{"id":3726,"date":"2017-02-03T20:34:23","date_gmt":"2017-02-03T19:34:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/?p=3726"},"modified":"2018-12-07T20:04:28","modified_gmt":"2018-12-07T19:04:28","slug":"buecher-und-das-vergessen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/2017\/02\/books-and-oblivion\/","title":{"rendered":"Books and Oblivion"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Some time ago I watched the film adaptation of The Great Gatsby<\/em> starring Leonardo DiCaprio. I rarely watch films, but since the book only moderately impressed me and the opportunity presented itself, I couldn\u2019t resist. Overall, I found the film quite successful, and the actors were very well cast for the characters. Daisy, styled true to the era, was very lovely, even if the parties and music felt too contemporary and not at all 1920s to me. So, a pleasant movie night\u2014but it reminded me of something worth a post here, and I\u2019d like to write a bit about it.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I read The Great Gatsby<\/a> at the end of 2015. I didn\u2019t think it was bad, but it didn\u2019t captivate me either\u2014pleasant reading, but not a slam-dunk classic. Typically, the scenes and characters you imagine in a book differ from how they\u2019re portrayed on screen. You get used to changed dialogue, scenes that appear in the book but not in the film, small tweaks to the story\u2014so I often felt that in the book The Great Gatsby<\/em> everything was actually quite different. Some lines of dialogue struck me as distinctly odd. It ended with me sitting in front of the TV with the book, flipping pages and reading along in parallel. And I was truly astonished at how close the film was to the original. Some dialogues were taken verbatim, even though I was convinced they never appeared that way in the book.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The question I ask myself is about memory. Why do we remember some books so well, while others slip away completely so that we can\u2019t recall a single passage? When I walk past my shelves, there are books I remember vividly, and others\u2014read not so long ago\u2014that I\u2019ve largely forgotten.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Is it because of how much I enjoyed a book? Then my gaze falls on some fantasy novels that entertained me brilliantly years ago. Apart from a few moments, a lot of it has evaporated. Perhaps it\u2019s the genre: with fantasy, I like to dive completely into another, foreign world, and in the end it\u2019s like a dream you can recall only faintly. In a way, that\u2019s perfectly fine.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Or do complexity or length have an effect? Then I think of Horcynus Orca<\/a>, which at 1,500 pages was truly hefty and very demanding. I can remember a great many scenes from it\u2014perhaps because of the wonderful language, which surged like the sea through my mind. Then I see very thick books I remember well, and others less so. It certainly also depends on how much happens in a book. Collections of novellas, with many short stories, I forget more quickly than a hefty volume in which not much happens. Emotions have only a limited effect. Key scenes that seized me I very rarely forget. But the surrounding texture\u2014the seemingly trivial yet crucial details\u2014fades and seems to stick at random.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Another question is what remembering and forgetting mean in the context of reading. What does it mean to remember a very extensive, eventful book? To hold every scene, every line of dialogue, every incident in your head? That would be absurd. In life, we don\u2019t remember every day or every tiny moment. The brain filters, selects, and allows only a fraction to reach consciousness. Reading is similar. The lines fly by, situations arise before the mind\u2019s eye, and in the inner cinema you watch people interact, speak, think, and feel. I find many parallels here in myself. When I pass my shelves, look at the books, and let my thoughts wander, countless moments return to me: Aunt Lison from one of Maupassant\u2019s novellas<\/a>; the mad Manon<\/a>, blithely blindsiding her lover; how Emma<\/a> loves in the H\u00f4tel L\u00e9on and looks like an \u201cangel\u201d; or the beautiful skerry landscape visited by the official in By the Open Sea<\/a>. These are a few random examples from books reviewed here, and not every scene is crucial to the plot. In the end, it\u2019s a multitude of memories, often lying dormant and surfacing in certain moments.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

On the other hand, there are books I\u2019d like to hold onto as a whole\u2014burn them into memory because they\u2019re sheer pleasure, because they contain so much: feeling, wisdom about life, nature, and being. In an article I read a few months ago (and can\u2019t find again, sadly), the author argues for rereading. Only by rereading, they say, do you grasp the countless details that would otherwise be lost. On a first read, you absorb only a fraction and don\u2019t read the book fully, not properly. There\u2019s certainly something to that. I\u2019m always torn. For me, reading is also about discovery; once I\u2019ve \u201cdiscovered\u201d a book, the next one beckons. Life is too short to read everything, but you can at least try to find as many beautiful books as possible. At the same time, I have a stack of books I want to reread, and right now I\u2019m rereading a fantasy series I last read over twenty years ago\u2014surprised by how much of my own past I find in it and how much memory remains. Rereading is definitely worthwhile and not a waste of time.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

So what remains of The Great Gatsby<\/em>? Numerous lines and individual scenes have disappeared into the nirvana of forgetting. But the essence remains: Daisy\u2019s nature, for example; Gatsby\u2019s love; the opulence and the felt meaninglessness of the parties. What Fitzgerald conveyed to me on that first read\u2014that did reach me. It\u2019s something I can live with very well. And so I will probably continue to waver undecidedly between discovering new books and rediscovering old ones. In the end, the moment is what counts for me.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

How about you? Do you remember the books you\u2019ve read well? What does a book need to have so that you remember it clearly? Is it important to you to keep stories in mind? Or is a book for you something that drifts by like a film\u2014where it\u2019s fine to forget it afterward?<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some time ago I watched the film adaptation of The Great Gatsby starring Leonardo DiCaprio. I rarely watch films, but since the book only moderately impressed me and the opportunity presented itself, I couldn\u2019t resist. Overall, I found the film quite successful, and the actors were very well cast for the characters. Daisy, styled true … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Books and Oblivion”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3721,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":{"title":"B\u00fccher und das Vergessen - lesestunden","description":"Vor einiger Zeit habe ich mir die Verfilmung von Der gro\u00dfe Gatsby mit Leonardo DiCaprio angesehen. Eigentlich sehe ich mir kaum Filme an, nachdem mich das Buch"},"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_slim_seo_primary_term_category":0,"_slim_seo_primary_term_post_tag":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/vergessen.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}