When I was a schoolboy, my grandfather allowed me to take a few books from his shelves once he saw me spend hours during vacation reading rather than climbing trees. “But not the Shakespeares,” he told me. “I reread those all the time.” I thought then that once was enough, that once you read a book you were done with it.
It was only years later that I understood him. Clifton Fadiman, American editor and author (most famously of The Lifetime Reading Plan ), once said that when you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than there was before, you see more in you than there was before.
Rereading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance recently after many years showed that great books are always relevant and seem as if they were written last week. It is one of my favourite novels, and I enjoyed it differently from the last time I had read it. When you are young and have led a fairly normal life, despair and hopelessness are merely theoretical concepts that other people struggle with; older and wiser, the thought is: “there, but for the grace of god, go I…” Fadiman would have understood.
“One cannot read a book,” wrote Nabokov, “one can only reread it.” Borges said much the same thing, “Rereading, not reading, is what counts.” Like most of us, Borges reread his favourite authors: Stevenson, Poe, Kipling. Nabokov felt that on a rereading, “one should notice and fondle details”. If we see more in the novel, and by extension in ourselves, Milan Kundera tells us why: “Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.”
Which brings us back to Mistry’s novel. Set against the background of the Emergency (1975-77), it tells the stories of ordinary people who underwent extraordinary tribulations. When Arundhati Roy attempted to do something similar in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness of a contemporary emergency, she ended up writing a polemic, hammering the politics on our heads. Mistry’s skill lies in letting the characters tell the story, which is probably why it remains fresh. Current events have painted it with a fresh coating of relevance.
Some books are best read years after publication, while others lose their significance quickly. Some have to be read at regular intervals. Anthony Powell said he read The Sun Also Rises once every six months. I used to read Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop once a year.
And here’s another Fadiman, the daughter Anne, who has edited a book on rereading: “...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.”
( Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu )
