Each summer we return to the same house in France, and one of the many advantages of this rather unadventurous habit is that we don’t have to worry about what to read during our stay. Our reading is selected in advance in the form of several shelves of miscellaneous books that I call the accidental library. These books have accumulated in geological layers over the years. We have added some, our visitors have added some, and some have appeared mysteriously out of nowhere. You will often find such random book collections in old hotels, in prisons, and other places where people have time on their hands.
The accidental library offers two particular pleasures. First, there are the books we would never have read if we hadn't found them here. Then there are the books we would never read under any circumstances, but which give a fascinating and sometimes alarming insight into the minds of the people who brought them.
For example, psychosexual thrillers are very popular. The psychosexual thriller has only one plot: a woman, and often her children, are threatened by a mysterious psychopath, terrorized, and usually rescued on the last page. Who wants to read this stuff on vacation, or at any other time? But the popularity of the theme suggests that Freud was right about something, or perhaps about everything.
Another common discovery in the accidental library is the gigantic unreadable paperback. This is a genre unto itself. The plot scarcely matters. The main thing is the length. On the shelves one year I found a 976-page medieval romance - that's the size of a Gideon Bible. But my most impressive find in the massive paperback category was Puzzles by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: a 795-page novel with 82 chapters and a six-page index of names. As if that was not enough, the whole indescribably tedious thing was explained all over again in a lengthy postscript at the end of the book in case you missed the point the first time.
This summer somebody had contributed a copy of Anna Karenina, frequently described as the greatest novel ever written. By the time we had to leave I had only reached page 73 out of 923, where Vronsky sees Anna for the first time, and I can almost guess what will happen next. But it will happen so slowly, with so many highly refined emotions, that I fear I will never make it to the end next summer or even the summer after that.
Each secret librarian adds something unexpected to the shelves, like Milan Kundera's The Joke, which is a sort of joke about jokes, Muriel Barbery’s utterly original The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and oddities like Clive James's Brm Brm, the hilarious tale of a young Japanese man called Suzuki adrift in London. Next year there will be new arrivals in the accidental library, things that we would never even think of finding in our local library. It’s an education, sometimes a challenge, and always a surprise. What more do you need for a perfect summer vacation?
Copyright: David Bouchier
