For those with the rage for reading and rereading, it is something of a feast for others, it will be daunting.
HAROLD BLOOM SERIES
It’s a series of meditations on what Bloom believes to be the most important novels we have, and it takes for granted that its readers already know the books under consideration in other words, that they have already absorbed “the canon,” and are eager to reconsider it later in their lives. Here’s what “The Bright Book of Life” isn’t: It isn’t a handy list of the 50 or 100 novels “you must read before you die.” Nor is it a collection of painless expositions of “the world’s greatest works of fiction.” Nor is it an introduction to the world’s greatest writers.
Like it or not, the zeitgeist is the zeitgeist. We knew, and our tastes were formed by, the same books, both the classics and the dominant works of modernism. (Oddly enough, until the Gottliebs graduated to Manhattan, we lived on Walton Avenue in the Bronx, not very far from where the Blooms lived on the Grand Concourse.) The crucial thing is that our reading was the same - just as my reading almost exactly duplicated that of Toni Morrison, who, like me, was born a year after Bloom yet whose external circumstances (she grew up in a Black community in Lorain, Ohio) could not have been more different from mine. But then Bloom’s experience of religion and in particular Judaism - he spoke only Yiddish until he was 6 - is radically unlike mine, since I grew up in a completely secular family and society. He was also deeply invested in Gnosticism, although there I cannot follow him, since my understanding of Gnosticism is as limited as my understanding of what it is that hedge fund managers do. “The Bright Book of Life” is focused on the novel, but Bloom is just as knowledgeable and passionate about poetry as he is about fiction, and the poets are never far from his mind. If you suffer from what Bloom calls “the rage for reading and rereading,” you’re on a never-pausing treadmill - no sooner have you consumed, yet again, “War and Peace” and “Middlemarch” and “The Charterhouse of Parma” and all of Jane Austen but it’s time to return to them once more: to have one final go before (as the ever-morbid Bloom reminds us) it’s too late. It can’t be mere coincidence that the two books Bloom considers to be the “most eminent of all novels” - Samuel Richardson’s 2,000-page epistolary “Clarissa” and Proust’s seven-volume “In Search of Lost Time” - are works I have been making my way through again this past year (along with “The Tale of Genji,” “Tom Jones,” “Lolita” and “Martin Chuzzlewit”). What’s more, since he was only a year older than me, our early reading followed essentially the same hectic arc. (A number of these he’s written about before - he’s rewriting as well as rereading.)
Its subtitle is “Novels to Read and Reread,” and since it is first and foremost personal in its approach and tone, I feel justified in responding to it personally - especially since reading and rereading novels has not only been a lifelong pursuit, but I’ve spent much of the past three years rereading many of the books Bloom writes about here. Harold Bloom’s posthumous “The Bright Book of Life” is his farewell gift to his readers - unless (and I wouldn’t put it past him) there are further 500-page Bloomian tomes lying in wait for us.
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