Books in Canada

IN HER ESSAY "READING," Virginia Woolf writes of a library in an old house:

I liked that room.

I liked the view across the country that one had

from the window, and the blue line

between the gap of the trees on the

moor was the North Sea. I liked to

read there. One drew the pale arm-chair

to the window, and so the

light fell over the shoulder upon the

page. The shadow of the gardener mowing the lawn sometimes crossed it, as he led his pony in rubber shoes up and down ....

When I recently read this passage, it reminded me how rarely literary criticism connects our immediate world as readers -space, lighting, sound, weather, our most recent meal -- with our impressions of the book at hand.

Sometimes the place where we are becomes unforgettably woven into our acts of reading. The first time I read Howard O'Hagan's Tay John, I'd just begun a train journey from Vancouver to Montreal. In the upper berth of a sleeper, between I I p.m. and I a.m., my attention was held by the train's darkness and rhythms, by the speed and richness of O'Hagan's prose, by the myth-building and -breaking of his story. (For anyone unfamiliar with Tay John, I should mention that this novel set largely in the Rockies tries to puzzle out the life and legends of a man named "Tete-Jaune," from the French for "Yellowhead.") O'Hagan's words and the atmosphere of the swaying train seemed to mesh into a whole. Next morning in the dining car when I saw a wide expanse of glittering water through

the window, I asked where we were. "Yellowhead Lake," said the waiter. Since I hadn't studied the map much yet, that answer jolted me, as if I'd tipped over into the world of Tay John.

Years later when I read Rachel Carson's classic of nature fiction, Under the Sea Wind, I was lying under a swinging flashlight in a small tent on Brier Island, at the extreme western tip of Nova Scotia. The wind, the water, and the sea-birds of the book overlapped with those sounding outside in the dark. While the book seemed to provide structure to the nocturnal wildness, that wildness helped stir up visceral power in Carson's prose, bringing it closer to the noisy tumult beyond the tent. Reading, I felt an extraordinary interplay between book and world, where each made the other more vivid.

I don't mean to suggest that the ideal condition for reading is a naive matching of book with setting. Choosing a book that seems provocatively wrong for a setting -- say, Moravia's gritty, poverty-and-crime-stained Roman Tales read in an Italian resort town -- can also be an interesting experiment. Most of the time, however, we don't make such choices; we read where we happen to be, and what's in the air mingles with what we read, enhancing it with similarities or contrasts. A prisoner in a maximum-security cell or a convalescent in a hospital room could have as intense an experience reading Tay John as I did on a train in the Rockies.

Someone with boundless curiosity and energy should write a book-length meditation upon reading as an act bound up with our homes, jobs, meals, music, distractions of all sorts -- and with our loves, resentments, hardships, emotional highs and lows. How does reading

Purdy's poems in October differ from reading them in May? Is picking up Atwood's Power Politics after you've just married different from doing so after you've just divorced? If you've suffered from insomnia for three days, how does that affect your responses to Avison or Newlove? In our criticism we too easily write as if reading were an act separate from what we do the rest of the day, and from our current personal or psychological state.

If our reading experiences are tinted by whatever surrounds us and has happened to us, surely the same is true for bookreviewing. Most us who have written a lot of reviews eventually reread a book and, for whatever reasons -- evolved taste, new attitudes, aging, a different setting -- change our mind about it. Then we wish we could bum all copies of our published review and make amends by writing a new one. Whatever regrets we have, it's good to know we've not solidified into some sort of changeless reader.

Here's a brain-wave for another booklength meditation. Literary historians have traced the shifting reputations of writers among different readerships over decades and centuries, but what about the shifting thoughts of an individual reader'? Why not offer personal histories of overturned -- or confirmed -- first impressions? What stories can reviewers and critics tell of their changed judgments and affections, their cooling toward or warming up to a book'?

In any case, it's hard to exaggerate how complex our reading experiences are. Whole areas of our relations to books remain less explored than the surface of Mars.

Brian Bartlett recently completed a new collection of poetry, Granite Erratics.