May 9, 2004

Zia Akbar works as a software engineer in a small firm that manufactures software for questionnaire-based surveys in Lyon, France. He has studied mathematics and is responsible for the data-analysis module

ZIA AKBAR describes himself as a reading addict. “I’ll read almost anything. I’ll put it this way: the power of the printed word is very strong for me,” he writes in an email interview. “The thrill of reading has not changed since my childhood: the urge is very strong in me to pick up a book and look through it, perceive the words and feel them come together in my mind,” he says. His lament is that he gets less time for leisure reading nowadays.

Yet he usually manages to find some time in the evenings when “I don’t need to think too actively” to read. He usually prefers reading a good book to watching television. “In our family, books have always been very important. Both my parents are avid readers themselves and books are present in just about every room in the house. As far as I can remember, I have always been a reader. My childhood was full of books, and not just the usual Enid Blyton ones.”

When asked what type of books he likes, Akbar gives a long list ranging from good science fiction and old classics such as Dickens’ David Copperfield or Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons to something from ancient Greek, such as Aristophanes’ hilarious play The Frogs, or Homer’s Odyssey. He finds it difficult to pick out a favourite.

For this interview, he says he would like to talk about Donna Tartt’s Secret History. This is a mystery novel that has for its theme six students majoring in ancient Greek at Hampden College in Vermont. They hold a ritual in the hope of meeting Dionysus, the Greek god. In the process they lose control of their senses and commit a murder.

Akbar finds the book interesting because he feels that Tartt has immense writing skills. “Her descriptions are so atmospheric and with a lot of character. There are paragraphs you can quote as entities in themselves, and the character studies are generally very impressive, down to the narrator, Richard Papen, who intrigues me just as much as the other characters he is telling us about,” Akbar comments.

He feels he can relate to the book in many ways. The book is about university life and he is attracted by “the party atmosphere at the college, the thrill of researching your work in a library (I know, this will sound weird to most people, but there IS a thrill in this, and I can feel it whenever I walk into a university library, whether in London, Paris, or Karachi!), the feeling of being in contact with people who are discovering different ways to think, and to live. There are interesting characters you find there and Tartt knows this only too well and loves to inject little vignettes about them such as the professor who behaves more like ‘some gabby old codger who would sit next to you on a bus and try to show you bits of paper he kept folded in his wallet’, rather than a tenured professor!”

Then there is the moment when Bunny heads for the students’ residence fridge and pulls out a cake at random: “Taped to the box was a plaintive note: ‘Please do not steal this. I am on financial aid. Jenny Drexler.’” Dickens excelled at this sort of engaging digression, as did Turgenev. And Tartt surrounds all this with contrasts: the contrast of this modern period with that of ancient Greek literature with its imagery, violence and madness.

Tartt is a painstaking artist and it is understandable that she takes her time in writing and publishing. “I still haven’t had the time to read her second novel, The Little Friend, but I have thumbed through it a bit.” Zia Akbar comments in conclusion.

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