Our addendums to creation

WALK into any bookstore, and one of the prominent shelves will be stuffed with books on how to be a writer. College courses devoted to writing have proliferated like mosquitoes in tropical swamps. The problem is that writing isolated from reading is a sure recipe for a debased literacy. Julien Gracq does away with this disastrous apartheid in the very title of his refreshingly iconoclastic "Reading Writing."

Almost 70 years, ago Gracq published his first book, "The Castle of Argol," which was immediately declared the first truly Surrealist novel by Andre Breton. Gracq, who turned 96 over the summer, is the most important living French writer. He is singular in his literary accomplishments. His novels "The Opposing Shore," "A Dark Stranger" and "Balcony in the Forest" remain as fresh, invigorating and moving as the day they were published. Interestingly, they were, for the most part, written during the almost 30 years he was a high school teacher. In many ways, he seems far more youthful than many contemporary novelists. The scope of his interests and the intensity of his insight into the actual practice of writing are wonderful companions as one reads.

Not only does Gracq refuse to consider writing and reading isolated from each other, but he also does not isolate them from arts such as music, painting, sculpture and film. While "Reading Writing" is divided into sections with headings such as "Dwellings of Poets" and "Literature and Cinema," these reflect more our society's almost perverse need for such distinctions. Gracq is well aware of the deficiency in our educational systems: "What is missing is a department of the relationship between the arts, a department of the Nine Muses, whose goal, for each age, would be to study not only the reciprocal influences of literature, music, sculpture, painting, architecture and today, cinema, but the secret hierarchy that presided in the mind of the artists and the public over these respective influences."

A review of a book like "Reading Writing" is always a partial failure, for it can never encompass the diverse and complex richness of it. A quotation is both a distortion and hopefully an excitement to the potential reader.