2023-12-28 02:39:17
Every year I read not only the new but also the old. The book is bought and forgotten. If you pick it up and read it only years later, the years that have passed become clear. He puts a book away without reading it in the good faith that he will be able to read it later. In 2003 I bought the first volume of Marcel Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ ‘Swan’s Way’, translated by Lydia Davies. I started reading it the following year but did not go beyond a hundred pages. Maybe because it lacked something that hooked me, I left it there and went after other books. Twenty years later, in 2023, I pick up the same book again. When I saw the date I bought the book on the first page, I realized that so much time had passed between me and Proust. In the meantime I would have died or given up reading. Fortunately there were not two.
One of the motivations for me to read ‘Swan’s Way’ was the news that it had a new English translation (James Grieve). I thought I should read all 6 volumes of ‘In Search of Lost Time’ over the next two years. In fact, the one place where nothing is guaranteed is the mind of the reader, who can abandon this love at any time and pursue a new one. Still I decided I wanted to read Proust anyway. Because I’m so influenced by Walter Benjamin – he was translating Proust into German when he was visiting his friend in Russia in 1926 or so. When Benjamin arrived in Moscow that winter, she was being treated in a hospital there. He took a room in a hotel attached to the hospital. In ‘Swan’s Way’, another novel within a novel, the story of a love story of the character Swans has been given. Benjamin reads to her the passages he has translated.
Walter Benjamin, Picture Credit: Suhrkamp Verlag
I also picked up Proust after reading Benjamin’s Moscow Diary. I saw pencil lines on over a hundred pages I read 20 years ago. But I started reading again from the beginning.
Ann Curzon wrote in an article that she took 9 years to read ‘In Search of Lost Time’. Half an hour each day! This is not surprising. Not a single volume of it can be read in one sitting. But this year I got confident and I read ‘Swan’s Way’ at the most time. The new year comes while reading the second book of Proust.
I’ve been following a habit of choosing a few writers and focusing on them for a number of years. Creative energy and pleasure can be derived from reading when the number of books read is limited and certain choices are made carefully. Last year, the closest I came to such a relationship was with the Romanian novelist Meercha Kartarescu. Reading the novel ‘Solenoid’ was like traveling through a storm. It gave me new convictions as a reader and writer. Kartarescu’s ‘Nostalgia’, The Blinding and Why We Love Women were all available in English.
Meercha Kartarescu Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons Photo by Amrei-Marie
Ceausescu’s childhood and youth were spent in Romania, under communist dictatorship. What we read in Kartarescu novels. Solenoid analyzes the process of writing in many ways. In it, a totalitarian state is imagined as a dentist pulling teeth, or a totalitarian system as a chair about to pull teeth. But Kartarescu thinks we can go from the confines of this dental chair to an alternative world. Kartarescu imagines that the experience of art can lead us to the fourth dimension in this world. Solenoid occurs within this surrealism. It lifts you off the ground. It is a magnetic field that can be described as Dreams of levitations. The time in the work is Ceausescu’s communist Romania in the seventies. The author repeats that Bucharest, the capital, is the most depressing, ruined city in the world. At the age of 24, he was working as a teacher in a school in the suburbs, after the hallucinatory experiences of his childhood spent in that city. Solenoid has feedback built from reading and writing.
Meercha Kartarescu Image Credit Wiki Commons Photo by Cosmin Bumbutz
At the beginning the young narrator describes himself as not a literary man. But once he had written. At the age of nineteen, he stopped writing after the poem he wrote, believing it to be the best, was ruthlessly rejected. The poem was first read in the literature class of the university. One hour long reading on 30 manuscript pages. After that reading, the critic who was there criticized this poem severely. He described that writing as literary disease. The reviewer was followed by others. In the midst of great humiliation and infamy, the poet disappeared. After reaching home that day, the papers were locked in the cupboard. The hero of Kartarescu says that the poet’s life ended that day. He also says that if they had praised that poem then, he would have become a writer who has written dozens of books. The most frenetic experience of ‘Solenoid’ is the presence of Kafka and Borges, among others. In the first part, a story from Kafka’s diary is described as the theme of the novel. At the end appears a large library and a librarian there.
Franz Kafka Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Klaus Wagenbach Archiv, Berlin
Incidentally, the presence of Kafka’s diary in Solenoid gave me a strong urge to read it. Another incident came to my attention while reading the English translation of Kafka’s diary edited by Max Broad. The same diary has been released in its full form in English. The complete translation by Ross Benjamin felt like a novel to me. Ross Benjamin’s translation does two things. Firstly, it opened a secret window into the novel ‘Solenoid’; Second is the knowledge of how funny the writer Kafka was. He had an active social life – regularly going to the theater with friends, befriending actresses and fantasizing about falling in love with them. He wrote in his journal how beautifully he went to the railway station to see off his girlfriend. In addition to all this we read detailed notes on plays and the difference between a play and a novel. The real crisis for Kafka was his own home environment. Home was an obstacle to writing. Kafka was always bothered by his parents’ inability to support his writing and create an environment where he could sit down and write. Kartarescu explores the dilemmas of creativity raised in Kafka’s diary in ‘Solenoid’, relating it deeply to the genesis of fiction itself. I see these readings as a creative experience of books complementing each other.
The autobiographical ‘In the Presence of Absence’ by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darweesh, who raised his voice till the end for the liberation of his own people, is a farewell book. No other book has been read in recent years that deals with soil, water and sky so closely. There is no separation between poetry and prose. Pleasure and pain are mixed. Politics and poetry fight side by side there. I think I may leave this last book of Dervish’s on the table for occasional reading.
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