A difficult one, because I live in the place I’ve called home since birth (well, one move, but all the stuff from the first house went into the second one). To work this one out, it’s time to go to University, and desperately try to remember what I was reading there, that made me think of home.
Not much, is the answer. The majority of books I read at University were, unsurprisingly, books from the library, or books bought there. The only book that I borrowed/pinched from home would have been my Mother’s copy of Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy”, the longest single volume novel in the English language, and a ridiculous epic sweep through roughly a year in the lives of four Indian families in the early 50s.
Mum read this once, as is her wont, and passed it to me. I have since read it every year – along with the Lord of the Rings (it’s so funny, unintentionally so, but still, utterly hilarious) and Middlesex – as part of my literary comfort blanket mind-bath. This is a book you really have to dedicate some time to, and it definitely reminded me, at University, of the people I’d left back in London. My parents, for either reading or not reading it, my sister (for the book is full of sisters) and my family, for there is nothing if not a focus here on family, close and very widely extended.
Apart from the people, the very act of having to dedicate time to reading it is something that I only do with this book (consider the sheer physical size of it – almost impossible to read at rush hour, and the only book, grudgingly, that makes the e-book reader concept look attractive to me). It’s an armchair, cup of tea, Sunday afternoon sort of book, one where you do get lost in Seth’s amazingly evocative world. Like a Victorian novel, the descriptions of place can be wildly overlong, but the modern cadence of his writing keeps me merrily floating along the Ganges with him.
Another reason this reminds me of home is that a large number of the novels in my parents’ house have some connection to India, either colonial or post-Independence – it’s a period my Mother is absolutely fascinated by, and the number of novels dotted around the place set in the sub-continent grows each year. This is possibly the best, and certainly the biggest – the only other contender for me is Forster’s “A Passage To India”, which I read idly one summer at school, along with “A Room With A View” (but more on my schooldays reading in various following posts). None of them, though,reminds me so forcibly of home as “A Suitable Boy”.
