Reading fiction makes me strongly aware of passing time, sand grains
traveling faster than ever down the constricted throat of an hour glass.
Most often I find myself questioning, why am I wasting my time reading
some one else's version of 'non-reality' when
there is so much of reality or real world left to explore. Even if I
succeed in reading a truly genius work of 'non-reality', there is a
strong tendency for these stories to disengage, tumbleweed like and blow
away, fast fading across my prairies of forgetfulness.
I simply cannot seem to hold on to these superbly crafted non-realities
by any of the master wordsmiths of our times.
It is a quick read. Despite the place and the time where the story is
set, the narrative does not delve into the miseries of people fleeing
their native lands in the wake of wars but rather focuses on exploring the
psychology of human nature and relationships in a
dystopian but seemingly (new) normal future.
Non-fiction on the other hand gets hungrily ingested and cataloged for
future reference, adding on to an accretion of wondrous snippets of
information about the universe and everything in it. There is so much to
learn and non-fiction writing is one of my most
primary, go-to learning aids.
Being a lifer in the digital era - searching on Google or taking the
endless elevator down the Wikipedia rabbit hole is usually my first
nature as it might be for any urban human of my vintage. But there are
times when you feel the spiritual need to disconnect
from all technology, start on a diet of eating fruits and berries, stop
shaving, plant your organic cotton, pick it and weave your own clothes
and chirp with the crickets at sundown. Knowing my own limits, I have so
far only attempted the first step of this
yogic regimen - disconnect from all technology.
During the few hours of my technology abstinence, in the absence of
search engines and other crowd sourced enlightenment, I revert back to
reading scrolls - books, if you insist on using the correct modern
terminology. Whether it is to tackle existential
questions or to figure out a past President's horticultural habits,
there is a usually book out there somewhere documenting just that.
Every other month I become fascinated with aging, death, growing old and
the old age's titillating promise (or the only silver lining?) of
making a person wiser. In search of this wisdom or you could say as a
part of prepping early for the final act, I attempt
reading realistic accounts of people who have been there and done that
or books about old age written by people who have worked and lived close
with old people like physicians and care-givers. I have chanced upon
some very illuminating reads this way - like
Sherwin Nuland's The Art of Aging: A Doctor's Prescription for
Well-Being and Atul Gawande's Being Mortal : Medicine and What Matters
in the End.
Most recently I landed upon The Lioness in Winter: Writing an Old
Woman's Life by Ann Burack-Weiss, that belongs to the preparing for old
age genre. Unlike Nuland and Gawande who (were) are physicians,
Burack-Weiss is a social worker and her book reads a little
bit more like an academic work than a non-fiction best seller (which
the other two were.)
That said, her focus on the writing and thoughts of notable women on old
age and death and curating these into a cohesive account, is unique and
as a woman, interesting to me. There were places I skimmed through the
pages when it started reminding me of protracted
thesis documents and the hours spent in musty libraries jotting down
references to beef up the appendices.
Yes,that's how we did it in the dark pre-digital era, right around
the time when I was young and the wheel had just been invented.
The Lioness in Winter is interesting if you are curious about the winter
of life and are familiar with some older women authors like Maya
Angelou, Anais Nin, Joyce Carol Oates, Simone de Beauvoir and a bunch of
others and might care to know what they thought
about growing old. Or if you are a woman with some free time to read
(that's a rare animal, the free time factor eliminates all the
probables), it might be worth a try.
How many times have we relived with Holocaust ensconced in the warmth of
our couches? I know my answer, far too many to count. The list of
non-fiction books on Holocaust I have read is shorter compared to
Holocaust movies. There was Night by Elie Weizel and
Diary of Anne Frank - that's about it.
Last week I added one more to the list - Man's Search for Meaning by
Viktor Frankl. Again like The Lioness in Winter, Man's Search... also
verges on being an academic dissection of life in concentration camps
through the eyes of Frankl who was a psychiatrist
imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, almost through out the entire
war. He was imprisoned in four concentration camps, including Auschwitz.
The author intended his writing to be a honest description of every
man's life in those dreaded camps and wanted
it to serve as inspiration to never give up on life even when it gets
as tough as it got for those Jewish prisoners.
Frankl's work to me seems like a treatise on hope penned in the most hopeless of situations. A first-hand account of the most wretched people on Earth (at one time) and written matter-of-factly by a
person of scientific and logical temperance -
which I am pretty sure Frankl was. Are you like that? Then you might
like Man's Search for Meaning.
Mohsin Hamid is a notable novelist of our age, the kind you keep watch
on especially if you have roots in the Indian subcontinent. Why did I
pick Exit West? It is fiction, but it is one of the very few fictional
takes on a very contemporary crisis and I was
curious how the 'non-realistic' version of contemporary reality looked
like. Also, I have read a few of Hamid's earlier works like The
Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, that
I found interesting. Since the current truth of
the Middle East refugee crisis is too hard to bear, I thought maybe
fiction might present a more tolerable picture. I was not mistaken.
Exit West names no names, geographies of conflict are deliberately
obscured by the author. Although that didn't stop me from imagining it
all playing out in Syria. We get to see the yin and yang of human nature
responding to wars and displacement through
the two protagonists - one female and one male. Unlike the refugees of
the present day crisis, in this work of fiction, magical realism makes
sure there are no heart-wrenching, lifeless supplicated forms of little children washed up on Europe's beaches.
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