What's your 'One Book'?

The 'what-are-you-reading?' question is always an entertaining one to go back to.

The One Book Notion

This post (and some recent conversations while traveling) brought back memories of an almost-certainly-not-unique concept that first dawned on me many decades ago while in the Durbanville Library; the notion of "The One Book".

As an aside, in those days, long before ebooks or easy online access to long-tail physical books, libraries were places where some of us spent many happy hours.

Having, during those high school days, noticed that the library frequenters constituted a small percentage of the population - and with many people having been excluded because of skin colour nonsense - the One Book question was:

Are there books that, if people only ever read 'this' one book, they would have gained insights into some important parts of the human condition?

The Evident Answer

Firstly, it is obvious that this One Book would (is/was/will) for many people, be the holy books such as the Bible, Quran, and others.

Even so, one is often surprised at how few people have actually properly and completely read the texts that underpin their religions. There is a no-book crowd.

Which secular books could qualify though?

The List

Here is a very short list of One Book contenders (some of which have been mentioned before) with short inclusion justifications. True, many of these are possibly 'difficult' to read, but ditto the religious texts.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

This novel covers the complex life-decisions that all of us have to make, including choices between (on the one hand) doing the things that we know we have to do, versus (on the other hand) doing those things that we cannot not do. How often do we then choose the latter option.

One example of the former option:

“Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the stepmother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.”

One example of the latter option:

“The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating them, till they are left living with half a heart and half a lung.”

Stoner by John Williams

While many novels relate stories of heroism and/or heroic failure, Stoner truly is the story of an unremarkable person. Williams's very deep insight there is astounding. The novel describes a mundane life, full of disappointments. Yet it is an utterly compelling read. Most of us can find parts of ourselves there.

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”

Don Quixote by Cervantes

Between the tragically misguided heroism of Moby Dick's captain Ahab and the, somehow aspirational, inconsequentiality of Stoner, one can find a third novel that also describes us perfectly.

Don Quixote deeply mocks our ineptitude when we aspire to idealistic greater callings while simultaneously applauding our imagination as well as the eventual growth that many of us experience after constant failure.

“For neither good nor evil can last forever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.”

“It is not the responsibility of knights errant to discover whether the afflicted, the enchained and the oppressed whom they encounter on the road are reduced to these circumstances and suffer this distress for their vices, or for their virtues: the knight's sole responsibility is to succour them as people in need, having eyes only for their sufferings, not for their misdeeds.”

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

This is a simple novella: Gregor wakes up one morning and discovers that he has been turned into an insect. One can ascribe may interpretations, such as how to exist in a society that vacillates between not caring about you and actively wanting to destroy you and what it means to be human.

“The sister played so beautifully. Her face was tilted to one side and she followed the notes with soulful and probing eyes. Gregor advanced a little, keeping his eyes low so that they might possibly meet hers. Was he a beast if music could move him so?”

More?

Also, pretty much any of Dostoyevsky's books, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and Faid ud-Dinar Attar's The Conference of the Birds, (and locally) Elsa Joubert's Die Swerfjare van Poppie Nongena (the Afrikaans version, please, for the full impact and use of language), JM Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (which is better than his Disgrace), Andre P. Brink's Kennis van die Aand (again, the Afrikaans version, please), and many more.

And, the wild-card

What about a book that you will not find on most other lists such as these, namely Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet? The novel, in a twisted magic realism manner, inter alia (there's a lot more to it, hence its inclusion here), described and satirised how the dominance of people of Indian origin - Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Neal Mohan, etc. - would eventually play out in the West. Remember this was written in 1999.

Lastly, the classics

There are many good reasons why some of the oldest classics still survive: Homer's Odyssey, The Tale of Genji, and many more. Each of these classics will, forever, be worthy of being a One Book.