Warning: Long review
This book is a travelogue of 1960s Europe. A Europe hanging between lingering postwar sadness and Cold War anxiety.
But calling it just a travelogue will be a massive understatement.
Sometimes it is a travelogue, sometimes a history book, and sometimes a magical realism novella.
Reading it feels like the past has turned into a blurry dream that is superimposed onto the present.
For him, Paris is not just Eiffel and Notre Dame. Iceland is not just the Northern Lights. Prague is not just Charles Bridge.
The cafes of Montmartre feel like Picasso's blue period. The theaters of Prague feel bustling with the plays of Brecht. The streets of Vienna still feel like Mozart's favorite place in the whole wide world.
The author accomplishes all this while still being extremely opinionated about the art, personalities, and politics of the artists and nations.
Here is a shitty translation of a paragraph in which the author describes the feeling of going to an art gallery:
"How few pictures remain in our memory, dreams soaked in blood, sweat locked in frames hanging on the wall.
While we cross centuries at every step, only an impression remains with us—a memory born from colors and shapes but different from them altogether. A flight cutting through the void; a scream. Some keys of closed centuries, which we bring home with us to open later, alone; to our own loneliness."
Nirmal Verma, you absolute beauty!!