Aperçus

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Just because a book is written by a woman or is about women doesn’t mean it has nothing to offer men. It opens their eyes to what it’s like to live as a woman, the first step to learning empathy. And it may help to burst the bubble many men have been inadvertently living in, allowing new thoughts and insights to germinate. Isn’t that what the arts are for?

M A Sieghart

In the Guardian Review for 10th July earlier this year Mary Ann Sieghart’s piece ‘Bookshelf bias’ quite rightly bemoaned the results of a research she’d commisioned which showed that “men were disproportionately unlikely even to open a book by a woman,” and that of the “top ten of bestselling female authors only 19% of their readers are men,” the rest being women, while male authors had a more evenly split readership tilted slightly towards males.

I mention this because as a male I have in recent years been trying to ensure I get a better gender balance in the authored books I tend to read. This year, for example, of the 54 titles I’ve read so far 27 are by women and one is a collection of short stories by both male and female writers. And my intentions in so doing were for the very same reason Sieghart exhorts men to read women: to learn empathy. This then is the first bookish aperçu I want to share with you today.

© C A Lovegrove

Here is the second. I have a big reluctance to waste anything. From a young age I was told to eat up what was on my plate, and to think of the starving millions who would benefit from what I left. (Send it to them then! would be my unspoken youthful rejoinder, never uttered for fear of parental reprisals!) Even now I still finish what’s piled up in front of me as if the phrase portion control had never been coined, and healthwise I always regret it.

In terms of books it’s the same: I hate to give up on a title and hang on to half- or even quarter-read novels in the hopes of coming back to them at some unspecified date in the future. I have shelves with a scatter of tomes showing the telltale bookmarks sticking out or standing proud of “temporarily” abandoned novels or studies. I am getting better at realising there will be books I’ll never pick up again and so recycling them (so not quite wasting them).

In case you are wondering, aperçu is currently one of my fave words to interject at any suitable occasion (such as now). It means of course “insight”, but why use a common English word when you can sound properly brought up and sophisticated? For a reminder of the French word aperçu I’m grateful to the Canadian writer Robertson Davies, who employs it to send up a rather pseud character into whose mouth he frequently places the term. And so I come to my final aperçu.

Lory at Entering the Enchanted Castle inaugurated the Reading Robertson Davies week a couple or so years back, to coincide with the anniversary of his birth on 28th August 1913 (he died on 2nd December 1995). Even though she’s not running it this year I intend continuing to read and review one of his novels at around this time of year until I run out of them. (‘They’ meaning novels, of course, though they could be years.)

This year I’m fast approaching finishing Leaven of Malice (1954), the second in his Salterton Trilogy, and hope to post a review of that soon. Last year I read the first title, Tempest-Tost (1951), set in an Ontario university town, and Leaven of Malice stays in the same urban milieu with a few of the same cast of characters largely making fools of themselves. It’s in this instalment that the term aperçu is tossed around by one of the journalists on one of the local papers.

For an earlier reading week I’d previously read Davies’s Deptford Trilogy (1970-75), an altogether more sober collection of interlinked novels full of psychology, hagiography, prestidigitation and secrets, ranging from the New World to the Old. Thus far, however, the Salterton novels are more comedies of errors than of horrors, with characters who are more provincial or even parochial than sophisticated or urbane. I wonder what will epitomise the Cornish Trilogy when I come to it?

So there we have it: three aperçus I’ve gained recently. And, even if you don’t wish to profit from my insights, at least you have a useful word to chuck into conversations and which may simultaneously bamboozle and impress your audience.