A work of
fiction takes you on an imaginative ride as you read about the conflicts, the
happenings and the sufferings of the protagonist and the characters created by
the author of a novel. The
incidents and the cities where they take place may be fictitious or based on
some true events that have taken place in some places which actually exist on
the map of the world. Not everyone who reads read fictions . Some readers only
read non-fictions or materials that are related to their work and career advancement.
There are those who read fictions to kill time and those who find the time to
read fictions as they genuinely find pleasure and comfort in reading. I am
addicted to reading and simply cannot have enough of reading and more reading.
I enjoy good writings and I read both fictions and non-fictions. Reading can
improve one’s general knowledge and thinking skills and in turn sharpening
one’s mind.
Thinking is what
we internalize within ourselves and we have to get to know our minds before we mouth and say our
thoughts aloud. We are told to think before we speak. We cannot express
ourselves well if we cannot think clearly. Thoughts glide in and out of one’s
mind, we may not be fully aware of
our own thoughts and the more we read, the more lucid our thoughts can become .
While new encounters and changes can take you away from what you know about
yourself already, reading can definitely help you to think better and in turn
hopefully expand your perspectives and horizons.
According to Zoo Time a fiction
written by Howard Jacobson,
food and fashion have now left
fiction far behind and one has to
apologise for having read a book, let alone for having written one. Through his
narration, the protagonist, Guy
Ableman, a middle-aged Jewish novelist rants about the demise of literary
culture and serious readings.
Howard Jacobson had won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question in 2010
and I had enjoyed reading it. Perhaps I was very eager to get onto reading all
my other books, I could not wait to finish reading Zoo Time, another novel written by
Jacobson. Zoo Time
contains the continuous lament of Guy Ableman about how the literary world is
dying amidst all the tweeting, kindles and iPads. Guy is a novelist whose
family owns a fashion boutique in Wilmslow and his parents and younger brother
are not readers. It is a funny story about the changing publishing world and
how Guy is in thrall to his beautiful wife who is an aspiring writer and is
constantly distracted by the presence of
his alluring mother-in-law. At times, it feels like
reading a non-fiction that is sending out unequivocal message that says reading
is unfashionable in the face of the exciting developments in digital
technology.
“Reading no longer meant going to
bed with a book you were ashamed to admit you couldn’t finish. Reading was now
as little or as much, as frequent or as rare, wherever you did or didn’t want
it , at the desk or on the move. We had a historic opportunity to rescue
reading from the word. In a year he wanted to have a thousand story apps ready
to go for the mobile-phone market. Bus –stop reading, he called it. Unbooks
that could be started and finished while phone users were waiting for someone
to call them back, or for the traffic
lights to change, or for the waiter to arrive with the bill. In short, to plug
those small social hiatuses of life on the run.”
As Guy fears
that reading is finished, he sees Earnest Hemingway everywhere he goes.
‘More amazing to me was that
wherever I went, I saw Earnest
Hemingway, either sitting down outside a pub or café, or walking in the middle
of the busiest main roads, oblivious to the abuse, writing, writing, writing.
His shoes were down to nothing-mere cardboard pulp-and his buttocks were
completely out of his trousers. How long before I looked the same? But I
excited no companionable curiosity in him. Not once did he notice me. His eyes
never left his reporter’s pad and his hand was never still.
What was he writing? A journal
of the city? The story of the circumstances that had brought him to this ?
Behind the beard was a strong face, inside the filthy clothes was a powerful
frame ; he could have been anybody-an actor fallen from favour, a dramatist who
wrote plays too searching for these cardboard-pulpy times, a novelist who used
words of too many syllables for his readers. Or maybe he was just one of us, no
more tragic or unsuccessful, simply constipated and needing to walk his
constipation off.’
‘Was he invisible, I wondered,
to everybody but me? Was he the ghost of serious writing-all that now remained
of us? Was he Earnest Hemingway himself, come back from the dead, to stir the
conscience of a public that didn’t even notice he was there?’
Guy narrates, “ I sell suits by Marc Jacobs in
Wilmslow,’ I’d say today if I wanted to impress a woman,’and when I’m not doing
that I’m practicing to be a short-order chef at Baslow Hall. This fiction shit
is just a way of killing time.”
Zoo Time is a fiction that suggests that literary culture has become unpopular. I like to believe that with kindles and tablets, although the
literary world is changing its
landscape, all published writings
are definitely here to stay as they are part of our human legacy.
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