Her skin is silver in the light floating in from outside, smooth and glistening like the surface of a freshly caught pomfret.
An apartment buildingHer skin is silver in the light floating in from outside, smooth and glistening like the surface of a freshly caught pomfret.
An apartment building in the metropolis of Bombay on a random day. The handyman Vishnu, who lives in the stairway, lies unconscious, perhaps dying, on the landing. Is Vishnu an incarnation of the eponymous god that maintains the universe? Although the residents each try to live on their own island, Vishnu unintentionally brings them together. The dreams, memories, visions and stories of Vishnu and the other residents are artfully intertwined. In an sensuous atmosphere of sweet, juicy mango’s, Bollywood films and cumin-smelling mouths, Suri paints love, lust, death and envy in the exuberant smells and colours of India.
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In het licht dat van buiten binnendrijft, is haar huid als zilver, zacht en glanzend als een pas gevangen braamvis.
Een appartementsgebouw in de miljoenenstad Bombay op een willekeurige dag. De klusjesman Vishnu, die in het trappenhuis woont, ligt bewusteloos, misschien wel stervende, op de overloop. Is Vishnu een incarnatie van de gelijknamige god die het universum in stand houdt? Hoewel de bewoners elk op hun eigen eilandje trachten te leven, brengt Vishnu hen ongewild bij elkaar. De dromen, herinneringen, visioenen en verhalen van Vishnu en de andere bewoners lopen kunstig door elkaar. In een sfeer van zoete, sappige mango’s, Bollywoodfilms en naar komijn en uien ruikende monden, schildert Suri liefde, lust, dood en afgunst in de exuberante geuren en kleuren van India.
”As well as being an insomnia, this book is also a journey. The insomnia belongs to the writer of the book, the journey to the person who did the t
”As well as being an insomnia, this book is also a journey. The insomnia belongs to the writer of the book, the journey to the person who did the travelling. All the same, given that I too happen to have been through the same places as the protagonist of this story, it seems fitting to supply a brief index of the various locations. I don’t know whether this idea was prompted by the illusion that a topographical inventory, with the force that the real possesses, might throw some light on this Nocturne in which a Shadow is sought; or whether by the irrational conjecture that some lover of unlikely itineraries might one day use it as a guide”.
These enigmatic words figure Antonio Tabucchi’s prelude to his narrator’s journey to South India, ostensibly aimed at searching for a Portuguese friend ‘who lost his way in India’, Xavier, who disappeared a year ago. The narrator leads a dim existence on the fringes of an abstruse world, also travelling to India for ‘scouring through old archives, hunting for old chronicles’. Starting in Bombay (Mumbai), the narrator tries to piece together the traces Xavier left behind by travelling through the country by train and by bus, bringing him to Madras (Chennai), stopping over near to Mangalore to end up in Goa.
Each chapter draws a vignette of the narrator’s puzzling and fascinating successive encounters with a multitude of characters cross sectioning Indian society: a prostitute, a doctor, a thief, a Jain Prophet (arihant), a dying man on his way to Varanasi, the Secretary of the Theosophical Society Adyar, and finally a French woman.
The narrator ‘never stays anywhere for more than a night’, sometimes sleeping while on the road, roaming the country like a somnambulant, intangible to the reader, like India. Why is he so determined to find Xavier? Is he truly looking for his friend at all? Or is he essentially fleeing something, his own past perhaps, or himself? The oblique epigraph to the novella alludes to a tinge of guilt, of remorse, with a quote from the French writer, philosopher and literary theorist Maurice Blanchot:People who sleep badly always appear more or less guilty. What do they do? They make night present.
There is a certain similar anti-detective feel to this novella as found in Auster’s The New York Trilogy.
Gradually, the search for Xavier shifts into a search for the narrator’s identity, a search for his own soul, his ‘atman’. A fortune-teller deplores that he cannot enunciate the narrator’s fate, because ‘you are someone else’. His soul is missing. His personality seems to merge with Xavier’s, strengthening the bewilderment of the baffled reader.
The narrator’s dreams and nightmares intensify the dreamlike atmosphere of the novella, the blurring of what is real and what is not, unveiling distortedly the thoughts the narrator is hiding, his unconscious mind, like in the narrator’s horrendous encounter with an old man clad in a black cloak in a Jesuit library (*) in Goa, pretending to be ‘Afonso de Albuquerque, Viceroy of the Indies’’, echoing Borges’s universe:
He laughed cruelly and pointed his forefinger at me. ‘Xavier doesn’t exist,’ he said. ‘He’s nothing but a ghost.’ He made a gesture that took in the whole room. ‘We are all dead, haven’t you realised that yet? I am dead, and this city is dead, and the battles, the sweat, the blood, the glory and my power, all dead, all utterly in vain.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘there is always something survives.’ ‘What?’ he demanded. ‘His memory? Your memory? These books?’
As a writer, where would you locate an ethereal allegory on a spiritual quest for one’s self? To most Westerners, like the narrator, India is ‘mysterious by definition’. In an interview Tabucchi referred to Jung’s essay ‘The dreamlike World of India’, to explain that India is the place in the world par excellence enabling to evoke a dreamlike landscape.
Why do so many Westerners travel to India or long to do so sooner or later? For some of these passengers, travelling to India is synonymous with a proverbial quest for the self, for personal growth. Some look for spiritual enlightenment, or have a long-standing mystical relationship with the country. ‘Experiencing difference’ is mentioned as the most common reason for coming to India, conjoined with the search for self-realisation.
Ages after the hippie trail, a whole bunch of friends decided to depart for a few months, returning frequently, alternating work and budget travel. Years later, having devoured what was at hand in the local library on the subcontinent, I quit work and found myself travelling the land too, joining my partner in a lifelong dream. From the moment we got off the plane in Bombay, I couldn’t deny I was overwhelmed by a coup de foudre, and the memories of these months trying to connect to the culture, the people, the matchless beauty, still are an inexhaustible source of inspiration and rapture in my life (and, discarding the clichés, no drugs or ashrams crossed my path).
In some respects, this novella, as a philosophical quest permeated with references to Portugal, recalled another philosophical travelogue on identity, Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier, about a Swiss teacher abandoning his old life to travel to Lisbon in order to retrace an obscure Portuguese author, culminating in a discovery of the self. As Tabucchi was deeply in love with Portugal, teaching Portuguese language and literature at the University of Siena, spending 6 months a year in Lisbon, one shouldn’t be oversurprised by the appearance of Pessoa in the novel, Tabucchi’s literary hero whom he translated into Italian and who altered his life forever after reading Pessoa’s poem ‘The Tobacco Shop”.
‘Pessoa said he was a gnostic,’ I said. ‘He was a Rosicrucian. He wrote a series of esoteric poems called Passos da Cruz.’ ‘I’ve never read them,’ said my host, ‘but I know something of his life.’ ‘Do you know what his last words were?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘What were they?’ ‘Give me my glasses,’ I said. ‘He was very shortsighted and he wanted to enter the other world with his glasses on.’ My host smiled and said nothing.”
However as a reader one could prefer to keep wondering on alternative outcomes of the equivocal ending, I highly recommend the atmospheric film adaptation Nocturne Indien by the French director Alain Corneau (1989).
I am looking forward to read other work of this fascinating author.
This novella bringing back wonderful memories, I couldn’t resist inserting some of our slides photographed in India in 1994.
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------------------------------------- (*) In Goa, there actually exists a Jesuit history research centre called ‘Xavier Centre of Historical Research’, referring to the co-founder of the Society of Jesus, Saint Francis Xavier, a namesake of the friend the narrator is searching....more
If love is not all, then it is nothing: this principle, and its opposite (I mean, infidelity), collide down all the years of my breathless tale.
And bIf love is not all, then it is nothing: this principle, and its opposite (I mean, infidelity), collide down all the years of my breathless tale.
And breath-taking it was, this epic saga on the rise, thriving and fall of four generations of an eccentric, wealthy Indian family - at least, such is the imprint the novel left on me, having read it about twenty years ago.
Deception, hatred, revenge and murder are the ingredients of an exhilarating story ultimately revolving around love: scorching pepper love, motherly love, love of beauty and art (one of the characters, Aurora Zogoiby, is inspired by the painter Amrita Sher-Gil). Like in Midnight's Children and Shame, Rushdie emerges as a fabulous storyteller, sailing airily on the waves of his powerful imagination and wit when interweaving the fortunes of the da Gama-Zogoiby families with twentieth century Indian history and religious issues (Partition, Hindu nationalism), blending fiction and real historical events.
I wanted to cling to the image of love as the blending of spirits, as mélange, as the triumph of the impure, mongrel, conjoining best of us over what there is in us of the solitary, the isolated, the austere, the dogmatic, the pure; of love as democracy, as the victory of the no-man-is-an-island, two’s-company Many over the clean, mean, apartheiding Ones. I tried to see lovelessness as arrogance, for who but the loveless could believe themselves complete, all-seeing, all-wise? To love is to lose omnipotence and omniscience. Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, I told myself, still, without that leap nobody comes to life. The leap itself is a birth, even when it ends in death, in a scramble for white tablets, and the scent of bitter almonds on your beloved’s breathless mouth.
The vigorous narrative pace, the kaleidoscopic range, the alluring settings (Cochin, Bombay, Spain) and Rushdie’s characteristic style and prose (almost baroque, surrealistic, fast, dancing forwards, recoiling, tiptoeing sideways, digressing, almost baroque, coloured with word play and amusing references to film, music and literature) left me bedazzled and somewhat word-enebriated. Though the story lines and the many characters have mostly faded, I remember my younger self adored the flavour of Salman Rushdie’s writing, wondering now if the more mature reader self still would be enraptured by his spicy exuberance.
Bedrog, haat, wraak en moord vormen de ingrediënten van een spannend verhaal waarin alles uiteindelijk om de liefde draait: verzengende peperliefde, moederliefde, liefde voor schoonheid en kunst. Rushdie is een rasverteller met een uitzonderlijk rijke verbeelding. Luchtig en spitsvondig verweeft hij de lotgevallen van de families Da Gama en Zogoiby met de Indiase geschiedenis en religieuze kwesties. Rushdies taal is zwierig, bijna barok en krioelt van woordspelletjes en persiflerende verwijzingen naar film, muziek en literatuur. Een wervelend boek dat je onderdompelt in een heel eigen wereld....more
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