April Authors

Yay! 'Tis the month of April, and April brings so much literary joy to me. The number of authors born this month is humongous. 

Let me start with Emile Zola. Born today in 1840, Zola was influenced by Balzac, Stendhal, Charles Darwin and Flaubert among many others. He wrote about the derelict society under the influence of alcohol and violence which became more prevalent during the second wave of industrial revolution in France. In one of his most famous works, The Masterpiece he wrote, From the moment I start a new novel, life’s just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there’s still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied. I begin to say the book’s no good, far inferior to my earlier ones, until I’ve wrung torture out of every page, every sentence, every word, and the very commas begin to look excruciatingly ugly. Then, when it’s finished, what a relief! Not the blissful delight of the gentleman who goes into ecstasies over his own production, but the resentful relief of a porter dropping a burden that’s nearly broken his back . . . Then it starts all over again, and it’ll go on starting all over again till it grinds the life out of me, and I shall end my days furious with myself for lacking talent, for not leaving behind a more finished work, a bigger pile of books, and lie on my death-bed filled with awful doubts about the task I’ve done, wondering whether it was as it ought to have been, whether I ought not to have done this or that, expressing my last dying breath the wish that I might do it all over again!”

Washington Irving, Jane Goodall, Maya Angelou, Booker T. Washington, William Wordsworth, Barbara Kingsolver, Paul Theroux, Tom Clancy, Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, Seamus Heaney who died in 2013 and whose books I've been trying to trace without any luck in Mumbai's Bookstores, Arnold Toynbee, the historian, Henry James whose The Portrait of a Lady I've reread and made my many friends read, My lady Charlotte Bronte, the Butterfly collector Vladimir Nabokov and the bard, Shakespeare on April 23rd also celebrated as World Book Day, Anthony Trollope, Daniel Defoe who died on April 24th, the great Edward Gibbon, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Harper Lee who passed away early this year and Sir Terry Pratchett who left us last year, and Annie Dillard who I love quoting celebrates her birthday on the last day of April. Isn't this quite a list? And I am fully aware of how much reading I am yet to catch up. 

Some writers light up a rare fire inside the readers. Theroux has kept me on my toes ever since I took his train journey and travelled across Great Britain to Japan in his The Great Railway Bazaar. Such a beautiful and exhaustive narrative on the many train journeys between two different continents and many diverse cities and countries. My very first travel literature began with Paul Theroux before I moved on to William Dalrymple. Charlotte Bronte absolutely enthrals me more with her poetry than her novels. My only dedicated tribute to the Bronte Sisters is my collection of each one of their famous works, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Agnes Grey by the lesser known youngest Bronte sisters, Anne. Maya Angelou inspires and fills me with a passion to conquer the world with her Phenomenal Woman. Wordsworth enchanted me right during the school years with his Daffodils, and I've read more of this Romantic poet who launched the Romantic Age in English Literature along with Samuel Coleridge. Don't even get me started with Coleridge because I am an absolute admirer of his Rime of the ancient mariner, which is one of his most widely read longest poems in English. I shivered and cried and winced in pain and fear as each wave shifted the ship in the storm. This is one sea voyage I distinctly remember as if I travelled in it apart from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Will I ever come out of this beautiful, haunting and inviting world of literature? I think not. Let me quote Zola again who wrote- 

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.”