To stay awake (this after few nights of hard drinking and insubstantial sleep), in the airport last night, I read sections (roughly the first fifty pages) of the following novels:

Elizabeth McCracken’s “The Giant’s House”, which was billed as a love story of two misfits, a librarian in a dead end town and the world’s tallest man. But I was soon bored.

Chang-rae Lee’s “Aloft” – a sly humorous look at American ennui, from the cockpit of a small plane.

John Banville’s “The Sea” – this book won the Booker Prize last year, and had magnificat writing. I am buying this today at my cheap-ass book dive

...

Returning to my books last night, after a gap of three weeks, made me feel happy. It also made me feel like the "you" in the Vikram Seth’s poem, "All you who sleep tonight":

"All you who sleep tonight Far from the ones (books) you love"

If this is lame, so be it. Human beings (I include myself) can be limited, while a library on the other hand can be, to borrow from J.L. Borges, infinite.

This piece of news regarding Primo Levi's memoir "The Perodic Table" (which was gifted to me by my "bookie" friend C a year ago - thank you C if you are reading this!) makes me very happy. Levi is one of the writers whose prose can shift the gears of one's mind, and makes one want to be able to write with "humanity" - this ignoring the death camp terror that one perhaps has to endure first to arrive to the state from which such writing can begin.

This re-imagining of "Madame Bovary"'s ending by Julian Barnes proved to be a comfort because of the opening preface:

"A hundred and fifty years ago tomorrow, on October 1 1856, the first episode of Madame Bovary appeared in the Revue de Paris. The serialisation was a benign act of nepotism by one of the magazine's editors, Maxime Du Camp, towards an old friend of his from student days, Gustave Flaubert. This debut came at the late age of 35: Flaubert had put himself through a long and silent apprenticeship, working out his youthful romanticism, discovering a harder and more objective way of writing, and discarding - or at least, refusing to publish - almost everything he wrote. When his collected juvenilia finally appeared in 2001 (Oeuvres de Jeunesse, Pléiade edition), they were seen to take up almost as many pages as the subsequent novels of his maturity. Flaubert had always been wary of publication, and said that when it came to finally displaying himself, he would only do so "in full armour".

But there is always an entry-point for an unexpected knife: the first episode of Madame Bovary appeared with the author's name misspelt as "Faubert"."

Why you ask? Two reasons.

First, as I was ruminating in a conversation last night, in 1.5 years I will hit (the sell by date) 30 sans any literary fame (or for that matter any other kind of fame), which is what one of the "selves" claims to desire. So Flaubert's life provides me a convinient cover to delude myself with literary pretensions until I am 35. And if nothing happens even by then, I have Whitman lined up to provide further cover until I hit 39. Thus, even if I don't do a whit of writing till then, I will invoke Flaubert and fib by saying that I shall appear "in full armour" only. Second, that mis-spelling - "Faubert" - is comforting because it has already happened to me.