I had mentioned in my last post that I hadn’t written for a year. I realize that it was only a half truth. Though I had published a post on Substack only after a year, it was by no means my only piece of writing, not even my only public one. I had been putting out words on social media in various forms over the years. They were just not the elaborate long form essays I had in mind for this platform. Anyhow, the easiest thing about my mind is that I can change it. So here it is. From my archives, in no particular order, my thoughts on some books that made me ask questions and my attempts to find the answers.
I hadn’t read anything by Vikram Seth before, but a poem by him sits framed on my desk, implying a relation to him that I do not bear. It is the story behind the poem1, how I found it, that is of value to me, more than the poem itself. That I found An Equal Music in a by-the-kilo book sale was chance, not a story, but it became a nudge to finally read the author whose name I see everyday, asking me to Sit.
In An Equal Music, Michael does not sit. He can’t. Obsessed with his love for Julia, a woman he hasn’t been in touch with for a decade, he wanders, from his student-girlfriend to violin practice with his quartet to his small town home to London. He wanders because he is not at peace, neither in his relationships, nor his friendships. Music fills voids in his life but even that is incomplete without the woman he shared his music journey with. Can love once lost ever be found? Are our choices so permanent, irredeemable? How astray do we have to go to realize that we can’t go any further?
One does not need to understand the language of music (though it would help) to understand the language of love and passion, so interwoven in this work of Seth. I know nothing about western classical music, to which this book is an ode, but that didn’t stand in my way. What was a barrier though was my pursuit to find a subcontinental gaze when there was none. Can an Indian write a whole book that has nothing to do with Indian-ness? Can someone give up their identity so easily, even in pursuit of higher ideals like music? Is a book better or worse off when one can’t place the identity of the writer, his ethnicity? Perhaps Seth identified with music most, or love.
For a realist, An Equal Music is the tale of a man undergoing a middle age crisis. There may be truth, but no romance in that view. I prefer to look at it as an ideal for all that love can inspire and a cautionary tale of letting things loved go.
A few weeks ago my niece visited me. I was meeting her as a young adult for the first time. She was excited to see the many books in my home and I was heartened to meet a kindred spirit in my family. I knew of ongoing graduate education in literature and got to know of her training in western classical music. Contemporary literature, which I mostly read, she avoided, as the classics she found were so much better. I picked An Equal Music from my shelves hoping that it would interest her. It did. She read the book over every free waking moment over those three days. Meanwhile, I called all bookshops in the city for another copy of the book to give her but couldn’t find one in time before she had to leave, and then figured I’d send one online. A month later she returned, for a brief flight overlay, and I had only the time to scribble a note in my copy of the book to give away. Love was also letting go.
Last year, on reaching a literary event ahead of schedule, I fell into a conversation with one of the speakers. We stood near a table showcasing books for the event and began discussing our preferred Bombay books. The speaker regarded Bombgartner’s Bombay by Anita Desai as one of his favourite books on the city. I scribbled that into my phone, meaning to confirm the spelling later. The bookseller mentioned how one particular novel was selling a lot. ‘It would win the Booker this year,’ the speaker remarked, ‘I don’t particularly like it, but it has all the elements for the Booker.’ (Reader, it did not). Realizing then that he had perhaps overstepped, he clarified, ‘It is because I am too emotionally attached to its theme’.
I had forgotten this exchange when I began reading Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting. However, there was an introduction by Rana Dasgupta in my edition that mentioned the books’ 1999 Booker Prize journey, that brought me back to that conversation. J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace had won the prize that year, but that had been followed by a public squabble among the jury, leading to speculations that Fasting, Feasting, which had been named a runner-up, had been more than a close contender.
What makes jurors, readers, writers pick one book over another for a prize? Is it the intensity of the prose that while showcasing the protagonist's truths is simultaneously encapsulating our own? Is it the ability of the writer to transport us to the time and place of their choice? Is it the plot or is it the journey?
Part bildungsroman, part critique of the institution of family and marriage, Desai’s Fasting, Feasting dwells on the mundane, the placing of food on the table, the mending of the hem of the tablecloth, the giving of instructions to the cook, the peeling of the orange down to segments and removing of all the fibers before they’re fed to the man of the house. So many lives are lost because they are not seen. Perhaps you pick a book for the Booker because it makes you see.
A few months ago, I fell into a Kanan Gill rabbit hole, of which I emerged out with Italo Calvino’s2 If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler in one hand and Kanan Gill’s own Acts of God in another. I read the two books parallelly, but no this is not a comparison post, not even one searching for one artist’s inspiration in another. This is about those who stretch the boundaries of art, and those who hop over them.
In one of Gill’s blog posts from eight years ago that I found on the interweb, he imagines Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven many years later. The kids have grown up, but their minds haven’t. What Gill turns around here is not just the story, but the narrative: the same adverbs that you glanced over twenty years ago stick out and ask existential questions.
Existentiality of course, is also, as has been with his comedy, a strong theme in his debut novel. It is also about pain and regret. ‘If you could start again, would you? If you can, will you?’ But I’m getting ahead of myself. Themes are for readers to analyze later. Writers work with sentences. A sentence comes to them while they’re on their evening walk and they rush back to put it on paper. They could use dictaphones, but they don’t. They wait for the sentence to simmer, till it has a rhythm and rolls on the tongue.
Gill’s book has a pattern. A typical sentence in his book can be divided into three parts- the first part has wisdom, the second uses a metaphor and adds exaggeration, the third does what the second tries to do, but on steroids.
‘To that extent, Dr K’s office laughed in the face of regulation. It spat at the feet of regulation. Spoke behind regulation’s back to its colleagues, RSVP’s to regulation’s invitations and absconded, sent anonymous letters to regulation…… and slept with regulation’s husband.’ You get the drift.
Gill had a blast writing this book and it shows.
In If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, a book I found because Gill had recommended it on a podcast many moons ago, Calvino subverts most established conventions on writing. It is a rare book written in the second person. The protagonist is unnamed. Chapters and stories begin and then get lost and the Reader is on a quest to finish the book they started reading. But this is just the premise. The craft is in writing every other chapter in another voice, as if written by another writer, to do away with the idea that a writer has a voice that they discover and hone and then own. This may not have been the only time any of these devices have been used, but it does something to narrative structuring, making it like a game of kabaddi. How far into the next chapter can you go before returning unscathed? Calvino’s triumph is drawing in the Reader (and the reader) into a convoluted premise and also moving the narrative forward, in a universe that’s largely eccentric but takes itself too seriously.
Gill took the difficult entertainment part seriously as well, the universe of Acts of God takes a bit of patience to fully form around you. This isn’t a book that is describing the setting sun and character’s clothes and the entrance of a building. In fact, it describes the main character’s physical appearances halfway through the book because it wasn’t essential to the plot to know them sooner. The time period is uncertain, elements of the present exist to offer you a sense of familiarity, because technology and science have advanced to extents that render any comparison to the present meaningless. People, however, are the same- flawed, just another word for human.
I do not have experience of having read the speculative fiction genre to make apt comparisons here. But I have read books so I can make other observations.
The choice of the narrative voice is interesting (for lack of a better word to describe a piece of sentient wall) but it occasionally falls prey to the conundrum that most narrators face- the assumption of universality of knowledge. It also conveniently switches between the first person and third.
If ‘write what you know’ needed an example- the book is hilarious because in his sentences Gill has retained his sense of comic timing. At one point a character has ‘dark check-in bags under his eyes’ and I laughed louder than I should’ve.
The book breaks the fourth wall occasionally, asking you if you like the pace. It makes you feel seen and thinks like you, even preempting your thoughts.
‘How would you feel if you looked closely at creation and saw the brushstrokes?’
It’s a divine comedy.
The short version of the story is that I had read in an interview of a writer I admired that she had hung the same poem over her writing desk. So, on my 26th birthday, I decided to gift a framed version of the same to myself.
I later read Calvino’s Invisible Cities and found it much more difficult to structure my thoughts on it (though the prose I found beautiful). Thankfully, I attended a book discussion on Invisible Cities organized by the Italian Consulate and a vibrant discussion later, I was much more sure. Ah, the power of cities.
Excellent reviews! Except Calvino haven't read any of them so adding them to the list.
I remember reading the last section (on IG, was it?) and I'm glad it's now on Substack.
Agree with you on A Equal Music. I loved the book without knowing anything about classical music - but I will love a grocery list if it's written by Vikram Seth so there's that.
More essays please!