No Book but the World: A Novel Read Online Free

disturbing without being disagreeable. A boy peeping over his blankets in horror as rats dashed freely across his bed; a man in jerkin and tights hacking at thorns, his thighs a mess of bloody gashes; a hooded crone hauling herself up a stone tower on a shining rope of hair; a maiden splayed unconscious, cheeks flushed, her ice-blue gown tightly fitted through the bodice. It all lay in store for us, Freddy and me—I remember believing this quite matter-of-factly. Even as I made the distinction between pretend and real (I would not really grow up to become a princess, a witch, a wolf), still I believed the essence of these stories must in some way seep into or prophesy what our lives would become.
    Sometimes I wonder how things might have been different if a grown-up had read us those books. Might it have had a mediating effect? What if my own overly credulous renditions bore a kind of unnatural potency? I think of our mother’s voice, which possessed, even when speaking about ordinary things, a latent musicality, so that her words might rise and fall, glide and rest, carving out pleasant corners in which my attention liked to nestle. This vocal quality suggested a kind of mastery over the events she narrated, a completeness of perception that let me relax into my own spottier grasp of the world. Had the stories in our picture books come filtered through the voice of our mother, would they have reached our ears tamed, contained, stripped in some crucial way of implication? Would we have liked them as much?
    But reading to us was not one of the things in which our parents believed.
Reading
, our father used to pronounce with a kind of hammy horror,
is the scourge of infancy.
Also:
Books! What cheerless furniture!
This he liked to roar in mock dismay upon coming into the room and finding us sprawled on the couch among dozens of said objects. Sometimes, in an especially playful mood, he’d contort his face in a mask of revulsion, as if we were surrounded by actual vermin.
    We knew these utterances were not original. I understood them to be the words of “Jay-Jay,” whom I imagined to be an old and much esteemed friend of my father’s. I was eight or nine before I learned that Jay-Jay was actually the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, no pal of my father’s but his ideological hero, who’d died some two hundred years earlier. His book on education,
Émile
, had been the primary inspiration of my father’s own philosophy and, indeed, career. A reproduction of the Maurice Quentin de La Tour portrait of Rousseau hung behind the desk in my father’s office, and during my childhood I made a long and thorough study of it, determining always to my satisfaction that Jay-Jay had kindly eyes, a trustworthy forehead, a sympathetic, good-humored mouth.
    Much later, in college, when my disillusionment with my father was at its most excruciating, I set out to learn more about the philosopher and his life. It was only then that I discovered that the great philosopher, my father’s idol and model, had deposited his own five children in a foundling hospital.
    At any rate, our father didn’t forbid us to read. For all his blustery protestations, he didn’t even discourage it. Simply, books were one of the many things he thought we should be left to discover (or not) on our own.
    So it was Freddy and me and no one else up on the couch for long stretches of time, Freddy breathing with adenoidal impediment, the air ruffling thickly around his thumb, which he kept parked in the corner of his mouth, taking the occasional series of rapid sucks before letting it idle again; me enunciating schoolmarmishly (even though at five I had never set foot in a regular school, I somehow had a sense of the role and played it to the hilt). I had been prescribed glasses for amblyopia, and although I reviled them I never thought to rebel, but donned them each morning with a sense of duty that bordered on priggishness. What a homely sight we must have made,