, immediately, urgently - read this book.

This happened again quite recently, while spending a few nights in a friend's guest room. Temptingly close to my bed was an immaculate copy of John Updike's Due Considerations (2007), a collection of essays, criticism and short pieces about absolutely anything under the sun. This sixth - and sadly, final - volume of Updike's non-fiction prose was published eight years after More Matter, which in turn followed eight years after Odd Jobs. When the author died exactly a year ago, I posted a blog entry about his influential fiction(January 2009). This time I want to praise his non-fiction.

Due Considerations is a big, fat book of more than 700 pages - the index alone covers 30 pages! - a fine example of the variety and depth of Updike's interests and passions. 'Assembled here are pieces on...Shakespeare, Henry James, Hemingway, Albrecht Dürer, a baseball star, sex in literature, poker, undergraduate life and plenty about the New Yorker', as the Literary Review stated - and then we haven't mentioned the brilliant pieces on cars, Coco Chanel, a visit to China and many, many more. Updike has an opinion about everything, it seems, but he delivers it with such unfailing good humor, fierce intelligence and flashy style that it doesn't matter whether you agree with him or not. As the Sunday Times claimed, these pages 'don't only pay handsome tribute to the pleasures of reading. They abundantly provide them.'

What more could any enthusiastic reader ask from any book about reading (among other things)?

It also happens to be the perfect bedside companion - or guest-room book - because you can dip into it at leisure and find something delectable on almost every page, close it when you grow sleepy, read another page on a totally different subject when you wake up. This is how I started reading it in my friend's home, simply hoping for a few nights' entertainment, but I soon wanted more...

So when my friend kindly offered to lend it to me, I took it home and devoured it from cover to cover - and realised a little too late that the book wasn't looking quite as immaculate as when I first laid my eyes on it. (And to be honest, by this time I couldn't bear the thought of parting with a book that had provided me with so much reading pleasure.) I was obliged to find another copy for my friend - and quickly too.

Thank heaven for internet book shops. Now my friend has her new virgin copy to read, if she ever gets around to reading it, and I'm thrilled to have the frequently fondled familiar old copy next to my own bed. Together with heaps of other books I recently read or still want to read, tomorrow, next week, next month.

To all the readers out there, may 2010 be filled with fabulous books - bought, begged or borrowed - and enough spare hours to enjoy all of them.

Picture this

Pictures, you asked. Pictures you'll get. Well, actually only a few of you suggested that I might add pictures to my posts to attract people who are too lazy to read. Personally I don't think a blog on reading should try to attract people too lazy to read - but I thought I might as well offer the eager reader something besides words, words, words, as Hamlet so memorably mumbled.

To tell the truth, I've been toying with the idea of adding pictures for quite a while. We live in a visual age, after all, no use denying that. Even really serious novelists like WG Sebald had made use of photographs in their work during recent years. Not that I'm aiming for a really serious blog. The idea has always been to have fun producing it - and if I can provide a bit of enjoyment to those reading it, so much the better.

Still, I couldn't see the point of simply using publicity pictures of book covers or authors with my posts. Nor did I want to exhibit myself on my blog; that's why my official profile picture shows only one eye and a few fingers, the rest of me is comfortably hidden behind a book. But then this very same profile photo got me wondering. I asked myself how many ways one could possibly find of hiding behind books. And I started experimenting...

So today I offer you a non-view of myself (you'll have to trust me on this) behind a few of the books I've praised during the past year. A picture truly paints a thousand words, I realise once again. I also added pictures of me hiding behind other books to some of my older posts. Do have a look and let me know what you think. I'm beginning to suspect this could turn into quite an enjoyable past-time - not Hide and Seek, but Hide and Read.

I even used a picture of a young family member (or at least the arms and tongue of a young family member) with a post, The president, the professor and the police officer, from August this year, because the colour of her T-shirt and tongue went rather well with the splash of bright pink on the cover of Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty. I might use family and friends in future too, but rest assured, they'll always be anonymous behind a book. (Or next to a book or under a book or whatever.) This is still a blog about the joys of reading, not about the joys of family and friends.

Mostly, though, it will be me you'll see (or not see, preferably) with a book. If nothing else, it could at least prove that I've physically handled the book I claim to have read. Just in case you had any doubts.

Meanwhile, happy reading.

This literary life

Last week my adopted country honoured one of the great living writers of my country of birth - and not a moment too soon.

Karel Schoeman's Afrikaans novel, Hierdie lewe, was published quite a long time ago in South Africa (1993 to be exact), where it won the Hertzog Prize, the biggest cherry on the local literary cake. Although many of the author's other novels have also received important awards in South Africa, his works are not widely translated and he is not nearly as well-known internationally as his literary compatriots JM Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, André P Brink and nowadays even Deon Meyer. Hierdie lewe had to wait nearly two decades before it finally found a French publisher, the relatively unknown Phébus, which published Pierre-Marie Finkelstein's translation earlier this year under the title Cette Vie.

Et voilà! Within a few months the Afrikaans novel wins France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (PMLE) 2009 - which can be directly translated as Prize for the Best Foreign Book- a highly respected literary prize with a proud 61-year history. You simply have to look at the list of previous prize-winners to realise that this is la cour des grands, as the French say, 'the playground of the big kids'.

From Nobel laureates like Gabriel García Márquez and, more recently, Orhan Pamuk (who was crowned in 2002, before he won the Nobel Prize) to many notable names from the Anglo-Saxon literary universe like Salman Rushdie, John Updike, John Fowles, Peter Carey, Philip Roth, Graham Swift and Anthony Burgess - they have all received the PMLE during the past few decades.

The list is also a fascinating mix of 'serious' and more 'popular' authors, with recent laureates like the American Nicole Krauss for The History of Love and the Spanish Carlos Ruiz Zafón for The Shadow of the Wind. And the crowned novels are translated from an impressive variety of languages. Of course the 'big' languages like German (Günter Grass and others), Spanish (Mario Vargas Llosa and others), Russian (Vassili Grossman and others) and Japanese (Yasunari Kawabata and others) are well represented, but it is a pleasant surprise to spot so many 'smaller' languages on the list: Estonian (Jaan Kross), Lituanian (Youozas Baltouchis), Polish (Bruno Shulz), Hungarian (Péter Nádas), Swedish (Per Olof Enquist)... And now, for the first time, also Afrikaans.

Hierdie lewe (This Life) presents us with an old woman on her deathbed, recalling her long and lonely life in an isolated farming community in the Roggeveld towards the end of the nineteenth century. Since this is supposed to be a personal blog, I might as well confess that it is not my personal favourite among Schoeman's books - perhaps because I read it too soon after the Australian Patrick White's The Eye of the Storm, another novel dealing with an old woman on her deathbed, which really knocked me out.

I know, I know, 'comparisons are odious', as John Donne stated, and White's magnificent novel convinced even the judges of the the Nobel Prize to crown him in 1973, but there you are. I've always preferred Schoeman's earlier 'n Ander land (Another Country), which also earned him the Hertzog Prize a decade before Hierdie lewe, and once again gives us a dying protagonist at the end of the nineteenth century. This time it is an ailing Dutchman who comes to the dry climate of the Orange Free State for health reasons. His alienation and slow acceptance of death are brilliantly depicted, and the landscape of the Free State (where Schoeman was born) is beautifully drawn.

I have to admit, though, that I find most of Schoeman's novels brilliant but too 'bloodless' for my taste, too dry and too cold for someone like me who's always searching for Roy Campbell's famous bloody horse when reading fiction. From the poem On Some South African Novelists:

You praise the firm restraint with which they write -

I'm with you there, of course:

They use the snaffle and the curb all right,

But where's the bloody horse?

Still, I feel unexpectedly proud that Hierdie lewe is not only the first Afrikaans novel to win the PMLE, but in fact the first South African novel on the long list. The South African Nobel laureates JM Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, who both write in English, have never featured among the winners. Not that I prefer Schoeman to Coetzee; in fact, Coetzee's later novels please me precisely because I'm beginning to see at least the skeleton of the bloody horse. But I do think it worth mentioning that Coetzee, in spite of his far wider international renown, has not yet conquered the jury of the PMLE.

So, yes, I am grateful that a novel in my mother tongue has finally joined this illustrious list of foreign works honoured by the finicky French. Schoeman had to wait sixteen years for the honour - but in the literary world, as in life, it is always better to arrive late than not to show up at all. Dankie, Karel Schoeman.