Book Review - That Summer In Paris

That Summer in Paris, by Abha Dawesar

Prem was afraid he would manipulate his sentiment for Maya or hers for him. He did not want to love her as though she were a character in his book. After he had finished Meher, every affair of his life had been intricately connected with books he had been writing. Sometimes he took the initial sense he had of a woman and found himself investing similar or related characteristics to a woman in his fiction. Then he would fall in love with the woman in his fiction and transfer back some of his sentiments for the fictional character to the one in real life. What had happened innocently and accidentally with Vedika he had turned subsequently into a sort of formula. A formula different from Pascal’s, better from the viewpoint of literature, but much worse from the point of view of personal life.

At one of their first meetings, Pascal had discussed this with him. You are not manipulating la femme in these cases, mon vieux, you are manipulating yourself.

But I am aware of the manipulation, and I don’t want it.

You are still a victim of your imagination. And as long as you work in it, it will capture you. Our work as writers is always bigger than we are. It’s a huge hole into which we think we fit, but find that we lose ourselves. C’est comme comme ca!

How can you stand it?

There is nothing to do but embrace it. This is the nature of the ecrivain. The essence of writerhood.

Ten years younger than Prem, Pascal seemed to have better self-knowledge. He instinctively understood what it meant to be a writer, the folly, la souffrance, the unbridled freedom contained in the pages of one’s own work, and the war one had to constantly wage against oneself.

Prem had waged that war for the better part of his seventy-five years and produced work that redeemed his suffering in many ways. He had used the prism of his fiction to negotiate his deepest spaces, exposing his fears to the constant scrutiny of anonymous readers all over the world and to his own scrutiny. It was not as if Prem had been writing thinly veiled memoirs or telling stories that resembled his private life; on the contrary, he had never let even the most painful emotional crises of his existence escape the net of his fiction. And in transforming them, he had to risk each time letting go of that thin cord of sanity that kept him from tumbling into the abyss. His fiction had threatened to balloon and swallow him whole. Writing was not just therapy, self-expression, creation for the heck of it, compulsion, intuition, the twisting of reality, the perversion of facts, the mere recording or reality, and even at times the anticipation of real life; it was a perpetual trap set up by Prem, the writer, to trap himself. Each book held a little piece of him that he had had to cut off and preserve in the work of art. And while Prem hoped fervently that the pieces of his soul were regenerative, there was no proof yet of their having grown back.

As a writer he did not know how to keep a distance from his writing without allowing the writing to keep a distance from himself. And he knew, as all real writers know instinctively, that the writing had to be close to the bone. Creating every day with the dark stuff of the soul, Prem risked each day never having a private life to return to at the end of the day’s work. Each word tampered with his soul. For Pascal it seemed easy to play games with his writing and turn it into an instrument of seduction to get the better of it. Prem had envied him for that.

Pascal wrote about the raw and crude human stuff, his own, fearlessly. Prem took his raw and crude human stuff till he had absorbed it all and then wrote about other things using the poison in his body as the ink. Pascal didn’t stake everything within. He didn’t write dangerously or love dangerously. He merely exposed his demons, whereas Prem fed his demons with his own soul.

Presenting Prem Rustom, Nobel laureate and author extraordinaire, one of the three P’s of literature, and most importantly, 75-years young. At the urging of his French friend and fellow writer Pascal (one of the other P’s of Dawesar’s imagination) Prem ventures online to look for. What? Excitement? the chance of finding a woman for a brief relationship? Physical and mental rejuvenation? Something else? All of these and then some more? And so he stumbles on to Maya, whose online dating profile says:

Spiritual twenty-something aspiring novelist with hot buns and yoga body seeks another. Write like Prem Rustum, think like Prem Rustum, speak like Prem Rustum, be Prem Rustum. Worship at his altar like I do. Rank Grinding India, Kerala, and Dharma. Tell me what you would ask him if you met him. I’m reading Meher, don’t tell me if he does it with her.

–Excerpted from the book

So the seventy-five year old Prem who has been through Meher, Vedika, Julie, Valerie and the many unnamed femmes who have populated Prem’s beds and books, encounters Maya of the hot buns online, then in the flesh in NY city. Maya has a scholarship to spend three months in Paris, and Prem immediately choses to follow her. Dawesar brings her two characters together in Paris, where they talk a lot of French, see a lot of galleries, take in art, sculpture, Indian music, food and have almost everything but sex. Oh well, they do get to that, eventually. And its not that Prem doesn’t have phallus-like-iron situations liberally during all this.

This is a clever book, the characters are well fleshed out, though the author is as obsessed with the principal three as they are with themselves. I wish so much of their character didn’t require me to know conversational French - its tiresome how much French there is in the book, they seem to speak it even when making love! A completely unmemorable book though, and not one that I’d wind up recommending to anyone. Its not light reading, its not heavy reading, its clever reading of the type that I excerpted from the book. Still, its not a strain to read, its not trash chick-lit like Lavanya Sankaran, whose blurb on the cover page says ‘A pungent meditation on the innate sexuality of art and literature. Honest, bold, and absorbing’. What does pungent mean, I wonder!

Its bold, yes, after a fashion, but at times becoming a look-at-me-I’m so-clever-and-profound kind of thing. Perhaps I recognize this (or imagine I do) because I’ve used this myself, taken something that could have been sensuous in its simplicity and made it gracious with finesse and sophistication. And large portions seem to be written to show Dawesar’s familiarity with Paris and art.

But then, it take all kinds to make the world, hey? So perhaps we need Dawesar as we need Shashi Deshpande. Though perhaps Dawesar could learn something about bold, honest and the sensuality of forthrightness from Deshpande.

Well, 3-stars for a stylish and clever book, and looking forward to better work from a writer who definitely does have the talent to do more.