Boast of quietness

Since I have so much free time on my hands these days, I spend it on the treadmill. When I am not wasting my time watching Anthony Bourdain spout gibberish ("This bread is France and France is bread") on the gym TVs, I listed to audiobooks while running.

One of the recent books I was (and still am) listening to is Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss. It won a Booker prize and Desai has some pedigree - her mother Anita Desai is a famous novelist - so I decided to check it out. The book is meant to represent class struggle and the aspirations of the poor, both through the perspective of a retired judge clashing with local goons in India and an illegal immigrant trying to make it big in America.

Although the book has been a bit overly melodramatic and slightly clunky so far, a verse in the preface struck me deeply. I was running along when the narrator began speaking the following lines:

My homeland is the rythym of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,
the willow grove's visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensible, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away
he doesn't expect to arrive.

I was so impressed by the tenderness and the heaviness of these words that I nearly fell off the treadmill (no joke). I was truly impressed by Desai's writing (And this is only the preface! Lots more to come! I thought to myself), when the narrator finished reading and intoned, "Jorge Luis Borges."

I felt like smacking my head. Of course. Desai is good, but definitely not that good.