quote

I read Aminatta Forna's Memory of Love sometime last year, I think. 

The New Yorker has an article this week about "The Curse of Reading and Forgetting" and I feel nothing but comfort and joy at this. I feel like I am not alone in this - that other people also pick up books, happily read through atleast half or more than half of the book before realising that they've already read this. 

I nearly cried when I read that other people also have the same problem I do in social situations - that they have an intense urge to say "Yeah, I read that book! I loved it! It was so brilliant! etc etc" but they don't do it in constant fear of the other person bringing up plot details or dialogues or characters - none of which they will remember. Infact, I thought about what Ian Crouch quotes Nabokov for - rereading - and I figured that, really, the only books that I do remember anything about are books that I have reread. (The best example for this unfortunately, is Harry Potter and strangely enough, not Murakami.) 

Anyway, what I wanted to say about Aminatta Forna's Memory of Love is this - i loved it it was so brilliant she's my favorite author of the year last year etc etc - but there are very few things I remember about the book. Except for this line:

"People are wrong when they talk of love at first sight. It is neither love nor lust. No. As she walks away from you, what you feel is loss. A premonition of loss." 
I can quote that line in my sleep, almost. I know it like I know Cummings' Since Feeling Is First.  (Because I don't understand the whole of it. Not really.) 

A premonition of loss. 

I think it is because I spent a long time thinking about what she could have meant by a premonition of loss.

Because I got feeling love and loss. I felt it, deeply. I knew what she was talking about.  But a premonition of loss? I failed to understand it. I left this to my unconventional experiences of love. I thought, well, I don't know what it feels like, so I probably don't understand it.

The thing is - I think I get it now. A premonition of loss.  As she walks away from you, of possibilities and hope, of things coming together and falling apart. A premonition of loss. Not of loss, simply. Not a life you can have, by itself. But both. Simultaneously. A feeling of something wrenching at your gut, of something that you can have but something you can't hold.

A premonition of loss.

avoiding the tragic

For the past few years, I've been avoiding books set in the real world, especially if they're sad or tragic which is often the case. Often, I have wondered if, as a strategy, this works especially because I seem to be missing out on a large chunk of books that everybody else is reading and loves. 

For much of last year, I read all the fantasy and graphic novels I could lay my hands on. I also read a fair amount of children's fiction. Some noir fiction - Chandler, Hammett; some random other things like Scarlett Thomas (who I won't recommend to anyone) or Arun Joshi (who I could write a few songs for, he's that awesome). I discovered Borges and Calvino, both of whom changed my life.  I fell head over heels in love with Fitzgerald. I still think Murakami is possibly one of the greatest writers ever, but I'm not as mad about him as I was before. I like Ishiguro now, which is not something I could have said two years ago.

Since January this year, I have been in recovery. (I mean this about my personal life, I'm not being dramatic.) I've also been diversifying my reading. I'm still to read something that is sad (I don't think Em and the Big Hoom counts because it's one of the funniest, cleverest, most beautiful books I've read this year inspite of what it is about), but I'm making progress. 

Books I thought I might have to give up midway because of what I thought they might be about weren't as bad as I imagined - The Good Muslim, for example. Books I didn't think would be a problem turned out not so well - Thing Around Your Neck, NW. I just started reading Toni Morrison, and this is someone I'm extremely apprehensive about too. (I also stopped reading Book Thief by the fifteenth page - but this has nothing to do with the book itself. The book seems to be more amazing than I can imagine. I was reading this off an e-book and it was formatted badly - and much of this book is in the formatting. So Fact and Fiction, here I come!) I loved Americanah and Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (both of which are books that are set in the real world, and are books about diaspora in America). I still haven't been able to go back to Reading Lolita though. Or Leila Aboulela.

The point is - this year, I've been reading lots of things about real people in real worlds that don't have real dragons in them. And I'm enjoying myself so far.

That's all. 

americanah


by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In a surprise twist to my life, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie just turned up at my doorstep today. I ordered it on Flipkart more than three months ago, so it was quite an unexpected treat. What should be of no surprise to anyone is that I just spent the past seven hours eating this book right up. 

It's a remarkable book, to say the very least. (Aside - I've been mulling over using phrases like it's a remarkable book, or it's an alluring piece of work, or she's an attractive woman. So I'm remarking its remarkability? Being allured by its alluring quality? Getting attracted to her attractiveness? These are such vague things to say! It's like describing something as "interesting". But I remember reading someone recently who wrote about the use of the word "interesting" in a long academic sort of book in which she spends laborious amounts of space talking about it as an "aesthetic category.") But anyway, it's a remarkable book. Absolutely brilliant, in what it sets out to do, what it manages to achieve, how much it manages to say and how easily.  

What I have always loved about Adichie is how political her writings are. She writes in such a self-aware manner, rich and complex, bold and brave. This book is nothing different. While in Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, she wrote about Nigeria and Biafra, about the politics of being a girl, a child, a woman, sexual, Igbo, rich, privileged, poor, African; in Americanah, the book is about being Black, African and Diaspora. It is self-consciously about race: the main character writes a blog called 'Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known As Negroes) By a Non-American Black'. It is about politics of identity, and how these politics colour everything.

I gave myself a snarky little smile when Adichie brought up a grouse I often have with people I talk to or read.  At some point in the book, while Ifemelu is getting her hair done, she has a conversation about a book with a white woman (whose race I'm emphasizing because the book does). The woman says, "It's just so honest, the most honest book I've read about Africa." But Ifemelu doesn't agree with her, and gives her a "mini-lecture" about how she doesn't think the book is about Africa at all. It is, she argues, about "Europe or the longing for Europe." 

The woman then replies - "Oh, well, I see why you would read a novel like that."
"And I see why you would read it like you did," Ifemelu says. 

Adichie then goes on to say "...this girl (who) somehow believed that she was miraculously neutral in how she read books, while other people read emotionally."

Somewhere along the way, I had a thought about the content of the book - it isn't historical or political in an overt and obvious way like her previous two books. But it's more grown up, so much more layered, just, so much more. It might be a reflection of my own growing up (the first time I read Adichie was six whole years ago!), but I would really like to think that it's also Adichie who's writing better than before now.

But essentially, this book is a long, beautifully written (to the point of making me cry) love story. It is the story of longing, loss and seperation. It is a story of love for a person, a country, a feeling; one that is so full of life and vibrancy that even in its dark moments, it makes you want to hold on to a sense of a happy ending.  This is a new and enjoyable feature of Adichie's writing - one of resolution. In Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun (actually, in most of her short stories as well), the endings are often ambiguous, leaving much to your own reading of the story. This one isn't like that - it ends well, and happily (which I loved) and this also works for its love-story-esque quality.

I just read this - and I feel like I'm talking about Adichie more than I'm talking about the book itself. Which is just so, because that's what the book felt like in so many ways. My very first thought about the book at the very first sentence of the book, which is about the smell (or lack thereof) of Princeton, was - is this something Adichie felt herself when she was in Princeton? For me, this is one of the reasons why this book works so well. It's because she puts herself squarely in her book - she makes it about her. 

I'll leave you with this description of loneliness and depression that I have now read for the fourth time in the past nine hours:

"She woke up torpid each morning, slowed by sadness, frightened by the endless stretch of day that lay ahead. Everything had thickened. She was swallowed, lost in a viscious haze, shrouded in a soup of nothingness. Between her and what she should feel, there was a gap. She cared about nothing. She wanted to care, but she no longer knew how; it had slipped from her memory, the ability to care. ... Her days were stilled by silence and snow."

trains

do wonders for reading.

also, loved loved loved em and the big hoom. no idea why i postponed this for so long. so brilliant, so beautiful.