don’t judge a book

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The writer Arundhati Roy was the guest on Desert Island Discs this week. The presenter asked her whether it was true that she was granted complete control over the appearance of her bestselling debut novel The God of Small Things. ‘Granted?–I insisted on it!’ she began; ‘I was just a stubborn thing’. Her publishers had asked her what she would like from them. Her answer: ‘Complete design control: no saris, no tigers on my cover!’

Her comments resonated for me with those of another writer, Jhumpa Lahiri, who recently published an essay entitled The Clothing of Books. The clothing of books means their covers, and for Lahiri the cover brings with it a social anxiety that recalls the anguish she felt as a child caught between the clothing styles of her American schoolfriends and her Bengali parents. On becoming a writer, ‘I discovered that another part of me had to be dressed and presented to the world. But what is wrapped around my words–my book covers–is not of my choosing’.

Lahiri writes movingly about the strange sense of alienation from her own creativity that the cover sets in train. Designed by somebody else, suggesting a reading of the book and a projection of its meaning out into the world, a cover gives a book a new personality and makes it something of a stranger to its author. Lahiri yearns to have the book naked, without all the paratextual elements (author-mugshots, blurbs, snippets from reviews) with which we are now deluged. ‘I want the first words read by the reader of my book to be written by me’.

Lahiri cares so much about her books because she feels them to be, in some sense, part of her. A recent autobiographical work, In Other Words, has her photo on the cover, and this is fitting: ‘In the end the author is the book’. When she asks herself to imagine her ideal cover, it is a reproduction of a still life by Morandi or a collage by Matisse. Having written this thought down, she find herself the very next day, coming out of a building, confronted by posters of Morandi to her right and Matisse to her left. For a few moments she imagines herself ‘transformed into the pages of a book’. Some demand complete design control; others have it thrust upon them.

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