Disembodied

Hannah Green: During spring vacation I read "War and Peace" day after day, all day long, sitting in the book-lined study of our house in Ohio, and when I was finished I threw the book down on the floor and myself on top of it and I wept with my face against the book. I wept for the book, and I wept because it was over and now I would have to come back into my real life again. I was desolate.

I still have that copy of "War and Peace" - time-worn and rain-warped and soft - with underlinings in the pale-purple ink I used in those days - frequent at the start, and then, gradually, as I became disembodied, absorbed into the book, disappearing altogether

From "Mr. Nabokov", The New Yorker, February 14, 1977

Born in 1927, Hannah Green is the author of "The Dead of the House" which first appeared as a series of sort novels in The New Yorker.

Photo location: Baan Huey Papok, Uthaitani province.