A Midweek Haul

Only the day before, on the previous Sunday, I had returned from Abids with a haul of six good titles and on Tuesday last I felt an overwhelming urge to drop in at a Secondhand bookstore. It was a holiday for us because of a local festival and instead of sitting at home and reading I decided to check out a bookstore and ended up finding three good titles. I also stumbled upon a set of titles that led to the biggest haul of my life. I will write it in the next post but the three titles first.

A couple of Sundays ago I had come across an issue of ‘The Journal of Indian Writing in English’ edited by GS Balarama Gupta and picked it up because the entire issue was devoted to Ahmed Ali, a novelist I hadn’t heard about before. I had remembered seeing a copy of his most famous novel- ‘Twilight in Delhi’ somewhere. I was not exactly looking for it when I went to the Best Bookstore at Lakdikapul on Tuesday but I found a nice copy of ‘Twilight in Delhi’ by Ahmed Ali sitting pretty on a shelf. I was thrilled to find it so soon after reading about the book in the above journal. It was a nice copy published in India as a paperback in 1973 by Sterling Publishers, New Delhi.

The next find was a nice copy of ‘Through the Window’ by Julian Barnes. This is a book containing, as it says on the cover- seventeen essays and one short story. I am glad I found this wonderful title because the essays are about writers like Penelope Fitzgerald, Lorrie Moore, George Orwell and many others and their writing. These are the essays: The Deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald; The ‘Unpoetical’ Clough; George Orwell and the F***ing Elephant; Ford’s The Good Soldier; Ford and Provence; Ford’s Anglican Saint; Kipling’s France; France’s Kipling; The Wisdom of Chamfort; The Man Who Saved Old France; The Profile of Felix Feneon; Michel Houellebecq and the Sin of Despair; Translating Madame Bovary; Wharton’s The Reef; Homage to Hemingway; a Short Story; Lorrie Moore Takes Wing; Remembering Updike, Remembering Rabbit; and Regulating Sorrow. This did not come cheap though. I had to shell out two hundred rupees for it.

I’ve come across very few travelogues by Indian writers. One was RK Narayan’s travelogue on Karnataka that I found recently. I found another travelogue-‘Dead and Living Cities’ by Manohar Malgonkar in the bookstore, my third find of the day. One reason I bought it was that it was a travelogue and that too by an Indian writer and the other reason was that the copy I found was perfectly encased in a plastic jacket that seemed to have preserved the book very nicely.