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Literary Review
Prose
The writer as reader
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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An elegantly produced book of essays that evokes a book-haunted life.
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Here, there is no longer the pressure to be The Writer; she can slip back into that cherished identity as The Reader.
Goodnight and God Bless, Anita Nair, Penguin Viking, Rs. 399
Every night, before she falls asleep, Anita Nair gets ready to read in bed. This is the moment she has looked forward to all day. “The bedside lamp casts a pool of warm, butter yellow,” she notes. Her bedside table, which usually contains an assortment of books, groans under their weight. But there’s something special about this night: Glancing at this pile of books, she can’t “suppress a wave of pure delight. This is the joy of a magpie woman who has foraged and found a shiny vein of brilliant writing…I want them at my side where I can see and occasionally give them a little pat. This is a woman who has just put to bed her book-buying day.” The last line is lovely; an emotion booklovers will recognise. Informed by a gentle literary sensibility, Nair’s Goodnight and God Bless (elegantly produced in hardback by Bena Sareen and her team at Penguin-Viking) is a collection of 42 short, personal essays that, whether talking about gardening, travel, strange hotel rooms, parenting, food, literary friendships, or pets, evokes a book-haunted life.
Foraging in a second-hand bookstore once, she experiences an old, powerful memory of being a reader before anything else. An old bookstore, she discovers, is a sanctuary compared to a new one. Here, there is no longer the pressure to be The Writer; she can slip back into that familiar, cherished, and long-standing identity as The Reader. Here she is no longer reminded of literary prizes, large book advances, the next book she has to get out — the competition is absent. “And so for a moment I cease to be an author. Teller of stories. Peddler of imagination. I am the supreme creation of the God of books. A reader and a book lover.” This is the writer as reader. She can’t speak or judge any longer from a reader’s innocence. Yet the desire persists. To simply, as Salinger once asked of us, “to read and run.” She notes elsewhere (inside Shakespeare and Co., to be exact): “That was it. That was all I wanted. Neither fame nor money, awards or movie rights. All I wanted was a shelf of books in a bookshop and a runner that said: Arranged by the author in order of preference.”
Honest confession
Elsewhere, she writes with uncommon honesty about the authors of her adolescence — Mills and Boone, Harold Robbins, Sidney Sheldon — who turned her into a reader, and eventually shaped her into a writer. The literary writers — Fowles, Camus, Marquez — came later. There are times, even now, when she will take refuge in popular writing, except she can’t flaunt it anymore. She’s forced, instead, to camouflage it for all those literary snobs who just don’t get it. Thus, while her coffee table might display Jeanette Winterson and Colin Thubron, what she’s actually reading at that moment are some “pretty pink volumes of chick lit”.
Nair’s new book of non-fiction carries with it the added pleasure of “footnotes, quotes and other such literary diversions”. Like all booklovers, the first thing she does when arriving in a new city is to look for old books. She writes with affection of her Moore Market book bargain days in Madras. There was just this one time, she tells us, that she passed a chance to buy old books. While holidaying in Kerala once, Anita and her brother were tipped off about a family that was moving to the U.S. and selling off their son’s large collection of books. Excited, the two of them set off with an acquaintance who realised that if he could get these two to make a big buy, he would get something free from the house — like the dinner service he had his eye on — for his efforts.
Too serious
The owner, who spoke glowingly of his son’s erudite collection, warmly welcomed them. Ushered into the library, Anita and her brother realised that this “ardent reader, mechanical engineer, and perhaps solitary soul, was a porn aficionado. He had the most extensive and explicit collection of pornography I had ever seen. Covered with brown paper and indexed quite neatly…” They grab just one book that’s really just a book, with their acquaintance throwing them a dirty look. As they leave the house, the porn aficionado’s clueless and annoyed father, calls after them, “Why? Don’t you like the books? Maybe they are too serious for you, huh?”
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