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Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the Book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Book Reviewed by:This article relates to How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
Pierre Bayard was born in 1954. He is a professor of literature
at the University of Paris VIII, as well a practicing psychoanalyst. He has
written over a dozen books, most of which have not been translated into English.
Bayard's best-known work in English prior to How to Talk
about Books You Haven't Read is a work of literary detection entitled Who
Killed Roger Ackroyd?, published in 2000. In this book, Bayard dares to
suggest that Hercule Poirot's solution to one of Agatha Christie's best-loved
mysteries, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, is incorrect and that Christie
has deliberately deceived the casual reader. On his way to fingering the real
murderer, Bayard conducts a sustained investigation into the nature of detective
stories and the blind spots they exploit in hiding their solutions in plain
sight, which he extends to other literary genres as well. He writes, "Many
readers of fictional texts have at times experienced the disagreeable impression
that they are being kept in the dark." As in How to Talk about Books You
Haven't Read, this book concerns itself with literature that "disturbs the
transparency of reading." Reading, for Bayard, is never the simple transaction
between author and reader that it would seem.
It is fitting that, though he is in the business of writing
about and teaching literature, Pierre Bayard would focus his attention on
non-reading rather than reading. His background in psychoanalysis predisposes
him to notice what is hidden or repressed, what our culture forbids, and the
power that derives from such prohibition. He is interested, then, in the
"widespread hypocrisy" that attends the discussion of such a taboo topic as
non-reading, and says that he knows "few areas of private life, with the
exception of finance and sex, in which it's as difficult to obtain accurate
information."
How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read was originally
published as Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? and was
destined for the academic market but became an unexpected bestseller in France.
American and British publishers avidly sought English rights and the book is now available on both sides of the Atlantic, accompanied by reviews that fully enter into the spirit of Bayard's game. Several reviewers claim to have written their reviews without having cracked the book's spine (such as
The Guardian and
The Times of London)
and all try to out-clever Bayard in their turns of phrases (one reviewer in
New York
Magazine impishly deconstructs
Bayard's author photograph, noting that "he appears to be sucking on something,
perhaps the word oeuvre").
In employing this strategy, however, such
reviewers respond more to the marketing surrounding the book, which positions it
as a sparkling companion to the cocktail party circuit, and less to its
substance, which is often fairly mordant about the risks of reading to one's
very personality. Several reviewers somewhat alarmingly note that they’ll take
Bayard's lessons on non-reading to heart, as in this concluding passage by John Sturrock in the
London Review of Books: "We all of us carry some sort of virtual library inside our heads that we have
every right to draw on without worrying whether it matches the virtual libraries
of others or is especially faithful to the facts of the books we find ourselves
discussing. I mean to be a whole lot less scrupulous about these things in
future."
This "beyond the book article" relates to How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. It originally ran in November 2007 and has been updated for the
September 2009 paperback edition.
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