Anna Karenina [antikvár]

Foreword Why do you read novels? I asked that question of an acquaintance not long ago and was told, 'Because they take you out of yourself.' Now, though some critics might consider it trivial, this answer strikes me as being of great interest because it poses immediately so many other questions. As, for instance, why should one want to be 'taken out of oneself'? (And there could be more fascinatmg reasons for that than I have space here to explore.) Taken out of oneself into what? A foreign milieu - a world so different ftom one's own that events there have an exotic poignancy? Possibly, though many successful novels have a background as familiarly htun-drum as that of the reader. Is it then that while reading one is enabled to live other lives - the lives of the invented characters - and that this experience, often repeated, makes one's own life in some way more vivid or more tolerable? But this would imply that one's own life is less tolerable than that of Anna Karenina, or less vivid than that of her husband. And this proposition, for me at any rate, has to be rejected. Moreover, is it possible to find the lives of fictional people equally absorbing at a second or tliird reading when we already know all the events concerning them that their author has seen fit to divulge? After all our own hidden future has at least the quality of suspense. In any case, who would want to live anyone's life twice? But yes, it is possible. There are those who have read all the novels of Jane Austen a dozen times; I know a man who reads David Copperfield every year. And in this, I think, lies the clue. When he opens a novel new to him, the reader is indeed taken out of himself - if by 'himself we mean his own company. It is as though he were invited to a rather special party. He finds himself in the company of a group of people quite strange to him. If they are congenial, he will stay and read on. If they become dear to him he will return to meet them with fresh delight over and over again. Indeed, they can appear as real to him as his own family