The Circle of Reason

When I read Amitav Ghosh's writing, I realise why I read. For the love of reading and the art of story telling. 

The story goes on and his stories are strong too. But it's the little detail here and a little extra there, that fills up your heart and makes you fall in love with the characters. He allows himself to follow the story with it's little stories woven around and within and through it. One of the accolades on the cover called him "Sheherazade". How true! The name has the same magic his writing seems to ebb and flow in.

The Circle of Reason completes a circle on a man's love for reason and rationality that were inspired by the Life of Pasteur and fights many a fight with his weapons of reason and amusingly taking the form of carbolic acid. He passes on his passion to his nephew who takes it with him across countries and continents. And in unusual circumstances finds peace in the middle of a desert performing a ritual and winning a fight against the greatest enemy of reason, scepticism. 

Every turn of a page you find a new character or a new shade of an old character. How loved you must feel if you were Ghosh's character for he never abandons you. He gives you physique, a language, some mannerisms, little stories of your childhood that made you who you are and a few generations of history, for what is a man with no history?

Much more loved you  must feel if you were city in his world. For not only do you get centuries of history, you are also colourfully complete with all those characters living and dead that changed your face adding a little detail every time until finally you evolve into a beautiful bustling city full of life. 

And the most loved you must feel being a reader, for it is you who is though a minute part of it but the very last dot of infinite dots that completes the circle.