For those that know me and those that don’t, I love books. I can’t really remember the exact moment that I fell in love with them, or even when I became aware of their presence. It just feels like they’ve always been there, and I guess they have. They soothed me to sleep as a child, accompanied me on five hour car rides to the coast with my parents in the same way they do now on the strangely cathartic train commutes into central London. They decorate my bedroom floors, organised in a system that make sense to me but probably not anyone else, becoming make-shift tables and nightstands where I keep my lamp and the odd cup and I feel significantly less alone here in this big city with them around.
With all the books accumulating in my collection, I’d like to consider myself pretty well read. But in actuality, I’m probably not that well-read at all – despite having read Woolf and Limón and hooks and Levy and Plath (and all those photobooks in between, which too count as books that can be read). Think of all the books in the world, all the writers and all their words, all the knowledge and all the memory. I know nothing! But isn’t that the most exciting thing about reading? The infinite discovery through words and images of worlds beyond your own.
So even though I don’t remember when I fell in love with books, I definitely remember when I realised how under-read I am.
I was in a bookshop (a setting I frequently find myself in), searching for a book to gift a dear friend of mine, and fellow columnist (here’s your reminder to read The Impact Review), Rose. Books are, in my mind, the only appropriate gift – for any and every occasion. To buy someone else a book is an intimate act, almost vulnerable, as though you’re standing naked in front of said person wondering if they like what they see. I once read someone compare the act of gifting books to sex and no wonder. It’s romantic and seductive, secret meanings hidden between the odd handwritten note or underlining – something a bubble bath set doesn’t quite replicate.
Though the task of choosing a book for a friend or lover – or even a stranger – is a thrilling one, it’s certainly not easy. With Rose, I had an advantage. We frequently discuss what books we’re reading and what writers we do and don’t like. Yet, I found myself in a state of doubt. It would be just awful to buy a book she’d already read – or worse, one she wasn’t into. I could’ve easily bought her a bottle of red wine or a big can of Perello olives (both very, very good gifts), but for the aforementioned reasons, I think a book is the truest token of love. And so there I stood in the bookshop faced with a great challenge. But, as with most decisions I make, I went with my gut and found myself packaging up Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux in brown paper wrapping.
Getting Lost is the diary kept by the then recently divorced writer as she has a passionate (though truly only in the physical sense) love affair with a younger, married man in Paris. It charts her infatuation with this man who by the end simply becomes a fantasy (she wants more, he doesn’t, blah blah blah). From the get go, this seemed like the perfect book for Rose. We often fantasise about being a writer in Paris with a cigarette in one hand and a lover in the other. Plus, I always tell Rose that she’s the voice of our generation, and I think Annie is that of hers. So, it felt right. It was also a Fitzcarraldo Editions – need I say much more? And we say we don’t judge books by their cover.
While tempted to buy a copy for myself, my bank account was in disagreement. And so, I waited patiently for Ernaux (and money) and I to meet again.
My second encounter with Ernaux’s work was once again in a bookshop (where else?). This time, I wasn’t searching for anything in particular. The thing I love about books is that, when you let them, they have a way of finding you at the exact moment their needed. Like friends, books can become confidants. They can console you, comfort you, transform you. And so there I was, wandering around with no real objective, when I came across The Years – a book that was to become one of the most touching and profound reads I’d ever encountered.
The Years is similar to the shoebox under your bed filled with the things you can’t get rid for one reason or another. It unearths Ernaux’s memories through photographs, objects and videotapes which the writer uses as prompts to paint a portrait of history – both collective and individual. Switching between third and first person, she captures the changing political landscape through the objects she accumulated; the fluctuating cultural trends with the lovers she slept with. In this way, the book becomes a sort of collective autobiography, a collective conscious, that captures the passing of time – and perhaps even tries to hold it for just a while longer. It’s nostalgic and poignant, a bittersweet confrontation of the way time moves so unforgivingly. It won’t wait for us.
“Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be us silence and no words to say it…”
This sentence rang around in my head for days. I suppose it was love at first read. The rest of the book was devoured with haste – similar to how one might take a lover, wild with lust (as Ernaux did with her S).
It was an intense affair over the course of just a few sweet, long days. Her words struck me like no others I’d read before. I took the book everywhere. I daren’t be apart from it. It made my journeys into Central London just that little more bearable and by the end, I actually looked forward to the hour-long commute. Anything to spend time with those words. And while I sat on the 9:29 train from Lee to Charing Cross, absorbed in finger stained pages, time moved passed me in a soft blur.
I was so utterly absorbed that when I’d eventually reach my stop, I was pained to tear my gaze away from the pages. Homesick even. My mind would return to my body, remembering who I am and where I’m going, before dreaming about the next time I would once again be intertwined with Ernaux’s words.
Like most love affairs, this one ended in tears. Not necessarily because it was a sad ending, but more so because it was the end of something that made me feel so alive. She made me remember the joy and the pain and the beauty that makes life life – that makes us feel alive, makes us human.
To reference Ernaux’s words, this book will – like that box of stuff under my bed – become a keepsake of an age, of a feeling, of a moment in time when I’d get the 9:29 train from Lee to Charing Cross, of a time where I’ll never be again.