Restless Peregrine

Deja Vu

January 23, 2008

I’ve just finished reading a book for the second time. Under normal circumstances this wouldn’t be particularly note worthy. I am a voracious reader, and books have always been like old friends for me. I still re-read stories I’ve had since I was a child, and nearly every time I do I learn something new about them and treasure them even more. I probably have books that I’ve read a hundred times. So why am I writing about this time?

I didn’t know when I started that I’d read the book before. It was not because the work was so delightful that I couldn’t resist picking it up again, nor because it was so complex and important that I needed to go through it again to begin to grasp its enormous impact. I read it again because I simply didn’t remember reading it the first time. And I find the fact that a work could be so utterly forgettable deeply unsettling.

I guess I should qualify my ‘didn’t know’ with a timeline. Obviously by the end, I was certain I’d read it before or I wouldn’t be at the computer right now. I began to have flashes of recognition after the first fifty pages or so, but they were more like déjà vu in its common sense than like the literal meaning of that expression – already saw. I thought at first I must have read a few sections over when I first got the book but since I had no idea how it ended I kept on reading. It wasn’t a bad read, after all, even if it wasn’t entirely engaging. I still wanted to find out what happened at the end.

Around page 200 I was certain, absolutely, that I’d read it before. I could remember entire chunks of the plot and spent a lot of the last couple hundred pages skimming over stuff that I already knew. But I had to keep going because I still for the life of me couldn’t remember how it all turned out. In the end I realized it was because the book didn’t really have an ending. It just sort of ambled along for a while until it didn’t anymore and then there was the back cover.

I’ve never been a fan of cliff hangers, but even those I can appreciate. This wasn’t one of those. The book was about the lives of a couple of people (one, primarily, and how she related to another), and it was like the writer just got tired of them after a while and kept on going because he felt like he needed to but eventually didn’t see the point anymore and just put his pen down. And then got it published. The whole thing was entirely depressing. Maybe I was just immune to his genius (a lot of critics had a lot of good things to say about the book on its cover), or maybe once you’re as famous as this guy is you don’t have to be such a genius anymore to get people to publish you, I don’t know. But I do know that’s a few hours of my life that I’m not going to get back. All over again.