It couldn't have come at a more opportune time. Here it is, mid-summer, and many of us are gearing down for a slow August, business-wise, which also translates as an opportunity to read all the books we meant to get through during the year. This is the time when publishing people say they're going to read offerings from houses not their own, catch up on classics, or even (the brave admit) finish stuff they started last summer.
Clearly, Bloomsbury wants to help: yesterday, a slim galley arrived on my desk, slated for publication in November. The book: How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
Already a hit in France (the author, Pierre Bayard, is lit professor in Paris), the book was sold in this country by Georges Borchardt to Bloomsbury for a modest advance—but there were several interested parties, including publisher James Atlas. (In a neat piece of advance work, Borchardt spoke about the book on a panel at the L.A. Times Festival of Books last spring; the audience laughed when they heard the title, not quite sure if it was a joke.) Hailed in a story in the New York Times as “a survivor's guide to life in the chattering classes,” How to Talk... is, according to its flap copy, a “delightfully witty, provocative book [that] argues that it's actually more important to know a book's role in our collective library than its details.” And Bayard clearly knows a lot: he invokes writers from Valéry to Montaigne to the screenwriters of the Bill Murray classic movie Groundhog Day, and divides his thoughts into such chapters as “Books You Don't Know,” “Books You Have Skimmed,” “Books You Have Heard Of” and “Books You Have Forgotten.” A high-low treatise that will remind some readers of Wayne Koestenbaum (a writer I talk about even though I've never read him) and Richard Klein (whose work I know well—honest!), this slim volume manages to deceive the reader in 177 pages. You think you're going to be told how to act at a cocktail party when someone opines about a book you don't know—and you are; but at the same time, you're going to learn enough about the book to discuss it. In the “Books You Have Heard Of” chapter, for example, Bayard emphasizes that what goes on in a book is much less important than what you think about it, but then he goes on, at some length, about specifics of the narrative in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, which—in case you haven't read it, have only heard of or skimmed it or have just plain forgotten it—centers on monks considered heretics for having read a forbidden book.
It's a romp, in other words, but a romp of the most decidedly literary variety.
At least I think it is. Because, of course, I haven't really read it.
But that will hardly stop me from getting started on my own sequel to Bayard's literary cheat sheet, which I think I'll call—what else?—How to Write About Books You Haven't Read.
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