Books that keep haunting me

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.