Cloud 9 Minus One

The reason I picked up Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys from Archana was that she spoke so well about it. Her description made me extremely curious about the book. That’s not the reason why I borrowed the book on erotic short stories from her! But that’s another story.
I’m very happy when one of the others asks to borrow a book from me. It shows that my reading of the book has been sufficiently impressive. I remember Alka borrowing Mary McCarthy’s The Group from me. How happy I was that the two of us could share our opinion about this wonderful book! When Dnyanada spoke about Silences, all of us wanted to grab it then and there! As writers and women, we felt that Olsen had written about us. I was going through an extended block at the time, and sometimes I felt that it was high time I hung up my boots and retired. This after one book! Tillie Olsen told me that my plight wasn’t unique.
Now I’m reading The Satanic Verses. It was silly for India to ban the book, since it isn’t all that great as a piece of literature. It was Haroun that inspired me to read some more Rushdie. I’ve only read till page 100 but already I feel a sense of ennui creeping up on me. There is nothing new in the book. And not much of magic either. Rushdie has tried to wrap it up in exotica, but the essential story of a fading film star and a side actor is neither original nor unique. The film star’s paramour is the wife of a manufacturer of ball-bearings. And if that isn’t a cliché, I don’t know what is!
The Satanic Verses made me think of Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot for the way the two books portray the father-son relationship. And my first thought after reading The Satanic Verses was ‘Aha! So that’s why White won the Nobel.’ It was almost like an epiphany. Riders in the Chariot is a horribly tough book to read, and I’m not ashamed to confess that about eighty percent of it zipped over my head. But of the rest, one of the passages that impressed me the most was the portrayal of Himmelfarb’s father, the rich man of rich tastes to whom being treated as a second-class Jew is so distasteful that he converts to Christianity. White’s description of the son’s revulsion at his father’s loud behaviour and the mother’s genteel acceptance of it is one of the things that made such a powerful impression on me. And therefore I’m happy that White won the Nobel. And now I can see why Rushdie hasn’t got there yet. Rushdie doesn’t bother to touch one’s soul.