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THIS FORTNIGHT we bring you a wish list of four books — three old, and one relatively new, some of the most absorbing and most potent, life-changing even! The books can be found in some of the city's stores, and definitely can be ordered and one of them can even be read online.
The Lake
Yasunari Kawabata
Fontana/Collins
JAPANESE FICTION, like the rest of its art, is a dazzling blend of surreal and shockingly real; it completely disarms the reader, so that one is never really prepared for Japanese fiction.
And of all Japanese writers, Yasunari Kawabata remains, for me the most ethereal and the most lyrical, also the most startling. There is a daring in his writing, a headlong and unrestrained plunging into the currents of the human mind that remains unparalleled.
The Lake is one of Kawabata's best works. Its hero is the obsessive Gimpei whose search for unattainable beauty is sad, frightening and strangely elevating. What The Lake reveals about human nature and human longing for the other is sometimes too much to bear and you feel here as you do reading other Kawabata books, that life is sometimes too full.
Gnostic Contagion
Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Contagion
Peter O'Leary
Wesleyan University Press
THIS IS one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. It is an extraordinary maze of unsettling secrets and revelations leading through deep, dark, inconvenient places to disturbing though fecund notions of what poetry is and how some poets make it.
Its author, Peter O'Leary explores the prophetic-shamanistic, myth making potential of the poet, the psychopathological, revelatory, healing aspects of poetry and the complexities of the relationship between the two, which makes of the poet, his poetry and the poetics much more than we are wont to.
O'Leary's notion of poetry as illness, as an infection that takes over the poet till he is swarming with its viruses, and of the need for this affliction to remain uncured if he is to continue to write, will shake the calm of generations who have placed their faith in notions of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity or in the poet as one who is capable of constantly amalgamating disparate experiences. Teachers of English might want to stay away from this book.
Easter Vigil & Other Poems
Karol Wojtyla
Random House
THIS IS a collection of some of the most intense and challenging spiritual poems I have ever read; they were written in Polish by the young parish priest Karol Wojtyla, in Krakow, long long before he travelled to Rome to become Pope John Paul II.
What makes these poems so challenging for the reader is that they are neither about the joy of knowing God, nor about the longing for union with God — traditionally the subjects of mystical poetry — but are testimony to the struggle to find explanations for faith in the changing and varied world and to be able to show the world and work of man to be a trajectory into which god can enter.
The most famous of the poems here, "The Quarry", is almost prophetic in the way it describes work and workers and the life that they kindle forth.
"With work then it begins: the growing in the heart and the mind,
Great events, a multitude of men are drawn in.
Listen to love that ripens in hammers, in even sounds."
Don Camillo
Giovanni Guareschi
Penguin
WHAT'S SO special about the Don Camillo stories? They are just funny stories in which a stubborn Catholic priest takes on the village's Communist mayor in the course of some very funny incidents and some hilarious battles of wits between the two. They are, but in them Guareschi opens up the human struggle to remain human, the struggle between ideals and let downs, between what is humanly possible and between what humans long to make possible. And, in these stories the Christ on the Cross, in the little church speaks to his priest, Don Camillo and what he says calls open the heart's doors and windows.
The characters in these stories have the same unpredictable stubborn streak that Guareschi himself was known for — he was once arrested by the political police for howling slogans in the streets all one night; in 1943 when captured by the Germans, he adopted the slogan "I will not die even if they kill me".
The Don Camillo stories can be read, in whole, at http://vajrang.tripod.com.
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
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