A few weeks ago I was taken to see the theatre production of A Thousand Splendid Suns. Etching closer to the time of the show I was reminded that I’d not read the book, and that it might be a good idea to do so. Only problem was… the reading part.
Like everyone else I’m short for time, and can never seem to find enough of it to read. So I decided to set myself a challenge: to complete the 400-page novel before the curtains opened that Thursday evening. It was Sunday I had decided this, so I had exactly 5 days to go.
For those days leading up to the show, every spare moment I had – my commute to and fro, lunch breaks, trips to the loo – I spent, head buried, skirting through pages like my life depended on it.
Needless to say that despite a week of angst, I made it! (with only a few hours to spare, I might add). And to be honest, it didn’t find it all that difficult.
Cocky bastard, do it all the time then! I told myself. 52 weeks, 52 books. In a years time you’ll be as intelligent and as understanding as a motherfucker.
So this is exactly what I’ve been doing. Knocking out a book a week with a speed and tenacity unknown even to myself. That was, until this week…
Until Alice Munro. This week I’m reading the Nobel prize-winning author’s collection of short stories entitled Dear Life, and, despite the emotional depth I’d heard they’d contain, I figured her simple, uncomplicated prose (again, something I’d heard) would offset any serious challenge and make it a seamless and (most importantly) swift read.
Needless to say, I was wrong. Not about the seamless but about the swift. What I have found in her writing so far is a gently paced and measured rhythm. A rhythm that encourages the reader to slow down, to sensitively uncover the subtle, subdued nuances contained in her short and simple sentences. Interestingly, it’s in these spaces of restraint where Munro offers most suggestion.
Take, ‘To Reach Japan’, the first story in the collection. Her protagonist is a shy poet who mid-story makes her way to a party where she worryingly knows no one. ‘She was beginning to wonder if she had got the wrong street, and was not unhappy to think that’. Here, the use of the phrase ‘not unhappy’ reveals a great deal. It’s not that our poet wants to go home, or can admit to herself as much, but rather wishes for an intervention that would send her home, releasing her, without personal fault, from having to endure the social activity.
And so it strikes me that the inconspicuous sentence can render the power to activate the imagination to a greater possibility than the pronounced one. It’s a conflation of that old adage of less being more.
the inconspicuous sentence has the power to activate the imagination more than the pronounced one
Yet upon these reflections I had to stop myself. This all felt meaningful, yes, but also uneconomical. Two days of reading and I’d barely finished the first story (20 pages in a 350-page book).
The weeks before I had completed with no issue The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, and Slumberland by Paul Beatty, two brilliantly executed books written with a voracious energy that works to consume the reader with its outrageous hilarity, flagrant style and berthed imagination. I began to think, who/what is in control of my reading? Did I get through these books as quickly as I did because of the particular style of prose? Had these authors even intended their work to be read in such a way?
Many of these questions are of course rhetorical and perhaps cannot be answered, however my inclination is that the act of reading is a relationship, a compound effect of all participants involved, with the weight of control principally under the hand that turns the page.
After all, the written word is an inanimate, dependent variable which bends under the inclination of the reader. I experience a choice (I use this word lightly) as to what effect I offer each word, to how I pace each sentence, and to what extent I care to deliberate upon a chosen paragraph.
the act of reading is a relationship, a compound effect of all participants involved
It’s now day four, and I’m no closer to completing Dear Life. Not even a quarter away. I ought to give up but I begin to watch personal development videos (which have no shortage of advice on the matter): How to read a book a week. How to read a book a day. How to get the most out of your book.
Needless to say, it didn’t work and I’ve now thrown in the towel. I did want to get through this book, yet reading at the pace I am feels vivid, intentional and frankly, incredibly deep. It seems I won’t allow myself to sacrifice this for a finish line.
Great books consumed with passion do not measure time, but rather, eradicate it.
And neither should we want to. Finishing a book as quickly as possible for the sake of finishing is not the way forward, despite what our new age gurus tell us. A philosophy advocating productivity and economy in reading is to my mind largely redundant. My most meaningful and memorable reading experiences have never once considered the time. Ironically, and in the most magical of ways, they’ve always managed to eradicate it.
It seems to me that Alice Munro’s collection of stories serve as the very antithesis of quick consumption in reading. What I’ve been able to receive in only the few stories I’ve read thus far is that reading, as well as life, is profoundly dear, and that both ought to be spent with care, consideration and contemplation.
Margin Page
Margins Page is a play on its very words. Stories of black people in Britain, both past and present, have often been relegated to the margins of the British canon. This platform attempts to reconfigure this position, serving as a page to help develop, curate and promote black British literature.
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