The collaboration that is reading …

… Stories We Can’t See by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

We do not really “see” characters such as Anna Karenina or Captain Ahab, he concludes, or indeed the places described in novels, and insofar as we do perhaps see or glimpse them, what we are seeing is something we have imagined, not what the author saw.

That is why films based on books we have enjoyed often disappoint: because we imagined it all differently.