How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read Read Online Free PDF

also unsurprising that their comments—however far removed from the initial text (but what, in fact, might it mean to be close ?)—bring to the encounter an originality that they would undoubtedly have lacked had they undertaken to read the book.
    1 . SB and HB++.
    2 . “Shakespeare in the Bush,” Natural History ,August/September 1966. On the Web: http://www.fieldworking.com/library/bohannan.html.
    3 . Ibid.
    4 . Ibid.
    5 . Ibid.
    6 . Ibid.
    7 . Ibid.
    8 . Ibid.
    9 . The second of the three “books” studied in this essay, the inner book influences all the transformations to which we subject books, turning them into screen books . The term inner book appears in Proust with a meaning close to the one I am giving it: “As for the inner book of unknown symbols (symbols carved in relief they might have been, which my attention, as it explored my unconscious, groped for and stumbled against and followed the contours of, like a diver exploring the ocean-bed), if I tried to read them, no one could help me with any rules, for to read them was an act of creation in which no one can do our work for us or even collaborate with us [ . . . ] This book, more laborious to decipher than any other, is also the only one which has been dictated to us by reality, the only one of which the ‘impression’ has been printed in us by reality itself.” Time Regained, Remembrance of Things Past , vol. 3, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Random House, 1981), pp. 913–14.
    10 . Enquête sur Hamlet .
    11 . Ibid.

VII
Encounters with the Writer
    (in which Pierre Siniac demonstrates that it may be important to watch what you say in the presence of a writer, especially when he himself hasn’t read the book whose author he is)
    W HEN YOU DO NOT necessarily know the book you’re talking about, there is a person even worse to encounter than a teacher—the person at once the most interested in your opinion of a particular book, and the most likely to know whether you are telling the truth about having read it. This person is the author of the book, who is assumed a priori to have read the book himself.
    One might think that you would have to have a stroke of incredible bad luck to find yourself in such a situation. Indeed, many people spend a whole lifetime of non-reading without encountering a single writer, never mind the exceptional case of the author of a book they haven’t read while pretending the contrary.
    But everything depends on your professional context. Literary critics regularly come into contact with writers—all the more so, of course, in that the two groups overlap. Given that both groups often include the same people, critics move within a world so insular that in commenting on a book, they have hardly any other choice than to praise it to the skies.
    Such is also the case, to my misfortune, with university professors. Very few of my colleagues, in fact, do not publish and do not feel obliged to send me their books. Every year I thus find myself in the delicate situation of giving my opinion to authors who know their own texts and who are, moreover, experienced critics, skilled in evaluating to what extent I have actually read the books, and to what extent I am bluffing.

    The public remarks about books made by the two heroes of Ferdinaud Céline , 1 Pierre Siniac’s celebrated thriller, might best be described with the word ambiguous. In the opening pages of the novel, Dochin and Gastinel, the two authors of the best seller La Java brune , 2 appear as guests on a literary television program and behave rather strangely, to say the least, in their exchanges with the host. It is as though they both prefer not to answer the questions they are being asked about a book that ought to be a source of nothing but joy for them, since it has earned them a fortune and gotten them invited on television.
    The younger and physically slighter of the two authors, Jean-Rémi Dochin, seems