Peeking into authors’ mailbox: My year of reading letters

I never considered reading authors’ letters. “How can personal letters be considered literature?”–I thought. It felt like a cash grab by publishers, scraping the bottom of a dead author’s drawer to sell whatever was available. How could letters be anything more than small talk and errands?

But this year, mostly by accident, I ended up diving into the world of letters by some of my favourite authors. And I realised I was wrong. If reading novels is like watching a performance, reading letters is like sitting in the dressing room while the actor takes off their makeup. It is unpolished, vulnerable, and terrifyingly real.

It started with Rabindranath Tagore’s Chinnopotro (Visva Bharati, 1912) back in April. I picked it up expecting obscure philosophy, but instead found a young man drifting on a houseboat by the Padma, totally enchanted by the world. These were not lectures; they were snapshots. Tagore writes about the monsoon clouds and the Padma river with such intimacy that you feel like you are sitting next to him on the deck. It grounded me and helped me heal. In a year that felt fleeting and monotonous, Chinnopotro was a lesson in slowing down and actually looking at things. 

Then I moved to the complete opposite end of the emotional spectrum with Franz Kafka’s Letters to Milena (S. Fischer Verlag, 1952). If Tagore was at peace, Kafka was in an unadulterated panic. Reading Kafka’s letters is like watching a friend self-sabotage in real time: desperate, anxious, deeply in love, and yet terrified of that love. Oddly, it was comforting to see a literary giant so exposed on paper. It made my own anxieties feel valid, almost human.

Finally, I read Humayun Ahmed-er Koyekti Chhithi O Ekti Diary (Anyaprokash, 2013) by Sahana Kayes . This one felt closer to home. We grew up with Humayun Ahmed as a kind of mythical storyteller, the man who created Himu and Misir Ali. But seeing him through his letters, and through Kayes’s framing, stripped away the myth. It was raw and domestic. It reminded me that authors aren’t gods; they are just people who feel things intensely and write them down. Initially, I got to know about this book from a radio show, and couldn’t help buying a copy. I would urge anyone who is a fan of Humayun Ahmed to give this book a very worthwhile read

This year of “eavesdropping” through authors’ mail changed how I read. I stopped looking for perfect plots and started looking for honest voices. Letters aren’t written for an audience; they are written for one person. Because of that, they hold a kind of truth that fiction can not touch. It turns out some of the most revealing things writers leave behind are not  in their manuscripts, but in the notes they scribble to the people they loved.

Iftehaz Yeasir Iftee, a student at IBA, University of Dhaka, is a featured poet in the global anthology Luminance under the pseudonym Brotibir Roy.