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Summer Reading, Time Regained

The Guardian today asked some famous writers and poets to name their favourite summer holiday reading from the past.  It was a lovely list, and the anecdotes really caught the best thing about summer reading - the incongruity between sun-kissed or rainy, grotty or exotic, setting, with the novel or book in question (Tolstoy, say, or Proust).  I used to go away for a month or two every summer when I was a teenager, with my mother and brother, to a small log cottage on a private lake in northern Quebec; my father would drive up from Montreal on the weekends.  The nearest town was a good hour walk.  You reached the lake by driving half a mile down a dinky little pebble lane.  Bears were in the woods; beavers slapped on the lake surface at twilight.  The lake was a place of joy for me, prelapsarian, and I loved swimming for hours, and rowing and canoing.  Also, building fires at night.  But mostly, reading books.  I would bring a box of maybe 40 books up with me for the 6 weeks, and polish them off.

They were an eclectic mix of Colin Wilson, Ngaio Marsh, Mimesis, and, most memorably, the most wonderful summer book, I Am Not Stiller, by Max Frisch.  I had a deep woods crush at the time (I was 16) on a Hungarian-British girl from a posh part of Montreal I had met at a debating party, and we wrote letters to each other that summer.  I can still recall how I trembled to kiss her.  She had green eyes.  I wrote her many poems.  But mostly I read Frisch's deeply moving novel about denial and guilt and desire and identity.  I wept when it was over.  I have read other gripping books with joy and total immersion (The Idiot, Fear is The Key, The Secret History, most of Greene, The Road to Wigan Pier, The Good Soldier, A Month In the Country, Nemesis, poetry) but never again more so than then.  Will I ever be so transported again?  I always remain open to the chance I will be.

Comments

P. M. Doolan said…
It was the centenary of the birth of Max Frisch recently, a fact celebrated here in Switzerland. Great writer indeed.
Poetry Pleases! said…
Dear Todd

So, 'beavers slapped on the lake surface at twilight'. I'm not surprised that you enjoyed yourself!

Best wishes from Simon

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