Lesser, Wendy. Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.
The title, Nothing Remains the Same comes from a letter Mark Twain wrote to William Dean Howells in 1887. What he is referring to is also the premise of Lesser’s book – rereading a book at a different stage of life shouldn’t be the same experience as the first time. Twain argues that “nothing remains the same.” I am in agreement. When I was in high school I read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne for an English class. As a 14 year old I was guided through the pages like a blind girl. Six years later I reread The Scarlet Letter for a Women in Literature class. I was forced fed the ideals of a feminist faculty; seeing the story through her sense of self while struggling with my own. Finally, I reread Scarlet for me and myself last year. This time I read it without bias or guidance, without ulterior motive. No grade rested on my comprehension of text. It was like reading it for the very first time and oh so self indulgent. Lesser offers a literary criticism of a handful of books she has reread throughout her life. Each chapter of Nothing Remains the Same takes on a different well known book starting with Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Sprinkled throughout each chapter are details of Lesser’s life, some seemingly unrelated to the book in question, others all about the reading (using it in graduate school, for example).
Lessing spends a great deal of time quoting from the books she is remembering which can be nice if you have never read them yourself but slightly irritating if you know them well. (I was somewhere in the middle.)
Favorite lines, “I had constructed a life in which I could be energetic but also lazy; I could rush but I would never be rushed” (p 3), and “In the meantime, as is always the case, the process of winning the batle has slightly cheapened the prize for me” (p 208).
Small gripe – say what you mean, mean what you say. Why write, “I decided to leave Anna Karenina out of my book” when you go on to mention it five times and dedicate an entire section to it? Complete with a quote, the section was at least a full page. This decision to discuss a book you originally wanted to leave out seems self indulgent, contradictory and rambling.
Overall I enjoyed Nothing Remains the Same. I think I would have enjoyed it more had it not been for the initial tone Lesser took. Example – early on (page 9) Lesser makes the comment, “Twelve seems young for a first reading…” (of Don Quixote) but in the next sentence she adds, “…when I first read Don Quixote I was eleven.” I felt like Lesser could have added, “so there!” punctuated with a tongue sticking out. It felt condescending and made me very aware of how many times she mentioned her age. I half expected her to say something about reading War and Peace in kindergarten.
BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, “Books About Books” (p 43).
~*LunaSea*~ 