A passion for reading

Froman interview with Pankaj Mishra:
"Initially, I saw the life of the writer as a life of reading, which for me was really an extension of the life of idleness that I’d been living as an undergraduate at university. Reading gave me so much pleasure that I felt that maybe I could continue that life indefinitely. I basically went from day to day, reading a lot, loving most books I read and making notes about them. I was just hoping that nothing would happen—like having to apply for a job or think seriously about a career—that would put a stop to the wonderful life I was leading. And, miraculously, nothing stopped me.
......
Most of what I read now is for reviewing purposes or related to something I want to write about. It’s slightly utilitarian. I definitely miss that sense of being a disinterested reader who’s reading purely for the pleasure of imagining his way into emotional situations and vividly realized scenes in nineteenth-century France or late nineteenth-century Russia. Often I find that when I go back to those books by Flaubert or Chekhov—which I loved—I’m unable to summon up that same imaginative richness. That seems to me a huge loss. Now I’m thinking more about the craftsmanship of it—why did this paragraph end here—narrowly technical things.
......
(while discussing his book avout Budha)
Three books inspired me. One was Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. It’s an extraordinarily radical book in that it’s the mid-twentieth century and he’s doing straightforward ethnography in Brazil while at the same time he’s looking at his own experience as a Frenchman and the larger encounter that’s happening between Western modernity and older cultures. The other book I had in mind was Native Realm by Czeslaw Milosz. It’s another hugely fascinating example of someone mixing personal history with a larger historical account. My experience was quite different from theirs, I was neither an academic like Lévi-Strauss nor someone coping with very fraught political situations the way Milosz was, but these books were inspirations if not models. Also [V. S. Naipaul’s] An Area of Darkness, which I think is one of the more interesting examples of experimental nonfiction: it’s an essay, a travelogue, it’s an instance of what today might be called cultural studies, it’s certainly a memoir—a very angry one at times—there is a range of moods and a range of tones."

"BLVR: If you could have every American read one book, what would it be?

PM: A House for Mr. Biswas. It’s quite removed from the glamorous notions of what a great novel should be. It’s about a man in the middle of nowhere working his way out of a background of deprivation and wanting a house of his own for his growing family. The frustration and partial fulfillment of that desire is described with great insight and humor, and, most extraordinarily, with no sentimentality. Apart from other things, reading that book makes you understand—intuitively—the violence in the world today."

"BLVR: Are you ambitious?

PM: Well, I feel very privileged to get to read and write and not to have to do things that I don’t like, and I don’t want to give that up. Everything else is just a bonus and often a distraction from the writing, reading, and traveling that gives me the most pleasure. I feel that I already have the life I love and I don’t see how it could be improved radically by any greater material success I might have—bigger advances, more prizes. It’s a kind of madness. And the culture of prize-giving is so corrupt. To think of what someone like Flaubert would have made of it, what kind of utter disgust and scorn it would have aroused in figures like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. What would they say if they were told they all had to compete for these little trinkets that were given out? Yet the longing for a very garish kind of success seems as widespread among writers as among investment bankers."
More links to Pankaj Mishra here.