In November 2019, at the literary gathering, Lekhana, held at The Jamun, I had the privilege of being in conversation with Shashi Deshpande about her memoir Listen to Me (Context Books, 2018). In the book, segments on her love of reading and the books that influenced her or stayed with her, weave in and out of the trajectory of her life as a writer, enriching the sense of being offered a window into the world of an author. We spoke then, about how Ms Deshpande would love to write regularly about the many books and authors, however obscure or forgotten, that she has read and loved. I said that if she would, we, at Out of Print, would be privileged to provide a platform for her essays.
The thought rested, we all went into isolation with the arrival of the Covid-19 virus, and became immersed in different projects.
December 2021, I spoke to her at the Bangalore Literature Festival about her collection, Subversions: Essays on Life and Literature (Context Books, 2021) that had just come out. In this volume too, the reader is allowed an extraordinary and pleasurable entry into Ms Deshpande’s thoughts on books and writers and reading. The session only emphasised to me, how important it would be if she did indeed begin a series on books.
Maria Popova, on her blog The Marginalian draws attention to Virginia Woolf's 1925 essay ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ that appeared in The Second Common Reader and summarises what many writers -- Vladimir Nabokov, Francine Prose, Henry Miller, and, of course, Virginia Woolf say about reading. In her essay, Virginia Woolf, speaks of the different aspects of being a good, responsible reader. The first part of the process is ‘to open the mind to the fast flocking of innumerable impressions’ and the second, to compare. But, she adds, ‘to hold one shadow-shape against another, to have read widely enough and with enough understanding to make such comparisons alive and illuminating is difficult’. She goes on to say that ‘to read a book as it should be read’ and I interject, to understand an author as she should be understood, ‘calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgement.’
Today we are beyond privileged to begin our series on reading, writing and books with an article by Shashi Deshpande, a reader with just those ‘rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgement’. It appears on the blog attendant on Out of Print, and is the first of what we hope will be many such essays.
In a rather extraordinary reflection on the body, Out of Print editor, Rahael Mathews takes us through her thoughts on the writings of Ismat Chughtai and Wajida Tabassum, and the poetry of Kamala Das and Tishani Doshi.
No comments:
Post a Comment