LAVINIA ZAINEA

Reading Fowles

      There are some authors whose books change your life. There are others whose books you love at an almost emotional level. And then there are some whose books you appreciate at an intellectual level. They don’t necessarily succeed in changing your life, their books are flawed in an almost frustrating way, because they aim for perfection, but you love them all the more for their flaws and their ambition. Fowles’s books are, for me, part of the latter category.
    I started reading Fowles when I was 15, at first fascinated, then frustrated, then fascinated again. The first book of his that I read was The Collector. I thought I would not care for it much. The cover seemed to indicate a cheap thriller and the blurb was hardly more promicing. I read it, I loved it, and I almost understood it, but not quite. I wanted to read more. Some time later, I read The Magus. I knew the opinions about the book were divided, some considered it a masterpiece while others saw it as failure. It was the hardest book I ever read. I was about 18 when I read it and the experience was exhausting. I didn’t understand it, but I can only say this now. Back then, I was convinced that that was how one was suppose to write a book if one wanted to make a difference. Reading it, I felt that to understand it one had to possess a vast degree of knowledge from many different areas, and still it was out of grasp. It was a fascinating experience. So, I continued reading Fowles: I read The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Daniel Martin. By then, I was already accustomed to the author’s style. To me, it meant a certain dispersion of the self, a deconstruction of everything I had believed a book was supposed to be, the first author who showed me that contemporary literature was more refined than other periods in time, the first one who showed me that irony and a relation with one’s own contemporary environment can be more fascinating than books written in cultural eras one feels distant from oneself.
     During my university years, I reread The Collector, and I felt that I understood it. I felt that I was right: the more knowledge one accumulates, the more fascinating it is to (re)discover Fowles’s books. It was like meeting an old friend after many years and discovering qualities and features in him you did not even imagined he possessed.