Daily Blague

In the past few days, I've shoved almost everything aside in order to read the manuscript of an unpublished novel, written by an unpublished novelist. It took a while for me to get going, but by the fourth chapter (of twenty-four) I was hooked. I read about half of the novel yesterday alone.

I'm not going to say a word about the novel itself - not a peep. Not yet, anyway. What I do want to talk about is the raw thrill of reading something about which I knew absolutely nothing in advance. It was quite unprecedented. Ordinarily, I know quite a lot about any book that I pick up. The very fact that it has been published (and by whom) predicates a great deal. I will almost certainly have picked up some buzz about it, or at least about its author. (In the case of Jane Eyre, which I'm reading for the first time, I even know about poor Bertha Rochester.) Ordinarily, nothing reaches me without having passed through a formidable number of gates.

In this case, there was only one gate, and the author controlled it, deciding whom among his acquaintance he would permit to read the novel. Those of us who did so paid for our own copies in paper and ink cartridges. I was never confronted with a redoubtably thick manuscript, because I printed the chapters when I was ready to read them. When I made notes, I flagged the page with yellow stickers; interestingly, the stickers are clustered at the center of the manuscript, where I really began to understand the novel. Not its story - that was perfectly lucid from the beginning. But I had no idea what kind of a book I had in my hand until I was well into it. That may sound like a criticism of the novel, but it isn't. It's testimony to the power of context and preconceived ideas to channel the mind in advance of actual experience. Every once in a while, it's true, those preconceived ideas turn out to have been ill-conceived, and the context shifts while I'm in the middle of a book ("so that's what it's about!"), but even in such rare cases, my reading is guided from the start. Here, there was nothing. Just me and the book.

It was exciting, scary, and very rash. After all, I like the author. I'd have hated to have to say, in one way or another, that the novel hadn't captured my interest. I only stopped worrying about that, pseudoparadoxically, when the stickers began to proliferate. By then, you see, I was sure that I was reading the real deal.

Bravo, my friend! Thanks for the honor and privilege.