AN ATTEMPT TO PERSONALISE THE LIST -Kiran Singh
Quintessence Editions Ltd, a publishing company based in London started the 1001 Before You Die series. In this series, there are books such as 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, 1001 Golf Holes You Must Play Before You Die and 1001 Beers You Must Try Before You Die, to mention just a few.

I remember a close friend of mine emailing me the list of books mentioned in the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die somewhere around 2008 or 2009. Going through it, I found that I had already read some; especially the classics. I decided to include as much books as possible from this list in my daily reading. Needless to say, I am one of those bookworms, who spoil parties with my bookish babbling on slightest opportunity.

Good thing that the ‘list’ did for me was, I started including more recent works rather than clinging on to the good old classics. I came across Murakami and Coetzee even if I had to keep Kipling and Woolf on hold.
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is compiled by over one hundred literary critics from around the world and edited by Peter Boxall who is a Professor of English at Sussex University, England. It contains literary genre such as novels, short stories, and short story collections, pamphlet (A Modest Proposal), a book of collected text (Adjunct: An Undigest), and even one graphic novel (Watchmen).

Charles Dickens as a classic writer and J. M. Coetzee as modern day writer have been featured the most with ten titles each.

The reason why a particular book is chosen is briefly explained and each book is accompanied by a brief synopsis. This is very helpful to people like me who are trying to expand his area of reading.
The book has been revised and updated in March 2010.

I am trying to go by the list as much as possible and so far I have been more or less successful but it is difficult. For example, I wanted to go back to classics, veering from the list, and started reading Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, which I have in my collection, after completing Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami but I got struck after couple of pages.

The list I have consists of the following titles at the beginning of the 2000s:
1. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
2. Saturday – Ian McEwan
3. On Beauty – Zadie Smith
4. Slow Man – J.M. Coetzee
5. Adjunct: An Undigest – Peter Manson

And it goes on to 1900s to include titles such as

70. Timbuktu – Paul Auster
71. The Romantics – Pankaj Mishra
72. Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
74. As If I Am Not There – Slavenka Drakuli
75. Everything You Need – A.L. Kennedy
And so on and on until the Pre-1700s which includes books like

991. The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
992. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
and
1000. Metamorphoses – Ovid
1001. Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

Not because J M Coetzee is featured 10 times in the list but because his Slow Man was the only book I could get hold of in Queens Library, New York, while I was still living there, I borrowed it even if it was on the fourth place in the list. The moment I started reading it I knew that I did the right thing.

J M Coetzee, or John Maxwell Coetzee, a South African/Australian writer, published Slow Man in 2005, which was his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.

The “slow man” in Slow Man is Paul Rayment, a man in his sixties, who is a retired photographer born in France and living in Adelaide in Australia. He is featured as “a cold, affectless, mean-spirited individual,” who is divorced and does not have any children, no living relaties, only frew friends and no acquaintances.

All in all, not a man of passion. He is not sure he has ever liked passion, or approved of it. Passion: foreign territory; a comical but unavoidable affliction like mumps, that one hopes to undergo while still young, in one of its milder, less ruinous varieties, so as not to catch it more seriously later on. Dogs in the grip of passion coupling, hapless grins on their faces, their tongues hanging out.

After losing part of his leg when a car driven by a reckless young man hits his bicycle, Paul Rayment, the main character of the novel becomes reclusive and retreats to his flat. He gets cared by different nurses but none of them get along with him. But when Marijana Jokic, comes along he stops complaining and give himself fully under her care. The reason for him liking Marijana is solely because they share a European childhood. She was born and raised in Croatia and him in France. Under the care of this ‘rounded’ Croatian lady, “with her shapely calves and furtive cigarettes and hilarious and wholly endearing English” Rayment falls in love with her. But the delimma is, Marijana is married and has a husband, Miroslav, a mechanic, and three children. Drago the son and Blanka the eldest daughter are giving her trouble becuase Blanka shoplifts and Drago drives his motorbike too fast.

Despite the fact that she is married Rayment tries to woo Marijana by getting himself involved in her family business. He offers to pay for Drago’s exclusive boarding school. He tries to buy off the manager of the shop where Blanka has been stealing. But when Rayment, finally, confesses his love to Marijana something unexpected happens. Elizabeth Costello steps in. Who is this Elizabeth Castello? Well, she is a caracter in one of Coetzee’s other books called Elizabeth Castello. Elizabeth Castello is a woman in her sixties, who is a writer, whom Rayment knows vaguely but she knows almost everything about Rayment. For example, she can recite the opening sentences of Slow Man, word for word. What’s going on here? The caracter in the novel reading the novel itself? This is the beauty of Slow Man. Coetzee has introduced himslef as a character in his own novel, but not as a man but as a tiresome old woman who is lecturing Rayment (or the Coetzee himself) all the time. But, if you look at it closely, she is trying to pass on to Rayment a very simple but profound message: “Live all you can; It’s a mistake not to.” In other words, even if Rayment is old, crippled and ugly he could strive for acceptance in love, no matter how bizarre it seems to other.

The book is more than simple romance; it is a bold experiment in which Coetzee introduces himself as a character presenting himself a dowdy, old Australian female who takes over and directs the plot. This novel can be read as metafictional discourse between the writer and his characters about their inter-relationships and the reality.

The Author can be reached at [email protected] Editor