the 941

I’ve written a few times in this space about the strange and convoluted ways books arrive on my shelf, but this week it’s time to own up to a method I have yet to acknowledge: outright theft.

That’s right. I steal books. Whew. It feels good to get that out there.

I can trace my history of literary thievery back to the one novel that probably did more than any other to warp my adolescent mind in the direction of reading: Stephen King’s It. I stole that volume while on an extended fly-fishing trip with my father in Argentina around age 12 or 13. We were staying at a small bed-and-breakfast-like home that catered to American tourists, and I casually picked out It from the house’s large living-room bookshelf, innocently intending to keep myself entertained for a few hours during the TV-less evenings. But, hooked on the book almost immediately, I packed it/It away in my bag, and smuggled it back into the States. The paperback still sits on my bookshelf, the cover by now in tatters.

And while I’ve grown up a lot in the past 17 or so years, my rarely exercised habit of stealing novels remains intact. But before you think me a knave and scoundrel, and refuse to invite me over for dinner, I need to add that I do indeed have rules.

Primary amongst them: I will never take a book from an individual, or a library, or a store. I will only thieve if I believe that my possession of the book in question will give it new life. I — admittedly self-delusional — consider my actions a form of re-purposing. Why does a dusty paperback of Sophocles deserve to waste away in a space where no one will pick it up, if I can instead take it home, spend time with it and give it a home?

And so I arrive at this week’s Book CL-B entry: Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove, purloined by me from Wake Forest University’s Casa Artom in the spring of 2008. I was working for Wake Forest’s study abroad program in Venice, Italy, and was spending many of my free hours delving into literature that dealt with Italy, and Venice specifically. And while I never got around that semester to reading Wings, it somehow found its way into my luggage before I flew back to Sarasota, and I recently dedicated several weeks to finally reading my way through it.

And it took weeks for a reason. Henry James regularly breaks the most clichéd rule of good writing: “Show, don’t tell.” James often purposefully loses the narrative thread of his scenes, choosing instead to step back and theorize about the implications of his characters’ conversations, rather than allow us to piece together the subtext ourselves. His style is so far removed from the contemporary novel that it’s difficult to know how to respond to it. The story itself — a penniless engaged English couple flirt with a beautiful but doomed American heiress — is captivating, and the settings — London drawing rooms, sprawling Venetian palazzi — equally so. But at times the novel lacks life, and specificity. Sure, “show, don’t tell,” is a hoary cliché, but while reading Wings I couldn’t help but come back to it.

Upcoming entries in The 941 Book CL-B:

• Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies (Could be a bit delayed: I just got my hands on the unfinished final novel from Vladimir Nabokov — The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun) — for a future CL review.)
  
• What will land on this list next? Franz Kafka’s Amerika: The Missing Person? Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus? Richard Price’s Clockers? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia? Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo? Saul Bellow’s Herzog? Jorge Luis Borges’ Collected Fictions? Richard Powers’ Operation Wandering Soul? You won’t know unless you tune in, so to speak, next time.

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