On a Friday evening in March of last year, in a flat above a bakery in the Vieille Charité quarter of Marseille, Naïma Bouallam read the first thirty pages of Annie Ernaux's Les Années aloud to her partner, who had not yet read it.
She read in French. He listened in French, which is not the language he grew up in. It took an hour and forty minutes. They drank a bottle of cheap Côtes du Rhône between them. He fell asleep, briefly, somewhere on page nineteen, and she waited for him to wake up before continuing.
This is, she would later argue in a short essay for this magazine, one of the oldest forms of reading there is, and one of the least practiced now among adults.
There is a way of writing about reading-aloud that turns it into a virtue, and Bouallam does not want to do this. Reading aloud is not better than reading silently. It is different reading.
What is different about it, she suggests, is the rate. A page read aloud is read at roughly the speed at which the sentences were composed. A page read silently is read at the speed at which the eye can move.
The eye is faster than the composing hand. This is a hidden fact of silent reading, and it is the reason that many sentences which are wonderful on the tongue feel ordinary on the page.
Read Marilynne Robinson aloud, she suggests. Read W. G. Sebald aloud. Read the opening of Mrs. Dalloway aloud. The sentences come back into focus.
There is a related fact, less often noted, which is that reading aloud requires a second person. One can read aloud to oneself, and Bouallam sometimes does, but it is not the same exercise. The second person is the listening surface against which the prose tests itself.
The listener is not passive. The listener is, in her view, the most important reader in the room. She is the one for whom the sentences are being performed, and her attention or inattention is a kind of immediate criticism of the book.
A book that loses the listener at page twelve is, by this test, a book with a problem at page twelve. Sometimes the problem is the book's. Sometimes the problem is the listener's. The reader, reading aloud, has to make the call.
Bouallam and her partner have, over six years, read aloud to each other in three languages — French, Arabic, and English. They have read Ernaux, and Mahmoud Darwish, and Marilynne Robinson, and Helen Garner, and a slim Catalan novella by Maria Barbal that he had been carrying around in a translation she did not love.
Not every book has worked. Sebald, she reports, is hard to read aloud, because the sentences are too long for one breath, and the listener loses the syntactic thread before the period arrives. She has tried twice. Both attempts ended in laughter.
Cormac McCarthy is, by contrast, almost too easy. The prose is built for the voice. She has read the first hundred pages of The Road aloud and found that the listener does not even need the book in front of him to follow.
Henry James she has not yet attempted. She is saving him for a winter.
There are practical questions that come up when one starts reading aloud as an adult. How long a sitting. What time of day. Whether the listener should be allowed to read ahead in private, which Bouallam strongly opposes.
Her own rules, evolved over time, are these. Forty-five minutes is the maximum sitting; the voice tires after that, and so does the listener. After dinner is best, but not too late. The listener may not read ahead. The reader may pause, at any point, to look up a word.
There is one other rule, which is that the listener is allowed to say stop, and the reader is required to obey. They have stopped six or seven books this way. None of those books are now in the flat.
This is, she concedes, a kind of literary pruning that single readers do not enjoy. A book read alone can be put down without ceremony. A book stopped aloud has a small ceremony — the partner says stop, the reader closes the book, and the two people in the room agree, briefly, on something.
Agreement is not the goal. Bouallam has read aloud, gladly, books her partner disliked. He has listened to books he would never have chosen. What the practice produces is not consensus but shared attention.
Shared attention, she writes in the last paragraph, is the rarer commodity. Books, she suggests, are good at producing it.
She does not know whether this constitutes an argument for reading aloud. She knows only that on Friday evenings, in the flat above the bakery, she and her partner are reading Les Années, and that they are reading it together, and that the bottle of wine, by then, is usually empty.