Out of an impulse I cannot bring to mind now, I started reading this book one night a few weeks ago. I managed to read some pages of it before I decided to stop reading it. Decided – is that the right word? For with short books, I find myself resisting to reading more parts of it in just one reading. Weeks passed, and I didn’t read this book anymore. Perhaps I might’ve discontinued this book, like some others, were it not for the small size of it. The small size of it encouraged me beyond my unwillingness to finish this book – a book I didn’t particularly like reading the first time nor grasped what it was about. Maybe the impulse was to read Nelson again – yes, I remember being fascinated by Nelson once again, a few weeks ago, although be it a short lived one. Just so as it happens, I at times feel a strong urge towards one particular book or author, and I keep repeating their names with enforced consciousness and pronunciation. Or I go online and read, uncharacteristically of my nature, everything profile or review there is of the author or the book. I resumed reading ‘Bluets’ last night, and at 4:30 pm in today, I have finished reading it. What was the sudden urge this time, or the inspiration, you might ask? Well, a piling number of books in my ‘currently reading’ category, which is really not that true; I am not ‘currently’ reading all the books I have started. Some I read more than others, based on my will to finish them in certain time or on my interest towards the book, and therefrom my ability to read it ‘currently’ over other started books. Being, again, the thinnest of the bunch, I picked this book, and surprisingly, stuck to it until, by now, I finished it. I say surprisingly because I didn’t think I would finish it as soon. But perhaps I might’ve underestimated Nelson, or my love for memoirs of authors, and overestimated my weak yet expansive apathy towards this book. Whatever the reason prior, I quite liked Nelson’s memoir upon my second and last reading. As one book critic from NYTimes said that she finished a book in less than ‘twenty-four hours’ (not in a single day), perhaps I could say something similar here: given an hour of initial reading plus another 16 hours of second reading, I’ve read, apparently, this book in well under twenty-four hours. But while the critic’s intent for mentioning a quantitative stat of her reading was to show her love for a thick book and its readability, mine doesn’t say much other than that this is a small book. I remember: I was reading Quatro’s ‘Fire Sermon’ where the protagonist mentions a book about the color blue; that was my impulse for reading this book. But maybe sadly, what you get out of a book outweighs what you went into with. It’s a memoir not about life, but about a color – Blue – and its significance in everything it wears in Nelson’s life: the sky, blue stone, blue ink, blue people, blue films, the blueness of depression, and so on. And by being this indulgent theme of the book, the color Blue then, inevitably, explores certain aspects of life. A costly accident of Nelson’s friend which leaves her quadriphonic, and Nelson’s role of as her caretaker, also take a stage-place in this short memoir. And so does fucking. Nelson’s unapologetic and starkly bare way of talking about ‘fucking’, as she likes to call it, took me by surprise and arousal both in ‘The Argonauts’ and here in ‘Bluets’. It’s not often that someone talks about sex so openly, and quite rare that someone does it with such sexy confidence and unashamed awareness. I don’t know what I am taking away from this book, a state I was in after reading ‘The Argonauts’, time will tell - but at least I remember my intent of going into this book, as well as my short and pleasurable stay in it.
Ratings: 3/5 *** Dec 6, 2021_