May 15, 2010
LONGING
By Colleen McWilliams
Loving books so much has put me in a quandary. The desire to read more extensively has become a dilemma. 
‘What a dilemma!’ you might think, but believe me wanting to tie up the loose ends and to finish the complete oeuvre of writers long dead is no easy task. And what about rereading favorites? I’d like to visit Stendhal’s ‘The Red and the Black’ again but ‘The Charterhouse of Parma’ is still sitting unread on my shelf. Zadie Smith has recently written about George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch – a book that completely absorbed me at the time – and I know that after I finish Smith’s essay, Middlemarch will be on my list. Should I fit in another Dickens…….finish Proust and maybe even have another go at Ulysses? Determination permitting. And all the Russians…..I have to get back to them! I’m sure you’re aware that this would just be the tip of the iceberg. What about all the wonderful writers working today? I’m exhausted just thinking about all this. It kept me awake last night. Seriously.
I want to write about a particular writer or more particularly a certain book I’ve loved but this unfinished business is making me somewhat schizophrenic. I headed off to the library today with Flaubert in mind, his travels in Egypt uppermost, as I thought that having travelled there myself, it might be interesting to have a mental chat with him about the place and perhaps write about it. I did get the book but only after being sidetracked by an Irish writer named Sean O’Faolain whose short stories captivated me a few years back. I came home with two of his books, one being an autobiography which I can hardly wait to crack.
But all this is getting away from the underlying reason why perhaps I’m feeling this need to sum up. To beat the clock as it were. I think it comes down to the value I place on reading well and the idea I have that I shouldn’t miss any of the wisdom that writers who have more than proven their worth will add to my life. Harold Bloom says ‘we read deeply for varied reasons……that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.’ He also recommends deep reading as a difficult pleasure which may be a definition of the Sublime and says ‘there is a reader’s Sublime, and it seems the only secular transcendence we can ever attain, except for the even more precarious transcendence we call “falling in love.” I must say that I felt grateful to this man for having written about this ‘condition’, an idea that I too have entertained. It may bear thinking about further.
In the meantime……what am I to do about this desire to gobble up literature? I know I need to push myself away from the table and let digestion take place. Tomorrow I’ll revisit the menu. For now, it’s time to sidle over to Flaubert and share in the remarkable feast of this ‘sensibility on tour’.
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April 5, 2010
A PORTRAIT OF AWE
By Colleen McWilliams
Today, Vladimir Nabokov, is for you.
This morning I approached my library with caution, trying to ease in to inspiration, eyes scanning the spines of my friends and loved ones. Would a muse be among them today? Uncertainty rattled me. How to choose among so 
many favorites? And there he was, my hero for today, one side leaning against someone from Ireland and on the other, pressed tightly against him, a decrepit Tolstoy, yellowed and brittle with age. ‘I promise to return you later’, I thought, ‘as I know you whisper together in the night’.
Nabokov is not someone I know well. I’m sure Lolita introduced us but we fell out of touch for years, with only one or two other works of fiction punctuating the silence. I thought about him often and knew that his reputation was large, well respected and intimidating. We kept our distance, with only occasional eye contact in a library or bookstore, until fate intervened when a friend sent me a copy of ‘Speak, Memory’ and the courtship began. To know someone’s history, particularly through the imaginative lens of such an honest and acute eye, is a privilege. My memory of his memories has somewhat faded but the awe I felt towards the brilliance of his writing has remained.
What is this nature of being impressed? This reverence? I only know that I can call it at will by merely holding my copy of ‘The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov’ in my hands. The lilac cover that promises transport. A temporal intimacy – a phantom lover. My admiration hovers between respect for his mind and its ability to pull from its depths imaginative flights of iridescence as beautifully marked as the wings of his beloved butterflies. This gentleman with old fashioned ways who could twist time with acrobatic ease never ceases to amaze me.
Here is an exquisite rendering of a painful and difficult subject. It is from the novel ‘Pnin’ and is referencing the Holocaust. I’m quoting here from an excerpt by Martin Amis in the Guardian Nov.14, 2009
‘At an émigré house party in rural America a Madam Shpolyanski mentions her cousin Mira and asks Timofey Pnin if he has heard of her “terrible end”. “Indeed, I have,” Pnin answers. Gentle Timofey sits on alone in the twilight. Then Nabokov gives us this:
“What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira’s image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself….never to remember Mira Belochkin – not because….the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind….but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira’s death were possible. One had to forget – because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one’s lips in the dusk of the past.”
My admiration for this man who was able to shine a light of such brilliance into the painful and disturbing corners of life with such understanding and tenderness is boundless. I admit to viewing him through the colored panes of glass through which he viewed his youth but at this point I have no inclination to blink.
I’ve spent a few weeks now with Nabokov and my limited selection of his writings, and it’s time to deepen our acquaintance. I have a list. For now, I will take you Vladimir and put you back on the shelf with your fellow explorers of the human heart.
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March 12, 2010
AKIN TO LOVE
By Colleen McWilliams
‘If the words are flowing, this is a good thing’. So says Zadie Smith, a talented British writer who has propelled me 
here to this page with the hopes that she’s right. If the words are not flowing but the heart is racing will this do? It’s not always easy to be articulate on matters we feel deeply about but here goes.
I have just finished listening to a recent broadcast of Zadie Smith in interview. Her passion for reading struck such a response in me that I want to be her friend. Even better, I want to be her. When someone understands what you can’t do without, where books are concerned in this case, the emotion I feel is akin to love. If you tell me that you love to read I’m sure that my pupils dilate. I want to back you into a corner and say “what and who do you love to read”? And then I wait for the click.
It’s only during the past few years that I’ve become so aware of the importance that books have played in my life. And here I falter. How can I go back all those years when the seed was planted which grew like Jack’s beanstock. The many shoots that took me places, across years and countries and enriched me to the degree that I sometimes feel my hyperbole an embarrassment.. Some call it an escape. Maybe it is, but the gratitude just goes on. As well, I don’t think it’s an escape from but and escape to. When impressed by a beautiful sentence, I sometimes feel the gift so keenly, that I close the book, hug it to myself and kiss the cover. Am I crazy? I don’t think so. I’m sure there are many of us affected by the beauty of ideas well put who will relate to this.
So here I confess my weakness for developing crushes on writers. “Martin Amis, you are some guy”, I said to myself out loud while reading one of his essays. That day I was full of admiration for him, his intelligence, and his savage wit. The book and the writer are inseparable. I think this is the reason that I’ve always avoided Writer’s Festivals. I’m afraid there may be a disconnect between the flesh and blood person and their work. The work stands for all time in what for me may be perfection. The writer in all probability will disappoint me – I’m sure they’ll lag behind.
Reading of other’s enthusiasms – of what they read, why they read it, where they read it, always interests me. Harold Bloom exhorts us to reach for the top and engage with the best, and I know he’s right. I could go on and on, citing writers who have written on the pleasures and values of reading – writers who are much more eloquent on this subject than I could ever hope to be. A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel is full of the most wonderful information on just that, and so readable. Jorge Luis Borges hoped that paradise would be like some sort of library. I hope he’s right. In the meantime I’ll continue to wander through my own book filled labyrinth, always on the look out for kindred spirits
My heart has slowed. It’s time to open my book and hold hands with my current crush, Jose Saramago. I hope his wife doesn’t mind.