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There is a wierd satisfaction, a brainfuck if you will, when the books you are reading strangely intertwine. Its an incredible coincidence, that two very unrelated books somehow turn out to be related; have chapters that complement one another and speak about the same things. This has happened to me a few times, and this happens to be the first documented one. I really want/ought to be documenting more.
Around the time my son was being born, which was more than a year back, I was reading Ismail Kadare's THE FILE ON H.. It was a story about a couple of Irish-American scholars travelling to Albania in the 1930's to trace the origins of the Western Epics Iliad and Odyssey and to find out whether Homer was indeed one person. Their belief was that the oral story-telling traditions of Middle-Eastern and Central Europe held the key to the mystery of how one person could indeed come up with so vast and complex a story as that of the Iliad and Odyssey. And around the same time I was reading Kundera's The Joke. Imagine my surprise and the warmth inside when the book held sub-plot of a Slavic musician who was trying to come to terms with the decay of his folk art; and whole chapters dedicated to the origin and nuances of Middle-Eastern and Central European folk songs and story-telling. It remains a fact that the nuances of pentatonic scales is lost on me. But yet, it was a brainfuck at that time.
Now imagine my situation whilst in the toilet a couple of days back, when I was reading Nine Lives by William Dalrymple, in the chapter The Singer of Epics about an illiterate Rajasthani folk singer called Mohan Bhopa, Dalrymple proceeded to point to the existence of a Milman Parry, a Homeric scholar, who really did undertake a project in the Slavic regions of Europe with the exactly same objective as that of the two young Irish-American scholars in Kadare's story. That, my friends, was when shit really hit the roof.
Around the time my son was being born, which was more than a year back, I was reading Ismail Kadare's THE FILE ON H.. It was a story about a couple of Irish-American scholars travelling to Albania in the 1930's to trace the origins of the Western Epics Iliad and Odyssey and to find out whether Homer was indeed one person. Their belief was that the oral story-telling traditions of Middle-Eastern and Central Europe held the key to the mystery of how one person could indeed come up with so vast and complex a story as that of the Iliad and Odyssey. And around the same time I was reading Kundera's The Joke. Imagine my surprise and the warmth inside when the book held sub-plot of a Slavic musician who was trying to come to terms with the decay of his folk art; and whole chapters dedicated to the origin and nuances of Middle-Eastern and Central European folk songs and story-telling. It remains a fact that the nuances of pentatonic scales is lost on me. But yet, it was a brainfuck at that time.
Now imagine my situation whilst in the toilet a couple of days back, when I was reading Nine Lives by William Dalrymple, in the chapter The Singer of Epics about an illiterate Rajasthani folk singer called Mohan Bhopa, Dalrymple proceeded to point to the existence of a Milman Parry, a Homeric scholar, who really did undertake a project in the Slavic regions of Europe with the exactly same objective as that of the two young Irish-American scholars in Kadare's story. That, my friends, was when shit really hit the roof.
