If
you love reading, you’ll love this book. Nancy Malone, a Roman Catholic nun in
the Ursuline order, has written an account of how our identities are shaped by
the books we read, and of how reading serves the spiritual need for reflection,
wonder, and communion. Walking a Literary Labyrinth is part biography,
part memoir, part essay, as Malone explores her own reading and spiritual life,
and her personal crises, including spiritual doubt, tuberculosis, and addiction
to alcohol. Malone likens reading to prayer and meditation. Anyone with
experience of either will recognize the experience of being lost in a story,
whether provided by a prayer like the rosary or by the attempt to suspend
narrative altogether in a search for oneness. Reading, according to Malone,
provides a similar experience.

The story of reading is a remarkable one indeed. The
practice of reading aloud, common up until the period of scholasticism, meant
that the reader had little opportunity to reflect while reading. Silent
reading, famously remarked on by St Augustine, introduced a new interiority to
readers, and it is this capacity of reading to direct our inner lives that is
the focus of Malone’s book. The book is structured to follow the trajectory of
Malone’s life. At each stage we hear of her literary influences and how they
interacted with the events of her life.

From
her adolescent experience of boys, smoking, and drinking, her entry to the convent,
and later emergence as a literary scholar, her illness, addictions and
recovery, Malone’s life is charted by books. Whether it is the Nancy Drew
mysteries, the romance of Scott Fitzgerald, the prescribed tomes of the convent
or the biographies, novels and non-fiction works she consumed voraciously as an
adult, books are both the milestones and inspiration of Malone’s life.

Malone
joined the Ursuline order in 1953, as a 21-year-old. For an inquisitive and
rebellious young woman the privations of convent life seem enormous. Prior to
Vatican II Roman Catholic teachings were unchallenged by the ideas of the
Enlightenment. Within the Ursuline cloisters this meant that that any reading
of modern or classical fiction, biography or history was proscribed. Yet Malone
recounts tenderly the long hours spent listening, reading and rereading works
of Catholic doctrine that most of us will never read. She read Thomas A Kempis’s
Imitation of Christ fourteen times. Once freed from the constraints of
prescribed reading Malone made up time. She caught up on the classics of
English literature, her regret at having missed out on these works as a younger
woman tempered by the greater appreciation of them in her maturity. The period
of her addiction is recounted with candor, and it comes as no surprise that the
AA 12 step manual, especially its individual stories, was her preferred reading
for some time. Through all of this Malone maintained her status as a nun, and
is still a practicing Ursuline, taking seminars and retreats on English
literature.

One
of the memorable concepts of the book is Malone’s idea of ‘providential
reading’; those books that we discover at just the right time in our lives, so
much so that we appear to have been guided towards them. Malone gives several
examples of her own providential reads, and probably we can all think of books
that appeared at just the right time.

I
would like to have read Malone’s views on the differences between short stories
and novels as a means of self-discovery. In her list of recommended reading she
mentions Joyce’s Dubliners, and refers to Alice Munro’s stories, but
there are no individual stories or collections recommended in their own right.
This is the more surprising given that the short story is often referred to as
an American literary form, providing the twenty-minute epiphany that the novel
can never provide. Middlemarch, another of Malone’s selections requires
a two-week retreat by comparison. The short story also seems more suited than
the novel to conveying the unanswered question, surely a cause of much
spiritual reflection.

Walking
a Literary Labyrinth is written in a
straightforward and engaging style, like an extended conversation. It is easy
to imagine meeting Malone for coffee and having an hour or two slip by immersed
in the world of words and their authors. Malone’s addition to literature will
add pleasure to your reading, and a considerable number of titles to your ‘must
read’ list.

© 2005 Tony O’Brien

Tony O’Brien M Phil., Lecturer, Mental Health Nursing, University of Auckland

Categories: General