1984
 
Some books float around in my memory, enjoyed, but detached from any time or place. Others are grounded in the surroundings I read them in. One such book is 1984 by George Orwell. I was on a trip across Spain with my parents. I read many books during that trip. I read sitting on the back seat of the car and at the terrace of restaurants. I read lying on hotel beds and on beach towels. In a deserted, parched town South of Barcelona, our car broke down. Above the ditch near the car service, I sat on the stubby yellow grass and read. Apart from the famous 'Big Brother is watching you' I don’t remember much of the plot. For me, 1984 is the smell of petrol and car engine oil. It is the blazing sun and the air pulsating with ripples of heat. It is the sound of engines choking and revving, the bangs of metal hammering that interrupted the distant scratch of a radio.
 
I didn’t read Lolita by Nabokov until years later – in a time and place unremembered – but it also reminds me of this: I felt the sweat beneath my knees and the scratch of the dry grass on my bare legs, below my sky-blue dress that seemed to get shorter every day. Even without looking up from the page, I was aware of the workers leering at my legs whenever they came out to the front yard and poked around scattered car parts. There was something dangerous and disturbingly sexy about those unshaven men lifting rolled-up cigarettes to their lips with an oil-black hand. I was thirteen.
 
I know I was thirteen, because the year was 1984. “But I have nothing to read!” I had whined as we packed for our trip. “Why don’t you take books from here then?” my Mum offered. Casually pointing to the bookshelves in my parents’ bedroom, she opened the world for me. I was awed: rows and rows of books, mysterious and appealing, with covers colourful or stern, authors’ names plain or exotic, Robert Sabatier next to Ismail Kadare.
 
About twenty years later, I did some cleaning in what had become my room during my visits back to France. Using a step-ladder, I reached above the bookshelves and opened the top cabinet that locked with a key. Behind piles of yellowed newspaper clippings and photo albums, I discovered another row of books. There were a few trashy detective stories, a couple of erotic novels by a Chinese writer whose name I can’t remember, and previously forbidden treasures like Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence and Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen. As I read them, I sometimes thought “I see why these were locked up when I was little”. I enjoyed those books. I felt comfortable with them. I felt grown-up. I realized how much I had read, and how much I had lived, since 1984.
 

* Ariane Synovitz says "Even though I am a native French speaker, I enjoy writing fiction in English as a hobby. I currently live in Prague, Czech Republic."