The past week I went back to two abandoned favorites.
I let my British Council membership lapse years ago as its location in Bombay at Nariman Point became increasingly irrelevant to my life.
I remember having a conversation then with the Librarian about how the centre of gravity of Bombay including the mass of its reading public had shifted northwards to the suburbs.
A couple of months ago they surprised me. The library went the “Netflix” model. Browse the library on the website, queue up the books you want to borrow and they deliver them and pick them up (on request- no deadlines!) from your home (www.mylibrary.britishcouncil.org).
The British Council is back in my life and as I browse the library the presence of a selection of graphic novels assures me that the brand’s relevance-seeking new avatar is more than skin deep.
One of the first books I read through my new membership of the British Council is Salman Rushdie’s “The Enchantress of Florence”. Unlike the rest of Rushdie’s books, I had not bought this book when it came out a couple of years ago.
I was enchanted, like many of my generation, with Midnight’s Children but every subsequent book of his, to my mind, was a milestone on his fall from grace.
With “The Ground beneath Her Feet” I thought the addling of Mr. Rushdie’s talent was complete and thus restrained myself from investing time and money in “The Enchantress of Florence”.
With the resurrection of British Council in my life I thought of giving Mr. Rushdie a go to.
I am sorry to report that I think the addled state continues.
In “Midnight’s Children” Rushdie used the device of magic realism to illuminate reality and multiply relevance. “Midnight’s Children” has a totemic status with the post-independence generation because it managed to in their emotional landscape, light the dry tinder accumulated from recital of the history of the independence struggle and the trauma of partition.
However every subsequent Rushdie novel has moved further and further away from this magic of inciting and exciting emotional relevance. There are passages in “The Enchantress of Florence” of great beauty; there are phrases and metaphors that ignite admiration but alas!, the narrative structure instead of involvement engenders distance.
Mr. Rushdie himself perhaps does not care much for relevance. I am sure he will point out he is an artist of the first order and not a public utility like the British Council. Be that as it may be but I for one will dip into the next Rushdie book with great reluctance.
1 comment:
For the first time in something like 35 years i am living in a place that has no British Library. The hole this has created in my life is huge. I miss it the way most people must miss a loved one. I miss going there every second Saturday. I miss the sense of anticipation with which i would search the shelves, slowly, book by book, wondering what I'd find this time. My entire education has been at this Library. I was for years a member in Delhi, for a short while also in Bombay and Poona. The books and great writers i discovered i would never have read had it not been for the British Library. Almost none of them (mostly the fiction and literature section) are found in bookshops. I'm glad i was too broke for many years to buy books because all the money in the world would not have given me the immense joy that borrowing books from British Library did. i am living in a village now, but if i move back to a city, it will be mostly so that i can have access to British Library again.God i look forward to that day!
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