A last read of a dying book

The book belonged to my late grandmother, and still contains some notes of hers, written in a fountain pen. They’re not academic study notes, or anything. It looks like a household budget. But the book carries her spirit.

It’s almost a hundred years old, this book, a faded red hardcover. The binding is coming loose from the spine, and the leaves have a frangible, delicate texture, like they could crack and disintegrate at any time.

Every time I open the book, I feel I am damaging it, even while I try to read its timeless contents. I am damaging it. After every read, the corners seem a bit more frayed, the spine peels off a bit further…

But I can’t help myself. I must read it. I may be the first person to read this book in 60 years. Perhaps only a handful of people have ever read it – my grandmother, my mother and I. Looking at it now, I’m pretty sure I will be the last to read it.

Shakespeare’s body of work is easily accessible. I could find copies of the Henry VI plays I am currently wading through at any school bookshop. So it’s not the content. It’s the book!

This object, containing as it does the essence of my English-speaking literary heritage, also contains me. It was my people who read this book. The insights I gain into human nature through Shakespeare’s account of the English War Of The Roses … those insights were shared by my grandmother, perhaps back when she was teaching literature at St John’s College back in the 1930s.

Maybe she would still dip into the compendium in later years, when she had moved to Port St Johns in the Transkei to marry my grandfather. She must have passed the book down to my mother, the only one of her family to attend university. My mom must have used it as a reference book during her studies at Rhodes in Grahamstown, as it was then.

I remember finding the tome on my parents’ towering book case in the study, some time during my early adulthood. You don’t see the full works of Shakespeare in a single volume too often. There were many gaps in my Shakespeare knowledge, and I snapped up the book, resolving to return it once I’d finished. It would become my living inheritance.

I think that was about 20 years ago. I’m almost halfway now. At my pace, reading all the Shakespeare will probably be my life’s work. Perhaps with some typing of my own thrown in there too.

It’s not easy reading either. The pages are split with a column rule and the font is an outdated serif, perhaps 5 points high. I battle through it, completing about a page or two, whenever I can rally myself for a reading session.

But read I must, with trembling fingers, squinting over the text, feeling the pages gently dissolving on the stitching as I fearfully turn the leaves. I am destroying my heritage, even as I take it in, as I try to keep it alive.

Then I replace the book on my own bookshelf, where it now lives. I put it there as if to rest, so it can steel itself for the next leg. Once I have made it through heavy Henry history plays, things may get easier for both of us. The poems at the back may be a gentle shakedown, a pleasant outro to the project. But it may be years before we get there.

I have returned to my task again recently, after an absence of years. I remember when I met the woman who would be my wife for a while; she was impressed that I read Shakespeare. Ironically that seemed to fall away during our marriage.

Now, for whatever reason, I have returned to The Collected Works, this book that I inherited. To get through it, to savour its universal truths, to absorb its wisdom. As I do so, I will reconnect with my family, with our history, from England, via rural South Africa, to the cities…

Perhaps one day my daughter will read the book, but I doubt it. I feel its decay, its disintegration, as if I am reading the book into myself, literally consuming it. Perhaps, in four or five years’ time, when I’m done, I will replace the book on the shelf for the last time and it will become just a reminder, a symbol. An icon of the culture it holds and represents, for all its glory and its shame.

Until that day, it can still function as a text, to share understanding, to teach, to entertain. Its pages still turn. But I feel, as I turn them, that this is the last read…

Hagen Engler. Picture: Supplied

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