What the Swedes Read: François Mauriac

• LAUREATE: François Mauriac (1952, France)
• BOOK READ: Vipers’ Tangle, trans. Warre B. Wells

Above and below: Pages of notes found in
Daniel Handler’s copy of Vipers’ Tangle.

Some years ago I boarded an airplane and was greeted by the gentleman sitting next to me. It was the dawn of the iPod, and the fact that we were both listening to this new device was apparently reason enough to chat. He asked me if I agreed it was a terrific little machine and I said I did. He asked me if the shuffle function wasn’t really cool and I said it certainly was. Then his eyes lit up and he said, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if we both happened to be listening to the same thing right now?” and we both looked down at my little screen to see what was playing.

It was The Spellbinding Piano of Burma.

Part of my life will always be lonely. I have terrific family and friends and a professional life about which there can be no complaint, but much of my time is spent traipsing around literature in one way or another, and my traipses tend to be generally unaccompanied. I’m usually not reading what other people are reading. I get accused of playing cooler-than-thou—Me? Oh, I’m reading that Henry Parland book Eliot Weinberger likes—but the truth of the matter is that I just like this stuff. I like the Scandinavian modernism. I like the self-published queer rants. I like the secondary gothic novelists and the autobiographical verse novels of decades gone by. I like the forgotten essayist the NYRB has put back into print, and the uncool novelist New Directions keeps in print, and the wild experiments Ugly Duckling Presse prints itself. The only thing I don’t like about it is that nobody else is reading it. I don’t like that nobody else is reading it, because it seems bad for the world, which would be much improved if everyone knew who Barbara Comyns is. I don’t like that nobody else is reading it, because then it’s hard to find. And I don’t like that nobody else is reading it, because I don’t have anyone to talk to when I’ve read it myself. It’s tough, at a party, to say, “I just finished this novel, Four Frightened People” with the utter certainty that the other person will just say, after a lengthy sip, “Huh.”

It’s a little sad that the Nobel Prize in Literature is full of books that fall into the nobody-reads-it category. When I decided on this somewhat-harebrained scheme of reading one book by each winner, I decided I’d...