What a dogged reading. Looks if nothing is going to happen. None of the character talks with himself to bring out any kind of insight. There is a parasitic dependence on the things without to have any movement in the story. It at times is a dog thinking and reasoning like a man and the other way for a man. What is the point if it is as uncertain and as non-starter as it appears, if not a sudden quirk or a twist in the story occurs, which makes it worth to continue? Before you reach the middle of the book Gunter Grass begins to overwhelm with the brilliant way he uncovers the distress and consequences of the war under Hitler in the country. An elderly school teacher, a neighbor of the narrator Harry, who taught literature and writing methods, often by leaving them alone, to his students, besides other subjects, disappears for his crime of failing to celebrate the birthday of Hitler. He was charged with eating the candies the school administration has allocated for his students. The cousin of the Harry named Tulla, who he fingers at times beside the daughter of the disappeared school teacher, Jenny, to check the depth of their holes–as he puts it, speculates that the teacher has been taken to a place from where a heap of freshly collected human bones have been dumped in open in their town, which foul the air of it all the time and attract a large number of rats and crows. Tulla brings a human skull from there to prove her point. Sex scenes, more often than not, by Gunter Grass, are not the tenderest and delicate type. They are vicious, crude and occur like an act of sabotage. Taking a reader by complete surprise, besides the characters performing it. Similar can be said about the writing style. It makes things obscure in the way they are described in a convoluted language which often is difficult to get hold of. By keeping the going on a scene surprises by its sudden arrival, for it is shocking not only for what it is but also for the lucid and forth-coming language in which it is described. One hopes the original German language edition reads better than its translation. Also that, a better translated version comes soon in English, which also cares about readability as well. For the subject is the most deadly war one has known; written by someone who fought it as well. Little other literature is available on this subject otherwise–from the side which lost it. Tulla takes Harry and Jenny to a leech infested area and makes them attach leeches to their bodies and feed them till they are fully fed on their blood and become easily detachable. Then she collects those leeches and cooks them in a tin pot till they become a thick paste, then she eats it and asks them to eat it as well. Tulla thinks this is how her brother, somewhere fighting in France, might survive the war. But he is killed soon. In their early teens, these three characters try strange things to deal with the effect the war has created in their lives. When, after his disappearance, the school teacher’s daughter is taken away by a middle-aged dance master and a probable Nazi official, who wants to keep her as a mistress while she learns dance in Berlin, she comes to knock at the door of Harry’s to say her goodbye. Harry and his parents do not open the door. But She and Harry continue to write each other till a long time later. A Poignant and heart-breaking scene is when Harry, now inducted finally into the army at the age of sixteen, comes to say goodbye to Tulla, who is pregnant now at the same age by a person she never discloses. She is now working as a bus conductor to support herself. She wanted Harry to make her pregnant but he always declined this possibility. She offers him bundles of ticket as a souvenir with which he plays-with his fingers, just like a child. It makes Tulla laugh. How the war was sucking in and destroying the lives of young children fills one with a profound sadness. A while ago, a bomb drops at a place where Jenny was performing and both her toes were amputated to end her dancing career. But the war was to last another three years. Tulla asks Harry to pay the bus fare for the distance he traveled with his modest luggage, before he leaves to join his duty in a war turning increasingly bloody. The third and the last part of the novel deals with post war years in the country. Grass deals with so many trends in a desultory manner in the beginning. He picks technology, economy, politics and much more randomly and in an arcane language, without making any point clearly. But soon he picks the people trying to practice a conscious collective amnesia to forget the bad memories of the war. But then a glass comes to the market for children of ten years of age, a time since the war has ended, which makes them see the past of their parents clearly. They see all the murders and other crimes which their parents have committed but never discussed. It leads to an epidemic of psychiatric diseases in the children using those glasses and many of them commit suicide. But, some how, behind the religion, liberalism and progress, the society tries to hide from its past. The author sarcastically deals with the hypocrisy of the society to collectively forget a criminal past. It shows how neatly and effectively the author is capable of dealing with the things he really feels are important before he goes absent-minded again and talks about so many generalities in a language which is difficult to decipher. In a way he expiates alone for the scores of unacknowledged sins committed by the society he belongs to. There are not many writers courageous enough to take up such a thankless task, though many other countries have perpetrated no less horrendous crimes on mankind than the Nazi violence. On the contrary, all the efforts in literature mostly have been to make that past obscure enough, so that any future inquiry is preempted. In it not only the writers from the side of the perpetrators, but also a few from the victims’ side, too have contributed. It makes one’s heart bleed for the pathos of the writer of this novel.
It was the book shop I went to visit in Bag Bazar after many years.
Earlier I lived in Exhibition road area and often went to this shop for it had a good collection of fiction, non-fiction and other books of general interest.
It was a unique shop in this regard as all other shops in Bag Bazar and Putli Sadak area mostly sold text books as there were so many university campuses around and the roads remain crowded with students throughout the day and evening.
The students were often also smartly- clad-in-dress students of a women’s college in the area. When you are young you want to be around such company hoping to make an acquaintance with a suitable woman.
It was a time when Late Princess Shruti, the only daughter of King Birendra, too studied in that campus. However, it was said that she came and left in a car and only her closest friends had a time to look at her and talk to her. Only a few people ever claimed to have seen her at the campus.
The bookseller running the shop was an elderly man with a kind face. He often was himself reading a book silently. He barely smiled at a customer who entered his shop before his gaze returned to the book he was reading.
He did not mind if a customer lingered long in his shop and browsed through many books before he left the shop without buying any. He just smiled again at him while he left.
He smoked often on his seat when he took a break from his reading. So in his shop there was always a residual reek of tobacco all the time.
Mixing with the scent of books and glue it formed an aroma I liked, while I leisurely perused the books I took out from shelves one by one. I carefully placed each of them back from where I had taken them as I did not want to bother the seller with any additional work on account of my visit to his shop.
It was from here that I purchased many titles of Charles Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, V S Naipaul and many others. Those titles still remain with me after more than twenty years. Finding Diary of the last Indian Viceroy Lord Mountbatain and the stories of Gay De Maupassant were some spectacular discoveries I made at that shop. These writers enriched my world tremendously. I kept rereading their work as they answered best my anxieties in different stages of my life.
I also bought from here many books which I abandoned too. One such book was by a classical English writer half of which was written in Greek between English.
With the time however, my reading became diverse like the contents of my life. I had now my wife and children who were growing up fast demanding a great deal of my time and other resources.
Also, I shifted to a locality in the south of Kathmandu which had lower house rent and from where Bag Bazar appeared too far away and the Himalayan Mountains glittered in the north every morning as the sun rose. It all occupied me so totally that I was almost under a spell to only focus on the urgent matters and not to indulge.
So I did not go to this shop for a long time.
Finding the garlanded framed photo of the bookseller just above his seat was deeply saddening. His son, sitting on his seat, on asking informed me that a few years back his father passed away and since then he has been looking after the shop.
He just smiled as I said sorry at it. Then I went to look for a few titles inside the shop.
I found that now this shop had so many titles from Nepali authors too who wrote both in Nepali and English. Beside now it sold many text books too.
Many of the books were on a heavy discount. Among them I found a book which was a collection of articles from a journalist who wrote routinely for newspapers in older days. It was a collection of those articles.
I was never a big fan of his writing and mostly ignored his columns which appeared on every weekend issue of The Rising Nepal on Fridays and other newly arrived English dailies and weeklies. He then had a good following and readers were found talking about his columns in a social gathering.
I had heard some time before about the death of that columnist. He had lived to the age beyond seventy writing his scandalous columns almost till the end while living a life mostly supported by business and political interests he promoted in his writing, rather than by his writing.
Now finding his book in my hand at a discounted price my heart filled with ambiguity. I knew his name so well that I could not ignore his presence in the book shop. By his admirers he was possibly entirely forgotten as his book had no takers and it was on a discount.
I decided to buy his book less for reading more for keeping as a souvenir.
In a way it will help me to invoke the nostalgia of the age which is slipping away slowly for those too who have survived it, not to mention those who have passed on with it.
For the ever changing dynamics of time has demolished many old structures and has created so many new landmarks at their place that one feels at a loss while seeing a familiar old city disappearing and a new one emerging which has no sign of the one that has been replaced. It is largely true for the people too.
In such a tumultuous age, may be, only a writer one was familiar with, could help one relive the age which seems so distant now.
It was my love for the form not the content that I decided to buy the book, which had brought together me as a reader, him as a columnist and the book seller who sold his work. We were complete strangers otherwise.
Before I left the shop the son of the late book seller asked me to visit again. He was neither a smoker nor a reader—I had noticed. His eyes were restless, besides. He was a man very different from his father.
I said I will Try.
K C Bhatt
WOW ! World Of Words. 