Tess, a note again

Such an emotional book. Got me all teary at times. The heroine could learn from Salka Valka one wishes. To be a heroine. To be stronger when she has been weak and you so much wish she were better guided, or the hero would have a bit more sense, and an expansive mind. Anyhow lots of emotional reactions to the book. It is so much of life happening to people rather than people happening to themselves. A lot of tragic drama. A lot of decisions which have impacts beyond the immediately perceptible future. Choice of the author - for the kind of story he wishes to tell, it is his chosen angle. Perhaps not the best thing to look for a heroine where the drama is more about circumstance or how human being is a subject of circumstances. Although her stoicism and fortitude is exemplary and inspirational at times. Loved reading it, even though a lot to argue with the author.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Very engaging book. Difficult to put down. One of a few such that I finish in one long afternoon.

War torn countries, lives, refugees. It is emotional but what perhaps breaks the heart more is the people drifting apart. There is life and reality which is involuntary, one finds oneself in, and one deals the best possible way with. But then there’s the voluntary bits, which we all face and given our egos, our perception of life – I don’t know, there’s no good or bad, right or wrong between people, but there are moments of grace, of courage, of generosity, which ideally, need to be reacted to gracefully, courageously and generously, by meeting them like that, fully, if we are lucky perhaps. Sometimes one can’t see beyond the intensity of the emotional moment. Sometimes, one is too small for the moment. But the wish and prayer is that may we all find our best selves for moments which need the best selves.

The book makes you want to read it again immediately almost...I get affected more by the people, their story than their common lot.

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I don't know how great literature treats this.

Only the depth of time, the distance allows us to meet the greatness in any writing. Layers removed from that world and age, accepting everything from the author, more fully participating in the writer's world, perhaps less judgemental, with less contemporary baggage of our own, we come to the time honoured in a different way. My gripe is less with the book, but with all contemporary literature, where people and relationships reflect reality, which is less than ideal. Perhaps in contemporary fiction, however great they may be, the current times cannot appreicate it well enough, it is a privilege of later, removed ages.

What literature allows is instances or characters that somehow transcend the shallow bounds of their moment or their selves. Somehow they become larger than life while very much remaining of life. That perhaps speaks of my personal preference in literature that inspires me, elevates me, enriches my spirit. Perhaps that is what I crave from any good book. A spirit made whole. Choices made generously.


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Personally, the drift in the novel got me emotionally high strung...anyhow. It is what it is. Overall, a strange push and pull with the book.

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The book doesn't  name the country of our protagonists. It is a war-torn country, poor, itself a shelter to refugees. But when life becomes unliveable under militant rule, they escape. They escape through a door, into a better world. A world where they try to make their home, moving from Mykonos, to London to Miren. But as refugees they face the wrath,  befuddlement, at times kindness and understanding of natives, who do not really understand how to deal with them. In one sentence somewhere he says, nativity is relative. Especially in America. It is just a matter of time, and sometimes generations born anew in a new country forget the past movement across continents, the migration. 

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On a factual note, if one carefully looks at the demographics of the world, where the population has grown, where it is declining, there'll be a discernible shape of poor to rich countries. A country being poor is perhaps never the only problem, the problem is mismanaged poor countries, with religious strife and people's basic freedom on line. In such a world, Mohsin Hamid's book is very topical. What perhaps European countries feel in terms of refugee crisis, until development comes to poor nations, a search for better life will keep leading people to migrate to better destinies.

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It is a very vivid book. Keep thinking of the characters even later in your day too. Almost as if people you know from somewhere. A little bit of magic realism or perhaps euphemism in describing the doors, and peppered with unrelated stories of refugees around the world... it is a beautiful book. The emotional tug makes you want to put it aside, but the very tug makes you want to keep reading it. It is written well, with high economy.

I haven't read any other of his books but the topic is not something I would often pick up...I am generally wary of modern contemporary books, but sometimes I do pick them up. And perhaps they are the best way to understand the modern world, to complement the facts with stories of lives lived, characters known... I am not a big consumer of news, but books like this bring the world alive in front of your eyes in all its good, bad and ugly.

 
 

Essays by Lydia Davis

This is another book open on my desk. The best books are those that don't allow you to continue too long on their pages in one sitting but keep sending you again and again to blank page to discuss, explore, think yourself better, or write, or note, or quote. Hers is one such book. Instead of reading it in order, I begin reading 'Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits', and it sends me here. To note, to observe, to explore.

On a separate note, I am trying to commit myself to read 500 essays in a 1000 days. The problem with any such numeric goals is that they are not cut and dried like that. Sometimes an essay from a book makes you want to read the whole book. And then counting all those essays is not the point. You count one or two that are on the aspiration list, but the idea is to read far and wide with 500. So anyhow, I am still in the throes of committing, and the AI helps with wonderful lists culled especially for me given my interests. Lets see how far we go.

I am keen to count this essay by Lydia Davis as one entry. It is worth a reread, and then found again and again amidst busy or quiet years, it again pumps new energy in you. And as one grows out of youth and into middle ages, one values highly whatever that can pump new energy and vitality in you.

Here's to finding good books that:
- send you out of their pages to a blank page to explore and expand and note and quote
- pump you with new energy and vitality.

:)

Tess of the d’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

In the recent times, this is my second Thomas Hardy. Far From the Madding Crowd was the other one, after finishing which I didn't want to open another book with new characters, wanted it to go on and on. So with Tess at the moment. Although like a novel it keeps moving forward, but some passages need you to linger, to stay a bit longer with them. Noting them here. 

Sometimes the whole philosophy to life is encapsulated in a few passages and one can just read them again and again and be fortified to face life with a new found energy.

 

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary. She knew how to hit to a hair’s-breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions. She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece with the element she moved in. Her flexuous and stealthy figure became an integral part of the scene. At times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were. The midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped buds and bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A wet day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.

But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess’s fancy—a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason. It was they that were out of harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism, she was quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.

*

A resolution which had surprised herself had brought her into the fields this week for the first time during many months. After wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illuminated her. She felt that she would do well to be useful again—to taste anew sweet independence at any price. The past was past; whatever it had been, it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences, time would close over them; they would all in a few years be as if they had never been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten. Meanwhile the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain.

She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly—the thought of the world’s concern at her situation—was founded on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides, Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought. If she made herself miserable the livelong night and day it was only this much to them—“Ah, she makes herself unhappy.” If she tried to be cheerful, to dismiss all care, to take pleasure in the daylight, the flowers, the baby, she could only be this idea to them—“Ah, she bears it very well.” Moreover, alone in a desert island would she have been wretched at what had happened to her? Not greatly. If she could have been but just created, to discover herself as a spouseless mother, with no experience of life except as the parent of a nameless child, would the position have caused her to despair? No, she would have taken it calmly, and found pleasure therein. Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations.

Whatever Tess’s reasoning, some spirit had induced her to dress herself up neatly as she had formerly done, and come out into the fields, harvest-hands being greatly in demand just then. This was why she had borne herself with dignity, and had looked people calmly in the face at times, even when holding the baby in her arms.

Beginning again

After a good start, this blog has languished for the last couple of months. I have been collecting notes in my scrapbook, and this year, on my old reading blog, I am noting down a paragraph on books I finish. So I've kept some notes. But the main issue is books I finish is a small number compared to the books I open. And I would like to keep a note of those encounters, what they set forward in my head, the thoughts they ruffle or ripple or bring to the fore. 

So hoping to begin here, again.