Now that Marie Kondo’s strange ways of organising our possessions have caught the public imagination again, thanks to the Netflix series, it’s heartening that there is finally outrage over her book-selection techniques. In her terrifyingly popular book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up , some years ago, she had sought to solve every book hoarder’s dilemma on what to keep and what to discard: dump all your books on the floor, consider each book, sense “whether or not it gives you a thrill of pleasure when you touch it”. If it does, keep it. If not, get rid of it.
Looking at our shelves
Some, like novelist Deborah Levy, see the bemused reaction to Kondo’s decluttering mantra as a validation of the powerful hold of the physical book in the digital age. And this reaction does not come from a feeling of possessiveness or acquisitiveness, of not wanting to lighten one’s bookshelves. In an article in The Guardian , Levy writes about how she has “emptied my shelves of many books I have carried around with me for decades”, but it is a deeper engagement with the books that has determined what she has owned and what she now does not.
But I wonder if our instinct to recoil from such decluttering recommendations is, in fact, not just about the books in our possession, and how we arrange them on shelves and stack them up on the floor. Has Kondo hit a deeper anxiety about holding on to the books we have read, and not necessarily possessed? And in doing so, has she actually done a favour by nudging us to think deeper about how to inquire into our reading selves and figure out how much of what we have read informs who we are? It is impossible to hold a book in my hand, determine whether it gives me “a thrill of pleasure”, and then decide whether to keep it or not. It is easier to know when a book does spark this “thrill of pleasure”, but in that case do we keep or give? I am, for instance, forever looking for copies of Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen. It’s a novel that possessed me when I read it, and it still does in multiple joyful ways, but it is not one that I would necessarily list in my all-time favourites or influences. But each time I do find a copy, I give it away to bring another reader to the book, only to again hunt for another copy to keep, ever so fleetingly, on the shelf.
However, what about the books that we read or possess that alter our internal selves so much that we sometimes wish they had not, but know it is important to have been unsettled? Levy writes about Italian chemist Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man , his memoir of being transported and living in a Nazi concentration camp, on her bookshelf. It does not make her “happy”, but: “When I think about what it must have taken for Levi to relive his time in Auschwitz, to go back there every day as he revised and edited If This Is a Man , I understand that it was a great sacrifice, as well as a historical necessity.” I don’t have Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved on my bookshelf — I don’t even recall where my copy of the book, bought second hand from the pavement bookshops at Delhi’s Connaught Place, went. But I remember the monsoon rain outside my office when I read it, the hush inside as our fortnightly magazine had just gone to press, how my colleague was re-reading Jack London’s The Call of the Wild at the other end of the copydesk, and how I had been forced to ask difficult questions about the human capacity for evil as well as goodness. I do have If This Is a Man in my possession — I haven’t read it yet, but to see it sitting there is to be reminded of The Drowned and the Saved . Should I actually hold it in my hand, as the feelings of joy or its absence, whatever they may entail, are about another book? Should I keep it or not?
The art of giving
In any case, if folks gave away books that brought them no “thrill of pleasure” — and let’s assume Kondo means that feeling to be more capacious to include not just shallow joy, but also various appraisals of being constructively reshaped or informed — how is it that we find such treasures in second-hand stalls? There is the filter of selection by the retailer, and possible compulsion of the seller on account of financial need, lack of storage space, etc. But surely there’s more to it than that. Hope resides between the pages that a second-hand book, a physical copy that benefited its previous owner, will always find yet more readers.
Mini Kapoor is Ideas Editor, The Hindu
