Rivers and fountains

As I re-publish Genghiz in Love this summer, I am flooded with gratitude for the writers who influenced me at the fertile time when I wrote that novel.

The other day, I wrote a recommendation for Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, which was so strong an influence that I originally named my own novel Anastasia's Slave in allusive tribute to the earlier masterpiece. (Oddly, I first heard about Bulgakov from Salman Rushdie at a book reading for The Satanic Verses, weeks before he was forced to go into hiding.) Reading Bulgakov felt like listening to the subversive sound of triumphant trumpets in some dour government office block; his high-spirited and chivalric ode to the power of the imagination trills through the daily din of deadened words.

Proust was another major influence, I'll write more about that later. Alain de Botton is right, if rather obvious and didactic, in pointing out that reading Proust can change your life. For a period of about 18 months in Prague, I stopped reading anything else besides the Remembrances of Things Past. I'm not sure if I would recommend reading Proust as a cure for heartbreak, but it does work.

When I am immersed in the sheer scope of a great writer's oeuvre, I feel like Huck Finn floating on a raft in the middle of the Mississippi, a great inland sea whose pull is so strong that we mostly consider its vast surface, the distance between its banks, the length it traverses until it meanders into delta, estuary, ocean.

What we often ignore in our bird's eye view of the river's coiled flow is the magnitude of its depth, its murky tides, and at its bottom the porous bed through which its unique minerals and contaminants seep into the groundwater, the collective unconscious of our culture. Proust, Bulgakov, Twain have fed me and countless others, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Professor Woland, Tom Sawyer live and breathe cheerfully within me, giving life to new characters jostling yet to be born.

Hence the futility of the quest for fame, as if a spring could architect itself into a fountain.