You never read the same book twice
on the joys of re-reading
A few months ago, I was reading The Enchanted April on the train when a fellow passenger said, ‘That’s such a great book, you’re going to love it.’ I smiled and thanked her, but I already knew I loved the book; I was just wondering how I would love it differently this time.
I don’t re-read books as often as I would like. There are so many new books I long to read that it takes an effort to lay them aside for a little longer and prioritise a re-read. My mind calls out for the new, the ‘novel’. What if this next book is brilliant and life-changing? If I put it on hold, I postpone this new version of me further into the future. I want to read it now, experience it now, be changed by it now.
But a novel is a new experience each time you read it, and it can change you over and over again, in unexpected and deeper ways. In some ways, we never re-read a book. The text may be the same, but the mind that experiences it has changed.
When I think about a book I have only read once, I can remember whether I loved it or was disappointed, but as for the specifics, well, I can usually remember only a few scenes or moments. It’s like remembering a distant relative’s wedding or a mediocre school trip. For example, I have read The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood once, and, while I can recall the depth of the feelings I had when I read the book — the horror, the sadness, the sheer astonishment — only a few scenes have stuck in my mind. I don’t remember the main character’s name, or how it felt to be her.
However, if I think about a book I have read twice or more, a whole world fills my imagination in an instant. I have a deep reaction: visceral, sensual, a moment of stepping out of this time, this place, to a different place, but one that is part of me, like the memory of falling in love or eating real Italian pasta for the first time! (They amount to the same thing). The characters in these books are not mere acquaintances; they are people I know well. I feel their joy and pain. I understand their motivations. I don’t just know them; I’ve been them!
Often we turn to well-loved books for comfort. When our lives are in flux, they offer something familiar. I’ve read The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim maybe four times. I always find it comforting and joyous, but it also offers me new wisdom at each stage of my life. Once upon a time I read it for the sense of escape it offered: the freedom from the stress of everyday life. I immersed myself in Italian sunshine and the heady scent of wisteria. However, on my last reading, I found a new insight that resonated at this time of my life — the idea that being set in our ways, guarded and afraid, can limit the potential for love and joy in our lives. The book may be the same, but I have changed.
When I first read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett as a child, Colin’s father seemed nothing but a monster. Why had he locked the garden and buried the key? Why had he absented himself from his son’s life? Re-reading it as an adult, a parent, and a person who has experienced loss, I have a better understanding of his grief and fear. I have more experience to bring to the text now. And in addition to this lived experience, I can also draw on the encounters I have had with the books I have read in the interim. I have seen loss in novels too, the many ways it manifests and the ways we find to bear it. When I re-read, the old familiar characters are in conversation with the new. Themes echo from one novel to the next, across space and time, and with differing contexts.
With each re-read I also bring my increased understanding of how books work and writers achieve their effects. Re-reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, after many, many years, I realised how little I had understood the first time round. This time, I noticed the menacing imagery of nature, the ‘tortured elms’ and the ‘monster shrubs’. I noticed the rhododendrons that were ‘slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic’ and I thought about why those choices had been made. I still had sympathy for the second Mrs de Winter, but now I was much more focused on Rebecca.
And once more, links with other books came to my mind to add to this reading. Was Rebecca another maligned female character like Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason, her sexuality an inconvenience that must be destroyed to protect the patriarchal line? And speaking of Bertha Mason, I must re-read Jean Rhys’s story of Bertha Mason in Wide Sargasso Sea, and Sally Beauman has done a similar thing with Rebecca’s Tale, which I have yet to read.
These links crop up all the time. I recently read Miss Mole by E. H. Young and noticed similarities between Hannah Mole and Jane Eyre. Miss Mole handles the restrictions of being a genteel servant very differently to the way Jane Eyre does. Jane’s morality is guided by her strong faith in the God of the Bible. Miss Mole’s religious milieu is more fluid, and so she finds it necessary to create her own moral compass. Different times call for different responses in writing and in reading.
I keep thinking about the woman on the train. She said I was going to love The Enchanted April, and she was right — but which love did she mean? My young giddy escape into wisteria and sunshine, or my realisation that my fears have been getting in the way of my joy? But of course she meant neither. She was offering her own experience of The Enchanted April, whoever she was when she read it. Or perhaps the several people she had been at different times.
Perhaps I can hold all of these reading selves together. I don’t need to discard the person I once was. Younger me had a way of looking at the world that I sometimes need reminding of. She was naive, of course, and she believed everything the narrator told her. She missed the blood-red rhododendrons on the drive at Manderley; she couldn’t relate to Mrs Fisher’s obsession with dead poets in The Enchanted April; she saw the joy of the walled garden untinged by grief. She saw things in black and white, where I see shades of grey — but all that grey can tip into deliberation and overthinking. Perhaps now and then I can step back into her confidence and clarity. And I can still be full of wonder, and love wisteria and walled gardens, and dream of a half-haunted house by the sea.