Reading update

The year has been progressing slow in terms of books read. Meanwhile, I have saved on my phone a thousand beautiful essays and stories. Saved to be savoured peacefully. Some really long essays. And a few short stories. Some short articles, and some books. And then, when I have a stretch of time available or desire to lose myself in a story, I shake my phone like a mint case and read the one that falls out the top. So that's what I've been doing. Savoring mints. Mints don't get counted on this blog. Only completed books make it to the recent reads page.

And I remind myself again that books read is not the right metric. It is a good general indicator, but not the correct measure. The correct measure would be a bit more subjective. Such as how I feel about my reading? Am I exploring more? Am I reflecting, and taking the time to write about what I read? Am I enjoying the process?

The answers change so much through the year, if not the questions themselves over time. And that, that exactly is the right metric. Am I growing and changing?



Bending Time

Sometimes, going through old notes I find so many reading lists and things worth exploring. It is a bit of despairing feeling. There'll never be time enough to read what all I wish to read. Unless I learn to bend time. I am hoping that one of the books I read will teach me how to do that.

And then this afternoon, I found another way to bend time meanwhile. Listening after a long time to some songs that I used to listen to non stop years ago, I was back in time. Everything that song evoked was rich in color - present in my mind and thoughts. Was I transported back in time, or was the time bent and brought to re-exist around me?

Aren't such stuff, such music, fragrances, good writing, art, tunnels or warps in time? Enter here, read this, listen to this music, smell this, and voila, bend the time. Over and over again.

So may be, no need to despair. Sometimes, one instance is deeper than the average depth of rest of the lifetime, and perhaps that is the linear programming function to solve for. Maximize intensities of moments. Maximize collecting these time bending experiences. Everything else, the average, the mediocre, the never-ending lists, there is no limit. What one cannot conquer in distance, perhaps one tries to conquer in depth?




Memoirs and other Personal Non Fiction

I am currently reading quite a few: Simone De Beauvoir's The Prime of Life, Doris Lessing's Walking in the Shade (both part two of their respective memoirs. I read both their first parts last year). Even though I am making little progress, and I'm not even sure whether I'll finish them soon, I am enjoying alternating between them. And then, in similar vein was the book of short stories by Edith Wharton which again seems drawn from something close in her life. Every once a while, one of the characters is a writer, and the settings and scenes are very unique, and perhaps depict the perpetual question that the author tries to answer - of perusal of art vs living of a life.

It pretty much continues on last year's theme of reading autobiographies, personal essays and memoirs. One of the other reasons I realize I enjoy these writings is because they open up ways of seeing. Life as closely observed by other people who carry with them powers of superb expression. The way they see the world, it is not explicitly mentioned at times. But it gets revealed in turns of phrases, by what they take for granted, and by what surprises them. Things so close to them. It can be fascinating this way to get under their skin and look at world the way they look at it. You come away richer for perspective, and wiser for someone's deep thoughts.

The rewards of such readings are then in the process. One can read quickly, or one can dwell, take time out every few minutes to note down their thoughts and the meta that opens up in your head. That makes progress slow. With other things, it just means a few pages a day. But aren't they very rewarding pages?

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And yet, because of that, because of the way they take their lives so seriously, and whatever they are upto so seriously, a heaviness gradually creeps in, making it difficult to go on and on. The spillover is sometimes quite sad and negative, and can weigh you down. For such times, standing out in sharp contrast to these two memoirs is the posthumously collected writings of Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt). I enjoy Doris Lessing and Simone De Beauvoir, but Adams, and another of my current exploration (Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue) shine with joy and cheer. Sometimes, that is what one needs to lift up the day.

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Apart from these, there are a few other open explorations.One of them is Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. I have been getting in and out of it for over a year now. Everything I read there, I feel like quoting or noting down. Reading it sequentially, I sometimes reach stretches that  pull me down a bit, gazing into the nothingness and finding, nothing - making me spill over around me. I close it then.  And that little helps the book's progress. 

Still, since I touched upon it, I'll quote one bit:

Passage 11
(Litany)

“We never know self-realization.
We are two abysses – a well staring at the sky.”

The Thirty-Nine Steps

John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps features in so many all-time book lists, that when I came across this book, I picked it up without thinking. The first thought is that perhaps people read this book in their teens, and hence what they take away is different from reading it later in life.

In the dedication page, the author writes to Thomas Arthur Nelson:

"You and I have long cherished an affection for that elementary type of tale which Americans call the 'dime novel' and which we know as the 'shocker' - the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible. During an illness last winter I exhausted my store of these aids to cheerfulness, and was driven to write one for myself. "

This pretty much sums up how I think about the book. It is fun, cheerful, a quick, gliding read. But that is what it is.

Here, in Richard Hannay, we have a protagonist who seeks adventure, and finds it gift wrapped. The book is set in the months before WWI, and the protagonist tries to stop some particular event, details of which somehow I do not understand completely. It is much more about the chase, and reads like a movie. No wonder so many times it has been adapted to or inspired, film version.

I seem to have read quite a few books in this category of London, terror and spy/agent fiction.  This one comes soon Conrad's The Secret Agent and Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday in my recent reads. Not really any anarchists here. But the chase is similar to The Man who was Thursday. Although so much more logical and sensible and of this world than Chesterton's. Unlike The Secret Agent which dealt more with the politics of it all, and which belongs to a different genre altogether, this one sits in the spy thriller category, albeit with more lightness and humour, and bigness or horrors of the impending WWI is just referred to, and the dark powers reduced to three gentlemen who play the antagonists here.

Not fair to compare it like this. It is a good quick read that holds your attention completely when you read it, but soon after leaves you with very little to report.

Still, I do have a couple of things I would like to note from the book. First one is on acting:

"I remember an old scout in Rhodesia, who had done many queer things in his day, once telling me that the secret of playing a part was to think yourself into it. You could never keep it up, he said unless you could manage to convince yourself that you were it."

And secondly, an interesting observation by the author on hiding in plain sight.

"If a man could get into perfectly different surroundings from those in which he had first been observed, and this is important - really play up to this surrounding,  and behave as if he had never been out of them, he would puzzle the cleverest detectives on earth.... A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different"

These two go in my list of stuff that help 'seeing'. Perceiving, observing and seeing. Stuff that makes living intense and life, rich.

Edith Wharton's The Muse's Tragedy and Other Stories

Although well-known for her novels, Edith Wharton wrote a lot of short stories during her life. The twenty stories in this collection are from late 1800s to early 1900s. Spanning from early in her career to later in life when she was well-known, widely-read novelist. It is a collection culled from a few other collections I believe.

Where her popular novels are mostly based in old New York society, for these stories, the setting and society is quite varied. Part of the set have one of the protagonists as an aspiring or published writer. A few are ghost or supernatural stories. Some more are about tired marriages. And the rest are in the same vein of New York society and as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. (I have read one, yet to read the other).

The point of short stories is experimentation I guess. There are all these people, some of them not really courageous enough to be written into full-length novels. And stories can be an interesting way of dealing with them summarily. I guess for novels, the setting - the time and society play an important part. For stories, where the problem at hand is quite momentary in time, the range explored can be varied. And that is where I find this collection very rich, and took my time working through it - the number of different characters and their so different lives and their problems. I find the range much wider in these 20 stories than some of the other short story collections I've read.

In this book, I best enjoyed the stories where one of the parties is an aspiring or published writer and trying to write. They seem drawn close from the author's own experiences and ring truer and more authentic. I quite enjoyed the title story - The Muse's Tragedy. (A reminder to read James' The Aspern Papers). And another story that quite touched me was "Autres Temps ..." dealing with the protagonists worries and anxiety which she realizes are not ill-founded although everyone around her tries to convince her otherwise. I am sure with the way society and its veneer works, Wharton's un-layering of that veneer with different characters leads to as many interesting episodes.

I couldn't see the resolution in ghost or supernatural stories. (but then I have read little in that genre, and don't have much to compare them with). I find them strange. I enjoy and love science fiction, but this is different - the supernatural bits I find intriguing. Not a fan. They made me wonder about how one comes up with such ideas. Not really a ghost story, but in similar vein was  'The Journey' which I found quite troubling. This one, and some of the other ghost stories read more like nightmares.

As to the book and its pace, I was slow given each story was quite unique in setting and characters, and required a bit of imagination warming up. Add to that, I found some of the writing a bit tedious.  (I say this, because I find myself holding  Buchan's The Thirty Nine Steps in my hands at the moment, for which I don't have to do much to read. I simply glide.) With Wharton's book, it was a bit of work in some of the stories in the early pages. (As she mentions in Xingu, one has to wade through it) But then they pick up pace, and you wish to see them through.

But her way of thinking and observing, I loved it and noted down parts (mostly, where she deals with perception, and ways of looking and considering).  How people 'feel' their way in conversation, and how it is difficult in one-sided written correspondence. And I think it is from things like this that is where I draw value from books I read. Language itself can be a delight. But the thought, and observation, and what the novelist chooses to tell you irrespective of the smoothness or tediousness of prose is what stays on.

Overall, I enjoyed the collection, and hope to make time to read Ethan Frome, if not The Age of Innocence soon.

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

I read Snow Country a few weeks ago. And since then, I have been reading stuff quite far and away from Snow Country and the world of Shimamura and Komako. Hence, this post tries to cover a bit of distance, in time, as well as in my thoughts.

Although it is difficult to access my thoughts from the time of reading, I do have some notes which I'll work through. I like coming back to these posts about the books I liked and found interesting even though reading older posts can invariably draw my attention to all the errors I make. I wish I could write perfect posts. It is a fleeting balance, this striving for the elusive perfect post, living with perpetual drafts, or, to live with the fact that there'll be errors. What then happens is that once I get a broad enough post covering most of what I wish to say, I hit publish. And then, over time, I can get at least the errors in thinking cleaned up, if not all the grammatical ones.

Back to Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata. I stumbled across this book during a recent second-hand book sale. The joy of such book sales is in stumbling across things that you would not normally look for, or aisles you would normally not walk down. Most of the time, the books are clubbed randomly, and the chances of you picking up something new are higher than the usual familiar places to get books.

So with this discovery too. My first read from Kawabata. Yasunari Kawabata was the first Japanese recipient of Nobel for Literature in 1968 (the next was Kazuo Ishiguro recently). In fact, Kawabata acknowledges in his Nobel Banquet speech, that he was the first Oriental recipient after Rabindra Nath Tagore, 55 years before him. Understandably, translations make their way slowly.  He was awarded the prize "for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind." Snow Country, which kept evolving through his life (talk about people unhappy with their own writing, or striving for a better way to express what they wish to express), was one of the contributing reasons for the prize.

The book opens up through a tunnel in Japanese snow mountains. And although Shimamura (the protagonist) keeps leaving the place, and heading back to Tokyo, the book stays there, in snow country. White landscape, clean, and fresh, as Komako (the other main character in the book). When the book opens, Komako is a yet to be Geisha. As Shimamura notices in the book, she goes from being a good girl, to a good woman. There is an ideal image that Shimamura seems to be seeking -clean and fresh, untainted feeling -  initially in Komako, and then as reflected in Yoko. And there is this recurring theme throughout the book of "wasted effort" or "wasted life".  Komako's pursuits, Komako's love, Komako's life, her strivings, all "wasted effort".

But what stood out was in the way that all of them, all the characters, accept their role, their place, and continue with their lives in zen-like ways. In-spite of their 'wasted efforts'.  It was interesting to see this view point after the all consuming emotion of Werther in The Sorrows of Young Werther.  In Snow Country, there is similar unrequited love,  similar gaping holes in hearts, but there is restraint, there is acceptance.

I am not sure I understand the book completely. I liked reading it though. I find it lyrical, poetic in things said, and left unsaid. There is a lot of beauty in the book - in seeing the way light and image is reflected in moving train and the landscape outside, in singing voice, in people, in the silvery grass. Beauty in its sparseness, refrain, fragmentary impressions of the lives of its characters. It provides the cues and then leaves you to imagine and build up the landscape in your mind evoking the snow country, the mountains in different seasons, the beauty of the place. Rustic, old country ways. Peaceful lives.

May be, I do not get the book fully because I don't think I understand the cultural nuances completely. Where rest of the world seems relatively homogeneous, Japan seems to stand out. It seems a magical, different place, with different nuances. Strange, fairy-tale like.Whenever I read about Japan, I find the imagery beautiful, somehow other-worldly, transcendental, and yet, find it difficult to completely reconcile with the way family life, place of women in society works.

While reading this one, I kept thinking of the other books which recreate that fairy-tale strangeness. There is little that I have read on Japan. A couple of books by Kazuo Ishiguro. I haven't read much from Murakami. Just Kafka on the shore. And his NF/personal book on running. And more recently, this short story, Cream. (Set in Kobe. Quite interesting as well as inspiring. Here is the story link). I have read Pico Iyer's "The Lady and the Monk". He recreates the Japan as seen by an outsider. And then David Mitchell. Both people who have not grown up in Japan, but have found, time, love and space to write about it, and to convey its magic. Where The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet was the beginning of modernization, most of the other reads are based in relatively modern times. And then, a little bit of Japan of TV and movies. I recently watched a show called "Midnight Diner" which is a series of short stories anchored around a Tokyo diner and its master.

Perhaps when one reads from a culture far away, one is looking at a multicolored picture with a slightly impaired vision band, and hence one is bound to miss out on seeing completely what is being portrayed. 

However I do understand the refrain of "wasted effort".  And yet again, seen from a high enough, or far enough vantage point, all our lives and all humanity is a wasted effort. But isn't it the continuous series of "wasted effort" that make life interesting?

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PS: This week's New Yorker (Feb 10, 2019) published this interview with Haruki Murakami. Worth a read. It refers to the magic of Japan.