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The Life and Adventures of a Bibliophile

(by Soonha Abro)

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10 Books Challenge: The beauty of reading

The ‘10 Book Challenge’ that has been doing the rounds around on Facebook recently has made me really happy. I found that there are so many people who read, even if it's just a couple of books a year, and that some of these books stay with them for the rest of their lives. There are copious amounts of books that I have seen people citing as the greatest influences in their lives, each varying in genre, language, and literary tradition. It’s reassuring to discover that there are other bibliophiles like myself out there who have connected to a writer and their work across the boundaries of Time. So I’m not the only crazy one here, then; there are others, too.

One of my cousins commented on my 10 Book Challenge: “You can tell a lot about a person from the books they read.”

He’s right. This challenge has indeed turned into a window to the souls of the people we know; those we meet frequently, and those who we haven’t seen in years; those whom we have recently met and those whom we have known, intimately, for many, many years. I think that this challenge might have brought many book-lovers closer to each other, which is amazing.

I discovered a large number of writers that I’m either yet to read or will read them in near future through this challenge. For an aspiring writer like yours truly, seeing people love lesser-known books is the most encouraging and inspiring thing to happen. Indeed, it is the best thing to happen to me at this point in my writing career. At least I know that someone somewhere out there will be mad enough to understand what I’m trying to express through my writing. It is a great consolation to know that I will definitely be able to reach out to someone through my stories. What more could a writer want?

Things like this challenge never fail to sustain my faith in the power of reading and books. A happiness of the purest kind courses through my veins in such situations, for example, when I weave my way back and forth through the swarming multitudes at the Karachi Literature Festival, and the Karachi International Book Fair. The phrase, commonly seen on the Internet, ‘faith in humanity is/has been restored’ describes exactly how I feel when I see people who are simply delighted to be around books. Watching children running into the bookshop with gleeful grins, pleading their parents to buy them some books, and then walking out of the bookshop cradling their latest bookish purchases in their arms with the love and respect that a book must be always be given is the most joyful sight that I have ever seen. 

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Thoughts on The Blind Assassin after re-reading it

The last time I wrote something here was when I’d just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin. Since then I’ve been re-reading the novel, read her short story Happy Endings, as well as some other amazing short stories by writers like Alice Munro, Kate Chopin, John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway and a few others as well. I’ve also been reading Elif Shafak’s The Flea Palace (more on that in the next blog).

  In my previous post on my experience of reading The Blind Assassin I wrote that from my second reading of the book I was hoping to learn more about the intricate plot points, and subtleties that I’d missed during my first reading. I’m happy to report that I really do understand the novel better now that I’ve read it right to the end already so I know what is happening. Based on that knowledge I’m able to perceive what happens in the earlier parts of the story. For one, I now know that the unnamed woman and man – who, it is apparent from the beginning, are clearly embroiled in an illicit relationship with each other – are actually the main narrator Iris Griffen nee Chase, and Alex Thomas, probably the only man with whom the narrator and her sister Laura could have had a certain romantic and/or physical attraction for.

  Second, I’ve also understood that the entire narrative has three distinctive parts to it. It’s as if the plot moves in three different sections of Time and Space.

  One plotline is the older Iris who has returned to the town – or village, if you may – of her birth and is now permanently established there. She is writing an account of her past life, a memoir. She doesn’t specify any agenda that she might have in writing her autobiography. One might assume that she might be trying to leave something to her granddaughter Sabrina, from whom she has been estranged for a long time, so the young lady might be able to reach a reconciliation with her grandmother. There you have a hint of a serious family conflict. When Iris talks of Sabrina you can sense her desperation to reconcile with the only living memory of her daughter Aimee who was taken away from her when she was a child. The sense of desperation is also heightened because Iris has been diagnosed with a weak heart presumably caused by old age. She has resigned herself to her impending demise and talks about it in her chronicles, too. But she also despairs when she thinks about the possibility that she might die before she has had a chance to complete her account of her life.

  The second narrative is the story of Iris’ childhood spent in Port Ticonderoga and at Avilion, her family home, and her subsequent marriage. This is where we get to know her sister, Laura.

  The third storyline comprises the clandestine meetings of an unnamed couple. It also involves a telling of a science-fiction story about a city on a distant planet, its people, its temple and the guild of the blind assassins.

  One thing I haven’t been able to understand yet is the significance of the novel’s title. I’m hoping that my current re-reading of the book will enlighten me on this. If not this time, maybe this will occur on my next reading of the story.

[soonhaabro]

Avid Reader, Reluctant Writer

It has returned, that feeling, the penetrating yearning that makes me want to create. And this time it is unlike the feeling I get when I am inspired to pen down a piece of prose or a story. This is just like the time when I had wanted to become a filmmaker. Although this time it is more intense. I think it is because the yearning to pen a tale or a script that would be brought to life on screen or on stage have combined to give birth to the emotions that I am experiencing presently.

I had not expected that this feeling would ever return; this fascination with how a script so sparse, so utterly boring in its bareness can be turned into a finished creation that is jam-packed with strong emotions, subtexts, insinuations, so many gaps for reading between the lines that the viewer is left breathless at its majestic, absolutely glorious beauty. In other words, how a sparse script can be brought to life on screen and/or on stage.

A few years ago, I had been convinced with logical arguments that I cannot just do something for myself and feed myself off others’ money. A fiercely independent soul, like me, must earn its own bread and butter, along with that of its family. So I altered my career plans.

But now, increasingly, I am beginning to be pulled back into the black hole that creativity actually is. All I want to do is to write: first, it was prose, then fiction, and now it is scripts. But then, in the end, for whom I write is inconsequential. Whether I write for a publisher, my readers, for a theatre company, a production house, there is only one reason that I read and write for: myself, and only myself. To become a writer is, for me, to discover my voice; to release the torrents that gush within me; to allow the roaring underground rivers within me to form their way to the outside world. There has to be someone who will see the beauty of the landscape that I have created inside myself. There has got to be someone who can see and understand the desolate beauty of my dreamscape.

That is all this comes down to: about being unsure of whether I am prepared to take this plunge and carve out an opening for the world that resides within me, a window to the outside world that would serve as a door to the others to see what lies inside. That is where the self-doubt comes in. Am I good enough to have my writing enjoyed by readers? Is my writing appealing enough? Can I actually have a fan somewhere out there? I have all these thoughts, and unlike others in similar situations, I also possess the solution to my predicament. I think I might be one of the lucky ones, because already knowing the solution is a problem half-solved, so they say. But in my case, it is a problem quarter-solved.

As it stands, I still have to deal with the problem of writer’s block, a problem that is so real, and yet so ridiculed by numerous writers, both past and present. Writing is a 24/7 job, so complaining of writer’s block and even saying that you suffer from it is not an excuse. But what to do when your mind is racing through ideas, people, events, places at such a breakneck speed that your hands cannot keep up with it. My mind is like an undisciplined learner who yearns to learn but cannot bear the slow pace of its teachers and guides and continues to run faster than the fastest human being or animal.

It is not just the writer’s block that prevents me from writing. I have a fear too, a dread that putting down everything on paper will convert the events and incidents into cold, hard, eternal facts. Right now they are in my mind only. They are still facts, yes, but they are forgettable, easier to ignore and bury because no one except me knows these things. But once they have been written down, they are there for the entire world to read and see. Everyone would know the truth, the reality of how people are, of what goes on behind the closed doors of a family residence, the pain and sense of betrayal that a human being can hide. What we show to the world is different from what we are within; we wear masks for every occasion imaginable, and no one is ever the wiser, no one at all. Even our closest aides and confidants only know the side we choose to show them. They can manage to scratch only so many layers that form our whole being.

Nevertheless, it is the same fear that is my sole motivation to write. I have things that I need to get off my chest; I have stories that need to be told; there are people I know that the world needs to know through my eyes. The only thing stopping me is the inability to put pen to paper, a powerlessness to control my wanton mind that I cannot quite catch up with. Only practice, and habit, can achieve this, and achieve it will. A day will come, hopefully in near future that it will become unimaginable for me to end a day without having written a word, just like now it is unimaginable for me to end my day without having read a couple of pages.

[soonhaabro]

Pittho’s World: A book review

Pittho’s World by Murtaza Razvi is a novel with stories of numerous characters, as well as that of the narrator himself. The entire novel spans a period of about two centuries, and is spread out over a large geographical space that consists of countries like 19th century Iran, the pre-partition India, which then becomes Pakistan (particularly Lahore, Karachi etc.), East Pakistan/Bangladesh (Dhaka). This geographical space even includes the land of Caucasus, if only in a fairy tale, as well as the Swiss city of Zurich. Due to the numerous characters and settings, one would think that just the amount of material to be dealt in a book like Pittho’s World would turn the text into a large jumble of characters and events. But it hasn't.

The narrative in Pittho’s World is certainly inspired from the Arabian Nights; even the narrator, Sheikhu, and his partner Rani are reminiscent of Scheherazade and Shahryar in the Arabian Nights, although with a complete role reversal. But the similarity ends with the novel’s opening lines:

“No, I am no Scheherazade of the Arabian Nights,” I tell Rani, when she agrees to listen to my stories. “And I am no depraved king,” she says.

(Razvi 1)

It signifies the breaking away from the mold of Arabian Nights, and the creation of a new one that is more suitable for understanding Pittho’s World. The opening lines also indicate that the book is not going to be what one might think after reading the blurb at the back. Therefore, it lends a certain uniqueness to Pittho’s World, in the sense that the novel is actually like a collection of short stories – all of which are true, and not a part of Sheikhu’s imagination, unlike in the Arabian Nights – with the narrator being the focal point, who is telling all these stories to his partner, and by extension, the reader too, who has also become a part of the narrative, playing the role of the listener to Sheikhu the narrator, the storyteller of Pittho’s World.

In terms of characterisation, the reader receives the most insight into Sheikhu, as compared to all other characters, even Rani. In fact, one is acquainted with the characters, and their stories through Sheikhu’s perspective, which gives a limited view of every single character with the exception of the narrator. The reader knows more about the latter due to his exposition in the first five pages, at the beginning and end of almost every chapter, unless that particular chapter is about Sheikhu’s story.

The other characters, mostly relatives of Sheikhu, and of course Rani, are all portrayed through the narrator’s perspective. Therefore, when he talks of his great-great-grandparents, great-grandparents, and grandparents, the reader can sense what he actually feels about each of these characters, whether he likes or dislikes them, respects them or treats them with contempt. But his feelings are vague, often with two or more opposing emotions directed at a single character within a space of a few lines sometimes. This leaves the reader without a clear idea of how one should consider a certain character, as well as how should one feel towards the multitude of characters illustrated in Pittho’s World. Same goes for the remaining oddball characters in Sheikhu’s family, for example, Apa.

The narrator, Sheikhu, is an equally eccentric character like the rest of his relatives. And why should he not be? He is just as nonconformist as Apa was; just as odd as all the rest of the clan; just as fond of stories and storytelling as the rest of them were. The reader gets to know him better through his stories, which appear to be his way of expressing his individuality – how he is so different from most of his conformist relatives; how he refuses to follow the norms, values, and the social mores of his clan that have been transmitted to each generation in the family over a span of about two hundred years.

Each story jumps between the past, and the present; the former being the actual story, which happened in the past, and the latter being the storytelling session taking place between Sheikhu and Rani, where he speculates about what she is thinking of his stories. Because there is little explicit description of what Rani is thinking, and the fact that there is mostly Sheikhu’s speculation regarding the various signals he thinks he is receiving from her – like a look in her eyes, a smile on her face, her enthusiasm, or her occasional lack of it, her laughing and teasing of Sheikhu for his childhood antics. All of these make the reader speculate about Rani’s opinions about the stories she is being told just as much as Sheikhu. This makes her one of the most nebulous characters in Pittho’s World.

The pace of the narrative alters between the past and present timeframes mentioned previously. The parts with Sheikhu and Rani are slowly paced, like when it is calm before the storm. When the story begins, the pace quickens, giving that particular portion a sense that there is a lot to tell to the listeners – Rani and the reader – but that is restricted by the time and space constraints.

Pittho’s World is unique because it is a collection of short stories that are all united by the presence of single narrator, and two listeners, Rani and the reader. It is also united by a common starting point: the migration of Sheikhu’s ancestors to the Indian Subcontinent from Qom in Persia in the 19th century. This particular point then connects all the subsequent stories with each other, and to Sheikhu himself. The book’s main strength is its numerous characters, all of which act as a catalyst for the narrative to move forward. The novel is highly recommended for those who are looking to read something new.

Razvi, Murtaza. *Pittho’s World. New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2013. Print.

Available at Liberty Books. Pages: 205 Price Rs 695

Originally published here.