#102

It is difficult to remember for some reason, though further back my memories are clearer, almost overwhelming. I remember the two books from which I learnt my letters and colors simultaneously, as well as the objects and fonts employed in this grasping of the symbol, I remember the feel of sitting in my mother's lap and the look of her fingers as she turned the page. Later than that, but still earlier than when I am trying to remember, there is the full, deep, rich memory of first encyclopedia I ever read, a Spanish translation of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals, some edition that was up to speed in the late eighties. The current American edition is what I own these days; the old book was lost in some move. No matter; I remember it with such a clarity that I really have no idea why I bothered replacing it. If I close my eyes, I can see the same illustrations with my child's eyes, sharper and clearer than mine today, richer in color and detail, larger and realer. Certain memory is more than capable trouncing the present moment.


What I am having trouble remembering is the very first novel I ever read. 


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A friend of mine insists we have the Devil to thank for the written word; would that it were so simple. Of course he is being deliberately provocative and knows full well that this is not quite so; neither can I deny him.


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On the inside covers or blank pages of the books I have owned the longest I can find examples of my handwriting from when I was three or when I was five; my name, correctly spelled and easy to read but the letters composed of mostly wobbly angles and crumpled curves. I had good handwriting, actually the beginnings of promising penmanship, for a magic span sometime when I was nine. Then it crossed over into hurried sloppiness, still beautiful on occasion, but never neat or truly correct or consistent. 


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The novel would have had to be in English, but the problem is, it may have come from a library, and not my own collection. I can be fairly sure the International School I first attended did not supply it; like the rest of my very early childhood books, the tomes I selected at that very first, most sacred (to me, the whole place was a temple to Neo-Americo-Brittanic flat-affect employment of right angles using bright primary colors cheer if there ever was one, truly a cradle of the projected global civilization*) library were still largely children's books, even the ones in novel form, like The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, both cornerstones of my heart. Well, moreso Phantom Tollbooth. I could read that bad boy seven times in a row and come back for more. One of the best books ever.


Memories of my first collection of short stories are easy; the first, a most precious trove which holds great power to this day, was A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard. That was followed by Kipling's Jungle Book, and various collections of children's versions of Aesop's Fables and Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. Also, The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame,  Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie, some others in that vein. I recall also from the age of five through six beginning to read a whole raft of young adult books and children's novels, Animorphs by K.A. Applegate, the Dragon of the Lost Sea series by Laurence Yep (fuckin Boneless King is still one of the scariest things to me), Jerry Spinelli books, Star Wars books, L'Engle's Time Cycle which I have mentioned, the Chronicles of Narnia by Lewis, Patricia Wrede, Louis Sachar, Charles Dickens, Avi, Lois Lowry, Garth Nix, Brian Jacques, Jane Yolen, random stuff, starting to crawl into the adult territory sometimes. Some of these books I would collect for myself, some I would check out of the library up to eight times over the course of two years.


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Treasure Island. That counts, I'm sure, it was Kipling that brought it to mind, and I read Kipling very early, perhaps four. Robert Louis Stevenson, a grown-up enough book. It's for young people. A novel nonetheless.


Ah, but if we're going to quibble over definitions like that, the first novel must indeed be The Phantom Tollbooth, which I did already mention and I might also need to throw in Roald Dahl's Matilda, being as which came first is a detail lost to memory. I believe. I'll try to remember.

Said goodbye to my childhood in a new way, at the age of eleven, with Stephen King's Bag of Bones, shortly followed by To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, and then, irrevocably, One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, possibly my very favorite novel, certainly one of the most important to me. 


Stories which disrupted my childhood badly were written by Franz Kafka. Yikes, dude!  


Of course, there is the first book, the Book from which I would have heard my first written word, spoken aloud. Doesn't quite count, probably. Did not read that myself until a bit later, before I turned ten, and, uncharacteristically, I did not reread it until last year. It was fucking fire. Rad book, please do try it no matter how you feel about people who use it as a weapon.


On that note, The Brothers Karamazov deserves to stand amongst among the greatest works of art ever produced, and is certainly one of the greatest novels ever written, as Fyodor Dostoevsky stands in the very front ranks of novelists. I just felt like saying that. If you have only read it once, please! should you only read one book twice in your whole lifetime, let it be this one.


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That same friend of mine, a white dude, while acknowledging my delicious ethnic ambiguity, does not let me forget that I am basically a white dude, even literally a white dude. Like the other thing, I don't quite agree, but can't say he's at all wrong.


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Guess some people would say that the above would be my colonized mindset, abetting my oppressor. That's a whole thing to get into, but to be concise: no. Not accurate. 


Another time.



--JL


*by which I mean what I understood as I read the very acclaimed book People, by Peter Spier at the age of three, along with Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak, Japanese and African folktales, classic British children's literature and nursery rhymes, Eastern European fairy stories, Greek and Russian fables, all these new favorites I was continually discovering in that beautiful little children's library up a mountain in Venezuela where the English books all hid, my first aperture into a wider, vaster world: that this planet is more compassed by a kinship than it is fragmented by a sundering.