Nine Pages

I have always wanted to read Night by Elie Wiesel. When a friend finally lent me a copy, however, I discovered I was not brave enough to do so yet. I have had three attempts to read it, but I only got as far as the ninth page, this last time. Reading those first nine pages was unlike any reading experience I have had. I knew this because the whole time that I read it, the hairs on my face, my arms and those at the back of my neck kept standing, and this has never happened too early in anything that I have read, nor for that long. I had always dubbed that sensation "The Longinus Effect", credits to Longinus, a literary scholar/critic who theorized about an aesthetic criterion--a feeling that you get when you read and you know that whatever you are reading is good because you had been "touched by the sublime".

As I said, the Effect came too soon and persisted for too long that it felt oddly misplaced, as if it broke some universal law on writing that postpones the best until the end or the damning until later. Night is a slim volume of the biographical account of a Holocaust survivor, written in such potent prose. It is a record of the worst that human beings could be, and I worry that when I read it, I might see things I cannot un-see.

I’ve seen such things in Schindler’s List and in Life is Beautiful. I have read it in Alice Walker, in Toni Morrison, in Alan Paton, in Edilberto Tiempo, in Joseph Conrad, in Anna Akhmatova, and I remember the things that that seeing had caused me: grief then questions. Questions, then an inconsolable sense of abandonment. That and then a struggle for redemption.

I never got past those nine pages. Not yet. I had to put the book down, eventually. It was too powerful, and I am terrified of its power. I still look forward to reading it, one day, when I am wiser, when I have found answers to those questions. One day, when I am no longer afraid of the consequences of seeing.

As for now, Night will stay on my bedside table, closed. Silent. And benign.

Redemption

Tonight, I’m thinking about the Hindu tailors Ishvar and Om, the scholar Maneck and the beautiful Mrs. Dina Dalal—the characters that people Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. Ever since I put the book down several weeks ago, I knew why I thought the book was 713-pages worth of wasted time. What I did not understand was the wonderful reviews about it. I agree that the story is told in fine prose, but the plot it unravels is a terrible progression towards conflicts that are never untangled nor resolved.

“A Fine Balance” tells the story of these four characters. Theirs is a wonderful connection of unparallel lives, each of which has been riddled with tragedies that mold their persons. The book was a wonderful read until the last few pages, when I realized there weren’t enough pages left for the denouement I believed the characters deserved. In the end, all the tragedies in each of their lives amounted to nothing. The free-spirited Maneck jumped in front of a train; the indomitable Dina Dalal surrendered to the humdrum of domestic life she so detested; and the Untouchables-turned-tailors Ishvar and Om became a tandem of beggars—Ishvar, legless on a wheeled platform steered by an overweight eunuch that had been the zesty Om.

The conclusions of their struggles are a mockery to the fights they fought. By not rewarding them even a semblance of redemption in the end, the storyteller has invalidated his own tale. What is the sense of detailing tragedy after tragedy, if not for the redemption that is saved in the end? What is the sense of a struggle if not for the respite when one can say “This tiny moment is worth everything”?

I rebel against Rohinton Mistry’s conclusion. Yes, there is reason to believe that life does not owe us a happy ending. But redemption? Life owes us that at least. Otherwise, I fear that like Ishvar and Om’s tragedies, Maneck’s suffering and Dina Dalal’s struggles, our own stories would be nothing but long meaningless tales spun with silvery time-threads, that were never ours in the first place.