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A long goodbye
DAVID DAVIDAR
TEN years is a long time to be doing anything without pause. As it has been over a decade since I began my book "appreciation" column, I decided, with the consent of my editors at The Hindu, that "Book Talk" would assume a different guise in the year to come and beyond. For a start it would be longer in terms of length but would appear less frequently, once a month rather than once a week. This will, I hope, enable me to dwell longer and more reflectively on the finest books I happen across. I'm rather looking forward to the challenges its new format will throw up.
For my last column in the old avatar, I decided to look back on my favourite books of the past decade. These were certainly among the best books I read (although some were published earlier) but the reason I chose them was because they struck a particular chord in me. In order to keep things manageable, I decided to choose just two from each continent. This meant leaving out dozens of books I enjoyed hugely, but sometimes choices have to be made.
To start with the continent nearest home, Asia, given my inability to review books by Indian writers (which would have certainly have made my choice much easier) I'm afraid I've had to cheat a little by picking a writer who is technically a Canadian. Michael Ondaatje returns time and again to his country of origin so his Running in the Family is my first pick. As memoirs go, I've seldom read a more brilliantly recreated picture of a man and his family. The English Patient brought the writer fame but for anyone who wishes to sample his unique descriptive abilities, his Sri Lankan memoir is the book to treasure. My next Asian pick is the Chinese poet Bei Dao, and the book is The August Sleepwalker translated by Bonnie S. McDougall. Bei Dao was one of those who defied the orthodoxies of Maoist China, this defiance shaping and influencing his poetry, and at his best he is fantastic. Here's a fragment of one of my favourite poems "Cruel Hope".
Stirring up brown shadows
the wind has carried away
the pine trees' endless chatter
The miserly night
scatters silver coins among
the beggars
the stillness has also grown
feeble
and can't stop children talking in their sleep
From Asia to Australia, and again I had to discard great books like Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda in favour of the two books I've liked the best from the island continent in recent times. The first is a marvellous love story called Eucalyptus set in New South Wales. Murray Bail the writer spins an engrossing tale that is composed of folklore and romance, botany and ruminations on the art of storytelling. The other Australian novel I return to time and again is a vast sprawling family saga called Cloudstreet by the gifted young Australian writer Tim Winston. His tale about the Lamb and Pickles families, like the best family sagas, creates a compelling world that we are reluctant to leave.
And then to Africa where, once more, there were at least two books I'd have liked to have included, Rian Malan's extraordinary memoir My Traitor's Heart and The Life and Times of Michael K by J.M Coetzee but I finally plumped for Chinua Achebe's great first novel Things Fall Apart published the year I was born and J.M Coetzee's spare and infinitely disturbing masterpiece Disgrace. The first is a mesmerising story about the downfall of a village and the second is the best book I've read recently on the conflict between races in South Africa, but so very subtly told that it rises above the babble of lesser voices to hold you in its grip. Anyone who is not moved by the tragic and helpless lives of David Lurie and his daughter Lucy has a heart of stone or perhaps mud.
Choosing my favourite books out of Latin America was exceptionally tough. In the end, I just chose a book apiece from that continent's two greatest living writers. Mario Vargas Llosa's latest novel The Year of the Goat must rank with his finest books, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and The War of the End of the World. A fictional reconstruction of Trujillo, brutal dictator of the Dominican Republic, it's a deep searching enquiry into the heart of a monster. And so to one of the greatest books of our time, a book that needs no introduction, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's towering masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. I read the story of the Buendia family every two or three years and each time I find in it something new, startling and, well, magical. Enough said.
Moving north, I was again faced with a difficult choice. Which novels of Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Proulx, Jane Smiley, Jonathan Franzen, Robertson Davies, Octavio Paz or Joseph Heller should I pick? In the end, regretfully, I chose none of them, preferring instead two books I read quite frequently, one for its astonishing use of language and the other for the haunting quietude of its tale. First up is Cormac McCarthy's triumphant novel, Blood Meridien, a tale of the American West unlike any other. But what has struck every time I've read the book is the unusual precision of the words and phrases the author deploys to tell his tale. A unique and justly celebrated talent. I know nothing about fly fishing but I went to great lengths to get myself another copy of Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It and Other Stories when my original copy was borrowed and never returned. The book was a bestseller in many countries and its easy to see why this story of a Presbyterian minister and his sons who lived and fished along the Big Blackfoot River in Western Montana, won so many admirers because its take on life, the great outdoors and familial relationships is quite stunning. It also has one of the best closing paras I've ever read. Judge for yourself.
"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."
And thus we come to the last continent, Europe, and I was spoilt for choice once more. First, I cut out all the books published over 10 years ago, and I still had too many masterpieces to choose from. Finally, I just plunged right in and picked two books that are somewhat similar in narrative tone, and appeal to my current frame of mind. The first is by a writer who died tragically in a road accident last month. W.G. Sebald was in his writing prime, and had he lived he could have been one of the foremost contenders for the Nobel Prize in a very short time. A German who lived in England for over 30 years he wrote several books of which three have been translated into English, of which the best was The Emigrants. His new book, Austerlitz surpasses even that "novel". It is written in the unique style Sebald used where non-fiction and fiction intertwined to create a matrix in which were embedded the various questions and puzzles the author wished to explore. In Austerlitz, the principal character Jacques Austerlitz tries to recover a past that has been kept from him. My final pick is again a book that is not easy to slot.
Danube by Claudio Magris is ostensibly a travelogue, a journey of discovery down that great river but it is hardly a conventional travelogue, exploring as it does the history, sociology, literature, politics and culture of all the lands the Danube drains.
And so there you have it 12 books that stand out among the hundreds of books I read over a decade. Until next month, then.
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