My Country Is Literature: Adventures in the Reading Life

by Chandrahas Choudhury

'A book is only one text, but it is many books. It is a different book for each of its readers. My Anna Karenina is not your Anna Karenina; your A House for Mr Biswas is not the one on my shelf. When we think of a favourite book, we recall not only the shape of the story, the characters who touched our hearts, the rhythm and texture of the sentences. We recall our own circumstances when we read it: where we bought it (and for how much), what kind of joy or solace it provided, how scenes from the story began to intermingle with scenes from our life, how it roused us to anger or indignation or allowed us to make our peace with some great private discord. This is the second life of the book: its life in our life.' In his early twenties, the novelist Chandrahas Choudhury found himself in the position of most young people who want to write: impractical, hard-up, ill at ease in the world. Like most people who love to read, his most radiant hours were inside the pages of a book. Seeking to combine his love of writing with his love of reading, he became an adept of a trade that is mainly transacted lying down—that is, he became a book reviewer. Pleasure, independence, aesthetic rapture, even a modest livelihood: all these were the rewards of being a worker bee of literature, ingesting the output of the publishers of the world in great quantities and trying to explain in the pages of newspapers and magazines exactly what makes a book leave a mark on the soul. Even as Choudhury's own novels began to be published, he continued to write about other writers' books: his contemporaries at home and abroad, the great Indian writers of the past, the relationship of the reading life —in particular, the novel—to selfhood and democracy, all the ways in which literature sings the truths of the human heart. My Country Is Literature brings together the best of his literary criticism: a long train of perceptive essays on writers as diverse as VS Naipaul and Orhan Pamuk, Gandhi and Nehru, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and Jhumpa Lahiri. The book also contains an introductory essay describing Choudhury's book-saturated years as a young writer in Mumbai, the joys and sorrows and stratagems of the book reviewer's trade, and the ways in which literature is made as much by readers as by writers. Delightfully punctuated with 15 portraits of writers by the artist Golak Khandual, My Country Is Literature is essential reading for everyone who believes that books are the most beautiful things in life.

Genres: Nonfiction, India

288 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[Pretty Little Bibliophile · Rating 5 out of 5]

(An excerpt)

Can I become a cliche and write about the choice of books that Choudhury chose? Since it is my essay, I think I can and I will.

Because this a collection, there lies on the writer (or editor, as is the case in most compilations) immense importance including the very best. What this means is that this is a collection of book reviews on books that Choudhury does place a lot of importance on and that it is also a collective list of books, for which Chouchury believes he wrote his best reviews.

First, let me address the books. The 62 reviews in this collection are on works by popular authors such as Perumal Murugan, Anjum Hasan, Anuradha Roy, Manto, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Romila Thapar, Shashi Tharoor, Kafka, Cummings, Kazuo Ishiguro, Irene Nemirovsky, Willa Cather, Malcolm Gladwell, and many many others. There is a huge variety of all kinds — geography, temporal, fiction versus non-fiction, etc.

Did I enjoy all of them? Because of the differences in things I like versus Choudhury likes, no.
But did I benefit from them? Yes.

And therefore, did I get to know of books/authors I would love to explore in my future? YES.
Therein lies the most important importance of this compendium — exposing the reader to a multitude of writers and their works; to different time periods, different socio-political events, the changing perceptions of time and so on.

And this is therefore the reason I shall implore you to give a chance to this collection of book reviews.

In simple words, this collection by Choudhury is a launchpad. If you see the Contents page and balk because you haven’t read any, don’t hesitate to then put down the book, but only to grab a pen and a piece of paper (or your reading journal, or even your phone), and then jot down the books to be added to your TBR list.

I assure you, you will not be disappointed.

Read my full review here: https://medium.com/coffee-time-review...

[Kaviiiii Krish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the book for its vivid truth. The journey of the author was well portrayed and can never be livelier. His life experiences are worth reading especially for someone like me, who loves to read books from a critical point of view.

[Subhadrika Sen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Coming from a literature background, I couldn’t have been happier to introduce Chandrahas Choudhury’s latest – my country is literature. Do you remember the circumstances in which you bought the books on your bookshelf? Do you have memories attached to gifted books? When did you start reading a book – on a bright sunny day, gloomy rainy afternoon, soaking in the autumn sun, or on a train/ plane journey to your much-awaited holiday destination? Can you recall your mind and emotion while you read your books for the first time?

my country is literature is not a book of essays, but an assembly of books – Indian and international- critically decoded by Choudhury. From Perumal Murugan’s social dramas – One Part Woman and Trial by Silence / A Lonely Harvest to Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness in my Mind; from A Writer’s People by V.S Naipaul to A Strange Attachment and other stories by Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay – all find a place in the book.

This serves as a collector’s edition for those trying to make a mark in the field of critical appreciation. The small nuances picked up and explained by Choudhury may have been easily missed parts of the stories, unless carefully read. But they hold strong anecdotes to the storyline itself. These 62 carefully curated and well-researched essays explore Indian and global society, its norms, values, morals, understandings, and judgment; but above all, their effect on the writer and through them on the characters in the novels. It carefully shows how any work (non-fiction of course but more so) of fiction is influenced by one’s surroundings, and it cannot be truly secluded from the environment and societal boundaries one lives in. In doing so, Choudhury rightly points out, that a novel is best described as ‘to each his (her/ their) own’.

Rating: 4/5