Archives for December, 2007

she had been forced into prudence in her youth – she learned romance as she grew older – the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning

- Persuasion (Jane Austen); quoted in Running in the Family (Michael Ondaatje)

I read Zulfikar Ghose’s Veronica and the Gongora Passion a few weeks ago. I can’t remember the last time I reacted to a book so viscerally. I hated the first five stories so much that they overshadowed my appreciation for the other stories in the book. It’s not that I’ve never read a book that I didn’t like, but something about Ghose’s book threw me in a way that still has me baffled.

Eventually, my dislike for the text grew so large it swallowed other concerns of mine and it became this fetid monster that took up residence in my mind and would not stop growing. I could not dislodge it and I didn’t really have the energy to try. Things came to a head when, during a conversation about the book, my professor said, “The question becomes why you aren’t in Anthropology or Sociology, why you’re in English.” Granted, my professor was posing a question that Ghose might have asked me – and it is definitely the kind of question Ghose would ask (peevishly) – but I’ve never before had to face that question so blatantly. I mean, I know: I’m in freaking English. The department is full of people hiding from the real world. It’s an ideal haven for people who think we can write in vacuums. I know this, but I knew it only abstractly, because, in the people I know and the things I read, I lead a charmed existence. But I’d never before had a professor pose that question to me so explicitly. It’s not that I think my professor is oblivious to the politics of literature. He was just posing the question as Ghose might have asked it; he was getting me to take a position, to clarify to myself where I stood.

We were sitting in a university office walled with books. It seemed to me then that that question came bearing down on me with all the crushing weight of The Academy.
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“Are you closely attached to your daughter?” asks the nurse.
“Meaning?”
“Have you read each other’s diaries?”
“What use are diaries if someone else ends up reading them?”

- “Parachute Aunty” in Seventeen Tomatoes” (Jaspreet Singh)