How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard

 Foreword 

PIERRE BAYARD PUTSHIS readers—this reader—in a uniquely paradoxical position. Having just read his witty How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, I have now discovered that there was no reason for me to have read it in the first place. But without having read it, how would I have known that I could just as well have skimmed it, or perhaps heard about it somewhere, or possibly formed a sense of the book based entirely on what other readers have said about it, on the sort of received opinions about a work that float around in the culture? In addition, not having read the book shouldn’t—or so Pierre Bayard has assured me—prevent me from talking confidently and learnedly about it, or even from writing these brief, introductory words of appreciation. But how would I have known that without Bayard’s sage advice, which I could only have found in his wise and original volume?

In any case, the fact remains that I am very glad I did read Bayard’s book. Had I skimmed it too rapidly, I might have missed the chapter in which he gives us the thrilling examples of literary doublespeak with which Paul Valéry eulogized Marcel Proust and Anatole France while making it quite clear that he had hardly read a word of their work. Had I not read Bayard, I would not have found myself determined not only to read—but to reread—Graham Greene’s The Third Man, as well as the essay in which Montaigne lamented his failing memory and its effect on his ability to read and retain what he had read. I would not have been so thoroughly entertained by Laura Bohannan’s attempt to discuss Hamlet with a group of West African tribesmen whose responses were hilariously and informatively out of synch with the instant, cross-cultural recognition of Shakespeare’s universality that she expected. Nor would I have been so pleased to discover that Bayard’s advice to those who meet writers of books they have not read confirms, so very gratifyingly, my own observation and experience: “Praise it without going into detail. An author does not expect a summary or a rational analysis of his book, and would even prefer you not to attempt such a thing. He expects only that, while maintaining the greatest possible degree of ambiguity, you will tell him that you like what he wrote.”

Having read such passages, I can only hope that I am not being insufficiently ambiguous when I say that what I liked best about Pierre Bayard’s sly meditation on the permissibility, the importance, and the sheer necessity of not reading is how, without our quite being aware of it, it becomes a study of the psychology of reading and of the purposes of literature, and a hymn to the pleasures of reading and to all the reasons why we cannot live without it.

—Francine Prose