I Murdered My Library (Kindle Single) (5 page)

Now
time gobbles up my life. I don’t need even the fraction of books on my shelves
– those pitifully empty shelves.

When
the Israeli novelist Amos Oz was a child, the son of a librarian, living in a
home choked with thousands of books, his ambition was to grow up to be a book.
Not a writer. ‘People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill
either.’ (Isaac Babel was murdered in 1940 in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow,
begging for a stay of execution so he could finish his novel. The Soviets
didn’t murder Vasily Grossman, they ‘arrested’ his book,
Life and Fate
,
and he did not live long enough to see it smuggled to the West and translated.)

But
you can’t kill books, Oz writes – this is page 22 of the UK edition of
A
Tale of Love and Darkness
,
published by Chatto, on the bottom shelf
of the bookcase to the right of my desk in my corridor study, randomly filed
between two Philip Roths,
The Human Stain
and
The Plot Against
America
; filed, actually, by size for the moment, until I have a few days
to order the whole, diminished collection:

However
systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy
will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner of an
out-of-the-way library somewhere, in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.

I’m
afraid to ask Chris, the manager of the Oxfam shop, what happened to my books.
I think some of them went to be pulped. It’s like the child’s story of the old
dog sent to live on a farm.
Buried
on a farm.

The
whole business of this move has made me massively insecure, blindsided everywhere.
I’m not writing a book at the moment; I don’t have the concentration – that’s
why I’m writing this. Everything is wrong, abnormal. Three quarters of the way
into my life, I’ve had the ground taken from under my feet. I have damaged my
connection to the little girl frightened of her Struwwelpeter book.

When
I began to write on a computer, when I abandoned the typewriter, I didn’t look
back. I don’t miss my turntable or my cassette player. I’m not a Luddite, I’m a
Modernist. But the books seem not to be – not even the Modernists themselves,
not James Joyce or Jean Rhys. A
part of the cliff has fallen into the sea. There are not enough books here. The
sight of the bare shelves shames me. What have I done?