It may be that there are indeed ways sharing e-books, and I am simply too tech-challenged to figure them out. But as things stand, each time impulse or deadline forces me to buy a book on my Kindle, there is a sense of limitation, that this one will not be passed on to fellow readers. For all the giddy lightness of being able to carry our personal libraries on e-readers, with old purchases downloadable at the touch of a button, there is a need to crowdsource all the losses that have accrued from such convenience.
Or course, it’s not only the complete personalisation of our individual libraries that is at the heart of Ali Smith’s new collection of short stories, Public Library and Other Stories , but that lingering anxiety is framed more starkly after finishing her book. Smith’s concern is the shrinking space of public libraries, and she runs quotes from friends about what libraries mean to them alternately with her stories. While the focus is, predictably, on Britain, Kamila Shamsie’s Karachi recollection sums up the childhood experience of those of us across the subcontinent with “a reading rate of a book a day”. The big logistical question each vacation would be how to pack in the right number of trips to the library to keep to the flow of books going. Libraries are still “places to escape to”, as Shamsie points out, but the 21st century upgrade of the public library, where it survives, is a place slightly less dominated by books, and more geared to serving a community of readers and writers working on their laptops and tablets.
Fact and fiction
In fact, it’s a sign of the crisis that the most dystopian vision of the new reading world that Smith finds is the one based on fact, and she must start by saying, “Here is a true story.” Walking with her editor off London’s Covent Garden, she spies the sign “library”, and they enter to look around. It turns out the establishment is in fact a private members’ club, with a few “luxurious” hotel rooms. To her question asked against the sounds of people “drinking and talking” elsewhere in the club, “have you actually got actual books”, she is told, “We do do some books as a feature.”
Later, looking up the club’s website, Smith discovers that a line runs through the word “library”, almost as if the negation is worth celebrating — or, to take it further, an indulgence. It sparks memories of walking into a home or public space and warming to the sight of shelves heaving with leather-bound books, only to find that it’s just a facade, there are no real books.
In recoil perhaps, as I’d like to imagine, Smith writes fiction about the centrality of books, stories, poetry, writers in different lives. In a world where the discovery of books is becoming more driven by algorithms, and not through serendipitous finds in the intimacy of library aisles and bookshop selections, she seems to be saying that it needs the shock of recognising the role of books in shaping our interior selves for us to begin to start calculating the ways in which reading has become a less varied experience.
In my favourite story in the collection, ‘The Art of Elsewhere’, a schoolgirl reputed to have a troubled family life takes on a classmate’s assignment as gratitude for having her admiration of E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children validated.
Later, a teacher sets up for competition to see who could be the first to learn by heart Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’. The girl Debbie recites it instantly, and he turns mean-spiritedly on her, accusing her of having already known the poem.
The democracy of reading — of access to books and of opportunities to discover both the canon and the marginal text — must necessarily be up for appraisal, and it is only apt that storytelling like Smith’s could serve as a trigger for the task.
mini.kapoor@thehindu.co.in
