The following piece is published as part of our TLM Young Writers series, a dedicated section of The London Magazine‘s website which showcases the work of exceptional young talent aged between 13-21, from the UK and beyond.

David Baghdasaryan

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Gravity’s Pull

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A year ago, when I was visiting Paris, I queued up waiting to enter the storied English-language bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, on the banks of the Seine, opposite the Notre Dame. The bookshop has been a meeting place for writers and readers for more than 70 years. I waited in line for no less than 25 minutes, and when I walked in, it was as though the period had collapsed by a sudden gravitational pull.

Once inside, I impulsively asked the cashier if they carried Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.”

“No,” he said.

Undeterred,  I walked past the totems of books into a cluttered cave, hoping to find a more collaborative employee who would be willing to scour the towering shelves and unearth the book. Another five minutes passed, and she finally appeared with a hefty copy, declaring it as the “last in Paris” and expressing her amazement at the novel’s enduring popularity.

In 1974, the Pulitzer jury was unanimous in its decision to award Pynchon’s seminal novel the Prize for Fiction, yet, the advisory board, offended by the novel’s content, reversed the judges’ decision and no prize was awarded that year. Few have the mettle to go through it.

The phenomenon of buying books and not reading them is, of course, not an uncommon one, especially with this particular novel which has such wide appeal among the cognoscenti. Let’s be honest, most of us who buy a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow are unlikely to read it within years after buying it. More often than not, the unattended book ages on a neglected shelf, an unfortunate fate also shared by my copy. Among many things invented by the Japanese, the term Tsundoku appears to characterize this very concept. Combining the terms tsunde-oku (to pile it up in the back) and dokusho (reading) provides an ideal definition for what is commonly referred to as book hoarding. Having originated in the second half of the 19th century, Tsundoku engenders the relationship between humans and their thirst for knowledge, which existed millennia before the invention of the Gutenberg press or the increased affordability of books. As humans, we treat any object that carries knowledge as a virtue whose intrinsic value must be protected, but this obscures the notion that acquisition does not automatically lead to understanding. A farmer in Medieval Europe would hardly comprehend, let alone speak any Latin, but might still cherish Latin scripture in the church due to its association with a vessel of elevated significance. My experience with Gravity’s Rainbow was no different. Having read James Joyce’s Ulysses a couple of weeks earlier, I was ready, so I thought, to take on Gravity’s Rainbow. While I was aware of the book’s general plot and, most importantly, of its complexity, my initial impulse was that of possession.

Almost a year has passed since my purchase, and I am still stuck on page 26. I have no plans of reading the novel in the foreseeable months. That is not to say that I have not tried. Every now and then, I would pick it up, wipe away the dust on the cover, and solemnly place it on my desk, letting the book guilt me into resuming reading. This method was not particularly effective, as I never went further than several pages at a time. It was not necessarily the book’s complexity that instilled fear in me, but rather my own consideration of a perfect time. On any given day, I would reject the idea of opening the book due to a series of mutually unconnected reasons. Whether it was university work or other obligations, there was always a more immediate activity to be done. Another justification arose from my belief that Pynchon’s novel deserved my undivided engagement, a scarce commodity in the modern world, where the constant blast of dopamine-inducing information reduces the collective attention span to that of a goldfish.

As I put off reading Gravity’s Rainbow, it became the central object of my anti-library, delineating the kind of reader I wanted to become. I considered its dusty cover. The book was a testament to utter potentiality, teleporting me into a future universe where I read for sheer joy and gave Pynchon my full attention. While I can hardly guarantee that my next attempt at reading the novel will result in success, it just might, and, therefore, I will keep trying.
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David Baghdasaryan is a writer and filmmaker currently pursuing his undergraduate studies at the American University of Armenia.