Monday, November 12, 2007
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Pierre Bayard: How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
Pierre Bayard: How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/books/review/McInerney-t.html
[First chapter and interview appended.]

Faking It
By JAY McINERNEY
HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN'T READ

185 pp. Bloomsbury. $19.95.

Carrying this book around recently Ive caught more than a little
flak, not least from my kids, who once thought of me as a literary
intellectual, or at the very least as a guy who espoused the
virtues of reading. Hey, really, I told them as well as my wife and
the guy sitting next to me on the subway no kidding, its a serious
book, written by a professor of literature whos also a
psychoanalyst. A French professor/shrink, no less, whos written
books on Proust, Maupassant, Balzac, Laclos and Stendhal, among
other canonical heavyweights. So lay off.

It seems hard to believe that a book called How to Talk About Books
You haven't Read would hit the best-seller lists in France, where
books are still regarded as sacred objects and the writer occupies
a social position somewhere between the priest and the rock star.
The ostensible anti-intellectualism of the title seems more
Anglo-Saxon than Gallic, an impression reinforced by the epigram
from Oscar Wilde: I never read a book I must review; it prejudices
you so.

Bayards critique of reading involves practical and theoretical as
well as social considerations, and at times it seems like a
tongue-in-cheek example of reader-response criticism, which
emphasizes the readers role in creating meaning. He wants to show
us how much we lie about the way we read, to ourselves as well as
to others, and to assuage our guilt about the way we actually read
and talk about books. I know few areas of private life, with the
exception of finance and sex, in which its as difficult to obtain
accurate information, he writes. There are many ways of relating to
books that are not acknowledged in educated company, including
skimming, skipping, forgetting and glancing at covers.

Books
Monday, November 12, 2007 2:56:05 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Disclaimer  |  Comments  |  Related posts:
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