Off the Shelf

I ENJOY READING in bed. It’s a nice way to ease into sleep. There’s something soporific about the act of reading in bed.

I’m re-reading a book I read many years ago, Le Grand Meaulnes, by French author Alain-Fournier. The book is set in the 1890s in the Cher district of France, a beautiful story of lost domains, lost love and village life. It’s one of those examples of the proposition that there is nothing so universal as the intensely regional. It covers so much, but if you mapped its territory it would only be a few square kilometres. Sadly, the world he captures in his writing, like the author himself, was blown away by World War I.

‘I’m re-reading a book I read many years ago, Le Grand Meaulnes, by French author Alain-Fournier’

Then I went on and read his biography, The Land Without A Name: Alain-Fournier and His World, by Robert Gibson. It’s wonderful. Gibson has the novelist’s touch — imaginatively re-creating Fournier’s life and putting Le Grand Meaulnes in context.

I’m also halfway through Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Short Residence in Sweden, which is a series of letters she wrote while travelling around Scandinavia in 1795. Basically, it’s memoir in letter form. I started reading it after I read Sidetracks: Exploration of a Romantic Biographer, by Richard Holmes.

Another book by the bed is The World at Night, by Alan Furst. It’s set in Paris in 1940 during the first year of the occupation, a convincing picture of the city in what must have been a bizarre and frightening time.

I usually read two books at a time. Most of the time I finish every book I start. Last year I read Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald. I didn’t like it much; a bit cold, but it had the authority of a book that ought to be finished.

‘I usually read two books at a time. Most of the time I finish every book I start’

There’s also the ongoing process of reading [Marcel] Proust. It’s taken me about two years and I’m up to Guermantes Way, Vol. 3. It’s not something that can be rushed.

Steven Carroll