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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Book Review | The Novel Cure: An A-Z Of Literary Remedies
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Book Review | The Novel Cure: An A-Z Of Literary Remedies

An alternative guide to seeking comfort for the ailing body and the soul

An A-Z Of Literary Remedies: By Ella Berthoud & Susan Elderkin with Indrajit Hazra, Roli Books, 480 pages, Rs 595.Premium
An A-Z Of Literary Remedies: By Ella Berthoud & Susan Elderkin with Indrajit Hazra, Roli Books, 480 pages, Rs 595.

Bibliotherapy, or seeking comfort in books, usually tends to be a metaphysical exercise, unless you are ploughing through a tome on homoeopathy or Ayurveda in search of an alternative cure. Of course, scores of titles clubbed under “self-help" appear each day, addressing various states of anguish or inadequacy. The majority of those likely to pick up Dale Carnegie’s best-seller How To Win Friends And Influence People are probably suffering from one form of social awkwardness or the other—the enduring popularity of the book, since its publication in 1936, goes on to attest the endemic nature of the problem.

In The Novel Cure: An A-Z Of Literary Remedies, which appeared last year, Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin had put together a compendium of literary cures for the ailing soul and, odd as it may sound, the body. In a pleasing contrast to the dreary roll-call of sensible advice provided by non-fiction, they chose to list fictional works that could soothe or offer solace to those in distress. An eccentric combination of agony-aunt column and encyclopedia entry, their approach was endearing, whimsical, and when necessary, serious. The volume now appears in India with inputs by Indrajit Hazra, who, much to our relief, provides a longed-for break from the monotony of Anglo/Euro-centric recommendations that his co-authors had offered.

Like most works of reference, this one too is not intended to be read from start to finish. Some may, of course, undertake such a task, and a remedy for fatigue induced by reading may not be hard to find. But ideally, you are meant to inspect these entries alphabetically to see if there is one suited to your affliction.

Generous reserves of irony, humour, and the ability to make the occasional imaginative leap are the prerequisites for the fullest enjoyment of The Novel Cure. For the illnesses, along with the cures advised, are as quirky as they can get. In the entry “children, under pressure to have", for instance, the bibliotherapists pithily ask sufferers to gift Lionel Shriver’s novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, to those who habitually cause them this distress (the eponymous Kevin, for those who do not know, is a young sociopath responsible for causing a bloody massacre in his school).

For “single, being" advice is dispensed circuitously—by documenting the day in a young mother’s life in the manner of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. The entry concludes with her child holding a lit match to a copy of The Runaway Bunny, which he had made his mother read in loop all morning, the mother picking up her knickers and rushing to the rescue, and the father being delighted with finding eggs in the cupboard.

Most of the maladies are the figments of a rather fertile imagination—though their corresponding cures may not inspire a great deal of confidence. Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is offered as a solution to “Delhi, dealing with", while Kiran Nagarkar’s Ravan & Eddie is the answer to Mumbai, and Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange And Sublime Address applies to Kolkata. Of the three, only the last seems to make the best sense.

It is not clear why reading vivid descriptions of Indian men defecating in the open should ease constipation or why reading in the loo is associated solely with those suffering from diarrhoea. Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet is meant as a cure for wanderlust, which is just as well, given its girth, though, one suspects, a dose of Robinson Crusoe may have been equally effective as a deterrent to leaving home.

Finally, there are cures that are meant only for the finest minds—such as a reading of the description of the afternoon tea ceremony in the opening chapter of Henry James’s The Portrait Of A Lady to combat anxiety, or using Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man And the Sea as an antidote to anger management problems. In such moments The Novel Cure rises above its facetious demeanour, making us intensely aware of the psychosomatic potentials of healing through reading.

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Published: 20 Sep 2014, 12:15 AM IST
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