“The novel I would most like to read at this moment,” Ludmilla explains, “should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as if of branches and leaves…” (92)

Somewhere the complete volume must exist; you look around, seeking it with your gaze, but promptly lose heart; in this office books are considered raw material, spare parts, gears to be dismantled and reassembled.  Now you understand Ludmilla’s refusal to come with you; you are gripped by the fear of having also passed over to “the other side” and of having lost that privileged relationship with books which is peculiar to the reader: the ability to consider what is written as something finished and definitive, from which there is nothing to be removed. (115)

The first sensations this book should convey is what I feel when I hear the telephone ring; I say “should” because I doubt that written words can give even a partial idea of it: it is not enough to declare that my reaction is one of refusal, of flight from this aggressive and threatening summons, as it is also a feeling of urgency, intolerableness, coercion that impels me to obey the injunction of that sound, rushing to answer even though I am certain that nothing will come of it save suffering and discomfort. (132)

I asked Lotaria if she has already read some books of mine that I lent her.  She said no, because here she doesn’t have a computer at her disposal.
She explained to me that a suitably programmed computer can read a novel in a few minutes and record the list of all the words contained in the text, in order of frequency. “That way I can have an already completed reading at hand,” Lotaria says, “with an incalculable saving of time. What is the reading of a text, in fact, except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistences of forms and meanings? An electronic reading supplies me with a list of frequencies, which I have only to glance at to form an idea of the problems the book suggestions to my critical study. Naturally, at the highest frequencies the list records countless articles, pronouns, particles, but I don’t pay them any attention. I head straight for the words richest in meaning; they can give me a fairly precise notion of the book.” (186)

“No matter. The place where you’re going now is a model prison; it has a library stocked with all the latest books.”
“What about the banned books?”
“Where should banned books be if found if not in prison? (215)

Posted: March 26th, 2008 under daily notes.
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