Tag: Classics

The turning point of my reading career

In the youthful exuberance of our teenage years, with all its ups and downs, the mood swings, and our search for a productive outlet of our energies, as also our imagination, it only needs the faintest touch from the right kind of an author, for those suitably inclined, to be sent on an entirely different and profound trajectory, as far as their reading habits and choices are concerned.

Dostoyevsky is one such writer.

I clearly remember the day I had bought Crime and Punishment, and I think what led me to the book was my recollection of a reference to it in Babe : Pig in the City – a cinematic adaptation of Animal Farm which I had seen a few years earlier.

Crime and Punishment was the first unabridged classic I read, and it was also my introduction to the genre of philosophical fiction; before that I wasn’t even aware that such a combination existed (I was seventeen, what do you expect!) and had been reading the thrillers of John Grisham, Dan Brown and the occasional Jeffrey Archer; in addition to the omnipresent Harry Potter series.

Over the course of the eighteen or so months that I spent in slowly completing the book, I eased into my college studies, and experienced a whole new range of emotions, and probing questions, for the first time in my life. All this while, Crime and Punishment was performing a kind of slow baptism by fire in the background, and completely transformed me as a reader.

Being my first classic, this book was also my introduction to Victorian English (I read Constance Garnett’s 1914 translation) and I just fell in love with the language. Victorian English is often accused of prolix verbiage, of dramatic and extended monologues, and of having a proliferation of words and a profusion of sentences so articulate one will never use them in real life. But I have always found this criticism incorrect on two accounts.

Firstly, it fails to see just how much, and in what degrees, the expectations from literature have changed even within the relatively short time frame of the past hundred and fifty years and the whole point of literature, good literature in any case, is to bring us closer to thoughts, ideas and situations we may never experience in our own lives.

And secondly, this tendency is more on account of our having gotten used to internet lingo and abbreviations in our normal conversations in the twenty-first century, than as an objective criticism of the language in itself.

How has the book affected me? That is impossible to determine, and yet I can observe a few noticeable changes.

I take my time when reading a book as I want to absorb each sentence, each word, each gesture and wave of a hand. The books I read come to life in my mind in vivid detail. Since I am on Earth for only a finite amount of time, and there are just too many books I want to read, I have become an elitist in my book choices and I think it was a natural result of having gained more from this one book than probably all the books I had read until that point, combined.

Additionally, with my to-read list being so excruciatingly long, it is a foregone conclusion that I will almost never try out a new author I know little about. This, unfortunately, automatically deprives me the pleasure of serendipity, but that is a sacrifice I seem willing to make.

Crime and Punishment radically transformed what I came to expect from the written word, as also what I believed were the limits of what could be expressed through this medium. The internal turmoil of the protagonist Rodión Románovich Raskólnikov is beautifully portrayed, as are his frequent bouts of feverish obsession with the crime(s) he has committed. In addition, the portrayal of his crushing poverty, in the backdrop of the depiction of St. Pertersburg of the day, and his interactions with other people provide an extremely enriching reading experience.

I distinctly remember one particular scene where Pyótr Petróvich Lúzhin, a lawyer who is engaged to Raskólnikov’s sister in the beginning of the book, accuses Sónya Marmeládova, the daughter of a drunkard whom Raskólnikov meets in a tavern, and whom circumstances have pushed into prostitution, of stealing a hundred rouble note from him. Katerína Ivánovna Marmeládova, Sónya’s stepmother, rushes to counter Lúzhin’s claim and vouches for Sónya’s innocence. And then, finally, Lúzhin’s roommate Lebeziátnikov enters the scene and counters him, managing to prove the innocence of Sónya with the help of a moving monologue by Raskólnikov.

This scene was spread over five pages and provided me my first experience of, what I can only refer to as, a literary orgasm.

It has been almost a decade since I read Crime and Punishment. I never came around to writing what I felt about the book for it seemed very difficult to express the myriad ways in which the book has affected me and the very fact that I am able to talk so clearly about my feelings associated with the book, even after so much time has passed, is a testament to that.

Dostoyevsky belongs to that certain breed of authors where first impressions are nearly impossible to improve upon. Ayn Rand and Khaled Hosseini are others that come to my mind.

I think in the case of such authors, whichever book a given person picks up first will generally remain their favourite work from that author.

I have read two more books by Dostoyevsky in the intervening years, and they were delights to read. But I doubt I will ever be affected this much again, by any other work by him.

Thank you, Fyodor.

The silent roar of Howard Roark

Since its publication 73 years ago, The Fountainhead has given its readers a unique reading experience indeed.

The protagonist Howard Roark presents a depiction of man that would seem impossible to most of us. And that is precisely the point. Howard Roark is a person who rises on his own, is an independent body, mind and soul. An independent force. He rises against that inevitable influence that society has on its members – over time it builds a set of conventions, then it conditions its members, since their birth, to believe those conventions are sacred, then it establishes another set of conventions to punish those who flounder the first set of sacred conventions, and in most of the cases, these steps are enough.

Then arrive men of ideas, who are trying to find a new path. The trouble? The new path isn’t a part of the convention yet! So all hell breaks loose.

This conflict between the individual and the collective would not be so vitriolic if the collective didn’t regard the individual as a threat. The fact that it does is more of a judgement on the collective’s insecurities than it is on the individual.

Fountainhead is a beautiful book. It champions ideas too idealistic. But why should that matter? Rand deserves credit not only for her literary prowess but also for her ability to beautifully transform her thoughts and philosophy into a powerful work of fiction.

There is one important thing to understand here. You cannot become Howard Roark. You either are Roark or you are not. I’ve heard people say that the true power of this book, as it was intended by the author, is experienced in the late teens and the very early twenties as at that time, we have an idealistic outlook towards the world and believe everything is possible. Then as some years pass and we reach the late twenties, we begin to grow averse to the ideas espoused in the book as they seem unrealistic and impractical.

I think this has a very valid reason. The age when a child’s personality is slowly taking shape – the common denominator of his personality that will stay fixed for the rest of his life even as additional traits will get added and subtracted as time shall pass – is from about three to six. If a child could read and understand The Fountainhead at that age, it would impact him in ways we aren’t in a position to imagine or extrapolate.

By the time we reach an age when we can actually get to grips with this masterful work, our basic personality has already formed. However, till the late teens we believe we can still change certain traits of ours and we feel we have the power. So the magic of this book enchants us.

The real disappointment dawns when we are in our twenties and realise it is not possible to act like Roark. However much anyone may mock Rand, and there is no dearth of people who do, at some level, and in varying degrees, they all will agree that living like Roark is not an unwise way to spend one’s life, even if they may not step into his shoes if given the chance. The antagonistic feelings that may arise in someone’s mind for Rand’s work betrays the very thing that that feeling is supposedly a result of. They understand that they can no longer have the independence that Roark has. Of course some people may genuinely dislike her philosophy, but I’m not referring to that set of people here.

This book has a few recurring themes that strengthen its foundation, and form the bedrock of its narrative, effortlessly carrying the story forward.

Of love, and such a conception of it which we may not have come across before, and which I had assuredly not.

Of power and its nature, how is it held and wielded. What is the role of someone who holds power? Is it more important to hold power over others, or over oneself?

Of beauty, and whether the beauty of a thing or an idea depends in any way on its existence in the physical world.

And of patience, self-assuredness and determination.

Howard Roark may not exist. But neither do unicorns. Do we also berate the person who dreamed up the unicorn?

Outsiders just are, they do not choose

Society is a funny construct.

For some reason, after thousands of years of evolution, man has formed this edifice to coordinate the mutual relations between its members, and the edifice stands on the principles of uniformity, common knowledge, customs and traditions and accepted and expected behaviour.

The edifice propagates because each member learns, consciously after teenage years, and unconsciously before then, about these very principles that drive and sustain his society.

But not all people are amenable to these influences. Man is a mysterious creature, insofar as his personal convictions and inner nature are beyond the observational apparatus of society. You could be a cruel, sadistic, heartless psychopath holding malice towards one and all, but if you manage to hide all that beneath an external veneer of empathy, patience and calmness, you are good to go.

Since only your actions (or the lack of them) can affect others, as long as your actions are in line with those that the society expects, you aren’t really considered harmful. Actions take precedence.

Camus breaks this very barrier in The Outsider. The protagonist lacks any kind of filter that could separate his thoughts and his actions. It’s not his actions per se, for you could find many people like him, but the lack of a filter between his thoughts and actions that repulses the reader.

A person’s personality is basically driven by two processes – if we were to look into his brain, each electrical signal would have its unique signature, acting like an input to the chaotic system represented by the entirety of the brain. However, man’s free will provides a counter-balancing force to this randomness and gives a sense of direction to his personality. Man is, thus, a stochastic system.

Each person grows with his own brain configuration. At every step, he is moulded by society, his parents, teachers and his school and home environment. This interplay means, a person is taught to make the choices that society wants him to, and an ideal social man arises. That this should happen in such a huge majority of the cases is the actual surprise.

Given this background, and that seven billion people live on the earth, it is natural to expect some members on whom this process won’t work, some members who will remain outside such influences, the outsiders that Camus is referring to. They are different, and they are not choosing to be so. They just are.

When Meursault does not mourn the death of his mother, he is not choosing not to mourn. He just doesn’t feel mournful. In this sense, there is no malice in his actions, no ill-feelings, and no imaginary feelings of resentment against his mother can be attributed as a cause. He just isn’t what society expects him to be. He is an outsider, and he doesn’t even know.

No wonder such a person will quickly be taken as a threat to the social construct, because he indicates that the social influences approach is not fool-proof. If Mersault knowingly did the things he did, it would have been an indication of his personal choices, and as long as a person is doing things by choice, his choices can be moulded to what the society wants, through one of many means. But if a person has fallen out without exercising his choice, there really is no hope.

Camus raises some pertinent questions.

Honesty is preached as the best policy, but the moment the honesty of a person crosses certain lines, or is not in line with (pun intended) the conventions of society, it is taken as a source of moral revulsion. Meursault, unknowingly, manages to cross this line and disrobe the hypocrisy of our society.

Our social construct will happily accept the most cruel and diabolical person as a member of its own, provided he acts properly and presents a face the society wants, but that same construct will summarily reject a person who, though not in line with the conventions of society, nevertheless doesn’t hold any malice towards anyone. The cunning dishonesty of the bad is rewarded, and the innocent honesty of even a saintly outsider is punished. But, to be honest (ironical, eh?), I’m not sure we can blame our society for that.

Outsiders will always be there. The social engine isn’t fool proof, and even if it were, it cannot predict the internal workings of something as complex as a human personality. Rather than being repulsed and terrified by such outsiders, they should be accepted as a natural consequence of such a system as the human society.

We must remember that man precedes society.

One of the greatest tales ever told

I had read an abridged and illustrated edition of A Tale of Two Cities when I was small. Over the last few years, whenever this work came to mind, two words would spontaneously come along – courage and self-sacrifice. I did not remember any characters barring two and I hardly remembered the plot. But whatever I had read back then had got distilled into the two words aforesaid.

A Tale of Two Cities follows the lives of a few people caught in the midst of the French Revolution of 1789. The men, and the beautiful young lady, would not have been so condemned and their lives in such a predicament, in any other time, their actions remaining the same, had the blood of the locals not been infused with the frenzy of the revolution. Public mood, so easily manipulatable even in times of peace, took such an extreme dualist form, with butchery in one breath and compassion in the next, that even the smallest and most forgotten details of the character’s lives came back to haunt them.

Some of the most glorious parts of the text come when Dickens compares the surge of people to a wave – rising and falling, ebbing and flowing. The imagery is beautiful, and one can almost imagine seeing that group of thousands of people slowly swaying to the tunes of the words of Dickens. They rise and fall, driven by an energy that feeds off the last vestiges of life left in them, for their liberty, equality and fraternity.

The beauty of any Dickensian work lies in the sheer planning that goes into the development of the plot. Every small detail is planned and developed at just the right pace (and place) so that towards the end, it all comes together beautifully. I can gauge two reasons for the success of A Tale of Two Cities, not only when it was released but even to this day. Apart from, obviously, brilliantly portraying Paris of the time, the novel manages to capture the individual human stories and feelings really faithfully. These could be two among many reasons why it is the best-selling novel in history.

This is the importance of classics, especially more so in today’s post-modern world where “every emotion and every feeling has already been expressed”. Paradoxically, we live in a time of scarcity of time. People want their demands to be met in an instant, modern means of communication like sms and emails have reduced the average number of vowels being used in words and some words and expressions are gradually dying out as they are supposedly too clichéd and anachronistic.

But those who read classics experience a bygone age when the real beauty of language was communicated to the reader, who would relish it and wait for the next offering (many of Dickens’ works were published in magazines in monthly instalments).

Using up paragraphs to convey or reflect on a feeling, long sentences to express one’s inner state, not only because fewer words were incapable, but also because the listener was intently engaged, flowery feelings that took a page to settle in, and which grew in silence, all these and much more can we find in the literary magic of these pages, much like other books written in that time. That the modern reader may not be able to relate with them is all the more reason to dwell in their beauty.

Slow down. Take a deep breath and read this book. Experience what it feels to see an atmosphere, an environment, a whole country slowly take form in front of your eyes!

The world will always ask you to hurry up, it will always demand more information in fewer words, in lesser time. But if you choose to always abide to these demands, then you will be losing out on more, than them.

Utopia does not a perfect world make

We come across certain words during our childhood which are exotic, yet manage to find enough occasional mentions to end up leaving an impression in our minds. We may never use them by the time we reach our teenage, but we seem to understand what they mean, for the words are exotic, but not complex. Consequently, as one grows up, one forgets when one had first heard that word, even though it is not a usual word like an article or a preposition, which would naturally give that feeling.

Utopia is such a word.

Exactly half a millennium has passed, if only counting years, since this treatise was published. The scale of such a time period can easily get to the head, and even more so, when we realise that More’s words were so far ahead of his time. I’m surprised the work wasn’t labelled as being blasphemous!

More narrates the universe of Utopia through the mouth of Raphael, a sailor who claimed to have travelled with Amerigo Vespucci in the latter’s four voyages of 1507, and who was then left by him, along with 23 other men, at Cabo Frio, Brazil, for six months. From there, Raphael began his own journey and ended up reaching Utopia. By mingling his ideas with real-life events, More subtly saved himself from the aforementioned charge as he could (of course, in jest) easily attribute the ideas to (the fictional) Raphael, absolving himself.

More imagines Utopia as a place where all aspects of human society – administration, economy, polity, social cohesion, system of justice, religion, trade and commerce, employment and other such areas – are perfectly planned and perfectly implemented. Rather, optimally may be the better word.

The term “Utopia” conjures up a perfect place in our minds, where everyone is living happily, the needs of all the people are met, and there is no sadness, no misery, no agony. However, this is more a reflection of the kind of world we would ideally want, and not what this book, from where the word takes its genesis, presents.

Utopia is not a perfect world in an absolute sense of the word – it is perfect in the sense that no improvements are possible. Humans aren’t purely rational creatures. Consequently, a certain non-zero percentage of the members of our species will always end up committing crimes or transgressions of various kinds, moral or otherwise, no matter how perfectly we may manage all our other affairs. In fact, this is reflected in the very presence of a criminal justice system in Utopia. A perfect world, but with criminals? What is that!

Another issue at work is our very idea of perfection. Though it is possible to reach a consensus within a group as regards the possibility, or the lack of it, of attaining it, not a lot of us will be able to define what perfection is. We may have our different definitions or assign different meanings to it – some find it in the people around them, some find it in nature; some believe it is one quality whereas others think it is actually a set of many qualities; for some it is the process of being, for some of becoming and so on.

I have only listed this wide range of interpretations for a specific point in time, across many points in space. Just extend it to many points in time and across many points in space and you’ll see the problem. Perfection can’t even be defined.

As a species, our sensibilities, our moralities, our culture, our visions – all these change as we get exposed to new ideas and discoveries. Surely what we think as being a perfect world also changes from time to time. Equal access to technology and to the fruits of scientific progress might be something we list today, if asked to think of a perfect world, but such a thought was a logical impossibility barely a century ago.

The beauty of Utopia, therefore, doesn’t really lie in the world it presents – it has its own flaws which the modern mind would find weird, if not downright comical (for example the custom of allowing, before any marriage, the would-be groom to observe the would-be bride completely naked, accompanied in this tough circumstance by a matron; and then allowing the bride to see the groom accordingly).

What Utopia has given us is an idea – in our quest for perfection, we do not have the luxury of being indifferent to our very own nature. Utopia is administered so well not because its residents are perfect, but because they are disciplined and devoted towards their state and fellow utopians.

They are human, they have their follies. So does Utopia, but then maybe that is the whole point.

Great Introduction to Dickens

Oliver Twist is the first Dickensian title I have read. Of course, when I was in school, I had read a few of his works (Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities), but they were the abridged, illustrated editions for a younger audience.

What captivated me to read the book was its opening page. “Among other public buildings in a certain town…”. That is one of the distinctive traits of any work by Dickens. The opening page itself is able to have such a hold on the reader, that it gets difficult for him not to venture to the next page. Whether it is “Now, what I want is facts…” of Hard Times or, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” of A Tale of Two Cities.

In Oliver Twist, Dickens chronicles the circumstances  of a child, Oliver, and traces his life right from his birth, whence he becomes an orphan, to his encounters with some of the worst (as also the best) aspects of human society, and human nature. How he manages to weave so perfectly the opposing streams in Oliver’s life, is something to be noted.

Oliver is innocent and naïve, living in constant fear of how easily things in his life can turn for the worse. He never fails to show his gratitude for his benefactors, whether Mr. Brownlow or Mrs. Maylie and Rose, in thoughts and in action. He is always eager to help them, in his own small way, and it is during one of these very expeditions, when Mr. Brownlow and Mr. “I’ll eat my head” Grimwig have placed a bet on whether Oliver would return or not, the latter believing that he won’t, that he is captured by his old gang, on the orders of Fagin.

Dickens must be commended for creating such memorable characters by skillfully sketching their personalities. That of the principal antagonist, Fagin, deserves special mention.

Fagin, referred often as simply “the Jew”, is painted as the most grotesque, diabolical and scheming person one can imagine. He is not really evil per se, but his irrepressible motivations to take advantage of the people around him, especially the group of children he has trained in ‘pickpocketry’, for his own needs is nothing short of evil. He is constantly on the lookout for new opportunities to further his interests.

Fagin, and his shady associates, paint a picture of Victorian London where child labour and trafficking are the order of the day – to the extent that it makes one feel that a child living with his parents, away from the prying eyes of the gang, is nothing short of fortunate, for the gang is capable of ensnaring virtually any child from any strata of society, if only Fagin is sure of his safety.

The book is replete with dark humour. For it is well known, and well-accepted, that to speak the unspeakable, humour is the best weapon one can have.

Dickens never directly criticizes the workings of the gang, or even the fact that something like this was very common in England at the time. But he skillfully uses black humour, sarcasm and irony to get his message through. And it works. As much as the book is about the life of Oliver, it is also a scathing criticism on the Victorian society, and how easily innocent children are misled, trapped and forced to do things they would otherwise never have done.

But on the whole, the book is about the eventual triumph of good over evil. There are bad people in the world, no doubt. But if the good people choose to keep doing good things, and vow to teach the other half a lesson for all their misdeeds, all evil can be uprooted from its very roots.

It was but obvious from the beginning that the charm of such a beautiful opening could not reasonably be expected to be maintained for any appreciable duration during the rest of the book and, indeed, the story meandered a bit, as if trying to pick up the strands it would require in its denouement. In fact, for a considerable part of the first hundred pages, I wasn’t really sure whether I was really enjoying the book at all.

However, once the plot got into its groove, there was simply no turning back. Each passing chapter gave me something more to relish than the previous one, and by the end of it, I was more than satisfied.

At 350 pages, it is not a long novel. And it just may be the perfect window for any person who might want to get a taste of Dickens before going for some of his lengthier works.