Deja vu

[desayunoencama]

I'm maybe 100 pages into W. Somerset Maugham's novel THEATRE and I'm struck by the sense that I've already read this.

This is one reason I do keep track of what I read. It happened last year when I had no memory of having read Henry James' THE ASPERN PAPERS until I started reading it again and though this was just too familiar and sure enough I'd read it back in 1999 (when I first started recording what I read). It also happened earlier this year when I started reading a Zilpha Keatley Snyder YA novel that was too familiar and sure enough, looking at my files I'd already read it a few years earlier.

Only occasionally do I get this sense, or at least this strongly, and it turns out that I hadn't yet read the book. The most clear memory of this is with Rita Mae Brown's cat mysteries. I quite like her writing, and have read almost all of her non-cat mysteries, many of which I at least enjoyed and some of which I quite like. (VENUS ENVY is absolutely dreadful, but otherwise she does a lot of things so right, in terms of complex and very human characters, sense of humor, the milieus she describes, her values, etc.)

Does this happen to you? Either the deja vu feeling, whether or not you've already read it, or the forgetting that you have in fact already read this...

(If I did read THEATRE it was from before I kept my book log, so I'm not sure. Although the deja vu feeling is so strong, and it's only increasing as I read on, so I think I will set it down on the assumption that I have, in fact, already read it...)

Comments

[rozk.livejournal.com]

Could it be because you saw the recent film of it as Being Julia?

[desayunoencama.livejournal.com]

Didn't even know there was a film of it, even under other name. Definitely didn't see it.

And it's definitely a deja vu of having READ the book before.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

Fair enough - it was just that the movie got a fair amount of coverage because Melanie Griffiths was nominated for an Oscar for it. I sometimes find that close adaptations of books bleed into my sense of the book quite a lot and then back again - the obvious example being the John Huston Maltese Falcon where, when I reread the book, I hear the characters with the voices of the actors from the film, and where my memory of the film falsely includes Bogart telling the story about the guy who ran away from his life only to create an identical one elsewhere...

Memory is tricksy, particularly when it comes to books and films.

[deliasherman.livejournal.com]

Since I have the memory of a new-born gnat, this happens to me fairly often--mostly with mysteries. It actually makes re-reading whodunits more pleasurable, since I never remember who did, even while the whole experience is faintly and comfortably familiar. Not that I don't like new books, mind--I do, very much. It's just sometimes that it's the second or even third time I've read them.

[(Anonymous)]

zilpha keatley snyder is awesome. i devoured her books when i was younger. and i emailed her through her website and she wrote back :)