Musings of a Bibliomaniac

Review: Faith: Essays from Believers, Agnostics, and Atheists (edited by Victoria Zackheim)

2016-02-19T12:52:00.000+05:30

First published:- February, 2015

Star rating:-

2.5/5

There was a time when I was still an optimistic seeker of doctrinal wisdom blissfully entertaining the certainty that there would at least be one religious doctrine fashioned by humans in the whole wide world which would not delight in depriving members of one half of the human race of any political and social standing. I was naive then. My ardor in this regard cooled considerably once I came across information that even Buddha helpfully classified seven kinds of wives (as recorded in the Anguttara Nikaya found within the Sutta Pitaka) of which the wife who meekly takes a beating from her husband, never argues back and remains as slavish as possible is defined as the ideal one.

So is there any organized religion in the world which does not cheerfully preach, propagate and advocate misogynistic ideas and practices? If there is, do let me know. Meanwhile, I delight in evolving my personal belief systems to deal with pangs of short-term nihilism and remaining as religion-free as possible even though, to my dismay, every time I'm required to fill a government-printed form, I am hard-pressed to tick the 'Hindu' box.

Organized religion has all the elements of organized crime, except for compassion. If you offend a crime boss who has no compassion, he will have you beaten up and sometimes killed. If the crime boss wants you to go to hell, he will have you killed after you have committed a sin so you have had no time to repent (i.e. you get yours as you leave a whorehouse or have just eaten pork, or have neglected to kill a female relative who has disgraced the family). Organized religion, however, does show some compassion. Still, in my mind, crime bosses and the guy called God have a lot in common: revenge, rage, and punishment are essential to their mission.

I requested this collection on Netgalley expecting to discover other, disparate ways of viewing faith and institutional religion and maybe challenging discussions on the intersection between religious philosophy and recent developments/intelligent speculation in the domain of astrophysics and the cosmo-sciences but nope. Instead what I got was a collection of maudlin musings on life and its trials and tribulations. It doesn't help either that most of the writers were raised in a Judeo-Christian tradition which means most of the articles lose their sheen of novelty after a while with similar anecdotes of childhood rites of initiation into a state of knowledge about organized religion re-appearing time and again. Catholic school, baptism ceremonies, obsession with collecting Virgin Mary statues, bar mitzvah experiences, traumatic memories of having to endure indoctrination at an early age and so on and so forth. A majority of the believers narrate experiences of dealing with life-threatening situations and losing loved ones to cancer and other terminal illnesses which is perfectly understandable because nobody really seeks out 'God' unless hardships and despair wrestle their way into life but after a while these reminiscences just wore me out.
And then there are the more ridiculously cringe-worthy interpretations of faith - one contributor literally going on and on about her miserable love life and the fact that no man wants to be with her for the long haul.

For believers, Faith is a remedy; for atheists, it's a smoke screen obscuring as shameful the essence of being human: our fallibility.

The only essays which made any impression were by Tamim Ansary, Amanda Enayati, and Aviva Layton. All of them are secular humanists/decriers of institutional religion of course but that does not mean their writings do not showcase a keen interest in giving the benefit of the doubt to all sides of the debate. Ansary, who identifies as a secular mystic, refreshingly does not go into saccharine-flavored tales of personal woes and triumph, instead choosing to recount a simple anecdote about a few moments spent in the heart of nature with his youngest daughter which helped him appreciate the fact that to be alive, for however brief a blink in the unending spiral of time, is to be close to the mystery of all creation. Amanda Enayati's touching piece documents her tryst with a most harrowing period in the history of Iran in an almost Marjane Satrapi-ish fashion except her voice is devoid of the latter's signature humor. Another plus was getting to know about the surprisingly liberal tenets of the Bahá'í faith, a minority monotheistic sect whose members were ruthlessly persecuted during the Iranian Revolution of '79. Aviva Layton's ruminations held nothing special unless one counts her wonderfully unsentimental description of the aftermath of personal loss and her logically argued repudiation of superstitious ideas about heaven and hell.

To conclude, it's not like all the other remaining essays were completely unpalatable or anything but the very fact that I scarcely remember anything about them speaks for itself.

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Also posted on Goodreads & Amazon.

Review : So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood by Patrick Modiano

2015-09-30T21:51:00.000+05:30

First published:- October, 2014

Translated by:- Euan Cameron

Publisher:- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Star rating:-

Call this a book of mirages and mirrors that distort the contours of visible reality all the time. Call it a lament for the inevitability of change that erases all the landmarks to a place that anchors one to a past self. Call it a psychological thriller, a faux-noir in which people materialize out of thin air to serve as clues to lead the joyless protagonist to a truth too terrible for him to comprehend all at once. (Faux noir because Modiano ingeniously deploys its signature leitmotifs to subvert the genre. The token crook is merely a shady character, the token gangster's moll/seductive siren becomes a sympathetic confidante and the token mystery transforms into a disconcerting odyssey through the maze of time and memory.) But an adroitly spun yarn as this one transcends the imposed boundaries of any such labeling with ease and surprising grace.

One can tell the Nobel committee usually doesn't mess around at least when it comes to this greatest of honours reserved for literary achievement. Only pure artistry could have produced something as perfect as this - a combination of strategically placed expository bits, a dreamy, sublime narrative voice reflecting both a subconscious longing and antipathy for lost time, a melding together of reality and delusion, an overlapping of the worlds of 'was' and 'is', and a cautious but sure-footed unravelling of plot. The last time something this unambiguously postmodern in tone and form had brought me such pure reading pleasure was when I happily surrendered before Ali Smith's rhetorical playfulness in There But for The.

There, on the pavement, in the light of the Indian summer that lent the Paris streets a timeless softness, he once again had the feeling that he was floating on his back.

Author Jean Daragane's world is populated by ghosts - ghost-like individuals who hover over his reality to lead him to places and people he has forgotten and, in all likelihood, does not want to recall, the specter of self-written words that elude his feeble grasp on memory, ghost of a city's turbulent past intruding on the equanimity of the present, ghost of those nauseous years of the Occupation that one cannot shake off despite best efforts. And these myriad ghosts proliferate at the back of his mind to warp his sense of time, creating a stark dissonance between reality and memory that usher in a renewed sense of dislocation. In a way, he seems like a vagrant spirit himself, adrift in life like flotsam after a devastating tsunami, alienated from the rituals of work, love, relationships. But this deceptive placidity of the surface of his consciousness is disturbed by a phone call out of the blue which sets into motion a chain of fated meetings and ridiculous coincidences which eventually allow him to find a way back into his past, a journey he undertakes with considerable reluctance and disguised trepidation. I'll leave you to summon the curiosity to find out where this journey eventually leads him.

It would appear, he often used to say to himself, that children never ask themselves any questions. Many years afterwards, we attempt to solve puzzles that were not mysteries at the time and we try to decipher half-obliterated letters from a language that is too old and whose alphabet we don't even know.

Like a true master of the craft, Modiano only ever mentions the War in passing, subtly inserting roadsigns which point to the ineffaceable marks of damage on a Paris which itself appears like a figment of Daragane's imagination at times, as if it might flicker out of focus any moment to reappear in a pale imitation of an unrecognizable former avatar. But the memory of war lingers on in the desolation of rue de l'Arcade and the boulevard of Champs-Élysées witnessing the flow of time like a dispirited sentinel, in Daragane's uneasy perambulations through the courtyard of Louvre and the mist-laden autumn air of the rue de l'Ermitage. An amnesia sets in when the currents of time gradually whittle down the tangible reminders of a tragic event into unfamiliar forms but reality forgotten is never reality expunged.

...And yet he now wondered whether he had not dreamed this journey, which had taken place over forty years ago.

Daragane's Paris is tied inextricably to the past just as he finds himself colliding with the vision of an abandoned, forgotten child navigating the unfamiliar nooks and corners of an unknown neighborhood, perhaps, pained and relieved in equal measure to have finally remembered that which he was so intent on forgetting. I could not have wished for a more befitting sense of closure for our traumatized narrator.

**with thanks to Netgalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for an ARC**
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Also posted on Goodreads & Amazon.

Review: The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt

2015-07-05T21:41:00.001+05:30

First published:- 2014

Star rating:-

The problem with this book is that none of it rings true - the characterization, the narration, the atmosphere, the dialogues, the relationships, even the emotions. Everything seems so fake and overwhelmingly dramatic that at times I cajoled myself into reading on in the hopes of spotting some noticeable evidence of parody at work. But nope. Sardonic self-deprecation isn't the objective here. These people are all serious and want me to take them seriously.

Although once I persuaded myself to go with the flow and obsequiously accepted the narrative's palpable delusions of grandeur and omnipotence, the reading experience became a lot more bearable. Because sometimes even if a book manages to irritate me with its undisguised self-admiration, I can gleefully read on if it contains an intelligent discussion on the human condition. And the good thing is 'The Blazing World' is blazing with new ideas, bursting at the seams with complex concepts on neuroscience, memory, phenomenology, perception and gendered identities which require careful, prolonged contemplation. Additionally, Siri Hustvedt can rustle up a wonderful turn of phrase and a syntactically elegant, lexically succulent sentence. So the negatives and positives are fairly balanced.

Much like its protagonist Harriet Burden's creations, The Suffocation Rooms or Beneath, the book is like an elaborate contraption, a labyrinth of contrasting worldviews and allusions to arcane texts designed to aid the reader in comprehending the mess that lies outside clearly demarcated boundaries defining human existence. Friends, family, therapists, gallery owners, art reviewers, journalists, expose layer after layer of prejudice, personal contempt, vague conjectures, hollow biases while projecting their own image of Harriet Burden as an artist who had to use male pseudonyms to get attention in the art world. In posterity, Harriet is only reconstructed as a montage of other people's opinions and her journal entries, as a widely learned woman whose talent is overlooked by her rich, influential art collector husband and the male-dominated art world in general. Desperate for recognition, she decides to pull off an intricate con on the artworld by showcasing her work using three male artists as her 'masks'. But her plans derail when her last front aka Rune Larsen, an eccentric, manipulative artist, refuses to play along and takes credit for her work.

All intellectual and artistic endeavors, even jokes, ironies, and parodies, fare better in the mind of the crowd when the crowd knows that somewhere behind the great work or great spoof it can locate a cock and a pair of balls (odorless, of course). The pecker and beanbags need not be real. Oh no, the mere idea that they exist will suffice to goad the crowd into greater appreciation.

Women artists are less appreciated than their male counterparts, viewed with prejudice, treated with contempt, rarely allowed entrance into the hallowed halls of fame.... yada yada...you get the picture. Except something about the way Hustvedt delivers this feminist-y rant left me a little cold. I blame the highly unconvincing multiple perspectives and Hustvedt's general disregard for the 'show don't tell' device. This is where I prefer Margaret Atwood's deconstruction of the mind of a female painter/artist (Cat's Eye) because Atwood knows how to fashion a blistering denunciation of male chauvinism without being overt about it and she can recount a believable story like nobody's business. Hustvedt, on the other hand, seems rather intent on creating opportunities within a text to insert esoteric references and paragraph length footnotes which scarcely add anything to the world which our characters inhabit.

Long story short, I want to remember this as an intellectual exercize, or as a corpus of interesting ideas.

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Review: Middlemarch by George Eliot

2015-06-26T00:45:00.001+05:30

First published:- 1872

Star rating:-

First read:- April-May, 2015

Take this for granted. Middlemarch will haunt your every waking hour for the duration you spend within its fictional provincial boundaries. At extremely odd moments during a day you will be possessed by a fierce urge to open the book and dwell over pages you read last night in an effort to clarify newly arisen doubts -'What did Will mean by that? What on earth is this much talked about Reform Bill? What will happen to poor Lydgate? Is Dorothea just symbolic or realistic?'
And failure to act on your impulses will give rise to irritation. The world all around you will cease to matter and you will be forced to perform everyday tasks on autopilot mode, partly zombified, completely at the mercy of this wonderful, wonderful book. Even hours after you turn over the last page, Middlemarchers and their manifold conundrums and self-delusions will maintain their firm grasp on your consciousness. What I mean by these not at all far-fetched generalizations, is that Middlemarch is engaging, suspenseful and readable. Profoundly so.

Despite its dense outlay of character arcs dovetailing into the politics of the community, subplots jostling against each other for primacy and the reader's attention, vivid commentary by an omniscient narrator who interjects often to shape a reader's perception, and the painstakingly detailed inner lives of its zealous hero and heroine struggling to hold on to their lofty ideals in the face of sobering reality and suffocating marriages, everything moves at a breakneck speed. I never knew when I ran out of pages to tear through. There are few happy coincidences here and certainly no deus ex machinas to bestow easy resolution on conflicts. Characters do not stumble upon gentrified fulfillment accidentally, those persecuted because of their 'lower birth' do not magically acquire status and wealth, thereby proving beyond doubt that Mary Ann Evans meant to contravene the most fundamental of tropes created by her more celebrated contemporaries. Instead they wrestle with their own conscience, hypocrisies, prejudices, mortal desires and fatalistic judgments. The day to day grind deepens their spiritual crisis, derails their noble mission of being a part, however insignificant, of the progress story of the world at large, makes them realize the futility of the individual's struggle against the forces that govern society. Some emerge victorious, able to cling to the passions and ardors that drive them ahead in life despite the inclemency of their circumstances. While others flail and flounder, succumbing to the tyranny of material wants and demanding, selfish spouses. If that's not bitter reality served up on a plate I don't know what is.

If I am asked to pick one flaw with the plot and characters, I must confess I had considered withholding a star initially because of the book's treatment of Dorothea and the infuriating Ladislaw-Dorothea arc which made me want to quit reading out of pure frustration. Evans' fascination with subjecting every character's mental makeup to her trenchant irony seemed to expire every time her beloved heroine came into the picture. Frequent comparisons with the Virgin Mary and St Theresa and references to her queenly grace made me skeptical about her credibility as a character of flesh and blood in a narrative otherwise populated with believable, fallible men and women. Is she merely symbolic then of a life dominated by a 'soul hunger', completely immune to the mundane concerns of quotidian living? Why must her womanhood be almost deified and worshipped? But thankfully Dorothea is salvaged and humanized in the end, when she lets her own romantic passions overpower her altruistic zest.

...the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Many may disapprove of the choice but if I had to name one book very similar to 'Middlemarch' in thematic content and in terms of a multiple-perspective narrative structure set against a modern backdrop, then Rowling's The Casual Vacancy comes to mind. In fact, it is hard not to figure out the connection after having read both books. If the slew of unfavorable reviews on GR and elsewhere nipped your interest in the bud, I urge you to give it a shot. Unworthy of literary immortality as it maybe, perhaps, it still offers an intricately detailed portrait of a small town and how individual choices shape the destiny of a society. Of course it is no Middlemarch as no book ever will be but it is where Rowling shows her true calibre as a novelist. And really, it is not as horrid as most reviewers made it out to be. Far from it.

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Review: I am China by Xiaolu Guo

2015-04-05T15:25:00.001+05:30

Publishing date:-September, 2014

Publishing House:- Doubleday Books

Star rating:-

Seldom do I rue the absence of the solidity of a paperback I can clutch to my chest out of an overwhelming love, memorize the feel of its pages against my fingertips. My priorities lie in knowing what I do not, the means to the end irrelevant in this instance. The advent of the e-reader has negated the problem of the steadily shrinking space on the book shelf and helped me horde books without a care. And yet sometimes a kindle copy just isn't enough. The last time I had felt this familiar pang of kinship with a book right after turning over the last page was when Adichie left me feeling the weight of Biafra's senseless wartime violence (Half of a Yellow Sun). I procured a physical copy right after.

I will do the same with this one too. Because imperfectly characterized and contrived as it is, this is the story I would want to associate modern China with. This is a book I would want to read again someday.

All the cacophony around censorship and forgotten square massacres and totalitarianism aside, Xiaolu Guo's globe-trotting, no doubt most ambitious work till date tries to reclaim the dignity of the individual from the clutches of state ownership - a theme I have been desperately seeking out in my pick of literature from the land with less than satisfactory results.

So far what I have gleaned from the works of writers from the mainland is mostly an overarching sense of dejection and bitterness - a gloomy preoccupation with rubbing old wounds raw.

Outside the bar, the midnight sky was lit by a vast cascade of fireworks, illuminating the solemn and dark Long Peace Avenue, the featureless Heavenly Gate Park, the foreboding Forbidden City, the drumming Bell Tower, and finally creating a fake light of day in Tiananmen Square. A new century of amnesia had arrived on China's earth.

But unlike the defeated, anguished voices of other contemporary Chinese authors, Guo's brims over with a valiant hope. Her Mu and Jian face the consequences of their political beliefs with an understated courage, hop across geographical boundaries to embrace the challenges of a hitherto unknown world outside their beloved China, even if to find themselves thwarted at various junctures. Driven out of their homeland by forces beyond their control and comprehension, they plunge headfirst into individual journeys of self realization, only their letters to each other tethering them to their shared reality in Beijing. And yet the same restlessness of being, the same grim disillusionment and feeble optimism color their evolving worldviews as they grapple with both hostility and acceptance in the humdrum heart of Europe and America. Experiences dismantle their prejudices about the west and the reckless abandon of youth gradually gives way to true wisdom. While Mu comes to acknowledge the purpose in Jian's subversive punk rock concerts in Beijing and his revolutionary zeal, Jian discovers merit in Mu's pacifist stance, her unrestrained love of life, art and literature.

Art is the politics of perpetual revolution. Art is the purest revolution, and so the purest political form there is. A great artist is a great revolutionary.
Revolution = art, and art = perfect freedom. Right now, we have no revolution, no real art and no freedom.

As a lonely, unsociable Scottish translator unspools the many different threads of their past and present from a collection of letters and journal entries in her London flat, Mu and Jian's discordant voices harmonize in pitch and intensity across the barriers of time and space to meld into a symphony of human triumph. Their unbridled zest for life and liberty comes to symbolize the individual's quest for emancipation, to disentangle oneself from the myth of a national identity. Time, place and circumstances recede into the background. History's tenacious grip loosens. Mu and Jian's enduring love for one another finds its truest expression in the dream of a new China - one freed from the shadow of oppression.

I am China. We are China. The people. Not the state.

May this very dream survive.

**ARC received from Doubleday Books through Netgalley**
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Also published on Goodreads & Amazon.

Review: Broken Homes & Gardens by Rebecca Kelley

2015-03-12T20:23:00.000+05:30

To be published:- April, 2015

Published by:- Blank Slate Press

Star rating:-

It is nigh impossible to banish the specter of sky-high expectations for a book which proudly advertises itself as the When Harry Met Sally for the millenial generation. That movie has been comfort food for the lonely and the lovelorn and the ones navigating the treacherous waters of friends-and-a-little-morerelationships for decades now.

So potential readers and Nora Ephron fans, better be forewarned that the central characters here are not even pale imitations of Harry Burns and Sally Albright. Neither does Malcolm possess Harry's infuriatingly self-assured persona nor does Joanna manage to embody Sally's quirkiness and emotional vulnerabilities. More often than not they come off as people with no discernible character traits - they flicker in and out of focus like shadowy silhouettes in a hazily lit room. Their friendship is never fleshed out for the reader's benefit. In fact the only conversations they have are completely devoid of any wit or substance and merely border on good-natured flirtation.

Malcolm and Joanna meet at a party and make out without even exchanging proper greetings first. Malcolm flies out to Kazakhstan the very next day for 2 years with the Peace Corps during which time they maintain a correspondence through hand-written letters - yes you read that right - not emails or the phone because nothing puts a dampener on romance like modern technological innovations! When Malcolm shifts back to Portland after the designated time period, they keep hovering around each other, doing the mating dance without actually acting on their mutual attraction. They make bad decisions which would have been acceptable had they not appeared as deliberately manufactured unrealistic plot contrivances to delay their eventual union.

Long story short this is a bit like Harry Met Sally but not quite. It tries to sell the illusion of an unorthodox, fantasy love instead of conveying the truth of how relationships work in reality which brought Nora Ephron's creations universal adulation in the first place. However, on the plus side, there's no casual sexism here - Malcolm does not patronize Joanna like Harry aggressively dismisses Sally's opinions in the movie. (But then we are no longer in the 90s) It has all the trappings of a regular chicklit novel except without the mediocre writing and the abundance of idiotic cliches. And quite readable if not compulsively so.

As long as you are not craving for Nora Ephron-level insight into the quotidian comedy and heartbreak of relationships but light reading which does not require complete suspension of disbelief, Rebecca Kelley will keep you entertained.
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**with thanks to Blank Slate Press and Netgalley for the ARC**

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Also published on Goodreads and Amazon.

Review: Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee

2015-02-25T21:08:00.001+05:30

First published:-1980

Star rating:-

It is impossible to read this and not be reminded of an almost genetically programmed inferiority complex, the burden of history only the descendants of the colonized have to bear. Despite those smug pronouncements of the 21st century being an era of a fair and equitable world and the hard battles won in favor of interracial harmony, there's the fact of your friend barely suppressing a squawk of alarm when you express your admiration for Idris Elba - no female I am acquainted with in real life has learned to wean herself away from the fixation with a white complexion. Scrub your skin raw till it bleeds but never fall behind in the race to make it whiter because that's the color the world approves of. You can fawn over Simon Baker's blonde, light-eyed glory but not over Elba's hulking, ruggedly handsome perfection; heaven forbid you prefer the latter over the former. The 21st century is yet to cast its magic spell over the standards of physical beauty.

So if I, a citizen of a purportedly newer and better social order, can still feel the rippling aftershocks of the catastrophe called Imperialism from across the barrier of decades and centuries, what would a man like Coetzee have experienced, stranded in the middle of the suffocating sociopolitical stasis of Apartheid? Moral anguish? A bitter impotence? A premonitory sense of doom? Anger?

Fiction, I believe, must have been his preferred method of exorcizing these demons. And purge these emotions he did through the composition of this slim little novel which can be aptly described as a most heart-wrenching lament on the condition of the world of his times.

It may be true that the world as it stands is no illusion, no evil dream of a night. It may be that we wake up to it ineluctably, that we can neither forget it nor dispense with it. But I find it as hard as ever to believe that the end is near.

An anonymous magistrate stationed at a farthest corner of an unspecified Empire witnesses the death throes of its reign while recovering his own humanity at the loss of his position of power and influence. In the beginning he is convinced of his righteousness as a dutiful servant of the Empire who oversees the welfare his subjects with moderation but with the arrival of a bluntly tyrannical figure of authority whose methods differ vastly from his, he begins to question his own collusion in the maintenance of an unnatural order. Unable to stand as a mute witness to the horrendous abuse inflicted on innocent 'natives' on the false suspicion of their complicity with 'barbarians' or armed rebels who threaten the stability of the Empire, he clashes with the aforementioned administrator who undoubtedly represents the true face of any oppressor when divested of its sheen of sophistication. And thus begins his fall from grace culminating in a kind of metaphorical rebirth through extreme physical abasement.

I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow. Two sides of imperial rule, no more, no less.

In the fashion of Coetzee's signature didacticism the novel is rife with allegorical implications but as much as these can be deeply thought-provoking, sometimes they also resemble conveniently inserted contrivances. Like the pseudo-erotic entanglement that develops between the ageing magistrate and a young 'barbarian' girl who is left maimed and partially blinded after a violent bout of interrogation is amply demonstrative of a colonizer-colonized arrangement - the one bereft of power to drive the relationship in a desired direction becomes dependent on the volatile benevolence of the other party. Or the mounting paranoia about the anticipated attack of the 'barbarians' who, much like Godot, fail to appear and remain a myth till the end although emerging as the key factor hastening the impending demise of Empire. All the layers of meaning and symbolism could send a dedicated literature student into paroxysms of pleasure no doubt.

With the buck before me suspended in immobility, there seems to be time for all things, time even to turn my gaze inward and see what it is that has robbed the hunt of its savour: the sense that this has become no longer a morning's hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to death on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim; that for the duration of its frozen moment the stars are locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things.

Wary as I am of Coetzee's often stilted world-building, my 5-star rating was an inevitability given my obsession with narratives containing a discernible vein of literary activism in harmony with notions of social justice. Here he also seems to have successfully reined in his pesky habit of turning his characters into sockpuppet-ish mouthpieces to tout his own passage-length worldviews. The narrator does occasionally morph into a pedagogue but his inner monologues never seem out of place given his unique circumstances. Besides it takes courage to acknowledge the fact of white man's guilt in a world which is yet to discard the rhetoric of 'white man's burden'.

Review: The Fan-maker's Inquisition:A Novel of Marquis de Sade by Rikki Ducornet

2015-02-20T20:53:00.001+05:30

First published:- 1999

Republished by:-Dzanc Books, Open Road Media

Star rating:-

For the past few weeks the subject of responsible use of freedom of expression and speech has dominated our public discourse. And this is not in the context of Charlie Hebdo. A group of Indian stand up comics had collaborated on a live 'roast' of two Bollywood actors (the very first of its kind in India) and posted the video on youtube - a performance peppered with sexual innuendos and a mind-boggling amount of profanity. The video went viral within minutes, inspired twitter hashtags, gave netizens a few good laughs, and 'offended' the usual suspects. A few days later, probably following the diktats issued by self-appointed guardians of Indian culture and values, the video was removed from youtube and criminal cases registered against the participants in this venture for 'obscenity'.

Miscreants who vandalize churches, demolish mosques, rape women or launch into vitriolic diatribes against a specific religious community are allowed to function within the legal framework of the state but citizens who take to the streets to protest against the aforementioned atrocities are either water-cannoned or arrested with astonishing swiftness. Now it seems stand up comics, who are trying to inject some novelty into our painfully predictable entertainment industry which churns out lame potboilers by the dozen month after month, have secured a spot for themselves in the list of 'enemies of the state'. Law enforcement has its priorities right.

Far fetched a parallel as it may seem, Rikki Ducornet's richly imaginative, Bohemian novel harps on the same double standards of moral policing. You can dismiss that glaring'erotica' label (not that I have any problems with this tag), dive in without hesitation and let Ducornet overwhelm your senses with her gossamer fine prose and her evocation of a turbulent Paris during the years of the Revolution. If you are looking for titillation and descriptions of sadomasochistic practices ala Sade, then let me forewarn you, the transgressions alluded to in Sade's monologues are not as frightfully repulsive as one might expect them to be. The only erotic similies I came across are of the following kind -

..although the apple was as wrinkled and bruised as the clitoris of an old whore...

The plot weaves its way in and out of an imaginary Gabrielle, a fan-maker famous for her pornographic etchings and illustrations, and her patron Sade's points of view, stringing together their correspondence through letters during the time both were incarcerated for heresy by the Comité de surveillance while also including a parallel, semi-fictional narrative of the Catholic Church's barbaric suppression of indigenous pagan practices of Mayan people in the Yucatan peninsula during the Spanish Inquisition. Aside from all this there are various fascinating tidbits on Sade's upbringing and stories within stories which are aimed at highlighting the importance of unfettered freedom of thought.

A book is a private thing, citizen; it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space. Within that space, anything is possible. The greatest evil and the greatest good.

The portions containing Sade's letters have him refuting the allegations levelled against him by the Comité by claiming most of what was regarded blasphemous in his work was simply the product of his virile imagination and that no sex act was ever performed without consent. The Marquis alternately laments the loss of his friend and confidante, Gabrielle and her lesbian lover Olympe de Gouges (an actual feminist figure from the Revolution) both of whom were put to death by the Comité, and chastises the hypocrisy of the Revolution which was systematically destroying the ideals of a civilized society in the name of upholding them.

Once the Revolution has gorged on the citizens of France and returned to her den to sleep for a century or two, what will happen to the triumvirate she whelped: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity-that vast heresy! That near impossibility! That acute necessity!

If you, like me, had not spared a thought for the infamous Parisian libertine till now then do pick up Ducornet's spirited defense of Sadeian ideology of unshackling one's life and art from hypocritical moral constraints. There's a good chance she may arouse your curiosity enough to want to take a peek into Sade's world of amoral creativity. In Gabrielle's own words -

Sade offers a mirror. I dare you to have the courage to gaze into it.

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Review also published on Goodreads and Amazon.

**Thanks to Netgalley and Open Road Media for an advance reader's copy**

Review: A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

2015-02-13T20:29:00.000+05:30

First published:-1924

Star rating:-

Read in:-December, 2014

Make no mistake. This, to me, will always be Forster's magnum opus even though I am yet to even acquaint myself with the synopses of either Howards End or Maurice. Maybe it is the handicap of my Indian sentimentality that I cannot remedy on whim to fine-tune my capacity for objective assessment. But strip away a colonial India from this layered narrative. Peel away the British Raj too and the concomitant censure that its historical injustices invite. And you will find this to be Forster's unambiguous, lucid vision of humanity languishing in a zone of resentful sociocultural synthesis, his unhesitant condemnation not merely of racism, casteism, religion-ism and what other noxious, vindictive 'ism's we have had throughout the history of our collective existence but of the fatalistic human tendency of rejecting a simple truth in favour of self-justifying contrivances.

Yes there's the much hyped 'crime' analyzed in the broader context of presupposed guilt and innocence . There's the issue of race, class and privilege factoring into the ensuing judicial process. The ripples of the eventual fallout of this mishap disrupt the frail status quo that all parties on either side of the race divide were tacitly maintaining so far and pose crucial existential questions before people of all communities.
Then there are hypocritical Englishmen who cannot choose between preserving the sanctity of the Empire's administrative machinery and upholding their own prejudices. And hypocritical Indians who righteously accuse the Englishmen of institutionalized hatred while stringently maintaining their own brand of intolerance. But greater than the sum of all these thematic veins is the connecting thread of Forster's sure-footed, measured prose which explores not only the inner lives of the central characters but tries to penetrate the heart of a nation-state in the making.

The India depicted here is a foreign country to me - a time and a place yet to be demarcated irreversibly along lines of communal identities that are presently dominating our political rhetoric. It is of little appeal to the newly arrived umpteenth Englishman but, nonetheless, presents itself as an amalgamation of unrealized possibilities. Not once did my brows knit together in frustration on the discovery of any passage or line even casting a whiff of Forster's bias against the people or the land. My senses were stretched taut all the time in an effort to detect any. Sure, Dr. Aziz is a little infantilized and his importance is sometimes reduced to that of a plot device used for manufacturing the central conflict while Adela Quested, Mrs Moore and Mr Fielding appear before a reader as upright individuals who stand for the truth. The other Indian characters seem to be defined by their general pettiness. But these imperfect characterizations can be more than forgiven in the light of what Forster does accomplish.

The song of the future must transcend creed.

There are times when the narrator's voice dissects the drama unfolding against unfamiliar Indian landscapes with a kind of fond exasperation and times when it dissolves into a withering regret for the way the engines of civilization continue to trundle along towards some catastrophic destiny without ever pausing for the purpose of self-assessment. And it is the profound clarity of Forster's worldviews and his sensitivity and forthrightness in deconstructing the enigma of the 'Orient' that elevates his writing even further.

Perhaps life is a mystery, not a muddle; they could not tell. Perhaps the hundred Indias which fuss and squabble so tiresomely are one, and the universe they mirror is one.

It's not the 'handicap of my Indian sentimentality' after all. Forster sought to extract the kernel of truth buried underneath layers of artifice and his craft could successfully flesh out the blank spaces between that which can be expressed with ease. Those are always worthy enough literary achievements in my eyes.

Review: Stoner by John Edward Williams

2014-12-11T19:52:00.002+05:30

First published:-1965

Republished by:- Vintage Digital, 2012

Star rating:-

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” - Henry David Thoreau

The triumph of this work lies in its self-effacing world-weariness, its tone of presupposed indifference even to the prospective reader's concerns. Like the inexorable stoicism of its protagonist in the face of misfortune and persecution, the narrative revels in its own lacklusterness, its state of diffused melancholy.
William Stoner, first student and eventually English professor at (fictionalized) University of Missouri lives a life of flawed choices, unrealized potential and innumerable regrets, witnessing the world go through a period of tremendous sociopolitical ferment in the 20th century, and remaining invisible in the eyes of history. He breathes his last, just as silently, alone in a hospital ward, feebly flipping through the pages of a scholarly work. But do not for a moment think this deceptively drab synopsis encapsulates the essence of 'Stoner'. John Williams, through his luminous prose and by the aid of a vision which is as solemn as it is lucid, reminds us of the quotidian battles fought every moment anywhere by faceless individuals against the forces of oppression and moral laxity - that the fate of civilization is dependent on the capable or incapable shoulders of an individual.

He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become.

An ode to literature? Yes. A story recounted with conviction and a quiet dignity? Undoubtedly. A sincere attempt at proffering acknowledgment on a seemingly inconsequential existence? That too. But more than anything else this is a literary toast raised in honour of those small, often unnoticed, acts of courage and compassion which somehow realign the moral order of the universe but are blotted out from memory and consciousness easily.
There is sadness here - boundless in depth and overwhelming in intensity - but hope glimmers occasionally too. Hope that the world may go to pieces and things may fall apart irrevocably yet a man may summon the strength to endure the tragedy of existence by discovering a true and unbreakable love. The currents of time weather away all past disappointments, longing, old grudges and anger. Only the love of the written word casts a glow in the eternal darkness.

A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure--as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been. Dim presences gathered at the edge of his consciousness; he could not see them, but he knew that they were there, gathering their forces toward a kind of palpability he could not see or hear. He was approaching them, he knew; but there was no need to hurry. He could ignore them if he wished; he had all the time there was.

**much gratitude to Netgalley and Vintage Digital for providing a free e-copy as ARC**

Review also posted on Goodreads & Amazon.

Review: Broken Harbour (Dublin Murder Squad, #4) by Tana French

2014-10-19T19:10:00.000+05:30

First published:- 2012

Read in:- June, 2014

Star rating:-

There are certain things I pride myself on - the ability to read through a tremendous racket without losing my thread of concentration, the audacity to share my blasphemous distaste for pizzas with pizza worshippers who then proceed to shoot me death glares, and more pertinently, the way I don't balk at rating a piece of mainstream literature 5 stars if it has shown the grit to discard gimmickry and preserve that golden human touch.

How ingeniously Tana French subverts the formulaic plotting of a 'psychological thriller', poking and prodding at the darkness we prefer to bury under the gloss of make-believe contentment until it becomes a threat of gargantuan proportions. How masterfully she paints this picture of a family marooned at the thin divide between normalcy and utter chaos, dangling precariously from the edge of oblivion. How mercilessly she concocts such a heart-wrenching tragedy where the lines between culpability and innocence are blurred to the point that both merge into a single entity, where the victims are just as unwittingly drawn to the dark side as the perpetrators and the ones entrusted with the task of rectifying the wrongs done.

Sometimes the ugliness of visible reality is nothing but the tip of the iceberg and the truth is like a lightning bolt from the blue, capable of shattering the glass mansion of denial we prefer to live in. The truth runs much deeper, past the shallow defenses offered by skin and flesh, inexorably slicing through our bones.

"In that moment I thought of Broken Harbor: of my summer haven, awash with the curves of water and the loops of seabirds and the long falls of silver-gold light through sweet air; of muck and craters and raw-edged walls where human beings had beat their retreat. For the first time in my life, I saw the place for what it was: lethal, shaped and honed for destruction..."

'Broken Harbour' is about the proverbial monsters of our own creation lurking in the shadows biding their time to harm what we cherish the most, the slow disintegration of that 'good life' we have put together bit by bit and how sometimes cause does not precede effect. And it is a sad acknowledgement of the fact that a horrendous fate may lie in ambush for the sinless and unsuspecting.

For the ones who steer clear of 'murder mystery novels' for their stereotypical compartmentalization of crime and detective work, I dare you to read this particular Tana French creation and remain unaffected.

Review: The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad, #2) by Tana French

2014-10-18T10:48:00.000+05:30

First published:- 2008

Star rating:-

Read in:- March, 2014

"We had worked together seamlessly, she and I. I had drawn her to this house, this life, every bit as neatly and surely as she had drawn me."

Tana French knows how to conjure up the most charmingly creepy characters out of thin air like nobody's business - damaged individuals who go about life like sentient, breathing time bombs about to go off and leave a trail of wreckage consisting of wounded hearts and shattered illusions in the wake of their committed mistakes. Call this tale of blurred identities a flight of her fancy where the basic premise induces one eye-roll after another. Call this The Secret History redux. Call this anything at all. But a beautifully worded commentary on the unpredictability of human behavior will remain as unputdownable under any other name, all criticisms notwithstanding.

A murdered girl with a fake identity made up and used by an undercover cop and her superior years ago, and that same undercover cop destined to unravel the mystery of her murder by pretending to be the dead girl brought to life - who are we kidding here? All of this sounds ridiculous on several levels.

But hey it's Tana French! When she tells you a story, you deferentially suspend disbelief, snuggle into the comfort of your blanket, and read till you hear the first bird gleefully chirping outside your window signalling the onset of yet another morning.

'The Likeness' is a story about people who breach forbidden boundaries in search of the ultimate freedom, refuse to fit into some generic, pre-determined cog in the wheel of society and develop a hermetically sealed, secretive world of their very own where no outside forces are allowed to operate. And it depicts how this painstakingly achieved state of domestic harmony comes apart at the seams when the personal needs of an individual jeopardize the unity of the close-knit group. Thus in the same vein as its predecessor, 'The Likeness' ingeniously utilizes its characters and events to introspect on the fallout of human foibles. But it is important to note here that it is not much of a standalone mystery. It is essential that readers acquaint themselves with the happenings of the first book in the series to grasp the motivations behind our headstrong, kickass female protagonist's actions and the fragile state of her mind.

It has been 6 months since the spectacularly eerie and depressing events of 'In the Woods' and Operation Vestal blew up in the face of Detectives Rob and Cassie, damaging their relationship beyond any hope of salvation, and leaving them with emotional scars that run much deeper than they care to admit to themselves. Cassie has moved from the Murder Squad to Domestic Violence, Rob is stuck in some other unknown branch of the police department, both no longer on speaking terms. In the midst of this irredeemable mess, a baffling murder case surfaces where the victim resembles Cassie down to her last lock of hair and carries an alias Cassie had used years ago on an undercover drug bust and gotten rid of later on. With no leads to follow and the mystery over the girl's true identity steadily deepening, Cassie decides to revisit her undercover roots (much to the chagrin of her gentle and considerate detective boyfriend Sam O'Neill) by masquerading as the victim, who somehow survived the assault, and returning to the secluded Whitethorn House with its assortment of 4 other inhabitants who are all PhD students of Trinity like Lexie, the murdered girl. Cassie aka Lexie's return under extraordinary circumstances triggers a set of curious events which, in turn, reveal alarming aspects of the lives of the 5 students whose closeness not only hints at something inexplicably disturbing but reveals darker sides of their past lives.

To be fair, this installment of the Dublin Murder Squad series is slightly underwhelming compared to Ms French's brilliant debut. None of the occurrences narrated are as bone-chilling or spooky and an awareness of the wafer thin nature of the logic presented creeps in once in a while. The very Secret History-ish list of ensemble characters (Daniel is Henry, Justin is Francis, Rafe is a cross between Charles and Bunny while Lexie and Abby have shades of Camilla in themselves) evoke a keen sense of déjà vu and the ending disappoints since the emotional aftermath of the crime(s) is much less affecting here compared to the climax of 'In the Woods', which begs the question why I have still rated this 4 stars despite the flaws.

A good way to answer this question will be to put my finger on French's accurate reconstruction of that feather light feeling of not being tethered to worldly considerations yet and that firm, transient belief in the fact that we'll always remain young and invincible, forever unyielding to civilization's ruthless demands - the wonderful friendships of student life which slip right through our grasp and melt away into oblivion like treacherous mirages as 'real life' hurls one gauntlet after another our way. And it is this thoughtful portrayal of that unavoidable tragedy, of having to grow up and grow out of the optimism of youth, that all of us eventually experience at some point of time which tugs at the heartstrings the most and transforms 'The Likeness' into more of an homage to the intrigue and vigor of youth from just a preternatural murder mystery.

Review: The Secret Place by Tana French

2014-10-06T19:46:00.001+05:30

First published:- August, 2014

Published by:-Viking Adult

Star rating:-

Few other books have conjured up the ghost of my teenage years as successfully as this one, dredged up the hazy remembrance of that first, most agonizing heartbreak, the subsequent amateurish cynicism summoned up to preclude the hassle of emotional hangups and the feeling of having only just the foggiest notion of how the world works.

It is awe-inspiring how Tana French continues to incorporate such authentic sociocultural commentary into narratives which are usually taken to be written for the sole sake of providing cheap thrills. So blame her if I end up sounding like a smitten fangirl every time I review a book of hers. She is just that good even when she is writing out a logically fallacious scenario.

The teenage girls of 'The Secret Place' are much more than what C-grade teenybopper flicks and stereotype-riddled YA books make them out to be. They are capable of as much cruelty as kindness, as much self-sacrifice as vindictive selfishness. Here, the conniving, bitchy and backstabbing blonde isn't a cardboard cutout 'mean girl' symbolizing pure evil just as the archetypal good girls aren't as puritan. And a private boarding school turns into a zone of ineluctable conflict of interest where the realm of the personal frequently dovetails into that of the collective forming the intricate web of high school politics which implicitly governs the place.

...a place like this is riddled with secrets but their shells are thin and it's crowded in here, they get bashed and jostled against each other; if you're not super-careful, then sooner or later they crack open and all the tender flesh comes spilling out.

More impressive is how the four girls who lie at the heart of the mystery do not let their budding sexualities define their lives, or even sacrifice individuality on the altar of some contrived requisites of 'coolness' which teenagers are prone to do since rarely do they know any better at that age. Instead, they defy odds to carve out a private utopia for themselves, a clique which doesn't require the glue of some common ideology to survive - a secret place neatly tucked away in an obscure corner of their minds where they can be wholly unabashed of the unflattering sides to their personalities, sure of the fact that they will have each other's backs even when the world goes to pieces.

...the whole point of the vow was for none of them to have to feel like this. The point was for one place in their lives to be impregnable. For just one kind of love to be stronger than any outside thing; to be safe.

In a way, the narrative of friendship and loyalty in the aftermath of a terrible crime is reminiscent of an earlier book in the series -The Likeness - which in turn was inspired by Donna Tartt's The Secret History. So fans of any of the former will be sucked right in even if they may have reservations about stories involving teenagers, specially teenage girls who are forever being dumbed down by writers looking to make a quick buck. Ms French here, true to her gift for impeccable characterization, adds many dimensions to their personalities.

As the common refrain goes, calling books of the Dublin Murder Squad series mere 'crime novels' is almost like an outrageous insult. And this one's certainly no exception in this regard. There are two parallel 'before' and 'after' narratives devoted to uncovering the truth of the same murder. A story of the tragic collapse of a close-knit group of teenage girls who, even while trapped in the complicated tangle of sexual politics, fight to ward off influences which threaten to destroy their fortress of solitude. A celebration of the bond of friendship, how powerful and all-consuming an affair it can be and how unpredictably it can turn dangerous and even life-threatening. And, in the end, a poignant tribute to those charged years of adolescence, a unique phase of our lives we look back on with equal parts terror and fondness.

They are a forever, a brief and mortal forever, a forever that will grow into their bones and be held inside them after it ends, intact, indestructible.

**I received an ARC from Viking Adult via Netgalley**

___

Also posted on Goodreads and Amazon.

Review: The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Martin Luther King Jr.

2014-09-21T11:54:00.003+05:30

First published:- 1998

Star rating:-

I had to keep reminding myself that it's not the civil rights movement I am rating and reviewing, because the spectrum of legitimate excuses, let alone justifications, which could explain the withholding of a star or two is rather limited. It comes as a kick to the gut every time a young, unarmed Clifford Glover or a Travyon Martin or a Michael Brown is shot for no valid reason and the realization sinks in that the process of integration which was initiated by Lincoln some 150+ years ago and furthered by Martin Luther is yet to reach its completion. So the essence of this book and MLK's doctrine of nonviolent agitation are now relevant more than ever.

In a way this is Martin Luther's own account of the movement he helped steer in a direction which not only sought to free an entire community from socioeconomic and political servitude but prevented America from becoming synonymous with the ultimate hypocrisy of all - preaching the infallibility of human rights abroad (by waging wars against Communist totalitarianism) but carrying on with its tacit agenda of institutionalized discrimination back home.

"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

How the spirit of rebellion - which found expression for the first time with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in '55 (unwittingly started by Rosa Parks' act of denying her occupied seat to a white passenger) - trickled into the hearts of oppressed millions in Albany, Georgia, Birmingham, Alabama, Florida, Chicago, Boston, and Washington culminating in the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, is recounted by King himself.
That aside, there's a brief autobiographical sketch patched together from the fragments of writings gathered from the Stanford University archive by Clayborne Carson. Excerpts from King's speeches (sometimes even the full text) also make appearances in between the accounts of all the non-violent movements of civil disobedience he gave leadership to.

To put it more accurately, this is less of an autobiography (since King didn't live long enough to write one) and more like a montage of every single written document or important oratory piece which King left behind. So lucidly written are these that Carson's work must have been reduced to simple editing and piecing together a coherent narrative out of the vast amount of material at her disposal.

And yet there are such glaring mistakes here which marred my reading experience. Consider this excerpt from King's personal writings after his visit to India in '59 which cemented his faith in the inviolability of civil disobedience as an effective tool to usher in socioeconomic and political change -

"On March 1 we had the privilege of spending at the Amniabad ashram and stood there at the point where Gandhi started his walk of 218 miles to a place called Bambi."

It's not Amniabad. In all probability, it's the Sabarmati ashram in Ahmedabad King is talking about, while the historic walk was to 'Dandi' - a coastal village in Gujarat (the state our present PM hails from). Not Bambi, the iconic Disney deer.

Even if it was a memory lapse on King's part or a sad apathy for geographical names, as a King scholar looking to publish a work of monumental importance Carson should have been more vigilant for inconsistencies such as the above, especially since Gandhi gets mentioned several times by virtue of his being King's role model.
(Some quick googling led me to the unhappy discovery that the Stanford archive still retains the unedited, therefore, incorrect information derived from the original sources. I can understand the significance of preserving King's writings exactly as he authored them but the insertion of incorrect facts diminishes the integrity of this work.)
Also occasionally 'Gandhi' is spelled as 'Ghandi'. (Aaarrrrggghhhhhh!)

In addition to these turn-offs, nearly all of King's speeches are so chock full of archetypal metaphor after metaphor that I felt it weakened the gravitas of the narrative. Perhaps, they would have been better off being included in shortened formats. The fact of God's mercy and benevolence being invoked (quite natural since King was a pastor) in every alternate sentence also served as an effective irritant. These are undoubtedly the primary reasons why it took me a whole month to finish reading this.

But these causes of botheration aside, there's plenty of good to be found in this compilation. Like the way MLK expresses his disappointment with 20th century capitalism in a letter addressed to his wife, Coretta -

"...I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, viz., to block the trade monopolies of the nobles, but like most human systems it fell victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes."

or his critique of the Vietnam War and correlation drawn between American militarism and the dangerously skewed nature of race relations in the deep south-

"I do not believe our nation can be a moral leader of justice, equality, and democracy if it is trapped in the role of a self-appointed world policeman."

The absence of that missing star, thus, should be attributed to my personal aversion to factual inaccuracies, overused metaphors and bad analogies. Otherwise no rating system in existence can measure MLK's significance in American history and all that he stood for.

Review: The Royal Family by William T. Vollmann

2014-09-13T21:12:00.000+05:30

First published:- 2000

Star rating:-

Some books are very obviously flawed, contrived in ways which slow down the reader's progress and heavily tax his/her ability to dredge up empathy over the headache-inducing frenzy of loaded work-weeks. And yet these narratives are so divine in their earnestness, so far-reaching in their scope, that you are filled with this overwhelming, earth-shattering zeal to shower them with a holy love and not let even a drop of your skepticism dilute your admiration for the writer's boldness. Your cowardice and inaction dictate you honor his unstated wish and this is the least you can do anyway. Embrace it all - the two-faced treachery perpetuated by the torchbearers of civilization, the endless cycle of degradation and corruption and the myriad sorrows of all the characters which bleed into its pages. Take one swig after another from the truth flask until you have been purged of all your self-indulgent guilt-trips and left with nothing but a crushing hopelessness which devours all other emotions with a vindictive fury.

There's us, cocooned in the warm illusion of security, dissecting the politics of injustice from our ivory towers, wholly in denial of our bubble of happiness feeding off the despair of others. In an effort to scramble toward whatever glamourous concept of affluence it is we consider salvation, we do not see the charred wreckage of lives strewn all around.

There's the woman of flesh and bone who becomes a grotesque assimilation of mere genitals, who can only be an abstract embodiment of the abuse with no human face - a walking, breathing cunt for hire whose existence you acknowledge only when you require its use. Every once in a while she leaves crack-addicted babies with no fathers in the maze of foster care or dumps them like inanimate blobs of flesh in seedy abortion clinics. She only lives in those documentaries harbouring Oscar-nomination ambitions, at the precipice of our segregated utopias merging with the abyss of the Tenderloins of the world. And the sanctimonious laws state with conviction, that the Tenderloins and the red light areas do not exist.

There are the hobos, the panhandlers, the bums, the destitute - not allowed to be anything other than victims of their own ineptitude, worthy of a stray sympathetic glance and a few seconds of pity, to be religiously warded off our vaunted inner sanctums. There is Henry Tyler, a pathetic loser bearing the Mark of Cain, wallowing in eternal self-pity, choosing to live as a homeless man to find his Queen, his antidote to a desiccating loneliness. And then there's the Queen of the Whores with her magical powers and her crack pipe - just an emblem, a protector, a redeemer, a guardian angel, a modern day Jesus - and law-abiding respected founder of 'Feminine Circus' Jonas Brady, with his multi-million dollar franchise of selling men the right to rape, torture, and mutilate disabled girls, her nemesis.
They are all actors in an absurd pantomime. They are all real.

'Part biblical allegory and part skewed postmodern crime novel', the blurb announces with relish. But that doesn't even skim the surface of this tome.

I call this Vollmann's gift to the perpetual outcasts of society, the ones we have pushed so far beyond the edge bit by bit in our own mad dash for the center that they exist in a kind of parallel netherworld where all humanly concerns are put to rest, where violence and deprivation are the order of the day. I call this his sincerest attempt at chronicling their stories the way they may have approved of, however alien to our feral cravings for taint-free reputations, routine and fake dignity, however repulsive to our faux-fragile sensibilities. I call this a searing critique of the hypocrisy of the ones holding the reins of the civilized world, who would sputter with mock indignation when asked to legalize prostitution.

However small or insignificant, I call this book an act of redemption.

Review: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

2014-09-05T23:12:00.000+05:30

First published:-2006

Star rating:-

It came to me as an epiphany as I barreled through the last few pages of this book, blanketed in my Sunday evening lethargy, marveling at Adichie's graceful evocation of a forgotten time and place and feeling the embarrassment of having known nothing about the Biafran war, that somewhere in the Gaza strip the maimed bodies of children must lie strewn amidst the debris of their former lives while vicious debates rage on twitter in which people pick a side - Israel or Hamas - to defend from criticism. As if that's what matters.

Somewhere at this very moment there may be a terror-stricken, weeping child, fleeing to find cover, unaware of what she is running from, unaware of the finality of death, shielded by the caprices of the same history she is living, perhaps. Someday she may grow up well to become another Chimamanda to write the story which is hers to tell, and time, circumstances, and health permitting, I am going to be reading that book and be reminded of the umpteenth 'war' that not even my generation of enlightened, Nobel-peace-prize winning heads of state did enough to prevent, the damage that could have been preempted, and the children who could have grown up to carry the weight of civilization some day but didn't.

The farce of this relentless cycle of mayhem, killing, pillage, rape, and starvation will hit us time and again and yet leaders of the first world will continue to look dapper in their crisp suits and appear dignified while justifying their sale of high-tech weapons to warring parties because revenue is to be earned from the spilling of blood. For the sake of self-made demarcations, for the sake of that ridiculous nonentity called national pride, for the sake of righting wrongs done in the past we'll bury our children and future in mass graves and commit more wrongs.

This book deserves 4 stars in my eyes. It's not a flawlessly written work with its frequent straying into the territory of melodramatic personal relationships and cliched characterization and Adichie's writing seems to lack polish in places. But in no way does that stop this from being a highly important work of fiction that the annals of literature ought to acknowledge with a gleaming appraisal.

This is the past transcending the barriers of time to appear before us in a surely pale imitation of its true grotesqueness. This is Adichie leading us to history of a corner of the world we only associate with food programs, the UNHCR, unstable governments and inexorable ethnic conflicts. This is Adichie telling us that history ignored isn't history blotted out.

I didn't know Biafra at all; there are not enough books on Biafra (as confirmed by Goodreads and Google Books), because only those horrors of war survive oblivion which are fortunate enough to receive the world media's stamp of approval. Not all death and devastation caused by 'civil wars' are worthy of the glory of 'crimes against humanity' like Nigeria's smooth war tactic of starving Biafran children with tacit British support wasn't.

"Starvation propelled aid organizations to sneak-fly food into Biafra at night since both sides could not agree on routes. Starvation aided the careers of photographers. And starvation made the International Red Cross call Biafra its gravest emergency since the Second World War."

But there was a Biafra. Not the transient existence of the nation represented by half of a yellow sun but the reality of the people who, in the paroxysms of misguided idealism, picked the losing side in a war.
Chimananda's Olanna, Ugwu and Richard, all of whom weave their way in and out of manifold conflicts of morality, identity, and survival, serve as our guides in this landscape of kwashiorkor-plagued children with pot bellies while trying to make sense of the muddle of mutual Hausa-Yoruba-Igbo animosity. And along with them the reader navigates the maze of wartime barbarity, political allegiances, and interpersonal relationships with a growing sense of unease and uncertainty - who are the ones truly responsible? who are the perpetrators? who are the victims? what was the war for and what did it achieve?

"Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved. But it was not grief that Olanna felt, it was greater than grief. It was stranger than grief."

In the end any such attempt at such neat compartmentalization makes little difference to the truth of lives destroyed in a fit of murderous passion. In all likelihood, there will be more Biafras and Srebrenicas and Rwanda-Burundis and Syrias and Gazas as there will be the burden of future tragedy and loss to be borne by hapless survivors. But there's the small assurance that there will be the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies of the world to give a human face to the solemn formality of statistics every time.

Review: The Black Unicorn: Poems by Audre Lorde

2014-08-30T22:23:00.001+05:30

First published:-1978

Star rating:-

These poems are like shards of glass refracting the blurred image of some sombre new insight into the human condition - the agony of love, the pangs of coming to grips with the idea of racial segregation in a world one previously thought had no demarcations, the pervasive pessimism of living as reaffirmed by the morning newspaper, an elegy to the memories of a childhood friend whose time on earth ran out too soon, the melancholic ruminations of a prostitute, the absurdity of children of today being raised like slaughterhouse pigs to be sent to the war-front tomorrow.

Coming in and out of cities
untouched by their magic
I think without feeling
this is what men do
who try for some connection
and fail
and leave
five dollars on the table.

If the annals of literature are to be consulted, most of these are time-worn subjects which other more renowned poets have regurgitated throughout their distinguished careers, after molding them in accordance with their perceptions of the world and its many idiosyncrasies. And yet Audre Lorde's words, imbued with despondency, regret, hope and fortitude at the same time, tempt you to read them again and again. Her lines flow effortlessly despite their innate simplicity, maintaining an enviable rhythmic symmetry, rendering the reader's tendency to puzzle over esoteric references unnecessary since there are almost none.
There are a handful of poems here, in praise of the female and androgynous forms of divinity worshipped by the inhabitants of the historical kingdom of Dahomey and the Yoruba people of western Nigeria, which bring to light the oft-overlooked aspects of the cultural ethos of African people. But there's a conveniently provided glossary of African terms at the end to better facilitate complete understanding of these.

You were not my first death.
but your going was not solaced by the usual
rituals of separation
the dark lugubrious murmurs
and invitations by threat
to the grownups' view
of a child's inelegant pain
so even now
all these years of death later
I search through the index
of each new book
on magic
hoping to find some new spelling
of your name

The implications hidden between her verses do not reinforce a kind of self-obsessed confessionalism as often found in Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton's works or the heavy-handed inclusion of so many allusions that the poet's urge to communicate is buried under towering ambitions of dismantling poetic conventions.

Sometimes, her words give the impression of mildly cryptic messages casually scribbled at the back of a notebook, perhaps, while she may have been staring out of her window distractedly. Sometimes, they are her anguished lament, her impassioned protest, wrenched out of her by the brutality of the world or the injustice perpetually dished out to those clinging to the lowermost rungs of the societal ladder for dear life. Her 'Power', one of the most influential and well-known poems from her entire oeuvre, simmers with a righteous rage, intense enough to blow a hole through the edifice of 'white supremacist patriarchy' aside from being a tribute to the memory of young Clifford Glover, a 10-year-old African American boy shot dead by a white cop on duty in South Jamaica, Queens, New York in '73, who was later acquitted by a white-majority jury with a single black female judge.

Today that 37-year-old white man with
13 years of police forcing
has been set free
by 11 white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one black woman who said
"They convinced me" meaning
they had dragged her 4'10" black woman's frame
over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go of the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.

Lorde remains one of the few poets in American history who had to contend with the tyranny of conforming to the demands of too many labels conferred on persecuted minorities - black woman in a white man's world, radical feminist, lesbian, civil rights activist. And yet she managed to breach the boundaries of these individual identities by singing in a richly resonant voice whose musicality still holds the power of bridging gaps, relaying the stories of the voiceless and the marginalised, healing the scars left by turbulent times and smoothening out our countless differences across continents and timelines.
In my eyes, that makes her a hero more than a poet.

____

Review: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

2014-08-25T21:06:00.000+05:30

First published:-1987

Star rating:-

Read in:- December, 2013

Claudia Hampton speaks to me of wars fought in distant lands, of the ever-persistent forward march of humanity in the quest for collective betterment, of stories unknowingly buried forever in the catacombs of time and never unearthed, of the people we carry in our hearts wherever we go, of the history of the world intertwined with our own. Claudia tries to make sense of the cacophony of voices inside her head and outside, of conflicting opinions colliding violently creating sparks that burn down empires and turn to rubble the foundation of regimes. Claudia tells me a story of the past melded with the present.

Claudia's history of the world isn't one-sided. She accedes, to all the players involved, their right to speak for themselves, to say that which has been coldly snubbed by the opinionated historian of the past. Claudia does not look at past events through the lenses of established notions, of opinions passed off as indisputable facts. Larger than life heroes are reduced to the status of mere mortals in her eyes, violent uprisings become a trigger for devastating tragedies instead of turning points in the history of a nation's struggle for liberty. Images of a world war become indiscernible from the images of her lover who dies fighting in it and the entailing heartbreak she could never purge from her memories no matter how hard she tried. The unyielding bond she shares with her brother Gordon, her rival, her biggest critic, her most devoted admirer, and in the end her lover, remains intact even after he is no longer there to provoke her, to argue with her relentlessly, to urge her on towards becoming a more refined version of herself.

"For there are moments, out here in this place and at this time, when she feels that she is untethered, no longer hitched to past or future or to a known universe but adrift in the cosmos."

Claudia never became what others wanted her to be, stubbornly trudging along a path forged by none but herself. She loved the daughter born out of wedlock dearly, but from afar, without the grand show of affection expected of any mother. And as she lies in that hospital bed, her life force slowly ebbing away, a frail old woman of 76, misunderstood by the ones dearest to her, my heart weeps for the grief that she kept carefully hidden from everyone, a secret she carried to her grave. But I bid her farewell with a smile, soothed by the knowledge that her life was, after all, a life well-lived.

Review: White Teeth by Zadie Smith

2014-08-11T13:05:00.001+05:30

First published:-1999

Star rating:-

There are parts of this book fully deserving of unadulterated love and veneration, worthy of 4 stars in the least. The fact that the real India, Jamaica and Bangladesh are recreated here and not the imagined India, Jamaica and Bangladesh of white writers too reluctant to put in the requisite amount of research for getting the most inconsequential tidbits right has much to do with it. In addition, Zadie Smith succeeds in keenly evoking their history, language, cultural ethos, the stench of their festering old wounds inflicted by an undo-able past, and their bizarre hypocrisies making the leap across land and oceanic borders into alien territory, exempted from being dissected by the scalpel of 'western reason' in the name of minority rights.

There's the undeniable truth of centuries of conditioned servility, hatred of the power which established the ground rules of the abusive relationship called colonialism, and the unfathomable responsibility of bearing the burden of yesterday.

"[] they can't help but reenaact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country in to the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign."

There's the Bengaliness of the family to be religiously guarded against the sallies of Western liberalism; imminent dilution of the much treasured Bengali DNA in the gene pool staved off at all costs. And there's war to be waged on foreign territory - for another inch of land, another notch up on the dignity scale, for yet another step of the socioeconomic ladder. Whenever stung by the prick of casual racism, whenever thwarted, they will go back to their institutionalized tendencies of seeing things in black and white and studiously avoiding mentions of a gray area; they won't think twice before disregarding their favorite Gandhiji's famed 'An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.' They will seek out the greener pastures of first world optimism but resist synthesis, tugging at the roots of old grudges again and again so that the present and the now can be drawn and quartered on the altar of history.

"And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems like some long, dirty lie...and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident."

But then there are the 'just-roll-with-it' parts which deserve no more than 2 stars - the cocksure and smug tone in which the narrator recounts this multi-generational saga of families caught in the chaos of modern day materialism vs heritage, the unrealistic, often two-dimensional characterization and the zany Britcom feel to the episodes which warrants a suspension of disbelief and gives rise to the nagging suspicion that this was written with the idea of a film or tv series adaptation in mind.

As much as Smith's light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek, clever mockery of roots and righteous reliance on said roots for existential validation is absolutely legitimate and spot-on, it is awfully disingenuous to think roots can and should be so easily discarded. Assimilation requires time and the immigration conundrum will never be felt as acutely by second generation immigrants (like Smith herself) as by their progenitors. This is where I prefer Jhumpa Lahiri's narrative voice (her later works) over Smith's - no inflection of moral and intellectual superiority, no pronouncing of judgement on flawed choices but a restrained attempt at humanizing all characters.

Since the 4-star and 2-star ratings are equally bona fide in my eyes, a 3-star it is. More so because I can't remember the last time a woman writer of contemporary literary fiction made me laugh so hard.

Review: Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson

2014-08-03T13:13:00.000+05:30

First published:- 2006

Star rating:-

Neil deGrasse Tyson is a force to reckon with.

But he is not Carl Sagan.

While Sagan must have smiled down kindly on your meek acknowledgement of ignorance regarding, say, black holes, Tyson will have most probably given you the stink eye or aimed a sarcastic jibe at your apathy, before proceeding to explain why black holes still remain a topic of much speculation in the community of astrophysicists worldwide.

Tyson does not pull any punches in this collection of essays while slamming the news media, who more often than not, come off as ill-informed hacks doing a shoddy job of reporting facts in the field of space science, forever (stupidly) claiming how scientists are baffled by so-and-so new developments.
"Scientists cannot claim to be on the research frontier unless one thing or another baffles them. Bafflement drives discovery."

Or snidely commenting on the Hollywood exercise of producing multi-million dollar sci-fi films which badly butcher the scientific aspects of such ventures by inserting factually incorrect observations in scenes and dialogues. (there's a brilliant anecdote concerning James Cameron's 'Titanic' in this regard and the Contact film gets an honorable mention for its adherence to proper science if one overlooks a minor gaffe)
"I am glad that, in the end, the humans win. We conquer the 'Independence Day' aliens by having a Macintosh laptop computer upload a software virus to the mothership. [] The entire defense system for the alien mothership must have been powered by the same release of Apple Computer's system software as the laptop computer that delivered the virus."

Or criticizing the mad dash for extending the frontiers of space science during the Cold war years, when the spirit of scientific inquiry was sidelined in favor of a dangerous game of political one-upmanship, a kind of puerile assertion of 'our scientists are better than yours'. Or openly chastising revered names from ancient Greece like Aristotle whose inaccurate assumptions about the unchanging nature of stars and the geocentric universe helped the Catholic Church in propagating falsities for centuries with impunity. (He doesn't even spare Newton for~~God's~~ Higgs Boson's sake who, unable to satisfactorily explain the ordered behavior of the solar system despite the many often conflicting gravitational forces at work, had cited God's need to step in to correct things in his famed 'Principia')

While Sagan may have adopted a more benign, less aggressive tone in course of addressing issues of religious dogma being at loggerheads with scientific reasoning and aversion to science and mathematics among the general populace, NDT takes the approach of pure, unadulterated logic and demolishes one popular misconception after another (for e.g.:-the North Star is not the most brilliant star in the night sky or how everything that goes up doesn't come down) with a brute force which I am certain will not sit well with some sensitive readers who are easily offended.

Being born in a country whose space research organization head performs pujas and makes ritualistic offerings prior to launching a 'Mission to Mars', I can't say I fault NDT's acerbic tone or his distaste for those who are hell-bent on unifying science and religion without even realizing that finding common ground between both is akin to attempting to exceed the velocity of light.

But if NDT lacks Sagan's sage-like demeanour and his rich, authorial voice (Sagan's prose is much more refined no doubt), his excellent sense of humor almost compensates for their absence -

"The good thing about the laws of physics is that they require no law enforcement agencies to maintain them, although I once owned a nerdy T-shirt that loudly proclaimed, "OBEY GRAVITY."

"The only people who still call hurricanes 'acts of God' are the people who write insurance forms."

(and Michele Bachmann, just saying)

And occasionally there's a sop thrown in for the literary-minded (particularly the postmodernist fiction lover) -

"The physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who in 1964 proposed the existence of quarks, and who at the time thought the quark family had only three members, drew the name from a characteristically elusive line in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake:'Three quarks for Muster Mark!'"

The more frivolous aspects of the essays aside, among the astrophysics-related topics NDT centers his discussions around, the ones which were relatively new to me are the concepts of hypernovae, gamma ray bursts, dark matter and dark energy, the uncertainty surrounding the string theory and the probability of the annihilation of Earth through ill-fated, cosmic encounters with errant asteroids, the unavoidable, impending collision of our galaxy with the Andromeda galaxy which is the nearest one heading towards us at a speed of more than 100 kilometers per second.

The Andromeda Galaxy

Since this is a collection of 42 essays which were published in the 'Natural History' magazine, some repetition of concepts and names creeps in occasionally but that merely helps you refresh memories of what you just read a few pages back, not exactly a shortcoming I am keen to quibble over.

4 stars, because Tyson seems a little too bitter about artists who exercise 'artistic license' to distort certain astronomical facts in their paintings. Besides I am certain there is a lot of 5-star-worthy goodness in the rest of NDT's works left for me to discover in the future.

Review: Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto

2014-07-29T12:36:00.000+05:30

First published:- 2012

Star rating:-

The tragedy of words like 'touching' and 'poignant' is that they have become hackneyed to the point they only give rise to skepticism if one spots them in a blurb. And yet I can't think of word choices more apt at the moment.

After having had nothing but disdain for the present crop of Indian Dan Brown wannabes and writers of mythological retellings and nauseating romances riddled with blatant sexism, featuring terminally ill fiancees and 'hot girl on campus' and what other pathetic genre tropes have you, my faith in contemporary Indian literature (sans the Kiran & Anita Desais, Amitav Ghoshs, Vikram Seths, and Arundhati Roys) has been revived all thanks to this critically acclaimed gem of a novel. Rejoice Indian readers! Do not abandon hope ye all.

It comes as a blessing when your mind is still fresh from the tvshow-esque humor of White Teeth and you are confronted with a good instance of the kind of tragicomic family drama you consider free of any intent of providing amusement at the cost of insidious disparagement. 'Em and the Big Hoom', which is only but a few modifications away from being the story of my growing years, is suffused with the kind of humor which delineates the comedy of quotidian life while attempting to pare down its tragedies.

For a country whose pop culture validates the use of the word'mad' as an excuse for dehumanizing the psychologically unwell, here's an author who cuts through the bullshit of stereotypes, accepted misconceptions, and whatever it is that sets the cash registers ringing and keeps us stuck in the dark ages, and creates an endearing, true to life portrait of a Goanese, Roman Catholic family in the Bombay of 70s-80s. A family of four ensconced in a love for each other as much as an acute distrust for life's caprices. An unusual but not dysfunctional family conjured from reality and not the fantasy of Bollywood-ish tear-inducing schmaltziness.

The bumbling, manic depressive, bipolar disorder-afflicted, suicidal, terrifying and fascinating matriarch Imelda, called Em by her offsprings, is the centre of this family with her dreadful mood swings, her chain-smoking of cheap beedis and addiction to countless cups of tea, and her capability of antagonizing and praising her children in the same sentence. Em is loved, feared and despised in equal measure while Augustine aka the Big Hoom is the reliable better half of volatile Em, the father with the stolid outer facade, a 'paragon' of patience, the iron wall which refuses to be shaken even in the most distressing of circumstances.

"Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself. You can only stand outside it, as a woman might stand outside a prison in which her lover is locked up. From time to time, a well-loved face will peer out and love floods back. A scrap of cloth flutters and it becomes a sign and a code and a message and all that you want it to be. Then it vanishes and you are outside the dark tower again."

The young narrator, who unravels the mysteries of his mother's life, takes the reader on a journey through Bombay of the last few decades, its socio-cultural quirks, the hilarity of Imelda and Augustine's courtship years, their unspoken, enduring love for each other, and the family's bitter battle with Em's post-partum depression.

There's something to be said for a book which makes you tear up and laugh at the same time. And I am not exaggerating or making a good use of rhetoric in this context.
For those of you, like me, adequately suspicious of blurbs, you can take those words of high praise from Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh at face value here. For this one at least you can more than suspend your disbelief.

______

Also published on Goodreads and Amazon.

Review: The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

2014-07-26T12:28:00.001+05:30

First published:-2011

Star rating:-

"For after the rain, when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams,
Build up the blue dome of Air
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise, and unbuild it again." - P.B. Shelley

The heron preens itself majestically, perched delicately at the edge of the pond, having found the familiarity of a home at last after miles of mateless flight. Gold-flecked koi fishes dart surreptitiously just below the surface, disrupting the lotus leaves. Wisps of rain-bearing clouds and the mountains meld into each other's embrace in a rare moment to become a mist-robed goddess and render the vista an acute resemblance with aukiyo-e painting, a charming illusion not even a discerning eye can remain immune to. Unwilling to pay the dues exacted by aphasia, Yun Ling hears the fading whispers of times gone by - unspeakable horrors etched across the soft palate of her consciousness she'd dearly like to forget and fond remembrances of the ones who sustained the flame of empathy in their hearts while the symphony of death and devastation reached its crescendo all around the Malay peninsula. The beautiful and fragile landscape of Yugiri lies forgotten in the wake of Aritomo's perplexing disappearance, but his decrepit, untended garden stands as a testimony to his lifelong devotion to a dying art form, to his solemn resolve of remaining humane at a time when savagery was the norm.

One war replaces another as the ruthless Communist guerrillas commence a new reign of terror at the end of the Japanese Occupation. Peace remains that idealized mirage in a desert, forever out of reach. The prospect of succumbing to an acute hatred of the ones who caused her misery tempts, but Yun Ling struggles to hold on to her sanity and conscience in the grey abyss trapped between light and dark. Her faith in Aritomo wavers time and again but she lets her skin become the last canvass of his horimono art anyway.

Did Aritomo's loyalty lie with Emperor Hirohito all along? Or had he simply ignored the obligations imposed by notions of race, gender, skin color, and nationality to respond to that primordial voice of reason every time it had called out to him to do the right thing? Will Yun Ling ever be able to forgive herself for surviving the atrocities that claimed her sister's life? Will Yun Hong find the peace and dignity in death that she was denied as a 'comfort woman' at the hands of her Japanese captors?

In her twilight years, Yun Ling realizes that these questions will continue to ricochet off the walls of her consciousness time and again until the day she breathes her last. But she is no longer haunted by their echoes. The war had claimed victims on all sides and nearly every one was complicit in the collective barbarity of it all. Her festering psychological wounds will never truly heal but she finds contentment in calm acceptance of this baffling duality of life - the juxtaposed coexistence of kindness and cruelty, love and loathing, memory and oblivion, the human capacity for creation and destruction.

"Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?"

Reconciled to history's ironies, Yun Ling now knows that the world will forever rotate on its axis of disastrous decisions and terrible consequences for all. The relentless flow of time will weather away all the damage that had seemed indelible once. Remembering Aritomo's words, she will cling to a greater purpose with every last bit of strength if and when the cycle of madness starts all over again. Because nestled in the heart of the mountains in Tanah Rata lies the frayed dream of her refuge from the brutalities of the outside world - the slumbering garden of evening mists which patiently waits for her to awaken it to the magical touch of life once again.

Review: Skylight: Poems by Carol Muske-Dukes

2014-07-21T11:41:00.003+05:30

First published:-1981

Republished:- By Open Road Media on June 10, 2014

Star rating:-

One of my pet gripes with poetry is on full display in this poet's works - losing so much of time re-reading lines, fishing out implications from the layers of metaphor thrust upon allusion thrust upon circumlocution that in the battle between the reader's enthusiasm for emotionally connecting with the verses and sheer exasperation, exasperation wins.
Poetry is meant to be savoured - the rhythm, the flow, the delicate alignment of pretty words combined with some semblance of purpose all taken in together - and not decrypted like some hidden code through multiple readings. It doesn't matter if the occasional pair of lines succeed in concealing their intent, their true significance, perhaps, too exclusive to the poet's inner life or too obscure to aid our understanding. But there should be a limit to this sort of penchant for inserting excessive imagery and hyperbole.

Don't take my complaints too seriously though. Finding poetry that hits just the right note is actually like finding the right shoe fit and hence the criteria that go into its determination will differ from reader to reader. Besides I had problems with only a few of the poems. Most of the remaining ones are exceptionally well-written and make their points with so much subtlety that you are more likely to miss them unless you keep your eyes peeled.

I had no idea Carol Muske-Dukes (former Poet Laureate of California) had such a good knowledge of Indian history and an even firmer grasp over our cultural sensibilities. (Color me impressed)
Her 'Ahimsa' on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre (which is still regarded as one of the most barbaric things done to us by the British and which caused Tagore to reject his knighthood) is elegiac and deeply philosophical.

"Say you walked in the shadowy garden
in Amritsar, before night descended,
tried to imagine the massacre, that crazy saint
Gandhi and the people on their knees to a god
less civilized than he. You would
disagree, agree....
violence teaches nothing."

While 'War Crimes', a reflection on rape (a subject which Adrienne Rich versifies with more finesse, no doubt, in her Diving Into the Wreck) is wrenching and cerebral.

"...that the great nerve
which runs from head to pelvis
which makes us courteous
shy
scrupulous
makes us touch another with gentleness
would tremble
till it was plucked
held in the pliers
then in the fire
shriveling in that little violence
of heat and light
which in another form
we often refer to
as love."

The variation in her themes is another noteworthy aspect of her range as a poet - subjects from abuse of young children, a daughter's view of her painter father, a child with a stuttering problem, an opium addict mourning the loss of his wife/lover, real estate, to the last set of poems which seem to be meditations on grief make appearances in this collection.

No points for guessing that the poems on India-related subjects, an old man in Benares carrying his dead wife in his arms to her pyre, the one on sexual violence and androgyny are my favorites from the collection. Yes I am predictable like that.

**I received an ARC from Open Road Integrated Media via Netgalley**

_____

Also posted on Goodreads and Amazon.

Review: Feminism is for Everybody by Bell Hooks

2014-07-17T11:37:00.000+05:30

First published:-2000

Read in:- June, 2014

Star rating:-

Not until recently had I emerged out of the rock I was living under and located the @everydaysexism twitter account. Keeping an eye on their retweets for a little less than two weeks enabled me to discover that women are not only forced to endure the lecherous male gaze (often called 'stare rape' these days) on public transportation, made the object of innuendo-laced, denigrating remarks since puberty but also masturbated at in public without their consent (not even women over 60 had been spared) . How blissfully ignorant I was of this last facet of everyday sexual harassment! I went on a kind of mad rampage immediately, flooding my timeline with a deluge of tweets on the subject, appealing to more of my followers to follow the everyday sexism account. A day later when I had checked back in eagerly in the hopes of noticing any visible change - NOTHING. Not even one person among my followers (I have nearly 1600 which maybe just a handful but it's not a very teeny number either) had honored my request apart from the 3 who were already following them - all of them women or women's issues related accounts.

It was then that I realized, 'feminism' in the 21st century is actually like a hip, new item of home decor that you place on a wall cabinet among the other borrowed, trendy opinions you profess as personal philosophy, then forget about. Whenever some horrendous instance of brutality against a woman makes the morning news headlines, everyone's 'tch-tch-ing' fake concern for civilization resurfaces, spills over into the realm of their office lunch hour debates and after a while dies a natural death. Then they go back to the comfort of their tweleb status by posting the same old 'jokes' about dumb blondes, unreasonable wives, sluts, 'cunts', boobs and what have you, each of which are guaranteed to get at least 20+ retweets.
Lulz just chill, we're all kidding here, getting our kicks out of reinforcing the same old stereotypes that have done considerable damage to society since the dawn of time. No harm done.

It is this same all-pervading reluctance of acknowledging the efficacy of a concept like feminism as a panacea for sexism, violence and all the other concomitant shit women face every single moment of their lives that forms the backbone of Bell Hooks's book.

She merely chooses to use 'white supremacist capitalist patriarchy' as a refrain so as to hammer this information into our brains. Yes the recurrence of this phrase gets dull after a while, yes it is somewhat annoying but no it is not irrelevant. Especially since Bell Hooks seems to support the branch of feminism which brings the concept of equality for everyone (including homosexuals) in all walks of life - sexual, economic, social and religious - under its envelope.

She summarizes the inception and journey of the feminist movement through the decades - how it made a first appearance in the U.S. in the 60s with the waves of bra-burning (she is not against bra-burning btw), angry women who had major grievances against a domestic arrangement where they held little to no power, how initially they believed 'feminism to be the theory and lesbianism the practice', how it has undergone gradual improvement to evolve into the polished academic discipline that it is today, how it was seen as an anathema in the past and how it continues to face a steadily growing list of challenges - apathy of mass media being a major one. She deftly interweaves feminism with the idea of politics, class struggle, physical beauty, love, religion, marriage, reproductive rights, parenting, masculinity and race to present before us a realistic picture of what truly internalizing its precepts can mean for us and our future.

But all the conventionally known preachings of the book aside, she makes another very pertinent point about stripping the verbiage of jargon from all the academic work on feminism to make them more accessible to students and laymen alike, and working together to raise awareness of how feminism isn't inherently 'anti-men' or 'anti-religion' or even simply restricted to serving the interests of women in civilization, how feminism is for everybody.

"Today in academic circles much of the most celebrated feminist theory is written in a sophisticated jargon that only the well-educated can read. Most people in our society do not have a basic understanding of feminism; they cannot acquire that understanding from a wealth of diverse material, grade school-level primers, and so on, because this material does not exist. We must create it if we are to rebuild feminist movement that is truly for everyone."

To come to the negatives, there are almost none except the monotonous drone in which Hooks drives home her points which makes the reading experience little less than enjoyable, the drabness of her prose and the way her repeated references to her own writings reek of self-importance. And to further account for that missing star, I have this teeny niggling doubt about her defining acts of 'domestic violence', even those carried out by women against other women and children, as'patriarchal violence'. She reckons some women have been so rigorously conditioned by the patriarchal world order based on principles of domination through violence and other acts of intimidation, that they re-enact the same in their daily lives while dealing with people inferior in status to themselves. Which I agree with but my limited knowledge of the world and its assorted contradictions tells me it's not just the men. Some primeval inclination towards violence and skewing the power balance in any relationship is embedded in the human psyche in general, irrespective of sex.

But that aside, the overarching message one gets from Hooks's outlook is that the traditional notions of 'manhood' and'masculinity' have to be flushed down the toilet for feminism to even have a chance at victory. And there's no second guessing it.

Review: Enon by Paul Harding

2014-07-11T13:04:00.000+05:30

First published:-June 7th 2012

Published by:-Random House

Star rating:-

It is an ominous sign when your trusted, steady flow of empathy tapers off into a reluctant drip while you were making your way around the misfortunes encountered by a fictional parent rendered newly childless. Are you being too coldly practical, perhaps, mentally asking this grief-addled father to pick up the pieces of his heart and kickstart his life like a pre-programmed cyborg? Is your work-tired brain refusing to let you feel an intense pity for this man who resorts to tripping himself up on drugs to have a daily hallucinogenic rendezvous with his dead daughter?

I dearly wish I could nip such nagging doubts in the bud by answering all these questions with a 'no'. But I can't. My feelings for this book are as vague as the state of the protagonist's chaotic inner world post his daughter's demise.

The themes of trauma and tragedy permeate literature of any merit right down to its bones ever so often, that it's hard to come by a new treatment of the same old soul-crushing sadness. While some authors add an outer gloss of dignity and self-restraint to their psychologically broken characters, others deftly interweave unforeseen outwardly manifestations of repressed grief with the ennui of carrying on with the daily routine. And this is where Paul Harding does things differently.

He kills Charlie Crosby's carefully organized world in an instant, shoving him right down the gaping hole of nothing. Charlie has no story to tell anymore, no purpose left in life except giving us prolonged glimpses of the tendrils of darkness that coil around his waking moments threatening to choke him to death. He only pulls us along for this turbulent ride as he traverses the distance between the edge of utter madness and a saner place, between losing himself in the futility of preserving any and every remnant of his daughter's short-lived earthly presence and finding his footing in the treacherous bog of loss. And this is fine really. But what is his justification for pushing away his co-mourner, his wife?

There's only a thin line of difference between grieving for a loved one and internalizing that grief to the point where you begin using it as an anchor keeping you tethered to the reality that was stolen from you, to the extent the sadness which was gnawing away at your insides bit by bit became so fattened on your weaknesses that it pushed out every other thing from your head to make space for itself. And Charlie treads on this thin line barely holding on to his balance, often crossing over into the territory of no-man's land.

"I could not stop myself from stepping over the same dark threshold, night after night, trying to follow her into the country of the dead in order to fetch her back, even though she visited me in dreams and never left my waking thoughts."

I do not claim a kinship with most kinds of life-threatening sadnesses, especially a grief so fatal as the one entailing the loss of a child, not yet anyway. But I have lost a parent at 14. So I hope Paul Harding forgives me for judging Charlie Crosby the way I did.

Maybe I have never felt important enough to accord my grief a higher place over all the other more terrifying griefs - many of them unknown to me - which befall fellow humans and compete for priority every second in this mystifying drama of life. Maybe it's a personal foible to revere the ones who carry the ineffaceable marks of psychological damage, yet muster the courage to wake up every morning and put in their share of effort to keep the world's engines running. Maybe it's a puerile thing to care for tortured, emotionally scarred, righteous heroes like Rust Cohle who find an all-encompassing nihilism to be the answer to the inherent unfairness of life yet battle with that nihilism every moment with hope.

Whatever the actual reasons maybe, I could not sympathize enough with this hapless father's 'magical realist' tendencies to keep his daughter frozen in the amber of his dope-induced daydreams. Even Harding's thoughtfully wrought, ornate sentences chronicling Charlie's memories of the small rural town of Enon, which witnessed the birth and death of his daughter, couldn't help me establish that intense emotional connection I was expecting to form with this story-without-a-story. In some of the narrative's most lucid yet hazy moments, during the course of Charlie's scarily accurate depiction of despair in its rawest form - the terror of waking up from a nightmare where your loved one was constantly slipping away from your grasp - I came close to developing a sense of solidarity with his pain. But then these moments of sporadic brilliance were interspersed with numerous other iterations of similarly-themed moments which gave rise to nothing other than indifference in me.

On occasions like these, I wish I could align my reviewing methods with those who never rate books but simply move on after recording their experiences with it. Because how do you rate a grief-stricken father's lament?
This is why I am trying to believe that the noticeable absence of 2 stars will only underscore my apathy for infinite extrapolations of the aftermath of tragedy, paraphrased again and again until the reader becomes too jaded to care, and not my disregard for mourning as the key resonant theme. Because the latter assumption couldn't be further from the truth.

P.S.:-I have a feeling my experiences with Harding's Pulitzer winning book, Tinkers will fare much better.
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Review also posted on Goodreads and Amazon.

**I received an ARC from Random House via Netgalley**