If you enjoy reading, if it’s part of your job, or if you’re just wondering when you’ll finally find time for a good book, this is a question for James Wood, the New Yorker’s preeminent literary critic who teaches literary theory. at Harvard, it is how many books he is regularly asked to read and how many he would like to read. “Not much, about 3-4 a month, and that’s a number I would like to read anyway,” says Wood to “K,” who met him a few days ago at his hotel in Athens.

He came to the presentation of his book How Literature Works (published by Antipodes, translated by Kostas Spatharakis), an enlightening analysis of the novel’s technique, and attended the 19th Thessaloniki International Book Fair. There were six books in his luggage. And as for his behavior towards them: “I treat them very cruelly,” he admits. “I read in the bathroom, they fall, I dry them, crumple the pages, write notes or grocery lists on them. I think that books are the creations of life. Everything is inside them.”

But what is the pleasure of reading for the 57-year-old Briton? Is this the thing “closest to life,” as George Eliot puts it in his book? And is this a meal?

“I’m very cruel to books – I read in the bathroom, they fall, I dry them, I crumple the pages, I write notes on them – they are creations of life.”

“Reading literature is a special way of living,” Wood replies. “It’s not identical, but that’s where the fun lies. I like Eliot’s formulation, I like the idea of ​​taking a step away from life, because it insists on intimacy, on connection with it, and not on relegating literature and imagination to something secondary, as in the case of Plato, whom he believes. that there are true forms and their lesser counterparts. I think this is the wrong way of thinking. Yes, these are replicas, but they are so close to life that they are almost invisible. That’s exactly what I love.”

In his book, the Brit also mentions that when starting a novel, he often thinks that there was absolutely nothing before it was written. “I feel like there’s something sacred about this creation from scratch,” he writes, alluding to the definition of art he loves. Fiction, he suggests, are “made-up dilemmas” which, because they have no reason to exist, “should aesthetically justify their invention,” which includes the characters of each story “in a larger moral path.” Very dense description; we note that this can also be an alternative definition of religion.

“Reading literature is a special way to be alive”

“Great observation. And that may explain why religions—the Bible in particular—are drawn to stories. They think, feel and preach through stories, versions of the myth. Yes, I think you are right. Of course, the difference is that religious stories act as if the dilemmas are not made up but real, visible to people and controlled by God. And you are absolutely right in pointing out what I mean, which is that the novel is a secularized or secularized form that inherits a lot from religion, but removes the guardian god. This god is gone, and only we remain.”

We and writers

From all he quotes in How Literature Works (from Cervantes, Tolstoy, James and Hamsun to Joyce, Kafka and Wolfe, but also McCarthy, Wallace or even Ferrante and Knausgaard, in whose works he analyzes the style, point of view of the narrator, etc. d.), Wood singles out one in particular: Gustave Flaubert. It was he, with his dexterity and high level of visual observation, who shaped what we perceive as contemporary realist storytelling. Is this purely Flaubert’s personal achievement? Or are the cultural contexts of his time included in the frame?

“Perhaps it’s a combination,” Wood replies. “If you look at the 1850s in France, you will see that two things happened: first, photography was born; secondly, a certain class of artists – and I think the most typical example is Courbet with his still lifes – have been described as realists, while reviews of Madame Bovary note that its author paints realistically, that he deeply dissects with a scalpel French society, etc. Thus, for the first time, these forces produce and emphasize Realism with a capital letter. Obviously, we must talk not only about “realism”, but also about “realisms”, since many before Flaubert considered themselves realists, with a small “r”. And they tried to describe what this village looks like, what it’s like to be shipwrecked on an island, to die of the plague in London, or to live in a big apartment in Paris. I also try to remember them.”

But what about today’s realism and its language? Has the fragmentation of the Internet affected it? “Yes, if I look at today’s writing and the possibilities of young people,” concludes Wood, “I find that the control over long, complex and difficult sentences is no longer possible. They have a hard time understanding them, and they don’t write so easily. However, a complex sentence not only has a melody, but can also contain a lot of irony. I also like sentences that start in one place and—ironically or metaphorically—end up in another. I love the feeling of going from A to M in one fell swoop, like Virginia Woolf, Bochumil Hrabar, Thomas Bernhard, Roberto Bolagno did. And I think it’s harder to achieve that when you think in small, simple, flowing sentences. In the twentieth century, a hallmark of modernism, postmodernism, avant-garde, experimentation was a commitment to great proposals. And I think it’s under threat.”