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. 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. (A number of these he’s written about before — he’s rewriting as well as rereading.)
What’s more, since he was only a year older than me, our early reading followed essentially the same hectic arc. 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”). 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.
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