Author: Surya

  Ben Okri, the booker prize winning author, was one of the panelists at the Oxford Lit Fest last weekend. And that’s what he autographed for me. Me like..:-) Funny thing was, he wanted the book. Apparently, he had never seen this edition of his own book. Think it was bought in South Africa, and…

James Lasdun at the Guardian has a wonderful piece on the short story as an art form and reviews some of the best collections of 2009: “…it raises the question of whether there is any special quality, aside from length, that distinguishes the short story from other literary forms, and if so to what extent…

I love traveling and spend a lot of time on the road. In every trip, no matter how short and in every city, no matter how beautiful – I visit the bookshops. Prague was no exception. People fondly recall many things after they return from a trip to Prague – after all, it is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe – but I remember the bookshops the most. There were so many of them, and so many Czech authors whose books I had struggled to find elsewhere. From Jan Neruda to Josef Barák to Jaroslav Seifert and of course, the Kafka, I returned with two bag-loads more than I left with.

Today, I will write about Too Loud a Solitude. Of all the books I picked up, this one tugged at my heart strings a little bit more than the rest. For Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude is a book which is deceiving in its simplicity, scathing in its humor and uncompromising in its honesty, but most of all, it is profound in a way that makes you think about it for a long time even after you have turned its last page.

From the very first line,

“For thirty-five years now I’ve been in wastepaper, and it’s my love story.”

I was hooked. Fortunately, the book was short enough that I did not have to skip too many meals to finish it one sitting.

The book is about Hanta, an old man who has spent his entire life compacting paper, but is overflowing with ideas.

“I am jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me.”

An unusual character, the book explores his world in minute detail and within the narrow perspective of his vision, which rarely expands beyond the compacting mill in the cellar, rife with mice and his home, that is so full of books that it might he collapse if he turns in his sleep.

Hanta is also an alcoholic, claiming that he has “drunk so much beer over the past thirty-five years that it could fill an Olympic pool, an entire fish hatchery”, but it is only to “muster the strength for his godly labors”. Despite his job of destroying books, he has saved quite a lot of them from the evil shredder – either giving away or selling, but mostly just stacking up in his tiny home. But Hanta, who may be a nitwit according to his boss, is also a fountain of knowledge, from which can sprout Talmud, Hegel, Kant or Lao-Tzu.

“Because when I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing through the veins to the root of each blood vessel”

In Hanta – the destroyer of the written word, yet also its perpetrator – Hrabal has found the perfect setting to examine the permanence and abstraction of ideas, the inevitable march of time which threatens the relevance of all of us, the different kinds of relationships one can have with the written word and the myopic nature of an individual’s perspectives.

“And so everything I see in this world, it all moves backward and forward at the same time, like a blacksmith’s bellows, like everything in my press, turning into its opposite at the command of red and green buttons, and that’s what makes the world go round.”

The novel might have a narrow focus, but it also covers the gruesome details of Hanta’s existence, from the mice in his cellar to the details of his mother’s and uncle’s deaths and his haranguing boss. He also talks about his unlucky love life: of Manca, “who never having known glory, will never relinquish shame” and the nameless gypsy girls who “had their pictures taken everyday, but never saw a shot of themselves”.

Despite its short length and outlandish setting, the novel is rife with symbolism. It is as much a thought-provoking satire as it is a literary treat. If you haven’t read it yet, I don’t know what you are waiting for.

Link: Buy from Amazon

I just read Albert Camus’ The Plague – Camus being Camus, I was ready for a slow read , but after part I (the book is divided into five parts), I could hardly put the book down. Consequently, I am done – in the literal sense of the word. But perhaps, not really. Even after starting on my next book, I feel my thoughts returning to the life and choices of the characters of The Plague.

For the uninitiated, The Plague is an account of life in Oran, a city in Algeria that finds itself, rather unexpectedly, in the middle of a deadly epidemic. The book follows the reactions of various individuals as well as the collective, as they progress through the various stages of the plague. I am not sure I would call it an existential classic, but it definitely does a phenomenal job of examining the absurdity of life, its irrationality and human reactions to anything that they have no control over.

One of the emotions that Camus paints beautifully, especially in the early stages of the plague, is the feeling of exile. The town walls have been closed and almost all means of communication have been stopped. Telegrams have become the only means of sending and receiving messages of any sort.

“Creatures bound together by mutual sympathy, by flesh and heart, were reduced to finding the signs of this ancient communion in a ten-word dispatch, all written in capitals. And since, as it happens, the forms of words that can be used in a telegram are quickly exhausted, before long whole lives together or painful passions were reduced to a periodic exchange of stock phrases such as “Am well”, ‘Thinking of you’, ‘Affectionately yours”.

We don’t need to imagine a plague to appreciate the gravity of the message. Perhaps it has been exaggerated by the unusual circumstance, but it is hard to deny that this is increasingly relevant in our interconnected global world. Far from isolation we are, you might say. But then reducing exchanges to stock phrases must be all too familiar. Loved ones who knew every aspects of our lives are reduced to being recipients of abstract accounts of general happiness, on account of the distance that separates us. Friends are emailed that all is well and that the summer is bright. For, after all, how much distance and isolation can you conquer with a message, no matter how much it is filled with love?

Which brings me to abstraction. To not experience something is to, in a way, alleviate it to a level of general abstraction.

“He tried to put together in his head what he knew about the disease. Figures drifted through his head and he thought that the thirty or so plagues recorded in history had caused nearly a hundred million deaths. But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has fought a war, one hardly knows what a dead person is. And if a dead man has no significance unless one has seen him dead, a hundred million bodies spread through history are just a mist drifting through the imagination. The doctor recalled the plague of Constantinopole which, according to Procopius, claimed ten thousand victims in one day. Ten thousand dead equals five times the audience in a large cinema. That’s what you should do. You should get all the people coming out of five cinemas, take them into a square in the town and make them die in a heap; then you would grasp it better.”

Even after reading the book, the whole concept of the plague remains an abstraction to me, the removed reader. Just a means to understand the message, the object that is separate from the idea. And as long as I haven’t felt it, seen it, heard it, touched it, it will remain an abstraction. As will most things in life, some pleasant, some unpleasant. Such is the blessing of life, though perhaps one less acknowledged.

Tarrou, undeniably one of the more interesting characters in the book, notes in his diary:

“Question: how can one manage not to lose time? Answer: experience it at its full length. Means: spend days in the dentist’s waiting room in an uncomfortable chair; listen to lectures in a language that one does not understand, …”

If we want to save time, and if doing unpleasant things seem to stretch time, why don’t we do it? Sure, you can appeal to the conventional wisdom that the time you have is constant – 60 seconds is 60 seconds no matter what you do. But then, I could argue that fragmentation of time itself is artificial and really, just a convention. When you wish you had 48 hours in a day, you don’t wish for 48 equally fragmented segments of time, but that you could achieve double the amount of whatever it is that you wish to achieve in 24. The end goal is not to save time, but really to have the perception of saved time. Then why not do something that manages not to lose time, especially when it is so obvious and easy?

Paneloux, the priest, no less of an interesting character, first thinks of the plague as punishment from God. Towards the later part of the book, after coming in direct contact with the disease, he delivers a controversial sermon, where he claims in effect, that there is no middle way – either you love God, or you hate God. Either you accept or you reject. Or more eloquently,

“When innocence has its eyes gouged out, a Christian must lose his faith or accept the gouging out of eyes”.

In other words,

“If a priest consults a doctor, there is a contradiction”.

The book reaches its epitome of eloquence in Rieux’s thoughts, almost towards the end of the plague, when the town had begun rejoicing over the imminent freedom from pestilence:

“But what had he, Rieux, won? All he gained was to have known the plague and to remember it, to have known affection, and to have one day to remember it. All than a man could win in the game of plague and life was knowledge and memory. Perhaps that was what Tarrou called winning the game! But if that is what it meant to win the game, how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, deprived of what one hopes. ”

Perhaps the book was an allegory on France’s Nazi occupation. Perhaps it was a fictional account crafted as a medium for exposition on the absurdity of life. Perhaps it was meant to exposit and acknowledge the sterility of life without illusions. Perhaps what I had read from it was nothing which the writer intended.

Does it matter really?