For someone who is as avid a reader as I am (and as pedantic to boot), the worst crime that can be committed is to abandon a book mid-read. Even if a book is an insufferable chore and slower than a snail with a ball and chain attached to it, one goes down with it, struggling manfully against the upswells of pompous language, the eddies of lack of story and the jagged rocks of funereal pace. But abandon ship? No sir!
I have struggled through the worst Garcia-Marquez inspired excesses of Arundhati Roy and emerged at the other end; I have read Booker-by-numbers dirges by everyone from Nadeem Aslam to Kiran Desai; I have read Tolstoy at his most tedious, Coehlo at his most convoluted, Mahfouz at his most melancholy, Dickens at his dreariest, Kafka at his most kaotic, and lived to tell the tale. But this is not the tale of big-name authors who write books that should be sold with a warning label. This is the story of the first book that I ever abandoned unfinished.
There is a running conversation among some of my movie-loving friends, that all the directors who have made a very good first film in the New Wave of Indian Cinema (1994 onwards, say) have gone on to make a truly poor second one. And it seems that this habit is not restricted to filmmaking either; for the eponymous villain of this piece also made his debut with a true gem of a book, only to follow it up with what could be described as tripe, only there is a high chance that this analogy would offend all tripekind.
Rohinton Mistry’s first book was “Tales From Ferozsha Baag”, a collection of short stories about the dwindling Parsi community in Bombay. The story was told through the residents of a colony of Parsis and dealt so lovingly with their lives, loves and losses that the affection felt by the author towards what clearly are his friends and neighbours thinly disguised shines through the pages. It is a truly remarkable book with the insights that only an insider can provide, and highly recommended by me unreservedly.
I read this book in my “India” phase; I was in England, living alone and working towards my Chartered Accountancy qualification. Being away from home meant that I tended to read a lot of ‘local’ authors, typically anything that came highly recommended on Amazon, or that was available in my local library. “Tales from Ferozsha Baag” fell in the latter category. I fell unreservedly in love with the book, with its sheer joie de vivre, with its cast, who were Characters yet not caricatures. My library did not have any other books by this author, who was apparently highly fêted and decorated. So I went out the very next Saturday to my local Waterstones and picked up a copy of Mistri’s second book. It was called “Family Matters”, and had apparently been in the running for the Booker Prize in the year of its publication. Little did I know that this simple transaction would have such far-reaching consequences.
It seemed that Mistry had set himself out to write the Venom to his original Spiderman, if I may be permitted a comic book nerd’s analogy. “Family Matters” was everything that “Tales from Ferozsha Baag” was not; more importantly, it was also nothing that the first volume was. It too was based in the Bombay Parsi community, but there the similarities ended. Where the first book was all sunshine and light, the second was the darkness of the Underworld, with accompanying chorus of damned souls.
I don’t think I had before, or have since, read a book where all the characters were so profoundly unhappy, or indeed where the author seemed to have so little affection for any of them. It is a book about mean little people and their miserable little lives. It seemed that Mistry’s literary agent had told him that the best way to get international acclaim was to be short listed for the Booker prize. The New Wave of Indian Literature is a Booker jury favourite, so Mistry had a pre-existing advantage that he had to capitalize upon. And the fool-proof way to do this was to write a tale of relentless, unceasing misery. I am sure that had I got deep enough into the book there would have been the obligatory paedophile experience thrown in for good measure.
I have read my fair share of dark and depressing books. But never before, and never since, have I read anything that is as thoroughly devoid of any sympathy, redemption or indeed narrative impetus. It is like the mean little lives of the characters, whom the author surely hates, is at a standstill, so must the flow of the narrative move at the pace of continental drift.
I tried, dear readers, I really did. To this day the tome looks balefully at me from atop my trunk of books, a piece of paper sticking out from the point beyond which I could not drag myself. It’s been more than 5 years, I think, but I have not yet admitted to myself that this is a book I shall never complete. Denial is not a river in Egypt. Others have tried my spirit, but “Family Matters” shattered it as thoroughly as is possible.
Rohinton Mistry, you broke my heart. You reeled me in with your ability to make me care about your characters, with the promise of taut narratives and a story you felt an urgent need to tell. And when I came to you, willingly spending my hard-earned zar-e-mubaadla, this is the blow you dealt me.
People may rave that Mistry’s “A Fine Balance” is a brilliant novel and well-worth a read, but I have been burnt by hot milk, and now drink even salt lassi by blowing on it to cool it down. I have no intention of picking up a Rohinton Mistry book any time soon, and woe betide anyone who tries to give me one as a gift. I’d rather get a desk ornament that I can at least pass on to someone else at their birthday; for I would not even give my worst enemy the gift of Misery… er… Mistry.
Originally published in Dawn, June 2008.
The edited version of the article, as published:
Cards on the table time:
There is a bit of artistic license employed in the above. In reality, the first book I ever left unfinished was some utter tripe from a third rate Bombay hack, who basically wrote a fictionalised account of Amitabh's relationship with Rekha, set during the time when AB was in a coma after an on-set accident. I borrowed it from the Hemel Hempstead Public Library, and was glad to return it ahead of time.
The idea for the above came from my first (and only, I think), visit to the Books and Authors team's room at Haroon House (which, by the way, is an extremely interesting place to visit as a first-timer, with corridors, doors sometimes-open-sometimes-shut, hives of activity half-seen or sometimes just heard; I could go on). Saima had (I think) decided that she was no longer going to give me books to read for free until she could put a face to an email, so off I went, the better to protect my supply lines.
We got to talking and, true to form, I went off on one on the subject of pet hates. I put the tagline to her, and she was hooked. This in itself is a first for me, by the way, as normally my suggested titles are promptly binned by my editors. I bashed out the above in a matter of hours, and here we are.
No comments:
Post a Comment