Get a book, you lifeworm!
published: Monday | March 31, 2003
Stephen Vasciannie
FOUR BOOKWORMS have been invited to a conference in Bridgetown, Barbados.
Bookworm Number 1 always falls asleep with a novel by her pillow. She is a medical doctor, but finds that Austen the subtle, Thackeray the top hat, Greene the confessor and even Michener the wanderer writing far away, and almost long ago provide much insight for her life and her Portmore practice.
At times, the late night reading proclivities of Bookworm Number 1 have deterred boyfriends and potentials. But, generally speaking, her current understands: he teaches at high school, read Ikael Torass by N.D. Williams a few years ago, and enunciates clearly, "so that people will know that I don't work at the law school," he maintains.
Mr. Current draws the line, however, when Bookworm Number 1 tries to do her writing in bed. Bookworms may read in bed, but they must not write, for, he insists, every stroke of the pen is distracting. Bookworm Number 1 is not partial about where she acquires reading material: Sangster's, Book Place, Pharmacies in Liguanea, Manor Park, that quaint second-hand bookstore on Constant Spring Road where pianos and paintings are bought and sold. Not partial, but voracious: a bookstore attendant, noting her book purchasing habits, once asked Number 1 if she bought the books only to play "picture or no picture", in primary school style!
Bookworm Number 2, a bank employee, has more eclectic tastes. He reaches for most books, reads the first 40 pages or so, and then asks himself whether he could have written those 40 pages. If he could have, or believes he could have, he moves to a different book. Otherwise, he presses along, sometimes on the bank's time, always at lunchtime, and two or three times per night.
Of late, Bookworm Number 2 has taken to the acerbity, no, honesty, of Jamaica Kincaid. Annie John and The Autobiography of My Mother could not have been written by a man, and yet, both novels captured some of his own thoughts of childhood with precision. Though jarring in places, they are not exaggerated, and they steer clear of the soppy sentimentality of certain highly acclaimed novels of growing up imported from the North. Bookworm Number 2, has also completed Kincaid's Talk Stories, found that the book about the dying AIDS brother failed the 40-page test, and now has the Mr. Potter book on the stand beside his bed.
Bookworm Number 3, a restaurant owner, has a preference for essays and journal articles, but often moves from these to novels, or vice versa. He salivates when the New York Review of Books arrives in the mail, routinely reads Commentary (though he finds it unduly conservative), and spends time with Foreign Affairs (though the essays here tend to be somewhat uneven).
As a book lover, Number 3 can list the history of his reading patterns in different streams. So, with a little prompting, he is known to say: Orwell, 1. Animal Farm, 2. 1984, 3. Collected Essays, 4. As I Please, 5. Other Collected Essays, 6. Burnese Days, almost ad infinitum. And, with a little more prompting, he will tell you the order in which he completed C.P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series, identifying along the way why these apparently irrelevant expositions from foreign climes are special to him. Clarity in writing is an acquired habit, he frequently opines.
Then there is Bookworm Number 4, an eccentric lecturer given to travelling. Once, while visiting Barbados, she took the bus, started reading F.R. Leavis' The Great Tradition, entirely missed her stop at Cave Hill and, it is said, ended up in an area called Redman's Village. Lost, but stimulated. Number 4 has been a bookworm all her life - when she sat the Common Entrance in 1971, one question required her to write a letter to a "bookworm friend" explaining that there was more to life than books! Shock and awe! No wonder the country is in a mess! And when asked in English 'O'Levels to describe her most prized possessions, she just listed the books in her room, without comment.
Bookworm Number 4 bumped into The Book Place in Bridgetown, and has passed on her knowledge to colleagues, 1, 2 and 3. There, they all find Peter Abrahams, Chinua Achebe, back issues of New Beacon Reviews, Bulletins 5 and 7 of the African Studies Association of the West Indies from the 1970s, the New Voices on Naipaul (from 1976), Caribbean Historical Review (1954), Hoyos on Responsible Government, essays on Edna Manley in Arts Jamaica, the first series of Readings in Government and Politics in the West Indies and other classics.
Money done? Politics? The Conference? Forget dem things just for now. The Bookworms are in heaven.
Stephen Vasciannie is Professor of International Law at the University of the West Indies.
