Ways of Seeing

There are books that we read, books that we remember, and then there are books that somehow become part of us. They acquire the texture of particular years, particular people, classrooms and places.

If I look at the books on my shelves, I realise that they are less a collection of favourites than a group of friends I have met along the way. They speak, in different voices, about courage and conformity, childhood and memory, love and loss, injustice and freedom. And perhaps most importantly for me, they are books that urge me to look more closely at people and the world around us.

Having spent nearly three decades at Welham Girls’ School, I suppose I have developed a soft corner for books that explore childhood and adolescence with literary sensitivity. Watching young girls grow into young women over the years has made me conscious of how much lies beneath the surface of those formative years. The best of these books do more than capture the experience of being young, they help us understand it.

A novel that sits closest to my heart is Château de ma mère, a memoir by the French novelist, playwright and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol. The book has lived with me not only as a reader but also as a teacher of the French language. I have taught it for years to students in Classes XI and XII. I have taken my students with me into Pagnol’s Provence, sharing his childhood memories, his landscapes, his mischief and his extraordinary tenderness for a vanished world. There is something deeply moving about the way memory turns ordinary childhood experiences into treasures. Pagnol has never failed to provoke in me a curious mixture of tenderness and rage. Tenderness for the child remembering, and rage at the irretrievability of what has been lost. Perhaps that is why the book feels so personal.

A little nondescript book on the face of it, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is equally profound. It is one of those books that appears deceptively simple until you return to it as an adult. As a child, it seems like a whimsical story. As an adult, its simplicity becomes almost unbearable in its profundity, especially when you have the luxury of reading it in French. It speaks of love, friendship, responsibility, loneliness and the strange blindness of grown-ups. It is plain yet complex, a children’s book that perhaps adults need more urgently than children do. I return to it because it reminds me that growing older should not mean becoming less capable of wonder.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is another of my favourite, an extraordinary read that can change the way one thinks about perspective. Christopher is a truly singular character, whose remarkable eye for detail and uncompromising honesty make him see the world with a logic that others often overlook. His world is ordered differently from the world around him, and that difference forces the reader to question what we casually call “normal”. It reminds its reader that every person arrives with a mind that works in its own way. What looks like defiance to one person may be distress to another and what looks like indifference may be an entirely different way of processing the world.

There is something deeply affecting about Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. It makes me think about how easily we become defined by the roles we inhabit, and how difficult it can be to recognise what they have cost us. Stevens, the butler at the heart of the novel, is not someone one can easily dismiss or judge. Perhaps that is what makes his story so poignant. It leaves me wondering how often, in doing what is expected of us, we put aside the things that matter to us personally, assuming there will always be time to return to them. Ishiguro captures the quiet sadness of a life in which some realisations come a little too late.

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a book I picked up almost in passing, and I was immediately hooked. It opened up another world for me, that of Africa, its politics, its faith, its silences and its contradictions. What stayed with me most was the way Adichie gives voice to people living within structures they did not create but must somehow navigate. I have always been drawn to literature that allows us to cross borders without travelling. African literature, at its best, does exactly that. It unsettles the comfortable assumptions we carry about other societies and sometimes about ourselves.

A poignantly feminist work that was given to me as a gift was The Frozen Woman by Annie Ernaux. It explores a more difficult territory, that of a woman negotiating the expectations placed upon her. Ernaux’s unsentimental examination of marriage, domesticity, motherhood, work and identity is uncomfortable precisely because it is so recognisable. There is no grand melodrama. Instead, there is the slow freezing of a self beneath the accumulated expectations of what a woman is supposed to be. It made me think about how easily roles can become identities, and how important it is for women, particularly young women, to retain a sense of self even while inhabiting the many roles life asks of them. It is a quiet book, but its questions are not quiet at all.

And those questions lead me to another work, Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, a modern retelling of Sophocles’ Greek tragedy, in which the conflict between individual conscience and society’s expectations becomes impossible to ignore. Antigone’s refusal to surrender her conscience, even in the face of Creon’s authority and devastating consequences, is particularly compelling. Anouilh’s version is especially interesting because it does not allow us the comfort of an uncomplicated moral victory. Creon, too, has his arguments. He speaks for order, responsibility and the difficult business of governing. Antigone speaks for something more absolute: the right not to compromise one’s deepest convictions. What makes the play endure is that neither duty nor defiance is presented as an easy answer.

Émile Zola’s Germinal offers another stark portrayal of life in the coal-mining communities of nineteenth-century France. Zola captures the brutality of poverty, the indignity of exploitation and the struggle of ordinary people to preserve their dignity. What is striking is his refusal to romanticise his characters. His miners are flawed, desperate and often defeated, yet bound by a shared longing for a life beyond mere survival. Germinal has stayed with me for its unflinching reminder that it is easy to speak of opportunity and dignity without acknowledging those denied them. It leaves one asking how much suffering a society can tolerate before it is compelled to change.

Perhaps this is a good place to return to a very different kind of book, a small volume of Wordsworth’s poems that has a permanent place on my bedside table. It is an Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets edition, picked up at Blackwell’s during one of my visits to Oxford. I return to it not so much to read as to disconnect, to step away from the weariness and noise of the day and immerse myself in the imagery of his words. The World Is Too Much with Us feels uncannily relevant in today’s world, while A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal carries a stillness that I find deeply moving. At the end of a long day, I can open the book almost anywhere, read a few lines, and feel the world slow down.

Perhaps what I value most about Wordsworth is his ability to make us look again at things we have stopped noticing. There is something comforting about returning to a familiar poem and finding that it speaks to you differently, simply because you have changed.

And finally, there is The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. This is the book I would take with me if I could keep only one. I will never quite finish reading it because I don’t think it is a book one finishes. It is a book one returns to. I can open it at almost any page and find something that meets me differently, depending on where I am in my life. When I have ten minutes, it gives me ten minutes. When I have an hour, it gives me an hour. It does not demand that I read it from beginning to end. It simply waits. Gibran’s language has a lyricism that seems to drip with the essence of something larger than the words themselves. What astounds me most is the extraordinary economy of it. Profound truths expressed without the weight of explanation.

Perhaps that is why this motley bunch of books belongs together on my shelves. They have all, in different ways, taught me to look beyond the obvious: at the child behind the behaviour, the woman behind the role, the stranger behind the stereotype and the desperation behind the defiance.

And perhaps that is what my shelves really hold.

Not books, but ways of seeing.