Smitten

I'm slightly embarrased to write about this: my book infatuation of the moment. But I have to, if for no other reason than to unburden myself, like a old sinner in the confessional. I am madly (and I mean it in the slightly pathological sense) with Paul Scott's Raj Quartet.

I have felt this before: with Jane Eyre when I was in my early teens, Jane Austen in college, Alice Munro's stories after college. I read these books and authors obsessively. My copy of Jane Eyre has chocolate smudges on the pages from the time my mom made fudge for the first time and it didn't harden properly and I ate it straight out of the pan with a spoon while reading the book for the fifth or sixth time.

And now I'm smitten with Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown, the first volume of the Raj Quartet. The passion I have for this book is almost physical, and it mortifies me a little. As usual with me, it began with the beautiful thick paper and the glossy cover of the book. And then I opened it and read the first sentence. I was in my India phase then, trying to get my hands on all books about the British occupation of India. In college I took a class on the literature (written in English) of the subcontinent and that's when the spark was lit -- with E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. And then I found, quite by accident, Paul Scott's quartet. I've read all four books last year. I'm re-reading the first volume now. And I see myself coming back to these books again and again, over the course of my entire life.

I don't understand how a work such as this could be written. It is so broad and rich -- what poor adjectives these are to describe it -- that one human mind seems too limited to have been able to conceive it. Although it is full of pathos, it never strays into sentimentality. (It strays into other problems, but even my overly critical mind cannot linger too long on them; they are compensated by so many other wonderful things). It weaves the personal with the political with an assurance and fluidity that give me goosebumps. How can such skill be honed? It seems a miracle, not the product of years of ordinary, everyday practice.

Here, I have gushed enough. My soul doesn't feel lighter, as it should after a confession. And I know why. This excessive love of books bespeaks a fallacy in my thinking: I believe that living through books, living other characters' lives, is more interesting and valuable and exciting than living one's own life. Well. I've come out of the closet. The air is a little too bright and too sharp out here. But I'll live.