A Literary Viagra?

By Manish Chand

Indian-American novelist Abha Dawesar’s new novel “That Summer in Paris” is a passionate meditation on the subversive and anarchic nature of desire and sexuality and their incestuous connect with art in general and writing in particular. Imagine a 75-year-old Nobel-winning literary legend falling in love with a 25-year-old woman itching to become a writer. Well, it may sound like yet another variation on the old Lolita-Humbert Humbert theme, but in Dawesar’s rich and complex novel of ideas, the old man-young girl love myth turns into a compelling story about the agelessness of desire, its mystic kinship with death, and it’s transfiguration into art and writing. In more ways than one, That Summer in Paris is a “a novel of bliss,” in the Barthesian sense, and an exploration of art and its redemptive powers.

Dawesar’s talent for getting to the underside of transgressive love finds luminous expression in Prem Rustum – the larger-than-life male writer protagonist of her novel — whose one great love affair with his older sister in his teens shadows his numerous adult affairs with women of all nationalities and ages. Meher, his older sister who married and birthed a child — there are dark hints that Rustum could well be the real father — haunts his last great affair with Maya, his last love interest with whom he hoped to escape literature into life.

In this nuanced narrative of love, lust, longing and loss are embedded many philosophical riddles that have haunted anyone who has tried to write and come face to face with a thousand beguiling ways of desire. Is love immortal? Or is love ephemeral and it is art which is immortal? Or, are love and art both a longing for transcendence and immortality? Is sexual passion a form of death wish? Can death be orgasmic, or can orgasm be the closest one can come to a near-death experience? Or are these seemingly profound questions utterly banal when all one wants is a f…, as suggested by Rustum’s friend and fellow-novelist Pascal Boutin — a Frenchman who advises him to go and find a young female fan online and f…?.

And then there is the problematics of writing about sexuality and the erotic nature of all writing. The novel has sketches of almost every type of sexual love possible — not positions, but broad categories — incest, lesbianism, the ageing literary great being preyed upon by teenage houris, hints of homosexuality and even a mention of sodomy. In a multi-media word saturated with porn and sex-driven advertising that stalk every minute of our consumerist existence, what can writing sex do, and how can writing of sexual experience go beyond mere prurient fantasizing that forms the staple of so much of pulp fiction. Prem, for one, for all his famed literary prowess does it badly. “Even the French repeatedly poked fun at Prem’s passage on drinking a lactating woman’s milk.”

Dawesar rises to the challenge and gives it her best shot — no, it’s not a viagra-inspired performance — and although a subtle and not-so-subtle eroticism pervades her prose there are occasional lapses into trick writing that sounds forced and even formula-like. In this sexed-up tale, the invocation of mythic characters to describe sexual rapture is frankly embarrassing. Sample this: “I feel like Galatea coming alive to Pygmalion’s kiss,’ she [Maya] whispered, moaning at the sensation of his flesh everywhere against her own.”

In her enthusiasm to conjure up the intensity of “lust and rage that dance attendant upon old age,” the author tends to get carried away at times and it shows. Masturbatory fantasies of a septuagenarian novelist and his life-and-death struggles to get an erection to achieve his final dream orgasm with the love of his life sound slightly ludicrous and trivialize the aesthetic beauty of a relationship rooted in an insistent hungering need of each other sans any artifice.

But these are minor flaws in a novel that’s ultimately about the transforming power of love, the sheer magical potency of love to engender a new way of seeing and experiencing the world and writing about it.

As a distraught Maya, who literally worships the reclusive Indian-born novelist, confesses after Prem’s death towards the end of the novel: “I saw the world through Prem’s books. But then, most of all I saw everything this summer through his eyes. I want to keep seeing from his eyes. The eyes are immortal, aren’t they” I want a book choked with his presence. I want to write Prem. Not about him, not about me, not about what could have been or was. But Prem himself, I want to write a book of him. There is no proposition in the language for it.”

Maya wanted to write a book about India, but in Paris she finds Prem, the book of life and love she longs to “sleep inside, sleep for years.” It is this deft interweaving of love, life, art and literature that make for the warp and weft of Dawesar’s novel set in a sensuous summer in Paris — the only city in the world where streets and cafes are named after artists, poets and thinkers – Freud, Sartre, Rimbaud, Njinsky and Garcia Lorca, to name just a few. Small wonder, the streets of Paris, for Maya, “sounded like building blocks of an epic love poem, the scriptures of a religion called Art.” And by looking at art together in this art-smitten city — sculptures of Rodin, colours of Degas and Manet — two lovers, old and young, find ways of seeing that make writing possible.