The shelf / 7 Asian healing fiction recommendations for rainy days

I can’t sleep anymore Piano. Storms. White noise Nothing works.

It’s already been several months since we’ve been hurled into the vortex of the coronavirus. The virus lives among us, silent and invisible.

On the first day of this month, 76 years ago, Anne Frank wrote her last diary entry. Three days later, on August 4, the building she was hiding in with her family and four family friends was raided by the Gestapos.

Shirley (2020), directed by Josephine Decker and adapted by Sarah Gubbins from the 2014 eponymous novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, interweaves fact and fiction into an imagined narrative about the time when author Shirley Jackson was writing her second novel Hangsaman (1951).

“A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.”

“Happily, the Web is so huge that there’s no way any one company can dominate it,” wrote Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1999.

On the Daily Star Book Club last week, we asked members how they organise and look after their book collections at home. Here is what we learned:

Diversity can seem jaded when it is employed for the sake of appearing “woke”.

Humans are a storytelling species. Yet history, which is but the stories of yesteryears, is taught like a chain of facts and dates.

The Routledge Diaspora Studies Reader (2017) co-edited by Klaus Stierstorfer and Janet Wilson made significant observations about the increase in global movement of people, capital, products, cultures and ideologies;

I hold stares - I sing to the moon Rigid, motionless - senseless woes

The human race is doing quite well. There was a possibility of a climate catastrophe in the early 21st century but they came to their senses soon enough and managed to deal with it by 2050.

For anyone sitting through heat-stricken afternoons on forever-long summer days, reprieve can come in the form of escape into a fictional world, and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay is a master at offering it.

Before my mother bought me a copy of Sarat Shahitya Samagra (2003) one fateful summer back in high school, my exposure to Bangla literature had been limited to Feluda and whatever my textbooks offered.

For me, Amar Chelebela (1991) by Humayun Ahmed would not only be a summer read but also a comfort read, a holiday retreat, a walking tour of a Bangladesh unheard of today, and also a sneak-peak into the daily bustle of a family who redefined literature, science fiction, caricatures, humour and so much more.

Come June, the season of light reading arrives with the promise of filling lazy afternoons freed from school work or, for adults who can’t manage a vacation, escape in the form of relaxing books.

For lovers of short story collections, Rizia Rahman’s Char Doshoker Golpo (2011) can be great company on lazy afternoons. Rahman is undoubtedly among the finest writers of literature in Bangladesh, yet her craft goes unnoticed by many from the younger generations today.

During my adolescent years, I devoted a significant portion of my time exploring the idea of ‘summer love’. The cinephile in me went from cheesy Disney Channel flicks like Lizzie McGuire: The Movie (2003) to masterpieces like Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012), while the bibliophile in me devoured Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name (2007) and John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines (2006). However, I had to acknowledge all the ways in which these stories didn’t feel relatable to me. Being a Bengali, I’ve grown up reading about the intense romance shared by Devbabu and Paro or watching the pangs of unrequited love in Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (1964). Should I then dismiss the ‘summer fling’ as an irrelevant Western trope? A thing of the sunny Florida beaches and umbrella topped cocktails?

Unshaven, skeletal men, with hollow, black-ringed eyes, sitting in silent solitude in inner city gutters. Youngsters turned ageless by addiction, their endless need for the next fix drowning out all other desires, commitments or relationships.

Readers over the last two centuries have generally liked the bright and sparkling world of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, whereas Persuasion has often been described as “a departure from the rest of the novels, a turning away from the brilliant and public play of the mind for the deep and private truths of the heart” (Morgan 168).