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Contemporary Fiction Views: Reading is life, and life is reading [1]
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Date: 2023-05-16
How does one live without books?
The audacity of beginning a novel with the memories of absorbing words and words upon pages and pages in books and books, as remembered in a plural voice, is an apt start to Checkout 19, the second novel by Claire-Louise Bennett. The overall effect is to make crystal clear the realization that words are what make the narrator live, and reading is as essential as breathing.
From that minute examination of library books, including the pages on the right side and the left side of the spine, and the way the words stand out depending on where they are in a book, Bennett's novel segues effortlessly to days and days spent reading out in the sun. And to the things hidden in her mother's cabinet. Books -- books that the narrator soon read whether she understood all of them or not. Because reading was the thing.
Checkout 19 is written as autofiction. There are times when the descriptions threaten to overwhelm the narrative, but Bennett is adept at coming right up to that line without tripping over it. The narrative style reinforces the necessity of reading and books and writing to the young woman chronicling her coming of age. It is a story of discoveries, from authors to the realization that covering up a doodle turns into words, which turn into a story.
Everything we learn about the narrator's life is something connected to the power of story, of words, from the time her doodle became a story that she eventually showed to the teacher whose portrait she tried to draw, to her memory of a scene from A Room With a View to her attempted recreation of it, to the time a white-haired Russian who shopped at the store where she was the cashier at Checkout 19 thrust a book into her hand.
In each, the ties to books and reading make everything more real, more important and more thrilling to both the narrator and the reader.
Bennett also writes about stories that the narrator has written, or has been working on, for years. In one, a foolish young man decides he needs books in his home to look important. Poor Tarquin Superbus (what a glorious name for such a creature!) becomes a figure of ridicule because the thousands of books he has moved into his home are blank. However, his wise mentor tells him there is hope, because on one page in one book, somewhere among the millions of pages he has brought into his home, is a sentence. And not just any sentence.
It has upon it one sentence, that's all, that's it--one sentence. And this one sentence contains everything. Everything. Whoever comes upon it undergoes an immediate and total awakening.
Within the narrator's writing, and outside her writing, there is the realization that words are what is powering her.
Certain written words are alive, active, living--they are entirely in the present, the same present as you. In fact it feels as if they are being written as you read them, that your eyes upon the page are perhaps even making them appear in any case certain sentences do not feel in the least bit separate from you or from the moment in time when you are reading them. You feel they wouldn't exist without your seeing them. Like they wouldn't exist without you. And isn't the opposite true too--that the pages you read bring you to life?
Passages like that are thrilling for a lifelong lover of letters and words to discover. And, as all true writers do, Bennett circles back to the idea of a perfect sentence from her narrator's fable.
Sometimes all it takes is just one sentence. Just one sentence, and there you are, part of something that has been part of you since the beginning, whenever that might rightly be.
The novel also includes sections on the fallacy of being told you can be anything you want in school, and the failure of a man who thought he was protecting a woman he treasured to not be a predator himself. Both sections are worthy of contemplating. That they are not entire novels in and of themselves shows the range within this book. Yet everything always comes back to words, to books, to literature. Words are the anchor and the North Star.
We were students of literature but we didn't read in order to become clever and pass our exams with the highest commendations--we read in order to come to life.
Checkout 19 makes a life of reading live and breathe.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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