A compendium of book blurbs jumping into bed with a medical dictionary, a book about books meant for the medicine cabinet, a treatise on the power of the novel, a bibliotherapist’s vade mecum, a bibliophile’s treasure chest. Whichever way you look at it, The Novel Cure is all of these and more or as the authors say, “Our apothecary contains Balzacian balms and Tolstoyan tourniquets, the salves of Saramago and the purges of Perec and Proust. To create it we have trawled two thousand years of literature for the most brilliant minds and restorative reads, from Apuleius, second-century author of The Golden Ass, to the contemporary tonics of Ali Smith and Jonathan Franzen”.
We all remember the recent spate of Facebook posts containing lists of ten life-changing books. It was all for the best, because this internet meme drew our wavering attention back to books just as the volume under review does, buttressed as it is by the erudition and humour of its authors. And so this book of remedies offers straight-faced cures for ‘too many orgasms’ (or too little sex) just as it does for ‘snoring’, suggesting in the latter case a list of ten books (Joyce’s Ulysses being one) that will drown out the sounds resulting from vibrations of your partner’s soft palate.
Indeed, this is a book of lists as much as it is a dictionary of remedies for diseases of the body and the mind, and certain reading-related ailments. Where it differs from a manual of medicine is that the chemicals of allopathy and the tinctures of homoeopathy are replaced with books—novels to be precise. This is a celebration of the novel on a scale that will put saturnalias to shame; The Novel Cure is a bibliophile’s pleasure palace, a librocubicularist’s secret fantasy. But let us now dig a little deeper.
The dictionary of cures begins with ‘abandonement’, closes with ‘zestlessness’. Each ailment (or condition) is introduced in an engaging style rich in pscychological insight. Sometimes it’s the amusing tone that propels us towards the cure, elsewhere the insights about a condition assure us about the efficacy of the proffered remedy.
A short precis of the novel follows with robust justification, explaining why this is just what the doctor ordered for the fight against depression (for example) or the assault upon an eating disorder. Intransigent conditions like ‘adolescence’ require multi-drug therapy—four books backed up by a list of ‘ten best novels to read in your gap year’, while ‘uxoriousness’ can be tamed with a shot of Tagore’s The Lost Jewels (Monihara). While one can appreciate how a gap year teen can enjoy Kerouac’s On the Road or Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, it’s hard to imagine the kind of nourishment they would draw from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas—a difficult masterpiece that revels as much in formal and linguistic gymnastics as in space-time flights.
The entries are cross-referenced and a very useful index of authors and their works is provided at the end. Between these restorative pages one finds forty idiosyncratic lists of ‘ten best’, including the ‘Ten best novels to turn your partner (female or male) on to fiction’. Useful, no doubt! Then there are the fixes for reading ailments, numbering thirty, no less. And what, you ask, is the fix for the ‘desire to seem well-read’? The ‘Ten novels for the literary fake’, of course.
It is a bonus for readers in this country that this Indian edition of The Novel Cure has writer-journalist Indrajit Hazra batting alongside Berthoud and Elderkin. So we are treated to Hazra’s blend of perspicuity and an impish wit, in entries such as the one where he describes Calcutta as the ‘city of the Golden Ageists’. Among several Indian salves on offer are Premchand’s Shatranj ke Khiladi for denial (being in), Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide as an antidote for environment (not caring about) and Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address for help in dealing with Calcutta. There are many more. While books work differently for different people, this attempt to make them worthwhile for the business of living gets three full-throated cheers. Keep this tonic on your bedside table.
(Rajat Chaudhuri is a Charles Wallace Fellow and the author of the novels Hotel Calcutta and Amber Dusk.)
