Last modified on Mon 1 Feb 2021 10.10 EST
In 1988, Pankaj Mishra was a would-be writer in Varanasi, north India, whiling away his days reading the American critic Edmund Wilson. In books such as
Axelâs Castle and
To the Finland Station, Mishra detected a temperament he could aspire to: erudite, self-assured, swiftly able to read between the lines of a book into the authorâs worldview and the wider social and historical milieu, âa man wholly devoted to reading and thinking and writingâ. But years later, trying to write on Wilson, Mishra realised that he had nothing new to say about his hero. âIt hadnât occurred to me,â he wrote, âthat a separate narrative probably existed in my private discovery of Wilsonâs writings in a dusty old library in the ancient town of Benares [Varanasi].â