Literature and the Family

Prominently shelved, scattered about, and tucked away in forgotten places all over my house is an untold number of books. They can usually be found in little clusters with some type of thematic cohesion – such as the interests of a certain individual or pertaining to a certain era – and all reveal something about my family, its members, and its secrets. Packed onto a wide set of shelves over the TV, as if enticing the viewer to higher forms of entertainment, are the classics that my mother accumulated while at university. This is the literature that she values and she revisits it multiple times to access the worlds described within. My father began collecting books later, with embossed leather covers and pages that smelled of the passage of time, which I remember hunting for together when I was a child in antique markets and thrift stores.

This is what is visible in our house, the inheritors of English literature and history pre-1960. My family lives in Canada while all of our relatives live in England – in ways that are too difficult to think about for the purposes of writing a blog, these books provide a connection, both familial and patriotic, to a life that was left behind. Down in the basement however, a dim and unpleasant place, is where books are hidden away. There are boxes of children’s books and shelves containing bestsellers and other dubious items. The children’s books are mostly mine but some are my mother’s – some we both read as children – families grow and literature perseveres. Two large boxes sent from England gather dust in a corner, they arrived years ago but for fear of provoking some unwanted emotion I don’t ask why they haven’t been opened. Sometimes I wonder about the nature of the books I know they contain, books that were written, read, and perhaps affected the course of events in a family history that I don’t even know the half of.

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