In his famous book "The Name of The Rose", Mr Eco told us that the books talk to each other. Practically the whole novel was an celebration of this fact. The books, indeed talk to each other in a silent way, one book referring another, and that referring another ten on his turn, as if there exist a big white universe of them, you can start with any one and if you care to remember the references you will surely land on a bunch of them and then on a bigger bunch. Moreover the fun is that no two books will have the similar essence. I can start reading a rocking Sandipan Chatterjee story, where the hero quotes from "The Outsider", voila! I landed on an Algerian novel, and I really don't understand why the hero is so moody, so I look up the encyclopedia which says that this is a very "Existential" novel inspired by the philosophy popularized by Sartre. I can take up a book by Sartre and try to understand why there so much fuss about it. I am sure that will lead me to other philosophers, Aristottle, Plato, Socrates, Nietsze to name a few. In a different root it will also take me to early 19th century europe, to the politics, to the art revolutions, to the scientific expeditions, to you-never-know-where.
But really I do not look forward being such a learned man, so I will probably leave the trail and start reading the next story from my recently bought second-hand Sandipan Chatterjee collection, and again he picks up and throws a line from a Tagore song straight on my face. Next, as you rightly guessed, I am unloading the 16 volume Tagore Collection from my handsome book-case hitherto untouched by any living man. More I read Tagore, more I curse my luck, because there are again so many references of Old Sanskrit Literature, Kalidasa, Upanishad, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Baul songs, folk culture, Charyapaad, Baishnav Padabali, Shakespere, Keats and all the romantic english poets that it will probably take my whole life to go through them without considering the fact how many other books I have to read to resolve the references hidden in those.
Really Mr Eco was so correct, I can almost see his passionate ramblings on the labyrinths of his library, frantically jumping through the novels to plays, plays to newspaper articles, from articles to magazines, then to thrillers, then aircraft manuals, engineering science books, mathmatics books, Geometry, biography of Euclid, History of middle ages .... the list is never ending. This love and passion to read anything and everything, categorically, with utmost interest has made him such a unique writer. Most of the time he doesn't bother to build up a realistic plot, neither does he care to reach a "proper" climax. He happily hops around the immense printed media around him and that produces a 400 page book quite easily. For the reader, well, if he loves the circle of knowledge, it's a paradise for him.
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