“Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. I looked on the shelves over there and couldn’t find it – is it perhaps in another section? Russian Literature or something?
The librarian consulted a computer. We both waited. The wait was friendly, full of the special time that wanders in municipal libraries, like a solitary walker between trees in a wood.
She lifts her head and says: We have two copies and I’m afraid they’re both out. You want to reserve one?
I’ll come back another day.
She nods and turns to attend to an elderly woman – younger than me – who is holding three books in one hand. People hold books in a special way – like they hold nothing else. They hold them not like inanimate things but like ones that have gone to sleep. Children often carry toys in the same manner.
The public library is in a Paris suburb which has a population of around 60,000. About 4,000 people are members of the library and have tickets for borrowing books (four at a time). Others come to read the papers and journals or consult the reference shelves. If one takes into account the number of babies and young kids in the suburb, this means that about one person in ten has a ticket and sometimes takes home books to read.
I wonder who’s reading The Brothers Karamazov here today. Do the two of them know each other? Unlikely. Are they both reading the book for the first time? Or has one of them read it and, like myself, wants to reread it?
Then I find myself asking an odd question: if either of those readers and myself passed one another – in the suburban market on Sunday, coming out of the metro, on a pedestrian crossing, buying bread – might we perhaps exchange glances that we’d both find slightly puzzling? Might we, without recognising it, recognise one another?
When we are impressed and moved by a story, it engenders something that becomes, or may become, an essential part of us, and this part, whether it be small or extensive, is, as it were, the story’s descendant or offspring.
What I’m trying to define is more idiosyncratic and personal than a mere cultural inheritance; it is as if the bloodstream of the read story joins the bloodstream of one’s life story. It contributes to our becoming what we become and will continue to become.
Without any of the complications and conflicts of family ties, these stories that shape us are our coincidental, as distinct from biological, ancestors.
Somebody in this Paris suburb, perhaps sitting tonight in a chair and reading The Brothers Karamazov, may already, in this sense, be a distant, distant cousin.”
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