Fictional People Recommend Books To Me

I had read too many good books in a row, sucked in first by Jane Eyre by Emily Brontë, which I had not yet read, then Arabian Nights and Days by Najīb Maḥfūẓ, Participation by Anna Moschovakis, and A Room With A View by E. M. Forster. As each book unfolded its plot and its atmosphere for me, I felt like a child with a flashlight up late and under the covers. But then I tried one book and another, and didn’t like either. The first was unredeemably sad, with a heaviness I felt would only increase as I read. The second was simply terribly written.

Absurdly, I began to feel that I had run out of books. Even at the library, literally surrounded by them, I felt that I had run out of books for me. Because I so enjoyed Jane Eyre and A Room With a View, I was on the hunt for more classics that I had missed, but I have read so many, and the ones I haven’t read… maybe there’s a good reason for that. How ridiculous for a librarian to feel this way! I have a friend who feels overwhelmed in libraries: like looking at the stars at night, there are too many books to read in a lifetime. When I am more myself, both stars and libraries exhilarate me!

I read A Room With A View at the recommendation of a fictional character: the unnamed narrator of Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19. A novel I loved so much, I read it twice in the year it was published (2022). Have you ever taken reading suggestions from someone who does not exist? Bennett’s narrator reads A Room With A View twice: once as a young student, when she is so taken by the romance of the novel she travels to Florence to see the same Santa Croce and the same Arno that Lucy Honeychurch saw; and again more in the present tense of her narration when she is surprised to discover that she is this time drawn to Charlotte Bartlett, Lucy’s fuddy-duddy cousin and chaperone. While I read the novel, I thought of Checkout 19’s narrator, the way you might think of a friend who lent a book to you.

Basilica di Santa Croce, Firenze

Bridges over the Arno

Checkout 19 is a reader’s novel, the story of a young woman building her own story out of the books she reads and becoming a writer. To quote the publisher’s jacket copy: “The growing heaps of other books in which she loses – and finds – herself. [...] The thrill of learning to conjure characters and scenarios in her head is matched by the exhilaration of forging her way in the world, the two kinds of ingenuity kindling to a brilliant conflagration.” ‘Heaps’ is a good word to describe the masses of books in this novel. The novel has epigraphs from two books, and each chapter has one as well. Sometimes the narrator orients herself in her own development by listing the book she had by then read, and the books she had not yet read. “Strange to think but when I first wrote the tale I hadn’t yet read a single word by Italo Calvino, Jean Rhys, Borges, or Thomas Bernhard, nor Clarice Lispector. I had read Of Mice and Men, and Lolita, and ‘Kubla Khan,’ and The Diary of A Young Girl.” She lists hundreds of books and authors over the course of the novel, but there are some she returns to, besides A Room With A View. The English writer Ann Quin and the French writer (and recent winner of the Nobel Prize) Annie Ernaux recur as models of working-class, female writers of intimate and ambitious prose.

Although frustrating, my reader’s block did not last so long, really. Finally, I picked up Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov and translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel. In this speculative novel of national and personal memory (and forgetting), the narrator encounters a character named Gaustine – or does he invent him? Gaustine opens a clinic in Switzerland for people with Alzheimer’s and other memory problems, a sanctuary in which patients can live out their lives in the decades of their choosing. The clinic expands and so do Europe’s memory troubles. Discontented with the present and the future that it seems to foretell, Europe holds a great referendum in which each country choses a time in the 20^th century to return to. Spain and France return to the 1980s, Sweden and Denmark the 1970s, and neutral Switzerland decides to remain perpetually in the day of the referendum. Gospodinov’s native Bulgaria choses to exist in two times at once: in the 1970s of socialism, and in the heroic (imaginary) 1870s of Bulgarian folk culture and legend. It’s about the slipperiness of identity (personal and national) in the face of fallible and failing memory.

Time Shelter was the right book for the moment because I enjoyed it, but also because its unnamed narrator recommended another classic to me. Beginning as it does in a Swiss clinic outside time, I thought of The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann; I’ve never read it, but I know enough to see the echoes. Then the narrator mentions “Hans Castorp and his intention to stay only three weeks at the Magic Mountain.” Connection made: I added the book to my to-read list. Much like my list, The Magic Mountain is long, so I will wait for the right moment to read its 750 pages. Still, it is a reminder that the supply of books – great ones, the right ones for the right time, entertaining books, enlightening books, challenging books, comforting books – is basically bottomless. 

My favorite way to discover books is to read interviews with authors I love. Writers are often asked about their influences, favorite books, and what they are reading now. Thanks to Bennett and Gospodinov, thanks to their narrators, more or less fictional versions of the authors, I have happily added more titles to my list.

- by Corina, West Windsor Branch