I have been on a big re-reading kick recently. It’s not something I’ve ever been in to before, but all of a sudden: CALL ME BY YOUR NAME twice, CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS four times, and now EARLY WORK a second time.
This is a book I really, really like, and even more the second time around. With CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS, there is something in the way the way she structures the plot that I find strangely interesting, like a clock I could take apart. This one, it’s not so much the plot or the language or anything that I can say I so much admire. It’s more there is something about it that feels deeply familiar. As if it was written out of my own consciousness, in some creepy way. I couldn’t say why, as in theory the story has little to do with me, being about an American man making poor decisions about his love life. But there you go, that’s the mystery of literature.
I find this to be so utterly true, from Alan Bennett’s HISTORY BOYS:
The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours