I do not like popular taste. I have always been attracted to things unknown that I discovered on my own simply out of curiosity or coincidence, and sometimes because someone I love recommends it. I know, some people might call me elitist, just from reading these two previous sentences. But I am not all that arrogant to deserve such a label and actually do not look down on people who go for what is popular or famous because respected critiques or historians teach them to do so. It’s just that I get suspicious when some name is on everybody’s lips. Sure, when I was younger, I also loved Demis Russos songs, Charles Bronson films, Tintin comics, Sartre and Camus and so on. But in reality, I like to discover good films, music, literature and art in general by myself...it entices me, it quenches my thirsty soul and thrills me. Let me give you an example so that I can make myself clear: When you know nothing about Chile or Neruda and you pull out a slim book from the bookshelf of your beloved brother, a brother whom you have missed for three long years because he had left for Canada and now you are finally reunited there, a brother about whom you are so curious that you try to get to know him anew by going through his book collection, and the book ends up to be Neruda’s “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair”, do you know what happens? Neruda becomes yours, even though he is already famous and everyone else has read him. But you do not know. A whole world opens in front of you...a wonderful world. Something tickles your soul lightly. Neruda and his poetry become like love at first sight...nobody instructs you to love them. It is your heart telling you to do so. And I trust my heart!
Let me make a confession here. I sometimes feel that I am the most ignorant person and other times I feel very content and happy that I know so much. What is the weighing scale for this comparison? It is simply that, regarding many subjects and popular names, I have no clue whatsoever. But throughout my life, I have always followed my curiosity and discovered other ones that gave some meaning to my life and helped me in my search for understanding myself. I confess that I have not read what people call essential books. I have not read for example “Crime and Punishment”, “War and Peace” or “Don Quixote” or...But I have read Fournier’s “the wanderer”, Saroyan’s “Father you are so silly”, Jumpa Lahiri’s “the interpreter of Maladies” and...What is the difference, really? Everyone of these writers, known and unknown, tell something about the human soul in pursuit of the Truth. All of them write about the search for a meaning in life, the agonies and joys of humans and their struggle; the importance of love, conviction, freedom and justice and integrity. Who is to say that Dostoyevsky knew about all of these more than Jumpa Lahiri for example?
The gratification that one gets because of a wonderful discovery that comes out of curious pursuit is like receiving a gift. A year or two ago, I phoned that beloved brother of mine who now lives in Yerevan and said to him, “congratulations to both of us. Our man has won the Nobel Prize for literature!”. He was confused and said, “who is our man”? I was referring to Abdulrazak Gurnah. Maybe thirty years ago, going through the shelves of a bookstore, one day I had found a book called “Paradise” by a writer I did not know. Leafing through some of the pages, I decided to buy it. It turned out to be one of the most impressive novels and I must have read it twice at least. I liked that book by that unknown writer from Zanzibar so much that I had passed it to my brother. We always shared books, music and films with each other. He loved it also and like many other things we shared, we discussed it at length. I somehow lost that book because of a flood that destroyed a lot of our books and music records, and I have never read the book again. But I did buy one of his other books called “By the Sea” and I have it in my collection now.
So here I was, thirty years later, happy at the prize that unknown writer from Zanzibar had won. A writer whom I had discovered simply by reading a synopsis of the story on the back cover. It told about the longings of a child taken on a merchant caravan in the desert...Just like the child I had been when I had first arrived in Canada. That’s a discovery that I would call Destiny.
