A Common Reader . . .

Review: Proust and the Squid - Maryanne Wolf

In Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf, an expert on the reading brain, describes how our brains manage to read.  Reading is not an innate activity, but it is an invention, and only a few thousand years old at that. It does not come naturally to humans in the way that walking or eating does and on the first page of this book, we learn that it is only because of the remarkable "plasticity" of our brains that we are able to achieve an understanding of the written word.  

The book is divided into three parts.  Firstly the history of how humans learned to read, secondly how reading is learned and how it develops, and thirdly what happens when in cases like dyslexia, something goes wrong in the "learning to read" process.

The reference to Proust in the title refers to passages from Proust's writings in which he describes the pleasure of reading, the memories that are evoked by thinking back to special books from childhood (how Proustian!), and the "reading sanctuary", that place of escape, a refuge from the world and its troubles.  If Proust is a metaphor for a particular approach to reading, so the squid in the title refers to early neruo-scientific investigations of that creature which found how neurons fire and transmit to each other, adapting when things go wrong, repairing and compensating along the way.  The squid analogy refers to the way reading required something new from existing structure of the brain, only possible because of the "plasticity" referred to earlier.

Review: The Assistant - Robert Walser

Robert Walser wrote The Assistant in 1908,soon after attending a course in becoming a servant, and while occasionally working as a secretary in Berlin.  The book is about a young man, Joseph Marti, who secures a position as live-in personal assistant to an inventor and entrepeneur, Carl Tobler, who lives with his wife and four children in an elegant lake-side house beautiful mountainous country.  Tobler has invested all his money in buying the house and supporting himself while trying to obtain financial backing for his inventions, including the ill-fated Advertising Clock.  

Young Joseph has had a difficult time in finding work, and can hardly believe his good fortune in finding employment in such a luxurious setting (his room, a tower room, a "noble, romantic location), while also being invited to take-part in every part of family life, from sharing morning coffee with Tobler's wife in the summer-house, to watering the garden in the evening.  The food is excellent, the wine and fine cheroots abundant.  He has to deal with the capricious moods of his master, but he sees this as the inevitable lot of the clerk, and something which can only spur him on to greater achievements in his career. 

Review: LibraryThing

LibraryThing has developed very quickly into the best book cataloguing website on the net.  It has so many features I would find it hard to write about all of them, but its invaluable even for the probably limited use I make of it.  LibraryThing is a free service for the first 200 books (I've only listed 100 so far), after which you can buy a year's unlimited subscription for $10 or a lifetime membership for $25.

Adding books to your catalogue couldn't be easier.  You just enter the title, author or ISBN into the Add Books box on the homepage (and various other places) and LibraryThing searches Amazon (you can specify .com or .uk) and 680 world libraries to identify the book.  You then select the edition you have, and it is automatically slotted in to your catalogue.  The wide range of catalogues searched means that LibraryThing is quite capable of finding out of print and even very old books, an example being my 1925 edition of Essay's of Elia by Charles Lamb which it has catalogued quite successfully.  A new feature is a $15 ISBN scanner that plugs into your computer's USB socket and feeds ISBN numbers directly into LibraryThing (I'm sure this would be very useful when intitally setting up your library). 

Casanova

This week, Ian Kelly's Casanova is published and goes straight to my wish list, not least because Casanova is for me unfinished business from W G Sebald's  Vertigo. In the second chapter of his book, "All'estero", Sebald portrays Giacomo Casanova as a victim of Venetian (in)justice, when he was imprisoned among people who were incarcerated for no reason other than that the rulers of the city wanted them removed from society.  The tribunals, before which they appeared, had already decided their fate, which often consisted of indefinite imprisonment, and rather than submit to many wasted years, Casanova managed to escape and travel very far from Venice to escape further terms of imprisonment. 

Sebald's narrator (and let's not make the mistake of reading Sebald's books as autobiography) wakes in his hotel room in Venice on the day after the anniversary of Casanova's escape from his Venetian gaol, with an troubled mind.  "I became enveloped by a sense of utter emptiness and never once left my room.  It seemed to me that one could well end one's life simply through thinking and retreating into one's mind, for, although I had closed the windows and the room was warm, my limbs were growing progressively colder and stiffer  . . I felt as if I had already been interred or laid out for burial".  Just a few pages earlier, Sebald's describes Casanova's escape as breaking out from a "lead-lined crocodile", perhaps echoing on his own feelings in the hotel.  

The review in the The Times gives me the impression that Kelly's book will be a worthwhile read and is has also been selected to be Radio 4's Book of the Week from tomorrow (Monday 24 June 2008) and I shall listen in to get a preview.  I suspect it won't be on my wishlist for long: my cash-back credit card which pays me in Waterstone's vouchers owes me £20 so a visit to Eastbourne seems to be in order when they arrive in the post. 

Copyright on a life?

Vedran Smailovic gained his reputation as the "The Cellist of Sarajevo", when in 1992, he played his cello in the rubble caused by an explosion which killed 22 of his fellow Bosnians.  After a brief flirtation with fame, when Paul McCartney, David Bowie and others played with him, he retired to the side of a lake in Ireland (think John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun). 

Now Steven Galloway, a creative writing teacher from Vancouver,  has published a novel, Cellist of Sarajevo, "inspired by" Smailovic and his life, in which the cellist does not know he has a guardian angel, in the shape of a young woman named Arrow.  So far so good (unless the thought of a book with a central female character called Arrow is too much to bear).  Alas, Vedran Smailovic has taken great exception to Galloway's borrowing of his life for fictional purposes.  A report in The Times tells us that Smailovic is so angry that he is threatening to return to Sarajevo to burn his cello in protest at this novelistic desecration.

I think I can understand where Smailovic is coming from.  He says, "They steal my name and identity, nobody can take the rights to that from me. It’s quite clear that it is me in the book.” Alas, the law is of course not on his side.  You can't copyright your life like that, and if Sue Townsend can write books based on The Queen and the Duchess of Cornwall without being incarcerated in the Tower of London, then I suppose creator of romantic novels can use any story he's harvested from the television or popular press.  I understand that unless Smailovic directly helped Galloway by providing interviews or perhaps written correspondence, he has no legal claim for compensation.  

I'm now sifting through my memory trying to think of other books "inspired by" real people and a large number of authors come to mind, but most wrote about dead people.  Perhaps Tony Blair should be angry with Robert Harris for his latest novel The Ghost?  I am sure there are plenty of other people who's lives are "stolen" but I still feel sorry for Vedran Smailovic who's only claim to fame was his heroic and unique act so many years ago

Electronic books versus the real thing

I downloaded an e-book a few months ago.  It was a new text on one of my interests and was only available in electronic form at this stage.  I can't honestly say that I've read it as such, but I've certainly skimmed through it, and found it useful as a reference guide.  But the experience bore little comparison to actually sitting down with a real book, and I suspect that the amount of attention my e-book gets over the next few months will be very small.

Had it been a real book of course, then things would be very different.  I would have carried it around, taken it from room to room, browsed through it in the garden, or picked it up while having a coffee.  The problem is I think, that being located on my computer, the e-book has to compete with so many other things on the machine: the Internet, my diary and accounts, Google Earth, the occasional computer game and so on.  I go on the computer to do something, whereas I sit down in a chair in the garden to relax with a book.

Review: The Library At Night - Alberto Manguel

I always enjoy "books about books", or books about the pleasure of reading, and remember Manguel's A History of Reading as one of the greatest literary pleasure. Now he had presented us with what is effectively a history of libraries in The Library At Night and the effect is equally as satisfying.

Perhaps "history" is not quite the right word, for in his 15 chapters, Manguel writes of not only the history of libraries, but also the impact and meaning of libraries through the centuries.

Everything is covered here, from the history of the great library of Alexandria to the development of the most modern libraries such as the British Library or the library of the Freie Universität Berlin. The book considers location, cataloguing systems, themes, and great librarians  (Gottfreid Leibnitz of Hanover, Andrew Carnegie who created over 2500 libraries, Aby Warburg of Hamburg and many others).  But the book is far more than history, containing many digressions on the nature of literature itself, and the process of reading.