The Reading Addiction

 

This Reading Addiction

Here I am, again, trying to write. Ben Okri, he of the Famished Road  fame was on TV (6/6/20) talking to the news anchor about James Floyd's death. And I think, there are writers like me and there are writers like him. So many more like me. Yet, we are compulsive writers too. If we don't write we feel dispossessed, as though we have been ousted from that intellectual and emotional domain we occupy.
   My problem is that I have to feel strongly about something for me to venture an opinion. (Friends who have suffered from the 'strength' of some of my opinions, will vouch for the fact that this happens much too frequently. Sorry.) At the moment I am staggering under the weight of happenings that make my thinking frenetic and confused. I  don't know where to begin. So I consider the writers I have really respected, and learned from. A more pleasant exercise -- you could call it a cop-out.
   Penelope Lively wrote Moon Tiger and won the Booker Prize some time in the eighties. Every little section in a chapter, sometimes consisting of a paragraph or two, like the brother and sister dancing, oblivious to all around them, with a faint suggestion of incest; much later the sister, in a car with the brother and his wife, and her total contempt for the woman...
   There was also Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, in the year Indian writing in English nudged all others out and declared ownership of that language. And later, Arundhathi Roy with her The God of Small Things, which reinvented the English Language so powerfully. All over the Commonwealth, countries claim their own version of English: Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie... The list is a long rainbow list of wonderfully evocative writers.
   Many, like Rushdie have woven long stories flitting in and out of the realms of fantasy. I am not a great admirer of fantasy, but that image of yellow moths crowding round the naked woman as she walks, keeping her covered, has stayed with me for decades. Put that alongside, the brutal dinner-conference, generals moving pepper-pots around on the dining table to visualise the steps in the assassination of a President – no fantasy in that. Kashuo Ishiguro is another writer who cannot be boxed into any genre. There was ‘Remains of The Day,’ and much later, ‘Don’t Ever Leave Me.’ Remembering those books, I want to find them again on my shelves, boxes, loft, wherever they are, and dive into them.

  Which – leaves me with a selfish thought. After a die, all these and many more amazing writers, will keep on writing, and I have never heard of a library in the eternal silence. If there was, I would start believing in it.