Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering [Paperback]

Wendy Lesser (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 8, 2003

From the esteemed cultural critic and journalist Wendy Lesser, Nothing Remains the Same is a bibliophile's dream: a book about the pleasures and surprises of rereading, a witty, intelligent exploration of what books can mean to our lives. Compared with reading, the act of rereading is far more personal -- it involves the interaction of our past selves, our present selves, and literature. With candor, humor, and grace, Lesser takes us on a guided tour of her own return to books she once knew, from the plays of Shakespeare to twentieth-century novels by Kingsley Amis and Ian McEwan, from the childhood favorite I Capture the Castle to classic novels such as Anna Karenina and Huckleberry Finn, from nonfiction by Henry Adams to poetry by Wordsworth. Lesser conveys an infectious love of reading and inspires us all to take another look at the books we've read to find the unexpected treasures they might offer.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Lesser is the founding editor of the Threepenny Review and author of Pictures at an Execution: An Inquiry into the Subject of Murder and His Other Half: Men Looking at Women Through Art (among other titles). She defines herself here as a "self-employed, self-designated arbiter of cultural taste," but few of these 15 short essays match the intensity of her best work. Lack of enthusiasm repeatedly becomes the point here: one essay begins: "I was never very fond of either Pope or Wordsworth," while another notes "it was only when I found that both Anna Karenina and Middlemarch had failed to work their magic on me, this time around, that my diminished reaction took on a potential interest." James Joyce's Ulysses fails to compel. The tone throughout is unrelievedly personal ("Antony and Cleopatra was my favorite for a long time, and I still think it is one of Shakespeare's greatest plays"), which works well when the subject is close to home, as with Hitchcock's Vertigo, set in her home city: "My own ghost, in relation to this movie my own Carlotta, if you will is San Francisco.... Like Scotty, I am mourning a beloved who never really existed." Essays on John Milton, Henry Adams and George Orwell aim middle-to-low on the brow, sometimes with a dash of odd coyness: in a chapter on modern British novelist Ian McEwan, Lesser mentions a decade-old review she wrote of one of his books, stating, "I will spare you the entire review" and then goes on to quote a page and a half of it. Potential readers would do well to stick to the prolific Lesser's fresher and more enthusiastic The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Lesser, the founding editor of Threepenny Review and the author of five previous books, including The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters, joins memoir with literary criticism in this unusual work. From the perspective of middle age, she examines a few of her favorite books after the passage of 20 or 30 years and reflects on how her reactions to them have changed. Choosing works ranging from such classic novels as Don Quixote, Anna Karenina, and The Idiot to nonfiction by Henry Adams and George Orwell and poetry by Wordsworth and Milton, she presents literary criticism in an approachable, meaningful way. One of her most insightful essays reveals how age and theater experience have deepened her understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare's The Tempest and The Winter's Tale. Some works do not fare as well: maturity has not altered Lesser's impatience with the female characters in Eliot's Middlemarch, for instance. Lesser writes with intelligence, humor, and grace. Her contagious love of reading will encourage readers to take a new look at some of their favorite works. Recommended for public and academic libraries. Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (May 8, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618340815
• ISBN-13: 978-0618340811
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,885,258 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars On my 'most beloved' shelf., June 27, 2005

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Richard L. Pangburn (Bardstown, KY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering (Hardcover)

I read this when it first came out, and have reread it again several times since. Some of it I now know by heart, and it has become a part of me.

Which is to say, Wendy Lesser has affected my thinking about Art and the way we view Art through life. It has helped me rediscover books and movies that I had previously written off as a younger man. Some colleagues have told me that it changed their reading habits and enhanced their enjoyment of the many classics discussed too.

For instance, she devotes a chapter to the movie, Vertigo. It was a failure when it first came out:

"In 1958, when Vertigo came out, movies were not quite the willed. eternally accessible experience they are today. You couldn't just pop down to your local video rental place or order up the film online. You had to wait for the movie to appear in its own good time...then the movie was taken off the market for 15 years."

And audiences did not like the movie the first time because it was slow, slow, slow. Jimmy Stewart was having surreal experiences, a vertigo in which, on the screen, his figure in superimposed on a descending hardwood corkscrew, his hands out in a state of zombie paralysis.

When she saw it the first time, Lesser says she thought that Stewart's obsession with Kim Novak was silly, and the slow, slow, slow kiss, now famous for the 360-degrees turning camera against the surging music, particularly slow and ridiculous. Hokey and embarrassing.

It was fifteen years before she saw it again, and it was then a different experience. She says, "I was aware, even at the time, that I was getting the benefit of a second viewing. The first time I was too caught up in the suspense, and if that is your motive, the end of Vertigo can be a bit disappointing."

"But once you know how it ends, you are free to focus on the emotional progression of the film. For the first time I saw how much of the movie was about loss, and about second chances." Something she had learned to care about in the fifteen year gap between viewings. "What had seemed hokey and melodramatic to me before now seemed tragic and true: this was what love was like."

And what was she learning from this second viewing of Vertigo, this story of obsession and ghosts and love and loss?

"Well, all of the usual things that those of us who have ever had their hearts broken learn. That you temporarily lose yourself when you lose somebody you love. . .that you go looking for your former self as much as for your missing half. . .That love is mysterious and archaic, with something almost ghostly about it, so that being powerfully in love seems to take you back to some point of origin, back beyond your childhood to a past you couldn't actually have known."

"We are soul mates, we say. I seemed to have known him forever, we say. These are the banal, colloquial expressions of a feeling that Vertigo, with all of its dramatic excess, subtly and skillfully captures."

"At the heart of the movie is a ghost story that doesn't really exist, not in the obvious sense, but because it has largely been made up by a character in the movie. Galvin Elster constructs the tale of Carlotta Valdes, a long-dead woman whose spirit is now haunting Madeleine Elster, driving her toward madness and suicide." He hires Jimmy Stewart to follow her and observe her strange behavior.

But the story he makes up is part true, as he weaves in facts and places that Jimmy Stewart knows, and for those living at least in San Francisco, they know too. Doing this creates pegs of reality on which to hang the ghost story upon with the audience, just as the real books and real history that John Harwood's protagonist mentions in her creates pegs for us.

"So Jimmy Stewart's character learns from a local antiquarian book dealer that there was indeed a Carlotta Valdes, a San Francisco woman who was abandoned by her rich lover, and whose grave can be found at Mission Dolores. This part of the story is true, in the sense that Gavin did not make it up; it is true, that is, in the context of the movie, which is a made-up story of things that happened in real San Francisco."

"Jimmy Stewart discovers that there is also a portrait hanging in a local gallery called Portrait of Carlotta, and the woman he takes to be Madeleine closely resembles it, down to the rosebud bouquet she carries, the twist she puts in her chignon, and the strikingly individual piece of jewelry she wears around her neck."

Gavin explains to Stewart that Madeleine is Carlotta's granddaughter, and that she inherited the jewelry.

The first time we see the movie, we are with Jimmy Stewart; we believe, or a part of us believes, in the ghost story. The first time we see the movie a part of us is let down at the end when we discover that it has been a con. A part-con containing fragments of reality.

"We knew going into this book that it is a ghost story and that ghosts do not exist, just as we know that movies are a temporary suspension of belief; but while Vertigo is just a movie, and The Ghostwriter is just a book, there are feelings in these stories that ring true to us and enter our reality. Hence we become involved, we care, we have a rooting interest in what happens.

In the movie, we discover that the Madeleine he lost and the Judy he now has found are the same person--this has to dawn on the viewer, the movie never tells us.

Like Judy, we in the audience continue to hold on to something from the Carlotta plot even though it has been proven a fake. This particular Hitchcock device is the very opposite of a MacGuffin: it is a story element so powerful that even after it has ceased to function in the mystery it persists in ghostly form in our imaginations.

It is bigger than Gavin 'Elster, who created it, and much bigger than Judy, who embodied it. When we think about Kim Novak in this movie, it is Madeleine we remember, not Judy. . .And because Madeleine exerts this powerful hold on us--from beyond the grave, as it were--we understand not just why Jimmy Stewart can't love Judy for her down-to-earth self, but also why Madeleine herself can't let go of Carlotta.

So the made-up story of a woman inhabited by her own dead ancestress comes to be as real, or as important, as the central love plot doubly enacted by Jimmy Stewart. As is not really the right connective here: they lend each other importance because they are in some way the same plot.

The longing to be haunted by something richer and more mystical than one's own daily existence--that is what Vertigo so cunningly enables us to feel. You can call it romantic love, or the movies, or fiction, or ghosts, or history (Vertigo at various times calls it all of these), but whatever you decide to call it, you will not be able to rationalize it away by pointing to its invisibility, its patent nonpalpability. Whatever it is, it is there even when it is not there."