But that was pretty much it as far as cultural immersion went. With nowhere to go and no way to get there, I loitered around the house like a sullen French teen, perusing La Redoute catalogs and trying to make use of the Minitel, a pre-Internet networked service that looked like a portable Apple II Plus. On the television, I watched outdated episodes of the soap opera Santa Barbara, in which a very young Robin Wright emoted in dubbed French. On the radio, the pouty pop princess Vanessa Paradis had a hit song, “Marilyn et John,” which competed in heavy rotation against her previous hit, “Joe Le Taxi.” She would go on to star in a Chanel commercial and have children with Johnny Depp; that summer she breathily provided my life soundtrack.
Given that I was spending the summer lolling about, only Frenchly, I was relieved to have brought my own books—Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember. But once those were done, in an effort to absorb the language, I picked up a couple of native paperbacks from a rotating rack at the local drugstore. Unfamiliar with contemporary Francophone literature and daunted by the prospect of Hugo or Balzac, I went straight for the lesser challenge of American translation: Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon and Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, in livre de poche form for French escapists. Though I’d already read both in English, I made it only several chapters into each, winded by the effort.
Guiltily, I put an “inc.” in the Book of Books next to these lapses, an impromptu notation for “incomplete.” Those “inc.”s bummed me out. A doer of assignments and a fan of last pages, I liked to finish what I began. Later in Bob, the “inc.” became a more succinct empty square next to the title, noting in a more muted fashion when I gave up on a book. What I hated or couldn’t finish or failed to grasp was often as telling as what I did manage to complete. Just like a regular diary, Bob would record my failings, however noble.
There was quite a bit of failure in store that summer. I didn’t entirely learn to read in French and I didn’t see the France I’d come to see and I didn’t fully integrate into the culture or even bond with my fellow Americans abroad. The person I’d gotten to know best in France was spending his summer outside Cincinnati. Things were being left undone.
So it was only appropriate in the Book of Books with The Trial, a novel that never ends. This was not a perversely inspired stroke. When I’d picked it up, dazzled by Mikhail Baryshnikov’s recent Broadway turn in Metamorphosis, I’d no idea Kafka never finished it. On the contrary, I’d urgently awaited the story’s resolution, needed it—the meting out of punishment and forgiveness, the tying up of loose ends and righting of wrongs.
Instead, Joseph K. spends this last chapter refusing to kill himself, whereupon he is perfunctorily knifed to death in a brief final chapter. After this “ending,” my edition moved on to several pages of unfinished chapters, deleted passages, diary excerpts, and assorted postscripts. Even with this bonus material, we never find out Joseph K.’s crime. Had Kafka intended to leave the crime unspecified, if there even was one? There was no way of knowing and no fellow Kafka readers to ask; there was no Internet to consult.
But finished or not, The Trial was the book I needed at the time, an apt metaphor for the extended bout of umbrage and frustration of adolescence. It is the teenager’s lot to feel simultaneously innocent and guilty, accountable to grown-up society but not allowed in, bristling with potential yet largely powerless. How could you not be drawn to a book about a person falsely accused, harassed, and made to carry out a series of tasks he didn’t want to do? I got out of The Trial exactly what I needed: Vindication. An excuse. An escape. A convenient metaphor. A hero with whom I could identify.
The Trial also made clear to me, in a way a book could but another person could not, where bitterness crossed into brattiness. Joseph K. was the subject of a gross injustice and heartless bureaucratic dudgeon; I’d merely accompanied him along the way, then broke for croissants.
But this was my own business. I marked the book down, in secret, in my new clandestine diary. I may have felt misunderstood and terrible at French, but you wouldn’t be able to tell any of that from reading the pages of my personal journal, my most excellent yet still thoroughly true-to-me Bob. In this Book of Books, I’d be able to take charge of my own story and make it better.
CHAPTER 4
Catch-22
Never Enough
Some people are perfectly content with the mere reading of books. They take them out of the library, they borrow them from friends, they give them away with little expectation or even desire to see them returned. They download them onto devices where they exist in some ephemeral electronic format, never to be carefully stowed in a specific slot on a physical bookshelf or left to beckon from a nightstand or artfully piled on top of a coffee table. For these people, it’s all about content. I envy their focus and their discipline.
Because there is also the other sort, the kind who gets all caught up in the rest of the book—even when it’s not read. My sort wants the book in its entirety. We need to touch it, to examine the weight of its paper and the way text is laid out on the page. People like me open books and inhale the binding, favoring the scents of certain glues over others, breathing them in like incense even as the chemicals poison our brains. We consume them.
We in this latter group like to own books, and, with our constant demands and high expectations, we’re the worst—preferring some editions over others, having firm points of view on printings and cover designs. We’re particular, and we’re greedy. We want an unreasonable number of books and we don’t like to throw them away. Some of us develop an almost hoardish fear around letting go of a book, even after it’s been read and reread. Throwing away or lending a book to an unreliable reader inevitably leads to regret. It is lovely to share books, but they need to come home. I have known people to maintain years-long grudges over unreturned books. Who can blame them? (You with my Daniel Kahneman. You know who you are.)
Obviously, I want the books that I intend to read, but I also want the ones that I don’t intend to read but think someone else I know might. Some books I may want to check back in on occasionally and I worry when they can’t be found. Some books I need to have around “just in case.” Just in case my daughter has to do a school project on French colonialism. Just in case one of my sons finally shows an interest in dinosaurs. Just in case one day I go to Ireland and need to consult the Irish classics. Or decide it’s time to read Gilgamesh, or need a last-minute emergency gift.
I remember the moment my parents gave me my very first book, a soft fabric treasure called The Pocket Book that contained real, workable pockets you could open and close with a snap or a button. I could hardly believe such a spectacular creation existed and that it was mine. I wanted to climb inside The Pocket Book and snap it shut.