The NY times ran a column a few months ago about how the advent of social media, and online bookclubs might have helped book sales, but has taken little something away from the private experience that reading a book used to be. I agree to some degree. As a child, I would finish lunch after school and prop myself up on our old, shaky, wooden four poster bed next to my grandmother, promise to nap but would instead lose myself to a world woven by someone else. Hours would go by, and I would be alone in that world inside my head that some one else created, and one that the author shared, in that moment, only with me. There is absolutely no substitute to the satisfaction of rich, beautiful, layered prose. And I refuse to be available when I feel like escaping into a beautiful story, or a poem, or the lyrics of a song (except my all-powerful claimants almost always win).
I owe my love for stories to my grandmother, and a few other very memorable people (paternal uncle, maternal uncle and Nupur Didi). All these people have left a little bit of themselves with me in all the stories they told me.
My grandmother used to have a old, large chest filled with books that she had collected from when she used to be a little girl. Most of her books were written in Bengali, which I, regrettably never learned to read. But I loved digging out the lovely hard bound books from of her treasure chest - mostly I did that to annoy her and have her chase me around the house, but I also loved their tattered edges, their old odor and their yellow pages with notes scribbled in Bengali. I imagined my grandmother as a little girl reading from these books, and wondered what the little scribbled notes were about. Sometimes she would read to me from one of her books. I'd listen to her comforting, crackling voice which she expertly modulated to express the character's rage, disgust, surprise, sorrow, delight and even a much wider range of emotions I don't have the words for. Sometimes, as a bonus, she would even read me her little notes.
My grandmother lost her eyesight to the point of not being able to read well by the time she was 80. And yet, she would swear by how she would rather give away her jewelry than have anyone taker her precious books away from her (I love books but I doubt I'd go that far, if I had owned any worthwhile jewelry i.e), and how it was her books that had been the constant in her life.Most of my cousins remember her as their cantankerous, sharp-tongued, caustic old grandma. I, however, remember her as a restless, deeply dissapointed person towards the end. Knowing her love for stories and poems, and the care with which she had preserved her books through the many changes in her life, I am convinced that some of her restlessness had to do with not being able seek refuge in her books, when she perhaps needed them the most. She grew up in a non-facebook-internet-TV time. She heard the radio for the first time when she was over 40. Books and her friends were her escape. I, for one, know for a fact that she was happier and absolutely delightful when she could still read, the same book and the same story for the umpteenth time.
Such, I think, is the love for books that spawned this ode to the joy of reading - Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Amy Barrows and Mary Ann Schaffer.
Set in the decade of World War II in Guernsey (Channel Islands), this book is as unconventional as its name. Its dedicated, sincere faith in the magic of story telling as an escape is what sets it apart from other numerous accounts of extraordinary human endurance and sacrifice in times of war. It is as witty, funny and intelligent as it is overwhelmingly sad, all the while superb in its refrain from overtness of any nature (except perhaps about the love life of the person I shall call the psuedo-protagonist. Her love life was, I think, the most unnecessary part of this wonderful book but more about that later).
The story is about the lives of people in Guernsey when the island was occupied by German soldiers during the war. After making their way into France, the Germans occupied the Channel Islands because they believed it would serve as an entry point into England.
The book speaks of the endless restrictions imposed by the Germans on the local residents not in the least of which was the complete blockage of any communication with the world outside of Guernsey. The only thing worse than being cut off from the world is being kept from good food - they ate turnip soup, for days on end because they weren't allowed to eat any good food- if they were found cooking roast pig they could be sent off to the wrong kind of camp. Cut off from the world and forced to do the bidding of the soldiers for everything, Guernsey residents sought solace in each other and in books which they read and talked to each other about in their daily/weekly book club meetings which they hosted in turns. Food for the guests included things like a potato peel pie (residents were not allowed to eat potatoes either). The book is written as a series of letters exchanged between a journalist for the Times (London) and the residents of Guernsey, after the war ended. The exchange is sparked when a book, onced owned by the journalist, somehow finds its way to one of the residents of Guernsey.
Now I am not well read enough to have known that this form of narration (in letters i.e) has a precedent, but I loved it. Before the days of the internet and when there was such a thing as a long summer break, I used to write long letters to friends and family, and anyone who'd reply. A dear uncle in particular was especially kind about writing me back, as generously as I'd appreciate. So there's my very personal reason to love this book.
Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame is far from being among my favorite authors (even with my unimpressively short roster of favorite authors) with her frivolous, although funny, rant about going on tour around the world (Yes, I HAVE read her book on a 6 hour flight to Hawaii), but she IS right about liking this book. Although she must like it for all the reasons I don't. At 30, the pseudo-protagonist (you haven't been paying attention if you've already forgotten who that is) spurns the advances of an all-goodies-rolled-into-one Mr. Big'ish character for some inexplicable neurotic reason after dating him for quite sometime. The way she then chooses to conclude her single life might be in keeping with the whole love-for-books angle of the story, and with the neurotic Liz-Gilbert-Carrie-Bradshaw brand of affected feminism, but it fails to keep up with the simple honesty of the rest of the book.
Now that the snarky bit is done, I must say I also loved how the story draws you in to feel for the characters and their dissapointments, making you want to curse the world for all that is inflicted on them. All they do in the book however is endure, without protest. Life's biggest dissapointments don't transpire with a bang. They sink in slowly, and painfully.
If this book was a person, I think I'd absolutely love her (it has to be a her, read it to find out). Thakuma (my grandmother) would too.
