Neighbours and Novels

One month from today I'm moving, and I'm very happy about that. But one good thing about my present location is that it always makes for good dinner conversation. Here's a priest who gives wild parties every other week, elevators that work at random, plumbing that works even more seldom, weird transvestites who occasionally comes barging in, demanding that I stop walking around without socks in my apartment, and that I stop vacuum cleaning in the middle of the night (my angry denial of such vile deeds was met with the comment "yeah, whatever"). To get to the nearest bus station, please to walk through the underground parking lot of a hospital. So part of me will miss this crazy building, affectionately known (at least in the good old days) as Chlamydia Tower.

I'm still reading The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri. I love it, it's so real and nuanced. I feel every breath of the characters, I can see them, smell them, I know them better than I know myself. When I read it I feel like I'm there, with them. I am Nikhil (or Gogol, as he was called when young).

I like to read a book which engage you so much that afterwards you have memories of things, that you only after a little while realises are not your memories, but things that happened in the book that you read. The first part of Fasting, Feasting, by Anita Desai, takes place in India, in a big house, and I feel like I have been there. I have been sitting on that porch on agonisingly hot days, watching the air shiver in the sun.

Jhumpa Lahiri has won the Pulitzer Prize, I wonder when I will.