For the love of reading

“It’s only words, and words are all I have, to take your heart away.”
                                                                                       The Bee Gees

We are made of words, as many as our feelings, probably more, and we use them unsparingly. Though feelings come before words, we need the latter to express the former. More importantly, the right ones are essential and if they fail the tongue, the expressions become misguided, misinterpreted and often misrepresented. If you’ve ever been in love, you’d know how difficult it is to find the right words to pour your heart out; there’s always so much to say but so little meaningfully said and sometimes so much said but so little meaningfully registered. It goes to the researched concept of sender, medium and receiver – how well and absolutely do you feel my love, vanity, anger, resentment when I express it? And then there’s an important life beyond words; do I feel the pain in your eyes or the fear you convey without anything or much being said? These seemingly piddly things are weapons of eloquence. As thoughts and expressions dance around in our minds shaped in these words, a chaos reigns and we are either trapped or released.  

“Oliver asks for more!” Is this sentence so intense that it is likely to arouse and trigger someone’s love for reading? Or is it the exclamation mark that did the trick (I don’t even remember if there was one.) I guess it did for me, though; else it wouldn’t be so deeply imbibed for it to stay and for me to be able to recollect it so easily. If you’ve read Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, you’ll identify that sentence where Oliver is with the other urchins being trained to be a thief, and as they’re having lunch, he asks for more; an audacious and horrendous crime to commit; everyone staring at him in shock and disbelief. And me at them and him.

I read quite a few books as a child, but Oliver Twist struck a chord that has stayed. Later in life, I did read it again and it had the same effect. Probably as a child I wouldn’t have been able to explain why I liked the book or the ‘bringing to life’ of characters.

My parents were never into books and reading, so I can't put a finger where my love for reading has come from. I do remember though we had this shop collecting old materials and the mustached lanky shopkeeper, always sniffling, used to keep used story books as well. Sometimes, I used to buy; most times I borrowed for a price.

Growing up with Moby dick, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Robinson Crusoe was such a delight. And then Enid Blyton happened. Though I don’t remember much now, The Famous Five,The Fatty series, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Archie and his pals were a craze then. Also the comics – Phantom, Tarzan, Mandrake, Chacha Chaudhari, Champak, Chandamama, Tinkle – some characters like Shikari Shambhu, Supandi and Saboo are so vivid in the mind that the moment you utter their names, one can actually see them as they were, their looks, their attire, their expressions, simply everything. Ah, childhood!

So, what do I like about reading; what does anyone?

© Samyukta, my friend.

I’ve often read, and more than once have written myself that you live and breathe the characters you read; one becomes them, but does that really happen? Are you really transported to that era and emotions, do you actually see the sky as it is described – a purple spread of despair; do you feel the pain and anguish as is felt by the lover – my hatred was so intense as I loved her so much; and are you telling me that you can think and behave like that demented child? 

While reading a good book, we often don’t realize but end up writing our own story as we read along. How many Japanese gardens have I visited? None. So when Tan Twang Eng talks about ‘shakkei’ (borrowing from the scenery) in ‘The garden of evening mists’, do I understand? No. So I find out, I look for pictures on the internet and I realize. But do I still know what exactly the writer’s particular garden looks like? Probably not. So I make my own; I place the rocks where the writer claims to have placed it, I see the clouds in the pond as the lone heron, disconcerted by my presence and stuck in its own shadow sees it too and when this fusion of thoughts happen, it’s nothing but sheer magic invigorating the senses.

Yes, we can’t have lived all the experiences; so we do the next best or worst thing. Don’t tell anyone that you can empathize with the repugnance and brutality they faced in a concentration camp; you’ll be apparently lying then unless you were in one, being untrue to yourself and the others. When we can’t feel the bullets piercing the skin and can’t empathize, we just surrender to the closest resembling experience. We see the soldier from ‘Saving private Ryan’ instead, taking the bullet, the wound so fresh and raw, wisps of smoke emanating from the burnt gunpowder and we succumb to the heaviness and fall as he falls. 

You are in awe of how the simplest, subtlest and even the most complicated feelings can be sketched and magnified so perfectly, oh so clearly. The beauty, the clarity in some pages are so real and felt, you end up reading them twice, thrice, sometimes to understand, other times just to relive the richness. 

How often do you drift apart in your own thoughts, emotionally connected, feeling and living the situation and the characters?

I do. I do drift, I do feel. A derisive laugh does escape in a conspicuous disgust or treachery, a wave of anger does arise in an obdurate pride or a disparaging conduct, I do think of someone in words of passion, I do live the character/s even if for a while. I do! I run ahead - I want to tell the characters what to do, I want to warn them, I want to …

… I am there with Estha each time he makes the same walk in the rain; I feel his pain, I am his twin then, not Rahel. - The God of small things
… I strongly felt hatred for the person I loved as Maurice did; I was jealous just as he was; I yearned to cause pain just like the kind I was going through. - The end of the affair
… I didn’t feel disgust or guilt as Otto Gottlieb, making love to a married woman. - Unexploded
… I feel my chopped finger stubs beneath the glove and want to hate Tatsuji for what his people, the Japanese did to me in the concentration camps, I want to feel the hatred, for it to come back, but it doesn’t; I feel sorry for him in fact. - The garden of evening mists

Most novels, if you’ve noticed, are tales of sorrow; is that the truest of emotions and feelings then? There, I digress again!

The other gratifying thing about reading good mature writing is the realization that there exist others, who think and behave just like you; a kind of reassurance probably filling the emptiness you could never understand or probably express in your real life emotions. It gives a sadistic pleasure when you realize you’re not the only one capable of those contriving thoughts, feeling the gloom of an unrequited love, or so muddled in the head that madness, consequently, becomes a cure.

On the other hand one encounters many situations and feelings they haven’t experienced before. The author challenges you to visualize, to comprehend his characters and their feelings; his feelings. Even in the labyrinth of those million words, s/he leaves a lot unspoken as he hands over the reins of his thoughts to you - the reader, even for those brief moments, concealing himself in the shadows as you read between the lines; the story halts there in anticipation, watching you and either frowns from a failure to have been understood or displays a prized grin as the right chord is struck. A good writer is never a profligate spender of words; he respects the reader and treats him as intelligent.

For a lover in the story, the writer probably wouldn’t want to make him read between the lines; it’d make him go insane when he always reads it wrong. Or is it an act of deliberation for the character/s to go wrong? It’s a game the creator is adept at, a game he will always win, the rules are his and he tweaks them to his convenience and pleasure; not to the lover’s, not to yours!

In contrast, as a poet, the writer attempts to hone your skills of imagination. He feels a strong urge to force you to read between the lines; he believes expressing everything in black and white, not letting curiosity and fascination to bloom and scatter heedlessly, is not just mundane but vulgar, a shame to his vanity. I feel the best story tellers are prose writers who are really poets inside.

I’m so glad that I developed this habit of reading. Books like The God of small things, The secret scripture, Unexploded, The garden of evening mists, Waterland, The Heart of the matter, Disgrace and many others have left memories that can’t be erased; they’ll probably fade in time like everything else but I don’t want them to. I want to hold on to them for ever, forever.

I wish more parents would induce this love for reading in their children. It’s a world, rather many worlds and they’re out there waiting for you. Embrace and give in. Get lost in them and you’ll not emerge the same again.

Happy reading! :)

Pictures courtesy 
Open book - © https://www.halifaxpubliclibraries.ca/blogs/post/the-journey-of-a-book-part-1/
Books - © https://lithub.com/this-cruel-calculator-will-tell-you-how-many-extra-books-you-could-read-a-year-if-you-quit-social-media/

Waterland by Graham Swift – A book review

Claim to fame : Graham Swift (born 4 May 1949) is an English writer born in London, England. His book 'Last Orders' is the 1996 winner of the Man Booker Prize. His book 'Shuttlecock' is the winner of the 1983 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize

Tom Crick, now a history teacher, is forced into retirement due to an unfortunate and ghastly act committed by his wife. Why?

Tom Crick asks and seeks answers to a lot of why’s because history rides uncomfortably behind that very word, that very monosyllabic question – why?

It has a strong and veritable bearing on today, this history, the past, that incident; incidents. It shapes, shakes, cautions, humiliates, and intimidates – this history.

Would the gory chapters of the French revolution prove half as interesting if I told you instead of the happening of a particular day on the bridge of the Hockwell Lode, a water course draining into the river Leem, where five children stand to dive, to prove their manliness, to show it to a curious girl, standing with her hands crossed across her shoulders in an attempt to conceal the obvious. Is this where it all began? Or would the horrific incestuous relationship between a lonely father and her lovely daughter draw your attention? It can’t be vulgar, can it if they deem it to be love, both father and daughter? Or wait, maybe this would rouse your interest; a girl of fifteen getting pregnant in the hapless curiosity and discoveries of the body and then never being able to deliver a child and feeling the need to steal one at an age above 50; “God told me”, she said.

History doesn’t always need to be about kings and queens, wars and revolutions, countries and soldiers, little Tom Crick and his childhood sweetheart Mary Metcalf had created history too, by doing a little and by letting a lot been done. They created and let themselves be slaughtered at its altars. Everyone indulges in a history that is cunning, unbelievable, threatening, and treacherous – we all like extremities, don’t we and then we sympathize with the very pain, with the treachery, with a catastrophe, unrevealing unconsciously our shamelessness.

THIS is what I term brilliant storytelling. A masterpiece! With every neatly arranged chapter, the author ties you to a slack string and craftily leads you through what seems to be an aimless direction, lures you with his words, creates a suspense and when the string is taut and you seem lost in digression, he snaps it back and you fall face down, pleasurably into the embrace of the primary plot and your mind races and traces in excitement, connecting to it and you end up grinning in the deliberate attempts of the authors digression each time.

The novel is devoid of succinctness because the unfolding of a life and its mysteries lies in its details. Painstakingly, yet colorfully, the author, like the most meticulous surgeon has successfully dissected each aspect of the incident. So if there is a slimy eel involved on the scene, the author has poked into its very existence, its breeding patterns, its origination, the research behind it. If a bottle of ale is the weapon in question, then you are dragged into the inglorious history of its brewing and its makers. The river Leem, the scene of crime flows into numerous pages.

The first person storytelling invigorates the imagination. This is an uncomfortable quilt you would like to tuck under and not want to let go off.

My rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 10/10

Graham Swift