The Point of Return!? I'm still wondering why..

I finished reading the rest of the book, "The Point of Return", by Siddhartha Deb. Finally. I think I originally started on it more than a month ago, early August I think. I didn't have but 50-60 pages left as of the last post, but it took me longer than I thought it would, esp. since I was at work, and I kept getting interrupted every now and then. Then again there were some very interesting passages in there, that I read and re-read and wrote down in my journal/planner.

The following excerpts in particular jumped out at me. This first one especially, I could've been writing about myself.

"As for me.. there were mostly failures. Failures in love and work, moving from town to city.. restless and uncertain..
I make no bones about my failure. Things could have turned out differently, but they didn't. If I foreclosed my engineering career, choosing what I saw as freedom over following an unexciting if well-honed groove, the illusion of that freedom disappeared soon enough in the face of everyday routine.. An unappealing job.. in the evening, an empty apartment to go back to.. the weight of books on dusty shelves, memories in some distant corner, the strangeness of one's own face when seen in a cheap mirror over a small sink, the sudden awareness of my.. breath as I bend over the lock at the front door."

"How did I achieve this unlikely feat of forgetting in the very act of remembrance.. ..the answer must be that I chose to forget. Memory is also about what you decide to remember, so that you can make sense of what has been irrevocably lost. That was the only way the past could be recovered.."

"I don't know if those friends of mine remain in touch with each other and if I am the only one who has broken the circuit. Although I have little news of them, one feels that they too are dissolved in the vast spaces that opened up once we left the town. The sporadic correspondence we maintained for a while ultimately ceased, each step one took in the adult world - career, marriage, children - serving to increase the distance from the past.... Small-town boys settled in the United States or Australia or New Zealand, where they will become old men and sit on their front porches or lawns at the end of their lives, trying to remember whether the decades have taken them across many continents or if they are still in the first, original place where their old friends live around the corner."

Having finished reading it, I have a better appreciation for the book today than even just a couple of days ago. I like it, it's a little different, and the reverse chronological order of the story can get a little aggravating at times, but in the end, Siddhartha Deb ties the knots together. And it opened my eyes to the unique problems of the Indian North-East. While it is no "The Kite Runner", it is a must read none-the-less.

Something to be said for being reader-friendly!?

So I have been reading this book for a while, making time for it one or two days a week at a time, for an hour here and an hour there. It was gifted to me almost a year ago by my friend, and room-mate Richey, "The Point of Return" by Siddhartha Deb. I assume he picked it out because it was a book set in India, by an Indian author. I haven't investigated his reasons.

Anyway, it is a very interesting read, more so since I haven't read a book set in India, in such a long time. If I have one quibble with the book, it is that the author resorts to more than one word that you have to look up in a dictionary. Not to sound arrogant, but if I have to resort to looking words up, it makes you wonder what the author is trying to prove. In my humble opinion, if as an author you have to resort to the usage of obscure language to arguably enhance your novel, you're fighting a lost cause. Problem is most authors have a command and mastery of language and vocabulary that may be very natural to them, but often exceeds their audience for whom it may not be second or even third nature.

However, I also believe that you should not talk down to your readers or listeners. So how do you reconcile these two opposing points of view!? I don't claim to have all the answers. But as a writer myself, I do believe that one of your goals is not to drive your readers away, even if just for a second.

A sampler of said obscure words:
poseur
bier
hangdog
Friesian
simulacrum
elisions
solipsistically
innoxious
Bannerdown
reductive
prehensile

However, here's a couple of excerpts that I feel compelled to reproduce just because of how much they resonated with me.

"Perhaps this is the true return, the completion of a cycle set in motion long ago, and if it seems lonely, maybe it is because migration is a reductive evolutionary principle where the sprawling, oppressive family gives way to its streamlined nuclear descendant, to be replaced finally by the individual straining at the limits of memory."

"Put too much weight on any particular moment, force it into an epiphany, and experience cracks in half."

I haven't finished the book yet, hopefully should in a day or two, and then the verdict. I like it so far, just for the interesting window to the Indian North-East which is one of the few parts of India that I haven't seen yet. And with my renewed interest in traveling, that's something I hope to rectify at some point in the not-too-distant future.