A Bad Apple

Most of us must have at sometime or another experienced great and unrestrained passion, which is nonsensical, insensate, inexplicable, even perverse, forbidden and often involuntary. Who has never lost his head or been obsessed with an imbecile, idiotic, totally illogical desire or fantasy? You can be so besotted over someone or something, that you know full well to be unworthy or even dangerous but, you simply can't help it. The kind of passion that embraces both love and hate. Rejection and acceptance.

Mine, recently, was about a book, or it could be said about an author and therefore her work. I am talking about Fred Fragas, a pen name. The book is in Spanish, called 'La Tercera Virgen' (The 3rd Virgin). I read it a couple of months ago, my first encounter with this author. Only pages into the book I had my first doubt that I was going to finish it, as I found some of the pages irritating. I didn't immediately discard it, with the idea that 'I would definitely do so, just after I found out where all that annoying descriptive narration is going.' That's all I wanted to do, I thought; at least that's what I told myself each time I got annoyed or tired with her nonsense but, I kept on anyway and just couldn't put it down, and was almost surprised to find myself up to the page that marked clearly half the book already.

That went on, albeit with certain reluctance, even though every few pages later I would say to myself that it was ridiculous to go on any further but, somehow, I kept turning the pages anyway, " just one or two pages more." Almost equally irritated with myself for not able to resist her fastidious way of story telling, her crazy ideas and styles, her use of words and phrases through mouths of her characters, sometimes rather incoherent and infantile, other times provoking and plain challenging to my tolerance. Despite all that, I was hopelessly trapped and conquered by then to 'stick it out', instead of the normal, natural and logical desire to peep at the last page, to know the ending of a captivating story.

I finished the book and knew that I would seek out the others with her name shown as the author. I guess she herself must be in many ways featured and reflected in the combination of the various characters. There's always a bit of the author in what he or she writes. Like I do in my BLogs and you in yours. I perceive her to be of strong character, frank, honest, too down to earth to be accepted by convention, daring, even outrageous at times, sarcastic but contained, wild but exercising self control but, at the same time, humble, tender and loving. I am in many ways like that. Maybe that's why I couldn't chuck the book out. It's as though she was writing about me!!! Contrary. Not in any particular character, but a composite of all those characters, leaving out a few small aspects here and there.

I have long realized that a commercially or academically successful and well acclaimed books are not synonym of a masterpieces, nor are they necessarily books of literary value. Neither is a sell-out film the best movie; nor art in it's many forms that fetched the highest price the most artistic. A good person may well have his weak and shady side while a bad apple are sometimes extra sweet; that's often why the apple is bad in the first place, because it attracted worms.


Tags:attraction,obsession,book,apple

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