THE NOVEL CURE: AN A-Z OF LITERARY REMEDIES
Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin, with Indrajit Hazra
Roli Books
480 pages; Rs 595
Can books change lives? As someone who reviews them for a living, I am primed to say they can. But doesn't life teach one to man up, be robust, do things that are right and practical? The world of literature, then, can seem prissy and out of touch with reality.
Milan Kundera perhaps meant this when he wrote an entire book about the unbearable lightness of being. How do we reconcile the breathtaking promise of art with our trite realities? There is something precious given to us - an innocence, a lack of world-weariness - that we seem to lose along the way. How do our early selves morph into artless personas that we cling to for fear - fear, no less - that we might fall off the radar of worldly derring-do and its (hush!) attendant compromises? How tragic to look back on our past and find those spaces to be more ablaze, more lifelike!
Growing up in a small city in Madhya Pradesh, my contact with world literature was muted. I was a child marked by whimsy; unable to figure out the world, I was also paradoxically steeped in the calm that small city life bestows. I was a child of the small town, and I say that with no meanness. I was made by it, its smallness and lack of opportunities, sure, but also its wholesomeness, like a world untouched, wrapping into itself. I don't know if books changed my life, but they articulated for me what I knew inside me but did not then have the words or images to visualise.
Mrs Dalloway. That is the book that, in words often misused in the media, changed the rules of the game for me. I reached for it soon after watching Stephen Daldry's The Hours. This was 2002 and I was in engineering college. My world was bookended by the daily ride between college and home. My life was completely unremarkable, but so was Mrs Dalloway's, on the surface.
These books have stayed with me. I hardly ever read them anymore, because I feel they have somehow rewired my brain circuitry. I guess I try and live them. Live their immense kindness that intermingles with their characters' search for happiness. Live their openness about love and its many, hitherto-unknown manifestations. Perhaps books do not change lives, but if we meet them at certain points in our lives, as I did these two books, they change us and so change the lives that we build for ourselves. We needn't then mourn the loss of our younger selves; they have drunk from the chalice, as it were, and made us who we are.
Perhaps it is to honour this sentiment that the writers of the book under review, The Novel Cure, advise great works of literature to, among other things, kill the blues, deal with divorce, even build an appetite. Originally written by friends-at-Cambridge Ella and Susan, and updated for the Indian version by Indrajit Hazra, the compendium reads pleasingly like one of Dr Spock's guides on maternity, with alphabetical indexing, how-to lists, the works, but of course referencing an entirely different list of "ailments".
Sophie's Choice seems like a good, well, choice if you are in the mood to turn on the waterworks (entry marked, deliciously and lexicographically, as "cry, in need of a good"). Old Filth is a splendid pick on what the authors call "the horror of old age", though my own impressions of the book veer towards the solemn. Even for bread-and-butter calamities like being broke or missing a flight, the book offers plenty solace in the arms of other books.
On the evidence presented, one can never be sure what illness might cure itself within the folds of a book. Who knew that The Blackwater Lightship, Colm Tóibín's understated meditation on the ravages of AIDS, could remedy "irritability"? Or that Toni Morrison's prize-winning Beloved is recommended reading to rid oneself of "being haunted"?
Perhaps reading the whole book in one sitting is not the way to go about it. There is much good stuff here and one needs the patience and willing acceptance of a grateful reader to fully partake of this reference guide. It must be dipped into from time to time, one adversity to the next. While the selections of titles are nearly always singular, the synopsis of the novels under discussion can at times underwhelm. I wish, for instance, that Sarah Waters was not relegated to simply being called the "queen of lesbian erotica". Her books speak deeply to their settings that trawl England across the 19th and 20th centuries. There is a lot of edginess, yes, which derives partly from the open-eyed innocence of her protagonists, for example Nan in Tipping the Velvet, but precisely because the books are set in such "proper" times that the characters' inverted gaze thrills.
Be that as it may, The Novel Cure is a well-written and carefully researched guide that left me wishing I were better read for the few recommendations that I did know of seemed like excellent fits.
