The Recent Haul

‘Half a writer’s work,’ VS Naipaul wrote in ‘Prologue to an Autobiography,’ ‘is the discovery of his subject,’ says Pankaj Mishra in his editor’s introduction to VS Naipaul’s ‘Literary Occasions’, a collection of (11) essays by the celebrated writer on reading, writing, and identity. I was looking for Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘Living to Tell the Tale’ but found this book instead.

I had picked up ‘Literary Occasions’ at the Oxford Bookstore in Connaught Place in Delhi sometime last week. I had gone around a couple of second hand books sellers there but I found the prices too high for my Hyderabadi tastes so did not pick up any second hand books there. Exhausted after a couple of hours of gawking around at CP, I dropped in at Oxford Bookstore with the plan to have coffee at one of the CCDs at Connaught Place later.

I was pleasantly surprised that the Oxford Bookstore had a café of its own called ‘The Cha Bar’ right inside the store. I bought my book and settled down in the café after ordering plain Indian tea which they bought to me in a glass tumbler. It was an interesting idea, serving the tea the way it is served in small hotels in villages. Back when I was working in rural areas I had my tea in this manner though the tumblers were smaller in size. The tea was quite good and I felt glad I had spotted the store. I wish they would open a store in Hyderabad.

That was the only book I bought at Delhi, but the Saturday before at a bookstore in Nampally at Hyderabad, I had bought ‘How to Write Movies in 21 Days’ by Vicki King. Needless to say, one of my ambitions is to write a screenplay and I am at work on one since a couple of years. I bought the book hoping I would find something in it that would help me finish the script soon.

Last Sunday, though it was cloudy and raining intermittently, I ventured on my weekly book hunt at Abids. Because of the rains more than half the guys had not set shop and only a handful of them were standing beside their books spread on the pavement. One thing I have against these booksellers at Abids is that they don’t much bother if the books get wet in the rain. I hate anything of that kind happening to my books. I did not expect to find any good book, and moreover having bought enough books in the previous week, I wasn’t in the mood to buy any. However at the end of the short trip I found Annie Proulx’s ‘The Shipping News’ for twenty rupees and bought it.

Annie Proulx won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993 for ‘The Shipping News’ which is her second novel. I had found her collection of short stories that had the story ‘Brokeback Mountain’, sometime back. ‘The Shipping News’ is quite long at 337 pages and I plan to read it sometime later. There is high praise for this book on the back cover: ‘The writing is charged with sardonic wit-alive, funny, a little threatening: packed with brilliantly original images…and, now and then, a sentence that simply takes your breath away.’ This is by Bruce Allen of USA Today. I hope it is as good.