I have also had the experience of coming to appreciate a piece of literature in an entirely new way through hearing an author’s reading. Similarly José Saramago and Javier Marías are authors that more people might be able to connect with by inhabiting the language through reading portions out loud. I often stop and read a few pages out loud when I feel that I may be losing my moorings in the book long paragraph structure of his novels. And Thomas Bernhard, even though I cannot read him in the original German, flows with energy and intensity against JS Bach. Meditative, less conventional, writing forms itself especially to this practice, not only obvious writers like Cole or WG Sebald, but wonderfully spare and introspective works like Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room or the experimental The Absent Therapist by Will Eaves. “Sometimes, I even spoke the words in the book out loud to myself, and doing so I noticed the odd way my voice mingled with the murmur of the French, German, or Dutch radio announcers, or with the thin texture of the violin strings of the orchestras, all of this intensified by the fact that whatever I was reading had likely been translated out of one of the European languages.”Īssuming I am not in a public space where others would likely look on in askance I am likewise inclined to read aloud to myself at times. Settled with a book on the sofa he confesses that:

He explains his fondness for internet classical music stations, commercial free broadcasts from countries where the foreign languages of the announcers blend into, rather than distract from the musical tapestry. In the opening pages of Teju Cole’s Open City, his narrator, the young medical resident Julius, introduces the reader to his own reading habits, setting perhaps the tone and frame of mind for the recollections and encounters that will unfold over the following pages.

All the puny sorrows