Oscar Wilde | Photo Credit: By special arrangementDear Reader,For the whole of Juneâcelebrated as the Pride MonthâI have been reading The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde by Peter Ackroyd. Not because it is about Oscar Wilde, who is one of the most famous LGBTQI+ icons of the modern world, but because this book, with its cover showing Wilde in his fineries in the foreground and two harlequins doing acrobatics in the background, screams for attention.I am happy I picked it up because the novel is immensely gratifying, a perfect combination of drollness and tragedy. Its narrator is a broken Oscar Wilde after his gruelling trial for obscenity and subsequent imprisonment in Reading gaolâin the book, he is in the last years of his life, living in exile in Paris, where his writing powers are almost gone, he is derided by his countrymen, financially ruined, and a painted shadow of his former, flamboyant self.What remains in him are the characteristic sharpness of observation and the irrepressible urge to dramatise the self. âAt most I might play a role in one of Plautusâs more horrifying comedies. I might be the old lecher, his face painted and his hair dyed, who is an object of ridicule to the audience whenever he appearsâalthough the audience does not know that it is laughing at itself. The world always laughs at its own tragedies: it is the only way it has been able to endure them.â This reminded me strongly of Death in Veniceâthe ageing artist who becomes an object of ridicule and pathos because his unageing soul still craves for the attention, accolades, and the abundant loves of youth.Of course, the premise of The Last Testament is fictionalâWilde never wrote a record of his days in Paris, with his last published work being a searingly honest long poem, âThe Ballad of Reading Gaolâ (1898), about his experience of incarceration. But Ackroyd ventriloquises Wilde so perfectly that the journal seems genuine. We feel this is exactly how the self-conscious artist would have expressed himself had he kept a diary, endlessly playing himself, even in the private pages of a journal. He is at the lowest ebb of his powers, but can be lively, wicked, manipulative, snooty, humble, self-pitying, grandiose, as the occasion demands. With that neurotic self-fashioning, Wilde the Victorian turns into Wilde the Modernist, leading us into the Modern age characterised by its splintered selves as against the unified selfhood of previous ages. ââ¦but now I am positively Whitmanesque. I contain multitudes,â he whispers. Ackroyd is a treat playing Wilde playing Wilde, and The Last Testament can indeed be called a pastiche of the highest quality, as its blurb says. Incidentally, Ackroyd as a writer is remarkable for the way he becomes the subject he writes about, so much so that it is difficult to take a guess at the writerâs personality behind the works. His prodigious output includes books on London (biographies of the city), novels on the poets Thomas Chatterton, John Milton, a retelling of The Canterbury Tales, as well as excellent biographies of Dickens and T.S. Eliot that read like novels. It is only recently, after having read six or seven of his books, that I learnt that Ackroyd is, among other things, disarmingly unassuming, notwithstanding his enviable knowledge of literature, that he is a recovering alcoholic, homosexual, and a recluse following a health breakdown and the death of his partner some years ago. (Read Ackroydâs interview with The Guardian here)Another exceptional book I must mention is The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, whose very title is exciting. It is said that imagination is like Adamâs dream: he awoke and found it true. So, while the caste-less society desired by Ambedkar and his ilk has not yet been actualised, as long as young writers and readers continue to dream and conceptualise its possibility, the hope stays alive. In this book, a group of speculative fiction writers imagine casteless futures that might just come true. As Amritesh Mukherjee writes in the review, âThe power of speculative fiction lies not just in its ability to predict the future but also in its willingness to break from the present.â And for those historically marginalised, this might be the way to survive. Read the reviewin the current issue of Frontline. Thatâs all from me this time. Catch you again next week, with âReading with Frontline, Version IIâ, where I engage not just with books but also other little pleasures of life, like music, paintings, memes, and the like. See you there.Till then,Anusua MukherjeeDeputy editorFrontlineCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS