Staying up days and nights with stories We dip into an assortment of books old and new, and discover there’s something for everyone.

This time, my online library delivered two vastly different books. The first, a surprise, was a potboiler by none other than Louisa May Alcott. Yes, you read that right. None other than the individual whose hugely popular titles, Little Women, Little Men and Jo’s Boys, enthralled readers for more than a hundred and odd years after the death of the author. (Are they still on the TBR list of young people? Not sure.) The book in question is A Long Fatal Love Chase. What could be more risqué than a title like that! However, coming from the pen of Louisa May Alcott?

It appears she regularly wrote potboilers that were serialised in magazines in order to keep the home fires burning. This book was published only in 1995, long after Louisa’s death, when the manuscript was unearthed by editor Kent Bicknell who then smoothed it out and had it published. Why was it not published when it was written, in 1866, upon the specific request of a Bostonian pulp fiction publisher named James R Elliot? After all he had published her ‘dynamic thrillers’ in the past. Louisa has recorded in her journal that it was too long and too sensational even for Elliot! Bicknell writes in a note at the end of the novel that readers of that time may have been ‘startled by the contemporary issues with which the novel grapples: a woman’s right to be independent and free, the healing power of intimate female-female as well as female-male friendships, the psychological dynamics of abusive relationships, priestly celibacy, divorce, bigamy, suicide and murder…’ A Long Fatal Love Chase has all this and more presented in a breathless fashion but reflecting the sure, sophisticated hand of the accomplished writer Louisa was. Stephen King, writing in the NYT, says of the novel that it is ‘a suspenseful and thoroughly charming story … and it tends to confirm Alcott’s position as the country’s most articulate 19th-century feminist.’ A review in Publishers Weekly says, ‘This romantic cliffhanger about a woman pursued by her ex-lover, a relentless stalker, seems sprung from today’s headlines. This absorbing novel revises our image of a complex, prescient writer.’

Bookless in Baghdad is a collection of essays on books, writers, reviews, reviewers, literary festivals and much more by Shashi Tharoor whom we all know as reader, writer, former diplomat and politician who loves to engage in word pyrotechnics. Among other topics, he bemoans the fact that a genius such as the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin is so little known outside his own country, and is bemused by the fact that R K Narayan is made so much of. Clearly, he is not afraid of ruffling feathers considering Narayan is a national treasure. He reminds us why we love and enjoy P G Wodehouse so much in India, colonial hangover be damned!

Of personal interest is a short piece on reviewing, in the course of which he brings up the controversial matter of culture appropriation: that is, who may or may not represent or speak about a culture that s/he does not belong to. There’s much to-ing and fro-ing on this in literary circles. I will quote a small passage in this context, with a request to readers to reflect upon it: ‘The entire point about literature is that, while it may emerge from a specific culture, it must speak to readers of other linguistic and cultural traditions, for what endures in good writing is not culture specific. We read literature from other cultures all the time, and we do so because literature, whether or not from a society we know, serves to illuminate and deepen our appreciation of the human condition.’

While literature may emerge from a specific culture, it must speak to readers of other linguistic and cultural traditions, for what endures in good writing is not culture specific.

This takes us directly to Nadia Wassef’s Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller which resonated loudly and uniquely because of my own association with a bookstore in Chennai. Goodbooks, exclusively for children, was established in 2000 and so many of the things Nadia talks about bring back memories of the highs and lows of Goodbooks. When she mentions the fact that ever so often people would walk in to borrow books, not buy them, I am reminded of similar experiences. In fact, we even had a room dedicated to books from all our homes; it was a space for those who wanted to sit quietly and read. There are reports from all over the country of groups of young people getting together in parks and other public spaces to sit together and read silently. Goodbooks was fun while it lasted, but it ran out of viable economic steam. However, it nurtured an entire generation of young people who literally grew up at Goodbooks, participating in various workshops and activities and reading away to glory. Although Nadia has since moved on, Diwan Bookstore, co-founded by her, survives and has gradually expanded to include several branches in Cairo.

Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller will also resonate at another level for many, particularly for those with colonial connections. When Nadia says, ‘Like many Egyptians who went to foreign-language schools, Hind (the author’s sister) and I learned and read in a language other than Arabic. Complicated and inaccessible, classical Arabic left us linguistically orphaned; English adopted us, and we accepted all too gladly’, many of us are likely to nod our heads in agreement. Then again, she writes, ‘I grew up with the promise of solidarity and unity. My mother was Coptic and my father was Muslim. They narrated history as a long arc, teaching Arabic, French and English not as inherently dominant languages but as recent manifestations of a long series of conquests of Egypt spanning millennia. It wasn’t personal, just colonial. But in recent decades, acceptance of otherness and tolerance of religious differences seem to have faded.’ (This book was published in 2021.) Sounds familiar?

And who is not familiar with Arabian Nights? It’s a staple in many libraries, the stories in them watered down for the consumption of children. Known as Alf Layla wa Layla in Arabic, the stories were sourced from Persian, Indian, Arabic and Greek folklore. It is well-known that a certain Scheherazade told these stories to a king to escape death. Nadia provides the back story that there were two kings, Shahrayar and Shahzaman, who discovered they were being cuckolded by their queens. Shahrayar got so furious, he decided to marry and deflower a virgin every night and then behead her to extract revenge. This went on until Scheherazade appeared and told the king a story every night, leaving it on a cliffhanger so that he was forced to keep her alive to hear the rest of it. This went on for 1001 nights, at the end of which the king forgave her and they lived happily after.

Nadia does her own version of Scheherazade to negotiate the challenges of being a woman of power in a male-dominated society: ‘I had learned a Machiavellian lesson about managing men in this society: inspiring fear was more important than inspiring admiration. With time, I learned to deploy this power strategically, in doses. Curse words were like an arsenal of nuclear weapons: when everyone knows you have them, you don’t need to use them.’ As a scholar and regular client pointed out: ‘Your shelves have power. Use it wisely.’

Our shelves have power. Books have power. We must use them, wisely.

The columnist is a children’s writer and senior journalist