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| Part of my personal library |
Books sustain me the most. How do I choose my books?
Characters? Themes? Plot?
I love serious literature. When I say
my beloved writers are Dostoevsky, Kazantzakis, Kafka, and Camus, you will
understand what I mean by ‘serious’ literature. These writers have everything:
complex characters, philosophical themes, and gripping plots – things I look
for in fiction.
Take Dostoevsky, for example.
His novels probe the deepest recesses of the human soul, expressing the
tensions between faith and doubt, freedom and responsibility, sin and
redemption. His characters wrestle with conscience, guilt, and the search for
meaning. Life is at once tragic, fragile, and capable of transcendence in the novels
of this inimitable genius.
The Greek Nikos Kazantzakis
explores the human spirit caught between earthly passions and transcendent
longings, portraying life as a ceaseless struggle between flesh and spirit,
despair and hope. His works taught me that the meaning of life does not arise
from any certainty or soothing credos but from the courage to wrestle with
existence, to embrace struggle as a path to freedom and spiritual growth.
Franz Kafka belonged to another
domain altogether. While Dostoevsky and Kazantzakis can be called spiritual seekers
to a large extent, Kafka plumbed the absurdity of human existence. His protagonists
are trapped in labyrinths of bureaucracy, guilt, and incomprehensible
authority. In his works, we experience the terror of power from which we have
no escape though there seems to be no reason why we should subject ourselves to
that power. We are led on to confront the incomprehensible and we enjoy the
terror of that process.
Another French writer of equal
greatness is Albert Camus. He too confronts the absurd: the clash
between humanity’s longing for meaning and the universe’s callous silence.
Camus teaches us to accept the absurdity and then create meaning out of it. His
The Plague is the book that has remained close to my heart all these
years. I have written many posts on it.
Apart from these philosophical
writers is Umberto Eco whose only one novel made me fall in love with
him, The Name of the Rose. What keeps haunting me is the very
environment in that book. The environment is more than a backdrop; it is an
active force shaping the story’s meaning and mood. The medieval monastery,
isolated in the cold and misty mountains of northern Italy, creates an atmosphere
of mystery, austerity, and intellectual tension. Its labyrinthine library,
which is at once a physical as well as metaphorical maze, symbolises the
complexity of knowledge, its dangers, and its power to both enlighten and
deceive.
The harsh winter landscape, with its
snow, darkness, and silence, mirrors the chilling severity of the Inquisition
and the rigid control of religious authority. Mystery and horror merge into the
background of the plot. You’d think they don’t belong in a monastery. But the genius
of Eco keeps us on tenterhooks from page one to the last with this strange blend
of history, theology, philosophy, and mystery.
There are a lot of other works I
admire. But I focused on the best in my list.
PS.
This is written for Blogchatter Blog Hop.
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