As I ready myself for lightly-packed luggage in the coming week, I shall slip valuable essay collections from three inspiring, distinctive writers into the bottom of my bag. Namely, Other Colours by Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, The Other comprising a series of memorable travel dispatches, penned by the late celebrated Polish war correspondent Ryszard Kapuściński and the stimulating, profound descriptions of novel-writing to be found in Umberto Eco‘s Confessions of a Young Novelist. No doubt, these handsome translated editions will rest in my favourite airline’s efficient reliable cargo as silent, appeasing friends. There they will slumber for essential long-haul flights, that I must now undertake with satisfying zeal, if I am to complete the writing of my book slowly of course, but surely.
Thus, I seal my errand with a smile and a caressing swing of the heart.
I am hoping that the documented essays and lecture series of Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, the exclusive travel commentaries especially of those pertaining to Africa and belonging to legendary journalist Ryzsard Kapuściński and the very determined Umberto Eco’s stubborn bold reflections in Confessions of a Young Novelist, will serve as loyal companions and devoted teachers, even as I pick these writers’ brains in between all the errands I must run, on my future novel’s behalf, as I play the enthusiastic role of wayfarer.
Already, I have completed Pamuk and Kapuściński – please see my thoughts on Pamuk here and Kapuściński here - but feel compelled to savour their essays once more with solemn repetition for just another magic round. Perhaps in the wistful idea that practise makes perfect. “Read again and again until you understand,” my conscience appears to plead. “Search the exciting ways a writer uses an essay to open windows even from something dark and uncompromising, even from a stuffy, locked house that from somewhere in an unsuspecting quagmire, a startling beauty glistens.”
Through open heartfelt dialogues on what it takes to capture the essence of a writer’s heart and on reading the intellectuals mentioned, I feel that perhaps here once more, I am lost in the faded dialogues of my father and his clever friends mainly a firm and long-staying group of thinking individuals. Many eventually emigrated to Europe from Malaysia. Opportunities during the psychedelic era that abounded in Holland, West Germany, England, Switzerland and Sweden were too good to miss.
I was blessed to have a childhood centred around the conversations of these men, where through a dismal, masquerade role of pretending to fiddle with my Batman cards, I eavesdropped on countless astonishing stories that were gleaned from books and incredible media before these were discussed, debated and argued upon. I remember how in those days, Life and Reader’s Digest stayed all the rage.
Let me break away at this point to say that I travel this time not for the enjoyment of travel at all – although I do love the exhilaration of being in a plane – but I fly this time round for work. I need to revisit the locations of my novel. I thought I had everything down pat but I am still not satisfied. As a result, my trips promise to be both gratifying and exhausting.
Perhaps I romanticize too much but if such an attribute makes a celebration of life, than why not.
I feel for the moment properly transformed into my novel’s shadow. I playact its mother and guardian angel. My novel is the child running blissfully forth and I must keep up with the trail, panting of course and sweating all the way that befits my anxious, protective manner.
What awaits me are sessions of even more picture-taking than my tidy stack for references presently allow for absolute detailing, the recording and making of memory notes ie. what-once-was and what-now-is.
Then there are the mirages in my head of houses, shops, streets, strange alleyways, streams, people, stalls, restaurants, coffee-shops, all sorts. I feel as if my novel is the awakening friendly giant and I, its happy errand-boy. I birth it, live, breathe, shape, launder, paint and polish it to perfection. In fact, I possess such enchanting thoughts about this new subject in my life, that frankly, it deserves a post all its own.
But why this obsession with location?
I think that any genuine traveller who writes a novel, would desire this. If I cannot sketch descriptions vividly enough with which to make the reader feel that she has climbed into my fictitious bedroom and mulled over an entertaining poster on the wall, strolled my colourfully drawn streets while munching spiced peanuts and staring at a sly old fortune teller settled on a crowded walkway with his noisy green parrot, or for that matter, stirred a mug of Milo say, in an aunt’s rambling kitchen which offered the delicious whiff of an appetising fish curry…a kitchen that was built after the Second World War and tucked away in an oil palm estate in a small Malaysian town and where greedy cats waited impatiently at the back door; if I cannot manage all of these… than I have failed as a traveller. I have served my vocation poorly. Ah…I can hear you say that I am being too hard on myself but I can tell you now, that this stays a thrilling hard-on-myself venture.
This brings me back to Umberto Eco which I shall talk more about in subsequent posts as I am still dipping furiously into this essays, but when Eco wrote Island of the Day, he went to the South Seas, to where his story was set. He says, “I naturally went to the South Seas, to the precise geographic location, where the book is set, to see the colours of the water and sky at different hours of the day, and the tints of the fishes and corals.” When Eco wrote about ships, he studied drawings on ships of that period but also measured the exact length of cabins and cubby-holes. He wanted to know how long it would take a character in the ship he had fashioned with his pen full of labyrinths and mazes, to move from one room to the other. During the time, Eco wrote about monks and monasteries, day after day, he pretended that he was living in a kind of somber enchanted castle. How clear to me that with his theories as helpful needles, Eco wove large chunks of his heart, into all of his stories. During the creation of his novels, he did not walk with his tales but inside them.
Now, this brings me rather eagerly to a sound mention of Edward Docx‘s The Devil’s Garden, a novel published by Picador and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007. The Guardian described Docx’s accomplishment as having followed in Conrad’s footsteps. I was held spellbound on listening recently to The Guardian’s podcast on Interviews with Travel Writers. An endearing favourite, Colin Thubron was the first to be interviewed but while I stayed fascinated with much of what Thubron had to add, I was somewhat mesmerized by Docx himself. From having travelled widely in the past, the author-scientist conceded how important it was to him, to visit any location that adhered to his fiction. Despite the world being at one’s fingertips through the outstanding features of Google Earth for instance, Docx reaffirmed that nothing could replace a writer volunteering to be present at any specific location that formed for the said writer’s plot. The key to a winning form, he asserted, was to make a novel as authentic as possible for the reader.
Naturally, I had to buy his book and was relieved that I managed to purchase a copy this afternoon. I shall read it first thing tomorrow morning with a particular slant towards studying the imagery, descriptions, episodes and encounters that helped make Docx’s novel, a distinctive one. I shall report back on one of my following posts.
The essays I have chosen to pack away, will work to educate and assist me like the presence of old faraway friends. All will talk with me over coffee, teach me in the classroom, point to valuable references in the library and taking lingering walks with me on the many rambling streets like postcards locked into a canvas of interesting forgotten places.
What is presently so amazing stays the expansion of my already eclectic world. This, representing a sparkling prism of many different passions netted into one. I find now, that in writing my book, I am introduced to a broader scope of different worlds than the many, many writers and books I have already known. Suddenly, there are oh… so many more… Like a mythical abyss, an entrancing Alice-in-Wonderland burrow or a surreal trail of galaxies, my own multitude of welcoming doors too stay eternal. – susan abraham
