A Book About a Book

I love books about books. Here’s one that I find endlessly fascinating. It was a beautiful work when it was published in 2004 but like so many things in the world, The Red Book by Barbara Lehman unpacks in a whole new way in this era of Covid. It’s about travel and the imagination—a link we’re forced to make today as real travel continues to be fraught with difficulty. It’s about seeing others, in a time when reaching out to people has never been more important.

Its elegant shape, the way it plays with perspective and distance, its unobtrusively androgynous main character, the drama of the trip via a bunch of balloons—there are so many moments that invite us to visit and revisit this little gem.

Perhaps above all, I love the last page, a single in which a man on a bicycle is seen pedalling away. He looks back and is that suspicion on his face, or is he embarrassed at the thought he might have been spotted picking that book up? Who’s he looking at anyway? Us, the readers? Never mind; my eye’s on the book tucked under his arm.

I read that page as a recognition that grownups don’t always get the imaginative power of children, but they’re not beyond picking up a bright red book when it falls into their lives. And maybe, just maybe, this man with the expression that can be read in many ways, is going to be surprised when he opens this book. Is he perhaps going to find, not this story, but whatever story it is that he needs?

From Fahrenheit 451 to The Great Good Thing, from The Shadow of the Wind to A Child of Books—books about books get me every time. At the end of two years like no other two years I can think of in my life, and the beginning of a new one with a course no one can predict, The Red Book feels oddly comforting.