The Sunday Haul

Len Deighton happens to be one of my favourite writers, whose books I like immensely for their plots and also for the terrific one liners in them. Bernard Samson is probably my favorite character. Len Deighton’s ‘The Ipcress File’ is a book I’ve read countless times and also possess several copies of. I have this fascination to know more about the writers I like, stuff like how they write, what they read and so on. I’ve managed to learn such things about many writers but Len Deighton was not one of them. Last Sunday’s one of the finds was a copy of the Silver Jubilee Edition of ‘The Ipcress File’ that had a special foreword by Len Deighton. I picked it up the moment I laid my eyes on it. In the foreword Deighton writes something about how he came to write the book. I surprised to read that he had once been an airline steward and that he had no real ambition to be a writer when he first wrote the book. He wrote the first draft of ‘The Ipcress File’ with a fountain pen and later typed it out on a tiny lightweight portable typewriter. He was influenced by Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh and Raymond Chandler which made me strangely pleased since I too am influenced by Maugham and Chandler. I got the book for only thirty rupees, by the way.

Actually the first find on Sunday was Robert Bolano’s ‘The Savage Detectives’, a fat volume that I got for a hundred and fifty rupees. I had read about Robert Bolano a long back and had included his name in my ‘Must Read Authors’ list. So when I saw ‘The Savage Detectives’ I bought it. TSD is Bolano’s first novel ‘that brought him a lot of fame and international recognition as the leading Latin American author of his generation and one of the most original and important literary voices of the late twentieth century’ as I read on the back cover. Now I wonder when I will get the time to read the book that runs into more than 580 pages.

Another find was the September 2012 issue of ‘Conde Nast Traveller’ that I got for twenty rupees. It was the UK edition and inside were articles about the Amalfi Coast, Arizona, Sri Lanka and other places. After reading a couple of pages it brought from deep within a lot of unhappiness at the way I am living cooped up in a city not doing any kind of traveling worth write about while the weeks, months and years pass by. Incidentally the issue also had a sort of Q&A with David Sedaris and also came across Isle of Jura, the place where George Orwell wrote ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and also Positano, the place on the Amalfi coast, where John Steinbeck wrote the famous article for ‘Harper’s Bazaar’ that brought him fame. On the Books page were featured Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Green Hills of Africa’ that I had found very recently, and a book by Arthur Conan Doyle ‘Diary of An Arctic Adventure’ which I am now keen to find. It is an account of a seven month voyage during which Conan Doyle had some pretty profound experiences that changed his outlook.

Next to actual book marks, boarding passes are what I find in most of the second hand books that I buy at Abids and other stores. Sometimes there are also railway tickets, scraps of papers with names and other notes scribbled on them in ink. But last Sunday I came across something totally unexpected and also sad. There’s an edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island’ by Faber and Faber that I already have two copies of. It is a beautiful edition with illustrations on smooth white paper that is worth several times more than the twenty or thirty rupees I paid for them. So when I saw another copy of the same edition I picked it up. Later when I went home and opened it I realized I had made a basic mistake that many second hand book buyers make. I had forgotten to check if the copy had all the pages. The copy I bought had the pages from 60 to 65 missing. As I turned the pages to see if any more pages were missing two small newspaper cuttings fell out of the pages. One cutting was of an obituary ad of a young girl placed by her uncle and brother. The picture was that of a pretty, innocent girl with a smiling face which made me sad that she had died at such a young age. From the matter on the other side of the cutting I could make out that the girl had died sometime in 2004, February. She was a resident of Hyderabad. When I saw the other newspaper cutting I was heartbroken. It was a small item about the death of the same young girl. It seems the young college going girl committed suicide by hanging out of fear of exams. The book held no other clue as to whose copy it was and how the paper clippings came to be in it. Did it belong to any of her friends or her parents or who? I might never know the answer.

Anyway, after I found Balraj Khanna’s ‘Sweet Chillies’ recently I resolved to look for his other book ‘A Nation of Fools’ that I wanted to read before beginning ‘Sweet Chillies’. I thought it would be a while before I find the book but last Sunday Uma pointed out a copy of ‘A Nation of Fools’ to me on the pavement at Abids. I was thrilled for a moment until I noticed it was not a Penguin edition. I did not want to buy it for this reason and also for the other reason that the seller quoted a high price probably after seeing the way I almost grabbed the book from the pavement. Later I regretted not buying it but I am sure it will be there at Abids next Sunday and I will pay whatever amount the guy asks.