Tessa Hadley, the critically acclaimed author of five novels and two short-story collections, returns with her most accessible novel yet. The Past is an intimate story that follows four siblings on a three week long country holiday—a heady mix of love, jealousy, and rivalry that brings tensions and secrets to the surface of their otherwise idyllic lives. To celebrate the book's birthday today, Tessa stopped by to share her love of libraries.
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I went to the local library every week, up to the age of eleven, with the rest of my class at school. This was in England, in the nineteen-sixties. We were allowed to borrow three books each and I’d have read all mine by the time the next visit came around. I possessed few books of my own at home—borrowing them from the library was fundamental to becoming a reader. In my memory there’s something temple-like about that small late-Victorian branch library with its respectful hush, its incense of wood polish, its absorbed worshippers, its gothic windows too high for seeing out, its rituals and initiations: I knew from the beginning that I wanted to belong. On a rainy winter’s afternoon when the lights were on it was a little haven, a sanctuary. In the midst of the rough prose of adult life which we were beginning to learn, it seemed to me mysterious and encouraging that anywhere so substantial was dedicated to the private and inward act of reading—reading, which had already found me out, become one of the deepest channels of my relations to life.
In those days borrowers had tickets with pockets in them, yellow for children and pink for adults; there was a typed card inside every book, and a flap glued to the inside cover for a date stamp. I was in awe of the librarian who took out the cards and slipped them into our tickets and filed these away, then sternly stamped the date—no jolly condescending to novice readers then, or excesses of encouragement. Becoming a reader was a part of learning to be grown-up. I can still recover the different pleasurable sensations attached to each stage of that library visit: meandering along the sheer wealth of books on the shelves, trying things out, the desultory choosing, the beginnings of my mastery of the books’ order and its meaning. Each book’s small compact shape, smooth in its protective transparent plastic covering, was only an entrance to the infinite world stretching away inside it; on the way home, the three I had finally chosen would weigh down my bag with their promise—all those first pages hastily half-tasted and richly suggestive, those glimpsed sentences dense with new names and concrete detail.
Children aren’t critical readers in the adult sense, but that lack of criticism is never passive acquiescence. On the contrary, imagination leaps to meet each book, respond to what it promises, and fill in out of our own store whatever might be lacking in actual achievement. And I always knew reading was an initiation that couldn’t fail me, wouldn’t run out of power. Beyond the two children’s sections—fiction to the left, non-fiction to the right of the librarians’ station—three broad shallow steps, covered in yellow linoleum, led up to the collection of adult books. I wasn’t ready for that promotion yet, but I knew that it was waiting for me, when the time came.
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Thanks, Tessa! Let's all wish Tessa and The Past a happy book birthday! Be sure you grab a copy, on shelves today.
-Amanda
