Prologue
‘We find the pleasurable much less pleasurable and pain much
more painful than we expected’, said Schopenhauer. Under the effect of passage,
however, events and our forbearing through them lose their measure; the present
remains the most unbearable despite how much worse the past had been. This
summer, with its unending presentness, has been the worst in my life. I might
have had more challenging and depressing mid-year months before as well, but
their memories fail to compare to my present pains. It was only this past
winter and early spring that I felt I had succeeded to get a grip on life, that
come what may I will weather through it handsomely. Days were marked happy,
satisfactory, and I wasn’t prone to have a worrying perspective about life and
everything it contained or lacked all the time. Spring’s coolness withered into
early summer hotness, and things began to gradually go downhill. Teaching
became tedious; I felt more troubled teaching and handling the students than
actually feeling satisfied at having taught them something. Summer kept
arriving and the with the increasing hot weather, I became more lackluster,
less motivated, and depressed. I wouldn’t put it exactly on that, but my
brother coming home and his stay, had in some way to do with my failing outlook
at life and my future prospects. Perhaps in his presence, which I looked
forward to, I lost my confidence about my life up to that point and started to
feel a presumptive yet dominating inability at ever changing the prospects from
that point forward. He had made it and I had not; and more failingly, could not
as well. The summer peaked, school vacations started, and I could finally part
ways with teaching, which had become unbearably bothering and worrisome, given
my faulty relations with the administration. Yet it did not come easy. I
thought quitting my engagements I would be at peace to stay at home and watch
movies and shows – but I was never at peace, not until today, three months
later. I couldn’t leave school, being too cowardly, but I was never called back
to school which made me feel worse about the outcome I had nevertheless wanted.
With depression now wrapping itself more and more around me, my family wasn’t
happy about me leaving everything and staying home. I did stay home, and I did
stream shows and movies, but it was more in effort to escape from my growing
depression than in enjoying or at least living an easy and lazy summer. Summer
time and the living is not easy, I would say. Even calling it ‘not easy’
seems an understatement. Once I was vulnerable to depression, and had started
to feel its weight on me, it took no time to consume me all together. I avoided
friends’ company, then I started feeling suffocated being at home. I didn’t
talk to anyone and found it impossible to start or carry a conversation (it is
still the same). Going outside took tremendous effort and being outside was a
torture. Yet at nights I went out, in the safety of the darkness, but presence
of every person bothered me and I could hardly find any place to be all by
myself. My mind was restless all the time I was out and I never escaped being
in the prison of self-consciousness. I contacted Arif, hoping his company would
take me away from myself for a while. Yet soon, it got tedious as well; my
muteness, the tedium of routine, his reluctancy. And so I tried to get up,
every time nudging my mind to find its way through another way: different sleep
routines, finding new and old things to watch, starting prayers at mosque,
picking new books and leaving them unfinished, doing to doctor and trying new
pills. But every other time, I relapsed, I fell down. I felt miserable,
agitated, restless, and utterly beaten by the deadness of life. I still do. It
hasn’t changed. I do go on walks, I do eat, watch, talk to friends if I meet
them, read, fap - but depression still clings to me and I feel at risk of
relapsing again, falling down harder. No mercy, no hope, just dead living and
passing of days.
I did manage to finish a few books, however, and I am here
to briefly write about them. Old habits and hobbies are life-line when life
becomes unbearably light, but they also run the risk of dying out. Reading
books regularly and writing reviews afterwards, these hobbies, for now, have
fallen off from me. But as a seeking of refuge and an inkling of old habit, I
am nevertheless here to report on what and how I have managed to read in the
past few very disturbing months.
263- Father and Sons (Ivan Turgenev)
I had heard of Turgenev as one of the notable Russian
writers of 19th century, and I had ordered a copy of ‘Fathers and
Sons’, his most acclaimed novel, a year before. It was, however, recommended to
me to read by Amaan, as his suggestion for the buddy read, while I suggested
and gave him a copy of Kundera’s ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’. Amaan
is an outstanding reader and has great admiration for Russian literature,
therefore I had quite high hopes for reading Turgenev. But I didn’t read it
then; it was after my competitive exams and I had decided to stay in Quetta and
leave Karachi for good, thinking that I’d live a better life here. Man thinks,
God laughs, they say. I picked up the copy of it a month ago and started
reading it. The blurb on the back didn’t quite excite me, nor did the reviews
of my other friends who had read it. But I did manage to finish it, noting that
there were other books I picked to read and some way through, just couldn’t
continue with it at all. Perhaps it was the digestible size of the novel, or
the fact that I resumed reading it after leaving it off midway. It is a story
about two friends who return from their university after some years to their
hometown, Arkady and his ‘nihilist’ friend Bazarov. Turgenev makes it very clear
early on that Bazarov is an overt nihilist and holds unconventional and
rebellious ideas about different topics. Once they are in town, mainly two
things happen in the novel: one is the political and religious discussions that
Bazarov, and his admirer Arkady, engage in, and the other is the different
romantic interests that they find themselves in. We meet Arkady’s parents and
household at the beginning of the novel and Bazarov’s family towards the end,
and in between they stay at a beautiful widow’s residency by the name of
Odintsova - for whom Bazarov, to his surprise, build strong feelings and
eventually confess. It was these parts of the novel that involved the romances
that kept me going and eventually finish the novel. After having read it, I
came to believe that Amaan’s recommendation for this book came from the fact
that perhaps the character Bazarov closely resembled himself in one and many
ways. On the whole, while the novel didn’t win me over, for it had very little
going for it, I didn’t come to entirely dislike it either. I give it three
stars.
264- The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
Published in 1992 by Ondaatje, a renowned Sri
Lankan-Canadian author, this book was later adapted into a movie in 1996,
starring Ralph Fiennes. I remember feeling excited when discovering this book,
perhaps because of its title and its Sri Lankan born author. So, while browsing
my shelves, uninterested and in search of a book that might find me some
relief, I picked this book. Again, the blurb on the book put me off slightly,
but the praises for the book were prominent and encouraging. But as soon as I
started reading ‘The English Patient’, it never really clicked with me, and
remained the same way as I mechanically read the whole book. The English
patient in this novel is a horribly burned man who is beyond recognizable when
he is found by, or brought to a nursing hospital in Italy towards the end of
WWII. As the war comes to an end, and the area of the hospital is said to be
spread with landmines, the hospital is moved along with the soldiers, but one
particular young nurse, whose name I can’t recall, stays behind to take care of
the burned patient. She finds a deserted castle-like house with a big library
in it, most of which is blown apart from the bombings, and decides to take
shelter there, along with sufficient medical supplies. As the novel progresses,
a couple more characters are introduced, in them a friend of the nurse’s late
father and Sikh bomb-disposal army-man by the name of Kip, who later becomes
the nurse’s lover. Most of the novel is told in flashbacks as the English
patient recalls his journey through the Egyptian deserts, reading Herodotus’s
book History, and falling in love with the wife of a rich man who comes
to the deserts for their honeymoon and stays with these explorers. It’s a book
about deserts, the Egyptian nomads, about an old and worn-out copy of a book
that holds in it the snippets of an affair and a love story. As I mentioned, I
mechanically read through this book, just reading the words, the paragraphs,
and only partially forming what I was reading about. The movie which I watched
afterwards and which pushed to skim through the book, didn’t make the story
appealing either. There was almost nothing that would captivate me about this
book or the story it tells. I give it one star.
265- Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
Perhaps Dostoyevsky’s most acclaimed novel, a writer whose
name took my friend three days to spell correctly, ‘Crime and Punishment’ is a
novel I had heard a lot about. It’s a story of a brutal and violent murder by
an ex-student and intellectual named Raskolnikov, who then spends the whole
novel dreading his act and whether he should confess. Reading this book however
was not as fulfilling as reading Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’; this
book in comparison felt unidirectional, flat, and compact. Although there are
other plotlines to the novel, like the Marmeladov family and his orphan
daughter Sonia, Rodio’s mother and his sister Dounia, and her former employer,
her husband to be, and Razmoukhin, Rodio’s friend, her admirer. It’s an intense
novel with the story and prose having an agitated and disturbed atmosphere to
them, with the heat, the sickness, and poverty, and multiple deaths. So much so
that sometimes it isn’t at all pleasant to read, but thrilling enough that the
reader continues on reading in order to discover what happens next. Two other
dimensions to the novel are the social views on crime and the psychological
aspects of the investigations. The former comes from an article that is
published by Rodio on the subject of crime where he distinguishes the mankind
into two hierarchal classes, mainly the masses who live under normal
circumstances, obeying the rule and doing what’s asked of them, and the other
the higher class, namely Napoleon or Mohamet, who revolutionize the society and
who stand above the laws – and rather controversially, according to Rodio, have
the right to commit crimes if they see reason enough for it. The later, the
psychological aspect of the novel, has to do with the investigation into the
murders, that of the pawn-lady and her sister Elizabeth, where the officer, who
is to certain degree convinced that Rodio has committed the crime, engages into
multiple psychological discourses with Rodio which are intense and highly
uncomfortable for Rodio to navigate through. It is definitely as atmospheric
novel where the reader feels involved into the storytelling of Dostoyevsky,
with its poor apartment, hot weather, intense emotions, and hysterical
instances, and thereby leaves a mark on the readers psyche after he has
finished reading it – or has also listened to a ‘In Our Times’ podcast episode
on the novel as well. The book ends with a short epilogue, which some of the
critics think of as unlikely and artificial, but which to me wrapped gently a
story that was too intense throughout. While it’s not a happy ending, which
couldn’t have been possible, there’s a certain calmness and a hint of resolve
at the end which comes as a breath of relief for the readers who have been all
too involved with the chaos of the story and its effects. I give ‘Crime and
Punishment’ four stars.
266- Middlemarch (George Eliot)
It was last October that I discontinued reading Middlemarch, after listening to an ‘In Our Time’ podcast about it which spoiled most of the novel. I had ended book four of eight books total in the novel. And since that October, my slumber began; I couldn’t finish any book, although I started a few, for almost a year. And now one week into September, I am sitting to write my thoughts about this comforting book that I’ve now finished reading. Today was ‘chehlum’, and I had a most disturbing morning. My head hurt from being too anxious and restless. I couldn’t read, I couldn’t watch, I was just under the torture of my own consciousness, screaming at me mercilessly. Hours passed, ‘as they do anyway’ Beckett, and I made it to afternoon, and from then on I reached for some company and spent the evening hours with the ‘juloos’. Around 6pm, we reached our friend’s home for ‘nayaz’ and there I met most of my friends that I hadn’t seen for months due to my depression. I asked about their routines, and explained my absence, and I tried to complain why they had stopped reaching out to me; but maybe I was to blame, ignoring friends might come at a cost of indifference from them. The two hours there passed too, and I started getting anxious as we left his home, me and my other friend, anxious about being on my own again, and worrying if they’ll contact me later. Troubled stomach, tired feet, and anxious mind, my mind clicked while reading to write this review in order to unhook, unwind my mind, to find some relief and let the tiredness nudge me to submission, and then sleep. How the mind can ruin your life, what power it holds over man; why, a weak man like me! None of my other friends are vulnerable to depression, prolonged sadness, or chronic anxiety; this only adds to my loneliness and isolation, in that I can’t share my condition fearlessly nor can they understand the severity of what I go through, and what I might need. If only I could manage on my own, or if only things went back to how they were months ago. I would still be jobless, but at least I wouldn’t be suffering through life, I would be at least living it. This self-consciousness has crippled me and will be the death of me. Moving on. ‘Middlemarch’ is subtitled as ‘a study of provincial life’, and the novel stays true to that description. It isn’t set around one person, or one family, but it’s rather a portrait of a whole town, where various families live and are tied to each other in one way or another. Should one try to divide the book to explain it better, it could be separated into four couples: Dorothea and Casaubon, later Will Ladislaw; Rosamond and Lydgate; Mary Garth and Fred Vincy; and Mr. and Mrs. Bulstrode. The first couples are at the center of novel, in that the book starts with them, and Dorothea remains in novel till its beautiful ending. She’s a bright, kind and curios young lady who wants to do good in the world. Rosamond, the second couple, is on the other hand materialistic and high-minded, while Lydgate is newcomer doctor in town with an ambitious way of doing medicine differently; the third couple are childhood lovers and theirs is a sweet story; while the Bulstrodes get involved in the climax of the novel towards its end. All in all, the book revolves around these families, including others, with talks about farming, cottages, reforms, religion, and Eliot’s voice appearing for good measure to help the readers read better. ‘Middlemarch’ is widely and deeply loved by readers and Eliot is most praised for having written such an alive, morally apt, and beautifully woven novel in a most delightful prose. Although testing for its length, I much rather enjoyed reading this book than being bored or tired by it. I give ‘Middlemarch’ four and half stars.