The Secret Life of the Reader
I recently came across a statement to the effect that people who read a lot of books don't do it because they “have no life”, but because they have several lives. Not only was I amused by this, I was struck by the truth underlying those words. Growing up as a voracious reader in Bangladesh, I experienced life vicariously by chasing smugglers with the Famous Five along the rainy English coast, hunting down clues with Nancy Drew and solving mysteries with Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators in sunny California, discovering demons and winged horses in the fairytales and myths of the Indian subcontinent, and wandering further afield to the snowy Finnish landscape of Moominland and the exotic adventures of Doctor Doolittle in Africa. Books brought the wider world to my fingertips, effortlessly.
Of course, actually getting hold of the aforementioned books involved rather more effort! In those days, bookstores in Bangladesh did not have access to many English storybooks, so I would wait impatiently for my parents to return from their travels - especially from their trips to India. They invariably came home bearing a precious cargo of fiction waiting to be deposited into my eager hands, which were itching to turn the pages and immerse myself in the adventures of others.
My commitment to feeding my reading habit was such that I even tolerated the daughter of my parents' friends (though our relationship was characterised by mutual loathing in childhood, subsequently followed by a close friendship as adults), because they had a wonderful collection of books, which I could dip into to my heart's content.The other little girl - being an equally avid reader - did exactly the same. As her mother once perceptively put it, “Those two only ever visit each other's houses in order to borrow each other's books!”
Indeed, so constant was my anxiety regarding the insufficiency of reading material that I could truthfully have claimed to be suffering from “abibliophobia”, defined by wiktionary as the “fear of running out of things to read”. Hence, it was one of the best days of my young life when the British Council library, the only lending library in town, allowed me to “graduate” from being a junior member entitled to borrow four books at a time, to being a young adult member who could borrow a glorious eight books every week.
It was through my explorations in the British Council library that I was first able toappreciate just how many lives books would allow me to experience, as I journeyed through their pages. And I was recently reminded, once again, of this secret life that all readers have, as a result of one of my most recent reads: a novel by Sarah McCoy titled “The Baker's Daughter”.
The story initially follows Reba, a somewhat troubled young American woman, who is assigned the tiresome duty of coming up with a suitable “Christmas story” by her newspaper editor. But what Reba finds, when she visits a German bakery run by an elderly immigrant woman named Elsie in the hope of writing a fluff piece on a typical German Christmas celebration, is very far from what she expected. The story moves back and forth in time between Elsie's life as a young woman in Hitler's Germany, and Reba's own journey, in contemporary America, in coming to terms with the demons from her past.
For me, the most interesting part of the story was reading about the young Elsie, helping out at her father's bakery, living her everyday life in Nazi Germany and being courted by an SS officer who she didn't love, but whose protection was vital for the survival of her lower-middle-class family. The novel provides some interesting insights into what it was like to be an ordinary German family in the last years of the Second World War. It also incorporates some fascinating historical details - for example, using the exchange of letters between Elsie and Hazel, her older sister, who participates in the “Lebensborn” programme as a volunteer, providing sexual services to senior Nazis in order to produce perfect Aryan children for the Third Reich. Though Elsie (in contrast to Hazel) is already something of an independent thinker, Hazel's experiences contribute further to Elsie's growing understanding of the nature of the regime in power.
In the course of the novel, Elsie finds herself faced with a very difficult choice: to follow her conscience and risk putting her family in jeopardy, or to look away from the ugliness taking place and live with the consequences that it will have for her soul. Elsie's decision also brings up a question that has always intrigued me: what is it that gives ordinary people the courage and conviction to do the right thing in dire circumstances, even when they risk paying a high price for such a decision? We see examples of this throughout history, and they exemplify the contradictions between the cruelty and destructiveness that the human race has so often proved itself capable of, and its capacity for beauty and love.
While Reba's story was not quite as compelling in my opinion, it was sufficiently engaging to keep me interested. Reba's relationship with the elderly Elsie and Elsie's adult daughter helps her, quite unexpectedly, to make sense of her own life. The supporting characters in the novel are fleshed out beautifully: Reba's sister, who has dealt with their shared experience of a troubled childhood very differently, is one example. Her boyfriend Riki, born legally in the US of immigrant Mexican parents, is another. As a border patrol officer,Riki finds himself in the ironic position of deporting illegal Mexican migrants, and he struggles to reconcile the ethical conundrums involved with what he knows to be the letter of the law.
As the reader travels through time between Elsie's story and Reba's journey, she also finds herself travelling through the intimate lives of this diverse and very human cast of characters - Elsie, Hazel, their parents, the Nazi officer Josef, Reba and Riki - and becoming increasingly invested in each of them. As a result, by the time the last page is turned, the reader will feel richly compensated forthe hours that she has invested in this novel. And if she is a writer herself, she will find herself sincerely wishing that she had written it!
This piece previously appeared in READ Magazine, published at the NCell Nepal Literature Festival 2014, and is re-printed with permission.
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