THIS.

A Softer World's 1000th comic, and HOW.

Oh Joey Comeau and Emily Horne, how you sing to me.
How one day if I write like this, I'd be happy.
How.

"I miss something I have never known."

Sigh. *purrs*

yeahisawthatalready

For the past many months, my obsession with wanting to write consistently, daily and well has resulted in my reading stuff* on the internet like a mad person. What I have learnt from this is: the internet is unfathomably vast. Its vastness is something you cannot really fathom at all. It is so vast, your power to fathom anything at all just falls incredibly short. When I was much younger, I was once told that anything you could possibly conceive of was already there on the internet. If you dig deep enough, you'll find little crevices or caves in which people discuss/believe in the most mindblowing of things. (The thing that has managed to blow my mind the most in the past couple of months is of course Otherkin. But, dear reader, let this not limit your imagination as to how blown your mind can be by the internet.) 

So what began as an every morning adventure to find stuff to read immediately after my newspapers spiraled horribly into an obsessive need to read everything I could possibly lay my hands on that day. I realized how much of a problem it was when four Fridays ago Longreads posted their weekly Top 5 posts, and I had read most of them already. I realized it was a problem when, I would get emails from friends about interesting things they'd read that day or week, and I would have already read it. I realized it was a problem when I was having dinner with some friends and I had read everything they were discussing. 

I realized that the problem wasn't that I had already read it, the problem was that I wasn't sure if I was actually processing anything I was reading. It had has reached a point where I'm reading stuff because I think I need to just read stuff, and not because I want to read stuff. It's almost as if I read it, bookmark it and file it away. For most of what I read, I don't even do what I used to do even two months ago: Make mental notes in the margins, follow up, write about it, wonder what happened of it. None of that at all.

Is it just the curse of the vastness of the internet that leaves me with a mountain of things to read, and not much time to read it with? So many people with such interesting things to say, so many articles and essays that are painstakingly well put together, so many things that people say anyway, so many things that I think I need to know or opinions I need to hear - How can I leave reading these to the accidents of social interactions, emails or drunken dinners? 

But at the same time, what's the point of reading it and then not remembering even seeing it the next time someone brings it up? Just for the joy of "yeah, I saw that already"?

Does anyone else have these problems?

**

*i say "stuff" because i really don't know a more appropriate word for the melange of things people read on the internet

adi parva

by Amruta Patil

My love for Amruta Patil's work is too personal for me to share. Kari spoke to me in ways that I will never speak about. In a tiny corner of my heart live boatmen, disappearing lanes and prickly heartbreaks; panels, dialogues and journeys that have defined entire relationships for me.

But Adi Parva is different from the very beginning. A much grander tale, Patil goes from telling the story of a girl in a city to retelling an epic. While it is still a deeply personal work (a painstaking labour of love), it is not personal in the story but in the telling. And this is where Amruta Patil excels. It has taken me forever to start writing about this book. Mostly because I really don't know where to begin.

How do you write about a book that is so vast in its scope and beautiful in its rendering? How do you write about the possibilities it explores, the mythologies it breaks down, the narratives it builds? How do you talk about storytelling that is about storytelling? How do you ask the questions that it asks? And what is the use of a book without pictures? 

It opens in redness: blood red, vultures and death. 

It opens: "There are somethings your forefathers didn't want you to forget. So they sent the story down through the mouths of the sutradhaar - storytellers who carry the thread. We are an unbroken lineage of storyteller nested within storyteller. When I open my mouth, you can hear the echo of storytellers past. ..."

It opens in poetry and art, and compelling narrative. 

And it effortlessly holds you to it. 

Adi Parva also arrives at a time when there is an immense interest in retelling or reimagining mythology. So many people are doing it, yet not too many of them manage Patil's depth or articulation. And hardly anybody else I have read so far (except two that come to mind immediately) has done it with as much self consciousness of the politics of the work. 

I remember reading Kamala Subramaniam's version of the Mahabharata when I was in school. It remains one of my most favorite versions of the story, but its task seemed much simpler. It told a story we all knew, and asked very few questions of it. (I say "very few" because Subramaniam's treatment of a lot of characters is quite nuanced. Karna, for example, is the real hero of her story and Duryodhana is wronged by almost everyone he loved.) Around the same time, I also read Ashok Banker's version of the Ramayana and I remember being absolutely stunned by it. Here was a man who took another story we all knew and completely changed it around. He asked questions. Wondered how the hell some of the things that happened could have possibly happened. Traced histories. Rewrote characters. Asked questions. Found loopholes. Messed with language. Turned the Ramayana into a fantasy series. He changed how I saw the telling of epics at all. 

Amruta Patil is a different kind of artist and writer. She asks questions not only of how the story is told, but also of how we see it. She asks who sees it and why. She asks how histories shape stories, and how generations reimagine them. And she does this with so much passion. 

And how. 

Add caption

Creation is leela. Amusement, play, reverie.

ocean at the end of the lane

by Neil Gaiman

It's a good book. Heck, it's a brilliant book. 

But is it as good as any of his really fantastic, absolutely great books? Um. 

One way to say this is - It's not fair to compare. 

This Gaiman isn't the same Gaiman who wrote Sandman, clearly. Sandman is one the most amazing things to ever even have been imagined; to then go on and write it and get it illustrated and all that is not something a regular human being could have achieved. 

It would be stupid and laughable  to even think to compare anything to Neverwhere. Period.

Let's also not compare it to American Gods. That book is a terrific and insanely intelligent critique of the internet-age, capitalism, globalization, mythology; and all this is done with that beautifully Gaiman-esque quality of magic and beauty. For the same reasons, not even to Anansi Boys. 

Shall we compare it to something he did that I could think of as similar, may be? Coraline? Coraline literally gave me nightmares. For three nights. To this day, I can't look at that book and not feel something physically turn my stomach. So I suppose not even Coraline, then.

So the bottomline is, don't compare it to anything else he's written. 

But does he inspire magic, wit, wonder? Yes. Does he make you want to turn every page thinking, "thisissolovelythisissolovely." Oh. Yeah. 

Should that be enough?

I guess. 

if on a winter's night a traveller

by Italo Calvino

I have never encountered a book so mad and beautiful at the same time as Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller. As a book, it inspires you to read it over and over again. It is almost the reason highlighters, post-it flags and annotation in books was even invented. It's that mad. And beautiful. At the same time. 

I want to say that reading it is like sitting in a train, looking out a window, wrapped in a blanket, sipping coffee. (With your feet up, of course). But that's too obvious. And not enough. It's fragmented, and even half way through, you can only begin to see it coming together - fragments of a novel, a pattern in it, somewhere. But you're not convinced. The author (by which I mean Calvino) keeps throwing unresolved, mad, fragmented bits at you; and you, you have no choice but to give yourself up to them. Besides, Calvino describes it bestest himself, anyway. (Because this book is that good.) Right in the beginning, and you think he is saying it to tease you, but he's actually giving you a warning, he says: "Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears." 

Of course I underlined it immediately and put a little smiley face next to it. Of. Course. I did. Little did I know. 

The whole book, in its fragments goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. And all you can do is sigh, feel like you're being cheated, but plough on regardless because this is a master at his craft you're reading. And he's pulling tricks nobody has ever pulled before, like a true magician who doesn't need to show off, but ends up doing it anyway. 

You can only watch, enthralled, and hope that there is, somewhere in the horizon, a reward for listening to this mad man's story.

why i love

Nicholson Baker

quote

I read Aminatta Forna's Memory of Love sometime last year, I think. 

The New Yorker has an article this week about "The Curse of Reading and Forgetting" and I feel nothing but comfort and joy at this. I feel like I am not alone in this - that other people also pick up books, happily read through atleast half or more than half of the book before realising that they've already read this. 

I nearly cried when I read that other people also have the same problem I do in social situations - that they have an intense urge to say "Yeah, I read that book! I loved it! It was so brilliant! etc etc" but they don't do it in constant fear of the other person bringing up plot details or dialogues or characters - none of which they will remember. Infact, I thought about what Ian Crouch quotes Nabokov for - rereading - and I figured that, really, the only books that I do remember anything about are books that I have reread. (The best example for this unfortunately, is Harry Potter and strangely enough, not Murakami.) 

Anyway, what I wanted to say about Aminatta Forna's Memory of Love is this - i loved it it was so brilliant she's my favorite author of the year last year etc etc - but there are very few things I remember about the book. Except for this line:

"People are wrong when they talk of love at first sight. It is neither love nor lust. No. As she walks away from you, what you feel is loss. A premonition of loss." 

I can quote that line in my sleep, almost. I know it like I know Cummings' Since Feeling Is First.  (Because I don't understand the whole of it. Not really.) 

A premonition of loss. 

I think it is because I spent a long time thinking about what she could have meant by a premonition of loss.

Because I got feeling love and loss. I felt it, deeply. I knew what she was talking about.  But a premonition of loss? I failed to understand it. I left this to my unconventional experiences of love. I thought, well, I don't know what it feels like, so I probably don't understand it.

The thing is - I think I get it now. A premonition of loss.  As she walks away from you, of possibilities and hope, of things coming together and falling apart. A premonition of loss. Not of loss, simply. Not a life you can have, by itself. But both. Simultaneously. A feeling of something wrenching at your gut, of something that you can have but something you can't hold.

A premonition of loss.

avoiding the tragic

For the past few years, I've been avoiding books set in the real world, especially if they're sad or tragic which is often the case. Often, I have wondered if, as a strategy, this works especially because I seem to be missing out on a large chunk of books that everybody else is reading and loves. 

For much of last year, I read all the fantasy and graphic novels I could lay my hands on. I also read a fair amount of children's fiction. Some noir fiction - Chandler, Hammett; some random other things like Scarlett Thomas (who I won't recommend to anyone) or Arun Joshi (who I could write a few songs for, he's that awesome). I discovered Borges and Calvino, both of whom changed my life.  I fell head over heels in love with Fitzgerald. I still think Murakami is possibly one of the greatest writers ever, but I'm not as mad about him as I was before. I like Ishiguro now, which is not something I could have said two years ago.

Since January this year, I have been in recovery. (I mean this about my personal life, I'm not being dramatic.) I've also been diversifying my reading. I'm still to read something that is sad (I don't think Em and the Big Hoom counts because it's one of the funniest, cleverest, most beautiful books I've read this year inspite of what it is about), but I'm making progress. 

Books I thought I might have to give up midway because of what I thought they might be about weren't as bad as I imagined - The Good Muslim, for example. Books I didn't think would be a problem turned out not so well - Thing Around Your Neck, NW. I just started reading Toni Morrison, and this is someone I'm extremely apprehensive about too. (I also stopped reading Book Thief by the fifteenth page - but this has nothing to do with the book itself. The book seems to be more amazing than I can imagine. I was reading this off an e-book and it was formatted badly - and much of this book is in the formatting. So Fact and Fiction, here I come!) I loved Americanah and Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (both of which are books that are set in the real world, and are books about diaspora in America). I still haven't been able to go back to Reading Lolita though. Or Leila Aboulela.

The point is - this year, I've been reading lots of things about real people in real worlds that don't have real dragons in them. And I'm enjoying myself so far.

That's all. 

americanah

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In a surprise twist to my life, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie just turned up at my doorstep today. I ordered it on Flipkart more than three months ago, so it was quite an unexpected treat. What should be of no surprise to anyone is that I just spent the past seven hours eating this book right up. 

It's a remarkable book, to say the very least. (Aside - I've been mulling over using phrases like it's a remarkable book, or it's an alluring piece of work, or she's an attractive woman. So I'm remarking its remarkability? Being allured by its alluring quality? Getting attracted to her attractiveness? These are such vague things to say! It's like describing something as "interesting". But I remember reading someone recently who wrote about the use of the word "interesting" in a long academic sort of book in which she spends laborious amounts of space talking about it as an "aesthetic category.") But anyway, it's a remarkable book. Absolutely brilliant, in what it sets out to do, what it manages to achieve, how much it manages to say and how easily.  

What I have always loved about Adichie is how political her writings are. She writes in such a self-aware manner, rich and complex, bold and brave. This book is nothing different. While in Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, she wrote about Nigeria and Biafra, about the politics of being a girl, a child, a woman, sexual, Igbo, rich, privileged, poor, African; in Americanah, the book is about being Black, African and Diaspora. It is self-consciously about race: the main character writes a blog called 'Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known As Negroes) By a Non-American Black'. It is about politics of identity, and how these politics colour everything.

I gave myself a snarky little smile when Adichie brought up a grouse I often have with people I talk to or read.  At some point in the book, while Ifemelu is getting her hair done, she has a conversation about a book with a white woman (whose race I'm emphasizing because the book does). The woman says, "It's just so honest, the most honest book I've read about Africa." But Ifemelu doesn't agree with her, and gives her a "mini-lecture" about how she doesn't think the book is about Africa at all. It is, she argues, about "Europe or the longing for Europe." 

The woman then replies - "Oh, well, I see why you would read a novel like that."

"And I see why you would read it like you did," Ifemelu says. 

Adichie then goes on to say "...this girl (who) somehow believed that she was miraculously neutral in how she read books, while other people read emotionally."

Somewhere along the way, I had a thought about the content of the book - it isn't historical or political in an overt and obvious way like her previous two books. But it's more grown up, so much more layered, just, so much more. It might be a reflection of my own growing up (the first time I read Adichie was six whole years ago!), but I would really like to think that it's also Adichie who's writing better than before now.

But essentially, this book is a long, beautifully written (to the point of making me cry) love story. It is the story of longing, loss and seperation. It is a story of love for a person, a country, a feeling; one that is so full of life and vibrancy that even in its dark moments, it makes you want to hold on to a sense of a happy ending.  This is a new and enjoyable feature of Adichie's writing - one of resolution. In Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun (actually, in most of her short stories as well), the endings are often ambiguous, leaving much to your own reading of the story. This one isn't like that - it ends well, and happily (which I loved) and this also works for its love-story-esque quality.

I just read this - and I feel like I'm talking about Adichie more than I'm talking about the book itself. Which is just so, because that's what the book felt like in so many ways. My very first thought about the book at the very first sentence of the book, which is about the smell (or lack thereof) of Princeton, was - is this something Adichie felt herself when she was in Princeton? For me, this is one of the reasons why this book works so well. It's because she puts herself squarely in her book - she makes it about her. 

I'll leave you with this description of loneliness and depression that I have now read for the fourth time in the past nine hours:

"She woke up torpid each morning, slowed by sadness, frightened by the endless stretch of day that lay ahead. Everything had thickened. She was swallowed, lost in a viscious haze, shrouded in a soup of nothingness. Between her and what she should feel, there was a gap. She cared about nothing. She wanted to care, but she no longer knew how; it had slipped from her memory, the ability to care. ... Her days were stilled by silence and snow."

trains

do wonders for reading.

also, loved loved loved em and the big hoom. no idea why i postponed this for so long. so brilliant, so beautiful.