Читать книгу My Nine Lives - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - Страница 7

Apologia

THESE CHAPTERS are potentially autobiographical: even when something didn’t actually happen to me, it might have done so. Every situation was one I could have been in myself, and sometimes, to some extent, was.

The central character—the “I” of each chapter—is myself, but the parents I have claimed are not, or hardly ever quite, my own. I may not have outgrown the common childish fantasy that one’s real parents are someone different, somewhere else. Or I may have been trying out alternative destinies—this time not, as usual, for fictional characters but for myself. But however many times one may set oneself up with a new set of parents—or a new country—or new circumstances—the situations in which the “I” is placed (or places itself) always seem to work themselves out in the same way: as though character really were fate.

The various countries and continents in these chapters are those I have lived in. England gave me literature—language—words in which to express my world and the ambition to do so. But instead of the Anglo-Saxon world that I thought had formed and informed me, my autobiography seems to be an amalgam of a Central European background and years of living in India.

Although I soon felt at home wherever I happened to be, at the same time I held back, almost deliberately, from being truly assimilated. It was as though I wanted to feel exiled from some other place and to be free to go back to or in search of it. But then these quests turned out not to be for a place after all but always for a person. This may have been a person I have looked up to, or been in love with, maybe even for some sort of guru or guide. Someone better, stronger, wiser, altogether other . . . Does such a person exist, and if so, does one ever find him?