Books, Like People, Enter Your Life at the Right Time
When I was a child, I was introduced to books that my mother deemed appropriate for my upbringing. Enter Enid Blyton books, fairytales, old issues of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic magazines my mother used to collect, and of course, stories about the Prophets in Islam.
Later on, books came to me through recommendations, complaints, observations, and casual curiosity. One such book that was recommended by a friend to me was Hons & Rebels, a memoir by Jessica Mitford back in 2013. I ordered it, read it, and a lot of it went through my head. It is very much a British book and one needed to be familiar with the politics in the UK to fully grasp it. Words like Labour and Conservative, fascism, peer, Communist, Spanish Civil War went over my head. As a fresh graduate who was very much involved in her new working life, I couldn’t relate much to the book at all, though I admired the guts Jessica Mitford had to run away for a cause she believed in, and thought how dramatic it was that she did this recklessly with the man she loved at such a young age. I understood that she had disputes with her siblings, but it was something I understood on a surface level. Despite my limited understanding, for years after reading the memoir and looking back at my undergraduate days, I was plagued by how much I did not know.
Back then, work meant that there wasn’t much time to fill in the gaps of my knowledge. It meant that I had to focus on meeting goals set by my managers and think about ways to de-stress from work when I get my paycheck. So I passed by these words and stories without giving them further attention.
Fast forward 3 years later, and I was in London studying for my MA in Creative Writing. I got to know friends who were invested in the UK politics, and with the free time I had, I was able to make sense of the words that I had not known earlier. It helped that Brexit was still a hot topic and that year Theresa May held a snap election. My experience as a minority in the UK also encouraged me to figure out the blindspots I had with politics and my own writing; there had always been something missing, even when I had started the MA programme.
I completed my MA programme within a year, came home to my old room, feeling like I had outgrown everything (I still do). While unpacking and cleaning my room, I picked up Hons and Rebels again. New knowledge filled in the gaps I had before. I understood Mitford’s political awakening, and the rifts between her, her parents, and her sisters Unity and and Diana, who were involved with fascists. I understood her motives better when she decided to join the Spanish Civil War with her to-be-husband Esmond Romilly. The book felt new to me.
“I am not an enemy of the working class! I think some of them are perfectly sweet!” she [Jessica’s mother]retorted angrily. I could almost see the visions of perfectly sweet nannies, grooms, gamekeepers, that the phrase must have conjured up in her mind. I decided to keep my new ideas to myself for a while; there was little hope they would take root in this distinctly unfertile soil. Nevertheless, a new dimension was added to my Running Away plans. I knew now what I was running away from, and what I should be running to. — Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels
As a child, the books you read tend to tell you the difference between right and wrong, to teach you what is moral and not. At primary school, I entered storytelling competitions where you had to tell a story that taught everyone a moral lesson. Parents wish for their children to continue reading things that I would bring them up to be upstanding people who contributed to the community. This is normal.
But there are books that should challenge you, turn your life upside down, and help you understand — and acknowledge the world for all the complexities it holds.
I had always meant to read Elena Ferrante after one of my best friends raved about the books. I trust her opinion and literary tastes, so I decided to buy the first book of the Neapolitan quartet, My Brilliant Friend. The first book, which set up the two female protagonists and the neighbourhood they lived in, was dense, a slow burn and even now I think I may re-read it. I was not prepared for what the second book, The Story of a New Name and third, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay had in store for me.
Ferrante, whose identity we still don’t know (and honestly, as a reader I don’t want to know as she still chooses to be anonymous) has a way of writing that is so raw, frank, and her unreliable narrator, Lenu, is so realistic that you cannot help but be sucked into her life, and into that neighbourhood.
What stands out to me from the books is how she organically weaves in the setting into the characters’ lives in a systemic way. Her characters develop an awareness towards everything around them — politically as well — and this parallels with the neighbourhood they grew up in, a place that later on is tumultuous with violence and class struggle, befitting the Italy set at the time.
“And this is how I see it today: it’s not the neighborhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth, it’s the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things.” — From Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
The complicated friendship between the two female protagonists, is the most profound thing about the novels. You can feel the competitiveness and insecurities emitting from reading them, and yet they hold such high expectations on one another that you want the men who keep barging into their lives to go away and let them grow.
But the men continue do so. The women in her Neapolitan books seek validation from the men in their lives, even the educated women. The books do not shy away from presenting the various flawed nature of men, even those who who are educated. Occasionally I’d get this feeling that Ferrante was sending a warning for women to be careful of academics who are misogynists in disguise (the second book should be a pre-requisite reading for women entering universities, really).
At the same time, Ferrante also doesn’t shy away from exploring female narratives that we may find it difficult to find elsewhere because they could be deemed too ‘controversial’. Too often we are exposed to stories in which women characters are put on a pedestal when it comes to family matters — Ferrante subverts all of this by giving us the point of view of a woman who abandons her family — without romanticising or adding too much sentimentality in that particular scene.
Every time I finish a Ferrante book I would end up sleeping late thinking about it. I would think about the female characters and how they continued to be stuck in a cycle of patriarchal influence. I would think about how this very much reflects in real life and the society we live in, where women are silenced and held back by moral gatekeepers — standards usually set by men and women who are complicit with them.
Ferrante’s books are visceral and searing; they are not guides for what a woman should or should not do. But it is a relevant book to read as an adult, with the accumulation of knowledge I’ve made — I can’t imagine reading these when I was younger and fully grasping them like I do now.
Books come to us at the right time in our lives. I don’t mean to romanticise this and say that all books are meant to be profound and leave such an impact. There are books I couldn’t finish and books I read before that I am more critical of now. But just like we let the people in our lives in so that we may see a different side of the world, we should also let stories in, so that we can push open the window and let more light into our lives, instead of shadowy gaps of knowledge waiting to be filled.
