When I said on Facebook yesterday that
Dandelion Wine was one of the ten best books in the world, one
comment was, not quite unexpectedly, “this is an invitation for you to
list the remaining 9”.
I guess what I meant is not so much
“the best in the world”, but the most formative for me: books
that made a lasting impressions, books that I keep going back to (or
not, but still books that made me what I am). All of these I read before I was sixteen. The list has remained unchanged for the past forty-four years. I have read some excellent books since then, but none has changed my life. Perhaps books can only cnange your life when you are young.
I have already explained Dandelion Wine, and the rest I will explain briefly, perhaps to elaborate
on later.
Winnie-the-Pooh. The best book
in the world. Has something for everyone, explains everything and
reveals new dimensions of each re-reading. I can't tell how many
times I have read it.
The Little Prince. Also has
everything, and while Pooh can be read by a child as a funny book,
The little prince is profoundly sad. Not because the little prince
dies, but because “the prince tamed the Fox, and now it was time to
say goodbye”.
The Master and Margarita. I wish
I could explain why this book changed everything for everyone in
Russia, young and old, when it was first published. It has so many
layers, humorous and sublime, and so much of it has
become part of the Russian language. I think this is the only book
that we read aloud in my family. And because it was published in two
instalments in a literary journal, we had to wait a whole month for
the second part. I re-read it at least once a year.
Cat's Cradle. Explains
everything, and ends without hope. We got all our wisdom from it.
Like The Master and Margarita, it was cross-generational. It
was my father's great favourite. I re-read it just a few months ago,
it's still brilliant.
Doctor Zhivago. When I first
read it, age fifteen, it was a romantic story, not romantic as in the
horrible movie version, but mysteriously and disturbingly erotic. It
is also brilliantly crafted, with a chain of incredible
serendipities, when a tiny detail in the beginning becomes decisive
three hundred pages later; a prefect example of dramatic irony when
readers know more than any characters and would so much like to warn
them! And of course it is the tragedy of Russian intellectuals
destroyed by communism, which I recognised from my family history.
When I re-read it later, I saw other things as well, the
philosophical layer. But after that, it suddenly became very
ideological and intentional. I re-read it every other year, but it
does not get better.
Joseph and His Brothers.
Breath-taking book. My grandmother used to re-read it every year. I
re-read it perhaps every five years, and it gets better every time. I was
too young when I first read it, but even then it changed my world.
Eugen Onegin. It's of course the
Russian national epic and impossible to translate, even if you
are Vladimir Nabokov. I can still recite long bits of it. The status
of school classic couldn't kill it for us. When we were young, it was
very romantic, but when I started to re-read it about twenty years
ago, I saw beyond the plot, and it's ironic and funny. And all about
dreams.
Anna Karenina. Another school
classic that turned out to be something else. Among other things, it
used stream of consciousness long, long before Joyce. Such a rich
book. I re-read it every three-four years.
Finally, I cannot omit Scarlet
Sails, a book nobody outside Russia will have heard of, but for
many generations of Russian girls it ruined our first, and perhaps
second and third, relationships because it set up a pattern of
perfect love that had very little to do with reality. In Russian,
rather than “a prince on a white horse” you say “a prince under
red sails”, but it adds up to the same. The only right way to fall
in love. I re-read it a couple of years ago, and it is a good story
if you don't take it seriously.
Now I have provided you with summer
reading.
