Just this evening, I was rummaging
through an entire collection of photographs of my college days, days when we
had been to inter-collegiate events and won prizes by the dozens, crystallised in snapshots of various hues, letters preserved for posterity, that bear testimony to time past – letters written by near and dear, from the early
1990s on, when I was deposited in a hostel, to learn life in all its vitality, to learn for myself, firsthand, communal traits for life!
Nay! This post ain't gonna do the leg-pulling to my heart's content on all ye dynamic day- scholars on this count though!
Still, life lived in a hostel has its
share of fun and frolic!
There’s a lot you have to bear!
And a lot you’ve gotta do!
There’d be a guy who’d always pry around
To somehow
rummage through your cubicle!
That’s so ‘tidy and neat!’
A guy who waits
for the snacks to pop up
To finish them all at one go!
And then go to sleep!
There’d be another
who would quick catch a lizard
And throw it straight
into your mosquito net
When you’re busy on your dream mode!
And another imp!
who always makes it his hobby
to flick with glee -
Your toothpaste,
Your toothpaste,
Your towel and your soap even!
And make you
search and search for 'em all -
Till you give up!
And get late
And get late
to your first hour’s class!
And sometimes even your second!!!
Living those past days in your memory add such fun and joy to your present days in every way!
Added, looking up those memory-days on your
treasured photographs, paper records, picture postcards etc., are real joys galore in double measure!
Exactly what German writer and academic W.
G. Sebald has done in his swan song of a novel! His last one before he passed
away, a novel that was also published in the same year when he died - in 2001!
A student of German and English
literature, in Germany and in Switzerland respectively, Sebald was touted to be a forerunner for the Nobel Prize in
Literature before death plucked him away at 57!
His works deal predominantly with memory
and loss of memory with specific reference to the Holocaust, and also with the horrors
and the trauma of the Second World War on the German people!
And his novels are witness to these
reflections in abundance! In fact, his novels are made up of reflections,
recollections and observations from around his European travels!
Sample the opening lines to this, his
last novel Austerlitz –
Sebald speaks -
In
the second half of the 1960s I traveled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly
for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to
me, staying sometimes for just one or two days, sometimes for several weeks. On
one of these Belgian excursions which, as it seemed to me, always took me
further and further abroad, I came on a glorious early summer’s day to the city
of Antwerp, known to me previously only by name.
And of the significance of Antwerp to the
Holocaust is anybody’s guess!
And why pray, did I stumble upon this
intriguing read? You may ask!
For a reason though!
Flashback-o-back to November 2018!
When I was gifted a wonderful book by a
lovely-o-lovelyyy chella friend of
mine, which is titled, The Fun Stuff and
Other Essays!
It’s by New Yorker fame James Wood!
Now, guess what happens when one of the
foremost literary critics of the present era, James Wood, doubles up as an essayist and a
novelist as well?
We are all eyes! Ain’t we?
And so it was, when I browsed through the
collection of essays on Fun Stuff, the
very first essay totally hooked me on!
It’s titled, W G Sebald’s Austerlitz.
It looked a very arresting read by all means! So
before I ploughed my way into the essay, I wanted to get a copy of Sebald’s Austerlitz
on me to read it full throttle, to be worthy enough to plunge headlong into Wood’s take
on the same!
To my surprise, when I opened the novel, I
saw the mighty James Wood popping up on the prefatory, and the same, selfsame essay that i'd read on Fun Stuff, sitting pretty over here, added as a kinda introduction to the latest edition of the novel! A highly appreciative, laudable marketing strategy! Kudos to y'all for that!
Thanking heavens and the angels, I started reading James Wood
now, with a sense of great satisfaction, that I had read through Austerlitz at last!
And yesss! James Wood is at his literary best, in
his take on Austerlitz!
Says he –
This
book is like the antiques shop seen by Jacques in TerezΓn; it is full of old
things, many of them reproduced in the photographs in the text: buildings, an
old rucksack, books and paper records, a desk, a staircase, a messy office, a
porcelain statue, gravestones, the roots of trees, a stamp, the drawing of a
fortification.
The
photographs of these old things are themselves old things—the kind of shabby, discarded
picture-postcards you might find at a weekend flea market, and which Sebald
greatly enjoyed collecting.
If
the photograph is itself an old, dead thing, then what of the people
caught—frozen—by the photograph? (Flickering slightly at the edges, as Evan the
cobbler describes the dead.) Aren’t they also old, dead things? That is why
Sebald forces together animate and inanimate objects in his books, and it is
why the inanimate objects greatly overwhelm the animate ones in Austerlitz.
Amid the photographs of buildings and gravestones, it is a shock to come upon a
close-up of Wittgenstein’s eyes, or a photograph of the rugby team at Jacques’s
school.
On
the one hand, these photographs sear us with the promise of their accuracy—as
Barthes says, photographs are astonishing because they “attest that what I see
has existed … in Photography, the presence of the thing (at a certain past
moment) is never metaphoric.” We are lulled into staring at these photographs,
and saying to ourselves: “There is Jacques Austerlitz, dressed in his cape. And
there is his mother!”
So there, you saw it! James Wood at his
natural eloquent best!
A literariness that so prompted me to
read through the novel at one go!
Thanks to James Wood and his Fun Stuff by the millions!
And to the amazing, lovely heart who thoughtfully gifted me this lovely read, who's then, the real spur behind this post!!!
And to the amazing, lovely heart who thoughtfully gifted me this lovely read, who's then, the real spur behind this post!!!
More on Austerlitz follows…
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