Tales That Are Right From the Start

A dozen years ago, I remember hearing the Israeli writer Amos Oz compare writers to shopkeepers. “I am like a grocer,” he said. “Every day I go into my study and open the store. Some days there are customers, some days there are not. But if I don’t open the store, surely no one will come.” A shelf full of glorious novels is testimony to Oz’s way with dry goods.

Now, in a new book of essays, “The Story Begins,” Oz has taken up a new profession, or at least a new metaphor--the writer as lawyer. “Where does a story properly begin?” he asks in his introduction. “Any beginning of a story is always a kind of contract between writer and reader.” In a series of interconnected essays, Oz examines 10 contracts or, more specifically, the opening statements of 10 novels and short stories, some of them monuments and some more hidden treasures.

Included are the famous openings of Gogol’s “The Nose,” in which the barber Ivan Yakovlevich discovers the proboscis of one of his customers inside his breakfast roll, and Kafka’s “The Country Doctor”--a doctor, a blizzard, a medical emergency and the timely discovery of an infernal team of horses in a pigsty. Also included are the openings of novels by two Israeli writers, S.Y. Agnon and S. Yizhar; “La Storia,” by the Italian Elsa Morante; and the first paragraphs of lesser-known works by Anton Chekhov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Raymond Carver.

“There are, of course,” Oz warns with Jarndycian glee, “all sorts of contracts, including those that are insincere.” For the most part, he has chosen stories in which the contract between writer and reader seems to be one thing and turns out to be something quite different. Broken contracts, crooked lawyers and fraudulent defendants, after all, make better reading than straight shooters. “In ‘Moby Dick,’ for example,” Oz explains, “there are many adventures, but also many delicatessen items not mentioned on the menu, not even hinted at in the opening contract (‘Call me Ishmael’), but conferred upon you as a special bonus--as though you bought an ice cream and won a ticket to travel around the world.”

Oz begat these essays from courses that he has taught at high schools and universities in both Israel and the United States. They belong neither to the library of literary criticism (although Oz draws some interesting interpretations out of his subjects, particularly in his contemporary reading of the lapidary beginnings of Theodore Fontane’s “Effi Briest”) nor to the studio of creative writing (although many writers could learn much about opening moves from the grand masters whom Oz cites). Rather, they are worthy introductions to the public at large on the Art of Reading.

There is, perhaps, a danger to turning the pastime of reading into an art, as Oz warns in his discussion of Garcia Marquez’s “Autumn of the Patriarch.” “The reader who approaches this novel armed with decoding chisels is likely to miss what the reader who approaches it with wild laughter will find, and the other way around.”

Nevertheless, Oz has a larger message to sell. Decrying the late-century pressures “to read five pages per minute . . . to scan the page horizontally . . . to skip the details and to reach the bottom line speedily,” he presents his volume as an “introduction to a course in slow-reading: the pleasures of reading, like other delights, should be consumed in small sips.” No longer the lawyer, here is Oz the sommelier or, better yet, Oz the consummate grocer, taking us by the hand, not through his own store, but among the barrows in the market, saying, “Look at the scales on this Kafka,” or, “Here--this is what a Chekhov should smell like!”