Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde – A Book Review

           Here I mark my salutation again; Oscar Wilde is a remarkably witty genius, a true observant and a sly story teller.

How easily he read not only the lips of society but the rationale hidden in their words, the cause for the effect and how beautifully he reverberates in his witty words, the incomprehensible fillers we miss in the thoughts behind the mouthing of the gaudy characters to submerge their ostentation and bring out the real ugliness or the real goodness. How sharpened his skills were as an observer, every character lying naked to the soul in his presence. He was a cynic who understood the value of everything.

I had read somewhere once, “If people saw in the mirror their true characters rather than their images, there wouldn’t have been many mirrors left in the world”.

This short play undulates between trust, deceit and forgiveness. Mrs. Erlynne, out of nowhere has pronounced her presence in the lives of Lord and Lady Windermere and her bearing is having a catastrophic effect on their love and relationship. Love, the overrated emotion has its own trying asks and one may spend his whole lifetime just proving it. Who is this scandalous seductress who is so popular among the men, where has she come from and why is she imposing herself on their lives, what are her intentions?

We all err, but only the one who gets caught is termed a thief, gets beaten up and is scarred for life. Oscar Wilde drives home the point that even the best of persons cannot be a Puritan in society for long, we all are misled sometimes and we all shed our values sporadically for our situational conveniences, we have to! It is a mental flaw to label someone as good or bad; even the worst of people have done some goodness in their lives and the best of people have been uglier. Patience is a virtue and to find goodness is another.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”.

I had watched the movie ‘A Good Woman’ featuring Helen Hunt and Scarlett Johansson and had liked it immensely but didn’t know that it was based on this play, now I do!

Some witty excerpts from the play:

“Lord Darlington: Do you know I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. It is absurd to divide people into good or bad. They are either charming or tedious.”

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“Cecil Graham: Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. Now, I never moralise. A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain.”

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“Cecil Graham: Now, my dear Tuppy, don’t be led astray into the paths of virtue. Reformed, you would be perfectly tedious. That is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if, we are good, when they meet us, they don’t love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad, and to leave us quite unattractively good.”

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“Dumby: In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst; the last is a real tragedy!”

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

Oscar Wilde

The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch – A Book Review

Is it good to be nice, nice alone, or is it nice to be good?

Come to think of it, our goodness almost at all times is an action, more so a reaction. It is for a purpose, it expects, it judges, it is hardly forthcoming and shies away from forgiveness. How miraculously difficult it is to be good to someone not so good to you and how difficult it is to be so when one is in control. As Murdoch quotes, “The only genuine way to be good is to be good ‘for nothing’ in the midst of a scene where every “natural thing”, including one’s own mind, is subject to chance, that is, to necessity. The good has nothing to do with purpose”.

The protagonists of ‘The Nice and the Good’ are lively, except for the dead Radeechy of course, each managing through their intricate lives to communicate to the reader their plights. The story begins with the enigmatic suicide of Radeechy, a follower of necromancy and magic. This incident drags in John Ducane, a colleague of Radeechy, to investigate and unveil the cause of this suspicious death and to unfold if there is more to it. Octavian the Head of the Department has assigned this to Ducane; Octavian who has herded in his huge place by the sea many friends with broken hearts and broken lives; the same Octavian who willingly and uncomplainingly witnesses the infidelity of his wife Kate with Ducane. So, in the Trescombe cottage, we have the widowed Mary and her adolescent child Pierce who is madly in love with Barbara, the beautiful lass of Kate and Octavian, and there’s the divorced Paula with her twins, Theo, Octavian’s brother and Willy Kost, a sufferer of war, a liver in the past than now. Each one is fused but their eccentricities mark their individualism and beautifully so. It’s a story of their discoveries of their own selves, getting rid of the veils of niceness to discover the real good, the good for them.

John Ducane is a civil servant of high regard, who his friends and companions look up to, for his goodness, for his righteousness, his truthfulness. He unconsciously likes to be in control or rather people who know him place the reigns of their decisions and emotions in his trustworthy hands. As Ducane’s investigation progresses parallel to the not so eventful happenings at the Trescombe cottage, the lives of the sundry are strewn threadbare by their intimate confessions to Ducane. Dark secrets, blackmails and a murder are revealed. How much of it can Ducane make visible to others, how much is he ready to? Richard Biranne, Paula’s divorced husband lies at the mercy of Ducane’s decisiveness.

How difficult it is to choose right over comfort, over that little safety that everyone invariably desires to hide into, is something that Ducane will have to struggle with to keep his goodness alive. How easy it is to plunge into revenge, to shatter lives without a second thought when one is in control and how unmanageable is it to surrender oneself to goodness and protect and let go for the larger good, to see something as naïveté and give a second chance. Trapped in a cave by the sea to save Pierce from his unwarranted foolishness and almost thrown at the pangs of death, Ducane’s conscience makes some discoveries. Will Ducane succeed in sustaining his rightfulness?

To not realize love can well be termed as the ignorance of the mind than the heart but to suppress it is a crime. The characters in this story, and quite a few at that, ruefully and in some cases compromisingly bind themselves to what they think are the obvious loves of their lives; only to chaotically discover ultimately by the melancholic yet loud thundering of the right chords of their hearts that they have been strumming the wrong strings all this time and the symphony of mutuality lies somewhere else, with someone else. While the act of forgiveness is almost a myth in real life, it isn’t in Iris Murdoch’s story as at the very end everything and everyone falls in place and is on the verge of leading their ‘and they lived happily’ lives. Wish this resembled vividly to us puppets in real life too as we strain to comprehend our mere existence and the glories in the pain that we undergo to find true love and then sustain it.

The author writes in a simple manner and yet it has an enchanting effect. Not for a single instance, did I feel weary of any of the characters and their endless confusing emotions. The multitude of characters reminded me though of David Lodge’s ‘Small World’, since, like here, his stories also end in ‘All’s well, that ends well’, amidst a lot of confusion though!

A few days back, out of the blue, I saw a thick rainbow in the sky. Literally out of the blue! It was drizzling and the sky was a messy gray and then suddenly as I chanced to look out of the unclear glass window, a clearing blue appeared and then there it was, emanating from a tall concrete rise, this amative merging blue, cushioned between the consummating violet, indigo and the other colors of the palette that concluded it.  It reminded me of being in love, of a soothing gentleness, of happiness. That’s the goodness of nature. It surprises and amazes. Without a reason, without a purpose!

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

Iris Murdoch

'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