Every year when I travel all the way to Jaipur for the Literature Festival, I travel with no expectations but one – by some stroke of perchance or serendipity – to discover a new author. And, in the process of that discovery, if my past experience was to bear any witness, you not only come back with a new name, you also inherit a new person, a new idea, a new way of looking at the world. I can’t thank the festival enough for introducing me to Jhumpa Lahiri, Andre Aciman, and now, Howard Jacobson.
Howard Jacobson took my fancy when he was a part of a larger panel on fiction (as told by my friends) and later on travel (which I personally bore witness to). Every time the mic was handed over to him, he was very funny, or very deep and, more often than not, both. Off I rushed to the book stall and to my dismay, neither ended up finding his Booker prize winning work ‘The Finkler Question’ nor the 2014 shortlist ‘J’ there. Apparently, everything had been sold out the previous day. As a drifted across the book stall, heartbroken, I chanced upon a slightly torn copy of his latest book – ‘Live a Little’ on a random aisle. With a cover like that and the lovely premise, my joy knew no bounds.
Live a Little is a story of two individuals falling in love in the absolute twilight of their lives. Beryl Dusinberry is 99, Shimi Carmelli is 91. And yet, here they are on Finchley Road, falling in love, slowly, but surely. To be honest, I didn’t enjoy the book so much when I started with it. Jacobson’s language initially reminded me of Joseph Conrad in its complexity and vocabulary, in that I had to look at the thesaurus often which broke my chain of thought. But once you are drawn into the story, it makes for a wonderful reading.
I found Shimi’s character much more layered and interesting, and Jacobson’s writing does carry that wit, if only in a darkly comic way. Sometimes you would chuckle to yourself, and often you would be moved. I can’t quite say I could feel for Shimi or Beryl, or completely connect to them, but the way Jacobson builds his characters, there was definitely this neutral space in which I felt I knew them closely.
My only grouse with the story is that it builds up slowly and then moves too fast. I just couldn’t help but compare it to ‘A Man Called Ove’ (due to the similarity of premise), and anything, when compared to A Man Called Ove is bound to end up falling short of your expectations at some level of the other.
To be fair, Howard Jacobson as an author grows on you. I wasn’t quite sure of him when I started, but by the time I finished this book, I fell in love with his writing. I think Live a Little shows the promise of his writing that may have once blossomed in A Finkler Question or J. That being said Live a Little shines in its own light in reminding us that love finds a way if we are open enough to embrace it, irrespective who or where we are.