Lost Classics review by Pat Boran

Lost Classics. Various Eds. Michael Ondaatje, Michael Redhill, Esta Spalding and Linda Spalding. Bloomsbury, UK £14.99

by Pat Boran

(Sunday Tribune, April 2001)

Canadian novelist Laird Hunt, describing his 'great good luck at stumbling across a long-desired book' in a second-hand bookshop recalls Jorge Luis Borges classic story 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' in which 'a certain class of objects, very rare are brought into being by hope.' The way in which the spirit of books shadows our lives, and in which our lives seem formed by books, is what Lost Classics is all about.

A compendium of very short essays in 74 hands, this handsomely-made volume started life as a special issue of the Canadian literary journal Brick, but was expanded into the present volume with a generous helping of writers from around the world.

Predictably, what makes a book either lost or classic is not something all the authors agree on, and the editors, among them Michael Ondaatje, are happy to leave the matter open, including books 'loved and lost, books that had been overlooked or under-read', books stolen and others simply out of print. The wonderful Australian novelist Murray Bail, for instance, believes that Thomas Bernhard's novel Frost fits the bill, because it has yet to be translated from German; in other words it is lost to English. And Canadian poet Steven Heighton already considers Jane Smiley's The Greenlanders a classic though it first appeared in print only ten years back. And there are more recently published books than this in here. A certain amount of the blame must lie with big bookshops and their impatience with slow starters.

The sense in which a book, once loved, can continue to grow in the mind is beautifully summoned by Helen Garner. She describes writing to the author of a book she loved as a child, and then borrowing the author's only copy on the proviso that she return it in perfect condition. 'Out of its battered pages,' she writes, 'flowed in streams, uncorrupted, the same scary joy it had brought me as a child, before everything in my life had happened.' That realisation that a book can, in a manner of speaking, be a bookend at both ends of a life, is a powerful and affecting one. That the lost classic, like the lost land of childhood, can retain its power and meaning makes it almost mythical. For those who yearn to go back again but cannot, and for those who manage to return but find the old world but a pale shadow of its former self, there is a common truth at work: at some level, the power of the lost classic is increased by the fact that it is lost.

It is of course tempting to compile an anthology like this, of what the editors call 'personal stories'. But there are also warnings here to would-be anthologists. Compendiums like this one themselves often have chequered careers. Kenneth Rexroth's Classics Revisited, a 'cheeky, loopy, opinionated and diverse' look at classic literature, according to poet and novelist Brian Brett, is itself often overlooked, despite such gems of literary observation as, on Julius Caesar's prose style: 'The simple nouns and verbs carom off each other like billiard balls.'

A survey of these mini essays leads to some general conclusions: often books are lost because they fail to observe some unwritten rule or expectation. Ingeborg Bachmann's novel Malina falls through the cracks because she is remembered primarily as a poet; Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, according to novelist Charles Foran, is virtually unknown to the many fans of the 'lite' work who cannot fathom the 'oddness and moral acuity of this manuscript'. Even the author, who claimed for a quarter century to have misplaced it, seems 'disconcerted, perhaps even scared, by what he is creating'.

In most cases, however, the lost classics described here are simply volumes that are hard to find. Sometimes it is hard to be sure if this was not part of the author's or publisher's intention. The Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini, for example, is described by Christian Bök as 'an incunabulum, bequeathed to us by some monk from a fantastic monastery in an alternate dimension'. Then again, Bök should know: his 1994 publication Crystallography is described in the contributors' notes as 'a pataphysical encyclopedia'. The rarity of the Codex, it would seem, is part of its attraction. A quick look on the internet, however, found 58 mentions, some sites including scans, reviews, etc - even an ISBN. Whatever about achieving classic status, it seems it's getting ever harder these days to get lost.