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A review by deepan2486
The Blue Book: A Writer's Journal by Amitava Kumar
Reading is almost always a predecessor of slow, brewing writing. The afternoons in which you write are strange ones, where even the most dingy patches tagging along start to seem evocatively humanised.
There were times while reading ‘The Blue Book’ that I wanted to keep it aside and fall asleep. Waking up, I would find myself swapping through the thick pages, gazing at the paintings more than reading the text, oddly transfixed and lost in thought, mostly of something else. Something else. I stopped keeping count of all the something else-s I thought about while reading and watching this book. I say watching because it’s just that, this book. Deeply comforting, with equal measurements of passages that tinted me with boredom. Yet, I came back. Soon enough. Mostly when I was alone. At around the fifty seventh page— the word ‘around’ doesn’t make sense as I’ve already gone back and checked that it is indeed page fifty seven—I rummaged through the drawer alongside my study table to retrieve a set of fluorescent, transparent set of sticky book-tabs that suddenly seemed attractive. I annotated. Stuck such a tab on the length of that page, and took a neon green colour-pencil from my pencil pouch and underlined the lines that struck me. Very momentary, almost impulsive. But so alive. So scintillating. In the next hour I went back from page fifty seven to page one, in reverse order reading the pages again and glueing more sticky pages of more colours into those abandoned but new-found pages, green pencil at hand and another purple one for better clarity. It felt so calming, like being able to read again.
The day that I finished the last chunk of the book, I left the sticky tabs aside—peeled some of them, felt the glue glistening on the sticky side, played with my fingers but then crumpled them and kept them aside. That day annotating felt alien. Marking seemed futile, but inaction seemed so versatile. Kumar’s book hit the crescendo at about three-fifth of the book where he delves into his writing process—‘process’ is a lazy word, it read more like an yearning. I loved it, read and re-read some of the passages, felt the need to again bring back the neon green pencil but I didn’t. I suddenly found three pages at stretch that were shockingly bland after the wordplay I had grown accustomed to. Drowsiness called again, did I sleep? Perhaps. This time too after some hours I was again in the book, flipping the coloured paintings of gouache on newspaper cuttings, the bright colours so exciting to see, thinking about all the things I could have drawn on my own journal—but didn’t. All the waves I would have stirred within my diary, but didn’t. But thankfully Amitava Kumar did, maybe more.
I do not know why this is called a ‘Blue Book’—although there’s a hint at one point in the book. There’s a lot of thought in this book, a lot of grassroot-level sharp intellect and also sweeping vastness. So much honesty, and so unusually effortless—that it glides above the want of the readers occasionally. Nevertheless you become a part of these journalistic entries—you become privy to so much beautiful weaving in this world, some pure satin, some fermented scrap. You want to hold this book close, and closer.
Thanks HarperCollins India for the copy.
There were times while reading ‘The Blue Book’ that I wanted to keep it aside and fall asleep. Waking up, I would find myself swapping through the thick pages, gazing at the paintings more than reading the text, oddly transfixed and lost in thought, mostly of something else. Something else. I stopped keeping count of all the something else-s I thought about while reading and watching this book. I say watching because it’s just that, this book. Deeply comforting, with equal measurements of passages that tinted me with boredom. Yet, I came back. Soon enough. Mostly when I was alone. At around the fifty seventh page— the word ‘around’ doesn’t make sense as I’ve already gone back and checked that it is indeed page fifty seven—I rummaged through the drawer alongside my study table to retrieve a set of fluorescent, transparent set of sticky book-tabs that suddenly seemed attractive. I annotated. Stuck such a tab on the length of that page, and took a neon green colour-pencil from my pencil pouch and underlined the lines that struck me. Very momentary, almost impulsive. But so alive. So scintillating. In the next hour I went back from page fifty seven to page one, in reverse order reading the pages again and glueing more sticky pages of more colours into those abandoned but new-found pages, green pencil at hand and another purple one for better clarity. It felt so calming, like being able to read again.
The day that I finished the last chunk of the book, I left the sticky tabs aside—peeled some of them, felt the glue glistening on the sticky side, played with my fingers but then crumpled them and kept them aside. That day annotating felt alien. Marking seemed futile, but inaction seemed so versatile. Kumar’s book hit the crescendo at about three-fifth of the book where he delves into his writing process—‘process’ is a lazy word, it read more like an yearning. I loved it, read and re-read some of the passages, felt the need to again bring back the neon green pencil but I didn’t. I suddenly found three pages at stretch that were shockingly bland after the wordplay I had grown accustomed to. Drowsiness called again, did I sleep? Perhaps. This time too after some hours I was again in the book, flipping the coloured paintings of gouache on newspaper cuttings, the bright colours so exciting to see, thinking about all the things I could have drawn on my own journal—but didn’t. All the waves I would have stirred within my diary, but didn’t. But thankfully Amitava Kumar did, maybe more.
I do not know why this is called a ‘Blue Book’—although there’s a hint at one point in the book. There’s a lot of thought in this book, a lot of grassroot-level sharp intellect and also sweeping vastness. So much honesty, and so unusually effortless—that it glides above the want of the readers occasionally. Nevertheless you become a part of these journalistic entries—you become privy to so much beautiful weaving in this world, some pure satin, some fermented scrap. You want to hold this book close, and closer.
Thanks HarperCollins India for the copy.