Rajiva’s Coronavirus Collection

After publishing well over half a dozen books in the period after coronavirus struck, Rajiva Wijesinha has now produced a much slighter volume, which is described as the first in what is defined as The Coronavirus Collection. As this book suggests, they are short studies of different interests, in this case both books and places. The immediate motivation is sketched at the start of the volume, when the writer says,

Nostalgia is always fun, and in this time of coronavirus it seems not an indulgence but a necessity. What else can one do but sink into the past when

the future seems to have stopped?

Having produced two books about travel, the writer moves to another great pleasure in his life, and talks briefly about 40 or so books, including the works of Shakespeare and of Byron. From these sublime examples, he also moves too to bound editions of the Daily Mirror in the sixties, and to writing for children, from Edith Nesbit to Enid Blyton.

But there is interest, too. in the places where he read, a number of rooms in his childhood and current home in Alfred House Road, the GA’s Lodge in Kandy and the Kirk Oswald plantation in Bogowantalawa and the old family house in Kurunagala, the Old Place. There were even more exotic settings abroad, not only the quadrangles of his first Oxford College and the beautiful Fellows Garden of his second, but also the French Alps and even Windsor Castle. But there are also quiet places like a little hut in the centre of France where he found himself when hitch-hiking round that country,50 years ago, and read Virgil during a tranquil day.

The experiences are rich and the range of books dealt with fascinating. Though a slight book, the ground it covers during this period of restrictions is inspiring.