Babel-17 – Samuel R. Delany

But for ‘house’ you have to end up describing ‘… an enclosure that creates a temperature discrepancy with the outside environment of so many degrees, capable of keeping comfortable a creature with a uniform body temperature of ninety-eight-point-six…’

A SF story, in words of Robert A. Heinlein, is one with “… conditions … [that] in some respect, [are] different from here-and-now … [but] an essential part of the story. The problem itself—the “plot”—must be a human problem … created by, or indispensably affected by, the new conditions … [and] it must not be at variance with observed facts …”.

The world of Babel-17 with the prevalence of inter-galactic travel, presence of incorporeal entities with human functions, and ability of humans to alter their bodies into grotesque forms that exist today, if at all, in the imaginations of some make it a entirely different world from ours. That a journey, ostentatiously taken to solve a critical problem, turns into a exploration of self and one’s relationship with the world is a genuinely human problem. Yet, nothing connects this journey of fears and wishes, and of understanding and acceptance, to the world that is created. And it is in creating this connection – using language, that is Samuel R. Delany’s greatest achievement in this novel.

Language, in Babel-17, is not used just a tool, to explore and uncover hidden recesses of the human mind; it is its main theme. In particular, Delany grapples with the role of language in human cognition and expression. In short, are we limited in our understanding of things and concepts because of our language? Or is there a transform from any one language to another, albeit in a convoluted way. Technically, linguists call this problem the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The plot relies on this hypothesis being true and Babel-17 starts off with a discussion of how a language differs from a code, implicitly implying that this hypothesis holds true. Yet, when Delany creates the definition of a house in a language that has temperature as the cognitive base, he moves away from the hard version of this hypothesis – something that has been proven to be false. This softening of position to create consistence with known scientific facts while ensuring that enough remains to lend credence to the plot is Delany’s most difficult endeavour.

And yet, the over-concentration on language results in an underdeveloped world. Delany flies through this new world, scarcely pausing to reflect, observe and describe. As a result, there is a strong dissonance between the two created worlds – the once inside the protagonists head, where language rules and the physical one outside of space travel and ghosts. Far too often the external world feels like an infringement on the first one rather than a natural extension. Also, the mental journey overshadows the physical journey, making the narrative extremely jarring.

Babel-17 is not a great novel. And yet, it failures are because of faults and impatience in execution, and not because of the smallness of ideas or being conservative in conception.

American Gods – Neil Gaiman

God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you – even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.

How does an author con the reader without poisoning the reading experience? In a book where so many cons are described in detail, and so many magic tricks are demystified, the best is Neil Gaiman masking American Gods for 90% of the book as a grand clash of civilizations and ideologies before really exposing it as nothing but the selfish quest for power by a few individuals.  And these are no mere individuals – but gods. A vareigated bunch – Norse, Slav, Egyptian, Hindu – called into godless America to protect those who just dropped anchor on these alien shores, they are dying. For people have new gods – media, technology – and no longer need to believe in them. This belief with the associated prayers and sacrifices is the lifeforce of gods, and for some these drastic times call for drastic measures.

American Gods is also Neil Gaiman’s ode to the USA. Not the USA of Wall Street denizens or the Hollywood population. And definitely not the USA of big technology, bigger media and biggest retail. Gaiman’s narrative takes us through the heart of US – to towns whose populations are lesser than the number of people in Empire state building. It is the US of roadside motels and the highway attractions, of local communities, local issues and local pride. Gaiman’s US is resigned to losing its way of life to chain stores and mass produced commodities. And the protagonist, Shadow, has all that is good about America – punctilious, hardworking, simple – and yet much like a Greek tragedy is fated to suffer (reminds anyone of Forrest Gump?).

It’s not easy to bucket American Gods. In parts it is a road trip, a retelling of traditional mythologies and an exploration of the American psyche. In Neil Gaiman’s own words he wrote American Gods as “big and odd and meandering” book. At 600 plus pages it is definitely big. With a litany of characters and multiple plot lines it is definitely meandering. And the fact that a majority of characters are gods makes the everyday normal look odd. But American Gods goes beyond these adjectives. It is also a study of avarice and gratitude, of trust and betrayal, of revenge and forgiveness – for even gods in their follies and greatness are human.

How does an author con the reader without poisoning the reading experience? In a book where so many cons are described in detail, and so many magic tricks are demystified, the best is Neil Gaiman masking American Gods for 90% of the book as a grand clash of civilizations and ideologies before really exposing it as nothing but the selfish quest for power by a few individuals.  And these are no mere individuals – but gods. A vareigated bunch – Norse, Slav, Egyptian, Hindu – called into godless America to protect those who just dropped anchor on these alien shores, they are dying. For people have new gods – media, technology – and no longer need to believe in them. For some these drastic times call for drastic measures.

American Gods is also Neil Gaiman’s ode to the USA. Not the USA of Wall Street denizens or the Hollywood population. And definitely not the USA of big technology, bigger media and biggest retail. Gaiman’s narrative takes us through the heart of US – to towns whose populations are lesser than the number of people in Empire state building. It is the US of roadside motels and the highway attractions, of local communities, local issues and local pride. It’s an USA resigned to losing its way of life to chain stores and mass produced commodities. And the protagonist, Shadow, has all that is good about America – punctilious, hardworking, simple – and yet much like a Greek hero is fated to suffer (reminds anyone of Forrest Gump?).

It’s not easy to bucket American Gods. In parts it is a road trip, a retelling of traditional mythologies and an exploration of the American psyche. In Neil Gaiman’s own words he wrote a “big and odd and meandering” book. At 600 plus pages it is definitely big. With a litany of characters and multiple plot lines it is meandering. And the fact that a majority of characters are gods makes the everyday normal look odd. But American Gods goes beyond these adjectives. It is also a study of avarice and gratitude, of trust and betrayal, of revenge and forgiveness – for even gods in their follies and greatness are human.

Sea of Poppies – Amitav Ghosh

The truth is, sir, that men do what their power permits them to do. We are no different from the Pharaohs or the Mongols: the difference is only that when we kill people we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.

Sea of Poppies is tale of movement – of people, of ideas, of dreams and of fears. Its characters move, mostly by circumstance or force, and some by choice, from places and societies they were born into, to lands and bonds that go beyond their imaginations. Amitav Ghosh’s narrative traces the movement of the myriad characters into the ship, Ibis, where they forge bonds that can only emerge from the shared joys and travails of a long journey.

As a novel, Sea of Poppies is interesting for a range of different reasons: it’s orchestral structure and form, the deft handling of a history that often goes unspoken,  the enlivening of tensions that arise when a new society is formed and it’s effortless bridging of the gap between tales of “sea” and “land”. Ghosh’s mastery over the novel form is apparent as he effortlessly guides the story from the dusty plains and crowded cities through the rivers into the, often placid and occasionally furious, sea. The characters, from the rustic Deeti and Kalua to the urbane Raja or the vagabond Zachary are as different in their stations as are notes from a rumbling drum and a soothing violin. That the author combines these disparate pieces into a single seamless narrative makes this novel worth reading for anyone.

While the technical wizardry is unquestionable, the greatest triumph of Sea of Poppies is that it is a subtle but utterly damning satire of British colonial rule. Ghosh does not use the plot or the characters to caricature the colonials; in the truest Orwellian legacy he uses language. The sun might look to be rising indefinitely on the British empire and free trade might have taken its position alongside Bible as yet another undeserved gift to the natives, but the tongue spoken by the British in India is as unintelligible to any English speaker in any age as is the Bhojpuri or Bengali of the locals, or the bastard vocabulary of the lascars at sea. All these people need Ghosh, an Indian writing in understandable English to make their voices heard. In other words, the British masters are share greater fellowship with the populace they loathe than the inhabitants of an island across seven seas. In reducing the masters to the same level as the subjugated in their ability to communicate, Ghosh mocks and shows the essential contradiction in the colonial psyche.

For all the above reasons and also for the fact that it is fun to read, Sea of Poppies is a must read. And in a rather disconnected note, I cannot understand how the Booker committee thought Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger is a better piece of literature.

Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell

First the good – Malcolm Gladwell is a kickass storyteller.

And now to the bad – he can, in all possibility, only tell stories without any substance. His new work Outliers suffers from the same problems that made Blink! a magnet for parodies (I personally love Blank?) and The Tipping Point seem like a ripoff (read Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas Schelling instead). The basic argument he makes in Outliers can be effectively communicated in an essay of few pages and even that won’t be original.

In Outliers, Gladwell tries to break down the cult of genius; that people like Einstien, Mozart, Picasso just appear and succeed irrespective of their background and culture. He posits that chance – by the way of opportunities recieved, family background and cultural legacy – plays a much greater role in the success of these geniuses than one tends to imagine. I agree that, immediately off the head, this is not the way a lot of people think about these outliers. But once phrased, the statement does not require too much explanation: and definitely not a book with an explanation.

Common sense tells us that the opportunities a person gets in life are contingent on the social and financial standing of his parents. Further, even the most brilliant guy then has to put in a lot of effort in turning opportunity into something tangible. And to make it really great, the external world should be ready and primed for this opportunity. And lastly, if you are out to change status quo you will be better off coming from confrontionist culture rather than a passive one. In short, if Bill Gates parents weren’t rich, or he did not spend enough time programming in school, or the world was not ready for computers, or he did have a problem with confrontations, he would not be the richest man in the world.

Does this hypothesis surprise you? If it does, definitely read Outliers. If it does not but you have bought it, take it on your next long journey as a book thats reasonably interesting without being taxing. And finally if you haven’t bought it and are thinking about buying it, think again!

Crooked Little Vein – Warren Ellis

Certain works are meant to outrage the reader. Primarily it is done by the choice of subject matter or the language employed. At other times a disjoint narrative or a unnatural choice of characters do the trick. Warren Ellis is no stranger to this art and in Crooked Little Vein, his first novel, he employs all the above techniques to anger, frustrate, confound and befuddle the reader. This Ellis does, as in his earlier graphic novel Transmetropolitan, to bring out the dark underbelly of the modern society in starkest possible manner.

Ellis novel traces one particular assignment that out-of-work detective Mike McGill gets from the US secretary of state. The task is to trace down the alternate Constitution of the United States that was lost by an ex-president in a night of debauchery. He and Trix, the self-proclaimed expert on all things hidden and nasty, get down to the task of finding the lost book and in the process explore the worst nightmares of any “good society”. And in the process debunks the thesis that there can be a society for the free and the brave that is just and fair to everyone around – and any attempt to impose a moral framework will be twisted and force the human mind into depravities beyond normal human thought.

All of the above makes for excellent subversive material but not excellent literature. Crooked Little Vein apparently is apparently a sideways hat tip to Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs but it terms of its narrative comes nowhere close. The disjointedness in the plot is neither indicative of the characters mental state nor is it a function of the environ it is set in. Essentially a detective novel, the plot never arrests the readers attention through sheer whodunit drama. It seems Ellis’s prose suffers because of the lack of a visual element unlike in graphic novels where they fill in the gaps in the text.

In the end, Crooked Little Vein remains a short quick read that you will forget by the time the next book is finished. For a better introduction to Ellis’s work I would strongly recommend Transmetropolitan.

Predictably Irrational – Dan Ariely

We usually think of ourselves as sitting in the driver’s seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we make and the direction our life takes; but, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires – with how we want to view ourselves – than with reality.

One standard critique of standard economic theory is the construct of a perfectly rational man. No human being however is perfectly rational, even in a very basic economic transaction. However, irrationalities are seen as random i.e. not repeatable and hence intractable for scientific inquiry. Dan Ariely and other behavioral economists over the years have focused on tackling these irrationalities in our choices so that they can be incorporated into policy making and other applications of economic theory. Predictably Irrational is an attempt to bring to bring this field into mainstream much like Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist did for standard economics.

Some of the findings reported are very simple – once you sit down and think about it. For example, it is not rocket science that one’s head kind of goes screwy in times of great emotional or physical stress. But that is not the main point – the crux is that we never take into account these behavioral deviations when in decision making mode. While this can be disastrous for individuals, it can also weigh heavily on how policies are structured and things are marketed. For example, a nation of people procrastinating on savings and living beyond their means lead to the current credit crisis. But in some of the more subtle findings , the author comes to his element. Chapters on relative thinking, supply & demand, our reactions to zero cost goods & cost of social norms are in my opinion must reads for any marketeer and pricing expert.

The methodology employed clearly has some flaws. Our decisions do not remain constant for any situation; they change in interaction with others. In the chapter on cheating and dishonesty for example, the experiment never sees the effects of people talking with each other. Also the rewards and risks in any of the experimental situations does not model the true nature of these forces in real life. A more detailed critique of behavioral economics outlines these and other problems.

Predictably Irrational as a book, is an unique mix of popular economics, business concepts and self-help ideas. The author sometimes adopts the preachy tone, especially in the self-help mode (no wonder I hate those books). But the insights presented here make these minor irritations a temporary blip in one of the most interesting books I have read.

Speaker for the Dead – Orson Scott Card

…Once you understand what people really want, you can’t hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can’t hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.

The battle for self discovery is probably matched in intensity by one’s endeavor to understand others. We encounter in our daily lives people who treat all things living – plant or animal – as equal and some for whom anyone outside a narrow band defined by caste, creed, color or country is a stranger to be treated with fear and animosity in equal measure. Neither of these extreme positions is right or wrong but is probably something that we inherit in our race for survival. “If it is me versus someone/something else it better be me”, is the thought that predominates our thinking in these matters. Speaker for the Dead attempts at looking beyond this narrow parochial view and asks us to question these inheritances in our thinking.

Its 3000 years after Ender Wiggin annihilated the Buggers in Ender’s Game. Now entrusted with task of resurrecting the same species he destroyed Ender hops from planet to planet trying to find the place where the Queen can hatch and live again. Ender, as Speaker for the Dead, has demonstrated to humanity that Buggers meant no harm with the result that he is now the greatest holocaust villain in all human history. Meanwhile, in faraway Lusitania a new species of beings (Pequeninos or Piggies) are discovered and humankind is yet again faced with the choice of understanding if they are capable of communication and peaceful co-existence with the human race. The book outlines the journey of Ender, the residents of Lusitania, Piggies and other characters as they come to terms with each other and try to find a common ground where all can co-exist.

Speaker for the Dead, is a unique sequel since it not only carries the story of the main character forward but also takes ahead the essential idea in the first book. It matches and even exceeds the original in terms of the ideas that form the bedrock for the plot. It is however not as fast paced as the original book and the excitement and intensity in the narrative is lacking. However, for those who liked the philosophical underpinnings in Ender’s Game this is a must read.

Related Posts – Ender’s Game

Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card

Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, then happiness as we can manage it.

The question of free will is something that humanity has grappled for eons. Do we have a choice in the paths we take? Or, are we no more than robots that someone – God, Society, Humanity – has a fixed purpose for? The existential dilemma might be for most of us a matter to ponder upon after a good Sunday lunch and having nothing consequential to do but for Ender Wiggin, the protagonist of Orson Scott Card’s amazing novel, it is something that comes up on a daily basis. After all Ender is a kid no more than 10 years old; and the sole reason that he is allowed to exist is that he will save the human race.

Questions like these make for great sci-fi fiction (Asimov’s Foundation Series; Clarke’s 2001 – A Space Odyssey; Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven)  and Ender’s Game is as good as they come (it won both the Nebula and Hugo awards). But what makes this standout from the crowd is that the philosophy is never in the limelight. It is always Ender – Ender the traumatized kid, Ender the brilliant soldier or Ender the supreme survivalist. The questions remain in the background but never become the focus. As a result Ender’s Game is probably a case study in character descriptions and how characters rather than the plot they inhabit are what define a story.

This is a book that will hold you by the collar and kick you straight in the gut. Make no mistakes about that. And it will creep into your thoughts and keep you up some nights. But you can’t put it down. Or at least, I couldn’t.

Note: The success of Ender’s Game has beget an entire universe of ancilliary works. It will be probably too much to expect the same quality in all books. So are there any sequels that I must read?

Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi

Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel is one of the rare instances where mostly through a Manichean narrative of real events, the author is able to create a richly layered story which is at once an honest account of growing up, an unflinching look at surviving under an oppressive regime and a passionate call for freedom of the individual in the truest sense. It is also a critique of  people and ideas that hold onto our imaginations and creep into our conversations, probably unjustifiably so, long after they are gone or are valid.

Persepolis is an autobiography of sorts, as Satrapi describes in two books, her life from the time Iran came under the Islamic regime in late 70’s when she was in junior school to mid 90’s when she left for France to train as an artist. In between, she experienced the Islamic revolution in Iran and the loss of freedom (especially for women) that came with it, the horror of the Iran-Iraq war, the xenophobic attitude of a different culture as she moved to Vienna to evade the war, the duplicity of everyday life back in her country and an early unsuccessful marriage. All of this is the perfect recipe for a heavy commercial tearjerker, but the greatest achievement of Satrapi is that she conveys all this in a tone that is matter of fact and light without ridiculing the seriousness of the matter at hand.

An artist by profession, the power of pictures also is not lost on her. The graphics are simple caricatures in black and white without the detailed penciling and coloring associated with most modern graphic novels. To a large extent, these stark images enforce the simplicity in her narrative without the burden of words. And in certain frames the black and white figures are imbued with a gamut of emotions that are beyond verbal language.

One could contradict Satrapi’s version of events because she was and remains a member of the elite in Iran. The great grand daughter of the Shah of Iran, she experienced things that ordinary Iranians probably can’t dream about. But such politicking does not take anything away from the sheer beauty of this work or her skill as a storyteller par excellence.

Note: This has now been made into an acclaimed animated film of the same name that is worth watching on it’s own. But then I always prefer the book to the movie.

Ham on Rye – Charles Bukowski

For authors describing childhood, it is either a period of unblemished innocence when the world around appears all fresh and green, or it is a domain of of all gray and black when the kid understands that there is something wrong with this world but fails to understand what exactly is amiss. Ham on Rye, chronologically the first episode in the life of Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s alter ego whose life he further goes on document in Post Office, Factotum and Women, is a work which falls squarely into the second category.

However, unlike the other Rye novel (Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye), which recounts Holden Caulfield’s often armchair disenchantment with the world, Chinaski’s is a story of growing up. With his share of beatings, fights, humiliations and bullying it is a no-holds-barred story of child becoming a man. There is also the joy of discovery, Chinaski’s first taste of alcohol and his introduction to the world of literature, to D.H. Lawrence, Hemingway and Turgunev; and the pain of rejection due to his acne-riddled face.

With his plain on-the-face invective filled language Bukowski is as much an alien to the world of literature as is Chinaski amongst school going teenagers. In no other novel, has a child so seamlessly usurped the language of the adults to present a manichean view of the world. As a result, reading Ham on Rye is sometimes an unpleasant experience, since things just don’t fit together in a nice little picture. But then, Chinaski never fitted into the picture. He lives on the fringes of the society often violating some of its basic ideals in his quest for survival; and so while his story is a great roller coaster ride, you do also sometimes get that sinking feeling in your stomach.

The Enchantress of Florence – Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie sure knows his English – probably both the syntactic and the semantic part. There is a certain pleasure for a writer when he manages the language to achieve something it was never designed to achieve. Languages are constructed so that we can say “Hi, how are you doing?”, “very good, thank you”, “did you sleep well?” kind of things – and for not for describing a woman who enchants everyone but is no more than the creation of a wandering vagabond’s mind. But then as Rushdie says “… witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits or magic wands. Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough” and probably meaning to add that words typed out on a keyboard might also just be enough.

He also seems to like his history and geography. For more than his human characters, renaissance Florence and medieval Fatehpur Sikri occupy the center-stage in his new book. Majestic in it’s splendour, vast in it’s conception, Rusdie’s Sikri is not a city redolent of antiquity and staid in its demeanour but bustling with the energy of the present and harassed by doubts of the future. Florence with it’s orgies, fiestas and revolutions is no prim cultured lady but a teenager with fears and aspirations in equal measure.

And then there are the human characters. Some of whom we know because history tells us they should be known. And some of whom Rushdie just invented. Or, so I guess. For reading this book I began to wonder if history as we know it is fact or fiction. For through the eyes of Rushdie’s vagabond protagonist, Akbar, the emperor of India, for whom even tautological titles were not considered enough becomes unabashedly human, and that great guru of strategists of all hue and colors, Niccolo Machiavelli, is no more than a hen-pecked husband looking at a failed career in matters of state.

Rushdie clearly likes to show off: his command of the English language and his knowledge of the world we live and the world our ancestors lived in. And though he manages to entertain for most of the book’s three hundred plus pages, sometimes he is just plain obnoxious. It seems at times that he has forsaken the plot and his characters to engage in verbal jugglery.

The Enchantress of Florence is great read – probably his best after Midnight’s Children – but provided you enjoy his puns on history and literature and forgive him his sometimes garish flamboyance. Since he considers this book his most well researched one that required “years and years of reading”, I guess some leeway can be allowed.

The Blind Watchmaker – Richard Dawkins

Evolution and natural selection ranks high amongst words that are much bandied about but little understood. Even amongst researchers and academics there are numerous and widely differing subtexts to these words. Richard Dawkins’ lifelong crusade has been to educate the general public of what, he thinks, Darwin meant when he postulated his theses.

Dawkins’ is different other popular science writers because he has an agenda and a point of view and pulls no punches when he goes against those who stand opposite to him. His is never a disspassionate theses that relies on only cold scientific logic. Rhetoric, satire and even mild invectives are as much a part of his repertoire as is the ability to factually and rationally argue against opposite points of view.

The Blind Watchmaker tackles a single problem: how is it possible that without the oversight of external entity (or engineer) complex organisms like Homo Sapiens have come into existence. Such is the complexity and design ingenuity of individual organs like our eyes or the sonar mechanism in bats that it appears incredulous that we “just” evolved. Dawkins handholds the reader through the arguments and counter-arguments on this issue throughout the book trying show that a combination of incremental evolution and natural selection can indeed lead to the complexity we see around us everyday.

Dawkins argument hinges on one key notion: evolution does not mean the immediate birth of new fully fledged features (or organs) in the new generation where none existed in the generation before. The probablity of this happening is so minute that we are better off assuming that every species came into this world as they are now by the efforts of some creator. However, if we assume minor changes (not necesarrily improvements) every generation and take into account the huge time available for evolution to happen the possiblity of us and other complex organisms evolving does not look too remote. This is the main argument he makes in this book.

Once, Dawkins thinks that he has convinced the reader of his main theses he trains his guns on some of the alternate theses that posit solutions to the same problem. It is here that the book loses some of it sheen. While he does make some good arguments against the punctuationist theory of evolution and Lamarckian view, too often he gets into details and examples, leading to an argument that looks purposely confusing. And yes, the amount of rhetoric and satire exponentially increases in this section of the book somehow making this a much less engaging read.

Lastly, I personally do not think that this book can stand on its own. To fully understand some of the arguements Dawkins’ makes one has to read his earlier work The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype and/or some other introductory work on evolution before embarking on this mostly engaging and sometimes frustrating book.

Player Piano – Kurt Vonnegut

This is probably the only true dystopic novel that Vonnegut has written. And there is enough evidence in Player Piano of why Vonnegut shifted from damning a dystopia to damning the real world in his later works.

The success of a dystopic work of fiction is dependent primarily on two things: the author convincing the reader that the world he builds can conceivably come about and presenting the reader with a point of view that he can sympathize with. Player Piano does not really succeed on both the counts. The world Vonnegut builds, though more possible than the worlds of Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty-Four, is somehow plastic and without an identity. The main character of Paul Proteus similarly is opaque and the reader never really is able to gauge his true intentions or get into his shoes.

But then, these are the very things that Vonnegut excels at and which make his works so wonderful. He is a master of distorting the world we live in and the people we interact with into caricatures bringing out the best and worst in them. Like a cartoonist his works distill into a few words the essence of the society he lived in. And at the same time Vonnegut also excels in often obliquely suggesting an alternate vision. His protagonists often are people who in current setup are at best ignored and at worst derided as unfit. His best works: Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle and Breakfast of Champions exemplify these very skills of his.

And the very same skills are the reason why Player Piano does not really work as a dystopia.

Books on Popular Economics

The first thing that comes to many minds hearing the word Economics are complicated policy decisions made by nations affecting the lives of millions of their denizens. While it is true that economics drives many of such decisions, basic economics also plays an important role in our daily lives. Using Lionel Robbins definition from An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science this field of inquiry is “the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses“. This broad definition firmly puts in perspective that whether we like it or not many of our key decisions are in the end economic decisions. However, unlike popular science, books on popular economics (not just popular books on economics) were never the norm of the day. Though one might argue that books like Tipping Point and Wisdom of the Crowds are in fact works on economics, they often masqueraded as some management hocus-pocus or general reading.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics however changed that. It was unabashedly a book on economics and deals in a rational manner with issues that normally have no connection with the field: cheating school teachers and sumo wrestlers, the discrimination against certain sections in game shows and against black-sounding names in job interviews, the links between abortion and crime rates and whether crime pays or not. Most of these issues are often drowned in rhetoric on social norms and morality but Levitt and Dubner prefer to make their arguments based on logic and rationality going as far as to define practical ways to measure the effect of what they preach. Their approach is refreshingly different because they neither put these studies on a pedestal, accessible only to a select few, nor did they water down the analysis to an extent that any serious thought into the matter would have found their logic to be tenuous. Rather Levitt’s intellect and Dubner’s skill in prose produced a book with which an interested reader could constructively engage.

The second interesting work in this field is by Tim Harford. While in Freakonomics, it was Levitt who did the economics and Dubner who did the writing, Tim is both rolled into one. However, he unlike Levitt is not an economist but rather a student of economics. His books The Undercover Economist and The Logic of Life are peppered with references to works of economists both past and present. Also Tim shows an willingness to grapple with much greater canvasses though his work then does not remain as impeccable. Harford’s books deal with issues ranging from the differential pricing of coffee and difference between a Walmart and a upmarket retail joint to world trade and development of third world countries. Tim’s books cover much wider ground but its solutions lack the immediacy that Levitt provides.

While the above are great introductions to the field of Economics for a layman, reference must be made to a couple of more books. The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers by Robert Heilbroner and New Ideas from Dead Economists by Todd Buchholz are great reads to get a grasp how the current thinking has evolved over the years. Another book similar in its subject matter to Freakonomics or Undercover Economics but a trifle more rigorous in its treatment of subject matter is Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling. This book is an excellent read for it shows how small deviations from the norm by individuals often results in situations that can best described as utterly deviant in the macro level. People who liked reading Tipping Point will find much to appreciate in this.

Economics and rationality has become very often either the stick to beat down arguments branding them as “economically unfeasible” or has become the whipping slave for all with the argument of “there is no rational man”. Between each of these extremes however, there is much that we as imperfectly rational beings and societies, glean from two and half centuries of studies in this field and these books are great attempts at that.

A Hero of our Time – Mikhail Lermontov

The Hero of our Time is, my good sirs, indeed a portrait, but not of a single person. It is the portrait of the vices of our whole generation in their ultimate development.

Pechorin is not your typical hero. Infact he might be amongst the most villainous of characters in the whole of literature, because his acts of treachery and betrayal are conducted not with a selfish motive that can be understood, but rather with a nonchalant attitude that is frightening. That this work was greeted with mass outrage by critics, after its first publication in 1840, is therefore unsurprising. What is surprising however, is that this brief psychological sketch, still manages to ensnare the reader’s mind and with great precision and effectiveness paint the picture of a man who very well might be a product of his generation rather than an aberration.

There is not much to write about the plot; primarily because the book lacks one. It is rather a collection of snippets from the life of the main character. The book in short is not about the plot; it is about Pechorin, its protagonist. It starts with the narrator hearing a story about Pechorin from a fellow traveler in Caucasus. The next episode is the narrator himself meeting Pechorin in person and the final parts are snippets from Pechorin’s diary. The reader thus gets a 360 degree view of the character. As far as I know it is the most complete character description in literature encompassing the first, second and third person’s viewpoints. Readers often complain about one dimensional characters; A Hero of our Time is an exercise in creating a multidimensional one.

Pechorin is the quintessential Byronic hero; someone who is “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. The second and third person viewpoints sketch out the essence of his character for the reader. However, it is in the first person description, that we realize what is it like to be such a character. It is often said that once the problem is known it is an easier problem to fix it. Pechorin diaries show the mind of tormented character, who knows what is wrong and how is it that he has reached this wrong state, but is utterly unconcerned by this apparently wrong state and the consequences of this wrong action. Is this what Lermontov calls “the portrait of vices of out generation in their ultimate development”? But the most damning critique of the societal norms is that in spite of his character flaws and its causes, Pechorin remains a human capable of feeling love, grief, longing and desire.

The way the character is developed reminded me of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg and Viper’s Tangle by Francois Mauriac. Also those who will see shades of Pechorin in Turgenev’s Bazarov (Fathers and Sons) or Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment) are not alone. After reading this work, I am fairly sure all that came after it could not remain unaffected by this great piece of literature.

The Dark Phoenix Saga – Chris Claremont (writer) & John Bryne (penciler)

Jean Grey could have lived to become a god. But it was more important to her that she die … a human

X-Men remains one of the most enduring and loved comic book franchises of all time, because in Stan Lee’s words “never in the history of comicdom have there been stories more filled human interest, believable characterization, far-out fantasy combined with stark, shattering realism“. And no story arc epitomizes these words better than the Dark Phoenix Saga, the tale of Jean Grey realizing her ultimate potential and horror of being the Phoenix and choosing to sacrifice herself to save the universe.

Since the time it was first published, Jean Grey has been resurrected many times over as her moniker Phoenix suggests and many others have taken the mantle but nothing matches the sheer shock of seeing Jean Grey, literally the girl next door, turn into the devourer of worlds. Even when she destroys a world and the billions of lives inhabiting it, genocide of a scale that Hitler would flinch at, the reader is still forgiving her for she is not Jean Grey but the Dark Phoenix. But she realizes, much before the reader does, that the Dark Phoenix and Jean Grey are one and the same. It is not possible to let one live and other die. For the safety of the worlds she has to die.

But again in Stan Lee’s words DPS is not only about Jean’s sacrifice; it is also about Cyclops‘ sorrow, Kitty Pryde’s discovery of her powers, the deviousness of Mastermind as Jason Wyngarde and diabolical conniving of the Hellfire club. It is first and foremost a very very well told story; much better than one will find in award winning movies or best selling novels.

Lastly, though the X-Men movies are amongst the reasonably well made comic book movies, X-Men-The Last Stand, which incorporates elements from this story arc, does scarce justice to the Dark Phoenix Saga. It neither brings out the frailty of Jean’s humanity in face of Phoenix’s divinity nor does it show her mental strength in choosing and accepting her fate.

Eastern Promises – David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg is one of my favorite modern day directors. His films showcase his ability to abstract the surreal out of the ordinary, and magnify it making us view the world around us a little differently. With movies such as The Fly, Crash, Videodrome, eXistenZ, Naked Lunch and History of Violence, he brings out the horror in our daily lives. His movies however remained nightmares; dreams from which we woke up shaken but with the knowledge that it was a dream. If to make a film is to create a new world, the primary task of the director then is to build bridges – emotional or otherwise – with the real world. It is not enough to start from the real and descend into the surreal – a film needs to continuously reinforce this connection. It is in this aspect that I felt Cronenberg was not so successful in his earlier ventures. And it is primarily in this aspect that he excels in Eastern Promises.

Like many other Cronenberg movies, violence – real or imagined – remains the central theme here too. But the plot allows him to depict the violence in this world and not in some dream world. The result is that we have a gangster movie that matches Godfather or Goodfellas in it’s depth. Much like the much vaunted Marlon Brando epic, what is seen and heard on the screen is merely the tip of the iceberg. The main action remains unseen and unheard, left to the viewer to imagine. While Cronenberg showed dreams in his earlier movies here he gives the viewer fodder for nightmares. The film captures human depravity when endowed with absolute power, and yet also shows that such depravity will leave a mark that proves to be the perpetrator’s undoing.

However, where it matches Godfather in depth it fails to match in it’s width. Godfather was not about the transition from one era to another, it was also about the era’s themselves. Eastern Promises remains the story of only the transition. But then it probably is not meant to be an epic, but merely a strong reminder of the reality of the world we live in.

Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata

Writing about Snow Country, the immediate metaphor that comes to mind is that of a Haiku. The reviews at the end of the book alluding to it, and the Japanese connection, though definitely existent, are not the cause of this comparison; rather the fact of it being a short piece pregnant with such numerous possibilities that prompts it. Also similar to Haiku is the challenge thrown to the reader – of figuring out the complete picture from the description of a small and yet significant portion. The description would allow many explanations, but in very few of those would the described event carry such weight. Snow Country to an extent can be seen as an exercise in figuring out the unknown at various levels; plot, character and even the geography.

Yet Kawabata does leave us with some clues; for he thus outlines the content of his description very early in the novel:

“In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted together into a sort of symbolic world not of this world.”

It is this world of juxtapositions and shifting realities, this quicksand of human emotions that Kawabata endeavors to describe.

Snow Country is primarily the tale of two women, Yoko and Komaku, and futility of their relationship with one man, Shimamura. While the theme of a decaying beauty waiting for its beloved is not new, it is Kawabata’s characterizations which lend the novel its uniqueness. Yoko and Komaku provide the buttress for each other characters and the counterpoint for Shimamura’s, much like a haiku again – it is through description of Komaku’s activities that we are asked to deduce Yoko’s character, while their undying flames of passion are contrasted against the cold lassitude and timidity of Shimamura. His annual bouts of remembrance and return to the snow country are beautifully set against the changing seasons. While saying nothing explicitly, the entire setup of the novel points towards one inexorable end.

The only problem with Kawabata is that the reader needs to extremely culturally sensitive. Since the actions described are often mundane, the text can become boring and as a consequence the reader can miss some action that is not culturally significant. However, for if invested with adequate patience Snow Country can be an extremely enriching read.

The Renaissance: A Short History – Paul Johnson

Renaissance has unlike numerous other academic labels of history, remained etched in the public imagination. This single word elicits at once, the awe of viewing the entire spectrum of limits of human achievement and, the fervent hope of all good and great that is yet to come in its image. Its utterance immediately brings to life an age when knowledge was acquired for knowledge’s sake, patrons acquiesced to the primacy of the creator and not their baser desires and the creator was as free to choose the content and delivery of his ideas without fear of sanction from higher authorities. Renaissance means a lot many things in the mind of the general public and in this book of fewer than two hundred pages, Paul Johnson manages to reinforce and buttress with facts why it has an undying place in our collective imagination.

In The Renaissance: A Short History, Johnson outlines the achievements of this period by first considering literature, and the works of Dante, Boccaccio, Machiavelli and Chaucer before moving onto the visual arts which he further categorizes into sculpture, architecture and painting. Johnson acknowledges that this mode of presentation may be confusing since most renaissance artists crossed the boundaries between categories and the major studios of the day where they worked contributed in all the fields but the alternate chronological approach would be unenlightening. For a book of this size, Johnson could have very well written a catalogue of the primary figures in Renaissance, with their birth dates and their primary works. However, within each category he defines a starting point and from then on traces the advancements in techniques and modes of presentation achieved by the different masters and with each pushing the envelope a little further.

The book’s true brilliance lies in uncovering the underpinnings of the movement (if we may call it so). Johnson lays great emphasis on three things that were responsible for the creative outpouring of this age. Firstly, the patrons acceding to artists in all matters concerning art and to a great extent tolerating the individual quirks of artist gave the artist freedom to innovate for “each time they commissioned a master, they were striving to help him push forward the frontier of knowledge and skill a little further – or in some cases a lot further”. Second was the spirit of competition, especially in visual arts. Military and commercial rivalries between cities of Florence, Venice and Milan boiled over to the arts and overall led to greater number of commissions. Also, the rise of the cult of individual artist demanded every artist sets the mark a little higher in “a race within generations and between them”. Lastly, the preeminence of the church and the lack of significant opposition to the Vatican allowed the ecclesiastics to turn a blind eye towards the broadening of subject matter (Boccaccio’s Decameron) and mode of portrayal (nudes in painting). In fact, the Vatican itself became one of the primary commissioners of the Renaissance masters.

However, the hold of Renaissance on popular imagination is primarily due to the characters that populated this age and not so much because of the superlative works they produced. In Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello and many others, we have men for whom the word genius was created. While Johnson never gives a biography of these great men, whose achievements he outlines with such skill and veneration, he nevertheless cannot resist mentioning some individual quirks. Coupled with the simple language used, this makes the book an extremely light and enjoyable read.

Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth – Naguib Mafouz

Reminiscent more of Citizen Kane and Rashomon, rather than any of Mafouz’s earlier works (Cairo Trilogy), Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth, aims to convey to the reader how amorphous the concept of truth, especially historical truth is. Detailing the life of the pharaoh Akhenaten, and his beautiful and powerful wife Nefertiti through the memories of the people whose fortunes rose and fell with theirs, truth becomes a piece of clay that is molded by each who wields it to suit their notions of reality. Indeed, Akhenaten, who started as someone who almost ruined Egypt – the traitor, the heretic had by the end of the book outgrown these narrow character descriptions. We remain unsure to the end of what he was – a prophet, a fool, a poet or a warrior. Maybe, all of them together. But history cannot, and will not, tolerate together such conflicting adjectives; thus invariably leading to a notion of truth that is as twisted as it is false.

In literary terms, there is very little innovation in this novel. The book essentially consists of a series of interviews conducted by Meriamun, who enraptured by the fallen city of Akhenaten decides to pursue the truth. Every interview goes over the basic plot – Akhenaten rebellion against Amun (the presiding god), the announcement of his new religion, his marriage to Nefertiti, their rule and shifting of the capital and finally his fall from power followed by Akhenaten’s death. The plot itself remains static and the different narratives do not fulfill the purpose of filling up gaps in this plot. Rather each narrative changes the setting and the dramatis personae; thus the causality that is implied by a linear historical narrative is fundamentally challenged. This more than anything else is the greatest achievement of Mafouz in this work.

I would not say, this is a great work of fiction. Mafouz himself has written much better. For the sheer beauty of his prose one need not look beyond Arabian Nights and Days: A Novel, while the aforementioned Cairo trilogy is a testament to his deep understanding of the Arab society. However, Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth, is not only a novel. It is also a subtle (but not damning, for the seeker of truth does not judge) attack on an establishment that chooses to see truth as it defines it.

 

Technorati Tags: Mafouz, Egypt, novels

His Dark Materials trilogy – Philip Pullman

   

It is interesting that Philip Pullman, who denounces The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis as religious propaganda, chooses to use a very similar plot of parallel universes and the protagonists from one dreary world doing interesting things in the other. It is therefore not surprising that some have read his His Dark Materials trilogy as a direct rebuttal of the Narnia series. Lewis and Tolkien greatly enriched the universe of fantasy literature but have also left behind a world view that seems to burden current day fantasy writers (Harry Potter, Eragon, Amulet of Samarkand, Shannara novels) to no end. It is this world view (often cited as the Catholic world view) that Pullman tries to break. The His Dark Materials trilogy basically then becomes an attempt to redefine the fantasy genre – a genre where godliness has triumphed far too often over worldliness.

As demanded by a task of this magnitude, the trilogy is vast in both scope and scale spanning a number of parallel universes, numerous characters from forgotten races and a final confrontation with God himself in attendance. However, it is in the details that Pullman falters. The plot meanders as we start the second book, every page sees a new character coming in to complicate the already complicated plot. Older characters are conveniently forgotten only to be brought out of oblivion when the situation demands. As a book which argues in favour of the free spirit against the shackled existence under an authority, it pays too little attention to the players other than the main protagonists. Whatever, their world view might be Tolkein ended up inventing an entire history to give each of his characters a place and Lewis never complicated his plot enough to get too many in the first place.

The Golden Compass, Subtle Knife and Amber Spyglass are interesting fantasy novels with an even more interesting plot line but people expecting a classic of the magnitude of Lord of the Rings or even Harry Potter will probably be a little disappointed. For those interested in reading fantasy with a slightly different flavour from that of Lewis and Tolkein should definitely look at the Earthsea novels of Ursula K. Le Guin.

In Concert Performance – Nikolai Dezhnev

“… had reached the age when a man begins to feel the need for reflection, or, more to the point the need to convince himself that that his life has meaning. At this age ambitions are still alive and hope may stir the soul with an errant youthful dream, but the blurry silhouette of old age is looming on the horizon, and when the sunset of life begins you occasionally feel a cold wind of indifference toward yourself, not to mention the world.“

Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, is one of my favorite works of literature. It’s biting satire, innovative plot and the superlative use of language to strike at the heart of Stalin’s despotic rule are in my opinion matched only by Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. So when a couple of years earlier I saw reviews comparing the In Concert Performance to Master & Margarita, I decided that I had to read this book. However the book never came to India and soon went out of print in the US also. Thanks to Amazon’s marketplace, though, I was able to order a fairly cheap old library edition and I finally yesterday got my hands on this long awaited title. I don’t have to say how much work I did after getting this .

Though often described a anti-Soviet-Communism satire, the scope of In Concert Performance far exceeds this narrow definition. It is at once, a treatise on humanist philosophy, a discussion on the nature of good and evil and a magical story of love-at-first-sight. And if it has to be read in one way, I would read it as a damning account of how mindless bureaucracy not only inhibits but butchers free spirits. And this is not true only for the Communist Russia. He does not absolve either the Department of Light or Dark of any blame. The story of Lukary, the protagonist of the story, reminded me of Stanislav Petrov who in 1983 decided that the US missile attack his computer terminal showed was a machine error and not a real attack. Had he been just a cog in the system, he would have been instrumental in starting the third world war. But his decision was made on human instincts. And for it he was/is forgotten and shunted into the shadows not only by his own countrymen but also in the other side. Breaking the chain of command is a crime whichever side you are on. Cold War must had many such heroes, and being a physicist and international diplomat Dezhnev probably knew more about them than us.

The beginning of the novel, when the author is setting all the pieces on the board before letting the story unfold were wonderful. They are written with intensity and force, in a manner that does not let the reader wait to catch his breath while introducing him to a smörgåsbord of characters from from this world and the one beyond. The novel effortlessly flits from the Russia of 90s to the Spanish Inquisition and the Dezhnev seems as adept in portraying the futility of pursuing a Theory of Everything as he is in describing the Anna’s emotions as she sees Lukary for the first time. However, somewhere in the middle Dezhnev’s focus shifts from the story he is telling, what happens to Anna and Lukary’s love, to fairly long winded discussions on the nature of existence, good and evil and such. Of course they are interesting to read but they lead nowhere in the resolution of the main plot which then shifts a gear and moves into Russia of 1932. The novel then suddenly reads like The Day of the Jackal (another one of my favorites, but where does it fit in here) before moving back to 1990s trying to close the narrative.

While both Bulgakov and Dezhnev dealt with essentially the same topics: good vs. evil, nature of time, Russian identity, the notion of sanity in an insane world, to the extent that even many of literary devices used were also the same, where one succeeded the other failed. Dezhnev took his eye (or rather his pen, typewriter, keyboard or whatever he was using) off his characters. The beauty of The Master and Margarita lies in the fact that Bulgakov always moves forward with the story at a breathless pace and that with all the fantasy involved, it always remains a human story. At the end you might not be sure where you are but you had hell of a journey that you can identify with. The same sadly cannot be said of In Concert Performance however which only in its opening chapters matches the brilliance of the Bulgakov’s work and where too many Deux ex machinis make it feel like hiss agent was really on his back to deliver the book to his publishers.

Lest my words be construed as an indication that one should not read this work I shall only cut-and-fit what Roger Ebert wrote while reviewing Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain: In Concert Performance “overreaches on every level” with a “big subject, big canvas” and “big ambitions” while trying to “cram just about everything” into a novel; this is definitely not a recipe for smooth reading “but I’d much rather watch somebody shoot for the moon when the stakes are sky-high than sit back while they play it safe.”

Technorati Tags: russian literature, literature, satire, books

If You Are Afraid of Heights – Raj Kamal Jha

“Look at the picture on the cover, there’s a child, a girl in red dress; there’s a bird, a crow in a blue white sky. And then there are a few things you cannot see“

Thus starts Raj Kamal Jha’s second novel that deals with things one misses in the monotone of day-to-day existence. For how many of us really look at the cover of a book carefully; seeing it as the first page and not merely an appendage. By tempting the reader to go back to the cover Jha sets the tone for the rest of the book; motifs and themes are repeated and three disjointed narratives intertwine at critical junctures. The dog with a stump for a tail, a building that seems to be crying, a building named Paradise Park that reaches to the sky, a crow-rider, the crying of a girl all appear and reappear in the various stories. And the reader might have to go back to see how they connect. If they do at all.

If You Are Afraid of Heights (IYaAoH) is three stories told from three different PoVs. In the first Amir meets with a accident and is nursed back to health by Rima, who just happens to be at the scene. Amir dreams of a girl and her mother drowning and Rima disappears mysteriously without a trace, after having gone to investigate the sound of a girl crying. The second story describes Mala’s investigation of the death of a girl in a remote village. She meets with the doctors, police officers, the mother and neighbors of the girl without any real progress but resuscitating memories of her past. The third is the story of a girl who is afraid that her parents will fall prey to the spate of suicides happening in their neighborhood and her conversation with a crow-rider who has been following her parents the entire day.

Jha’s narratives inhabit the world between the real and imaginary, the waking and the dreaming; he describes the world in a sort of hallucinatory haze induced by dope. It describes a state of just broken sleep and with eyes yet to open. The recurring motifs in a apparently random fashion and the temporal dissonance in the narrative, lends credence to the fact that Jha is probably stringing together three dream worlds and asking the reader to deduce the reality using Jungian techniques. Equally probable though is the fact that any or all of the three are real. In my opinion, the obfuscation is intentional allowing each reader to get his own version of the story. IYaAoH is not realism by any stretch of imagination but it is also not magic realism, for the unusual is not dealt with a straightforward manner, but is rather not spoken of. We know something is being swept under the carpet and yet the realization of it seems to just elude our grasps. Jha obliquely hints at incest, insanity, schizophrenia and domestic violence but never brings these themes out in the open. The novels limits itself to describing the contentious rationalism we shroud our daily experiences in, to explain things more “simply”. Jha’s training as a journalist is put to good use here. The gift of describing settings in an eloquent and poetic manner adds to the dream like quality of the narrative while the first person narratives of Amir, Mala and the child add to the immediacy. For it is through their actions in response to the external that the characters are primarily developed.

IYaAoH, for the impatient can be a frustrating novel. Its denouement does not lead to any tangible answers. There are gaps that need to be filled up and the anticipation built up is not always in consonance with the coming revelation. And the writing style might not be that original for the readers of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. But for all its flaws it is a work of great ambition and imagination. It attempts to delve into the psyche of an individual and give voice to the deepest and the darkest of the human states. And this allows the work to transcend cultural and linguistic barriers and appeal to everyone, not just Indians.

Ape and Essence – Aldous Huxley

Just finished reading, what I would now categorize as one of Aldous Huxley’s forgotten masterpieces, Ape and Essence. Describing a dystopian future resembling 1984 of Orwell and We of Zamyatin more than the other Huxley classic Brave New World, Ape and Essence is an attempt to study the causes and effects of human desires. Describing a world in the aftermath of the nuclear havoc wrecked by a Third World War, Huxley’s main theme here is the rationing of happiness in all forms but primarily sexual; for the primary world view now is that, being happy is to submit to the wishes of the Devil who is all set to take over.

Ape and Essence is a film script written by the enigmatic Mr. William Tallis, rejected by the studios of Hollywood and that by sheer luck falls into the hands of a day dreaming film executive. With his friend, he tracks down Mr. Tallis to his residence only to learn that he had died without knowing the fate of his script. The rest of the book is after that, an honest reproduction of Mr. Tallis’s script. This script moves back and forth across time to the period just preceding the third world war and a time many years later, after the world has been destroyed by nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Using baboons as a metaphor for the state that human race has descended to in the first period, Tallis describes the blindness and hedonism that seem to be the order of the day. As prisoners and playthings, these baboons have famous scientists, all tied and chained up, who though unwilling do the bidding of their primate masters destroying all humanity. Simultaneously, it tracks a group of New Zealander scientists (whose country escaped the fate of the rest of the world since it was inconsequential) who alight on the shores of California only to encounter a civilization, that now worships the Devil and considers women as unholy vessels since due to the after effects of radiation, the babies they give birth to are deformed. One of the scientific party, Dr. Poole, is captured by the local people and it is through his eyes that the reader experiences the horrific rituals that humanity has fallen back on to ensure its survival in this toughest of times. The book ends with Dr. Poole escaping from the settlement and trying to find a way to the north where supposedly humanity thrives in environs that are more rational. He however is not alone; with him, he takes Loola, and the knowledge that this rule of Devil can only be undone by the rule of love.

While the basic plot and theme of Ape and Essence have the potential of placing it in the pantheon of the great dystopian novels, Huxley’s narrative choices greatly undermine this potential. The point of view for the reader continuously shifts from the initial executive to Mr. Tallis to the director of the movie to finally Dr. Poole. Thereafter also, it does not remain static; Huxley takes care to switch the narrative continuously from Dr. Poole to the camera, always making the reader aware that he is not experiencing a reality but rather a motion picture being shot. The power of a dystopian description lies greatly in the immediacy that the reader feels while experiencing the text. The structure of both Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 is such that the reader feels himself/herself looking directly into an orb to see the future or an alternate reality. This induces a sense of a very real fear and alarm in the reader that is lost here with the filtering of content through numerous narrative lenses before reaching the reader.

Many of the dystopian descriptions are primarily the descriptions existing worlds, as they exists – Huxley though tries in Brave New World to bridge the gap between the real and the fictional. Ape and Essence on the other hand is not a study of dystopia, as much it is of the reasons for its emergence in the first place. Its foci are not the machinations of the State or any controlling entity but the individuals that inhabit this collective. Huxley’s contention clearly is that it is humanity itself that is responsible for the state of the world, whether it is the presented dystopia or the utopia governed by love that Dr. Poole imagines. Huxley, I do not think was entirely comfortable with the notion that all responsibility lies equally on the shoulders of all individuals rather than primarily on those who control and run the numerous institutions that humanity has built and nurtured over the ages. It is this conflict, that probably lead him to dilute his message with the introduction of the numerous and varying POVs.

Regardless, of Huxley’s comfort levels with this idea, the underlying treatment of the core theme of Ape and Essence, that of the role of human desires in our destiny, laid the groundwork for 1984 and other such groundbreaking works. However, an incisive treatment of the basic theme remains unexplored in the realms of literature as far as I know and one should read this brilliant piece only for this reason.

 [Credits: To Satvik for buying the book in the first place. And then convincing me to read it, saying this is better than Brave New World and lending the book without any compunctions.]

The Watchmen – Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?“

Translated as “Who will guard the guards” or “Who will watch the Watchmen”, this question was first asked by Socrates and described by Plato in his Republic. The society Socrates foresaw relied on laborers, slaves and tradesmen, with a guardian class for protection and the implementation of laws. But then who was going to guard these protectors; ensuring that they do not supercede the very law they are protecting or harass the very people they are protecting? This question is at the heart of the rise and the fall of every system of power and state that humankind has ever conceived or will conceive of. It is this same question lies at the heart of The Watchmen.

Alan Moore’s universe is not one set in the future. It is instead a creation of an alternate reality of the current times; much like the works of Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle comes to mind immediately).  The year is 1985 and the US of A has won the Vietnam War and Nixon is still the president. Russia and USA have continued to stockpile nuclear arsenals. The
world seems to be a button away from destruction, caused by the mutual
fear between the two superpowers. In this world numerous vigilantes of justice once roamed the city fighting crime (or what they thought was crime); but now they have been forced into retirement. Two of them, The Comedian and Dr. Manhattan, are active but only in the US government’s service. Another one of them, Rorscharch, is now a hunted felon by not giving up his mask when asked to and operating independently. Those who have given up shedded their masks (Night Owl etc) are now trying to fit into the monotone of a normal existence; not able to forget entirely their pasts and not fully embracing the present. The spectre of their own alternate identities continues to haunt them.

In this environment, suddenly the ex-vigilantes lives are threatened. The Comedian is murdered and by strange sequence of events Dr. Manhattan exiles himself to Mars. An attempt is made on the life of Ozymandias. Rorscharch, the still-active-in-underground vigilante sees a possible conspiracy to get the world rid of all its protectors before unleashing a violent bloodbath on the planet. He has a hard time convincing his fellow masked-men on the veracity of his claims but the curious turn of circumstances bring together the old friends at the time of the final showdown and the masked men (and women) back to their masks. All very standard and nice; kill the villain; save the world; maybe even get the chick.

Except that, nothing could be further from truth (except maybe the last statement). The Watchmen is an exploration into the psyche of the masked men and women; their lives, follies and aspirations. Those who set out to save the world and yet over their journey are consumed by their blind zeal and lose their humanity. Enraptured by their successes, surrounded by their fears and prodded on by visions of a half-baked utopia, they are dehumanized; becoming more like the people they are fighting than the people they are protecting. It is often stated that comic book heroes, especially those without superhuman powers (Batman for example), are the propagators of the fascist ideal; where one world view superior to all others and those opposing are the enemies. Frank Miller’s reinvention of Batman (The Dark Knight Returns and therafter) was based mostly on this mental tussle between the humanatarian Bruce Wayne and essentially fascist Batman. In Dr. Manhattan, Moore creates a character with true superhuman powers and his cold rationality and approach to justice serves as a mirror for the other characters exposing them as merely human.

Over 12 chapters, Moore grapples with the question that came at the beginning of the post. Moore’s world is in a way self-contained; its own God (Dr. Manhattan) included. The Deux ex machina does not come in here at the denouement to help tie the threads but is prevalent throughout. After all when you have a character capable of playing with atoms, the very building blocks of this universe, one does not need an external agent to wrap things up. Moore’s solution is essentially the same that Plato proposed, albiet proposed reluctantly and giving the reader enough space to derive his own conclusions. The guardians have to be convinced of their superiority. They must never fear the humans or the fact their power is contigent on any external factors not in their control. In essence they must become true superheroes.

Does killing millions to save billions make sense? Is perpetrating a gruesome horror justified in the name of awakening the latent goodness in all of us? Can only a false specter of  superiority, prevent the protectors from turning oppressors? These questions, and not the answers that Moore provides for them are at the heart of The Watchmen. And in this world, when certain individuals on the strength of the offices they hold are taking on the mantles of protectors of justice, freedom, democracy and all the good sounding words, they are more pertinent than ever.

Apart from its obvious attractions to the philosophically inclined, The Watchmen is eminently readable. Moore relies on a narrative that is reminiscent of cinema more than literature. The kid reading The Marooned issue of the series The Tales of the Black Freighter takes the viewer back and forth amongst worlds; each seamlessly blending into the other, conveying the same basic ideas. The reader is merely the part of another world where the same words and ideas would fit in. Dave Gibbons also relies heavily on the cinematic language in terms of his frame designs when the narrative shifts in time and space. If they ever made a movie of this, it would have the highest number of match cuts.

After reading V for Vendetta, I was not sure what to expect from the Alan Moore work. Yet another defense of anarchism, a regular comic strip with villains and world-dominating schemes or soemething else. It was something else, allright; but I never imagined this. Whatever it was, it will definitely figure when I make another list like this again.

technorati tags:comics, watchmen, graphic, novels

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The Long Tail – Chris Anderson

“Hey have you seen the latest episode of Friends?”

I roll my eyes and with a shake of my head manage to convey the negative message. It’s like the entire world sees and enjoys Friends and I am the only one who is left out.

Had I been born, a couple of decades earlier (making me a forty plus gentleman now, or so I suppose), my only choices would have been to see whatever my friends and the world was seeing and hearing. No weird Scandinvian metal bands, unheard Latin American authors or unknown European auteurs. But today I have a choice of either watching Friends or doing something else that may not so mainstream but equally enriching for me.

Internet as a medium has democratized choice of the individual; freed it from the tyranny of mainstream picks or the hits. It is now feasible to effectively target the entire demand curve across all tastes and not only to the majority. And as result, it has opened up for the businesses of the future a entirely new vista; a way to tap those customers who were previously too niche to be effectively targeted by a hit driven market. It is his phenomenon that Chris Anderson terms as the Long Tail. As opposed to the Short Head of hits where the focus is on selling things and services that the majority wants, the Long Tail model works on the principle that every market can divided into niches, each of which caters to a specific taste. And that all of them can be satisfied at the same time.

The 80/20 rule i.e. 20% of the products bring in 80% of the revenue has been the hallmark of the existing culture. In this it is important to choose wisely the 20% of the products that you intend to sell. The constraints of physical retail space as well the time of the consumers forced businesses to weed out anything out of the mainstream. Anything that did not fit nicely into the category of a hit. The advent of Internet and other technologies and techniques however has enabled online retailers such as Amazon to circumvent the problem of physical storage and the associated costs, thus allowing it to have an virtual inventory that cannot be envisaged by its physical counterparts. As a result, the importance of identifying the 20% of the HIT products reduces considerably. For the end customer, it translates into greater choice and a higher probability of finding something that exactly suits his needs. Anderson challenges the myth that greater choice is not necessarily better for the customer, arguing that it is not the plentitude of choices but the lack of information about them that peeves the customer.

Internet, however, did not create the Long Tail. It has always existed; often dubbed as the underground. Freed of the constraints of physical space, Internet has just made it much easier to access this market. Using examples of Amazon, E-Bay, Google, Netflix and Rhapsody, Anderson outlines the basic tenets of his framework, constantly reiterating the point that concentrating on the Long Tail allows an organization to expand its source of revenues and customer base. The history of the long tail, in fact, does not start with Amazon or the other online players. The author traces it back to the days when Sears and Roebuck opened up the first centralized warehouse and started delivering orders to the American hinterland via mail. They were tapping into a market that had till then been starved of choice and by offering them that, they were able to effectively tap the same. The basic principles of operating in the Long Tail have remained the same.

The key to this newfound ability of organization to cater to the demand down the tail is due to three primary reasons: significantly lower barriers to entry for producers implying much greater choice available to the end consumers, the development of better technological/human filter mechanisms and most importantly almost zero distribution and holding costs if you are holding bits and not atoms. Further technological advances have made it possible for a large amateur workforce to compete/collaborate with the professionals delivering products/services to the final customers. Leveraging the power of the network has never been easier.

In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson makes a pertinent point on how the businesses of the future need to reasses their view of what constitutes a target market and how to effectively access it. It also is a wake up call for organizations who continue to disregard the contuining shift in the locus of power from the producers towards the consumer. All in all, an excellent and highly recommended read.

technorati tags:longtail, books

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Books in my life … or whatever

Courtesy this post by Anurag or Bataas as we know him here in WIMWI, I suddenly got inspired to write down the psycho-literary history of my head. Those who are yet unaware of my incoherent ramblings might see some chaos in the order. I can however assure you there is only chaos. So, without further ado,

1. The book that has affected me the most

“Catch 22“. This was literally “love at first sight”. The fight of the individual over the collection that he had no wish of becoming a part of in the first place (Yossarian), the mindless exploitation and hoarding of power by some in the name of collective good (Milo) and the many who get stuck, squirm, scream and die in this entire process changed the entire way I have since looked at people and collections. And yes there is something called as Free Will and Choice

2. The book I have read more than once

Too many of them actually. The “Harry Potter series“, “Sherlock Holmes” novels and stories, the “Lord of the Rings trilogy“, “Hundred Years of Solitude“, “Catcher in the Rye” and “Slaughterhouse V” are some of the more memorable ones. Then are parts of the book you keep on re-reading rather than the entire book. I for example have read the first few chapters of War and Peace or the Nabokov’s description of his nymphets in Lolita so many times that those pages now look different.

And though I don’t read too much poetry, “Four Quartets” by T.S. Eliot and “If” by Kipling have over the years become regular companions.

3. On a deserted island I would like to have …

“Ulysses” by Joyce. Maybe out of sheer despondency I will finally read it and maybe even understand it. Yeah and the entire box of Asterix comics to keep me sane.

5. The book that made me cry

Can’t remember any. Lots of movies have done that to me. But not books for some reason except for a couple of short stories in Oriya that I read long back. Some of them made me feel really sad on the state of the world and stuff like that. “Petals of Blood” is a good example.

6. The book that made me laugh

Lots (maybe except Sartre’s works). Actually almost every good book will make you laugh at some time or the other. “Three men in a boat: to say nothing of the dog” takes away my prize for simplicity and inventiveness of its humour. “Breakfast of Champions” is also bitingly sarcastic and outrageously funny if you are not a George Bush fan.

7. The book I wished was not written

“Five point someone” … I was next in the line to write it

8. A book I wished was written

An Indian epic of the scope of “War and Peace” or “Brothers Karamazov“. Premchand’s works reputably have the same epic proportions but have yet to read them.

9. I am now reading …

“Anna Karenina“. Again

Now … that was a long post …

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The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

A work that has often been compared to Catcher in the Rye, because of similar subject matter – disillusionment and rebellion against the mores of the society, The Bell Jar, is an account of Esther Greenwood’s descent into and ascent from madness. The plot and the major characters all mirror real life people in Plath’s life on some degree. As a result the novel was initially published under the pseudoynm Victoria Lucas and was not published in America till 1970s.

While the work itself deals with the “going crazy” and “coming back” of Esther, it portrays at the same time the conflicting demands placed on the woman in the sixties – family vs. career, individuality vs. conformance to the ideal image and dreams vs. perceived reality.  Esther’s descent into madness starts in the summer of her third year in college when she is in New York working for a fashion magazine – supposed to be the chance of a lifetime, a make or break moment in her career. Here she finds herself disinterested and torn between the hedonistic Doreen and conformant Betsy. Returning back to home, she realizes that she would have to spend the summer with her mother since her application for a writing course was rejected. Esther decides to write a novel, but surely and steadily the bell jar of depression descends on her and she tries to kill herself. The later part of the book deals with her recovery at the asylum. A concurrently running plotline deals with Esther’s relationship with Buddy, her “boyfriend”, his socially accepted treachery and her obsession with virginity and maternity. These are not indepedent threads, with events in one affecting the events in the other, but merely follow concurrent timelines.

The publishing of this book and Plath’s subsequent suicide have made her and Bell Jar the icon of feminist movements. Had it not been so, The Bell Jar would have still remained a masterpiece and probably the most lucid and rational description of the mind of a  depressed person on paper. The first person narrative arrests the reader, forcing him/her to look at what Esther is looking, to feel what the protaginist is feeling. Esther’s descent into depression becomes one’s own and does not feel as an aberration but a logical outcome of the events preceding it. The reader shares the claustrophobic feeling, the repugnance at the double standards and outdated ideals of the society and the wish to be free of Esther.

As said earlier, The Bell Jar is often cited as the feminine version of that other society-is-completely-F***** book, The Catcher in the Rye. Yet while, Holden Caulfield looks perenially outward and apportions blame as per his wishes, Esther looks inward, trying to understand herself and why she was the way she was or was not. All the same, The Bell Jar like Catcher…, remains the voice of a generation, wishing to break out, make its own way and find its own path. The issues Plath raises in her only novel, remain as pertinent today as they were during her lifetime, with men and women still grappling with their roles in the modern, “non-sexist” society.

technorati tags:literature, books, plath

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The Google books

Though both, The Google Story (David Vise, Mark Malseed) and The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (John Battele), talk about Google, the first comes off as a rather amateurish attempt at piecing together newspaper clippings and a few interviews chronicling the birth and the rise of Google; the second on the other hand gives a much better perspective of why and how of the Google phenomenon.

Vise in his book merely traces the history of Google and its founders from Stanford dorms to Googleplex; it does nothing to establish the context in which this radical transformation has happened or how this transformation has affected the culture and economics around it. Google today is seen as a media company; Why? Vise’s book won’t tell you that. Batelle atleast tries to answer it or atleast prompts the reader to think about search in a different manner. Also it is not a ode to Google’s greatness; it puts Google’s successes in perspective bringing in other players of the market. While Vise’s book will make you think of Googlplex as the next best thing to heaven, Battele does not flinch pointing out the dark clouds on the horizon.

In short, if you want to read about Google and search, my vote would go for Battele’s work.

Technorati Tags: books, Google, Search

The Palace of Dreams – Ismail Kadare

Dystopias about totalitarian states are often set in the future; as if assure the readers that while they might be seeing the reflection of the present or the past, they are not really living in one. In Kadare’s The Palace of Dreams there is a dream describing a hell, where not only people but empires also lie down before being reborn on the earth as another avatar; the empires of Herod and Hitler according to this vision might just be different manifestations of the same entity and there is no assurance that the empires of the future will be any different. A hellish prospect indeed.

The Palace of Dreams according to the author was indeed born out of a need to invent a personal vision of hell; an exercise that has lead to the most personal of works and yet reaching out to the emotions and feelings of a globalised mass. The Ottoman empire is yet another empire; huge, bureaucratic and decaying. Of all the institutions it relies on to ensure order in empire there is none more important that the Tabir Sarrail; the Palace of Dreams; a place where the subconcious of the empires’ population is shifted through and analysed for patterns that point the powers to be about the revolutions, coups and massacres of the future. Kadare implicitely (and never explicitly) toys with the idea that by playing with the future, are we not changing it? The most critical rule of the Tabir Sarrail is secrecy and yet as the events unfold in the book we realise how little the rule meant. The dreams are fabricated and manipulated by those with influence to advance their own causes; immediately raising the question of whether any of the so called impartial institutions of the state are really impartial?

Mark-Alem’s (the protagonist of the story) hell however does not end with the Palace of Dreams where he is an employee. He is a Quprili, a scion of the most illustrious of families in Europe, one that has given the empire five Gran Viziers and numerous other generals and ministers. The family name comes from the fact that one of their ancestors had built a bridge and had walled a live man inside the foundations to ensure that it withstood the test of time. The Quprili name from time immemorial has demanded such sacrifices of blood from the family and our protagonist finds himself inexorably drawn into this whirlpool of deceit and violence. His meteoric rise in the hierarchy of the Palace of Dreams he feels, is as much a function of the machinations of his uncle, the Vizier, as it is of fate, fattening a lamb before its slaughter.

Kadare masterfully blends the public and private hells of the protagonist; the plot has the drama and the action of a coup with the intricate designs of the various players and yet it does not compromise on communicating the feelings and emotions of the main protagonist. The lanaguage is spare, the imagery Kafka-esque and the plot taut. The cold and dark interiors of the Palace of Dreams create at once an atmosphere of fear as well as decay. Kadare’s vision of hell is physically manifest as much in the description of the Palace as it is in the mental state of the protagonist.

The metaphorical depiction of the totalitarian state is so damning that the novel was banned by the communist government on its release in 1981. But Kadare never insults or disparages the state directly. The book itself can be read as a nightmare – broken, hapazard and without any singe meaning. That the state interpreted this dream as it did probably tells us something about its nature.

Technorati Tags: books, literature, dystopia

Factotum – Charles Bukowski

Sometime back I read Women by Bukowski and had decided that unless I was really short of books, I would not pick one of his again. But I have and do not grudge my choice at all.

Factotum like Women centres around Henry Chinaski; however the key difference is that while in Women Chinaski was rather well established in Factotum he is still the roving wanderer, an undiscovered artiste, doing odd jobs, getting drunk, being fired and all the while trying to write. And while he is still repetitive (the entire book can be read as Chinaski’s job history), it did not get boring as Women tended to become at times. The primary reason, I guess, was that shifting from place to place, doing odd jobs – from being a janitor to shipping clerk – Chinaski’s account here has a dynamism that, I felt, Women lacked.

Both of the books I have read by Bukowski have dealt with journeys. In Women it was the journey of relationships and in Factotum it is search to find the career that the protagonist wishes for. Neither of the works end with a goal reached (not even one in sight), however they do leave one with the feeling that the end is not too far ahead. I guess it is upto the reader to fathom if the end is real or merely a mirage.

At levels Bukowski’s work can be seen as the Catch 22 situation that unestablished artists face. To create art you have to live life your way and see the world as you want to see it. However good writing does not come from an empty stomach, and Bukowski does try a lot to dispel the myth of the starving genius. And to ensure that you hold a steady job and write well, you really can’t go on drinking binges and tell your boss what you think of him. Nowhere is this paradox as evident as in Factotum.

Underplayed satire coupled with the incisive, unabashed and telling observations about the society form the bulwark on which the book stands. In one case, where Chinaski’s job is to pack brake shoes into different cartons (graded on their quality), he says that he does not really know which are which; to which he gets the curt reply from his boss that all are the same. The incident brings out very well the major strengths of Bokowski’s writings.

Personally, this is after a considerably long time, maybe close to a month, that I finished a work of fiction. I was thinking that maybe I had outgrown fiction. Thankfully, there is a always a good book around the corner to pull you back in. And after reading this, I am thinking of getting hold of some more works by Charles Bukowski. Top of my list would probably be Post Office.

Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut

I wanted all things
To seem to make sense,
So we all could be happy, yes,
Instead of tense.
And I made up lies
So that they all fit nice,
And I made this sad world
A par-a-dise.

Bokonon on the roots of Bokononism

All I can say after reading this book is that I have probably found my religion – Bokononism. I do not like the Boko-maru part wherein you rub the soles of your feet with another person to get some kind of soul linking; but the basic tenets as espoused in the above calypso appeal to me. And the best part of the deal is that the Books of Bokonon start by declaring that everything inside them are just lies. Too bad it is just a fictitious creation of Vonnegut.

And it would do the world a great of good – letting people know how warped their realities are. And with kind of power some individuals today weild at their fingertips this generates enough panic in me to migrate to Mars at the earliest possible opportunity.

Cat’s Cradle is the tale of a Nobel prize winning scientist, Felix Hoenikker (the father of the atom bomb), creating a substance (ice nine) that can solidify water at room temperature. He was just solving a problem which would have made the life of marines easier because they would not have to wallow in the mud. On his death his children divide this invention amongst themselves. They use it to achieve their own personal goals. And finally due to this substance a whole lot of people in the island of San Lorenzo perish. Who is to blame? The inventor? The propagators? None of them had any intent whatsoever of harming anyone of those who perished. Cat’s cradle at once is a biting critique of the twin problems of nuclear proliferation and religious zealotry – that the world today is grappling with as unsuccessfully as it did when this book was
written.

Vonnegut is a master of writing disjoint stories. His ability to bring together randomly thrown events, without any clear notion of causality into complete agreement as a plot is what distinguishes his writings from other dystopian efforts. Also he very cleverly uses the imaginative substance ice nine and the religion Bokononism to pull the reader into a believable world – into a world which is so much like our own and yet destined to be destroyed. This makes the book a very entertaining and light read – never taking the obvious philosophical, ethical and moral issues at stake too seriously.

This book would rate alongside Breakfast of Champions and Slaugterhouse Five as the best of Vonnegut in my list. His talent in satirizing the common and the blase and the taken-for-granted facets of our existence gives us a way of viewing life that is at once both humourous and profound. A must-read IMO for any avid reader.

The Argumentative Indian – Amartya Sen

Just after reading this book, I had the opportunity to watch Thomas L. Freidman’s special episode on Discovery titled “The Other Side of Outsourcing“, where he talks in length about how globalization in its avatar of outsourcing has re-molded the Indian urban landscape; begeting an entirely new generation of Indians who are not loath to pick up a Texan accent and a American name to go ahead in life, leaving behind supposedly a lot of baggage, cultural or otherwise, that the previous generations have been forced to carry. Freidman would probably be put by Sen alongside such luminaries as Huen Tsang and Alberuni as belonging to the curatorial school of studying India; defined in his own words as “… includes various attempts at noting, classifying and exhibiting diverse aspects of Indian culture“. However as Sen points out that this perspective though the most catholic does not present the full view of the India, for curatorists, goaded by their quest for knowledge, are attracted to the differences rather than the similarities; and thus they fail to highlight those aspects of India which are commonplace and hence not interesting enough but nonetheless important.

India for long has been classified as the land of mystics, snake charmers and elephants. This picture panders to those audiences who would either want to see India as an unblemished spiritual idyll or to those who believe that the country is not yet out of the dark ages yet. These are what Sen terms as the exoticist and the magisterial approaches respectively. Sen’s major contention is that all these approaches have produced a skewed image of India both internally and externally; sufficient dialogic engagement with India as a subject is not seen; an egregious omission considering the long tradition we have for such activities. Very little is done to highlight the major advances this country has given to humanity in fields of rational and secular enquiry – sciences, mathematics and astronomy – normally considered as fruits of Western civilization. These strains of human activity, he contends, have as much a hand in shaping our culture as have the mystical and religious achievements.

Sen however is no nationalist in the mould of certain right wing activists who tend to believe and remain ensconced in the idea that we are and have always been the greatest. He takes great pains to bring out the fact that the achievements of Indian culture did not happen in a vacuum. Far from that, they were the effect of centuries of collaboration with other cultures – Chinese, Greek and Persian. Indian culture has always been in a dialogue with the neighboring civilizations – including that of the normally reticent Chinese; a dialogue Sen sees as benefiting both sides equally. It is in the light of such arguments that Sen takes into account the claims of certain sections of the polity that Indian culture is under attack and needs to be protected. This notion of protectionism goes against, he says, one of the basic axioms on which Indian culture is based – a strong dialogic tradition.

Another major issue that Sen tackles in this set of essays is the notion of Indian identity. Indians today, the fruits of such a varied and enormous cultural heritage, often find it difficult to define their identities, especially to outsiders. This, Sen argues is the major motivation for movements such as Hindutva that allow us to pigeonhole and rigidly demarcate our identities apropos of other nationalities and cultures. However in the process, he says, we lose much more than we gain, becoming the eponymous frog in the well, who thinks there is no world outside the well. It is by embracing our tradition of assimilation rather than adhering to an exclusive definition that we will truly find who we are. However in this light I was disappointed with Sen’s rather perfunctory glance at how Indian history is written. Apart from a brief aside at the BJP government for rewriting the history texts, often at odds with factual information, Sen does little cogitation on this subject. However our notions of India and its culture have primarily been molded by how our history is written. This I believe is a major failing of this work.

Sen does not only deal with Indian culture on an abstract level, a capacious idea of India, but discusses the challenges faced by India on various fronts today – poverty, primary education, status of women in society and the varied problems introduced by moving into a globalized environment. He tackles in his later essays topics as varied as primary education, Indian nuclear tests, the continuing endemic hunger and malnutrition and the failure of the ruling parties in broadening the net of success to the lower strata of the society.

These essays are not only instructive in their content but also in their exposition of the argumentative tradition of India. With the burgeoning IT industry and renewed interest in India from outside, it is pertinent that we take a fresh look at our culture and traditions and define ourselves rather than fit into the definition of others of who we are. The innate humanism of Sen coupled with his lucid reasoning in defense of diversity and dialogue makes this book a must read.

Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev

Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev – the big three of mid to late nineteenth century Russian literature. While the first two are acknowledged literary giants, I was surprized to find from the foreword to the edition I have, that it was Turgenev and not the others who was the most widely read and acclaimed in those days. However it seems that this giant has faded into relative obscurity. I had heard of the name earlier and had dismissed him as another Salieri. And only reason I picked up this book was that almost all Haruki Murakami’s depressed protagonists like to read him; plus the fact that the book had only 250 odd pages to read made this choice much easier.

Fathers and Sons, Turgenev’s most controversial and lasting work, though lacking the epic scale of War and Peace or the incisive pyscho-social analysis of The Brothers Karamazov, is truely a masterpiece in its own right. Turgenev, unlike Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, probably did not believe in certain philosophies as the bulwark on which the perfect world would rest. He was more interested in observing what is, rather than postulating what can be. And yet, it was this book that gave world the term Nihilism, often used to describe the writings of the great Friedrich Nietzsche, a much more radical philosphical point of view than what Tolstoy ever alluded to in his works.

What really struck me as I wound up the book, was how well balanced the characters were in the book. The protagonist, a nihilist by the name of Bazarov; Arkady, his one time companion and co-conspirator; the older generation of Nikolai and Pavel Petrovich; each gets an equal share of attention from the author and one cannot really judge from the characterizations, the author’s philosophical leanings. Turgenev was universally reviled, by both the right and the left, after the publication of this book, as they failed to find any concrete justifications for their respective philosophies. The author allows each character its own space to play out its role in the plot, and yet constantly anchoring them to the real world that he was describing, unlike Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky for whom the character often existed in a vacuum.

The writing is precise and economical – an extra sentence never belabors a point in this book. This is facilitated by the author’s reticence to flesh out the intricacies of the psychology of the character, and often limiting himself to write as a observer rather than the creator. Very rarely does Turgenev resort to taking the reader inside the heads of the characters and when he does that these become an extremely effective medium to communicate their true feelings. And never does he exagerrate the actions of his characters, as if subscribing to particular philosphy. To bring out the difference, I would compare the duel scene here between Pavel Petrovich and Bazarov and a similar scene between Pierre and Dolokhov in War and Peace, the result in both cases being that one of the combatants was injured and the duel had to abandoned midway. While Tolstoy chooses to go inside the head of Pierre describing with picturesque clarity his feelings before and after the act, Turgenev prefers to report things as they happened and the consequences they entailed.

Along with the text, my edition of the book, the 1972 Penguin Classics Edn, also has the Romanes Lecture by Isiah Berlin added to it. This was for me the most incisive commentary on Russian literature of those times that I have read. It allowed me to understand , the various issues Turgenev here and others elsewhere, were trying to address.

So even if I hate the rest of Murakami’s books I would remain thankful to him for introducing me to this great master of prose through his characters.

technorati tags: books, literature

Books in the past few months

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy – A true classic. Anything more than this and less than a book will not do justice to this tale.

Embers by Sandor Marai – Two old men talk throughout the night, reminiscing about and recreating that fateful day which destroyed the marriage of one, the love of another and the bonds of friendship between them.

Arabian Nights and Days by Naguib Mafouz – Mafouz at his best. His prose, lyrical and magical, seduces the reader into a world of Djinns and Sultans which stays with him long after the book is finished.

Ports of Call by Amin Malouf – From the French resistance to the shimmering cauldron called Beirut, Maalouf chronicles this love story with an empathy and poignancy that is altogether ethereal.

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami – Out of the world. With a dash of mystery and philosophical ramblings thrown in. Trademark Murakami.

The Gladiators by Arthur Koestler – What is revolution? Koestler takes a hard look at this question in this tale of Spartacus, the gladiator who became a revolutionary, challenging and shaking the mighty Roman Empire to its foundations.

Indian Unbound by Gurcharan Das – Part biographical, part journalistic this is probably one of the best books on Post-liberalisation India in particular and India in general. Eminently readable and scattered with anecdotes – the image of India as a wise Elephant rather than an aggressive tiger makes a lot of sense.

[Book Watch] The Design of Everyday Things – Donald A. Norman

Think of how many times you have pushed a door on the wrong side, turned the knob of the water faucet in the opposite direction or just stared blankly at some new funky looking gadget, which seems to have come from outer space and you cannot fathom for what earthly reason it could be used. And then waltzes in, the great all knowing dude to give you the knowledge to overcome the gaucheness on your part or maybe if you are of the adventurous sort you discover the knowledge for yourself after numerous hits and trials. But will there always be a omniscient guy around to help you or there be enough time for hit-trial methods when there is a fire in the building. Welcome friends to the brave new world of bad designs – the world where you and I live.

I have been ranting about usability for some time. But reading this book gave me a much clearer insight into the challenges and pitfalls of user interface design. And yes, it did convince me that by ranting about these things I do not prove myself to be dumb. I just have better things to do rather than remembering the shortcut keys to the new mobile phone in the market.

The author talks about three major things in the book – visibility of possible actions, evaluation of the results of those actions and allowing the user to build an accurate model for the object in use on the basis of causal inference. Additionally the author gives designers a new vantage point for viewing the eternal design anathema – user errors.

First rule of design – show the user what actions are possible. By its very appearance every object makes itself more suitable for certain tasks and at the same time ruling out others as unsuitable. Further constraints in terms of standards, cultural mores etc reduce the infinite set of possibilities into a limited set. The challenge for the designer is not only to make this set atomic and concrete but to expose the mappings that would allow users to explore the entire spectrum of possibilities.

When a user does something, show him what happens. Unless the user sees something concrete happening it is assumed by him that the action is redundant. Proper feedback is especially necessary for allowing the user to build a correct conceptual model, since it is the conceptual model, that is responsible for the users actions when an out of the ordinary situation, ill affording mistakes, arises. Further proper feedback will allow the user to backtrack if discovers that his actions are not producing the wished for effects and thus preventing some major error on his part.

Users will make errors. And they are not necessarily to blame. The author states that using an object can be seen as a dialogue, between the user and the designer, with the difference that they only communicate via the object in question. And as always, there are gaps in communication. And these are what we normally term as errors. Designing therefore, is not only about weeding out possible errors. It is about making the possible errors less malicious and hopefully completely reversible.

The author has lambasted the design of daily usage articles, doors, faucets and telephones enough in his book, so I won't be attempting to do that. Rather I will focus on computers, not again as a tyro, but from the viewpoint of someone who had been using one on an average of 8-10 hours a day for the last 6 years. Most of the time I have spent with computers are on very few types of applications – email and IM clients, editors and word processors, web browsers and development environments. A general survey, of applications used, might add a spreadsheet application, a PowerPoint like application and an image manipulation application to, and remove the IDE from my list. However the fact remains that the basic functionality required by an average Joe is not gargantuan. However it would be hard to find a user who is satisfied with his experience with this limited set of applications.

One reason for this disillusionment, is the lack of a common thread in the working of these applications. Each application demands a separate causal model. And I am not talking here of applications doing different things; even ones apparently doing the same thing probably will not lend themselves to a single model. If you want to try ask a hardcore Outlook Office user to shift to Thunderbird as his email client? I will not even go into the Unix\Linux and Windows dichotomy. This apparent lack of a common thread is probably due to the fact that most of computer applications tend to hide a lot of things. Hence the cause-effect relationship as understood by the end user is distorted, ending up finally as twisted user model.

As an example I remember of a situation I confronted some time back. I was talking with ,my colleague my hands resting on the keyboard; a pop-up suddenly appears says something will be disabled or enabled and I being engrossed in an interesting conversation just hit ENTER. Nothing happens. I go back to work and everything is fine till the evening when I had to cut-paste something and I discovered to my horror that the SHIFT-ARROW combinations have stopped working. It took me close to 2 hours to resolve this issue as nobody knew what it was nor I could remember accurately what had caused it. it turned out that I had pressed the SHIFT key for more than 10 seconds and something called STICKY KEYS was affected. These days while carrying around my laptop, I often have the same problem since SHIFT and ENTER keys are nearby. I just dread to think what would have happened one of these days had I not faced the problem earlier. I would not have actively done something and my computer would still be not doing the right thing.

As a result of these malformed signals to the user and the consequent distorted model, computer applications have the deserved reputation of needing high thresholds of learning ability thus scaring away an entire generation, who think their learning days are behind them, and for whom they might actually prove to be the most beneficial. And for me the real problem is fact that till today I continue to invest substantial amount of time troubleshooting various issues, when I cannot read as many books I want to because of lack of time.

The book, DOET, has become a bestseller. Things also have changed and usability issues are being given more thought every passing day. However, for every well designed Apple IPod I see a badly designed mobile phone, digital camera and a search site. We still have a long way to go on this road.

NOTE:: As a personal opinion, I did not think very highly of the way the book itself was designed. My copy is the standard international copy, available at Amazon, so I do not think I was shortchanged by a cheap edition. Test referred to pictures in different pages, notes which could have been made footnotes were added to the end alongwith others and the cover distorted itself after the first reading. Some of things I definitely don;t look for in a good book.

[Book Watch] The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

I wonder if any country has seen as much misery and suffering, as has Afghanistan in the last thirty years. Starting from the Russian invasion, the Mujahidin infighting, the Taliban era and finally the American invasion, the country has been in a constant state of war. The bitter skirmishes and the false hopes have left behind many scars, but none probably so deep as the sense of fear ingrained in the general psyche of the people. But as Afghans say, Zendagi Migzara – life goes on.

The Kite Runner is the story of Amir, the son of a rich Kabul businessman and Hassan, his friend, confidante and servant. While Amir is a Pashtun, the majority ethnic group in Afghanistan, Hassan is a Hazara, doomed by his birth to serve others. The book traces the life of Amir in mid seventies Afghanistan watching Hollywood movies dubbed in Farsi, eating Kabobs and flying kites, with Hassan a constant presence by his side, to his being a refugee in USA, studying, marrying and being successful. However, he has to come back to Afghanistan once more, to exorcise the ghosts of his past, to redeem his friendship with Hassan and to protect his lineage. And he has to return to the Afghanistan, not of the communists or the Mujahidin, but that of the medieval Taliban.

Khaled Hosseini rarely puts a false step in his taut narrative. He succeeds magnificently in two particular areas – letting the users know intimately the various characters and in bringing out the cultural and sociological aspects of the Afghan psyche. Kabul, both of the seventies and in Taliban days, becomes alive in the writings of Mr. Hosseini. The conflict between the various ethnic groups and the ill-treatment of the minorities will lead a reader some way in understanding the mess that Afghanistan is today. Each character seems to epitomize some trait of the a general Afghan. Their passion for the bloody game of Buzkhashi matches their enthusiasm for the subtle art of kite flying. The same hands which are responsible beautiful calligraphies and pictures from Herat are also responsible for publicly stoning people to death. A study of Afghanistan brings out two apparently irreconcilable facets but which still continue to co-exist.

After the publication of the book, the author went back to Afghanistan for some soul searching of his own. Some of his comments in the essay he wrote after the trip, give us a sense of how the diaspora – atleast the first generation – feel about their homeland. A sense of belonging and being a tourist at the same time. As he said, the author had forced Amir to go to Kabul, but when he himself went, the same feelings and emotions as his protagonists' raged inside him. But both the author and the protagonists trudged on in their respective journeys unfazed by these misgivings – displaying yet again the strength of the Afghan spirit.

More than anything else the book is about the fact that life goes on. Mr. Hosseini sums it up beautifully in the end when he says,

"It was a smile, nothing more. It did not make everything all right. It did not make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight.

But I'll take it. With open arms. When Spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I witnessed the first flake melting"

Zendagi Migzara.

[Book Watch] Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince – J.K. Rowling

An avowed Harry Potter fan, I do not think I waited for any book so eagerly ever in my life. And as with almost everything you have very high hopes for, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, though not bad fails to meet the high expectations.

This book is the starting of the end. Most of the story revolves around the placing of the characters and their backgrounds before the final showdown. We come to know of a significant amount of Voldemort's past, his days in Hogwarts and his quest for immortality. The path to his destruction is also charted out by the wily old Dumbledore in his final days assisted by an increasing abler Harry. Snape finally gets his wish of teaching Defence against Dark Arts and we have a new potions master after which Harry suddenly discovers in himself a great talent in the art of potion making – getting finally better than Hermoine in some course, to her great chagrin. Hermoine and Ron break and make up ten thousand times and Ginny and Harry get together.

And the Half Blood Prince, you ask? He becomes probably Harry's best teacher since he entered Hogwarts. And surprise!! Harry's loathing for him at the end of the episode matches that of Voldemort. But as I said before this book was more like drawing of the battle plans and the few random skirmishes just before the main battle and Mr. Half Blood Prince definitely has big role to play in that.

So where did I not like the book. Till Order of the Phoenix the HP series had got progressively darker and the characterizations had become complex. Rowling takes a step back in this book, trying very hard to separate out the black and white from the mists of grey. Voldemort is painted in such a dark hue that darkness would have some trouble recognizing him. This is, I believe the greatest travesty of the book. A hero can probably be a simple character. A villain never. Also the character of Draco, is passed over even though he probably brings about the single most important event if the book. This is a part of seeing everything in black and white. You just concentrate on the white and forget the black. However, Rowling does decent work of taking further Harry's characterization. For the first time we see Harry operating alone, not too perturbed by the fact that his friends and well wishers continue to sideline his concerns. He realizes finally that the burden is his and only his to bear. No one, not even his dearest friends should be expected to share it with him. He is probably on the road to become another Batmanish character. And as for Ron and Hermoine, they too are more or less passed over [apart from Ron's antics with Lavender].

The book even though set in the darkest of environs – with the Dark Lord rising and all that – has a lot more hope. The readers and the protagonists both now know what they are facing. They know what should be done to win the war and to eliminate the evil, much unlike other books where the enemy was nameless, faceless, not-sure-if-alive You Know Who. Apart from that, to add to all the hope, we had love floating all over Hogwarts [sniggering smile] . Rowling had conscientiously avoided pairing off characters in the previous episodes but it was done too abruptly here.

Bottomline, if you are a Harry Potter fan, you will anyway read this book. But do not look for anything beyond rehashing of the old stuff, putting in the missing pieces and the drawing of the battle plans. And yes, the wait for the seventh book has started.

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[Book Watch] Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World – Haruki Murakami

What happens when Dream and Day unite? Maybe you get a book like Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World [HBWaTEotW] (phew … that’s a long acronym)?

My last Murakami [Norwegian Wood] had left me no way prepared for this neo-Carrollian piece. From the very onset the reader realizes that the book is two different books in one – Hard Boiled Wonderland & The End of the World. This is apparent from the different fonts used in marking the alternate chapters in the contents. Even the annotation on the top left of the left page reads differently for different chapters.

Hard Boiled Wonderland, is the story of our Calutec protagonist who reads Turgunev, listens to Bob Dylan, watches John Ford movies and downs whisky with relish. He is called upon by an eccentric scientist to do some data laundering and shuffling, and gets embroiled in a grand conspiracy involving the System, the Factory and the INKlings. The End of the World on the other hand is the tale of initiation of a new entrant into the Town surrounded by the Wall who is given the designation of the Dream Reader. [If you did not understand anything from the above lines do not worry, they are not meant to be understood.]

But then why are these the same book? If I give the answer, I would be kind of spoiling the mystery of the story but I can say that the reader's answer to this query will probably form the basis of his experience with this book. Almost halfway into the book the readers would probably have no clue of what is going on but then things start coming together.

The prose is flighty and fast paced, sometimes bordering on corny. Murakami seemingly favors this form in all his compositions. The dreamy quality of the book is further enhanced by the chapter names; each of which seemed to be created after the chapter was written and then picking out the three most used themes in that chapter. It took away from the book any sense of coherence in the storyline, giving the narrative a very jagged and staggered look. The female characters reminded me a great deal about Naoko and Midori from NW. Seems to be another Murakami trademark – over the top or reserved female characters.

Read this book if you are tired and want your brain to be exercised. Read this book if you think your imagination is getting deadened. In short read this book if you are not frightened of the out of the ordinary.

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—–

The last three books I have read have got to do something or the other with phrenology and skulls. Weird coincidence? Probably.

[Book Watch] The War of the End of the World – Mario Vargas Llosa

This is amongst the thickest books that I have read in recent times – not just in terms of pages, but also in terms of the scope of the narrative and the number of characters involved. The narrative centers around the events in Canudos in Brazil towards the end of the nineteenth century. If it was only a tome in history, there would not have been much to write; if it was a book on social dynamics, there would have been more but not so much; the fact that the book uses history and the unique social setting in Brazil in general and Canudos in particular as a background for narrating a number of intertwined and parallel moving stories is what actually gives book it's bulk.

Unlike the previous Llosa novel I read "The Way to Paradise", "The War of the End of the World" [TWotEotW] carefully crafts and blends in each individual storyline onto the greater fabric of the book. No story lingers for too long and the narrative is expertly switched in between various contexts. Llosa's sense of history is for once reasonably balanced. For large parts of the book he manages to recount the events without apportioning blame or credit for those. This in itself is no mean feat to achieve while writing a historical novel.

This book has often been compared, for the breadth of human emotions and actions it encompasses, to "War and Peace". While it does try to emulate W&P, the author does not display the same control and finesse in the bringing out the varied emotions that a situation produces in each different individual. The characters in TWotEotW, though numerous in number can be sorted out in a few baskets. Though the author goes into great detail into the life histories of each of the major players, rarely do those details manifest themselves in the actions of the characters in the later stages. Take for example the stories of the bandit converts Abbot Joao, Pajeau and others. They are in terms of their experiences, probably the most colorful of the characters, but their actions in the war against republic rarely brings out these differences. The only thing in which the book compares favorably with W&P, is its length that sometimes frustrates the reader.

If I had to describe the book in a few words, it would be "The misunderstanding's of a few fanatics". For it is in the characterization of these fanatics – Galileo Gall, Rufino, Moriera Cesar or the Counselor – that the author produces his finest. What drives them can often not be codified, but it is something definite – a just society, honour, progress or the rule of God. Everytime he gets a chance, Llosa drives home the point that rational thought and reason are not the panacea for all ills. When towards the end of the book, the short sighted journalist comments that the entire affair at Canudos was nothing but a misunderstanding, the author sums up the entire book.

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[Book Watch] Art and Lies – Jeanette Winterson

There are books you love or you hate. Art and Lies is one such book. This book questions the reader's preset views on issues ranging from morality, sex, science to what a story is supposed to be.

The novel is set in a train and revolves around three passenger's whose names should be familiar – Handel, a priest turned surgeon, Picasso, an artist mired in the search for her art and self and Sappho, the poet of antiquity remembered today not because of her art. The book follows the musings of these passengers – each reflecting on their lives gone past – the actions and consequences and how it has turned them into what they are. The narratives follow a "Stream of Consciousness" style with the reader going inside the heads of the characters, privy to their most innermost thoughts.

The book has numerous strengths. The language is exquisite. Not since I discovered Saramago and Nabokov, have I seen such virtuoso use of the English tongue. Winterson's prose is as daring as the bold strokes of Van Gogh in his paintings. In addition the writing has a poetic cadence to it that gives the reader a feeling of being at sea or in a train rumbling away. The thematic choice of the novel is also bold for Winterson unflinchingly questions and explores complex issues such as self, sexuality, art and science.

However I felt the book, especially in the middle sections, sacrificed tautness in narrative for philosophical interludes into its numerous themes. The characters remain shadows; the author does not (possibly with some reason) allow them to take shape. They move about in the narrative as phantoms.

But what ultimately rescues the book is the ending. The final movement with the three voices in unison was awesome. The characters come here together and for a moment I thought if this was a tale of three people or just one with three different traits.

This is not an easy book to read. As it says on one of reviews, it will stretch your mental muscles to limits you never knew existed. But then a good exercise is never harmful.

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[Book Watch] Miss Smillia’s Feeling for Snow – Peter Høeg

I had picked up this book more out of curiosity; I had not read a Scandinavian novel yet. I believe that if you co-exist with some phenomenon of nature for a substantial period, you develop some bonding with it. I, for example invariably think of Rourkela where I grew up, on seeing the occasional rains here in Bangalore or when the wilting heat threatens to lay waste the entire city. And I felt snow is something about which Scandinavians should feel alike.

"Miss Smillia's Feeling for Snow" (MSffS) can best be described as Ludlum married with Alexander Dumas giving birth to a something looking like R.L. Stevenson. The book is a thriller, a social commentary and an exercise in character building all rolled into one. The plot is as complicated or as simple as all Ludlum plots are – a child falls from the roof and dies; an accident say the authorities; murder says Miss Smilla, to whom the tracks left in snow speak of a more gruesome tale. As Smilla, the protagonist of our novel delves into this mystery, the more complex and gargantuan it becomes. The plot has been in action for decades and the death of the child is nothing but a small link in this long chain of events.

However in trying to juggle various styles, the author in entirety does justice to none. Character building in a fast paced narrative is not a easy art to master. I really liked the first part of the book where the reader still does not know the scale of events to come, and the author's digressions into the past life of Smilla in Greenland, her displacement into Denmark after here mother's death, her inability to let go of her natural innuk attitude in favor of the manners of the west all provide for interesting reading. These also show that even in an (so called) advanced western society, the barriers of who are and who are not remain.

But as soon as the scene moved out of Copenhagen to Kronos, the ship on which the characters set sail to claim their golden fleece, the story became cumbersome. The author just could not balance the speed with his proclivity towards interludes on everything from social history of eskimos in Greenland to good culinary practices. And in my opinion, all threads of the story were not brought into a suitable conclusion in the end as should a good chase novel do. I felt I was cheated of my grand ending. Story telling on board a ship, a limited spatial space and character set is something only some authors like Stevenson or Melville have perfected. Høeg sadly cannot lay claim to this greatness.

In my opinion this MSffS can lay claim to neither the genre of "chasing the grand conspiracy" nor to realm of good old storytelling via the characters. It is an experiment, but a half baked one.

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[Book Watch] Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer

Visiting one's past can be compared to Schrödinger's cat in the box. It changes once you open it and look at it. No wonder in all civilizations they have saying equivalent to "Let bygones be bygones". Rarely do humans pay heed to these, for getting in touch with your past often brings out some part of one's persona that would have otherwise remain dormant. And can past be seen in consonance with the future? A tough question, but one which the above book manages to answer in some clarity.

"Everything is Illuminated" (EiI) is the tale of the author visiting Ukraine, from where his grandfather had fled to escape the oppression of the Nazi regime, in hope of finding the person who had saved him then. It is also the tale of Alex who acts as the author's translator for this trip, and his hopes and dreams – for himself and for his brother of a better world to live in. Both of these tales encompass what is in essence, some say is the meaning of our lives, to make the world a better place to live in.

EiI is an interwoven tale of the author's search as well as the story of the village of Trachimbrod and his ancestors. It takes us from the day Trachim's wagon sunk in the river Brod, leaving amongst the flotsam, a baby who would be the very great grandmom of the author to the destruction of the village by the hands of the marauding Nazi troops. The story of the search itself is recounted by Alex who sends with each of his installments, a letter of his own giving the novel yet another dimension. I found these letters from Alex the most touching part of the whole story – a tale of one knowing of a world outside and the opportunities there, with a dream of making them his own someday and yet realizing at the same time that these are nothing but mirages to help him survive in the wilderness of his own existence.

Many believe humor to be the anti-thesis of tragedy. But in my experience if one can laugh at tragedy, there is nothing more heart rendering than that. Alex's constipated use of English, learnt probably by memorizing a dictionary without knowing the context of using the words, his inability to paraphrase routine actions in a comprehensible tongue are definitely funny; but they hide his desperation to escape from the drudgery and poverty of his existence. In Alex's grandfather, the driver for the trip, there is another person asking to be freed; this time from the memories of the past which haunt him making his life a living hell. The story is a melting pot for these three characters (and a bitch), each searching for his Eldorado.

As an aside, I think this novel would make a really good case study for any class in post-colonialism, neo-colonialism or any related fields. There are interesting patterns in the way the author, an American to the boot looks at Ukraine, a third world country that reminded me of the novels I read while doing a course on those subjects. But more than anything else this is a tale of hopes and dreams, some fulfilled some squashed but each charting the destiny of the bearer in an irrevocable manner.

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[Book Watch] The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick

Imagine living in an alternate universe where Hitler and Imperialist Japan had won the second world war. Stretch your imagination to the limit. Can you imagine California as a Japanese colony and New York the centre of German domination in North America? Philip K. Dick does exactly that, in this above mentioned book.

Normally science fiction relies on a setting far ahead in time and often in space – a vision of the future to fire reader's imagination and pique his curiosity. "The Man in the High Castle" (TMitHC) does not rely on such tools – instead giving him an alternate vision for the present. Hence the classification of Dick's writings as science fiction does not go well with me. I would rather label his writings as alternative socio-political fiction, especially this one.

The book is set in a cold war scenario; Japan and Germany, allies in the past, are currently at loggerheads in almost all matters under the sun. Hitler is gone as is his successor Bormann. Herr Goebels is the new German chancellor after a short campaign literally out-orating his opponents, And the new government in Berlin seems to in no mood to allow any further insolence from its past ally and now greatest enemy, Japan.

Though he is an American and not from a country with a colonial legacy, Dick manages to capture all the essential traits of the both stereotype colonizer and colonized in his characters. Mr. Childan, Juliana, Frank Frink all paint the canvas of the colonized in their different hues while the Kasouras and Tagomis cover the spectrum of the colonizers. It is in fact humorous for someone like me to see Americans like Mr. Childan portrayed as mere servile creatures, besotted with whims and fancies of their colonial masters. Also interesting is the continual usage of the I-Ching by all characters, showing how certain aspects of the culture of the colonizers pervades the very fabric of the colonized society (for a real world example, think of the role of English language in India).

However the book is not about the colonization of the world by Fascists or its consequences. The main subject of the book is another book The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, that gives the characters the vision of a world if the Allies had been victorious in the great war. Also central to the story of TMitHC is fate and luck, as is evident from the numerous usages of I Ching or The Book of Changes, by disparate characters. I Ching seems to be some philosophical treatise which allows one to look at what the future holds; but the entirety of whose prophecies can be gauged only with hindsight. Reading this book, questions with "What if …" start becoming louder in the reader's head. Also at the same time the realization dawns that, many crucial events in history could have turned the opposite way but for some quirk of fate. In the end when we meet the author of Grasshopper …, one realizes that the book is as much a truth as reality, showing us how thin is the line between visions and harsh realities.

This book is probably not for the hardcore sci-fi fans – but if you are interested in the future of the society or alternates to the existing one, then as James Bond would say "Nobody does it better than Dick". And TMitHC would probably be counted amongst his better works.

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[Book Watch] The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco

My second reading of this book took more time than the first one. When I read this book 5 years back, I read the book only as a murder mystery and hence rushed past the various interludes that the narrative takes. In my last reading I realized that the book's true worth lay in the parts that I had previously paid scant attention to.

"The Name of the Rose" (TNotR) is a palimpsest. On the top it can be, as I initially did, read as only a murder mystery ala Sherlock Holmes. With its Holmesian undertones (the main protagonist is Brother William of Baskerville), the story can be seen as a reworking of the "Hound of Baskervilles" wherein the desolate moor is replaced by the labyrinth that the library of the monastery is.

But TNotR is also a treatise about the life in Middle Ages in Europe. And most of all it is a book about books and knowledge. And the power and possessiveness that access to knowledge gives.

The backdrop of the main narrative has the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor at loggerheads over the issue of whether monks and clerics should follow Christ's ideal of poverty. But as the protagonist said the fight was really over whether church should be allowed to wield secular powers. The opposing parties are set to meet at the unknown monastery to resolve these differences when the deaths start. Brother William with a reputation for logical deduction and ability to observe things minutely, who happens to be in the place as delegate for the forthcoming conference, is called upon to solve the mystery of the monks death.

From the protagonist's discussion with his apprentice Adso, the narrator, and other characters we learn of the nature of the church, kingdoms and practices in those days. One thing which stands out in my mind is William's rumination on the nature of the heretical movements – how they are different and hence cannot be clubbed together and yet each feeding and deriving momentum from others. Also interesting are William's meditations on good magic that can be used to make things to improve general lives, which tells us a great deal about how science was perceived than.

I never really understood why Gutenberg publishing the Bible is always heralded as such a big milestone in the history of mankind. TNotR gives some answers. Books are storehouses of knowledge, that can be used for good or evil depending on the bearer. The unknown monastery was renowned not for the piousness of its inhabitants but for the library it housed. Going forward in the book we realize that the deaths are over access to a certain book. Someone wants it hidden, while others are willing to do anything to lay their hands on it. Access to the library – and knowledge – is the bulwark on which all power games are based in our unnamed monastery.

Not surprisingly therefore , the majority of the book's volume is taken up by the various philosophical interludes our main characters take. This with the generous use of Latin in the text can make reading the book an onerous task – atleast in the initial stages. But once the reader gets in the flow of these discussions and becomes comfortable with the context, he will not be disappointed with it.

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[Book Watch] Women – Charles Bukowski

As a piece of writing, the novel "Women" probably conforms the greatest, to the precept of the protagonist Henry Chinaski, 'Everybody lives their lives, I just remember a something and write it down'.

The first thing I noticed about the book was how auto-biographical it sounded. It was as if the author was recording the life he was leading, which he later at leisure transcribed into prose. Not only was the main protagonist a writer by trade, he was born in Germany like Bukowski but also enjoyed the same kind of reputation, of a bohemian psycho, that the author himself must have endured at some point of his life. The novel revolves around Chinaski's (or is it actually Bukowski, even the names sound similar !!) various liaisons (sexual or otherwise) with women after a celibate period of 4 years.

The book starts with Chinaski hitting upon Lydia, from his initial infatuation to his gradual disenchantment with her. For opposites might attract initially , but rarely do they sustain any long close contact. The reader then follows this Bohemian writer in his search for women, constantly amazed at his ability to bed females almost half his age. What is the protagonist searching for?? Definitely not some concept like true love or the eternal life partner. Probably he is just testing the waters, always scared to dive in, yet unable to restrain himself from wetting his feet – to know how it feels like. Chinaski's nature can probably be extrapolated to every man on this planet, definitely not in terms of direct action, but at more conceptual level.

Bukowski in this tale manages to cut open incisively, both the male and the female psyches. If someone has to be convinced 'Men are from Mars, Women from Venus', I would hand him this book. The most interesting character for me was Lydia, Chinaski's first lover in the book. Lydia loves to go out, party and flirt (and may be occasionally get into the sack) with general public but cannot tolerate her lover talking about another woman. Initially one might term the emotion as jealousy but it is more inclined towards possessiveness. Chinaski on the other hand though continuously suspicious of her actions, never lends himself to the kind of violent outbursts which characterize Lydia. Similarly quite a few of the women following her displayed similar traits though not to her extent.

The satire in the book is another of its strong points. It never becomes overbearing. The reader generally get the feeling the world portrayed, is full of cribbers who can see no good in anything. But as with his psychological prognosis, Bukowski here is at his incisive best. But the book does tend to linger on. As the main character meets another women, or gets a letter from one of his female fans, the reader can almost predict what is going to happen. The basic storyline remains the same – 'Wham bang, kaam tamaam' (translates literally to job done). There is so little variation of the whole theme that apart from the wisecracks in between one tends to get bored. Also though Bukowski brilliantly portrays the type of persons he wants to, he conveniently skips the question of what exactly does Chinaski want. Maybe this ambiguity is by choice so as to allow readers to draw theie own conclusions but this approach definitely leaves a lot unexplained.

Overall the book was for me an unique experience for it was first sampling of Bukowski's work, but both the content and style tend to be slightly repetitive and do not see myself as a huge Bukowski fan unless his other works differ in their basic approach.

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[Book Watch] The Great Indian Novel – Shashi Tharoor

There would be nothing (forget great) in this book if one does not have the right context. And if one has the context right the book turns into a hilarious juxtaposition of the greatest influences on the Indian psyche – the Independence movement and the grand epic Mahabharata. Every Indian invariably grows learning of the deeds of our leaders of independence in school and of the heroes of the Mahabharata from grandparents and parents at home.

Incidentally both of these sources are rich in politics – a passion with the Indian populace matched only by its infatuation with cricket. Full credit however must go to the author, for bringing in these two episodes so far removed in time, space and characteristics in one narrative. So Gandhi becomes Bheeshma, the elder statesman who has the last say in any decision. Nehru becomes Dhritarashtra, learned and wise, but whose propensity to be correct often blinds him from the correct path to be taken. Bose is Pandu, the lost son of India, its martial face, one who dared to challenge the conventions. And Jinnah, the eternal villain in our textbooks, is Karna, a soul whose ambition and drive matched his unwillingness to toe anyone elses' but his own line. In this tale of intrigue and passion the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra are replaced by one daughter, who as the stars had said would be equal to a hundred sons.

Tharoor maps out the entire modern history of India from the days when Mahatma Gandhi started out on his first satyagraha marches in Champaran to the days dark days of emergency under Mrs. Gandhi to the subsequent chaos under the Janata government. . "The Great Indian Novel" (TGIN) is a not tale of good versus evil as are both of its sources often portrayed simplistically – Pandavas are good and Kauravas are evil, Britishers are evil while Indians are good, Indira Gandhi is devil incarnate while JP is a godsend. Tharoor understands that in Indian politics as in Mahabharata things run much deeper than what is evident on the surface. And therefore he carefully tries not to fall into the trap of notional classification of characters into camps of black and white. He chooses to paint the canvas rather in shades of grey with more than an ounce of satire for taste (or as some purists of Indian culture might say, for the lack of it).

All things said and done, what will intrigue the most any reader is the role that Krishna assumes in this tale. As in the original epic Krishna is somewhat a reticent god, one who carries the burden of divinity with such lightness that he appears almost human but at the same time at right moments is not afraid to show the world his actual divine form to literally awe them into submission. The Krishna in this tale probably is Kamraj, once described by my father, as probably the most brilliant political mind that India has produced after Chanakya. And history is proof that this great political mind chose to restrict himself in his state and his locality rather than stand up and be counted amongst the pantheon of great Indian leaders. Where would India be today if he had taken his stand in the great war. Tharoor manages with his wit to ask such tough questions to the reader.

But TGIN is not a biography of the major characters in freedom struggle. It is more than anything else the tale of India. It is an account of the decisions and intrigues which have shaped up the country as it is today. And that it manages to do with more than dash of humour so as not let one feel that he is reading his history textbook of class ninth, is probably the greatest achievement of this book.

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[Book Watch] The House of Spirits – Isabel Allende

"Spanning four generations, Isabel alienates magnificent family saga …" said the back cover of the book. I was immediately reminded of the Marquez's classic epic on the Buendas of Macondo, "One Hundred Years of Solitude"(OHYoS). OHYoS has since become the flagbearer for magic realism and Marquez has taken his place, rightly so, amongst the greats of the 20th century literature. I could therefore not help comparing "The House of Spirits" (THoS), with its more critically illustrious counterpart.

The initial comparisons were, to say the least, not very flattering. The book seemed a pale copy of the OHYoS. It was imitation of style, form and content but not doing justice to either of them, never reaching the levels set by Marquez. The description of the old houses, character traits (Rosa's beauty or Clara's premonitions) and events ,primarily deaths, seemed watered and tasteless, as if somebody has taken a juicy kebab, poured some water over it and given it to you.

However as the scene of action shifts to Tres Marias, the author finds her own bearings. Her forte clearly lies not in the finding the supernatural in the ordinary but a more straightforward style of narrative, much on the lines of Vargas Llosa. But as long as Clara stayed alive, one could not escape from description of three legged tables, of pendulums and other esoteric gadgets and adventures in the other world. But with progress of the story Clara's interference with the story started reducing considerably. Other characters with much more transparent psyches came into the fore. Also the canvas gradually shifted from the happenings in the "house at the corner" to the affairs of the estate of Tres Marias and finally the entire country.

The transition of Esteban into politics, his rise and fall and also the rise and fall of his party before Chile descended into the grips of a military dictatorship forms the bulwark for the later part of the novel. Here Allende displays her talent for connecting the everyday lives of the characters we have come to know in the course of the novel to the fortunes of the country in a seamless manner. Her description of the military dictatorship was so vivid that I could almost see the streets of Santiago, wide and clean, with walls as a boundary to keep out the poor and unfortunate so as not to spoil the picture perfect image. I do not know why but from what I have read, India during the Emergency would probably have looked the same. Here Allende can probably be compared to Saramago who so beautifully weaves in the flow of history in his novels. But whereas Saramago's protagonists though affected by the flow of events rarely contribute to it, alienates characters play a significant role in the unfolding of the events.

In entirety, THoS can be read as a metaphor for the descent of a society and country from being innocent and magical to being corrupt and earthy. That the narrator is someone young, who probably has just sensed whiffs of the old magic and clearly wants to go back to the old times, adds to this idea.

Regardless of its obvious failings, THoS is book which one should read for gaining some insights into the turbulent political scene in South America – trying to understand how countries, where street kids weave patterns with a football that even professional footballers in Europe can only dream of, cannot have a stable government for a couple of years.

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[Book Watch] The New Life – Orhan Pamuk

Which book lover can resist the first line – "I read a book one day and my whole life was changed". Pamuks' "The New Life" starts so and then proceeds to take the reader on a fantastic and often dizzying journey of Anatolian steppes in Turkey, of town centres with statues of Ataturk, and of cafes which serve the thick tea that Turkey is so famous for. The narrative moves at a frantic pace, often leaving the readers perplexed at turn of events, leaving a trail of unanswered questions for the reader to ponder on long after the book has finished.

Osman, a young student of engineering, chances fortuitously (or so he believes) on the book, "The New Life". He reads the book as a way to reach Janan, the beauty he has been smitten by, in whose hands he had first seen the tome. He definitely achieves his aim for the book leads him to Janan and her morose and reticent boyfriend Mehmet, but the book also opens to him another world, the world he thinks he has left but one which is continuously by his side, coexisting – waiting to be discovered.

Osman runs away from his home, hopping buses to reach the corners of Turkey, whose very existence he was unaware of. He sees his wanderings as a way to reconcile his existence with the teachings of the book. In his wanderings (and bus accidents), he chances to meet Janan, who in turn is searching for Mehmet who has left her to lead his new life. Together they start out – Osman searching for the lost meaning and Janan searching for her lost lover – different ways, but leading to the same end.

After a series of rather haphazard and unstrung events, Osman comes to know of the "The Grand Conspiracy", to get Turkey rid of those small things of daily usage – the popsicle candies, the gloves made from the hair of the mountain goat, the old stoves leaking oil – which together form the basis of existence of a community and its culture. Our young protagonist soon finds himself in the den of the people working against this conspiracy and for whom the book's name is an anathema, realising in the process that he himself is nothing but a screw in the grand design of the clock of time. That the events he took as chance were carefully crafted and orchestrated by someone else. That his reading of the book was not ordained by fate but decided by the Mehmet and implemented by Janan. He continues on his journey leaving his beloved Janan behind (never to find her again), with killing Mehmet as his sole aim – for he has come to believe that Mehmet's removal is the only way for his existence.

"The New Life" is at once a detective story, a parable and a critique of casting aside old customs without a thought in the race to get modernised. The structure of the novel is carefully conceived, so carefully that one might believe that the last and the first lines of the book were a single thought, with the rest of the material just buffering up the grand scheme. This indeed seems to be the trademark of the Orhan Pamuk novel, where the story is built up conceptually to very finish. So very often a Pamuk book feels like reading a Harry Potter novel (as Rowling herself has confessed to have already written the last chapter in the series), where the author knows what is the end whereas the reader hangs onto every page waiting for the end to occur – guided only by the number of pages left as to how close the end is.

I hung on to the last page.

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[Book watch] The Way to Paradise – Mario Vargas Llosa

Why the hell did the author want to combine two separate stories, linked only by some ephemeral threads, I did not understand nor appreciate. My expectation towards Llosa's writing had increased manifold since the reading "The Feast of the Goat", but frankly speaking this book was a let down.

The book is an effort to relate the stories of Flora Tristan, and her more famous grandson, the eccentric artist Paul Gauguin. If you want to read the story of Flora all you have to do is read the odd chapters while the even tell you of the life of Paul. What binds both of these characters is their search for paradise on earth, in Tristan case – a society where each one will have equality of opportunity in all spheres while Gauguin searches for a lost island where man lives as he did in the old days, unfettered by the chains of civilization and culture.

The stories by themselves are eminently readable, especially the account of the painter's life in Tahiti and Marquesan. This is probably the best rendition of the Gauguin's life since Maughm came out with "The Moon and Sixpence". The narrative is interspersed with flashbacks in both the tales, which gives the reader some context for the search that characters are undertaking. However in the story of Flora, Llosa uses a second person narrative while the lady reminisces about her past, which I found irritating and unnecessary. Is this to evoke in the reader a sense of pity for the character? If so, Flora Tristan will be turning in her grave.

From the looks of it this novel seems like an experiment on the part of the author. But for me it was an experiment which just did not pay off.

[Book watch] Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me.
She showed me her room, isn’t it good, norwegian wood?
She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere,
So I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair.
I sat on a rug, biding my time, drinking her wine.
We talked until two and then she said, "it’s time for bed".
She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh.
I told her I didn’t and crawled off to sleep in the bath.
And when I awoke I was alone, this bird had flown.
So I lit a fire, isn’t it good, norwegian wood.

Norwegian Wood – Beatles

Haruki Murakami has taken the theme of this song and as only a true artist can, has produced a work of art that will rank alongside the best in postmodern 20th century lit. Unrequited love, death, poignancy, madness and surprisingly humour are the basis of this coming-of-age tale of Toru Watanabe. Toru is torn between Naoko, his first love and that also of his now dead friend Kizuki, who is maniacally depressive and Midori, a person who is trying to come out the shroud of death to find a life for herself. As Toru struggles between maintaining his fidelity to Naoko and at the same time grows closer to Midori, Murakami's unique prose allows the reader to place himself completely in the protagonist's shoes.

The books' major forte is clearly the character development. Every aspect of each of the major players in the 19th and 20th years of Toru's life is drawn out in the book. Toru's despondent loneliness, Naoko's silence, Midori's ache for love are truly felt by the reader. There is a certain lyrical quality in Murakami's writing which allows him to transition from one state to another with a grace that is truly amazing. The same quality also allows him to leave a lot unsaid, especially about the setting and ambience, only to be said by the way the narrative develops. "Norwegian Wood" can be compared to "Catcher in the Rye", both being tales of adolescence, insanity and death. In fact we can see Toru reading the book quite a few times in the novel.

I have not read much Japanese fiction(Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy being the only other work I have attempted). But Murakami presents to us a Japan of Sony and bullet trains which is more in line with our knowledge than Mishima who seems to be stuck in the Post-Meiji era. While Mishima's prose is as heavy as the a branch laden with cherry blossoms, which he so often describes, Murakami's is light and flighty. What is common to them is the grace of movement which I have to realise is probably a cornerstone of their culture. Books, movies, cartoons, music all seem to possess this trait.

My favourite parts of the story -

1. The opening part where Naoko and Toru are going through the meadows and how Toru realises 18 years later that the scene is slipping away from him second by second with age.

2. Midori and Toru sitting on top of her house watching a house fire and signing a folk song. Talk of dysfunctional humour!!!

3. Toru visiting Midori's father in the hospital and eating cucumbers with him. And all he remembers is that the old man made the same crunching sound as him.

4. Reiki telling Toru in a letter that it is possible to love more than one and by accepting Midori he was not really casting away Naoko.

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A history of my reading …

Reading for me is not a habit, it is almost an addiction now. Most define reading as as an act of reading a book or papers something like it. But the word itself has much wider connotations, for you can read the underside of a bottle of cough syrup and realise first hand that what your mom gives you so many times in your childhood is exactly what she tells you to avoid in college parties. The above clearly belies the fact that reading something is a act of some intellectual achievement. I would rather term it as an act of discovery.

I have had in the last few days some discussions wherein, the theme was centred on the how a person's taste in books develops and evolves over a period. What we found was that this change is not gradual but their exists certain events which cause a person to alter his habits – either to adapt to his new surroundings, or as a way to catch up with his peers or just realising that something else exists beyond what he knows. However what was most interesting was that all of us almost shared almost the same timelines. Another funny coincidence was that this evolution stopped in one direction the very moment one lost the yearning to discover some new things and unravel some new mysteries.

I would divide my reading history so far into 3 periods – School, Undergraduate, and Present. It is no coincidence that these periods correspond exactly to the broad phases in our education. For it is education – only of our own choosing.

The School phase: When a person discovers books is very much a matter of circumstance. For me it was extremely early, leaving in a house that had enough books to be packed from floor to ceiling in a couple of shelves. I knew I loved reading when in class 3 I received a set of encyclopedias which I continued to pore over for the next 3 years till I had almost memorized everything that was in it. I have forgotten most of what I had so carefully gleaned from those books but even what little remains stands me in good stead even today. Then came the Hardy boys, Famous Fives, the Super Sixes, the Secret Sevens and Three Investigators. For some time I thought I had read enough. Then I from a relatives place I picked up "Day of the Jackal" by Forsyth and it was faster, more action filled and infinitely more intriguing than what I had read before. That was in class 9th. It would take close to 5 years, well into my college life, before I had my fill of this genre. Forsyth, Ludlum, Archers I read them all. And then there are the short stories. Our literature text books were a collection of short stories and through these books I was introduced to the world of Sherlock Holmes, O Henry, Tolstoy, Chekov, Saki, Maugham and so many other writers. I remember waiting every summer for the new books to come in so that I could read my literature text book end to end. It is in these years that one develops an yearning for books and reading or the opposite. That is why I would consider the Harry Potter series such wondrous creations. They are probably the best introduction a student can have into the pleasure of sitting in chair with a book in hand, discovering new places ,meeting new people and experiencing emotions so well understood and yet so alien. And lastly reading in school implies comics – from the urbane tintin, to funny Asterix to the downright garish Nagraj I read them all.

The College phase: In one line, introduction to novels. When I entered the hallowed corridors of the Hall 3 in IIT Kanpur, I prided myself in being well read. It took me a couple of interactions before I realised how much I still had to learn. There are a few books which are an essential read for every new undergraduate. Catcher in the Rye, Catch – 22 and Atlas Shrugged. First two of these give voice to those conflicting emotions that one feels on leaving the protected environs for the big bad world. And the last probably screams out the ambition of every young individual of doing something different and leaving his mark in the world. I discovered amongst other authors Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Tolkien, Marquez, Saramago and Vonnegut in these days. The problem with my reading in this period was that I was too busy catching up, filling up my perceived gaps rather than searching out what really wanted to read. So even though I read a lot they did not affect me as much as much as the books in my school days. I would say this was the period where I was defining my tastes and likes.

Present: I read whatever I get. I have given up hope that I will be able to read all I want. For every book I read I get to know of 5 more titles I want to read. I also widened my reading net. In came non-fiction, popular science and manage it yourselves books. Nothing went out. I still read cheap racy paperbacks along with Nobel prize winners and wannabes. Every time I talk books with someone I discover something new – a new author, a new genre or a new style. From these discussions I have discovered Bulgakov, Nabokov, Vargas Llosa, Mishima and so many others.

Regrets – I have never read a P.G. Wodehouse. That however should soon be rectified.

Wanderers of the chair ….

I still remember the two icelandic kids in a foggy haze. The field behind them was a green that I had never imagined. It was a 6 cm x 6 cm photograph of, I believe, two brothers. I have always seen them as brothers though nowhere was it written that they belonged to the same brood. I guess the photo remined me of myself and my bro standing together sleepy eyed dressed up for school and now immortalized in our family albums.

Reading Amitav Ghosh's Shadow Lines took me to a time when I used to spend hours together poring over the geography encyclopedia, thinking how the people would be in the islands of papua new guinea or how bright the lights will be in the city of Paris. Every country had a description of a couple of pages with some photographs and that would be enough for me to go a trip of the place in my mind. I have seen the Coral reefs of Austrailia and the falls on the river Zambezi without leaving the chair in my room. When Ghosh says that to visit any place it is more important to have a picture in your mind, than actually being there I felt so vindicated for the hours spent with books.

Shadow Lines is an archtypical Amitav Ghosh novel. Mutliple threads of narration intertwined both temporally and spatially. The narrative structure of a journey, towards some climactic conclusion that the author only knows. Another of Ghosh's strengths that came out really well in this novel is his eye for detail when describing places. I am guessing that the author himself is one of the armchair travellers that he made out his narrator to be. His other book "Calcutta Chromosome" also dealt with a lot of travel but there it was mostly of the physical variety. This book does not have the superb story line of CC but Ghosh manages to elevate common day occurences and events into another level. The langauge is very close to comtemporary English writers like Martin Amis. And add to it a dash of magic realism ala Marquez and you have "The Shadow Lines".

Yet another Latin american novel ….

Latin American writing is obsessed with history. The always interesting and often bloody past of these countries gives their literature an unique gritty edge that lends any story a corner in the bigger picture of things.

A reading of Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Feast of the Goat", is an affirmation of the above. With the difference that while Marquez and others wrap history in metaphor and give it a sense of fantasy, Llosa chooses to be painfully direct. The recounting of the last days the General Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic is done in three separate narratives. Urania Cabral's narrative is intimately personal and recounts the events which lead to her leaving her birthplace for thirty odd years. Trujillo's to be assassins form another thread with their tales of how they all were scarred by Trujillo or his cronies and then came along to be together at that momentous period in the nation's history. And last of them is Trujillo, an almost comic figure, who maps his own virility to that of the nation and his cabal of people with nicknames like Egghead, Constitutional Sot and Walking Turd.

Even though I am not knowledgeable about the politics and history of the Dominican Republic, the book seems to have recreated the environment of the Trujillista era in all its glory and ignominy in a stupendous fashion. If not for anything else I would recommend the book for its superb rendering of history on paper. The pace of the narrative is gripping with every bloody chapter giving away some sense of what it really means to not have your self-will. Statements like "The worst thing for a Dominican is to intelligent or competent", give away the sense of despondency surrounding the nation.

The structure of the novel is however staggered. The story of Urania Cabral suffers at times from a lack of attention and meanders into blind alleys. However, the other two narratives more make than make up for the slight defect and the make this novels the best I have read in some time.

The Hours

I saw "The Hours" directed by Stephen Daldry days after it was released and I have to admit that this movie is one few which continues to vex me with questions even after repeated viewings. It is not that it is an absolutely brilliant movie. It has its obvious faults. But it is the relationship between the three principal characters which continues to confound me. It was therefore with great gusto that picked up the Pulitzer prize winning novel of the same name by Michael Cunningham on which the movie is based.

Reading the book definitely gives me a much better perspective of the whole thing. For one the movie marginalises some major characters who give the story different facets. The most ill-treated in this department are clearly Sally and Louis. Also the book relies a lot on the voicing the thoughts of the characters especially Clarissa, which Meryl Streep (for all her talent) could not convey on the screen. It is in this light that I can now say that Julian Moore's performance as Laura was better. Without words she managed to convey the claustrophobic nature of her existence. Thus the Clarissa Vaughn part of the story clearly was half baked in the movie, causing mental upset on part of the viewer.

Who really gets a more prominent role in the movie is Kidman as Virginia Woolf. In fact, the scene in the railway station where she makes Leonard realise that Richmond is killing her is almost completely missing in the book. That is coincidentally my favourite part of the movie with some of the most powerful words in the movie. And both in the movie as well as in the book it is Virginia Woolf who glues all facets of the story together. In fact one way I interpret this movie is that the three separate stories separate out the major character traits of the Mrs. Dalloway.

To end this, the lines that remain imprinted in my memory long after I have seen the movie … from the station scene I alluded to earlier.

Leonard Woolf: If I didn't know you better I'd call this ingratitude.
Virginia Woolf: I am ungrateful? You call ME ungrateful? My life has been stolen from me. I'm living in a town I have no wish to live in… I'm living a life I have no wish to live… How did this happen?

Virginia Woolf: I'm dying in this town.
Leonard Woolf: If you were thinking clearly, Virginia, you would recall it was London that brought you low.
Virginia Woolf: If I were thinking clearly? If I were thinking clearly?
Leonard Woolf: We brought you to Richmond to give you peace.
Virginia Woolf: If I were thinking clearly, Leonard, I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark, and that only I can know. Only I can understand my condition. You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. Leonard, I live with it too.

Virginia Woolf: This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anaesthetic of the suburbs, but the violent jolt of the Capital, that is my choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity. I wish, for your sake, Leonard, I could be happy in this quietness.
[pause]
Virginia Woolf: But if it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death.

Harry Potter vs Amulet of Samarkand

After trying to get it for close to two months, I just finished reading Jonathan Stroud's Amulet of Samarkand(AoS). A one line description of the book (for dummies) probably will be "Harry Potter meets Jason Bourne".

Well the Potter part is easily explained. Nathaniel is a eleven year old magician – more correctly an apprentice, who is learning his trade in his masters' house. As regards the Jason Bourne part, the protagonist and the Djinni Bartimeus, whom he invokes, have the knack of turning up at the right place in the right time and taking all the right turns to save their bums just in time, ekdum Japanese style.

I would say for one, HP is much more dark and definitely much more fatalist at its core. Harry loses his parents in his childhood, endures eleven years of misery at the Dursleys' and till now five years of danger at Hogwarts. There is an impending sense of doom, a sword of Damocles hanging over his head. Rowling does not do readers any good by finishing off characters in a jiffy. No wonder a lot of people out there think that Harry might not live to see the end of his seven years at Hogwarts. The unanswered questions about his past life and the mysteries buried therein do no good either. In AoS, Nathaniel falls into the traps, gets enmeshed in his own hate and goes as close to death as Harry ever has been but as a reader I never felt, "Now he is doomed …".

Another major difference between both the books, is the way they portray the non-magic folk. HP books at least the first three approach the story as if Harry is just another boy, albeit with some extra powers. Also Rowling puts in a huge effort to get the magical world in context with our own i.e. that of the Muggles (The last is now a word in the Oxford English Dictionary). Characters like Mr. Weasley almost border on belabouring the issue. As a result the magical world which though not as rich or varied as Tolkien's universe becomes a extension of our own and consequently the characterisations become much more rich and situations more definable. Stroud however makes no attempt to etch out the normal world as it exists. To be fair to him it is a trilogy and in latter parts we would probably hear about the Resistance and other aspects of the common man's views of the magical world. But what really peeved me was the fact that the representation of the commoners is as of now dimensionless. Do they like magic? Or not ? Maybe some do and some don't. Why ?? Was Simon Lovelace quest for power was for powers' sake or towards the exposition of some specific ideology? Some of the answers to these questions, I reckon could have come in this volume.

However, the writing of the book is generally more mature than the HP canon. For starters, the blinding hate of Nathaniel at eleven years was somewhat experienced by Harry only in the fifth book. While Harry's maturity might be questionable Nathaniel's is not. It therefore gives the author a platform to build on this story in manners that Rowling cannot imagine for Harry. Hope Jonathan Stroud is upto the task.

Literary pastiche …

Last few days have seen quite a upsurge in my reading activities. In the last 7 days I have finished 3 books, the long pending 'Baltasar and Blimunda' by Jose Saramago, 'Haroun and the Sea of stories' by Salman Rushdie and 'The curious incident of the dog at the nighttime' by Mark Haddon.

'Baltasar and Blimunda' (B&B) was the book which first brought Saramago to the notice of the English speaking world, and it is not difficult to fathom why. As is usual it is not one story, but a multitude of tales each with its own characters and plots and yet twined together to form a narrative that is both coherent and compelling. Unambiguously the story teller of his stories Saramago pays lip service to those stories which cannot be incorporated in the current tale, a technique he continued to follow in his later works as well.

Couple of things which struck me about this tale.

• The similarity of the characters of Blimunda and the 'lady who did not go blind' in Blindness and the gift of vision in both.
• How clearly Saramago shows that history is nothing but a palimspset, where various tales of individuals once existed.

Rushdie's 'Haroun and the Sea of stories' (HaSoS) was read in a single sitting. It is a enticing tale of adventure and fantasy, Rushdie's magical realms are now truly magical without the fetters of any notion of reality. Higtened also is his talent for attributing common place objects and events with supernatural qualities. A rather easy read till nevertheless is exciting and entertaining in its own right. And at the end you of course have P2C2E to take with you.

The last book's title is clearly a tribute to Sherlock Holmes, being one of his enigmatic lines (Silver Blaze), and that is what made me pick up the book in the first case. At very crude level one can call it a cross between 'Sound and Fury' (no I am not comparing both) and the movie 'Rainman'. The story starts with how a Rainmanish Christopher discovers the dead body of their neighbour's dog and then proceeds to solve the murder mystery and then write a book on the same. Again an easy read but well written.

The Childrens’ Crusade

In his blogs Sups has been putting up a series of writings on his experiences of the first Gulf War [find his blog here]. Basically an account of how Iraqs' invasion of Kuwait, where they then lived, changed their lives and how they fled the war torn Persian Gulf via Iraq and Jordan to India. He talks about mundane things like playing football in a refugee camp, his parents worrying about his sister (very young at that time), open air toilets and things like that. I on the other hand, then sitting at the comfort of my home, considered the war as something of a very interesting happening. I used to revel in my knowledge of the firepower of the Iraqi and Allied armies. I could reel off statistics to prove that the American Abrahms were better than the T-72s or that the Iraqi MiGs were no match for the F-117s. I could sit there and talk about the war for hours. At the end I would say that war was not good. It should not happen because x number of people were dead, y were injured. All arguments supported by statistics. All as human as the horse power of a Challenger tank.

I just finished rereading Vonneguts' Slaughter House Five (SH5). I would not be first guy to tell that the book is probably amongst the best war (more like anti-war) books ever written. But I would also rate it as amongst the finest humanist works. What is so great about SH5 is not that it describes the war with its effects and after effects in great gory detail. It does not rant about the great sufferings bestowed upon humanity because of wars or by preaching what can be done to prevent such a calamity. It rather accepts war, for what is worth as just an occurrence. By making it just an occurrence it deglamourises war to an extent that no amount of tear-jerking can achieve.

War is often seen as an opportunity for average humans to becomes heroes. Even in Catch-22 (another superb satire on war), Yossarian is a hero. Years after reading that book I sometimes still hope that "Maybe, I would also have behaved like Yossarian". But I will never think "I would want to be like Billy Pilgrim". Billy Pilgrim is weak, uncourageous, unimaginative and miles away from the "man" that war demands. The difference between the two books lies in the answer they give to question, "Why Me?". Catch-22 answer is enconsced in the philosophy that it is you because you were not able to do anything about it. And that if you had important things like luck, money, power and brains you can do something about it. SH5 answer can be best phrased in the words of the Traflamadorians "Because the moment simply is… Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why". In short we do not have a free will. Rather, we are just living our lives like a tape playing a cassette.

And the taking away of free will, actually frees the perpetrators of the horror called war, from any responsibility of their actions. It was as it was supposed to be. Dresden was fire bombed, Aghanistan invaded and Baghdad stormed because they were supposed to happen. There is no other "why". This simple reasoning creates a gaping hole in the arguments that are often given as a justification for such actions.

The essence of the book can be summed up in these words of Mary O'Hare (to whom the book is dedicated),

"You were just babies in the war-like the ones upstairs… But you are not going to write it that way, are you… You'll pretend you were men instead of babies and you shall be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra or John Wayne or some of those other glamourous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will loook just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought bybabies like the babies upstairs."

ps:: Kalyan has often referred to an article by one of his friends about SH5. Finally searched it out after writing this piece. You can find it here. Echoes the thoughts expressed above, though in a much better way.

Now playing: Dream Theater – Take away my pain