The idea that a book is brought to life by its reader is not new. A writer pours all of the details and plot that they can into a work and then the reader comes along and makes it their own by keying into the things that matter to them and ignoring the things that don’t. This conversation and co-creation between writer and reader feels like magic when we allow ourselves to surrender to it. Yesterday, though, Ruth Ozeki took me beyond that magic to make me feel as though A Tale for the Time Being was not only written for me, but was being written for me as I read it. I wanted to go back and re-read it immediately to see if it changed. I also wanted to have you read it immediately to see if it was a completely different book for you. It probably isn’t (not really) but it’s very much worth a read either way. I’m going to delve into where the magic came from for me. Just go buy the book if you want to avoid my spoilers.

Metafiction Toys with Reality

A Tale for the Time Being is two books in one. The first is the diary of a teenage girl living in Tokyo in the nearish past. The second is the story of a writer, Ruth, living on an island on the west coast of Canada actively avoiding writing her next book, a memoir about her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s. Now if you look up metafiction, you’ll see that the form of authorial insertion is often used as parody. Yes, if you’re talking about Kundera. It’s also used as a tool to “explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art.” This is more what you see with writers like Paul Auster and it often feels like a stilted lecture. Weird, but stilted.

Ozeki, on the other hand, brings a rich humanity to metafiction that allowed me to bring my whole being to the book and not just my intellect. I’ve loved two other books by Ozeki before and I can’t recall her ever using herself as a character before, but she did it brilliantly here and it was just the right effect for this book. Part of the reason it worked so well is that she engaged my emotions first. Granted, it was the emotion of annoyance as I met an angsty Japanese teenager, Nao, who I though was being glib about metaphors as she called herself a “time being.” I pushed past that (thank God) and kept reading. Ruth’s story drew me in more easily because it is, at this point in my life, easier to engage emotionally with a writer who should be writing her masterworks but isn’t always. Ruth finds Nao’s diary and some other papers washed up on a beach in Canada and begins reading.

Through the relationship of these two stories, A Tale for the Time Being effortlessly whisked me through major events like the Fukushima meltdown, 9/11, suicide, and what it was like to be a kamikaze pilot in World War II, hitting each from a deeply human angle. Because Nao is a Japanese girl who was living in America but then moved back to Japan we also get a Japanese perspective on these events and more which was incredibly interesting and humanizing. There’s also lots of Buddhism. In gentle, washing waves that stretched my thinking and made me feel at home. The metaphor that had initially seemed pat expanded gloriously and this book wrapped around me and made me think deeply.

How This Book Wrote Itself for Me

At first it was easy to gloss over the details that were personal to me. Nao’s great-grandmother, Jiko, is 104, wise and dying. This year I lost my Djiedo at 104. Like Ruth, I’m a writer living in the Pacific Northwest (and most days I’d rather be on an island). She’s married to an artist (as am I). They’re both trying to find their place in the world—worried about being too isolated, too in the mix of things, not making enough work or the right work. Ruth had some complicated health stuff with her mom, something I’m navigating this past month (and for the last 30 years). Nao is a complicated, unhappy teen-aged girl (as I once was). And Jiku, a pacifist Buddhist nun, has to navigate her son going off to become a kamikaze pilot in World War II while I’ve worried about sending my son to war ever since I first heard myself sing “Taps” after “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” in a night of misguided lullabies (that I couldn’t seem to stop repeating for as many years as he still let me sing to him).

This is the spoiler part. There is a moment when Ruth opens Nao’s diary and finds that what was once written is now blank. That was the switch that flipped for my tired, busy brain and made me think that maybe it was no coincidence that I picked up this book, the copy of A Tale for the Time Being that I was holding, this week, a terribly busy week near the end of a terribly busy eight months in which I find myself writing book reviews at 5am and all that Buddhist balance I’ve been craving isn’t something I’ve even been able to look for. As Nao sat with Jiko practicing zazen meditation, I felt myself breathe. And it was everything.

I don’t know that this book will write itself for you the way that it did for me, but I hope you do have that experience of magic someday. Either way, Ozeki’s writing is fantastic, always.

Pick up a copy of A Tale for the Time Being from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

One of the things I was most afraid of in coming to India was replicating the colonial experience. This frightened me because I despise the exploitation of other peoples and cultures and I thought with my oh-so-white skin and complete lack of skill with local languages and norms that I could not avoid being seen as one of those colonizers who expects to be treated as more and better. It also frightened me because I thought I might grow to like it.

As a result, and as I’ve mentioned before, I steered away from bringing along books written from the British perspective (although I’ve read many before). Except one. I brought along Booker Prize winning Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala even though the prize, the cover imagery, and the jacket description all suggested it was England-approved. But the book was thin and I read so few prize-winning books (usually by choice) and I thought I’d muddle through whatever elitist whatnot the book might offer.

I’m so glad I was wrong.

Two Perspectives on India

Although there is one storyline in this book about a bored British housewife, Olivia, in 1923 India, it’s complemented perfectly by the story of Olivia’s step-granddaughter who visits a very different India in the 1970s to uncover the story of how and why Olivia ran away with an Indian royal.

Olivia’s story is actually a tale about a woman who’s questioning all the British convention she encounters as a newlywed who is first encountering British India. She doesn’t like the British society and she’s not afraid to act according to her own ideals. As much as I sometimes questioned her judgment—running off to spend all day nearly every day with a married Indian Nawab (I think this is a prince) without (and without telling) her husband—I admired her spirit—refusing to summer in Shimla just because that’s what the British ladies were expected to do.

As Olivia’s story unfolds, so does that of her granddaughter and here is where Jhabvala displays real mastery, because the two women experience many similar events at similar points in the narrative (from festivals to intrusions of unwanted guests and more) which could become quite cloying. Instead, because Jhabvala has made these stories just different enough, the intersections feel mystical and preordained and as I was reading the book I kept wondering if these two generations would fall into the same trap.

India in Real Life

My own perspective on India is much closer to Olivia’s granddaughter, in part because the India she encounters is much closer to the one I see during the day—the bustling emerging economy that’s making its own rules along the way, the street markets and roaming cows, the people who look as though they can repair anything (many things which an American would throw away), and the people who live in any spare space of traffic median they can find.

“For the first time I understood—I felt—the Hindu fear of pollution. I went home and bathed rigorously, rinsing myself over and over again. I was afraid. Pollution—infection—seemed everywhere; those flies could easily have carried it from her to me.” – Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

I refuse to judge the country based on traffic that scares me and mounds of garbage swept to the side of the street. It is different, but it should be different, because there’d be no point in traveling all this way if it was the same. I will not drink the water or eat the street food, but there are over a billion people here who are making the country what they want it to be. Don’t we all have some level of pollution or other problem we want to fix?

But that is not all of India. As an American tourist in Jaipur, I am staying in a hotel that used to be the residence of the prime minister of Jaipur where I swim in a large pool overlooked by peacocks and where an enormous staff is employed to cater to any need I might have and then disappear. Olivia’s set, though likely not Olivia herself, would have been at their most comfortable here behind the walls that separate us from the city.

Last night we dined with a local family in their palace in the old town of Jaipur. They are relatives (distant I think) of the Maharajah and their ancestors moved into the home in the 1760s. Nestled deep inside one of the pink blocks of market stalls and small shops, this home with three luscious courtyards houses several brothers and their families along with five dogs and a tortoise. They live behind walls and glass thick enough to block out the market noise in rooms beautiful in their simplicity that are decorated with family artifacts like pictures of the Maharajah and the Mountbattens as well as the skins and heads of leopards and tigers (decor it seemed as though our gracious hosts would not have chosen for themselves, but here family artifacts and history matter).

Today we’ll go into the jungle at Rathambore to hunt tigers with our cameras. I didn’t bring any more books about tiger hunting, so I’ll be reading a spiritual text in preparation for our visit to Varanasi or maybe a detective novel set in Mumbai.

How India is Changing Me

“She began to write to Marcia, but Marcia was in Paris and it was impossible to explain anything from here to there.” – Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

I’m not sure I’m doing a good job of conveying my experiences, partly because I’m still so far inside of them and things change every day, but I’ll try.

In Heat and Dust, Jhabvala writes, “India changes people,” and I’ve been reflecting on what that means for me. I am aware here of never feeling like I belong anywhere. I don’t know the streets well enough to wander then, and even if I did I’d be an object of curiosity. And the luxurious expat lifestyle (as much as I’m enjoying it) makes this democratic, do-it-yourself girl deeply uncomfortable.

Most of all I feel conspicuous. There are moments I’ve been able to own that feeling of being watched and to embrace what it means to be on display (including the long saunter to the pool where I take a brief swim and then lay and do nothing but be seen). But being in India is making me more and more conscious of how uncomfortable I am being seen whether as an object of curiosity or as a woman. I’m uncomfortable even writing about it here because of everything it implies. Now that India has helped me pinpoint some of the sources that discomfort, I can start to investigate what it all means.

And then there is the spiritual awakening aspect of India. I did not come here for a religious experience, though there are certainly years in my life that would have been my goal. Somerset Maugham wrote of his characters once that he was “a deeply religious man who doesn’t believe in God” and that’s been the case with me for a long time. I flirt with Buddhist philosophy, cross myself like a good little Catholic to ward off the evil eye, and am most at peace when I am subsumed by the power of sitting beneath a large sky in front of a vast ocean.

So when I walk into a temple or a mosque or a gurudwara and feel the immense energies of the places and of the people worshipping in them, I pay attention. I don’t know what is happening and I don’t plan on going home and beginning to worship Vishnu, but I am soaking up the Hindu idea that all gods are one and that we make of them what we individually need. I am attracted to the Sikh vision of equality. I’m even beginning to like the call of the muezzin who wakes us around 4:45 am because of the sincere love of faith embodied in his voice.

I can even feel India affecting my syntax and my gestures. As a mimic—a skill I think I developed to mask the feeling of not fitting in in the many places I’ve traveled—I’m very aware of these things (and have been fighting the change of syntax in this essay), but no amount of energy will allow me to resist those changes.

The one thing I am sure of is that I am not a colonial. At least not yet. So I’ll enjoy yet another sumptuous breakfast buffet where I can eat foods from all corners of the globe while the waiter brings me extra special treats. I’ll relish cool swims in pristine pools. But I will not stop wondering about the social cost of creating a service class or the environmental toll of this kind of tourism on a state with little water. The wheel of the world keeps spinning, but I am not yet ready to accept that “other” or “privileged” is a station I must embrace.

I’m grateful to you for reading along with me as I experience India through books and the windows of a tour bus. I never know when I’ll have access to internet again, so I’m posting these as I go. Sharing the journey with you in this form helps me better understand my days and nights, so thank you.

For other perspectives on what I read while in India, read my experiences of The Death of Vishnu and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall.

As preparation for this trip to India that I’m on, I gathered as much Indian literature around me as I thought I might be able to carry. I planned to read the books along the journey and then to leave them or share them with other travelers on the way. But one book, The Death of Vishnu called me to read it before I even left for the US and I’m so glad I did.

The Quiet Death of Contemporary Literature

The reason I stopped reading most literary magazines and why I’m very careful about what books I spend my time on is a trend toward complete lifelessness in much contemporary fiction as one character (usually a thinly veiled stand in for the author) contemplates his or her navel as not much happens. It’s all meant to be portentous or something but usually the connections are only in the author’s mind and not the page and the readers are left flat.

The flooding of the literary market with these kinds of stories and books leaves me adrift in a sea where I’m looking for meaning in all this quiet contemplation (a state of being I deeply love) but because the meaning is not actually processed enough to be communicated, most contemporary quiet fiction makes me feel desperately lonely and disconnected from humanity.

The Death of Vishnu is the exact opposite of that experience. Instead, the story of an impoverished man dying on the steps of an apartment building as the building’s residents go about their daily lives is rich in social commentary, quotidian detail (of the informative type), mythological importance, and even humanity. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.

Life in India

Mind you, I’ve been out of the enclave that houses the world’s embassies to Delhi for almost one full day, so everything I purport to know about real life in India is deeply flawed, but having read The Death of Vishnu before arriving, I feel like I understand everything better.

In The Death of Vishnu, the households of the apartment are supported by a range of people from the cigarette walla (who brings cigarettes) to the ganga (who brings milk) to Vishnu, the man who washes the families’ dishes. During the few days Vishnu is dying on the steps, we get to know two Hindu families (who are quarreling over such things as the amount of water they can pull from the kitchen they share), a Muslim family (whose son is carrying on a Romeo and Juliet type romance with the daughter of one of the Hindu families and whose father has been exploring enlightenment in other religions), an older man (who lives entirely wrapped in the memory of the woman he loved), and Vishnu (who may or may not be the reincarnation of the god Vishnu).

The details of life I encountered in this book, from the petty squabbles and keeping up with the Joneses of a ladies’ poker party to the way the ambulance system functions (where first the ambulance needs to be paid for and then the payment of resulting medical services guaranteed before the patient can even be removed from the premises) were astounding. I couldn’t believe the way the author packed so much life into so few days. And yes, the story overall is quiet with its petty squabbles and small joys, but the way the author fits the entirety of these characters’ lives into these few pages becomes an amazing reminder that all of these small things are the entirety of life for most of us, no matter where we live.

Halfway around the world from where I belong, I’m finding those small details of the lives of others completely fascinating. From the way the young, thin rickshaw driver pedaled my mom and me around a small section of Old Delhi yesterday—displaying an assuredness that showed how well he could navigate any system and made me imagine how he could (if he would want to) break out of what seemed to me to be a life of hand to mouth existence—to the ingenuity displayed by a group of young men when our bus was blocked into a tight curve by a car—they rocked the car to the point that it was moved out of the way—I feel like there is so much to learn from careful observation of life—both abroad and at home.

Yesterday I saw crazy amounts of wire strewn across tiny streets. I saw crowds of people gathered around watching us watching them. I saw couples on motorbikes and goats staked to the side of the road before they would be eaten. I also saw that this is a country in which things are still repaired rather than being replaced and how many people are employed to do a job that in the US we’d ask one to do. That last bit made me wonder if full employment, or at least the sharing out of some work, doesn’t make everyone happier because the responsibilities are shared and each person in the system is valued. I saw people begging on the streets and hawkers selling everything from washcloths to coconuts in traffic.

Making Meaning of it All

I don’t have the answers to what any of life here, or life in the US, means. And I don’t want to pretend here that I do. But one of the things I learned from reading The Death of Vishnu is that by providing enough pertinent detail, readers can make their own meaning. So when I think that life is missing from much contemporary fiction, maybe what I mean is that detail of experience is missing. Or that we’re so busy listing what’s in a character’s bedroom (a common writing prompt) that we fail to then let him experience life outside of that bedroom—something that would make all of those previous details have import.

Mythological Underpinnings

One thing the author of The Death of Vishnu relies on to add richness to this story is a relationship to the Bhagavad Gita a sacred Hindu text. And I feel like there are aspects of this book I would have cherished all the more if I were at all familiar with that text. But the author does a wonderful job of weaving in enough information that I could follow along, even if I missed a majority of the allusions. I miss this kind of writing, where one story is leveraged on another, older story. It’s something I tried to do in Polska, 1994 by tying aspects of Magda’s journey to moments in Christ’s life. I don’t think most readers will take that from my book, but for those who do, the meaning will be even greater.

On Being Vague in Book Reviews

You’ll notice I’ve named only one character here and not even the author. That’s the perils of being without my books. I made notes somewhere about all of those things so I’d have them with me, but it’s the middle of the night here and I’d probably wake my mom if I went looking for them. Oh, and I don’t have much internet access, so I’m forced to rely on the (not-so) trusty memory bank.

What I hope for you is that if you’re at all interested in life in India or if you want to know how to make a quiet story read loud, you’ll open this book and discover its characters and all the life therein for yourself. I promise it will be worth your time.

Leave of Absence

While I’m very glad that I read The Death of Vishnu in the US and have the book at home in my collection to read and re-read, I’m now back to reading the novels I had little enough confidence in that I thought I could leave them at home. If I get lucky and find enough joy in one of them (and an internet connection to boot), I’ll share them with you here. And if not, I’ll see you all in November. Thanks for sharing books, and the world, with me.

For other perspectives on what I read while in India, read my experiences of Heat and Dust and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall.