I like to think of myself as a world-class literary faker. In short, he looks like a foot soldier in the vast army of impish popular intellectuals France has been training since the days of Roland Barthes, just in case the struggle for freedom should ever come down to the ability to wring paradoxes out of a stone or unriddle the world with Lacanian decoder rings. In fact, in lieu of reading the actual book, I’ve spent a very long time scrutinizing this picture, which strikes me as a masterpiece of calculated faux-casual self-revelation: Bayard leans against a railing in front of a scenic spray of graffiti-a touch of vérité to anchor all the abstraction-and his eyes simmer like coq au vin, and his forehead bunches with a devastating whisper of wrinkle-cleavage (my God, he is about to think!), and he appears to be sucking on something, perhaps the word oeuvre. I know, from Bayard’s author photo, that he is fiftyish and improbably slim, and likes to dress entirely in black. I know, from a photo of the book, that it is small and blue. I know, for instance, that Bayard, a respected literature professor, admits in the preface that he doesn’t enjoy reading, has little time for it, and lectures frequently on books he hasn’t read-scandalous revelations that helped make the book a sensation in Europe. But I’m telling you it’s really happening to me, and I’m unhappy about it.įortunately, the book’s absence from my life hasn’t prevented me, as a citizen of the United States of Amazonikipedia, from learning everything there is to know about it. I imagine that every other reviewer in America is, at this very moment, chortling into his tweed collar while pretending to do the same thing.
Owing to laziness, busyness, and a bogus holiday that shut down all the city’s mailrooms at the worst possible moment, I have been forced, very much against my will, into the most blindingly obvious irony I’ve ever been obliged to arch my inner eyebrows at: I have to start writing my review of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read without actually having read the book. When someone asks me for directions to the local school for the deaf, I don’t automatically pretend I can’t hear the question. I usually prefer to be selective with my ironies-I like to parcel them out tastefully, subtly, unpredictably, like a playful summer rain lightly nurturing the wildflowers of early June.
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