Tuesday, 5 June 2007

Lines that Linger...

I have been reading The Hindu Literary Review for the past two days and I chanced upon an article of Navtej Sarna..."past two days" and "chanced upon"...sounds contradictory???...yeah... such fleeting is my relationship of late with the stuff I read...
But that left aside... I am lucky to have encountered this particular article of Sarna.I knew Sarna only as the articulate foreign office spokesperson of Indian Government, but his article "Reluctant Writers" unveiled the avid and the exquisite reader in him. Probably I have been grossly disconnected from the Hindu to have this taken such a long time to dawn upon me. (I have earlier read a travelogue of his, which seemed quite natural of an official from the foreign office.)
The essence of all this is that I am in for some great read... from the "writer’s writers", Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene and “a writer’s writer’s writer", Henry Green.

Towards the close I quote Sarna's favorite lines of Henry Green...
"Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself at night, and it is not quick as poetry, but rather a gathering web of insinuation…Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers…It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of stone"

Another piece of news is Sarna's debut novel "We Weren't Lovers Like That" is just out...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Prose is the poetry of life, I proprose.