Risqué Robbins

It has been a long time since, and my memory usually waxes dim on such subjects, or I would have whole heartedly wished to convey some notion of the manner in which Harold Robbins finds a place on my book shelf. There are two actually; Goodbye Janette, and The Carpetbaggers. These two I think dropped right from heaven, for I don’t remember buying them (that is ever since I started buying books) and for all my expeditions into streets where books are found I’ve never come across a Robbins work! My brother, a healthy contributor to the shelf is equally clueless, and so are mom and dad who do not believe in the concept of reading anyway. Nobody knows whom the books belong to; they are my family’s conundrum I guess, and the legacy is sure to stay unless some insane stroke of fate brings the real owner wandering to our doorstep! But, life isn’t celluloid, and therefore there’s hardly a chance of these ragged veterans getting back to their actual owner.

I believe I was still in my ‘Nancy Drew’ stage, probably in the eighth standard when I happened to flip through the pages of Goodbye, Janette. In many ways it was my first read, however I didn’t manage to complete it, for the sheer lack of patience and my arrant inability to come to terms with that thing called, sexuality. I realized it was one of those books which people call “dirty”, and I would be lying if I say that I did not want to continue, for at that impressionable age, with the hormones running amuck and the mind curious enough to de-cloud the myths about sex, made me flip more number of pages. The more I flipped, the more bedazzled I got, until better sense prevailed and made me drop the book out of sheer exhaustion. Unknowingly, I had become a reader of porn, although that word was quite elusive to me at that time.

Such a reading led to discussions with girl friends and the usual fuss about all matters relating to sex. Gosh, it looks so puerile now. But, what are you smirking at; you too have been there and done that! A dozen thumbs soiled the pages, following my publicity of its content, and a large number of people became porn readers as well!

But, I should hold my thoughts there and warn you from drawing conclusions based on the above statements! Now, Robbins isn’t appreciated much in the literary circles for his often graphic sexual detail, but boy, it’s amazing and almost unbelievable that he could actually write a book like, A Stone for Danny Fisher. For one, the book is absolutely “clean”, and not once does it come across as risqué, and boy, did Segal write Acts of Faith after reading Danny Fisher, coz it was out and out Segal-isque, and it had these deja-vu moments reminding me of Daniel Luria and all those Jewish traditions that one comes across in Segal’s Acts of Faith. I know Segal fans would probably kill me for such an analogy, but sorry guys, can’t help this time around!

Never in my wildest dreams did I think of Robbins of all to generate such magnitude of emotions. But isn’t it always good to be pleasantly surprised once in a while, as these final words of Danny Fisher:

I was not a great man whose history has been recorded for children to study in school. No bells will ring for me, no flags descend upon their mast……….for I was an ordinary man, my son, one of many, with ordinary hopes, with ordinary dreams and ordinary fears. I was the ordinary man about whom songs are never written, stories are never told, and legends are never remembered.

My Verdict: As readers we have a strong itch to show off all the great men whose works we have ever read. We even have our own individual lists of writers whom we consider to be great, and at times we are over-possessed with a sadistic pleasure of putting that which flutters the brain idly for a moment and then is heard no more in competition with some of the greatest works of art. And that is exactly where we fail as readers, for each writer has a unique ability and in the end everything boils down to the fact that, “different people have different ways of telling stories”, and it never serves good to reject someone based on first impressions!

Boy, I’m blessed with a soul so democratic!