There was a time when
I was an avid, voracious reader. When I liked a book, I went after the author until
I had read everything he (or she, of course) had written; or I got over him.
There are notable exceptions like Wodehouse and Asimov who beat me with the
sheer volume of their output: I could never exhaust their writing nor did I tire of them. However, contemporary writing was never my forte
and I hardly went looking for current writers unless they created a sensation
and it was impossible to ignore them.
As I grew older, my
interest in reading waned and I almost lost contact with contemporary writing.
Both English, including translations of international writing, as well as Marathi fiction. Then my daughter grew
up and she started giving me books to read. It was she who introduced me to
Douglas Adams, Haruki Murakami, Mark Haddon, Chinua Achebe and others. Here is
the latest addition: Rana Dasgupta. Just finished his novel ‘Solo’.
The author’s name is unmistakably Indian. The
book not once talks about India. It comprises wholly of reminiscences of a hundred-year-old
man named Ulrich who has spent most of his life in Sofia, the capital of
Bulgaria. I am not going to narrate the story here nor am I going to write a
review. And I have deliberately not yet googled ‘Rana Dasgupta’ because I want
to write this post without prejudice. I just want to share my reactions.
I am not an authority
on Bulgaria and so am unable to comment upon the authenticity of the history, the
geography and the social values and day-to-day life described in the novel. But
the way it all is portrayed from the viewpoint of a common man, of someone who
is a part of it all and so for whom nothing in it is larger than life, so to
say; is, well, amazing. A war bombing is not a national calamity; it is a hole
in a local building. The arrival or the fall of communism is not an
epoch-making event; it is change in social, individual relationships; change in
values and lifestyles. You know what; it revived my own mundane memories of
similar local events: the Samyukt Maharashtra Movement and the wars with China
and Pakistan and the Emergency. We have a proverb in Marathi: flood uproots
trees, the grass survives intact. That too is a perspective and it is important
to remember that it too exists.
The attention to
detail. Detail of an ordinary life and a ground-level perspective. Ulrich
wonders what happened to all the horses which pulled carts before motor cars
came. He remembers how there were a lot many horses, how the roads looked when
so many horses used them. And then, in a short time, there were cars. So, were
the horses killed? Where did they go away? A genuine enigma for an old man
trying to go back to those bygone days. Also, the sensory perceptions of the blind
Ulrich are full of sounds and smells. And in his own mind, he is not a
handicapped person; the sounds and smells fill his sensory universe adequately
to leave no sense of loss.
But there are fewer details
in his daydreams! You see; daydreams are about fulfilling some fantasy, living
a coveted but unatained life; the whole thrust is towards the larger picture.
Or towards some specific desire. Commonplace detail has no place in daydreams.
The contrast between Ulrich’s real life as an old, blind man and the happenings
in the life of the characters in his daydreams is striking. What is more noteworthy
is the fact that each set of events would appear quite normal fiction if the
other was not there. Again, a subtle point of perspective. An insight that will
change the way I accept the narrative in novels I shall read henceforth.
Lastly, the daydreams.
Dasgupta calls them that: daydreams. There is no
suggestion of them being
magical realism. Daydreams are half of the novel. In a way, they render
substance to Ulrich’s existence. But Dasgupta’s principal character refuses to
escape into a make-believe world! Sure, what happens in his imagination is
beyond the realm of his normal existence. But nothing in it is fantastic,
unreal which defies the physical laws.
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