“I think about forgotten gestures, the multiple signals and words of grandparents, lost little by little, not inherited, fallen one after the other from the tree of time.
“Tonight I found a candle on a table, and as a game I lit it and walked along the corridor with it. The breeze stirred up by my motion was about to put it out, then I saw my right hand come up all by itself, cup itself, protect the flame with a living lampshade that kept the breeze away.
“While the flame climbed up again alert, I thought the gesture belonged to all of us. . . for thousands of years, during the Age of Fire, until they changed it on us to electric lights. . .
“The vanity of believing that we understand the works of time: it buries its dead and keeps the keys. Only in dreams, in poetry, in play — do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.”
— Page 459, Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
Hopscotch is an amazing, sometimes frustrating but altogether delightful book I’m rereading for the third time this summer in an effort to finish a personal essay about Cortázar, first loves, 9/11 and military funerals.
That first time I read Hopscotch a huge number of significant events occurred — in my life and in the world — all of which would go to shape the person I am today. Or at least that’s what I believe and what my essay will try to prove.
But to be honest, I haven’t started to reread it yet. What with all the other great books to reread. Sometimes you get to an age when you only want to revisit the books that truly shaped your world. Still, I sometimes wonder if my penchant for rereading stems from incurable nostalgia.
Right now I’m rereading Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and considering rereading Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I’m curious what my reaction would be if I reread books from my early adolescence like On The Road or The Sun Also Rises but I doubt I’ll commit to rereading those kinds of books.
The book I’ve read the most is called Gemini and it’s about identical twins who are lovers. I read it the first time when I spent my summer loafing at a cafe called The Living Room which was, ironically enough, across the street from a mortuary. They served quadruple-shot Vietnamese coffees with real coffee beans floating in it. I tried to get a job that summer at a scaffolding company but instead I ended up being a proctor for special education law students.
What books have you reread the most? What books do you think you can reread indefinitely and still not exhaust?
What books do you think need to be reread almost immediately?
Now that summer is here these questions demand to be answered!
3 responses
My quick test for how much I love a book/how well it was written is if, upon reading the last words, I immediate go back to the first words. Double bonus points for the author if I keep reading beyond just seeing how the story ties together from start to finish to start. (To Kill a Mockingbird gets me to do this *every* time. Ditto Jeanette Winterson’s Weight.)
In general, I’m a big rereader, which is a problem when all the unread books stack up. There’s comfort in a well-worn book. I’ve also never reread a book and *not* noticed something new or different, which is perhaps the best part about books and who we are when we read them and all those delightful things I could ramble on about forever.
Michael, your post got me feeling a little nostalgic myself. I just spent the last hour re-reading my final project for Shelley Jackson’s literature seminar, (Nonlinearity and Structural Play in the Novel), the class for which I first read Hopscotch. I have to admit, some of my favorite writing to read and re-read is my own (I should probably not admit that). Anyway, here it is, my favorite lines from Hopscotch, all mixed up and put back together:
A bird who migrates or emigrates or immigrates or transmigrates
And I thought about that unbelievable
bit that we had read, that a single fish will get sad in its bowl
and that all one has to do is put a mirror next to it and the fish
is happy again . . .
When we were young, in a café, how many times did
The illusion of identity with our companions make us happy?
Identity with men and women of whom we scarcely knew one
shape of being, a shape of giving in, a profile.
What does is mean to live in a different way?
Maybe to live absurdly in order to do away with the
absurd, to dive into one’s self with such force that the leap will
end up in the arms of someone else. Yes, maybe love, but that
Otherness lasts only as long as a woman lasts … Basically there
is no such thing as otherness, maybe just the pleasant thing called
Togetherness.
Reading that again makes me miss the people I went to grad school with, and all the great literature I read and fell in love with during that time of my life. Books are such great little time capsules. Thanks for the reminder.
I love “Hopscotch” and “Mrs. Dalloway.”
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment.