“To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations – such is a pleasure beyond compare.” – Yeshido Kenko, Japanese monk.
Fiction is back with a bang. For years, I’ve not read much fiction at all, focusing all my reading energy on non-fiction, on subjects ranging from neuroscience and human behavior to history, politics, anthropology and just a little smidgin of philosophy. Once in a while, I paid my dues to the fiction world by reading a short story collection such as Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Collected Works of Andre Dubus and The Complete Short Stories of Ruskin Bond. Whenever I tried reading a novel, my eyes would grow weary, my mind would drift, and I’d discontinue pretty quickly.
A few years back, I was talking to a close friend of mine who had just become a father. What have you read lately, I asked. Winnie the Pooh, cover to cover, several times, he replied. When Maya arrived, I found myself exhausted and unable to concentrate on the books by my bedside. I’d pick up Orientalism by Edward Said or Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett and find myself at the same page, day after day. But I wasn’t ready to read Winnie the Pooh yet. A friend had just finished reading a science fiction novel called Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler and thought that I might like it. Surprisingly enough, I did. I hadn’t read science fiction since I left India, back in October of 2005.
While the book was too violent and graphic for my taste, it was gripping. It told the story of a woman who tries to establish a new religion in the aftermath of a world torn apart by global warming. She makes Change her god, chaos theory and quantum mechanics her metaphysics and with some smattering of rituals and lucid rhymes managed to build a following. How they are discriminated by a country caught in fear over the calamities was harrowingly depicted. For the first time, I could see myself as the object of discrimination and hate as a minority, as the Other. In the aftermath of 9/11, it is not hard for me to see that this country can go back to its Christian roots to discriminate and destroy anything that doesn’t resemble a White, Christian majority. Despite much talk to contrary, this country is very puritanical and conservative. Consider the ease with which Bush wakes despite many credible reports of misleading a country deliberately and destroying at least a hundred thousand lives and miring the economy of this country (Ron Susskind’s book is the latest in many such reports). Clinton was nearly impeached for having an affair with an intern and lying about it. But Bush walks about cockily, spouting his disdain for reality.
What that book did more than anything else was to reopen the world of fiction for me. I discovered Robert Sawyer whose novels are my idea of a perfect science fiction. Instead of epic space operas with the same earthly wars and dysfunctional behavior spread across star systems instead of being limited to Earth, Sawyer’s novels were intelligent, almost completely violence free stories that blended anthropology, fringes of quantum mechanics, neuroscience and social sciences in an intelligent, very believable package. The first of his books that I read was Calculating God, a story about two alien species landing on earth, demanding to meet an anthropologist and asking him for the fossil record of Earth. The aliens find that the great catastrophic wipeouts of species that happened on Earth had happened at the same time in two other places in the Universe, both of which were inhabited. The aliens had concluded that this was a sign of intelligent design, of a maker. The novel presented some of the most readable arguments for and against the existence of god, about how humans construct moral dilemmas that are meaningless to an alien, how our thinking and logic are born out of our physiology, that our mind is embodied. For example, one of the alien species has a prime number of appendages, 53. The main protagonist, another alien, expounds to the earth bound hero how in a society where you have a prime number of appendages, it is not adaptive to come up with an accurate number system.
I followed that up with Sawyer’s Nebula and Hugo award winning Hominid trilogy, about a parallel Earth with neanderthals instead of human beings. In the process of factoring a really large prime number on a quantum computer, an accident drops a neanderthal amongst humans, in this world. It is based on the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics that posits that there are many parallel universes. The accident connects two parallel universes, one in which neanderthals wiped out humans and the other is this one, where we wiped out the neanderthals. This leads to a brilliant exposition on how human societies are an artifact of our physiology, of how alternate societies that have a different physiology may be constructed, of hunter gatherer societies versus agrarian societies, of the evolution of consciousness and quantum computing. Aspects of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel come to life in this book in a way that made me appreciate and understand the ideas even more. Shanthala who never really cared for science fiction, gobbled up his books as quickly as I could get them. One of the chapters from the second book in the trilogy has a much talked about chapter on the Vietnam memorial. Ponter, the Neanderthal is wondering the point of the memorial. His human protagonist (and lover), Mary tells him that it is to honor the dead. Ponter asks if the point was to honor the dead, to remember so that we don’t repeat past mistakes, if wars are still fought. When Mary says yes, Ponter responds with: “They should do it right here,” said Ponter, flatly. “Their leader — the president, no? — he should declare war right here, standing in front of these fifty-eight thousand, two hundred and nine names. Surely that should be the purpose of such a memorial: if a leader can stand and look at the names of all those who died a previous time a president declared war and still call for young people to go off and be killed in another war, then perhaps the war is worth fighting.”
My friend, the one who got me started on fiction, then lent me Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Its hard to describe a book that has its heart the story of a boy and a Royal Bengal Tiger adrift in a small boat after the ship carrying them sinks in an accident. But it is so brilliantly imagined, so well written and such an amazing amalgam of adventure, philosophy, India and a tale of survival, that it was hard to put down. Though it is written by a Spanish author, I think it’d be easy to mistake it as coming from the pen of an Indian writer. Some of the book’s reflections were quite profound. For example, there was a piece in the book that captured one of the main reasons I grappled with Kitty’s death by writing so much: “The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.”
I then attacked an 800 page tome, Rohinton Mistry’s “A Fine Balance”. I was completely unaware of the effect of the emergency declared by Indira Gandhi on the lives of the poor and downtrodden. The book is written with such empathy and feeling for the characters, without ever becoming maudlin, it was hard to put down and harder to be not affected. How simple vagaries of life such as missing a train can wreak such havoc on the less fortunate !
Now, I was on a roll. My next book was Allegra Goodman’s Intuition, the story of modern science, of the drudgery of delivering empirical results, of the dangers and lure of big money that go with the possibility of big medical cures, of human foibles and hope. It is again so well written, it was as suspenseful as a thriller. Who says that philosophical meditations on the nature of science cannot be tautly presented and written ? This is a book that should plant the joy of fiction in just about anyone, so richly imagined and well written is it. The quote “Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures” holds well for this book.
I reread Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and read her Namesake for the first time. Her writing is luminous, limpid as an alpine lake, propelling the reader forward by the sheer strength of the story. The first story in Interpreter of Maladies is devastating. I’ve reread it so many times, gasping each time as the denouement is reached. Her metaphors don’t strain, are used sparingly and aptly and blend in so well with the story, it is a thing of joy. For example, in The Namesake, the mother of the hero, Ashima (which means without borders in Bengali) is pregnant and alone in a strange land, having come to the US immediately after her arranged marriage to an academic struggling in Boston, a city as far away as can be imagined from her home, Calcutta. Lahiri writes: “For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy – a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect”.
In the Interpreter of Maladies, there is a story where the cultural difference between India and the US is brought out sharply but humourously when a little girl thanks an elderly Indian guest for his present of candy. “What is this thank you ?”, responds the gentleman. “The lady at the bank thanks me, the cashier at the shop thanks me, the librarian thanks me when I return an overdue book, the overseas operator thanks me as she tries to connect me to Dacca and fails. If I am buried in this country I will be thanked, no doubt, at my funeral.” I had a similar experience with friends and family back in India when I thanked them. In a culture bound by tradition and duty, there is nothing to thank, it’s your duty.
Next in line was another intelligent, well written book called “The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night Time” by Mark Haddon, a story told through the eyes of a thirteen year old autistic kid. It was a revealing glimpse of how an autistic mind works. The book is filled with interesting soliloquies on various issues and trifles such as the Monty Hall problem, all from an autistic perspective. I then read Frank McCourt’s classic memoir, “Angela’s Ashes”. At first, I found the writing interesting, but didn’t understand what the hoopla was all about. When the book came out, it was on everybody’s lips and even was made into a movie (a bad one according to the critics). Shanthala had read it and enjoyed it. I was ready to give up after fifty pages, but something made me continue. I then realized how funny the memoir was about a life as wretched as they come. My sister tells me that my writing is mostly heavy and sombre. I realized how difficult it must be to write in such a humorous manner about something that was so devastating to live.
Not all books were completed. I couldn’t get past the first few pages of Arundhati Roy’s much acclaimed “The God of Small Things”. The writing called too much attention to itself and intruded too much into the story. The same thing happened to Tom Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume. I also found Kiran Desai’s Booker Prize winning “The Inheritance of Loss” cold and uninteresting. Her writing was excellent in places, but the story neither grabbed me nor could the writing sustain my interest for more than a few pages.
Lying on my bookshelf, still waiting to be read are Ethan Canin’s short story collection “The Emperor of Air” and Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest collection of short stories, “Unaccustomed Earth”.
Reflecting on fiction a while back, I thought that it was a great way to put myself in the shoes of others, empathize with characters and situations that life may not have afforded me yet and in the process, consider ways of being and thinking that maybe vastly different from mine. As Charles Lamb said, “I love to lose myself in other men’s minds…. Books think for me.” Well imagined writing such as Life of Pi are a sheer delight to read, reading for pleasure, for the sheer exhilaration of watching people string words together that is pure ecstasy.
“A good book should leave you… slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it” – William Styron, American novelist
References:
1. http://www.sfwriter.com/: Link to Robert Sawyer’s webpage with excerpts from all his books
2. http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2007/11/intuition-by-allegra-goodman.html: Review of Allegra Goodman’s Intuition
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