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Actor, director and teacher, Rahat Kazmi, talks about his reading habits
What are you reading these days?
Infinite Jest by David Foster and Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami.
Which books are on your bedside table?
An anthology of Pablo Neruda’s poems edited by Ilan Stavans. It is the best translated copy of it I have come across so far, and Ulysses by James Joyce.
Which titles are on your bucket list of books?
A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell and This Is Not That Dawn by Yashpal which is a work of fiction on partition and is translated from the Hindi. Also, Ada by Vladimir Nabokov.
What is the one book / author you feel everyone must read?
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. It’s a seven volume work and the same characters are featured throughout. The scale at which he thought out the novel is unimaginable and nobody has written a book like that. It is perhaps the finest observation of the bourgeoisie at the time. The sentences are beautiful and each one is a quotable quote.
What are you planning to reread?
I would love to reread The Man Without Qualities by the Austrian novelist Robert Musil which is a three and a half volume work as Musil died before he could finish it. Also, Remembrance of Things Past by Proust and The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch.
What is the one book you read because you thought it would make you appear smarter?
Ulysses by James Joyce, which is perhaps the finest book ever written in terms of prose. I have read it two to three times and I keep on discovering new aspects of the book. It has a very wry but brilliant humour about it and is a seminal work.
What is the one book you started reading but could not finish?
Snow by Orhan Pamuk.
What is your favourite childhood book or story?
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas; it is about revenge, love and adventure, and every person I recommended it to has enjoyed it.
