Virginia Woolf : How Should One Read a Book [1932]

Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature under-takes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole. And the book as a whole is different to the book received as separate phrases. Details now fit themselves into their places. We see the shape from start to finish; it is a barn, a pig-sty, or a cathedral. Now then we can compare book with book as we compare building with building. But this act of comparison means that our attitude has changed. We are no longer the friends of the writer, but his judges; and just as we cannot be too sympathetic as friends, so as judges we cannot be too severe. Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease? Let us then be severe in our judgements; let us compare each book with the greatest of its kind...

If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.


and the only person who can go word-for-word with Virginia:

Janet Frame : Living in the Maniototo [1979]

... he had really been a speckled sort of man, a kindly hen of no fixed sex; sensitive, with a well-lubricated voice with a resonance that made him a fine speaker and reader of poetry... I confess that he was the kind of man that I used to say I despised... yet face to face with him I loved him because he had an abiding passion for the French language. The apparent purity and vastness of his feeling gave him, in my eyes, a kind of greatness, for I feel that language in its widest sense is the hawk suspended above eternity, feeding from it but not of its substance and not necessarily for its life and thus never able to be translated into it; only able by a wing movement, so to speak, a cry, a shadow, to hint at what lies beneath it on the untouched, undescribed almost unknown plain.

	back