I mentioned about a month ago that I was looking forward to rereading Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist. The book club I frequent has it on the list for this year and I just thought, lucky me. I’ve just finished it, again, and again I’d have to say, lucky me. And lucky you too if you read it even once.

At some point in the past month I came across Nabokov’s exhortation to his students on the virtues of rereading. Indeed he didn’t think you could get much out a single reading, though sadly that’s all I’m sure many books get from most readers.

I’m entirely uncertain as to how the other readers in my book club will respond to Baker. I consider him one of the finest American writers. One gets the feeling that every single word is selected with great care. But not at the expense of the overall rhythm and lyrical arc. His intensely human portrait of Paul Chowder  – whom I couldn’t help thinking of as the narrator of Al Purdy’s poem At the Quinte Hotel – could incline you to just want to lean over and give Paul a silent hug. It’s really a love story, I suppose, a meandering exploration and declaration of Paul’s love for Roz. When Roz says, “Don’t you love the smell of brown paper bags filled with raw vegetables,” Paul leans over the bag she is carrying and breathes deep and agrees. His love for Roz at that moment impels him to want “to lie down on the sidewalk as a result.” That’s beautiful. Simple. Sad. Sweet. (rest)

I hope at least a few of the other readers in the group have found Baker’s The Anthologist as touching as I have.

I’ve been thinking about the discussion of Alison Pick’s Far To Go last night at the book club I frequent. I’m in the process of revising my interpretation of the principal narrator, Marta. Opinions about the book differed, but with reasons as all differences of opinion worth pursuing do. Some had high praise for the novel, especially its careful imagery and beautiful prose. I was in that camp, but I also had a few reservations. (None, however, that would prevent me heading out as soon as possible to read the author’s previous novel, The Sweet Edge, or whatever novel comes next for that matter.) I want to concentrate on just one of these because my afterthoughts have me rethinking what I said.

It struck me as odd, even jarring, that the Bauer family had a “governess” such as Marta. In the first half of the book this is the most typical term used to describe her role. Latterly, the narrator uses “nanny” frequently and then predominantly. What troubled me was that the Bauer family that employs Marta are supposed to be wealthy industrialists and socialites. They speak multiple languages. Their young son, Pepik, is 5 as the novel begins and turns 6 before he leaves on the Kindertransport. Marta is an uneducated, unworldly young woman, the child of farm labourers. Why would wealthy, worldly, sophisticated industrialists hire this woman as a “governess”?

Is Marta even literate? Yes, I think so. But it is clear that at 5 Pepik cannot read. And he still cannot read at 6. Just what kind of governess is Marta?

So that was bothering me, the decision to describe Marta as a governess. But now I think it might be more complicated.

Toward the end of the novel we learn that the story and its narrative frame are due to a female academic living in Montreal named Anneliese. This Anneliese is the daughter of Marta and her employer, Pavel. She is named after Pavel’s wife. (Pavel and his wife both die in the concentration camps.) Most important, however, is that this Anneliese is only 6 or 7 when her mother, the Marta of the story, dies. We learn that the entire book is supposed to be Anneliese’s imaginative exploration of her mother and father’s lives. This needs to be contrasted sharply with the letters and other documents that Anneliese has unearthed in archives from the time period.

What does this information tell us as readers? That’s what I’ve been thinking about. The purported “author” of the imaginative rendering is an “interested” party. She is the daughter of the main character and, so far as we know, has very little if any first-hand knowledge of her mother’s actions. Now I begin to think that maybe this narrator isn’t quite as trustworthy as she initially appears. Maybe she has coloured Marta’s tale, at least at first, to put her in as good of a light as possible. Hence the references to Marta as Pepik’s governess. Later in the tale it becomes less and less plausible to refer to Marta as a governess and so she takes on her more appropriate title as nanny to Pepik. A confusion which is taken further when Pepik, after a delirious transport to Scotland, associates the new English word “mother” for Marta when she is pointed at in a photo which he bears.

Now this, to my mind, makes the novel more interesting. Also more challenging than it first appears. It also washes away a number of other minor concerns I had. But is it the right reading? Is it even a better reading, at least better than I had before? Perhaps.

One thing is certain. I now look forward with special keenness to Alison Pick’s visit to Waterloo on 11 November. Maybe she will resolve some of these things I have been wondering about. Even better if she prompts new ones.

One of my guilty pleasures is re-reading. There are tens of thousands of novels published worldwide each year of which there might be (I’m just guessing) maybe a thousand that, given sufficient time, I might find worth reading. On my current pace, I will be lucky to get through 60 novels this year. And those are not restricted solely to recent publications. So any way you slice it, there are going to be a rather large number of novels I do not read in my lifetime. Reading a novel a second or third or tenth time seems like an extravagance, a dereliction of duty somehow, almost selfish. Yet I do so enjoy returning to a novel that has given me pleasure in the past hoping, perhaps, to rekindle my admiration for the author, or revise it, as may be the case. And sometimes I thinking reading again is my favourite form of reading.

That may be one reason that I find talking to other readers about a recent read we’ve shared to be so much fun. It forces me to go back over the novel in my mind and attempt to articulate what I like or didn’t like about it, what I thought was clever or dull, where the author surprised me or disappointed me, how a phrase or image or paragraph leapt off the page for me. It isn’t re-reading itself, but it is part of that process. And the more input I get from others, especially careful and sensitive readers, the more likely I am to enjoy my experience of reading the novel again.

For the first time the book club I frequent has given me the perfect excuse for reading a novel again. A little more than a year ago, I read Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, a book I thoroughly enjoyed. It reminded me what an exquisite craftsman Baker can be. A marvel. It triggered a bit of a Baker-fest in my reading schedule. So it was a great delight to discover The Anthologist on the list of books to be read in the book club this year. Now I have to re-read it. And I get the added bonus of anticipating a hearty discussion of same.

Will my fellow readers be as taken with Nicholson’s prose as I was? I have no idea. Will I be as admiring on a second read? I certainly hope so. In any case I expect to find a great deal more in the novel this time than I did the first time. Who knows, it may even prompt another plunge into Baker’s back catalogue. I can hardly wait.