ENDPAPER
Bookish fantasies
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
NETRA SHYAM
WHAT would be the dream life of a book lover? What would be her fantasies? Curious, I asked a handful of book lovers about their favourite literary fantasies. "I get a letter out of the blue saying: `You alone among all my fans understand me. We should meet. Sincerely, J.D. Salinger'". "I'm in this second-hand bookshop and meet this pretty girl who unbelievably enough seems to like all the same writers." "My book not only gets the biggest advance, it wins the Booker and the Pulitzer." "I suddenly run into Naipaul and he becomes so impressed with my knowledge of the place, he asks me to show him around and be his guide." "Mani Ratnam feels my short story would make a terrific film and wonders if I would like to collaborate on the screenplay with him." "Notice from Landmark Bookshop: `Dear Sir, You are our lucky winner! Please come to the store to collect your prize: gift book coupons worth Rs. 25,000.'" "What you need is rest. I'm recommending to the principal that you be excused from teaching for three months. You are not to read anything heavy or syllabus-oriented but only mysteries and P.G. Wodehouses." "E-mail: `I loved your book and wish I had written it. Signed, Vikram Seth. P.S.: I ran into Rushdie the other day and he told how much he envied your style."
Step inside a book
There's another one that readers don't talk about very much: the one about being able to enter a book and meet your favourite hero or heroine. When Woody Allen wrote those two masterful parodies of the literary life, The Kugelmas Episode and The Whore of Mensa (which you can find in The Complete Prose of Woody Allen) he was fantasizing for all of us. In The Kugelmas Episode, a bookish Jewish professor of literature finds a magician who can actually send him, body and soul, into any fictional work of his choice. The academic ends up sleeping with Emma Bovary. "My God, I'm with Madame Bovary!", Kugelmas whispers to himself. "Me, who failed freshman English." What he doesn't realise is that at that very moment students in various classrooms across the world were saying to their teachers: "Who is this character on page 100? A bald Jew is kissing Madame Bovary." He brings her back to New York and they go shopping. "I cannot get my mind around this," says a professor at Stanford, "first a strange character named Kugelmas, and now she's gone from the book. Well, I guess the mark of a classic is that you can reread it a thousand times and always find something new."
The Whore of Mensa, which I think is Allen's masterpiece, is about a high-class brothel that has women cater to your intellectual needs. For a price they'll come over to your apartment and discuss any subject: Proust, Yeats, anthropology. Or you could go over to the joint, which operates behind a famous New York bookstore, run by a Madam with a master's degree in Comparative Literature. Once inside the joint, you see girls with black-rimmed glasses lolling around the sofas, riffling Penguin classics provocatively. For a hundred bucks a girl would discuss the symbolism in Melville's books. If you want to get kinky, for two hundred bucks you could get a blonde and a brunette to explain Noam Chomsky to you. For more money, a thin Jewish girl will let you read her Master's thesis and fake a suicide of your choosing.
Confessions
My own favourite literary fantasy involves a phone call on a drowsy Sunday afternoon. I pick it up and it is my new neighbour down the street calling to say: "Oh hello, we heard you like books, our grandfather left us a roomful full of books that we don't know what to do with, would you like to take them? Most of them are old and it says signed first editions on them — what the hell does that mean, anyway?" I often envy non-readers for all the wonderful books out there that they have never read. Imagine the number of books that await them and the joy of encountering these great books for the first time. Thus, another favourite literary fantasy of mine has been to turn amnesiac for a year and pretend I'm reading all my favourite writers for the very first time.
E-mail the author at pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
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