hope for bookkeepers
When Don Quixote is dubbed a knight – a key moment in the history of the novel – the local innkeeper swears him in on an account book. Balzac is known to have kept on his bookshelf, beside the published edition of his Contes Drolatique (Droll Tales), a black-bound volume titled Comptes Mélancoliques (Melancholy Accounts): a compendium of his debts. What is the secret relationship between double-entry bookkeeping and the novel?
In the story Elif Batuman tells, these two writing practices originate from a single historical moment and a single historical urge: the impossible desire to write at the rate of life itself. Cervantes, who worked for seven years as a bookkeeper for the Spanish Armada, was the first to give novelistic shape to this desire – which Balzac, an erstwhile clerk, experienced perhaps more intensely than any other novelist. This lecture will trace the theme of double-entry in the life and work of these two literary giants.
(LRB)
