Beside books: this week

EVEN MY father said in one of our random car conversations this week, "Harry have to die man! He cyah be dealing with all that (by which I understood him to mean 'the dark arts') and not dead..."

Now, I suppose the unprompted comment was unexceptional given the current Pottermania that has water-coolers all over the world surrounded by people whispering (in conspiratorial tones too low to be picked up by JK Rowling's lawyers) all of the secrets of the final book. Even people who have never read any of the 500-plus-paged books and have no plans to do so in the immediate future were caught up. We pondered --based on sketchy extrapolations of the books' plots gleaned from the trailers for the movies-- Harry's fate.

But for my father to get involved in all this gibberish about poorly named villians (VoLdEmort? MAlFoy?) was taking things to an alarming new level. Because I've never seen my dad read anything except the Bible...

Yet, I found myself with not just one Harry Potter on my bedside pile this week, but TWO! Yes, dear Reader, it seems that the epic battle for my literary taste (and my time) has begun. Soon I may well be posting on TATOO nothing but spoilers and questions about really tangential characters to your general dismay.

Yet, The Order of the Phoenix (which I bought only because I liked the movie) and The Deathly Hallows remained unopened at the bottom of my pile this week. It was like the marketing magic did its work last Saturday and, once the mission of depriving me of my hard-earned living wage was complete, it released its tenterhooks and left its victim in a bewildered state of 'hmm-well-I-bought-them-I-guess-I-should-read-them-sometime'.

Instead, I have fallen prey to the wonderful tone of White Teeth, a book I had avoided reading for years because of its bulk. Blake, my favorite poet, is also fashionable these days and I finished Jean Rhys' gem A Voyage in the Dark which I enjoyed immensely because of its economy of expression (if only some people praised this quality more):

"It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feelings things gave you right down inside yourself was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey. But a difference in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy. I didn't like England at first..."

This is a novel which deals with, inter alia, identity and the place of desire (and by extension gender and sexuality) in the matrix of our lives. It is also a study of emotion, dealing with the crises of memory, alienation and emotional paralysis. And it is an account of loneliness and the universal loss of 'home' in self, in place and in time.

One or two uncomfortable passages dealing with race made me ponder the enduring question of the distinction between the character of the protagonist and the author, but by the time we come to the end (so perfectly chosen by Rhys within the narrative arc) and to the haunting last paragraph, the reader's mind is stained with the sense of a loss that stems from social and self-imposed exile.