Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn – A Book Review

             At what length would you go to prove your point, to punish, to win?

Boy meets girl

Well, this initial half of the book felt to me, more like reading ‘Men are from Mars and Women from Venus’, through a woman’s heart though. Why he behaves the way he does, why she should act when he does what he isn't supposed to do, why it is better to accept and let go of certain ways and mannerisms and childishness and manliness of the gender M. She loves him for a reason, she cannot resist him. He makes her laugh, he gives her space and so does she, Amy Dunne is happy being Mrs. Nick Dunne and not ‘Amazing Amy’. Amazing Amy? A character created by the perfect couple, the soul mates, her parents; a best seller. Since her childhood, Amazing Amy has had a conscious imposition on Amy’s life, but with Nick, life is different, she is herself, not a character from a book. And so what if they both have lost their jobs and have had to leave the limelight of New York to beat the recession and move into the quite neighborhood of Nick’s town to stay with his ailing mother; she is coping with all of this and what is important is that she has Nick by her side. Nick and his sister have bought and are running ‘The Bar’ with her money.

Amy writes a diary; all her happy moments with Nick are there. But Nick has been behaving unlike him lately, she is afraid of him; she wants to buy a gun!

And then on their fifth anniversary, as Nick returns home, the front door is open, the house is in disarray, there is an evidence of a struggle and Amy is gone!

Boy loses Girl

            

          Amy’s disappearance sets Nick on a treasure hunt that she has devised for him. A punishing treasure hunt, a cunning one. For some time, he repents having treated his wife wrongfully when he discovers clue after clue, letter after letter, the wonderful thoughts that his wife has had for him. But are the letters what they are, is his comprehension of them right? Everything is going against Nick. Why did Amy want to buy a gun? Amy is pregnant. His neighbour who he thought never spoke to Amy confirms that he tortures her and wants to kill her and their unborn child. His infidelity is discovered. His credit card transactions show costly items he never bought and like magic they appear in his sisters’ shed. Thinks get murkier as time passes. Stories she had told about her stalkers are horrific lies and all that the associated people from those incidents can do are run, run, run like hell...away, away, far away from her. No need for revenge; they have been bitten so badly and fear her so much that they cannot think remotely of revenge.

            So what does poor Nick do? He plays along Amy’s game not knowing if she is dead or alive. He laments in public about her disappearance and how much he loves his wife and how he has wronged her and wants her back to correct things. So is Amy dead or alive? Is she pregnant? Is her diary a hoax? So who is Nick’s wife, Amy or Amazing Amy? Was their life a consciously devised manipulative game, devised by her all the time? Has she let him have his way at times to win this sadistic war for proving she is, was always right? Find out, there is an uglier truth lying there.

I meet Gone Girl

            At what length would you go to prove your point, to punish, to win?

Amy’s mind is a shithole. It terrified, terrifies me that a person can live all her life as a game just to prove she is right. Creepy! How can you choose to fall in love, year after year, live a fictitious happy life with the only purpose to make someone else’s miserable? Can be understood in the case of revenge, but otherwise how? Why? It is mental sickness alright? Obsessive Compulsive Disorder – yes, yes, yes! Would you fear Amy or someone like her less than the deadliest of murderers? I hated Amy of course, but I hated Nick more in the end for his imbecility, for the erratic meaningless choice that he made; sounded not only silly but obnoxious to me but this is Gillian Flynn’s (she is a beauty, isn't she?) story not mine and she wanted Amy to win, I guess. The story evolves in the second half and you have to give it to Gillian Flynn to have been able to devise a horrendous character with such a sick mind. The fourth star is for making me realize such things do happen. This would definitely prove to be an encouraging book for all misogynists.

This definitely needs to be read by all married men and more importantly needs to be kept away from their better/bitter halves. All I remember when I think of Amy is what Nick’s dad says: Fuckinbitch fuckinbitch fuckinbitch fuckinbitch

Definitely want to watch the movie

My Rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 7/10

Gillian Flynn

Small World by David Lodge – A Book Review

David Lodge’s is a small world; the Japanese call it a narrow world. It is a world of conferences - literary conferences, conferees, professors, writers, critics, linguistic enthusiasts and geniuses, universities, educationists and once through this novel, one would wonder if there does exist a world beyond these universities and conferences; where do WE live then or is our existence a myth? And these so called guardians and critics of literature are not bound merely to their books and epics and poems and poets; they are also travelers  lovers, drinkers and for all that, a crazy lot too!

Persse McGarrigle is a conference virgin when we embark on this story, but by the end of it, he is spread, laid, banged and turned into a conference slut, if we can call him one, considering his rigorous globetrotting to attend and evade the miscellaneous conferences in search of Ms. Angelica Pabst, the most beautiful girl he has ever met, trying to finish her doctoral dissertation on Romance – how lovely! This is his disastrous, frustrating and comic journey around the world in search of the evasive girl who has played a prank on him and given him the skip, his true love because he believes in her and it. Persse is a virgin otherwise too, one of those who believe in keeping the sacred act reserved for the necessary suffering called marriage. But then the poor guy discovers that she isn’t so sacred for this sacred plunge as one fine day, rather night, discovers her in the cheap bars of Soho, not only stripping but likely to do much more and then again discovers otherwise; she wasn’t her, his Angelica after all. So imagine his plight when he finally finds her and plunges into bed and mounts and rides and rises to collapse, not once but thrice, and is exhausted and drained but still in love, only to find that the soft hills were not hers, the valleys were not hers and it was not she, Angelica; “Jassus”, Percy must have shouted out loud at the discovery of this disaster!

Persse and Angelica are of course not the only attendees at these conferences. There is Morris Zapp, the suave and witty university professor who is thoroughly proud of and so much in love with himself. I guffawed at one of the papers he presented on ‘The Interpretation of Text’. He has had a short romance with his friend Phillip Swallow’s wife, was deceivingly forced into a threesome by Fulvia Morgana, another professor and her husband, and now aspires and will marry Thelma Ringbaum, another professor’s wife. Is this book about infidelities, well this is just the beginning. Phillip Swallow, in turn has had limited fun with Morris Zapp’s wife, survived a plane crash, enticed Joy Simpson, wife of a fellow colleague who has been kind enough to give him shelter after the accident and is now ready to divorce his wife and family for the remembrance and life time reliving of that one passionate night. And here is Morris Zapp’s divorced wife, Desiree getting cosy in the sheets with Ronald Frobisher. Wow and there’s more!

Infidelity is just a part, you will marvel at the kind of coincidences Mr. Lodge has packed into this book. There are times, rather most of the times; you would scream “Oh, pleaseeee, spare me, that’s too much of a coincidence!”, but Persse McGarrigle will meet all the right people at the wrong places, bump into the wrong people at the right places, and of course the right people at the right places; all except Angelica of course! You will not complain though and love it nonetheless, at least I did! And not only Persse, but others too are magically placed together in flights and find each other rightfully in bars and restaurants, children lost 27 years ago find their parents when their old hitherto unknown father has just proposed to marry a girl his daughters’ age, messages left at the weirdest of places are gloriously discovered, a lost or rather runaway husband is found tragically when a boat is about to sink…and this…and that….

And embedded in this comic confusions and coincidences is literature, well thought of, well presented, giving a new dimension at the texts that we read, how we read them, register, perceive and form opinions about. This book is an easy read and God I have read it at leisure and enjoyed every bit of this witty novel. It came as a cool breeze of fresh air after having read ‘The Gathering’ and ‘As I Lay Dying’. Highly recommended if you desire a good laugh! Mr. David Lodge, I am definitely reading the next one!

P.S.: At a paper on the subject ‘The Function of Criticism’ presented by a few of our learned educationists and highly acclaimed laureates, Persse asked a simple yet very relevant question which silenced all the speakers. Look out for it.

This is a part of the oration of Dr.Morris Zapp on the presentation of his paper on ‘The Interpretation of Texts’ – Enjoy! (May seem offensive to some, but then that’s not me, it’s Morris Zapp or rather David Lodge).

“The classical tradition of striptease, however, which goes back to Salome’s dance of the seven veils and beyond, and which survives in a debased form in the dives of your Soho, offers a valid metaphor for the activity of reading. The dancer teases the audience, as the text teases its readers, with the promise of an ultimate revelation that is infinitely postponed. Veil after veil, garment after garment is removed, but it is the delay in the stripping that makes it exciting, not the stripping itself; because no sooner has one secret been revealed than we lose interest in it and crave another. When we have seen the girl’s underwear, we want to see her body, when we have seen her breasts, we want to see her buttocks, when we have seen her buttocks, we want to see her pubis, and when we see her pubis, the dance ends – but is our curiosity and desire satisfied? Of course not! The vagina remains hidden within the girls body shaded by her pubic hair, and even if she were to spread her legs before us [at this, several ladies in the audience noisily departed], it would still not satisfy the curiosity and desire set in motion by the stripping. Staring into that orifice, we find that we have somehow overshot the goal of our quest, gone beyond pleasure in contemplated beauty, gazing into the womb, we are returned to the mystery of our own origins. Just so in reading. The attempt to peer into the very core of a text, to possess once and for all its meaning is vain; it is only ourselves that we find there, not the work itself. To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of the text to another. The text unveils itself before us but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of striving to possess it, we should take pleasure in its teasing.”

My Rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 9/10

David Lodge

The Gathering by Anne Enright – A Book Review

The glaring rays of the sun are such a delight today; it’s a warm afternoon. It’s been raining unceasingly for the last two days and I can see the coconut tree in my backyard in its shadow, in its reflection in the small puddle that hasn't dried up yet and in itself of course  A small beautiful yellow butterfly with a dab of black flits playfully among the branches; now she is here, now she is not.

I follow her aimless path and I wonder what makes this beautiful being so restless, is there a purpose to her irritating journey where I lose her so frequently and then she appears teasingly from some other corner and I would have missed her if she would not have beguiled me into searching with such hunger. Even when she is long gone, she lingers in my mind and I realize it is not the restless butterfly buzzing in my head but the crazy and disturbing thoughts that Anne Enright through Veronica has drilled into me. I think I am losing it just like Veronica is!

Veronica is a mother of two girls; she is one of the twelve siblings. Twelve children and seven miscarriages; that has been the talent of her mother and father of course. 

There were girls at school whose families grew to a robust five or six. There were girls with seven or eight – which was thought a little enthusiastic – and then there were the pathetic ones like me, who had parents that were just helpless to it, and bred as naturally as they might shit.

Liam, her younger brother who she is closest to, is dead. Dead from drowning in the sea. He walked into it of his own accord. Suicide! Why? Did it happen due to an incident that happened long back at her grandmother’s house when they were innocent children; a shocking revelation to Veronica but which neither she nor Liam ever spoke about? But that was a long way into the past and Liam is in his forties when he finally decides to give up. What bearing on our everyday life does a past incident have, how difficult is it to forget this deeply rooted remembrance; does a single incident, however disgusting it might be, shape us, our decisions, our outlook towards life?

As Veronica gathers her family and journeys to bring back home what is left of Liam, his body, her thoughts about their inseparable childhood doesn't let her rest. In sporadic bursts, Ada, her grandmother, Charlie, her grandpa, the other guy Lambert Nugent and the secrets of their juxtaposed lives create a ruckus in her mind. She has turned into an insomniac, like a ghost she roams her house alone, drives aimlessly in the morning. She just can’t let go off Liam, their childhood, their growing up, their distances, their separations and it is driving her crazy.

 I am all for sadness, I say, don’t get me wrong. I am all for the ordinary life of the brain. But we fill up sometimes, like those little wooden birds that sit on a pole – we fill up with it, until donk, we tilt into the drink.

This isn't a story, it is the ramblings of Veronica, a lengthy loony conversation that she has with you where she reveals the madhouse of her mind, the uninvited disturbing thoughts that come up sporadically out of nowhere and at times you are infected and fooled into her pit of directionless nonsensical discursive. At times you can’t take anymore of her dirty and disgusting thoughts and like her husband, you want her to stop but she is in no mood to spare you and at times you grin at her silliness and absurdity. She is driving herself to madness, you think, and she IS, at the expense of her dead brother and their living thoughts and the discoveries that she makes post his death. I wouldn't be surprised if the author was on a psychedelic high or shamelessly drunk or in a disturbed state when she wrote this book. Is there a plot, there almost always is, but that is not what this book is about; its essence lies in its madness, in trying to comprehend and not be confused by what is reality and what is Veronica’s imagination.

And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like a massive waste of energy……and we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love anymore. And there is no logic or use to any of this that I can see.

And I turn around again and gather the covers about me, as the thing my husband is fucking in his sleep slowly recedes. A thing that might be me. Or it might not be me. It might be Marilyn Monroe – dead or alive. It might be a slippery, plastic kind of girl, or a woman he knows from work, or it might be a child – his own daughter, why not? There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I am not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw a line.

The initial pages of the book will remind you of ‘The Sense of an Ending’ because it is failing memories that Enright plays with. For me, the initial half of the book felt a little boring to the point I wanted to give it up which I don’t generally do with books, but I realized it was a building up of what captivated and influenced me in the latter part of the book.

There she goes again, my fluttering yellow butterfly.

My Rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 7/10 

Anne Enright

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner – A Book Review

A woman lies dying, a mother, Addie Bundren. Outside her window, her eldest son, Cash hammers and saws on the coffin he is readying for her even before she is dead. Her other two sons step out to earn three dollars aware that they won’t be there when she breathes her last. The old man, Anse, her husband lies there on a chair complaining about his failing knees.

And then she is dead. Her favorite son Jewel is not around when she is dead neither is Darl as they had expected. She didn't want to be buried here, at this place but she wanted to lie beneath the earth at her folks place. So the journey begins to take a lifeless body, a long gone wife, a detached mother to Jefferson, miles away where she wished to be buried. But there has been a relentless rain and the bridges over the river have been washed away by the flood. So the decrepit cart is turned through another town but cross one of the rivers they must. As they challenge the river on the ford, the cart succumbs and the mules are fat and dead with their peeping legs at the surface of the angry river. The coffin is afloat and the brothers are barely able to save it and themselves and Cash, the eldest son damages his leg when the cart falls over him.

For ten long days, the family, at the arrogance of Anse Bundren, the father, drifts with the soiled, smelly and decaying body towards Jefferson as the buzzards circle the sky in anticipation.

And is that all? Yes and no! Written in a manner in which Faulkner dedicates each chapter to each character and the voices are their own, there is a shameful past of the dead woman, the instability of Darl, the pigheadedness of Anse the father, the rebellion of Jewel to live with the family yet stay apart, the secret of the daughter Dewey Dell and was Anse’s rush and determination to bury the body in Jefferson truly from the love of his wife or was it a contrivance at the cost of his family

            There is a considerable amount of rawness in the characters and the writing as each character reveals their perspective and contributes to the happenings. I felt the story being dragged relentlessly by the unheeding mules of repetition. I neither loved the characters nor hated them apart from the thick headed bigoted Anse Bundren, the father. And there is no comic relief, unless you call the ignorant and ghastly cementing of Cash’s injured leg as humor. William Faulkner, to me, simply presented the characters and left the deciphering to the reader which is not a crime at all but I just couldn't register the greatness of this critically acclaimed piece of American literature, nor did the language appease me. Sorry Mr.Faulkner!

           

 My Rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 5/10

William Faulkner

An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde – A Book Review

I have been grinning all through the reading of this play! If there is a definition of satire, this has to be it (forgive me my ignorance of not having read more of this kind). I have always respected sarcasm because it is one of the wittiest forms of intelligence and if I may take the liberty to say so, a remedy to the plain and dull way of general life. And Oscar Wilde immerses you in it, completely, and you would rather choke on the drollness of his language than struggle to breathe the unembellished procedural air above. His extravagant descriptions are a celebration of words.

“Mabel Chiltern is a perfect example of prettiness, the apple-bosom type. She has all the fragrance and freedom of a flower. There is ripple after ripple of sunlight in her hair, and the little mouth, with its parted lips, is expectant, like the mouth of a child. She has the fascinating tyranny of youth, and the astonishing courage of innocence. To sane people she is not reminiscent of any work of art. But she is really like a Tanagra statuette, and would be rather annoyed if she were told so.”

Oh and there is a plot too; of deceit, of blackmailing! Sir Robert Chiltern is one of the richest and most respected gentlemen, of considerably high stature in the London society and an unblemished eminent individual in the political circle so much so to be a proposed member of the Parliament. Yet, his reputation, his entire political career, his future and more importantly the undying love and respect of his wife vacillates on the thinnest of threads orchestrated by the guileful Mrs.Cheveley. She harbors in her breast, a devastating secret of which the society is yet to be educated. So, would Sir Robert Chiltern hold his fort of honor and see his life wasted or would he yield in to the foxy scheme of Mrs.Cheveley – only if things were so easy!

“Sir Robert Chiltern: To attempt to classify you, Mrs. Cheveley, would be an impertinence. But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.”

Enter Lord Goring, a charming dandy of great fortune who is equally reputable but for his unmistaken competence in his indolence and unconcern; for him a matter of pride. Ladies are beguiled by his presence in spite of his glorified love for himself; his father’s tongue for him is not so eloquent though. His love for Mabel Chiltern, Sir Robert’s sister is undisclosed to her though her’s for him is loud and prominent.

“Lord Goring: You see, Phipps, Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear. Just as vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people. To love oneself is the beginning of a life time romance, Phipps.”

Sir Robert Chiltern considers him a dear and trustworthy friend and pours his heart out on his mystifying dilemma. What follows is a comical Shakespearean circus of confusion which would be welcomingly applauded on a real stage – comical for the readers, tragic for the characters.

            Oscar Wilde is a master of wit. Reading ‘An Ideal Husband’ brings to life a forgotten era of Lords and Viscounts, of long flowing skirts, uncomfortable layers of clothing, of ornate bonnets, of unreal wigs, the affectation of verbal soliloquies, the silverware and the annoying docility to indignation among others. For our generation and the one’s arriving, this polished multitude is or would be more incredible than the speaking lion from the Chronicles of Narnia.

            I could only try to imagine being teary from the sporadic bursts of laughter if I ever had the following kind of conversation with my father, and my father? He would only be assured that after all, I am a lunatic.

“Lord Caversham: Want to have a serious conversation with you, sir.

Lord Goring: My dear father! At this hour?

Lord Caversham: Well, sir, it is only ten o’clock. What is your objection to the hour? I think the hour is an admirable hour!

Lord Goring: Well, the fact is, father, this is not my day for talking seriously. I am very sorry, but it is not my day.

Lord Caversham: What do you mean, sir?

Lord Goring: During the Season, father, I only talk seriously on the first Tuesday in every month, from four to seven.

Lord Caversham: Well, make it Tuesday, sir, make it Tuesday.

Lord Goring: But it is after seven, father, and my doctor says I must not have any serious conversation after seven. It makes me talk in my sleep.

Lord Caversham: Talk in your sleep, sir? What does that matter? You are not married.”

My Rating: * * * * * * * * * * - 10/10

Oscar Wilde

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon – A Book Review

Claim to Fame : The book won the 2003 Whitbread book of the year award. It was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker prize.

The neighbors’ dog is dead. He was called Wellington and he is Mrs. Shear’s dog. Someone killed him brutally by driving a garden fork through him. Christopher Boone is the prime suspect since the dead dog is last seen in his arms. Christopher Boone likes dogs. He is 15 years old. He hits the interrogating policeman because he tried to touch him; he doesn't like anybody touching him. He needs to find out who killed Wellington; he decides to do some detecting and goes around the neighborhood asking questions against his father’s command.

            When we were children, we blindly believed in our history books, in the martyrs, the brave and the wicked and evil persons. We believed in our grandmother’s stories of dreadful ogres and that they hid behind bridges to devour humans. We were told that Jack & Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water and we never questioned if there wasn't another well or river or lake nearby. We simply trusted what we heard, what we saw. If my father convinced me as a kid that I could not touch the moon because it was too high above the mountains and some malefic forces had made the ladder reaching to it disappear, I believed him then but I don’t question him now on its authenticity because I grew up, I understood that everyone cannot have all answers.

            Christopher Boone is autistic. His mother died of a heart attack two years back. He never lies, he knows all about galaxies, is brilliantly intelligent to get an A grade in the A level math exam, he is brainy with equations, remembers acutely what he sees and aspires to be an astronaut. He does fall short on emotions and communicating though and feelings need to be explained to him. He needs to be told in detail and without any ambiguity for him to register. He can’t be told about the nonexistent ladder hanging from the moon!

            Christopher’s pursuit for Wellington’s killer opens up hidden closets and buried skeletons when he realizes that there is a lot that his father has concealed from him. He now knows who has killed Wellington, he discovers that his mother is alive, finds the letters that mother had written to him but were never handed over by his dad and knows where she lives. Why his father, who loves him the most, has committed such a lowly act he doesn't want to know. He just wants to get away from his father and this takes him on a daring journey to London to his mother’s place where there is another revelation to be disclosed.

            One character I really liked in the book is Siobhan, Christopher’s teacher who is gifted with an enormous amount of patience. Narrated in the first person, Mark Haddon writes intelligently and in a lucid manner presents the life of Christopher. It is a difficult subject to tread on. You are at times stunned at the clarity of thought that the child has and would want to be him in some difficult situations in life where you know the truth and dare to speak it devoid of emotions, hurt or pain - but then autism is not a choice. We, with a slightly better boon of communication face so many difficulties in routine life; spare a thought for the courageous Christopher for whom every other person is a stranger and bewildering, a simple journey on a train is such a mammoth and scary task. That he is a mathematical genius yet fails to understand love and care in the true sense does hurt though.

Just imagine this logical and scary piece of thinking by Christopher:

“And people who believe in God think God has put human beings on the earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put human beings into a zoo, like we put chimpanzees and gorillas into a zoo. Or human beings will all catch a disease and die out or they will make too much pollution and kill themselves, and then there will only be insects in the world and they will be the best animal.”

My Rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 6/10

Mark Haddon

Smell by Radhika Jha – A Book Review

There is a thundering sound up there. The first drops of rain fall on the parched earth; they have traveled miles only to splatter against the myriad surfaces  and amidst the scattering crowd looking for shelter, a penetrable smell arises; of the soil. It has always been there but it takes the advent of the rain to catalyze that strong happy odour, a smell marking change, a wetness redefining green and your eyes close unconsciously as you sniff with a deep breath and a heaving chest and the smell permeates and fills up your senses.

And can a stronger, better and unparalleled smell exist than that of a mother? An infant sleeping peacefully, cuddled in the safety of her embrace; her touch and scent an invisible layer of protection. You don’t need to turn around to know she is there; her clothes bear elaborately that cognitive, distinct Motherly smell and the presence of it lingers like a taken for granted comfortable acceptance; an acceptance which didn't need any accepting.

Then there are the myriad confusing smells of spices, the intoxicating fragrance of the rose, the salty smell of the sea, the pungent odour of sweat, the eggy smell of a freshly baked cake, the reeking of dried blood, the stench of death, the raw carnal smell oozing from the wild sensations of passionately intertwined bodies. We all have a realization of these smells but Leela, the protagonist of this novel envisages that her olfactory senses go beyond the normal. She has been displaced to her uncle’s house in France, abandoned by her mother due to the untimely death of her father in Nigeria, where she belonged.

Her life changes immensely as she is trying to come to terms with the acerbic tone of her aunt and her new lessons in cooking (which would be an integral attribute in her life later), when an untoward incident forces her to run away from the only family she knows in France, that of her uncle and aunt’s.

“I had rather be a whore than return back there”, she proclaims.

Her only friend Lotti comes as a guardian angel to her rescue and fixes her up with a female model for sharing a room. Once with Maeve, the model, Leela conveniently forgets Lotti. A few months later, when Maeve can’t accommodate her due to personal reasons, she shows the way for Leela to be au pair for the Baleine’s and their two growing children. Once comfortable with the family, she readily gives herself to Bruno (Mr. Baleine) and dreams of him forsaking his wife for her. And this doesn't last for long as she ultimately realizes that her placement at the Baleine’s was scripted since Bruno had a penchant for exotic females. Out of the Baleine’s family and she dives straight into the arms of Philippe Lavalle, a tycoon in the food business, a Casanova known to play and fiddle with beauties and dump them at will; she wants to be famous with him as the stepping stone. Her newly found friend Olivier, who likes her, has warned her against him but she has this penchant of abandoning well wishers and conveniently forgetting their favors in hard times; maybe this feeling was absorbed from her abandoning by her mother. From one male to other, she chooses and allows herself be used and abused and she wants people to be feel sorry for her sorry state. She keeps Philippe Lavalle mused by describing to him the various smells emanating from his body, during the wild love making and otherwise and when she fails to entice him anymore, he throws her out of his life like clearing a speck of dirt from his shirt.

Almost throughout the book, you hunt for a connection to smell, you seek to discover the extraordinary olfactory sense of Leela, but you realize you are toyed around with and the only unobvious premise you are presented is Leela’s disturbing discovery of a strange unpleasant smell within herself which she is afraid will get exposed to others and will render her unacceptable and she is turning crazy in bits because of this made up fear. In the end, it is a stranger, a ventriloquist who makes her realize that there is no smell, it is just a self created veil against which she prefers hiding and has now found comfort in and how important it is for her to drive away that fear from her mind which permits others to strike heavily and disgracefully on this vulnerability of not being accepted.

The writing appears subdued to a great extent and lacks passion. The author implicitly wants us to sympathize with Leela’s naivete and vulnerability but the want to do so lacks merit when the character is so thankless, selfish and unconcerned. It seemed like Radhika Jha had a mouth watering delicious dish in mind but she somehow what is finally presented is a bland assortment on your hungry plate.

My Rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 4/10

Radhika Jha

The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes – A Book Review

Do you remember your first kiss? Not a peck on the cheek; the real thing! I do. That memory of mine is so distinctly etched within the complexities of the brain that when I want to voluntarily remember and revive it, it gushes like an unstoppable river with an indefinable urgency. And I am not surprised at my analogy of a river; it is only natural because a river it was, rather the rocky banks of it where it happened. She was sitting beside me as we went on with our idiosyncrasies when a soft noise behind alerted us both and we turned almost at the same time and in doing so our cheeks brushed. Our cheeks brushed but our hearts thumped by that slight touch and I can never forget that longing, vulnerable and effusive look in her eyes, nor can I forget the inevitable fear and the simmering blood in me from the sudden adrenaline rush. It happened in a jiffy, the converging of our shaky lips, the urgency to taste, to suck, to slither and probe unknown corners within the small room of the mouth. Maybe it was the inexperience that had the lasting effect of this trembling and groping memory.

            And then years later, I met her yesterday at a reunion. We had broken up a long time back and I thought she would give me the cold shoulder but when we met, she was pleasant and smiled. She introduced me to her husband and when he left, the cunning person that I am, I tried to remind her of our first kiss on the rocks. She made a face as if someone had shoved a frog in her mouth – “Grow up, she said, we never went beyond holding hands, you never had the courage and I left you precisely for that lack of passion, so stop making stories and being a loser” – and she walked away, disgusted.

            “Liar!” I wanted to scream. Was I lying, couldn't be. I tried to go back to that day yet again in my mind, but it was not easy this time, I couldn't hear the sound behind us, I felt the palpitation but the look in her eyes were missing.  So then, was she right? Where did the glorified memory come from then, which I colored so frequently? Was it a fragment then, that I had invented and made myself believe in by forced repetition, a heroic act I was incapable of? Or had memory failed me? I felt like a fool, rather lost….

“And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our accounts, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.”

Memories - a strong part of our existence. How much can we rely on them? How much of it happens and how much of it is created? What part of it is lost on us? And how much do we remember? Would life be the same when we realize the memories we have been nurturing are mere figments of our imagination? Julian Barnes plays and puzzles us over the meandering streams of sprawling memories and leaves you amazed and helpless and lost. I loved the matter-of-fact and witty writing style and from the very first page; it was a delight as the curtains unraveled to the mysteries and failures of the mind.

“But time…..how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being safe.”

This is the life of Tony Webster and he begins his tale from his school days. His close pals Colin, Alex and Adrian, the new boy, like all from that difficult age, are struggling to find answers, delving into their own theories and are being happily convinced and content by their own arguments; anarchists in their own right. In all this, the new boy Adrian Finn is being looked upon by the trio as a thinker, as having a mind who doesn't accept without reason or principles; any form of rebellion is good in that age, more true of the mind and thoughts. The suicide of Robson, one of the school boys after having got his girlfriend pregnant shatters the entire school and our quartet of philosophical thinkers concludes that the act ‘was unphilosophical, self-indulgent and inartistic: in other words wrong.’

After the friends go their own ways to different universities, Tony falls for Veronica, a stubborn girl, but not for long as they go separate ways and as if to mock Tony, to make him realize how inappropriate he was, she hooks his best friend Adrian. Before Tony’s break up however, he visits Veronica’s family, which he finds to be substantially erratic except for her mother who warns him against giving much leeway to her daughter. Tony wonders what she means by that. Adrian being the gentleman that he is, seeks permission from Tony for his courtship with Veronica through a letter and Veronica is part of that letter. Tony writes back his consent and it is forgotten. Until the suicide of Adrian at Veronica’s place comes as a blow and Tony is sure that the disturbed Veronica is to blame.

“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age; when we are young we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for ourselves.”

Tony is now retired, divorced, life is monotonous but not mundane. The clear waters are again rippled when he receives an envelope from a solicitor; Sarah Ford, now deceased, according to her will has left him five hundred pounds, a note and Adrians diary, which is conveniently missing from the envelope. Sarah Ford is Veronica’s mother and the last line of her note is pretty disturbing – “P.S. It may sound odd, but I think the last months of his (Adrian’s) life were happy.”

Why did Adrian choose to leave his diary to him, why did Veronica steal it, what was in it that she didn't want him to read. This begins his quest for the last belonging of his friend Adrian. Veronica plays her own games to keep it away from him but does send him a copy of a letter; the same letter Tony had written to Adrian and Veronica years ago granting them permission to go on. That he is shattered on reading his own writing would be a much suppressed adjective. He gets lost on himself. Was he lying to himself all these years or was it his own failing memory stabbing him wholeheartedly, or did he push himself to believe what he thought was a fact? The quest for these answers, the truth, the need to be set free, to unwind, to remember, to obliterate the shades of grey takes him yet again to Veronica and what he learns, not through her though feels like a hard punch which knocks the air out of him. Adrian Finn, you were something, weren't you – as the friends would have put “That is philosophically self-evident.”

I already want to read this book again.

P.S.: The I and she in the first 3 paragraphs are purely fictional characters!

My Rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 9/10

Julian Barnes

Walking With The Comrades by Arundhati Roy - A Book Review

           It is five stars even before I have touched it. I hold the small book like a sacred text. There is an element of fear - what if the writing is not as soul stirring as 'The God Of Small Things'? I worship Arundhati Roy's writing, her madness. But this is non-fiction I remind myself. So Comrade Rahel and Comrade Estha will not drench me in their torrential emotions, the extremely irritable and idiosyncratic Chacko will be missing, Sophie Mol will still be sleeping peacefully and wild Ammu and her lover, Ammachi, Papachi, the Jam factory.....

Hey but there are comrades in this one too - real ones. Comrades of the forest. The Maoist and Naxalite rebellions are one of the oldest in India. This book is the journal of Roy's visit to the dense jungles of the dreaded DandaKaranya forests in Chattisgarh, in central India, home and hub to the Maoist movement where the comrades greet her with ‘Lal Salaams’. It is a presentation, a glimpse into the lives of the revolutionaries, these oppressed, oppressive people, a first hand experience of what they think of the Government, the Police hunting them like dogs and the other part of society; the other part that have a freedom to live – to live freely.

Lord Ganesha agreed to write the Mahabharata only if Ved Vyasa, without a pause would narrate the entire epic lest he influenced his own thoughts in the narrative. It is a crime for a translator to involve her thoughts, to be biased but Roy does extend a small hand of empathy and pulls the rope towards the Maoists. But then she is the very few who makes an attempt, who tries to tell the other side of the story.

Who ARE these Maoists, these tribals? Why are they Maoists, why did they become them? Were they created, do they love to kill, why the revolution in ones own country by these poor villagers? These inquiries are far from getting easy answers but when the government and the papers feign to clarify, the faint line between fact and fiction is ostentatiously blurred. Roy attempts to tell their tale, their version. Isn't it funny when the tribal villagers ask the Naxals to come and save them, but they are the projected atrocious lot, aren't they? Is it only natural to pick up a gun and defend and kill when you are evicted or lured and threatened into eviction by the Government to please the Corporate and earn from their meaty industrial plans? Or does it need the repeated burning down of not only houses but entire villages, rationing food and medicines, raping at will. Would they not have been happy tilling their lands? This is their land, isn't it, their forest, who is the intruder? The hunter has become the hunted. The Government calls this movement ‘Salva Judum’ – the purification hunt! Ha!

It is important to know why they have chosen this homeless life else who would like to walk days on end in the dangers of the wild, man being a bigger threat than the animals. Living in temporary makeshift huts and always being in hiding is not exactly an idea of a great life, is it? Fear isn't good but they are the fearless.

Arundhati Roy, in her lucid and sarcastic statements evidences that Maoists like us, are men and women of flesh and blood, they bleed, they get angry, they laugh, they cry; sing, like to enjoy just like us. They do what they do and have chosen this difficult path for a reason. The bare and basic reason for survival, for existence!

Some excerpts from her beautiful observations and writing:

“It’s an upside-down town, inside-out town. In Dantewada the police wear plain clothes and the rebels wear uniforms. The jail superintendent is in jail. The prisoners are free (three hundred of them escaped from the old town jail two years ago. Women who have been raped are in police custody. The rapists give speeches in the bazaar.”

"The drive from Raipur to Dantewada takes about ten hours through areas known to be 'Maoist-infested'. These are not careless words. 'Infest/infestation' implies disease/pests. Diseases must be cured. Pests must be exterminates. Maoists must be wiped out. In these creeping. innocuous ways the language of genocide has entered our vocabulary."

Of a village, house where she stopped – “There is a spare beauty about the place. Everything is clean and necessary.”

“We will meet a Didi (Sister Comrade) who knows what the next step of the journey will be. There is an economy of information too. Nobody is supposed to know everything.”

“I remember my visit to the opencast iron-ore mines in Keonjar, Orissa. There was forest there once. And children like these. Now the land is like a raw, red wound.”

“We are approaching the ‘Border’. ‘Do you know what to do if we come under fire?” Sukhdev asks casually, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Immediately declare an indefinite hunger-strike;”

Arundhati Roy

Patriarch Run by Benjamin Dancer – A Book Review

I get up in the morning. Groggy, I pull the curtains. The sky looks messy; dark angry pregnant clouds drift, promising the delivery of a torrent. Doesn't matter, rather can’t matter; I brush my teeth unwillingly and get ready for another day to the office. In the other room, my nephew, half dozing half awake looks blankly at the effort of an omelet in his plate while turning a deaf ear to his mother’s hurried lips; it’s time for school. My young neighbor might finally go to sleep now having practiced Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the water’ the whole night on his guitar. On the road, hurried umbrellas and rain jackets wade the streets to get to their destinations. And life goes on…

But there are bigger and heavier things going on; somewhere. Wars are being planned, genocides are being sketched out. Maybe the soldier standing there on the border, under inhuman conditions, with his attentive and piercing eyes and armed gun may get a role in this movie of killings, maybe the role of a dead soldier. How much do we know and how much do we care? Spare a thought for the soldiers who follow orders, kill, against their conscience.

Would you believe that a mass extermination of the race is sometimes not as inevitable as much as it is necessary? In ‘Patriarch Run’, Jack, an undercover agent of the US Government is a thinker and an observer and what he discerns scares him as it would scare me and you. He explicates why killings are a requisite for this spiral viral reproductions of the humans, else the people dying of hunger today due to lack of resources would be much greater in number than the people existing and it won’t be very long while we ride the dinosaurs in a different world. As Jack quotes,

“The number of people without enough to eat in the world today is equal to the entire human population of 1810. Where is the pressure, the competition, the predator to check human civilization?”

Aren't the deadly tsunamis, cyclones, forest fires, earthquakes then a worthy attempt, a natural course of Mother Nature to restore the balance? It reminds me of the Pink Floyd song, ‘She will take it back, someday…’

Jack, a mercenary, has stolen a device from the Chinese, that has the power of destroying the world and he is on the run. As he is hunted down, his abandoned wife Rachel and son Billy inadvertently get into the crossfire. And Jack beyond the bombings, remembers nothing. So how does he chance upon his wife, child and ‘Yan Shi', the device? Will the world be saved or do we find ourselves at the crossroad of Armageddon? Read this fast paced novel to find out.

Written with a purpose, the author builds up a lost relationship and longing between father and son; he intricately enumerates the consequences of lying on the altar of sacrifices, of making choices with no getaway to repentance when you have a larger role to play. This one is a page turner. Though at some places I thought the story could be a little tighter, overall it was a very interesting read, especially for the message that it conveys.

My rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 6/10

Benjamin Dancer

In the Country Of Men by Hisham Matar – A Book Review

          Betrayal. A stab in the back. If devoid of conscience, it is free of hurt; else you can never free yourself from the crushing ugly rock of repentance, of self pity.

            

          Did little Suleiman, a mere nine year old child know that he was betraying the ones he loved the most, murdering the hopes of a rebellion, a fight for a cause, a secret mission, a revolution to eradicate another? Was there a realization, even a tiny bit of shame when he did so?

            

          And for what, this heinous misdeed? It isn’t easy for a child to cope when the fatal realization dawns on him that his small world that he breathes in is built on a plinth of glorious lies. Is his Baba what he veritably knows him to be? Why does he leave them so frequently when he knows that Mama falls ill whenever he abandons them? Why can’t he be a simple man like Ustath Rashid, his best friends’ father? Left alone to be the man of the house, he is laden with his incapacitated Mama’s impressionable stories of her past, tales of woe and oppression a child should never discover. A boundary of hatred engulfs him when he realizes that his Baba has lied to him, to his Mama; what is this secret he can’t be told about? The internal turmoil lurking in a child’s mind can turn him into a monster, a fire breathing deadly ogre surpassing all confines of treachery.

            Hisham Matar’s story is based in Libya, during the trying times of Gadaffi’s revolutionary regime. It is a crushing tale of clandestine rebellion against this regime by a handful of comrades who strive for a better Libya, a free Libya lacking in oppression and dictatorship. It is the story of young Suleiman’s ugly and blatant utterance of truth, his gruesome effort of disentangling himself and breaking free from the cosmos of lies built around him. But truth comes at a price, at a devastating price.

           

            The writing lacks poetry, in fact is bland. It is plainly evident that the author thinks in his native language and what you read is a literal translation. You will inadvertently compare the story with Khaled Hosseini’s ‘The Kite Runner’. The stories from this part of the world are turning out into cliches but where the writing lacks in color, it compensates in its horrific simplicity and grotesque threadbare incidents of cruelty. Not for a moment did I feel any sympathy for the child; in fact I have to vulgarly admit that I hated him.

            Throttling freedom and strangling views under the veil of ideologies isn't manly, at all!

My rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 6/10

Hisham Matar