Pierre Bayard's toy of the mind (odd, isn't it, how jeu d'esprit sounds classier?) was published, in Paris, as Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus? in February 2007.

It was a slow news day in Britain and the story was picked up in the national press. A professor at the University of Paris had confessed to talking about (nay, lecturing on) books all his professional life without having read, to name names, Proust, Musil, Joyce (and, bizarrely, Zane Grey). The crème of the unread (unreadable?) crème.

Bayard doesn't in point of fact “confess” - he vaunts his unreading, he sky-writes it: “Because I teach literature at the university level, there is, in fact, no way to avoid commenting on books that most of the time I haven't even opened.”

I love that “because”.

I was flattered when, on that same day, I was asked to do a blog on the subject for a newspaper (must have been a slow blog day). More flattered when the BBC rang - would I comment: usual pitiful fee? Glad to. And I was mightily flattered when a big publisher, dangling an amazing row of zeroes, asked me to do an English version - Sutherland's Unreadables. Anything some Frog prof can do, I can do better. I was 20,000 words in, grinding my gears a bit, practically tasting those zeroes, when a friend asked me, tactfully: “Why are you doing this - don't you realise what people will say about you?”

His point was not that I was unqualified, but that some less sympathetic souls might think me overqualified when it came to bluffery.

Then, to cap it all, in The New York Review of Books, Hermione Lee (damn her), reviewing my latest effort, How to Read a Novel, sneered that it should more properly be called “How to Talk about Novels You Haven't Read”.

I repudiate the allegation, of course. But - despite all those zeroes and labour - I politely backed away. The publisher passed the project on to some braver author. You'll be able to read it next spring. Or talk about it. Or both.

In the meantime, we have a translation of the original. Bayard belongs to the dandy school of French literary criticism. He skims, fakes, and bluffs with truly Parisian panache. His epigraph is from Oscar Wilde: “I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.”

Bayard discourses on “non-reading” with wit. Perhaps the jest runs a little thin after a while, but, undeniably, he has style. His students, of course, may feel otherwise. They perhaps subscribe to the naive view that teachers should know whereof they teach. They should at least open the books. A class action suit may be called for. But can the students claim higher moral ground? His liveliest tutorials, Bayard says, have been about books neither he nor his tutees have read.

This translation rather clumps, I fear. It's not the fault of the translator: just that dandyism doesn't cross the Channel all that well. Like fine wine, it doesn't always “travel”. Imagine Martin Amis in a beret and matelot singlet with a string of onions round his neck. That's Bayard in English.

The French original is, to my Anglo-Saxon ear, lighter on the ear. And why has Granta (or the translator) chosen to drop the question mark in the original French title - a piece of punctuation that created a slight, but cunningly subversive, sense that Bayard might, after all, be having us on.

Espièglerie (I love a French word) aside, Bayard is making some weighty points. Very few of us can claim to have really read even those books we confidently believe we have really read. Everyone who reads this newspaper, for example, will have read Hamlet. But if you were locked in a room for eternity, could you reconstruct, with any textual accuracy, even 10 per cent of Shakespeare's plays?

There's a favourite sidestep in the bluffers' profession that Bayard and I both belong to. “Have you,” Prof 1 asks Prof 2, “read Snodgrass's book?”

“Yes, I know it,” Prof 2 answers. Which, of course, can mean anything from “I've consigned it to memory, like some student of the Koran in a Karachi madrassa”, to “Yes, I saw John Carey slash it to pieces in last week's Culture - or was it Peter Conrad in the other place?”

The fact is, we all fake our literary orgasms. A couple of weeks after Bayard's book came out in France, a “World Book Day” polled 2,000 British bibliophiles on the work of literature they could least live without. Pride and Prejudice came top. A couple of months later, David Lassman, the mischievous director of the Bath Jane Austen festival, sent out the opening chapters of P&P to 18 publishers with Austen's golden prose barely veiled and the famous “truth universally acknowledged” opening resoundingly intact. It resounded not at all - 17 recipients did not recognise the most essential book in the world.

So, we talk the talk: but how many of us really walk the walk? OK, I'll show you mine. The following are the books (some of the many, at least) that I've talked about authoritatively and never read - at least, not all the way through: Timon of Athens, Finnegans Wake, The Parlement of Foules, The Golden Notebook, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Piers Plowman, The Voyage Out, The Golden Bowl

Now I can add How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read to that list of shame. But at least I almost wrote it.

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard

translated by Jeffrey Mehlman

Granta, £12; 185pp

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