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Literary Review
Endpaper
Book bound
BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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Previous attempts at trimming my book collection have failed. This time I’m determined not to deceive myself.
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GRAPHIC: NETRA SHYAM
It is that time of the year when I have to find ways to downsize my library in my always book-crammed apartment. Year after year my relatives have never failed to throw this at me: “Books may furnish a room but where does it say that they have
to furnish every room?” I’ve always managed to hiss at such philistinism, but this new year I can’t help wondering, as I struggle to make my way between books in the bedroom, the passageway and the staircase landing, if books (at least my books) should furnish only two things: my living room and my life. My previous attempts at radically trimming my book collection have mysteriously failed: The more books I managed to let go of, the more books I acquired. This time I’m determined not to deceive myself. I’d like my little apartment (not to forget my life) to feel clean, airy, spacious and light. I suppose this is a long cherished fantasy for many of us: to uncomplicated our lives, to simplify, not to feel encumbered by obsession. It isn’t really a cliché that the moment you let go of a book, you miss it immediately.
New rules
Perhaps this time I’ll make a rule to reverse this: for every new book I acquire, one goes out. Easier written than done. Isn’t it always a sadness to see books that have made a home with you leave your shelf? One of the more friendlier ways I’ve let books go is in trying to find the right readers for my books among friends and family: to match reader and book. Sometimes it’s packing them off to a bookshop in the hope that they would meet the reader they want or deserve. Can I, this year, possibly be unsentimental with some of these books and show them the door? Let’s see: I think I can kiss Joyce goodbye. And there won’t be difficultly bidding farewell to all of Hemingway. Why keep all the books by an author? Get selective, especially with Hesse, Maugham, James, Rushdie, Naipaul and Roth. Keep all of Chekhov, Proust and Kafka. The Chekovs because they have become part of my autobiography, the Kafkas because they make more sense by the day, and the Prousts for late in life, when all is read, and you still want to hear a companionable voice. On the other hand (see how quickly compensation beckons), I have a sudden urge to acquire more Mann, Borges, Nabokov, Sebald, Auster and a lot of contemporary Indian literature. And I can’t seem to get rid off any poetry. These slim volumes take up little shelf space and grow dearer every day.
Banish all the philosophers (except the existentialists) but keep the mystics. Chuck out all the encyclopaedias, autobiographies, and the Deepak Chopras. I should really donate all those books that gave me pleasure as a child reader, but I’m offering them special dispensation, and retaining them. To make up for this, I’m tossing out a lot of overrated contemporary American literature that have insidiously entered my bookshelves. The one indulgence I have to confess is keeping (harbouring?) multiple copies of rare and out of print books. When I see them on sale, I can’t bear to leave them neglected and languishing in some dusty corner of a second-hand bookshop. I, of course, see this more as a rescue operation than hoarding. I wrote a column some years ago about my groaning bookshelves, and my botched attempts to streamline my book-bound life. I felt the desire to restore my library to something like an essential collection: the kind I had when I was a student and had just begun collecting books. Then there were only a handful of books but I knew every one of them intimately — I had read and re-read them all. It’s strange that I couldn’t bear the idea of unread books on a shelf then, but now feel the need to have books that I am yet to read, yet to open. Like friends I can call on unexpectedly. I don’t like the idea of an essential collection anymore. It seems to define me too much; as if I couldn’t conceive of other friendships, enter other worlds.
Getting to know them
This entire exercise of trimming one’s library now seems to me not about downsizing the books but really about getting to know them all over again. To pick one from the shelves, remember where and when you bought it, and recall the pleasure acquiring the book gave you is why a book collector gets all her books off and on the shelves ever year. Before you put them in a box to be given away, you are curious to flip the pages and see if you’ve stuck something in there — a note, a favourite bookmark, a photograph. At last I am done with sorting the books. And I’m happy to note the box of books leaving my library is really quite small — elegant in their economy even. It is not the end of my days as a bibliomane, after all. My philistine relatives will simply have to accept, as they skip and hop over them, that books will furnish my apartment.
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