Are you partial to complicated love affairs (that is, at least in the books you read)?
Do you throw phrases like “anti-teleological”, “anti-feminist” and “late capitalistic” at hapless sods celebrating Valentine’s Day with champagne, heart-shaped chocolate boxes, and teddy bears stuffed with rainbows, etc. etc. until their joy evaporates?
(Are you later secretly annoyed that you find the last, though insufferably cheap, is also kind of cute?)
Are you single this Valentine’s Day, and happy?
Are you single this Valentine’s Day, and miserable – but only because your boss is such a psychopath?
Are you in a relationship this Valentine’s Day?
Did you just want to go out with your friends on Sunday, after a horrible week, and found every single place hijacked by stupid couples and blithering tea-lights – and ended up slapping someone you didn’t really want to slap?
Is your love interest actually into Valentine’s Day?
If any or all of the above have been sending irritation blips up and down your nerve-endings all week, then welcome to the club. We like to spend Valentine’s Day reading books about love that are decidedly not about happily ever afters. Join us!
Goodbye, Columbus, Philip Roth
“The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses.”
Beginning with this extraordinary first sentence, Goodbye, Columbus tells, in the memorable prose rich with detailing – what one would later call signature Philip Roth – the tempestuous story of one summer when Neil Klugman from working-class Newark, a lowly assistant employed in a library, meets the Mary McCarthy-reading Brenda Patimkin, of suburban Short Hills, back home from Radcliffe for three months of swimming and tennis and other activities proper to her class of well-heeled Jews with prosperous businesses. Written while Roth was still in his early twenties, Goodbye, Columbus, is raw and sharp and oddly tender enough to sit perfectly atop our anti-Valentine’s Day list.
Ashadha Ka Ek Din, Mohan Rakesh
Often dubbed – somewhat dramatically, experts would say – as the “first modern play” in Hindi, Ashadha Ka Ek Din (translated ably by Aparna and Vinay Dharwadekar as One Day in the Season of Rain), winner of the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, is a powerful text that certainly changed the landscape of Indian theatre.
Based on intimate – and free – readings of Kalidasa’s work, chiefly, Meghadutam and Abhigyana Shakuntalam, the play is based on a fictional account of childhood sweethearts Kalidasa and Mallika, who live in a Himalayan village. It recounts the vicissitudes of their love after Kalidasa leaves for Ujjayini in pursuit of success as the court poet there, and eventually marries a sophisticate. A powerful depiction of what the decision to cast the sorrows of love as the subject of great art, as opposed to addressing it in real life, does to the people caught in its cross hairs.
Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin
A Russian classic, this novel in verse has continued to capture the literary imagination of young writers in different parts of the world, and has occasioned a great deal of literary conversation through the ages.
Vladimir Nabokov became one its translators, since he thoroughly disapproved of other popular translations, particularly Walter W Arndt’s much lauded translation which had consistently maintained the Pushkin sonnet and won the Bollingen Prize – he complained they sacrificed exactness in pursuit of melody and his own translation was published in prose; Vikram Seth was inspired by this to write A Golden Gate after reading another famous – and poetic – rendition of Onegin by Charles Johnston.
At the centre of the narrative is the eponymous St Petersburg rake, Eugene – Yevgeny, really – Onegin, and the account of his unfortunate dalliances in the country after he inherits his uncle’s estate that throw into turmoil the lives of three other young people, Vladimir Lensky, a poet and Onegin’s friend, and two sisters, Tatyana and Olga Larina. A dark story of love, foolishness, death and youth – readings from this are perfect for an anti-Valentine’s Day party too.
An Equal Music, Vikram Seth
A powerful love story told to the background score of some of the greatest compositions in Western Classical music. Many years ago, Michael, a violinist, had known and loved Julia, a pianist, when they were both students in Vienna. A decade later, they meet again. Julia is now married, she is a mother – and she harbours a secret that changes both of them and their relation to music, as it were.
Seth’s exquisite prose might always be the reason to return to this book again and again, but there is also something to be said for its Dedication, an acrostic Onegin sonnet, to his longtime lover, the French violinist, Phillipe Honore. (Last year, Seth had confessed how the breakup of this long relationship affected his writing greatly and, in fact, delayed A Suitable Girl):
Perhaps this could have stayed unstated.
Had our words turned to other things
In the grey park, the rain abated,
Life would have quickened other strings.
I list your gifts in this creation:
Pen, paper, ink and inspiration,
Peace to the heart with touch or word,
Ease to the soul with note and chord.
How did that walk, those winter hours,
Occasion this? No lightning came;
Nor did I sense, when touched by flame,
Our story lit with borrowed powers –
Rather, by what our spirits burned,
Embered in words, to us returned.
Shesher Kobita, Rabindranath Tagore
This Bengali classic, set mostly in Shillong, is about Amit and Labannya, and their different philosophical positions on love and marriage – and literature too, for good measure – and has a very quirky ending. It is, in many ways, the anti-Jane Austen book; and then again, in many ways, it is a very Austenesque affair. It is the perfect note upon which to end your evening before you decide to get dressed for your anti-Valentine’s Day gala, with knives and girlfriends and desserts, of course.
Devapriya Roy is the author of The Vague Woman’s Handbook, The Weight Loss Club, and along with Saurav Jha, of The Heat and Dust Project: the Broke Couple’s Guide to Bharat.
