When I read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground at school, it was like fireworks going off in my head’ … Claire Messud. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
Books
that
made me
Claire Messud: ‘Reading Dostoevsky made fireworks go off in my head’
The book I am currently reading
I’m just starting All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski, about the last months of the second world war in East Prussia. Kempowski is also the author of Das Echolot, the extraordinary multi-volume compendium of interviews, testimonials and documentation about the second world war that surely served as an inspiration for Svetlana Alexievich’s writings about Russia – only one volume of which has been translated so far.
The book that changed my life
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. When I read this novel in my last year of high school, it was like fireworks going off in my head. I’d always known I wanted to write fiction, but I hadn’t known that fiction could do this, too – that it could illuminate your darkest self, the paranoia, fear and shame you didn’t want anyone to know about. And hilariously, too.
The book I wish I’d written
There are plenty of these. The difficulty is choosing just one. How about a single Shakespeare play – King Lear, or Hamlet? Or Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; or Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye; or Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, or any collection by Alice Munro? Just for starters.
The book that had the greatest influence on me
Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser. Bernhard influenced WG Sebald, and Sebald is another writer whose work is always in my mind. Between them, they set a course for many contemporary European and English-language writers. Their influence on some is highly visible; on others less immediately so. In my case probably the latter, but it’s there.
The book that is most under/overrated
Where to start? A lot of nonsense gets wildly hyped; a lot of great books get overlooked. I certainly wish people read Willa Cather more than they do.
The book that changed my mind
I’ve long thought of myself as someone who doesn’t like historical fiction. And it’s true, I dislike a lot of it. I tend to agree with Henry James (“the ‘historic’ novel is, for me, condemned … to a fatal cheapness … ”). But then I read Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, her masterpiece, and was amazed. I feel that way also about Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. These two extraordinary writers changed my mind.
The last book that made me cry
I cry like a tap, I’m afraid, to the hilarity of my family. I’m not sure what book last set me off; but one that’s guaranteed to make me weepy is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. When my kids were smaller, I reread this beautiful, mysterious and sad story over and over again with them, after years of not doing so. Even now, I read it to myself every so often. And get teary every time.
The last book that made me laugh
Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher is a novel entirely written in recommendation letters. Its protagonist is a sad creative writing professor at the fictional mid-western Payne University. After years of teaching, I write a lot of recommendation letters, and Schumacher’s parodies sound alarmingly close to the real thing …
The book I couldn’t finish
Although I’ve tried at least three times, I’ve never got through Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Playful post-modernism avant la lettre, it ought surely to be exhilarating and delicious, but each time I found it a total slog and renounced. It’s probably been 20 years since my last attempt.
The book I’m ashamed not to have read
There are too many of these. Should the honour go to The Red and the Black by Stendhal? Or to Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow? Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate? Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique? Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings? The embarrassments are legion. But I’m not dead yet, so hopefully will read some of them.
The book I give as a gift
In the past year, I’ve given Michelle Kuo’s Reading With Patrick to at least half a dozen people. It’s a beautifully written memoir about Kuo’s experience (as an Asian-American and the child of immigrants) tutoring a young African American man in jail in Mississippi for a year. Together they read novels, essays and poems, starting with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis, and ending with Walt Whitman. Along the way, both Kuo and her student learn about themselves and about the transformative and liberating power of language. Never sentimental, profoundly self-aware, inspiring and tragic in equal measure, this book should be required reading for us all.
My comfort read
Rereading Tolstoy is always a joy, Anna Karenina perhaps most of all. It may sound a bit mad to suggest that it’s a “comfort read”, seeing as it doesn’t end so well for Anna. But reading it serves, for me, to conjure the pleasures of reading in my youth – that delicious sense of falling into a world so fully and lucidly constructed that you’re utterly at ease and wholly immersed. Tolstoy wants you wholly to trust his narration, and you do. It’s calm, luminous, precise and humanly true. And funny. What more could a reader ask for?
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