'The Old Man and the Sea' by Ernest Hemingway – A Book Review

The ‘Old Man and the Sea’ is a classic, a 1953 Pulitzer winner contributing to Hemingway winning the Nobel Prize in 1954. It was Hemingway’s final published work during his lifetime.

The story is of old Santiago, a cheerful, strong willed fisherman, although an ill-fated one. ‘Salao’, they call him, meaning the unluckiest one since he hasn’t had a worthy catch since the last 84 days. His only companion, a young boy Manolin who looks up to him and probably the only person who cares for him, has to abandon him as his parents have ordered him to leave the doomed old man and find another worthwhile boat. Santiago goes out to sea on the 85^th day like all days with an undying hope in his heart, thinking it will be his lucky day this day and while he has purposefully strayed far into the sea and has made a great catch of a marlin, but alas, it is lost on the way to the brutal sharks.

‘Hope’ is a strong word! This is a simple yet great story of hope, of keeping it alive in the worst of times. Santiago’s solitary struggle and undying spirit in holding on to the huge fish symbolizes the hardships, the numerous insurmountable challenges faced by people from all walks of life. Whether it be a singer struggling to get his/her first break, an artist wanting his art to be praised worldwide, a youngster wanting to play for his country or a father wanting to do all that he can for his child's secure future, there is no end to the demanding situations and the bitter challenges of everyday life and what Santiago tells us like the Johnie Walker tagline is to ‘Keep Walking!’, to believe in oneself, to build a strong willed character, to pay no heed to the one’s laughing at you or your failures. And it takes a lot to earn respect, even though from a very few. Luck may change, upheave or bring down your condition in life but it is unlikely to change your character if it is unshakable and that is what will define you in the end.

It stresses on the fact that disappointment will come in every possible way and knock you down, but like the grass you have to stand strong with your grounded roots when the wind has calmed. The character Santiago reminds me of lines from a song written by Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore which goes as:

‘Jodi tor daak shune, keu naa aashe,
            Tobe ekla cholo re...’

meaning

‘If nobody heeds to your call and refuse to accompany you, don’t give up...just            keep walking alone’

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

Ernest Hemingway

Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey

            I somehow thought, when I had the book in my hands, considering the praises on its cover, that it would be a fun ride, a journey of guffaws and cunning smirks but alas, deceived and dejected! In a single sentence, I didn’t find anything great about the story.

So, Michael ‘Butcher’ Boone is an artist, a cranky profane one, is recently divorced losing a substantial count of his paintings and his child to the “Alimony whore” as he puts it. And Hugh ‘Slow’ Bones is his brother, slow in the mind and Michael is the one responsible to take care of him.

Marlene Leibovitz walks into their lives one fine evening as the divorced, devastated and exiled Michael is trying to get his career back on track painting one of his geniuses. And Marlene, whom the Boones discover, more so the elder Michael Boone, is a wily art authenticator, a crook, a lovely one though as they generally are. She is the wife of the great artist Leibovitz’s son.

 A ‘Leibovitz’ is stolen from Michael’s neighbor and somehow Michael knows that the sly Marlene is responsible for the theft. He is cognizant of her chicanery, yet indulges himself in the strength of her mind and beauty. And the more he discovers her through their closeness, the more he slips into her contrivances, the bigger and uglier get her deceptive and guileful plans, eventually leading to his grudging realization as she parts with him finally that a thick wad of cash always weighs heavier than the irrepressible pumping of the heart and the inscrutable feelings thus generated.

Peter Carey’s writing appears ostentatious and loud almost throughout the book. The carefree language didn’t go well with me, I guess, since I was more eager to finish it than to savor it.

My rating: * * * * * * * * * * - 4/10

Peter Carey

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry - A Book Review

          

          Oh what a wonderful story! And such a tragic one! And so beautifully composed!

Power! What the possession of it by some can have a horrendous effect on the lives of others. A priest is a man of God, the closest we can get to Him. So can he ever err, go wayward with his judgement? Oh no, never!

What is truth? Is what we see always the truth, what we hear always the truth, what we feel, what we believe – no, yes, perhaps? And what if one harnesses their impositions based on this ‘perhaps’? A possible destruction – maybe, surely? Isn’t there something between these hard drawn lines of truths and lies, rights and wrongs – isn’t that what we live as a life, don’t we?

Roseanne Clear was a beautiful lass, well she was, still is as can possibly be at the age of an approaching hundred. This is her story, her own rendition of a life of which the most part was spent in a lunatic asylum. Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital run by Dr. William Grene, is where she is at present and from where she pens down her life. And this hospital is to be brought down and it is put down to the doctor now to decide who stays in the new place and who is to be set free. Set free, ha!

The journey begins from Roseanne’s childhood, during the war, her happy days spent with her parents, her closeness to her father. And then one remorseful event after other strikes the family, her father being ushered spinelessly yet tactfully by the priest to lose his dignity till the day he is found hanging from the ceiling of a neighboring house.

As Dr. Grene is on this personal mission to dig out the aging Roseanne’s true story, he figures out the prominence of the priest, Father Gaunt’s intrusion in her life and the dear ones surrounding her. So which one is true, the account that Roseanne pens down in her sheets of paper or the asylum records where Father Gaunt has glorified his belief of the truth. What then finally caused Roseanne to land in the asylum or was it a planned plot to teach her the lesson for being bad. Bad? Married for years only to be told later by the man of God that there has been no marriage – oh! The Church has passed some law for which he had fought tooth and nail. Being seen with a person other than her husband, well, isn’t she rightly termed a nymphomaniac by the priest? Marooned, exiled, broken, oh what has each one of the McNulty’s done to her. She stays in a tin hut watering her roses. Some people are doomed in whatever they do or they don’t, Dr. Grene finds out.  As he digs deep and the people he meets put the last bits of the jigsaw puzzle in place, the truth, yes this time the truth, the real one shatters him; a tragic reality confirming what a small world this is!

The beauty of Sebastian Barry’s prose is in the fact that it is not his, it is Roseanne’s, and the words are hers, and the feelings are hers, and the sanity in the madness are hers as she talks to you, the helpless reader. Her beauty, her simplicity, her love are in those lines, her presence presides all over those pages of ‘The Secret Scripture’. 

And at the end, her's and everyone else's, when it is to come to an end, would it really matter to any of us, what was right and what was wrong, what was true and what wasn’t, when we or she has already lived the pain, borne those ugly rashes on the soul, had those non-healing deceiving strikes and cuts on the heart? It wouldn’t, I say, with an unforgiving smile coz I ain’t a priest!

My Rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 8/10

Sebastian Barry

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