tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15747587109385758322024-03-13T20:33:43.743-07:00Bookthrift: A blog about booksBookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comBlogger306125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-43512907139079488902019-12-30T11:59:00.000-08:002019-12-30T11:59:30.925-08:00Book of the Month: Tigerman (Nick Harkaway)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J2d9wLviIO8/XgpXAGFDHCI/AAAAAAAABuA/QJZr6PjvkN8mOsRzCR6RLNJXroYL20IAwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Nick_harkaway.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="683" data-original-width="1024" height="213" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J2d9wLviIO8/XgpXAGFDHCI/AAAAAAAABuA/QJZr6PjvkN8mOsRzCR6RLNJXroYL20IAwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Nick_harkaway.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Nick Harkaway is the pseudonym of Nicholas Cornwell.
Nicholas Cornwell is the son of the legendary John le Carre, which, of course,
is the pen-name of David Cornwell.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I do not know what impelled Nicholas Cornwell to take on the
improbably sounding nickname; however, if the improbable plot-line of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tigerman</i></b>,
Harkaway’s third novel, is any indication, the man has a penchant for
improbabilities.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tigerman</i></b> is the story of superhero, comic book style, except
that Harkaway’s superhero does not have superhero-abilities as a result of a
freakish accident to which so many of the comic book superheroes, from whom
Harkaway seems to have drawn inspiration, are prone. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tigerman</i></b> purports to be a
realistic account of an ordinary man attempting superhero feats without
superhero powers. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Although nothing freakish has happened to Lester Ferris, the
eponymous hero of Harkaway’s novel, something very freakish and unpleasant is
happening to the island of Mancreau, the fictional island, one of the many
outer posts of the British Empire, situated between Africa and Asia, where
Ferris is posted. The island has become literary toxic, you will not be
surprised to read, as a result of the unregulated chemical work of the greedy
multinational companies, which dumped the toxic waste in the sea near the
island. The toxic waste is sending to the surface of the sea, and then into the
atmosphere, toxic bubbles, which are wreaking havoc on the flora and the fauna
of the island. They are also causing the kind of neurological disturbances in
the humans which would send Oliver Sachs straight to his lap-top to dish out
his next book of weird and rare neurological conditions. It is also gravely
suspected that the core of the toxic waste, resting on the sea bed, has,
somehow, given rise to a new strain of bacteria, which—no marks for
guessing—are resistant to every known antibiotic, and which, if and when they
are freed, will bring about the end of the humanity as we know it. If any of
this seems a tad far-fetched, please be advised that this is just the
beginning. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ferris, the British sergeant posted in Mancreau, is a
veteran of Afghanistan, so, it goes without saying, a burnt-out case. As the
once mighty empire is handing over the toxic island, which is dying, to the NATO
and UN forces, Ferris is given the ceremonial, though mostly redundant position
of the British counsel at the British consulate that has the staff of one
(including him). There are representatives of other nations: Dirac, a Frenchman
who got into trouble for publically flogging an African war-lord in an African
country the French had no business to be in the first place, but felt it was
their duty to send a peace-keeping force to (no doubt because the African
country was a French colony at the turn of the twentieth century, when the
French dealt with the Africans far more cruelly than Dirac did with the
war-lord); Pechorin, who is from Ukraine and (obviously) corrupt; and Kershaw
from the USA, who talks tough, concrete, and does not get the English subtlety.
The island is going to be evacuated soon; and, in these last, lawless days, around
the island has formed a ring of ships, referred to in the novel as ‘Black
Fleet’. The description of the ‘Black Fleet’ is (deliberately, I think) is
vague, but the reader is invited to consider that all the big nations are fully
aware of what is going on in the Black Fleet (‘a bit rum’, as Ferris might
say—in the middle of the novel full two pages are devoted to the talking habits
of the English, which, it has to be accepted, are curious—and diabolical, as
the rest of the world would say). Ferris’s job, as the novel opens, is mostly
to roam around aimlessly on the streets of Mancreau and exchange pointless
pleasantries with the natives (at which, being English, he excels, although
this is not cited as a characteristic of the conversations of the English).
Ferris has taken under his wing a 10 year old boy, who is more into comic books
than Dawn French is into sticky toffee pudding. The boy tells Ferris that his
name is Robin, which, of course, is down to the boy’s unhealthy obsession with
comic books. Ferris, a bachelor, harbours dreams of adopting the boy, but is
not sure how the boy’s family would react to it; indeed he is not sure if the
boy has a family. Ferris thinks that the boy has a family but is loath to ask
him about it for the same reason he prefers not to ask the boy his real name (that
curious English reticence, again). The bond between Ferris and the boy forms a
major strand of the novel. For the best part Harkaway manages to make it
affecting without becoming maudlin; at the same time the reader is expected to
suspend his credulity as the British sergeant refuses to ask the boy the simple
question about his family even as he (Ferris) gets involved in all sorts of
derring-do at the boy’s behest. Ferris, who is an intelligent man, figures out many
a conspiracy and shows skills in ferreting out secrets last shown by Sherlock
Holmes; but is unable to bring himself to do the simple thing that would help
him to solve the mystery of the boy’s provenance: either ask the boy a direct
question or follow him and see where he goes. (In Ferris’s defence, if he had
done it, his creator, Harkaway, would not have been able to string along the
suspense for 300 plus pages.) Then, suddenly, there is an apparently senseless
murder of a tea-stall owner called Shola whose ramshackle restaurant is
frequented by Ferris and the boy. (Incidentally Ferris prevents them from
killing the boy, who, so he thinks at the time, is not their primary target, by
dint of a tin can containing custard powder as some sort of improvised bomb!) After
Shola’s funeral Ferris, while roaming around, inebriated (as you do), in the
cemetery, comes face to face with a tiger. When he tells the boy his encounter
with the tiger the next day, the bot starts calling Ferris Tigerman, and the
two of them spend their combined energies on preparing tiger-shields and
face-masks (How much is this British counsel getting paid monthly?) As Ferris,
in the Tigerman persona, attempts to solve the murder of Shola, he, as is only
to be expected in such novels, stumbles onto more secrets neither he nor his
boss in London—a woman codenamed Africa (!) and talks in a manner in comparison
to which the female M character (played by the insufferable and vastly
overrated Judy Dench in Bond films) is an epitome of serenity—wants to know. He
also gets involved in the kind of scrapes, the likes of you and me would wet
our pants just thinking about. In the process Tigerman achieves the celebrity
status worthy of all comic books superheroes. As the novel reaches its climax,
the action becomes more frenzied and plot more improbable.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There is much to be admired in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tigerman</i></b>. The novel has
one of the most surreal openings I have come across in a long time: Ferris and
the boy ‘Robin’ watching a pelican swallow a live pigeon. Harkaway knows how to
turn a drily witty turn of phrase. The dialogues (especially those between
Ferris and Kershaw, his American counterpart; as well as between Ferris and the
Japanese scientist who is researching whatever ghastly thing that is
germinating on the sea-bed) are . The levity of the tone in these dialogues
stands in stark contrast to the dense prose, sombre in tone, of many other
sections of the novel. The tone, as a result, is somewhat uneven. The first
half of the novel is reminiscent of a Graham Greene novel: a reticent,
world-weary Englishman in the last days of a dying-out exotic island,
pullulating with local myths. Just as the reader is getting accustomed to the
gentle pace, the novel unexpectedly ratchets up a gear, and lurches into a
comic book action-adventure territory that gives a jolt to the system. Many of
the action sequences, though described in painstaking details, are not easy to
visualise. Harkaway does not let the pace slacken and throws in surprises and
twists by the bucketful, the last one being the biggest and the least
convincing. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tigerman</i></b> is a literary comic book thriller; that’s the best way
I can describe it. It is not a bad novel; it is not an easy novel to read; and
it is not a memorable novel. </span><br />
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-41719690414211704532019-12-29T13:44:00.000-08:002019-12-30T12:06:22.531-08:00Bloody Christmas<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Another Christmas is over. This year’s Christmas lasted longer.
Almost four hours longer than the last year’s, by my reckoning. When you are
not enjoying things, time seems to pass very slowly. I was invited by friends
and I accepted the invitation for the same reason I accept most of the
invitations I don’t want to accept: a pathological fear of saying no, which is
matched by the excruciating paranoia that others would see through my excuses
if I cooked them up and would view me with contempt and hostility. Even though
I tell myself it matters not a jot what others think of me, I know that it does. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So, there I was, sitting in the living room of my friends which
resembled a gynaecologist’s waiting room. Watching in horror and then despair
the couple’s five-year-old hurtle himself with apparent unconcern for his own
safety at various objects in the room. Of the various ways in which the boy
attempted grievous bodily harm, his most favourite activity was running from
one end of the room at a speed faster than that of the late England fast bowler
Bob Willis and throw himself on the sofa, not caring which body part he landed
on. I was concerned that the boy might break his neck. My concern was not for the child's safety, I should clarify (though, of course, I wished the child no harm). I was concerned that I would end up spending hours in
the local A & E with the distraught parents, if the boy did
manage to injure himself.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">After a decent interval following Christmas meal (turkey
gone dry (I hate turkey), brussels sprout with chestnuts (I hate brussels sprouts),
boiled carrots (tasteless; I hate them), and roasted parsnips (I don’t like
parsnips)) I took my leave, reproaching myself for accepting the invitation
(the recurring story every year: asking myself why I am going, as I make my way
to the friend’s place, and asking, again, after manufacturing my escape, why I
went).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Surely, there must be a less painful, at any rate, tedious,
way of spending your Christmas. Granted, there are those who are less lucky
than I am and spend the Christmas day with relatives whom they despise (who,
they know, despise them), exchanging dreadful gifts and banal anecdotes of inconsequential
life events.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And then I came across this article on the BBC website—people spending
Christmas Day ‘with a difference’ across England.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-50823553" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-50823553</span></a><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is not easy to describe the emotions I experienced as I
read the article: incredulity (it can’t be true; my eyes are deceiving myself),
followed by horror (my eyes are not deceiving me), followed by dismay (what
is happening to my country), followed despair (it <i>is</i> happening to my
country), followed by relief (it did not happen to me), followed by gnawing
anxiety (would I be able to refuse if invited to some or more of the events
described in the article?). The closest
one can come to this panoply of emotions is perhaps when one miraculously
survives an RTA in which one’s brand-new car is a write-off. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Apparently, all over England, on the Christmas Day, hundreds of
people gather to take a dip in the sea. Those who subject themselves to this
justify it by saying that it is a ‘bit of fun’; that it gives you some time away
from the stress of cooking Christmas dinner. If you are stressed by cooking a
Christmas dinner, drink more wine (or any other alcoholic beverage of your
choice); or feign a headache and lie down in the bedroom. I do not see the point
in taking a dip in ice-cold sea water in the middle of winter. It is insane. I
can’t imagine anyone <i>wanting</i> to do it unless they are masochistic or driven
to desperation. If they are feeling that desperate or driven to self-harm can
they not watch the queen’s Christmas address?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Then there are those who gather the homeless and the lonely, and
feed them. Why would you do that? There are food banks and Salvation Army soup
kitchens where these individuals can go, can’t they, if they want something to
eat and can’t afford? Why would you want to do it on the Christmas Day, or, for
that matter, on any day? I suspect it is just a ruse for some people to feel
smug and superior. Puffed-up moralists who wear their virtues, to paraphrase an
observation from a Julian Barnes novel, as a tart wears her make-up. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Some people go for park-runs on the Christmas Day. What’s
the point in that? I mean, what is the point in running, on any day of the
year? Running is OK if you are (like the son of my friend) a six-year-old with
hyperactivity issues. Or if you are a twenty-year old man who has robbed a
petrol-pump. Or you are caught short and the nearest lavatory is two-hundred
yards away. Or you are late for train. Or a big bottom in tight Lycra is
jogging in front of you in Hyde Park. But, to go for a collective run at five o’clock
in the morning, in winter, with healthy-living-freaks (who no doubt munch on
organic tofu) is self-inflicting pain. Running is bad for your knees—why would
you want to damage your knees and increase the burden on the already over-stretched
NHS? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Finally, there are those who give birth on the Christmas Day
and expect a medal from the world for this chance occurrence. What is the big
deal in having your baby born on the Christmas Day? You got your bun in the oven
a few months earlier; maybe there were pregnancy complications; and your baby
happens to be born on the day the Western World deludes itself into believing
is the birthday of JC (not Jeremy Corbyn). Does not make you a f**king Mary
(who was reportedly un-f**ked). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The best way to spend the Christmas Day is to treat it like
any other bank holiday. Do not meet relatives if you can help it. Do not accept
invitations from your friends (especially if they have young children). Don’t go for swimming in the sea or a parkrun. Don’t feed the
lonely (these people, in my experience, are lonely for a reason). Spend the
time with your immediate family (difficult to avoid that) and comfort yourself with
he knowledge that the ordeal will not go on for ever. Then relax with a novel.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-30294986120717579682019-05-29T12:41:00.000-07:002019-05-29T12:41:36.112-07:00Book of the Month: The Laughing Monsters (Denis Johnson)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Cv3Y4vFx0Ko/XO7edS06Q-I/AAAAAAAABsI/rGil9LQBVAYEZZBoMVfSXS-gS-EWmYfiwCLcBGAs/s1600/Denis%2BJohnson.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Cv3Y4vFx0Ko/XO7edS06Q-I/AAAAAAAABsI/rGil9LQBVAYEZZBoMVfSXS-gS-EWmYfiwCLcBGAs/s320/Denis%2BJohnson.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Laughing Monsters</i></b> is the first book of Denis Johnson, who
died in 2016, I read. I decided to read a novel by Johnson after I read an
article about the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Guardian</i></b>. <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>In 2012, Johnson’s novel, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Train Dreams</i></b>, was one of
the finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the panel reached the
extraordinary conclusion that none of the finalists was worthy of the award. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I picked up <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Laughing Monsters</i></b> because that
was the only novel of Johnson available in the local library.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Describing the plot of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Laughing Monsters</i></b> would be an
exercise in futility, but let me attempt. The novel, set in four parts,
involves two protagonists. The first is Roalnd Nair, a raven-haired Danish-American
agent working for the NATO Intelligence Interoperability Architecture (NIIA).
The second protagonist is Michael Adriko, who, although the novel does not
spell it out, is a mercenary fighter, who holds Ghanaian passport and likes to
tell everyone that in 2005 he saved the life of the then Ghanaian president by
taking a bullet in his groin meant for the president; however he is most probably
from Uganda or even Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo). Nair and Adriko
are friends, though probably not trustworthy, and fought together year ago in
Jalalabad, Afghanistan. As the novel opens, Nair has arrived in Freetown,
Sierra Leone, to trace Adriko. Adriko has ‘disappeared’ while fighting with the
US army against one of the militias in DR Congo. Why should the US military
bother about a mercenary fighter who has gone AWOL? The American interest in
Adriko is not clarified, but it is hinted that they are probably worried that
Adriko, who, above everything else, is also a conman, might have hatched a
devilish plan to sell enriched uranium to murky characters the exact
connections of which are kept vague. Mossad might have been involved in some
manner in this whole business. Adriko might have been trained, originally, by
Mossad. Why should the Americans send a NATO agent on the trail of an African
mercenary who has run away from their army in DR Congo, especially as they must
have known that Nair, no saint himself, is an old mate of Adriko? I have no
idea. What follows is a kind of picaresque, as Nair and Adriko go from Sierra
Leone to Uganda, from Uganda to DR Congo, and back to Freetown, Sierra Leone. The
romantic interest is provided by Davidia St Clair, an American, who is the
daughter of the camp commander of the United States Special Forces Group (10<sup>th</sup>
Division) from which Adriko is currently—as he quaintly puts it—detached.
Davidia, who is clearly not dumb, is pretty clueless about Adriko’s
shenanigans and intentions, and is even willing to believe his story that he
wants to take her to the village of his clan in Uganda (or is it in DR Congo?)
for a traditional African wedding. When Nair establishes contact with Adriko in
Freetown, it is inevitable that he would start lusting after Davidia, even
though he has a girlfriend who also worked for the NATO in Amsterdam. As the
novel ends, Adriko and Nair are back in Freetown, and Nair, having hatched is
own scheme, which I couldn’t tell you much about, as I did not fully understand
this sub-plot myself, except that it involved a character called Hamid (no idea
which party he works for, or, indeed, what might be the interest of this
unnamed party in Nair, although the interest must be considerable seeing as
Hamid is prepared to pay Nair handsomely for double-crossing—whom exactly:
Adriko? NATO? CA?), is richer by 100 K US dollars, and is fondly dreaming about
future (involving more cons and Adriko) in nearby African countries. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Laughing Monsters</i></b> starts as a promising spy story, but then
morphs into a surreal travelogue of Nair’s confused journey through Uganda and
DR Congo. There are some bravura scenes in the novel, such as the one towards
the end when Nair reaches the village Adriko comes from and where Adriko plans
to marry Davidia (who has, of course, been whisked away halfway through the
novel, out of the narrative, never to return again). Here Nair runs into
Adriko, having lost contact with him earlier when the Americans ambush them
(having finally cottoned on to what the two might be up to). The village has
been reduced to nothing, as much because of the endless rapacity of the
Congolese army and militia alike, as because of the rapacious extraction of
gold and other minerals (no doubt by the multinationals, although that is left
to the reader to figure out) that has rendered the water and soil toxic. The
children are dying and the remaining adults are barely alive, semi-deranged
ghosts, who, according to a missionary woman (who could be said to be equally
deranged in her own way), should get the hell out of there. However, the
village priestess, also known as the queen, who calls herself La Dolce, and
who, Adriko claims is the cousin of his late father, refuses, and, demanding a
sacrifice, squares up to Adriko, having descended from her throne, which
happens to be a wooden chair, up in the trees! However, such scenes are far and
few between, and do not have any direct connection to what you thought at the
beginning was going to a taut spy-story. That is a major
short-coming of the novel: the context and the story are so underdeveloped that
such set-pieces, as also some other (such as the one when Adriko, while driving
in a stolen Suzuki at a speed that refuses to come below breakneck, mows down
an African woman, and neglects to stop). </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Nair, the protagonist from the perspective of whom the story
unfolds, is a kind of anti-hero you’d encounter in a Graham Greene or John le
Carre novel: sardonic, cynical, droll, and who is very aware of his character
deficiencies (he sends semi-passionate, revelatory e-mails to his girlfriend in
Amsterdam and then sleeps with possibly underage African women, whom he
unsentimentally describes as ‘sluts’ and ‘whores’). Nair’s loyalty to Adriko is
inconsistent (although he can’t be loyal to Adriko seeing as he has been
assigned to trace Adriko and find out what Adriko has been up to), at any rate
he does not let it come in the way of trying to get into the knickers of
Adriko’s girlfriend. Half-way through the novel Nair is either drunk or so
confused that he can’t figure out whether he is writing to Davidia or his girlfriend
(Tina). He does in the end decide not to betray Adriko and hand him over to the
Americans, which, insofar as you can make out, was the plan at the start of the
novel. Nair is obviously a character that is morally ambiguous. Fully able to
recognise the virtuousness of human nature, Nair knowingly makes choices that
are amoral. In the end it is a character for whom you have neither sympathy nor
much of respect. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Adriko is depicted as a true buccaneer, and a
larger-than-life character. He, however, comes across as more of comic con man
than someone who has hatched up a fiendish scheme to sell enriched uranium to
rogue traders.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The female protagonists in the novel have the depth of soggy
cardboard. Davidia, who has “very high and very round” breasts, and rolls her
hips in a “very African” manner, is supposed to be smart, free-thinking, and
educated. You wonder what this woman is doing with Ariko in Sierra Leonne in
the first place. The meek manner in which she allows herself to be taken back
to her papa suggests that the fifth fiancée of Adriko (as Nair helpfully points
out on more than one occasion) mistakes infatuation for true love, but
thankfully comes back to her senses. The love-triangle involving her, Nair and
Adriko is half-baked and unnecessary. As for Tina, Nair’s girlfriend, largely a
passive recipient of Nair’s monologues, which he e-mails her, her only positive
act in the novel <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>is of sending a
cameraphone picture of her bare (and substantial) breasts to him. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What stops reader’s interest dissipating is Johnson’s keen
ear for dialogues and his talent for vivid descriptions. There are passages in
the novel that are create a mood of unease not unlike that in Conrad’s <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Heart
of Darkness</i></b>. The dialogues are sharp, crisp and pithy, and a joy to
read.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Laughing Monsters</i></b> is not a tedious novel to read; it is
even a moderately enjoyable novel; however I suspect it is not Johnson’s best. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: calibri;"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-70480459895691130722019-03-31T12:26:00.000-07:002019-03-31T12:26:04.543-07:00Book of the Month: The Collaborator (Mirza Waheed)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-etsUha4OQjw/XKET13ptuMI/AAAAAAAABrY/ooMFV9uxASkZ-boIAtKFLsr6QGNMvrUZQCLcBGAs/s1600/Mirza%2BWaheed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="961" data-original-width="1600" height="192" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-etsUha4OQjw/XKET13ptuMI/AAAAAAAABrY/ooMFV9uxASkZ-boIAtKFLsr6QGNMvrUZQCLcBGAs/s320/Mirza%2BWaheed.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The
unnamed narrator of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Collaborator</i></b>, Mirza Waheed’s debut novel, a finalist for
the 2011 Guardian Best Debut Novel award, is a 19 year old Kashmiri Muslim boy,
who is burning with hatred; he is seething with rage; he is incandescent with
anger. The hatred, the rage, the anger are directed at the Indian army,
representing the might of the Indian state, that has been fighting what the
Indian government describes as the proxy war with Pakistan-trained militants,
who cross the LOC—the Line of Control—the de facto border between the Indian-
controlled and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. In this brutal war, the Indian army
has indulged in wholesale torture of the Kashmiri Muslim youths, rape of
Kashmiri Muslim women, and wanton destruction of their properties—according to
the protagonist of the novel.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The
period is sometime in the 1990s and the secessionist movement in Kashmir is at
its deadliest. The dreaded and despised Indian army is everywhere in Kashmir,
terrorizing and brutalizing its people.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The
unnamed protagonist belongs to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gujjar</i>
community in Kashmir—the nomads. However, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gujjars</i> have put down roots in a hamlet called Nowgam, near the
LOC, where the tiny community has lived since the independence and partition of
India. In the peaceful and innocent days of his childhood the narrator has
played cricket with his close childhood friends near the border, oblivious of
the watch towers and sentry posts that always existed on either side of the
border. All of this belongs to a past that is becoming increasingly
mist-filled. The 1990s have arrived, and with it the secessionist movement, to
which Pakistan is providing more than just moral support. The hamlet and the
area surrounding it are of strategic importance to Indian army, as it is one of
the major passes in the mountains through which the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jihadists</i> and Pakistan-trained militants infiltrate into India. A
proportion of them is foreign nationals such as the Arabs and the Afghans and
the Chechens; but there also many Kashmiri youths who crossed the border into
Pakistan, received training in Pakistani camps, and are now attempting to
return to Indian-controlled Kashmir to wage the ‘battle for freedom’. There is
a massive army camp very near to the hamlet, and heavy presence of Indian
soldiers. The hamlet itself is empty save for one family: that of the narrator.
The narrator’s father, who is the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sarpunch</i>—the
head—of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gujjar</i> clan, has refused
to leave the hamlet; the rest have left, having come to a (not unreasonable)
conclusion that the area is becoming too dangerous, not least because of the
excesses of the Indian army, with its pre-dawn crackdowns to weed out what it describes
to Indian media as terrorists. All of the narrator’s close childhood friends
have disappeared one by one: they all have crossed the LOC and gone to Pakistan
to receive training. The narrator has not seen any of them since. He wants to
cross the border too, like his friends, and return to the Indian-controlled
Kashmir wielding a Kalashnikov. But he has not taken that step, torn as he is between
the opposing urges of joining the ‘freedom fight’ and caring for his elderly
parents. And to make his inner humiliation complete, the narrator is employed
by the Indian army to do a job which he finds utterly degrading. His job is to
go down in the valley—the no man’s land on the Indian side of the LOC—where lie
the bodies of hundreds of men killed by the Indian army, and recover their
identity badges, which, in due course, would be presented by the Indian army to
the media as identities of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jihadists</i>
trying to infiltrate into India from Pakistan. Here we meet Kadian, the
demonic, foul mouthed captain of the Indian army, who is in charge of the army
operations in the area. Kadian, the narrator believes, is responsible for the
deaths—murders—of hundreds, if not thousands, of Kashmiri youths. The narrator
loathes Kadian with a passion and fantasizes ways in which he would kill the
‘bastard’, as Kadian, his throat moistened with generous portions of whisky,
repeatedly subjects him to harangues, full of invectives and contempt for the
Kashmiris and the Pakistanis, reminding—as if to counterbalance—from time to
time that he (Kadian) is there just to do a job. The novel ends on a depressing
note: the evil Indian army captain has not met his comeuppance; after murdering
thousands of ‘poor Kashmiri boys’ he is going back to India on leave—he has
finished his ‘Kashmir stint’. The narrator, unable to see the dead bodies of
his ‘brothers’ rotting in the valley, is setting them on fire, even though he
is aware that, really, the bodies should be buried—as they are Muslims—having
reasoned in his mind that burning, still, is preferable to the bodies being
mutilated by crows and wild animals of the jungle.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Kashmir,
ever since India achieved independence and partition (although I wouldn’t have
thought she sought to ‘achieve’ the latter)—when Muslim majority Pakistan was
carved out of India— has been a bone of contention between the two nations. A
Muslim majority state ruled by a Hindu <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">maharaja
</i>at the time of partition, who decided to annexe it to India, Kashmir—referred
to variously as ‘paradise on earth’ and ‘India’s Switzerland’—has been the
cause of one full-scale and two proxy-wars between the two countries, in the
six decades of India’s independence. The end of the 1980s saw the beginning of
a fierce war between Indian army and—depending on your political sympathies—the
freedom-fighters or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jihadi</i>-terrorists.
The secessionist movement (I prefer this, as it is a neutral term, which
suggests that a proportion of Kashmiri population wished to secede from India)
was at its peak in the 1990s. During this period Kashmir achieved the dubious
distinction of being the most militarized zone in the world. India poured in
three quarters of a million soldiers in Kashmir (in addition to other
paramilitary forces), which meant, the novel informs the reader at one stage, that
there was one soldier per six civilians in Kashmir during this period. Over the
past two decades India has shown to those, who wished to break away its only
Muslim majority state (hence presumably the interest of Pakistan in it) by
violence, that it is a hard state when it comes to these matters and, no matter
what, Kashmir will not be allowed to secede. The back of the militant movement
apparently is broken, but simmering resentment among the locals towards India
and civil unrest remain. In the process the Indian army, which continues to
have considerable presence in Kashmir, has been accused of human rights abuse,
fake encounters to liquidate terrorists, and obtaining information by torture.
At the end of the novel, are given statistics: since the beginning of the
conflict in 1989, more than 70,000 people have been killed in Kashmir; more
than 4000 people are thought to be incarcerated in various Indian jails without
trials; and more than 8000 have simply ‘disappeared’. One does not know how
reliable these figures are (the novel also mentions that the Indian government
disputes these figures). In one section of the novel—one that focuses on the
meetings between the narrator and the dreaded Kadian—is mentioned Papa 1, the
rumoured Guantanamo Bay style prison Indian army had erected in Kashmir, and
where the captured <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jihadis</i> / freedom
fighters (again, take your pick) were subjected to severe torture in order to
obtain information.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Fiction
is a powerful way to give expression to the collective memories of peoples
traumatized by violence. With it come responsibilities, as there would be those
who would treat the ‘fiction’ as a quasi-documentary evidence of what ‘really
happened’. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Let’s
have a look at what is obviously ‘fiction’ in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Collaborator</i></b>. In an
interview of Waheed I came across on the Net, he says that the hamlet—Nowgam—near
the border—is fictional. No village has ever existed so near to the LOC.
Similarly, the mountains of bodies lying in the no-man’s land, which the
narrator is tasked with searching, are ‘fiction’. The large portion of the
novel, thus, is fiction in more than one way. It is entirely a construct of the
writer’s imagination: it is not a ‘fictional account’ of real events—important
to bear it in mind, as the novel purports to express, fictionally, the ‘real’
tragedy of Kashmir. It is a device—and a very powerful device—that represents
the inhumanity of the Indian army, which the novel portrays as the enemy of
Kashmiri people.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The
reader is faced with the ideological force driving the novel from its first
page. The novel makes no attempt at neutrality. It has identified the enemy:
Indian state and Indian army. The narrator is an unabashed admirer of the
insurgents (as the Indians call them) and of Pakistan. He has no confusion in
his mind as to which side of the border he stands, metaphorically speaking. What
he lacks is courage to take that final step: sever his ties with his family and
fight for a higher cause. The Pakistanis are ‘brothers’, the militants trying
to infiltrate into Kashmir armed with explosives, Kalashnikovs and AK-47 are
‘poor boys’; while the Indians are ‘bastards’, ‘rapists’, and ‘murderers’. The
demonic face of the Indian state is Captain Kadian, who, during his monologues
in front of the-inwardly-boiling-but-outwardly-complaisant narrator, repeatedly
sneers at the Pakistanis (stupid sister****ers) and Kashmiris (disloyal
mother***kers); expresses his contempt for the namby-pamby, ‘bleeding-hearts’
lefties in Delhi and Calcutta; derives great pleasure in the ghastly spectacle
of dead bodies rotting in the no-man’s land in the Indian side of the LOC, so
that the ‘sisterf***king Pakis’ and ‘ISI bastards’ can see for themselves what
has happened to the ‘boys’ they trained in their camps; and justifies and
underestimates the impact of the violent methods used by the army and
para-military forces in Kashmir. Kadian is not a man, it would be fair to say,
whose heart is overflowing with love for humanity—when that humanity comprises
Kashmiri Muslims and Pakistanis. Herein lies difficulty. While there is no law
against jettisoning neutrality (artistic license and all that); indeed, as many
Philip Roth novels ably show (for example, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Plot Against America</i></b>), it can drive
forth a point very powerfully—here, you can’t help feeling that Waheed has
overegged the pudding. The reader is treated to repeated descriptions of
atrocities linked—directly or indirectly—to Indian armed-forces in Kashmir. Several
examples based on hearsay (the narrator has ‘heard stories’) are given of the
barbarism of Indian army, which is depicted as a relentless, ruthless, inhuman
machine. It has no love for Kashmir and its people, and it overwhelms the young
Kashmiri ‘boys’, who have a genuine grievance (as the narrator sees it). It
tends to get a tad hysterical at times, not unlike the Bollywood films, the
songs from which are shown to be big hits amongst the narrator’s friends (an
example of an unwitting paradox: the narrator and his friends don’t consider
themselves Indian; they hate India; yet enjoy singing songs from Bollywood
films)—the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jihadists </i>/ freedom-fighters
in the making. All of this not only compromises the credibility of the
narration, it also detracts from the drama of the human tragedy in Kashmir. The
narrator struggles to consider that the Indian army can have any function in
Kashmir beyond terrorizing and marauding its people. Particular scorn is
reserved for the governor of Kashmir, ‘who has no surname’—“<em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; margin: 0px;">the former leader of the
demolition gangs and their bulldozers (who ran over the one-room tenements and
lavatories of the poorest of poor squatters in India’s capital because their
haphazard slum-clusters had no storm-water drains), the clinical undertaker of
forced, compulsory vasectomies.....</span></em><span style="color: #333333; margin: 0px;">”</span>—sent
by the ‘Centre’ [Delhi, India’s capital] to oppress local population. (A bit of
Internet search revealed that the hated governor in the novel, ‘the king of
curfews’, was one Jagmohan, and he had a surname—Malhotra. Interestingly,
Jagmohan was governor of Kashmir between 1984 and 1989, and for 6 months in
1990; that is only in the initial months of the insurgency. This does not quite
tally with the time period of the novel and when he makes his appearance in it;
but then this is a novel and the author is permitted to take artistic license).
Indeed, there are times when you wonder whether the diatribes of the whisky-sodden
captain Kadian, deeply unpleasant as they are, are entirely without merit. I am
not sure whether that was the intention of the author. The task Kadian gives to
the narrator—that of searching the dead bodies in the valley for ID badges—is
so ridiculous, it is scarcely believable. While one understands it as a device
by the author to emphasize the point (as if not already emphasized) that the
Indian army is evil and lacking in common human decency (and also allows the
author to stage some fascinating meetings between Kadian and the narrator),
surely he could have thought of a different device that wouldn’t have stretched
the limits of readers’ credulity.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The Collaborator</span></i></b><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"> does not satisfy at
another level in that it fails—it does not even attempt—to examine the reasons
underlying the disenchantment of the Kashmiris with India (assuming they are
disenchanted). The explanation, such as is offered, is meagre. The narrator’s
childhood friends, as also—the author would have you believe—thousands of young
Kashmiri men, turned militants as a reaction to the excesses of the Indian
army. Now I am no expert on the Kashmir problem, but it does strike as tad simplistic.
You are left wondering why the Indian army and the paramilitary forces
descended on Kashmir in the first place, forty years after it was annexed to
India. That, one could suppose, is because the novel is told from the point of
view of a village boy who has never been even to Srinagar (the capital of
Indian controlled Kashmir), let alone rest of India. It is therefore
understandable that the boy will not have a considerate, well-rounded view on
the geo-political problems afflicting the region. However, the absence of a
sound—even plausible—reasoning, coupled with relentless animadversion of the
Indian state and Indian army, makes the narrative imbalanced. Occasionally,
there are examples of militants torturing Kashmiri people who they (the
militant) think are informers of the Indian army; but the author’s heart is not
in it. What he is interested in is giving a chapter and verse ‘account’ of the
crimes of Indian army. The plight of Kashmiri Hindus—who lived there for
generations and were made destitute by the Islamic militants—is described in
one sentence. As you read it you feel that the truth—whatever that is—has got
to be different from the simplistic viewpoint of the protagonist..</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Where
the novel succeeds is in creating an atmosphere of menace. The descriptions of
the crackdowns by the Indian army, the visit of the loathed governor to the
hamlet, identity parades carried out by the army to ferret out terrorists / freedom
fighters hiding in villages are utterly gripping. At places the novel reads
like a thriller. Waheed has a great feel for dialogues: the foul-mouthed
‘wisdom’ of Captain Kadian, appals and fascinates you in equal measures. The
novel is also a lament on the passing on of an innocent world. There are
lyrical, elegiac—almost haunting—descriptions of the natural beauty of the region
where the narrator spent his childhood.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The
Collaborator</span></i></b><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">
is the debut novel of Mirza Waheed. It is said that the first novels are often autobiographical.
The author-information tells you that Waheed was born in Srinagar (capital of
Indian controlled Kashmir). At the age of 18 he went to Delhi where he enrolled
in a university and completed a degree course in Literature. He then worked in
Delhi for a few years (and, for the past ten years, has been living in London
for the BBC Urdu service.) The trajectory of the author’s career gives its own
message about the Indian state, which the protagonist of his novel sees as an
oppressing, unjust, immoral and hateful force. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The
Collaborator</span></i></b><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">
is gripping in parts in its depiction of the calamity that has befallen
Kashmir. It seems like a novel written out of intense anger, and the writer
seems as overwrought as the protagonist of his novel by the tragic subject
matter. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-67823853495444822312019-02-24T12:32:00.000-08:002019-02-24T12:32:26.147-08:00Book of the Month: The Misogynist (Piers Paul Read)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EvLsiI5lxdk/XHL-q8o7YWI/AAAAAAAABrE/EJ1bi2XIX7UyjzFdxGWfZl4pwH6UpXYCgCLcBGAs/s1600/Piers%2BPaul%2BRead.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="512" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EvLsiI5lxdk/XHL-q8o7YWI/AAAAAAAABrE/EJ1bi2XIX7UyjzFdxGWfZl4pwH6UpXYCgCLcBGAs/s320/Piers%2BPaul%2BRead.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nothing to be Afraid of</i></b> (also
reviewed on this blog), Julian Barnes’s entertaining and immensely readable
meditation on death, appears a writer who is identified only as ‘P’. ‘P’ is
Catholic and is concerned that when he dies he will be separated from his wife
and children who are atheist (and presumably will not be admitted to wherever ‘P’
hopes he is going).</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I read in article in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Guardian</i> that ‘P’ is the author
Piers Paul Read. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Geoffrey Jomier, the protagonist of
Read’s sixteenth novel, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Misogynist</i></b>, is not <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>catholic. For the best part of the novel
Jomier is an atheist. He is also a retired ex-barrister who leads solitary
existence in Hammersmith, on the wrong side of Shepherd’s Bush, several pegs
down from Kensington where he used to live until his divorce from his wife
Tilly. Tilly had an affair with Jomier’s friend Max, who is richer than the
average Sheikh in Abu Dhabee. Even though Tilly is the guilty party (in
Joimer’s eyes, and many would share his grievance) it is she who has done well
out of the divorce. Their house in Blenheim Crescent was sold and two thirds of
the proceeds went to Tilly; Jomier ended up paying the mortgage on Tilly’s new
house and a monthly sum for each of his two children until they turned
eighteen. It is not therefore surprising that Joimer is bitter than the lemon I
squeezed in my gin and tonic last night, even though the divorce that ‘took him
to the cleaners’ and reduced his ‘disposable income suddenly’ to ‘a quarter of
what it was before’, happened many years ago. To add insult to injury, the
infidel Tilly is now married to her hirsute lover, Max, happily for all outward
appearances, and lives in a large house in a posh part of London. (The house
for which Jomier paid the mortgage is now rented out, swelling further Tilly’s
already considerable income; is there no justice in the world?)</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Jomier is now in his sixties. He is
single. He has a lot of time on his hands, which he spends (a) transcribing the
diaries he has kept over the years in electronic format until they merge with
the present diaries which are already in electronic format (which gives him
ample opportunities to think about his dead friends many of whom led less than
perfect private lives), and (b) pontificating on all manner of things— from
immigration to feminism, in a manner and style that are not dissimilar to those
of his creator’s columns in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Daily
Mail</i>. Jomier resents that the ‘elegant squares in Belgravia remain empty
because the non-domiciled millionaires are elsewhere’. He does not approve that
titles are bestowed on immigrants (‘Sir Joshua and lady Zion, Lord and Lady
Japati, Baroness El-Aksa, Nazir Bookerbanana, OM’).<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Bradford and Leicester have become ‘Islamic
cities’. He does not think that feminism, on the whole, has been a positive
force; it is, he is sad to note, the principle reason for the break-up of
marriages in the UK. Jomier might be an atheist, but no one in his right mind
will accuse him of liberalism. He probably considers ‘liberal’ as a term of
abuse. Liberalism, as far as Jomier is concerned, is ‘about being
non-judgmental about people’s sex lives, but hyper-judgmental about pollution
and fox hunting and Tesco and Margaret Thatcher.’ At one stage Jomier lists the
‘Seven Sins of the Secular State’, which are: ‘Racism, Misogyny, Homophobia,
Elitism, Smoking, Obesity, and Religious beliefs’; and concludes that he is
innocent only of faith and fatness, and he no longer smokes. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In between his lamenting about the
deplorable state of affairs of the modern world and reminiscing of his dead
friends, Jomier visits his son Henry, who works in the city. Henry lives with
his ambitious wife, who is a corporate lawyer, and two children. Henry is (by
Jomier’s current standards) rich and lives in a half-a-million worth house in
Queen’s Park (which is now worth twice the money he paid for) but is unhappy
because his friends are richer than he and live in houses in Notting Hill
(which have quadrupled in price). Jomier also has a daughter, named Louisa, who
is married to a rich Argentine farmer (whom she met in her gap year) and lives
in a joint Catholic family—five children and a mother-in-law who rules with an
iron fist—in Buenos Aires. You will not be surprised to learn that Jomier has a
low opinion of his son-in-law whom he regards as an unsophisticated and
uncouth. As for his son, Jomier worries that he is turning into a bumptious
version of himself. Jomier and his ex-wife, Tilly, despite years of separation,
have not come to form an easy, relaxed relationship. They see each other only
at the birth-day parties of Henry’s children where they scrupulously avoid eye-contact.
They take turns in spending Christmases with their children, Jomier worrying
inwardly that his son’s family prefers Tilly over him. Being single and
unattached and of certain age, Jomier gets routinely invited to parties
organized by friends. At one of the parties Jomier is introduced to Judith, a
yoga-teacher and a divorcee. Jomier embarks on a relationship with Judith,
which, assisted by weekly meals at Indian restaurants and Viagra in the
bedroom, proceeds smoothly—the two even spend a Christmas together in
Venice—until Jomier receives the news that his daughter Louisa is gravely ill
with a ‘mysterious’ blood disorder. The Doctors in Buneos Aires can’t diagnose
exactly the condition, so Louisa is brought to London (cue for Jomier to rail
against the NHS and doctors). Louisa’s illness comes to have a profound effect
on Jomier’s views about the world, relationships, and theology in a way he does
not envisage. As the novel comes to its end, we meet a Jomier who is more
relaxed about things (although he would probably still recoil if called a
liberal). </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">In Geoffrey Jomier, Paul Piers Read has
created a character that is not dissimilar to many in Kingsley Amis’s later
novels. Jomier is a deeply cynical and profoundly disillusioned man, who holds
sour views on the 21<sup>st</sup> century Britain (London, to be more exact),
which border on being reactionary. Yet he is not offensive. That is because he
has a knack of expressing himself (again like many of Kingsley Amis’s
protagonists) in a manner that brings a smile to your face, even as you
disagree with the views themselves. There is an air of innocuousness about
Jomier. His whole demeanour is of a man who has accepted that he is second-rate
and is accepting (although not happily) of his less than scintillating career
as a barrister (his application to become a QC was rejected) and failures in
personal life. Therefore, when he expresses outrageous views such as ‘man’s
penis was created by God to inseminate the female of the species’ or
‘inconsistency, like menstruation, is a female attribute that one knows but
does not mention’, instead feeling outraged, you are likely to exclaim ‘Cheeky
Bugger!’<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Jomier makes liberal (the only
area where he is liberal) and mostly effective use of irony. Only occasionally
do his musings take on the unappealing hectoring tone. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The Misogynist</span></i></b><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"> is a sharply observed novel. It offers the reader the worldview
of a man in his sixties, who increasingly finds himself at odds with the values
of the society around him. There are passages of droll comedy in the novel, for
example Jomier’s pedantic counting of the expenses of the Christmas holiday he
has with Judith and his anxiety that the expenses should be divided exactly as
he and Judith agreed at the beginning, not realising, amidst the obsessive
computing, how it would make him appear. Jomier is an acute observer and has an
unfailing eye for the inconsistencies in others; yet he remains, for the best
part of the novel, oblivious to his own inconsistencies and failings, which he
tries to rationalise with his animadversion of political correctness,
liberalism, feminism. Jomier’s powers of observation are at their best and most
caustic when he is describing women. The first things he notices about women
are their breasts and bottoms. However, there is a barely concealed vein of
revulsion when he describes female body parts (pubic hairs are like lichen,
vulvas are slimy), although, to be fair to him, he is equally unsparing when it
comes to his own sexual functions. He can’t get an erection without Viagra and
when he does manage to ejaculate, it is neither pleasurable nor ecstatic—‘not
the gusher from a newly tapped oil well but a coughing splutter from a rusty
pump’ (that is an imagery you don’t need).</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The Misogynist</span></i></b><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"> is a neatly crafted novel. When the final twist comes in
the story it seems an appropriate culmination to the trajectory of Jomier’s
life. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Misogynist</i></b> Piers Paul Read has
managed the feat of making a man who holds deeply unfashionable views almost
likeable. At one stage Jomier says that he likes people who share his sense of
humour, catch his ironies, people who are oblique, unassertive, cynical, and
disillusioned. He could almost be describing the English national character.
Even if you share only some of the attributes with Jomier, you will enjoy this
darkly humorous, satirical novel. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-22084582070733445042019-01-28T11:27:00.000-08:002019-01-28T11:27:06.057-08:00Book of the Month: Here I Am (Jonathan Saffron Foer)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3RBi-ydTUUE/XE9VGBBaEPI/AAAAAAAABqo/hy2kqNbSN2455XJihFEwRbWlP1Q4D9EywCLcBGAs/s1600/Jonathan%2BSaffron%2BFoer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="179" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3RBi-ydTUUE/XE9VGBBaEPI/AAAAAAAABqo/hy2kqNbSN2455XJihFEwRbWlP1Q4D9EywCLcBGAs/s320/Jonathan%2BSaffron%2BFoer.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The title of Jonathan Safron Foer’s 2016 novel, his first in
a decade, is taken from the Book of Genesis. “Here I am,” is what Abraham tells
God after God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. The imputations of
Abraham’s cryptic response are explored by Foer in the context of his novel’s
gifted, if ultimately flawed, protagonist Jacob Bloch. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Jacob Bloch belongs to the third generation of Jewish
diaspora, after his grandfather Isaac left the horrors of Europe behind and
built a life for him and his family in America, starting as a shop-keeper.
Jacob, a secular Jew, is a successful, if creatively frustrated, television
screen writer. He has written a prize winning novel years ago, but, for several
years he has been hacking out the screenplay of a popular sitcom, which, while it
ensures the steady flow of income that supports the comfortable life-style in
Washington DC, leaves him feeling creatively unfulfilled. Jacob lives with his
wife Julia, and three (smart, precocious and, for these reasons, irritating)
sons—Sam, Max and Benjy. Julia is an architect, successful like Jacob, and (like Jacob) is creatively unsatisfied, not having built anything yet. Jacob’s
father Irv has turned into a provocative media blogger who has a special talent
for detecting anti-Semitism (Europe has become a Jew-hating continent (when was
it not?); French are ‘spineless vaginas’ who would shade no tears over the
disappearance of the Jewish people; and Germans were the only true European
friends of the Jews, but they were<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>bound
to run out of their ‘guilt and lampshade’ one day) and whose preferred solution
to deal with any anti-Israel sentiment is to take out the offender to an open
field and napalm. As the novel opens we learn that Isaac, nearly hundred, is
about to be shipped off to a care home as he is finding it increasingly
hazardous to live on his own. Isaac wants to die but is postponing his death
(as if it is in his gift) until the Bar Mitzva of his eldest great-grandson,
Sam. Sam, who is growing into a surly and opinionated teenager, is in trouble at
school having written offensive and racist words in his book (including the N
word, which is totally unacceptable), a charge he persistently and tenaciously
rejects. Julia does not believe him, but Jacob does. Here the reader gets the
first inkling that all might not be well with the Blochs. And the readr is right: the
mid-life snafu arrives. <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>The crisis in
the Blochs’ marriage arrives over the most trite, yet the most devastating, of
matters. Julia discovers texts Jacob has sent to a work colleague which makes
you wonder whether the talented television script writer wasn’t moonlighting as
a script writer for porn industry. Julia believes Jacob’s submission that
although he and the woman exchanged salacious texts, nothing happened between
them (she knows he would lack the guts), but that is not enough for her to stay
in the marriage which has been losing its shine. Julia may have many good
qualities, but forgiving marital infidelity, even though only in texts, is not one
of them. As Jacob's marriage implodes and descends into the predictable
pettiness, resentment, and self-pity (expressed, however, in scrupulously
polite manner and language, the estranged partners being in agreement that they
must keep up the front of reasonableness and moderateness for the sake of
children), another crisis arrives in their lives which poses serious questions
to Jacob about his Jewish identity in the pluralistic American society and its
freedom: the destruction of Israel (Foer rather dramatically opens his novel
with the sentence that informs the reader of this calamitous occurrence). The
dramatic worsening of Arab-Israeli relations (if that were possible) following
an earthquake, the ensuing mother of all wars between Israel and practically
the whole of the Muslim world, and the threat to the very existence of Israel
form the second strand of the novel. Jacob has a cousin (once removed) in
Israel; he is the grandson of Isaac’s brother who decades earlier decided to
migrate to Israel. Jacob’s Israeli cousin (as the cousin, Timir, is frequently
referred to in the novel), is a confident, brazen-faced, assertive man who has
achieved financial success doing business and deals that do not get covered in
the pages of Financial Times. Timir (like Jacob) has got his leg over on
occasions over the years, but (unlike Jacob) he is smart enough not to have got
caught. Jacob has a complicated—loving but tense—relationship with Timir. Timir
arrives in the USA with his middle son just before the Arab-Israeli war breaks
out. Goaded by Timir (who informs Jacob that he does not have enough real
problems), and perhaps subconsciously feeling the need to send a message to
Julia, Jacob decides to go to Israel in response to an emotional appeal made by
the Israeli prime-minister to the Jewish diaspora to return to the motherland
in her fight for survival (a rare instance of hysteria in the novel, worthy to
be in a Philip Roth novel). Julia does not stop Jacob (Julia’s depiction in the
novel is a tad unsympathetic: she is a somewhat cold and distant figure who
is bored with Jacob and takes the opportunity offered by Jacob’s inappropriate
texts to end the marriage and start relationship with the father of Sam’s
friend) and (predictably) this moment of heroism (or insanity) does not last. As
this sprawling novel ends, the reader is left (or is meant to be left)
grappling the questions of identity, relationships, and human existence.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Here I Am</i></b> is (relatively) more straightforward in its structure
compared with <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Everything is Illuminated</i></b>, Foer’s debut novel (my most
favourite). The novel has many sub-plots which appear to play hide and seek
with the reader; they disappear for a while, only to appear briefly again when
you are not expecting them. These digressions and subplots can be a bit
confusing at times, and give a fragmented feel to the novel (I don’t know
whether that was deliberate). Foer’s tendency to switch between formats
(combined with chronological dislocation of the narrative) can be exhausting
for the reader. Long passages of texts (bristling, I have to say, with incisive
observations and mordant humour) alternate with long passages of
stichomythia—so long in fact that the reader must go over the dialogues more
than once to understand which statement is said by which character. As one can
expect from a Foer novel, there are passages of great wit and verbal acrobatics
notwithstanding occasional cross-over from irreverence to puerility. There are
bravura set-pieces in the novel, and comic one-liners abound; but, for all that
there are also passages which are long-winded where Foer seems to try too hard
to be quaint. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Here I Am</i></b> is a reflection on what it means to be a modern man
in the modern world, Jewish or not. I read that there are many autobiographical
elements in Foer’s novel (he was married to Nicole Krauss for ten years before
the couple separated in 2014). Even if you did not know that, in Jacob Bloch
Foer has created a protagonist in whose foibles—his neediness and
self-absorption, his solipsism—as well as qualities (sensibilities, inherent
decency) many men would see a reflection of themselves. Perhaps there is also a
message somewhere in it: it is the heroics and not the sensibilities that will
get you through life. That is a great strength of this not-perfect novel. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-56187837872742126302019-01-27T03:11:00.000-08:002019-01-28T10:55:22.361-08:00Books Read in 2018<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Below is a list of
books I managed to finish reading in 2018.</span></div>
<br />
<ol start="1" style="margin-top: 0cm;" type="1">
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
Shrimp & the Anemone (LP Hartley)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
Train (Georges Simenon)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
Next Best Thing (Anita Brookner)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
Infatuations (Javier Marias) </span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sing
Unburied Sing (Jesmyn Ward)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
Song of Achilles (Madeline Miller)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For
Two Thousand Years (Mihail Sebastian)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Hospital
Babylon (Emogen Edward Jones)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Mendelssohn
is on the Roof (Jiri Weil) </span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Lucky
Jim (reread) (Kingslay Amis)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Unity
(Michael Arditti)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Party
(Elizabeth Day)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It
Can’t Happen Here (Sinclair Lewis)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">His
Bloody Project (Graeme Macrae)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
Mandibles (Lionel Shriver)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
Bell Jar (Re-read) (Sylvia Plath)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In
the Café of Lost Youth (Patrick Modanio)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A
Strangeness in My Mind (Orhan Pamuk)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
End of Eddy (Edouard Louis)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Birdcage
Walk (Helen Dunmore)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Bright
Precious Days (Jay McINerney)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Tell
Tale (Jeffrey Archer)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Swing
time (Zadie Smith)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Breaking
Cover (Stella Rimmington)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Adrian Mole and the Prostate Years (Sue Townsend)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Love
and Fame (Susie Boyt)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">4321
(Paul Auster)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Frankenstein
(Mary Shelly)</span></span></li>
</ol>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></b><b><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Non-Fiction</span></b></div>
<br />
<ol start="1" style="margin-top: 0cm;" type="1">
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For
Who(m) the Bell Tolls (David Marsh)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Horrible
Words (Rebecca Gowers)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I
Maybot (John Crace)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I
Partridge (Steve Coogan)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Life
in Question (Jeremy Paxman)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A
year in Provence (Peter Myale)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When
Breath Becomes Air (Paul Calanithi)</span></span></li>
</ol>
<br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A dishearteningly low number of
36 books in the year, way below my target of a book a week. But I guess these
things are relative. A colleague was telling me the other day about her new
year’s resolutions (without the slightest interest on my part; I had not
initiated this conversation). There was the usual list of improving fitness and
joining a gym (which, I suspected, were her resolutions every year—this woman on
a treadmill is like a hamster on a wheel; peddling furiously but going nowhere,
weight is still piling on), and I was about to think of an excuse to bring this
boring exchange to a swift end, when she mentioned, “And I am going to read
lots more books this year.” “How many?” I asked. “Eight, at least,” she said. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The year started on a
disappointing note. I began reading <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">King
of Pain</i></b>, which was on my Kindle for many years, described as a dark,
sharp and funny novel, '2012’s most enjoyable read', according to a bloke called
Neil Genzlinger who wrote in the New York Times about it. I can’t now remember
why I did not or could not finish the novel. I must not have found it all that sharp
or funny. I remember halting reading the book and making a mental note to
return to it sometime later in the year, but never did. Maybe I shall give it another
go this year.</span></span><br />
<br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This is another thing about the
books I read in 2018. As I went through the list of books I read, I was astonished
to learn that I had read Zadie Smith’s <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Swing
Time</i></b>. I have no memory of reading this book. I therefore read some of
the reviews on the Internet to see whether that would jog up my memory. Nope.
And this is, according to Taiye Selasi, the author of <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ghana Must Go</i></b> (another novel I have been meaning to read but
have not got around to do it yet), Smith’s finest novel. Should I read it
again? On reflection, perhaps not. If the novel failed to leave any trace on my
mind, there is no point in reading it again. I do like Zadie Smith, though. I shall
wait for her sixth novel, which, Selasi might conclude, is even better than the
fifth, and therefore the finest. </span></span><br />
<br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">2018 ended, too, on a boring
note. I had to read Mary Shelly’s <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Frankenstein</i></b>.
This book was chosen by the book club of which I am a member. 2018, a member of
the book club informed us, trembling with excitement, was the two hundredth’s anniversary
of the first publication of this “iconic novel”. “We must read it,” he ordered.
Either people did not have the courage to disagree with him or they were as
excited as he was about the two hundredth’s anniversary. At just over 160
pages, <b><i>Frankenstein</i></b> is not an overlong book; but that did not make it any
easier for me. It was painful, toiling through the stodgy prose of Mary Shelly, which sucked the life out of the story which was neither believable nor particularly
interesting. OK, we are prepared to suspend our belief when we decide that we
want to read a story about a monster, but some attempts at developing the plot would not have gone amiss. Everyone in the novel, be it Frankenstein,
or the English dude who writes letters to his sister telling her this story, or
even the monster, speaks in the same manner and style: wordy and long-winded. Nothing that happens is not met with a commentary that goes on for several
paragraphs. This novel epitomised for me everything I dislike about the
nineteenth century novels. Tedious does not even come close to describe it.
The only discovery I made (not having watched any of the Hollywood films), is
that Frankenstein is not the name of the monster but of his creator. </span></span><br />
<br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I re-read <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lucky Jim</i></b> and <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The</i></b> <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bell Jar</i></b>, two books chosen by the book club. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I had read <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lucky Jim</i></b>, Kingsley Amis’s debut
novel, years ago, and remember enjoying it thoroughly. Reading it second time
round, after many years, was still enjoyable; but the novel seemed a bit dated,
and some of the set-pieces in the novel, such as when Jim, in a drunken haze, damages the guest room in his mentor’s house and, upon waking up the next day,
ineptly tries to cover the misdemeanour (of which he has little recollection),
goes on just a tad too long and ceases to be funny. <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Luck Jim</i></b>, I decided, after my second reading of it, is an excellent novel; but not the novel I would recommend you should start with if you
have not read any of Kingsley Amis’s novels. I would suggest <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jakes’ Thing</i></b> or <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stanley and his Women</i></b>, <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Biographer’s Moustache</i></b> or <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">One Fat Englishman</i></b>. All of these
novels are funnier and more biting satires than <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lucky Jim</i>, </b>I think. Read these novels first. Then read <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lucky Jim</i></b>. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Bell Jar</i></b><span style="margin: 0px;"> is the only novel written by the American
poetess Sylvia Plath, who killed herself in less than a month of the
publication of the novel which was published under the pseudonym Victoria
Lucas. It is an autobiographical novel which describes a period in the life of
a young woman, who experiences a breakdown of some kind and keeps on harming
herself or making attempts on her life. She gets admitted to asylums where she
is given the electric treatment. The electric treatment does not work the first
time but does the second time. It is an absorbing tale in the same way watching
live coverage of a car crash is absorbing: you are appalled but can’t shift
your gaze away from the screen. The title, ‘Bell Jar’ is apt in conveying the
sense of feeling of claustrophobia and being trapped experienced by the
narrator. It must be excruciating to be trapped in the troubling thoughts
inside your head, from which there is no respite. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Unity</i></b> was the first novel I read of the British novelist
Michael Arditti. The prose of <b><i>Unity</i></b> is elegant and assured. Arditti cleverly
mixes historical facts with fictional events in the novel in which life characters
mingle with fictional characters. <b><i>Unity</i></b> was a pleasure to read. I think, I shall read
more novels of this novelist.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Occasionally you read a novel, which, when you finish it,
you are glad you read. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Underground Railroad</i></b>, the
American author Colson Whitehead’s novel, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for
fiction (as also the 2016 National Book Award for fiction) was one such novel.
It is an extremely well-researched novel. It is Whitehead’s skill that he does
not parade the breadth and depth of the research that must have gone into
writing the novel. Thrilling, as Barak Obama described it.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Lionel Shriver was another author whom I read for the first
time in 2018. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Mandibles</i></b>, first published in 2016, is set in near future—America between 2029 to 2047. The novel tells the story of its eponymous
family, four generations of it. The novel is slightly slow to take off, but,
once it does, absorbs you utterly. Shriver has a great feel for the human
foibles and pretentions, which she throws into relief with great relish. <b><i>The
Mandibles</i></b> is a biting satire and has many comic scenes (maybe I was imagining it, but I thought Shriver's prose style and the wry asides which appear regularly in the novel, were similar to the style of Barbara Kingsolver), but ultimately it is a
sombre commentary on how quickly values and behaviours disintegrate when money
disappears.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Anita Brookner is a favourite writer. Not the easiest
of writers to read, but I have never found her novels to be anything less than
superb. The protagonist of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Next Big Thing</i></b>, a 73-year old
German émigré called Julius Herz, is in many ways, like the protagonists of
many other Brookner novels. He is intelligent, a recluse, and has a special
talent for torturing himself with analysis and re-analysis and, when he is finished with it, some more
analysis, of everything. Like most of Brookner’s novels, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Next Big Thing</i></b>
proceeds at a glacial pace and nothing much happens. That is, in my view, the
beauty of it. Brookner’s novels, like a good whiskey, are not to be gulped down
in a hurry. You must savour them slowly.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I decided to read <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">It Can’t Happen Here</i></b>, the 1930s
novel of Sinclair Lewis (the first American author to win the Nobel Prize for
Literature), because a year or so ago it was promoted in many bookshops in the
UK as the novel that predicted Donald Trump. Many years ago, I’d read <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Babbit</i></b>,
one of Sinclair’s most famous novels, and although I don’t now remember much of
it, I remember liking it. I can imagine why those who are opposed to the Trump
Presidency would see the echoes of what they think is currently going on in
America (not good) in the protagonist of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">It Can’t Happen Here</i></b>, Burzelius
(Buzz) Windrip, a populist politician who becomes America’s president on the
backdrop of the Great Depression in the 1930s. But there, really, is no
comparison, I think, between the America depicted in Sinclair’s novel and the
twenty-first century America under Trump. Sinclair’s language is direct and
straightforward, and he does not much care for crafting exquisite sentences (I
thought). He is more interested in the message he is giving; and he gives it
with the force of an HK-27 Cyclops. The novel is satirical at times, but later
turns into a direct (and not wholly convincing) description of the struggle between the liberal values and tyrannical dictatorship,
which, whatever you might think of Trump and America, isn’t America of today. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Another Nobel prize winner I read in 2018 was Patrick
Modanio. His short novel, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In the Café of Lost Youth</i></b> (title of
the novel taken from a quote by the French philosopher and Marxist theorist Guy
Debord) is in four parts, each part narrated by a different narrator. Each has
known a young woman called Louki, who has mysteriously disappeared<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">.</i></b>
This is a strange and atmospheric novel, melancholic in its tone, which depicts
the Bohemian world of the 1950’s Paris (the period of the novel is not
clarified, but I thought the novel was set in the 1950s)—languid, but also
brooding and slightly sinister—extremely well. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Orhan Pamuk was the third Nobel Laureate I read in 2018. His
734-page novel, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Strangeness in My Mind</i></b>, is not a novel, it would be fair to
point out, that can be read in one sitting. It is an absorbing family saga, but
it is also a loving chronicle of a city. I have never been to Istanbul;
however, after reading <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Strangeness in My Mind</i></b>, it seems like
a magical city. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Paul Auster’s enigmatically titled, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">4 3 2 1</i></b>, is, at more than
thousand pages, requires even more concentration and stamina than does <b><i>A
strangeness in My Mind</i></b>. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">4 3 2 1</i></b> is the reason why I could
not meet my target of fifty novels in 2018. It took me more than two months to
read just this novel. What makes <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">4 3 2 1</i></b> a memorable read is Auster’s
assured, plush, sumptuous prose (notwithstanding occasional drifts into
overlong sentences, Philip Roth-style, which go on for a page at a time); his humane
approach and the gentle humour. This gigantic and ambitious <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bildungsroman</i> is also a commentary on an
important epoch in the twentieth century America</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Another novel which is suffused with an undercurrent of
menace is Helen Dunmore’s last novel, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Birdcage Walk</i></b>. Set in Bristol, it tells
the story of Lizzie Fawkes, the daughter of a radical advocate of women’s right,
and who is married to a property developer. The period of the novel is French
revolution, but the story takes place in Bristol. Lizzie’s step-father, Augusts
is a passionate advocate of the Republican cause and is in support of the
revolution. Lizzie in the meanwhile is trapped in a marriage that has hit
turbulent waters because of the financial difficulties faced by her husband that
are tangentially affected by the French revolution. <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Birdcage Walk</i></b> strikes a few false
notes (in particular, the unconvincing prelude), and is probably not Dunmore’s
best, but it still is a very good read. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Finally, Graeme Macrae’s <i><b>His Bloody Project</b></i>, which was
apparently long-listed for the Man-Booker Prize a few years ago, was an
unexpected and absolute joy. It is a blackly funny and fiendishly witty tale of
a murder in the Scottish Highlands in the nineteenth century. Belter of a book.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Two of my favourite writers, Philip Roth and VS Naipaul,
died in 2018. I consider Naipaul to be the greatest writer in English of his generation.
I have been meaning to re-read all the novels of Naipaul for a while. I wanted
to read at least a novel each of these giants of literature in 2018 but did not
somehow get around to do it. Maybe this year. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As always, the non-fiction books I read were fewer than the
fiction; but I liked all of them.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Below is a list of my top fiction books of 2018</span></div>
<br />
<ol start="1" style="margin-top: 0cm;" type="1">
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
Train (Georges Simenon)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Mendelssohn
is on the Roof (Jiri Weil) </span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
Bell Jar (Re-read) (Sylvia Plath)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">His
Bloody Project (Graeme Macrae)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
Shrimp & the Anemone (LP Hartley)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
Mandibles (Lionel Shriver)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Lucky
Jim (reread) (Kingslay Amis)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Unity
(Michael Arditti)</span></span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">4321
(Paul Auster)</span></span></li>
</ol>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px 48px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-8904051129826482532018-12-26T22:57:00.000-08:002018-12-26T22:57:42.032-08:00Book of the Month: The Hindi Bindi Club (Monica Pradhan)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-m5dHbsMkeJU/XCR3MKH3gHI/AAAAAAAABqE/qWDVSv05ztgUDvr6SxFkuJR0Pk-dxvfMQCLcBGAs/s1600/monica_pradhan_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="600" height="213" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-m5dHbsMkeJU/XCR3MKH3gHI/AAAAAAAABqE/qWDVSv05ztgUDvr6SxFkuJR0Pk-dxvfMQCLcBGAs/s320/monica_pradhan_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A frequent mistake many in the West make about distant countries
like India is that they represent homogenous cultures. In Britain, for example,
many natives wouldn’t have a clue as to whether a brown skinned person is from
India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. It is another matter that the aforementioned
three countries used to be one country until sixty years ago, and ruled by the
British for almost two hundred years. Undivided India was partitioned into the
Hindu majority India and Muslim majority Pakistan in 1947, when the British
rule came to an end; later, Pakistan, following a war between India and
Pakistan, in 1971, was divided into Pakistan and Bangladesh.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The partition of India forms one of the strands of Monica
Pradhan’s 2007 debut (and, to my knowledge, only) novel, the suggestively
titled <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hindi-Bindi Club</i></b>. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"> first noticed <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hindi-Bindi Club</i></b> two years
after it was published, prominently displayed in the about-to-go-bust Border’s
Book store. There was a glowing blurb from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the
Observer</i> which described the novel as a ‘cracking . . . and charming tale.’
On the back-cover was a summary of the noel which purported to tell the stories
of two generations of Indian women, living in America. That sounded a bit like
Amy Tan’s <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Joy Luck club</i></b>. Having recently read <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Joy Luck Club</i></b> (which
I had liked) I made a mental note to read <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hindi-Bindi Club</i></b> (I am always
willing to read ‘cracking and charming tales’) one of these days, preferably
after I had forgotten <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Joy Luck Club</i></b>. In due course I
did forget <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Joy Luck Club</i></b>. But I forgot about <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hindi-Bindi Club</i></b>,
too. Until last week, when I spotted it in the second-hand book-shop I have
taken to frequenting in the past few months. (The old man who runs the
book-shop is knowledgeable and likes to chat, and his shop-assistant is not
entirely unattractive.) It cost only a couple of quid and I bought it. I
finished reading the novel in a couple of sittings, which—I have no hesitation
in suggesting this—suggests that the novel is a very easy read.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The Hindi-Bindi Club </span></i></b><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">runs a fine line between genre
fiction (Chick Lit) and literary fiction that tells the story of the immigrant
experience in America (Indian, this time round) and the associated issues
(clash of cultures, values, and the balancing acts that the immigrant parents
as well as their ‘American’ children have to make all the time etcetera.) I am
inclining towards <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hindi-Bindi Club</i></b> being a Chick Lit. Not that it bothers me.
It has all the positive attributes that I have come to associate with chick Lit.
</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The Hindi-Bindi Club</span></i></b><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"> tells the stories of three Indian
women, who become friends in America. The women come from very different parts
of India; indeed one of them, Saroj Chawla, comes from Lahore, which is in
current day Pakistan. Chawla’s Hindu family escapes to India during the partition,
after losing all its wealth (and the lives of a few family members). While the
family succeeds in India, Saroj continues to hanker (in her mind) after her
idyllic childhood in Lahore, before she was violently uprooted. She has never
had a sense of belonging, she says, in India. The other two women, Uma and
Meenal, come from Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Bombay (now Mumbai) respectively.
The three women’s sub-cultures, in India, have about as much commonality
amongst them as the Brits have with the Portuguese Culture. (Going on a drunken
rampage through the city centres on Friday nights is frowned upon in the
Portuguese culture.) Yet the three women have become friends in America by dint
of the following factors. (1) They all belong to the Indian Diaspora, which,
when they first arrived in America, was small. (2) They live in the same area.
(3) They are all housewives whose husbands hold down White-Collar jobs and,
over the years, have become prosperous by hard work. Of the three Uma has shown
herself to be a rebel by marrying a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Phirangi</i>
(which, the novel informs you, is an Indian word for a white foreigner). Uma’s
husband is an Irish American, and by marrying him she has incurred life-long
enmity of her father who, back in Kolkata, refuses to forgive her for bringing
on shame to the family, a grudge he takes to his death. (The Indians in the
novel reveal interesting race prejudices; it would appear that Indians of
certain generation heartily disapprove of Indians marrying whites. If an Indian
does marry a non-Indian, it is a calamity. They couch their concerns in
cultural terms and the difficulties in adjusting to living with someone from
another culture, but, you can’t help feeling that, underneath it all, is the
belief that only a ‘good Hindu spouse’ would do, and everyone else is inferior.
Later in the novel, Meenal’s husband, who is a surgeon, cuts off their
daughter—also a doctor and therefore, one would assume, more than capable of
making up her own mind—completely when she marries a white Rock musician. When
the daughter’s marriage fails because of husband’s infidelity, the father’s
first response is ‘I told you so.’ I wonder how representative the views of some
of the characters in this novel are of the real Indians. I once heard the
author Louis de Bernieres say in a literary programme (I forget the context)
that the only system more labyrinthine and convoluted than the British class
system was the Indian caste system; so complex was the caste system that—Bernieres
hazarded a guess—even the Indians probably did not understand it fully.
Pradhan’s novel does not touch upon this subject at all, perhaps because
Pradhan, a second generation Indian in America, does not understand it herself
(if one follows Bernieres’s hypothesis).)</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The three women—Meenal, Uma and<span style="margin: 0px;">
</span>Saroj—are close friends, which means that their daughters, when they are
growing up, are forced to spend extended periods in one another’s company, as
their mothers host, along with other Indian women in the area, gatherings which
the daughters label as the Hindi-Bindi Club. (Bindi, Pradhan helpfully informs
us, is an Indian word for dot, which traditional Indian women wear on their
foreheads. Hindi is a language, not to be mistaken for Hindu, which, we are told,
is a ‘religion/way of life’.) </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The three daughters—Kiran, Preity and Rani—are the younger
generation of Indian women in the novel with their own narratives.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">None of the women is lacking in drama in her life. Saroj,
outwardly happily married to her husband—she has no intentions of leaving him—,
who is no Don Juan (‘A few thrusts and the party is over’), is secretly having an
affair with another Indian man, on whom she had had a crush as a teenager in India
before her marriage, and who, conveniently, is also settled in America, making
a fortune). Her husband, Sandeep, is a flirt and never loses an opportunity to
flirt with Meenal in any function. Meenal has a secret crush on Patric
McGuiness, Uma’s husband, and suspects that her surgeon husband, Yash, might
have had flings with work-colleagues although she has no proof. The only
secret-free marriage amongst these three, it would appear, is between Uma and the
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">phirangi</i>. Meenal, when the novel
opens, is recovering from a double mastectomy following breast cancer. Meenal’s
close brush with death has opened the doors of her minds to let in all manner
of Eastern philosophies which she believes has brought her closer to God and
made a better person. Uma might be happily married, but she has her own demons
to conquer, such as her mother’s suicide when Uma was young. The dead mother,
it turns out, was an amateur writer and has left behind her musings on life, in
Bengali, in tablets, which are distributed amongst Uma’s five sisters. Uma’s
plan is to make an anthology of her mother’s writings, but some of the sisters
are reluctant to part with their inheritance. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now to younger generation of Indian women. They are all married to
white American men. Although the marriage of one, Meenal’s headstrong daughter,
Kiran, has ended badly, the other two are happily married. One of them (I
forget which one) is a rocket scientist (I mean an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">actual</i> rocket scientist) but has discovered the inner artist in
her. Another one suffers from clinical depression—it might be the rocket
scientist who is clinically depressed; I really can’t be sure; there are so
many dramatic things happening in the lives of these women that it is difficult
to keep tracks. One other—probably Preity Chawla, Saroj’s daughter— used to be
a secret bulimic in her younger years and, once, as a teenager, while in India
on a holiday with her parents, had a crush on a Muslim boy before her mother
came down more heavily on her than a Japanese sumo wrestling champion on his
opponent. Now in her thirties, Preity is plagued with a desire to trace this
boy, a desire that her alarmed mother warns her, would bring nothing but
trouble. Kiran, the headstrong doctor, announces that she is not averse to the
idea of a semi-arranged marriage, which sends her aunties from the Hindi-Bindi
Club into a kind of frenzy American psychiatrists would have no hesitation in
diagnosing as a manic episode, as per the DSM criteria. Names of all sorts of
single / divorced Indian boys from ‘good families’ are suggested, but it does
not work out as either Kiran does not like them, or they don’t connect with
her. No marks for guessing that Kiran finally settles for another white
American boy (cue for her father to throw an apoplectic fit), but there is a twist.
This American man is living as a paying guest in Pune, India, where Kiran’s
grandparents live, and is learning Marathi, the mother-tongue of Kiran’s
family. What are the chances of that happening, eh?</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As this saccharine-sweet novel comes to an end, Kiran is getting
married in Pune, in the traditional Hindu ceremony in the morning and a
Christian one in the evening; all the protagonists have sorted out their
problems neatly (even Kiran’s father, under immense pressure from his family,
gives his blessings, although it could have been more effusive than ‘It’s your
life; do what you want’); and Kiran is dancing merrily into the sunset. It all
ends happily.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Pradhan certainly knows how to weave a story; the prose flows
easily, with sprinkling of witty observations and remarks at regular intervals,
which bring a smile to your face. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There are a fair number of main characters (a total of six), most
of them painted in broad brush strokes. It is not surprising that the character
that lingers the longest in your mind when you finish the novel is Meenal, who
is the least dramatic of the lot. Pradhan has obviously developed the character
of Meenal with a lot of love and care. By comparison, there is a sense of
incompleteness to other members of the Hindi-Bindi Club. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Pradhan introduces big themes in the novel, but therein also lies
a problem. There are more big themes than the novel can justice to. The tragedy
of partition of India might have been a subject for a novel in its own right;
here it forms the background of one of the protagonists (who, incidentally, has
other interesting things happening in her life) and you are left with the
feeling that this strand has not been exploited to its full potential. The
family tragedy lurking in Uma’s background, similarly, remains just one of many
dramatic events in the novel and the author perhaps has missed a trick in not exploring
it further. Uma’s search for her mother’s ‘tablets’ peters into nothing of
significance, as if the author lost her interest in this strand of the novel.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The Hindi-Bindi Club</span></i></b><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"> is full of interesting titbits
about Indian / Hindu customs. Indeed, at times, the novel reads almost like
‘Introduction to Indian Culture and Subcultures’, which suggests that the novel
is aimed primarily at Western readers who, Pradhan must have a reason to
believe (probably not without reason), are largely clueless about India and its
culture. Most of the time it works; occasionally, though, it drags a bit, such
as the overlong last section describing Kiran’s marriage to the
Marathi-speaking American for Texas that includes half a page description (I
kid you not) how a sari is worn. Apparently wearing a modern Indian sari is more
than just draping a several feet long piece of cloth around your body; it is
almost a science and requires a technique not easy to master; supreme hand
control is essential, and if, like mine, spatial orientation is not your strong
point, you are in serious trouble.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Pradhan probably also has an interest in Indian cuisine. At the
end of each chapter are recipes of Indian dishes (with list of ingredients
longer than M1), allegedly signature dishes of some or more of the characters
in the novel. These recipes are not weaved into the narrative (for example, as
in Anthony Capella’s <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Food of Love</i></b>) and remain interesting
add-ons. If you are not particularly interested in how to make a ‘chapaati’ or
a stew of ‘Moong Daal’, you can skip the pages; you will miss nothing. (The
recipes are delicious, though; I tried the Goan Shrimp Curry and it was yummy.)
</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The Hindi-Bindi Club</span></i></b><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"> is a novelistic version of a
feel-good movie. It will not fail to cheer you up if you are feeling gloomy. On
a rainy day, make yourself a hot cup of coco, wrap yourself in a cosy blanket
(or a sari, if you are (a) competent and (b) a woman or identify yourself as
one) and lose yourself in the world of Meenal, Saroj, Uma, Kiran, Preity, and
Rani. </span></span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-70333645202186219622018-11-29T07:34:00.002-08:002018-11-29T07:37:09.381-08:00Book of the Month: Two Brothers (Ben Elton)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-v3hx3yOugIQ/XAAHh0g7BeI/AAAAAAAABp0/aYvM2QXZWqkMSFgOplsSJbbDGi_nv322QCLcBGAs/s1600/Ben%2BElton%2B2%2B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-v3hx3yOugIQ/XAAHh0g7BeI/AAAAAAAABp0/aYvM2QXZWqkMSFgOplsSJbbDGi_nv322QCLcBGAs/s320/Ben%2BElton%2B2%2B.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Call me snobbish but
until recently I had not read any of Ben Elton’s novels, because Elton wasn’t
literary enough for me. I changed my mind after I heard him in a live interview
when he was promoting his fourteenth novel, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Two Brothers</i></b>. This was
partly because the interviewer, a pompous sounding man, no doubt a lecturer in
some provincial town, treated Elton throughout the interview with the kind of
amusing condescension one reserves for a dullard in the family whose attempt at
whatever he is doing is rather pathetic but nevertheless needs encouragement
for no other reason than human kindness. Elton, on his part, gave back as much
as he got (he even asked the interviewer at one stage how many novels he had
written that were published). I liked that. I also liked that Elton gave the
impression (with considerable success) of being supremely unconcerned about
literary critics not taking him seriously. His novels sold by the millions
(apparently) and that would do for him.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I decided to read <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Two
Brothers</i></b>. Partly because, having decided to read Ben Elton, I felt his
fourteenth novel was as good a novel as any of his previous thirteen, but also
because Elton said that it was his most personal novel, based on his family’s
history. It might not have been a literary novel (Elton couldn’t give tuppence
about it) but it was a novel with a serious theme, with Holocaust as its
background.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="margin: 0px;">Two Brothers</span></i></b><span style="margin: 0px;">, as the title implies is the story of two
brothers. Two Jewish brothers, except that one of them is not Jewish, as he is
adopted. The novel is however not just about the two brothers, Paulus and Otto;
it is also about their parents Wolfgang and Frieda Stengel; Dagmar Fischer the
rich Jewish girl both the brothers are in love with, and Silke Krause, their
Aryan friend and a budding Communist,<span style="margin: 0px;">
</span>the daughter of the Stengels’ friend who is secretly in love with Otto.
The story unfolds against the backdrop to the novel is the Germany in the 1920s
and 1930s, from the days of the Weimer republic to the rise of Hitler and the
Nazis. The novel traces the early happy years in the lives of the Stengel
family—Wolfgang is a jazz musician while Frieda is training to be a doctor. The
family survives the post First World War chaos in the 1920s before the family’s
fortunes brighten a bit, only to sink again in the Great Depression and the
rising anti-Semitism in Germany. The time of the novel is set in two time
periods: the 1920s’ and 1930s’ Germany and the Britain in the 1950s where one
of the brothers has been living following the Second World War. I shall not
reveal which of the two brothers was adopted and which survived the war and the
Holocaust, although I do not think Elton means it to be the secret; the
identities are revealed long before the novel reaches its end. The surviving
brother has been working in the British Foreign Office and, a decade after the
war ended, has received a letter from East Germany from Dagmar, who—the reader
is informed in the initial chapters—married the other brother before the
outbreak of the war, expressing a wish to meet him. The brother who has
anglicized his name to Michael is eager to meet Dagmar except that he is quite
sure that the writer of the letter is not Dagmar—who, he is convinced, perished
in the Holocaust— but a Stasi agent who has a very good knowledge of the
Stengel family history. This is a trap to lure him. MI5 are of the same view
and meet with Michael prior to his proposed travel to East Berlin. Michael has
a shrewd guess as to who has written the letter, but he still is determined to
travel to the city of his birth and meet the writer of the letter. This is not
the only twist in the novel. Elton packs in more twists in the novel than on a
winding country road in the South of France. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">At almost 600 pages <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Two
Brothers</i></b> is a huge sprawling novel. Elton does know how to spin a yarn.
The prose style is pacy, and at times gripping. A quick and easy read, which,
despite the unpleasantness of the subject matter, amusing at times (without
being irreverent). Elton paints his characters with a broad brush; he is not
one for subtlety. Paulus is the calm and calculating one; he has a plan for
everything, the sort of boy whom you can easily visualise sitting in Dragon’s
Den asking searching questions to the would be entrepreneurs, calculating
potential profits. Otto is the headstrong one, whose response to any conflict
is an invitation to the other party to step aside and have a fight. Frieda,
their mother, is nobleness personified. Most of the characters drawn are of
only two shades. The character of Dagmar, who comes to play a pivotal role in
the lives of the two brothers, on the other hand, has no depth. The heavy style
of exposition becomes a tad clunky at times. The atmosphere of terror (for the
Jews) unleashed by Hitler and the Nazis is described in a manner that has the
force of tornado, with language that is at times florid. Perhaps Elton was of
the view that the the nature of the atrocity perpetrated by the Nazis could
only be conveyed adequately by prose that pulled no punches. The result, at
times, is reiterating the obvious. Thus, in a chapter on the Night of Broken
Glasses, after describing at some considerable length, using stark images, the violence
unleashed against the Jews, Elton informs the readers that it was apocalyptic.
Elton has done historical research for the novel, and is driven by the need to
demonstrate it. The novel, at times, reads like a history lesson, as the
invisible, omnipotent narrator feels the need to stop the flow of the fictional
narrative and educate and remind the reader that Hitler was an evil man. It
gets a tad jarring after a while. The dialogues are a curious mixture of
clichés (“Only Jews could produce an Einstein”) and slang which is more British
than German. The characters refer to each other as “mates” and use words like
“wankers” to express contempt. Even allowing for the fact that this is an
English version of what the fictional characters say in German, seeing as the
period of the novel is Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, it seems a bit <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ersatz</i>. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="margin: 0px;">Two Brothers</span></i></b><span style="margin: 0px;"> is a novel that is, for all its weaknesses,
remarkable for the author’s sincerity. In the Afterword, Elton tells the reader
the inspiration behind the novel. The reader learns that Elton is Jewish from
his father’s side, and the family’s original, German Jewish name was Ehrenberg.
Elton’s uncle, Gottfried Ehrenberg, after enlisting in the British army in
1943, changed the name to Geoffrey Elton; and Elton’s father, Ludwig, followed
suit, and anglicized the name to Lewis Elton. Elton then goes on to inform that
a cousin of his father and uncle, Heinz Ehrenberg, was an Aryan child who was
adopted by his Jewish parents and went on to serve in the Wehrmacht. It turns
out that some of fantastic sounding “set-pieces” in the novel have been taken
from real life stories from Elton’s family. Thus, the end of the noble
Frieda—she volunteers to accompany Jewish children being sent east when she is
not required to go, and is gassed on arrival—theatrical as it may sound, is how
Elton’s great aunt (grandmother’s sister) died. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Perhaps Elton could
have written a family memoir instead of novel with unnecessary and unconvincing
twists.</span></span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-38227678746262785032018-10-21T00:32:00.001-07:002018-10-21T00:32:24.872-07:00Book of the Month: Food of Love (Anthony Capella)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EGL3SZMv-Uc/W8wrN-wmzBI/AAAAAAAABpc/Yu6ILjKN-ogEImqxol0BDaxvmA0-o3rWgCLcBGAs/s1600/Anthony%2BCapella.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="660" data-original-width="440" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EGL3SZMv-Uc/W8wrN-wmzBI/AAAAAAAABpc/Yu6ILjKN-ogEImqxol0BDaxvmA0-o3rWgCLcBGAs/s320/Anthony%2BCapella.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I remember reading somewhere that the
film rights of Anthony Capella’s 2004 bestseller, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Food of Love</i></b>, were
bought by the Warner Brothers. I do not know whether the film was ever made. <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>This is not surprising. Capella’s debut novel
has all the ingredients that are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">de
rigueur</i> for a feel good Hollywood flick which will fetch tidy earnings at
the Box Office. For a start, the novel is based in Rome and other scenic parts
of Italy. There is a romantic triangle involving two friends and a young woman.
You probably do not need me to tell you what unfolds: the young woman falls for
the wrong guy to begin with, thinking him to be a chef of great promise. His
interest in her, on the other hand, lies strictly south of the border. Driven
by the desire to explore the inside of her underclothes (and stick her
photograph on the inside of his cupboard to join the multitudes evincing his
past conquests), he plays along, enlisting help from his friend who,
conveniently, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is </i>a chef of great
promise—and we are talking Micheline standards here—and, equally conveniently,
so that the plot gets nicely rolling, falls in love with the young woman
himself. However, being a man of honour etcetera, he does not reveal his
heart’s secret to the other two. After the obligatory misunderstandings,
heartaches, travels through picturesque parts of Italy, and a lot of sex, it
all ends well. That is as may be, you might say, but why should the Americans
audience be interested in an Italian Mills and Boon romance? Because the young
woman in the novel is American.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Laura Patterson is an American student,
spending a year on Scholarship in Rome, studying art history. She is twenty-two
and is ripe as a mango to be plucked and devoured. After all you can spend only
so much time studying frescoes by Cavallini, however fine they are.
Unfortunately, the poor girl is not having any luck; all of her Italian blind
dates are hornier than rabbits on Viagra, and no sooner than the statutory
dinner is over, instead of going on a stroll under the moonlit night and
whisper sweet nothings into her ears, they want to examine her uvula with their
tongue, and stop short of getting her into bed only because they are still
living with their mothers. Laura has had enough of the Italian men and is
giving serious consideration to going back to dating Americans when, following
the advice of her Italian friend, she decides to go out on dates only with
those men who can cook, the decision being based on the premise that a cook
would be dextrous with his hands. Cue to enter the first male protagonist,
Tommaso Massi, who is a waiter in a Micheline Star restaurant called Templi,
owned and run by a humourless Scandinavian by the name of Alain Dufrais, who
seems to have missed his true vocation, which would be—judging by the way he
treats his kitchen staff (that includes Bruno, Tommasso’s best friend and the
second male protagonist of this story) and the customers (who are frogmarched
out of the restaurant if their voices rise a decibel above the approved
threshold)—the dictatorship of a little African country. Tammasso has spotted
Laura while she is speaking on the phone to her friend (getting tips in dating);
and has decided on the spot, in the grand tradition of virile Italian men, to
get her into bed. Tammasso meets Laura fortuitously—the first of many
expeditious serendipitous moments that propel the story forward— in a food shop
within a week and— it is a measure of Laura’s naivety or Tammasso’s
ingenuity—manages to give her the impression that he can cook. Except that he
can’t. Therefore, when Laura, who has noted him down—in front of the hanging
carcasses of hares in the food shop—, as a character from a Michelangelo
drawing, and is further impressed that he did not instinctively try to grab her
breasts (which is what the poor girl has come to expect from the Italian men
between the ages of six to death), calls him—he has given her mobile number,
you see—to get guidance on how to cook the hare (which should have rightfully
belonged to Alain Dufrais’s kitchen) Tammasso has foisted on her, he has no option
but to seek urgent help from his best friend Bruno. Bruno loves cooking; he is
passionate about cooking; he is as committed to cooking as KFC are to chickens.
He is a quiet and barely articulate man—his confidence has never recovered from
the taunting he received from the other boys at his school about his big nose—
except when it comes to cooking, when he can hold forth a scholarly discourse
that can only be understood with the provision of study notes. Bruno agrees to
help his friend in his mission to enter Laura’s underwear. All he has to do is
cook mouth-watering recipes, which Tammasso can pass off as his own. Bruno
sticks to his side of the bargain and helps out his friend in a number of
hackneyed and barely comic situations revolving around the theme of Tammasso
having to cook his recipes ‘live’ either in his own flat or in the house of
Laura’s Italian friend, which involves smuggling Bruno in and out of the
family’s kitchen without anyone noticing. It should come as no surprise that
very soon Laura’s photograph joins the many others in Tammasso’s cupboard. By
this time Bruno has discovered that he has fallen in love with Laura, but
cannot bring himself to tell this to his friend, partly because of the
awkwardness it would create, but also because, you suspect, he is incapable of
stringing more than three sentences when the subject is not how to make a
perfect ‘Tozzetti’. Tammasso curiously, and in contrast to his time-tested
practice—which has served him well in his impressive career as a seducer of
unsuspecting women—of dumping Laura and moving on to his next conquest, is
still carrying on with her. Could it be because some of Bruno’s recipes have
had the effect of pushing Laura’s libido way beyond the Richter scale, and
Tammasso’s Italian ego is wounded, as he struggles to satisfy her? Laura tries
to set Bruno up with her roommate, Judith, another American, but it does not
work out; Bruno is not interested; also, Judith’s dress sense which suggests
that she is colour-blind, and her tendency to laugh like a hyena on acid scares
him. Meanwhile, Drufais is becoming more tyrannical and dictatorial than Robert
Mugabway, and begins to pick on Bruno, favouring a Frenchman instead, who uses
every dirty trick in the book to destroy Bruno’s recipes, which, as we have
learnt, are mouth-wateringly delicious.<span style="margin: 0px;">
</span>Bruno and Tammasso leave Templi and, with the help of Laura’s friend’s
father—he too has become a fan of Tammaso’s cooking, his libido surging up more
than the FTSE 100 during the Bull market after tasting the delights of his
three course meal, except that it was Bruno who cooked it—take on a run-down
restaurant, the only plus point of which is a raven haired, full-breasted
waitress called Marie, whose hipsters look as though they are not commodious enough
for her curvaceous derrière. Since Tammasso inexplicably decides to continue
seeing Laura, they have to carry on with the charade, which, frankly speaking,
is getting a tad tiresome by this stage. The restaurant, Il Cucko, needless to
say, becomes hugely popular. Realising that the story, at this stage, is in
danger of becoming more schmaltzy and sugary than a sticky toffee pudding, Capella
introduces a dramatic element (and about time too). Bruno kisses Laura; Laura
catches Tammasso <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in flagrante delicto</i>
with another woman and dumps him; Laura also tells Tammasso that Bruno kissed
her, probably to prove that both he and his friend are a couple of perverts,
and begins seeing her history professor, an American called Kim Fellowes, who
is so stuck up he actually speaks in Italian all the time; Tammasso and Bruno
have a blazing row; Bruno leaves Rome, driving aimlessly to North, through a
succession of hills and valleys, stopping only to exercise his mandibles over
T-bone steaks cooked <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">alla brace</i> near
Tuscany, or to smack his lips over <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">minestrone
con pesto</i> (with basil and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">farinata</i>),
the staple street-food of Genoa, or to taste soupy risotto from roadside <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">osterias</i>. The gastronomic delights
regrettably fail to sooth the pain of his loss, till he comes to a small hamlet
called Le Marche where his van serendipitously breaks down. Here, Bruno first
samples the delights of a stuffed whole suckling pig and, in due course, of the
equally well stuffed daughter of the woman who agrees to have him as a paying
guest, till his van is mended, which, as can only be expected in these remote
hills of Italy, takes several weeks. These weeks are nevertheless long enough
to convince Benedetta, the inn-keeper’s daughter, that Bruno might shag her
brainless, but his heart belongs to an American, to whom, she is aghast to
hear, he has never declared his love; into the bargain the American girl thinks
he is a pervert. Another serendipitous incidence: Laura with her new beau turns
up in Le Marche, where, over a meal, the stuck up professor makes an ass of
himself after he gets an allergic reaction to a mushroom, the name of which is
roughly translated into English as ‘shaggy inkcaps’. As the professor is
threatening to call his lawyers (in English or Italian is not clarified), Bruno
steps out of the kitchen, and heroically and gallantly takes the blame, and
urges the professor to sue him and not the semi-literate villagers. After Laura
and the professor have left the village, Benedetta, having had enough of Bruno,
gives him the heave-ho as gently as possible, telling him that he has to tell
Laura how he feels about her. So off Bruno goes in his rickety van and returns
to Rome. Where he finds that his erstwhile friend Tommasso is shacked up with
the curvaceous Marie, and has transformed ‘Il Cucko’ into a successful
pizzeria; and he cannot find Laura’s whereabouts. Bruno goes back to work in
the ‘Templi’, his tail, for all practical purposes, lodged firmly between his
legs, feeling rather sorry for himself. However, in a twist redolent of a Hollywood
movie—but wait! This novel might still be be made into a Hollywood
film—involving yet more coincidences—coincidences are coming, now, so thick and
fast, you are beginning to wonder whether they do not come in pairs—that is too
tedious to explain, Tammasso, who, unbeknown to Bruno, really cares about him,
smuggles himself as a waiter into ‘Templi’; Laura and the stuck-up professor
end up dining, with an entourage of hangers on, in ‘Templi’ where the professor
again makes an ass of himself by proposing to Laura in front of everyone and is
politely but firmly rejected; Bruno ends up preparing the dream meal for Laura
and, for a change, owning up to it; and Alain Drufais ends up with his French
disciple in a cupboard where the two discover the joys of homosexual sex. As
the novel ends, Laura is back in America; Bruno is still in Italy, but ready to
embark on his maiden voyage across the ocean, waiting only for Laura to arrange
the visa for him; and the two of them are exchanging e-mails with each other
about—you have guessed it!—more Italian food recipes. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anthony Capella is an aficionado of
Italian food—he has devoted the best years of his life chomping his way through
Italian food—and his exceptional knowledge of regional Italian food shows
throughout the novel (Capella used to write for <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sunday Times</i></b> on Italian
food and recommended restaurants in Naples and Rome). There is a hint of magic
realism, too, around food and Capella effortlessly lifts it to the realm of
fairy tale when he describes the invigorating effect of Bruno’s dishes on the
libidos of those who eat it. Not a page goes by without Capella, via his
gourmandising protagonist, waxing eloquent about some or the other Italian dish
you have never heard of. He is kind enough in many cases to supply recipes,
too, the only hitch being you are unlikely to get the ingredients that go on to
make these foudroyant dishes in your local Tesco. If your knowledge of Italian
food starts with American Hot Pepperoni Pizza and ends with Tiramisu, you are
in for a surprise. If you are a carnivore, you are in for a treat: there isn’t
a body part of various herbivorous animals—from eyeballs to urinary bladder to
the outer membrane of transverse colon—that, if Capella is to be believed—can’t
be baked, fried or casseroled. To Capella’s credit, for the most part, the
gastronomic tuition blends well with the plot; it is only on a few occasions
that you feel that Capella is getting carried away with his culinary enthusiasm
and ephorizes: thus, when Bruno travels out of Rome and drives Northwards,
supposedly heartbroken, what the reader remembers most of this journey which
ends in the warm and ample bosom of Benedetta, is not his heartache, but the
exotic dishes he has cooked or eaten along the way. The last few pages of the
novel comprise nothing but recipes of even more colourful Italian dishes—from
fried zucchini flowers to peppers stuffed with rabbit. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For a debut novel, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Food of Love</i></b>, a
reworking of a Cyrano de Bergerac story—Capella obliquely acknowledges the debt
he owes to the seventeenth century French dramatist by giving Bruno a big
schnozzle—, is written with a great deal of self-assurance. At times it feels
almost as though the novel was written for the cinema (it is little wonder that
its rights were sold so quickly), reading it is like watching a movie, which is
as much down to the formulaic constructive format of the story as to the
author’s deft touch in writing. The novel overwhelms you with its rummage of
melodrama, humour (a tad on the cruder side at times), emotions, and
sensuality—a heady mixture of food, spices, and romance.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="margin: 0px;">The Food of Love</span></i></b><span style="margin: 0px;"> is a joyous, exuberant celebration of Italian food. You can
savour it in bite-sized pieces or gobble it down in one hungry sitting; you are
sure to enjoy it. I hope the Warner Brothers bring out the movie; I would
love to watch it.</span></span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-84287761464070425032018-09-30T12:09:00.000-07:002018-09-30T12:09:02.365-07:00Book of the Month: Gillespie and I (Jane Harris)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SRc6EoSj6y4/W7EfLYaHlwI/AAAAAAAABpM/vxlEDr_YO_MORrlZDMSkGegekWGgxWltgCLcBGAs/s1600/jane-harris-007.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="276" data-original-width="460" height="192" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SRc6EoSj6y4/W7EfLYaHlwI/AAAAAAAABpM/vxlEDr_YO_MORrlZDMSkGegekWGgxWltgCLcBGAs/s320/jane-harris-007.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="margin: 0px;">Gillespie and I</span></i></b><span style="margin: 0px;">, Jane Harris’s second novel is set, like her
first, in 19<sup>th</sup> century Scotland. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The story of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gillespie
and I</i></b> is told in retrospect by an octogenarian English spinster,
Harriet Baxter. The year is 1933 and Harriet, sitting in her flat in
Bloomsbury, London, is writing down what she calls her memoir, although, to be
precise, she is writing about a two-year period in her life, in the 1880s, when
she lived in Glasgow and became very close to the family of an upcoming artist
called Ned Gillespie. Harriet’s association with the Gillespies ended on a
traumatic note for almost everyone concerned and for a while earned Harriet
notoriety which she feels, even though more than forty years have elapsed, she
did not deserve.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As the decade of 1880
is nearing its end Harriet is (by the standard of that age) is a thirty-six
year old spinster of independent means. After the death of her aunt, Harriet
has travelled to Glasgow with the intention of spending a few weeks in the city
and visiting the International Empire exhibition. In Glasgow Harriet gets
acquainted with the family of Ned Gillespie, one of whose painting is hanging
in the exhibition. The initial meeting between Harriet and Ned’s family is by
accident when Harriet saves the life of Ned’s mother, Elspeth, who tumbles
while walking and, incredible as it may seem, is in danger of choking to death
having swallowed her dentures! After this initial, fortuitous, meeting Harriet
wastes no time in getting close to the Gillespie family and spends most of her
waking hours in the first floor apartment of the Gillespies. Ned Gillespie’s is
a lower middle class family. There is a grocery shop that is run by Ned’s
younger brother, Kenneth. Ned, who had taken over the running of the shop after
his father’s death, has ambitions to be an artist. He is spending increasingly
more time in pursuit of his art. His younger sister, Mabel, having split up
from her boyfriend, has returned to Glasgow. Ned lives with his wife Annie and
two daughters, Sybil and Rose. Into this cosy, domestic and closely knit family
enters Harriet. Writing her memoir forty years later, Harriet has no hesitation
in acknowledging that Ned Gillespie was a genius but for the most part his
family was a burden on him. Harriet, comfortably off herself, notices that the Gillespies,
while not exactly impecunious, are still leading financially uncertain
existence. Harriet does what she can to help the family. This involves
commissioning her portrait (which Ned’s wife Annie, an amateur painter herself,
paints), showering the family with small yet frequent gifts etcetera. <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Despite this Harriet is left with the
suspicion, as time passes, that her near-constant presence in the Gillespie
household is not appreciated by Ned’s wife Annie; also detested are Harriet’s
gifts to the family. Harriet’s suggestion that Ned, Annie and their children
come to stay at a house she has rented a few miles out of Glasgow is rejected
by both Ned and Annie. To add to the family’s stress, the behaviour of Ned and
Annie’s elder daughter, Sybil, unexpectedly and inexplicably deteriorates. Once
a well-behaved and placid girl, Sybil’s behaviour becomes unpredictable and
antisocial. Obscene drawings appear on the wall of the kitchen; during the
Hogmanay ceremony a number of guests become unwell after drinking punch and it
is strongly suspected that Sybil added rat poison to the punch bowl. Elspeth and
Annie fall out over how best to deal and “cure” Sybil’s bad behaviour. Harriet
does not much like Sybil compared with the angelic Rose. Then Rose disappears.
She and Sybil are playing in a public garden (not far from the house where
Harriet rented a room when she first arrived in Glasgow and which she has kept
even after she moved into hr rented house). Sybil, who comes back to the house
on her own tells the story that she was given a penny by a thin woman—a
stranger—whose face is covered with a veil to get something from a nearby shop;
and by the time she returned to the garden both the woman and Rose had
disappeared. An extensive search organized by the Glasgow police; however,
despite numerous claims that a girl fitting Rose’s description was seen in the
company of a man at different times in different parts of the city, Rose cannot
be traced. The disappearance of Rose has a devastating effect on Ned’s family,
in particular Sybil, whose behaviour deteriorates to the extent where she needs
to be committed to the local asylum. After a few months of futile search the
police close the case. Some more months pass and then a member of public
discovers Rose’s decomposed body in a wood. Subsequent investigation by the
police leads to the arrest of a German man and his Scottish wife. The couple
admits to having abducted the girl but make a sensational claim: the couple was
approached by Harriet Baxter to kidnap the girl. They did not know why Harriet
wanted the girl abducted; however her instructions were clear: the girl was to
be kidnapped for a day only and she should come to no harm. That Rose ends up
dead is the result of a freak accident. Harriet is arrested along with the
German and his wife and is tried in the crown court in Edinburgh. Writing her
memoir forty years after the trial Harriet becomes increasingly convinced that
the new maid working for her who calls herself Sarah, is none other than Sybil,
Ned Gillepsie’s eldest daughter. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="margin: 0px;">Gillespie and I</span></i></b><span style="margin: 0px;"> is a gripping tale, told with panache. Jane
Harris’s prose is lush, witty and with clever turns of phrase. At more than six
hundred pages this is not exactly a short novel. That it does not drag at any
stage is as much to do with the crackling plot—taut, unsettling and full of unexpected
twists—as with Harris’s prose that hides as much as it reveals. The prose has a
kind of lilting fluency which, imperceptibly, creates a momentum of its own.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The protagonist of the
novel, Harriet Baxter, is, like Madame Mao, small but lethal. As she starts
narrating her story the impression the reader forms is of an art-loving,
essentially good hearted, if ever so slightly lonely, woman who goes out of her
way to those whom she calls her friends. This initial impression soon gives way
to an uneasy feeling, as Harriet’s presence in the Gillespie household borders
on being intrusive and her proximity to Ned in particular becomes forced. For
an intelligent woman Harriet can be very obtuse; she has the ability to not
take hint and the talent to latch on to any ambiguities and distort the
messages to suit her emotional needs. All of this conspires to make Harriet, as
a narrator, about as reliable as Hermann Goering’s lawyer at the Nuremberg
trials. As the novel nears its end—Harris has one final twist in store for the
reader—the reader can’t make up his mind whether to pity or loathe Harriet.
Hers is a lonely, pitiful life but not less baleful for that. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="margin: 0px;">Gillespie and I</span></i></b><span style="margin: 0px;"> is an adroit psychological study of obsession,
manipulation, and deception—both of others and of self. It is a clever novel
that expertly manoeuvres readers’ expectations, and is remarkable for what is
unsaid and unsayable. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: calibri;"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-50971610499895652682018-08-21T22:28:00.002-07:002018-08-21T22:28:52.404-07:00Book of the Month: Started Early, Took My Dog (Kate Atkinson)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6WoI6SAqV6k/W3zz9acCIBI/AAAAAAAABo4/OvMfS-DyBZQ_lRdXL4Teqhs3MAiro2KSACLcBGAs/s1600/Kate-Atkinson-009.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="961" data-original-width="1600" height="192" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6WoI6SAqV6k/W3zz9acCIBI/AAAAAAAABo4/OvMfS-DyBZQ_lRdXL4Teqhs3MAiro2KSACLcBGAs/s320/Kate-Atkinson-009.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Kate Atkinson burst on to the British Literary scene in the
1990s with her brilliantly insouciant tragic-comic debut novel, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Behind
the Scenes of the Museum</i></b>, which won the Whitbread (now Costa) award.
This was followed by <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Human Croquet</i></b> and <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Emotionally
Weird</i></b>, both of which attracted critical reviews which were lukewarm at
best, although the novels, especially <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Emotionally Weird</i></b>, marked Atkinson
as a writer who had a great feel for humour. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After these three full length novels which could be
described as literary fiction (plus a collection of short stories) Atkinson
changed tracks and switched over to genre fiction. She began writing detective
novels. She has published, so far, four detective novels featuring the slightly
damaged yet clever and honest and uber-cool detective (is there any other
type?) Jackson Brodie. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These detective novels have sold well and, in 2011, the
first two novels were made into a BBC drama in which Jason Isaacs (hugely
talented but much underrated) played the detective.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The intriguingly titled <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Started Early, Took My Dog</i></b> is the
fourth novel featuring Jackson Brodie. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When one is writing a detective / crime thriller, one can opt for either the
action or the psychological. An Example of action thriller would be <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Big Sleep</i></b> by Raymond Chandler. Chandler’s intention in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Big Sleep</i></b> is very clear from the outset. He is out to entertain. The
plot of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Big Sleep</i></b> is not very intricate but never leaves the fast
lane—Chandler wheels in corpses with alarming regularity—and does not give the
reader time to think. Chandler does not waste time in developing psychological
profiles of his characters either; characters are useful to Chandler only to
the extent that they serve some purpose in moving the plot further (either by
getting murdered or telling Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s legendary detective, who
might be the killer). Chandler’s prose is stylistic (and hugely enjoyable) and
the whole thing is over in roughly 250 pages).</span><br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Started Early, Took My Dog</i></b> is as far removed from <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Big Sleep</i></b> as Saturn is from Sun, although, like Chandler, Atkinson has
her unique prose-style, liberally laced with humour. Atkinson takes great
trouble in developing psychological profiles of the protagonists, which, by
necessity, involve a raft of subsidiary characters which have no direct
relevance to the plot of the novel but serve the function of elucidating for
the reader the personality profiles of the protagonists. Also, since <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Started
Early, Took My Dog</i></b>—while a complete novel on its own—is fourth in a
series of detective novels featuring Jackson Brodie, Atkinson probably feels
obliged to bring in characters, which might have played a less peripheral role
in the previous novels (I read <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Case Histories</i></b>, the first novel in
the series, many years ago, but can’t remember anything about it other than it
was a moderately enjoyable read), so that the fans of her novels can have a
sense of continuity. It also allows Atkinson to bring some or more of them back
into playing a more prominent role in future Jackson Brodie novels, which, I am
sure, will come out.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The result is a novel that is almost 500 pages—witty almost
throughout, and entertaining in part.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The plot of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Started Early, Took My Dog</i></b> has
several strands. At the heart of it is the murder of a prostitute named Carole
Braithwaite, in Leeds UK, <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>in the 1970s. Carole
is found in her flat three weeks after she was murdered. The first person to
reach the scene of crime is a WPC named Tracy Waterhouse, who finds in the flat
a four year old boy, presumably the dead prostitute’s son. The flat was locked
from outside, which suggests to Tracy that whoever murdered Carole locked the
flat from outside before leaving, probably in the full knowledge that there was
a little boy in the flat. The boy is whisked away from the flat by the Social
Services and a rookie social worker by the name of Linda Pallister is in charge
of arranging foster care for him. There is a veil of secrecy surrounding all
this and Tracy’s attempts to make inquiries—both with regard to the boy’s fate
and the progress, if any, made in the investigation of Carole’s murder—fall on
deaf ears. Carole’s murder has taken place at the beginning of what would turn
out to be the reign of terror of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe (a
real-life murderer, serving an indefinite life sentence—a bit of post-modern
device used by Atkinson). Carole’s murder however remains unsolved; she is not
considered to be one of the victims of the Yorkshire Ripper. Zoom forward
several years and we are in the first decade of the twenty first century. Tracy
Waterhouse is in her fifties; she has left the police force and now is in
charge of a private security firm operating in a local mall. All the police
officers—senior and junior—associated with Carole Braithwaite’s murder are
either dead or retired—except one: Barry Crawford; and he is due to retire in
two weeks. Then, while on her stroll in the mall Tracy notices a known
prostitute called Kelly walking with a little girl, shouting abuses at the girl
and generally mistreating her in full public view. Tracy, on an impulse, ‘buys’
the girl from the prostitute for 2000 pounds. This provides the second strand
of the story. Tracy, having illegally gotten hold of the girl from the
prostitute (who probably was not the mother of the child in the first place),
begins planning her escape from Leeds, preferably England, and, towards that
end, is not above using her contacts in the underworld to obtain fake passports
and travel documents for her and the girl. In case you are wondering where
Jackson Brodie fits into this, please be advised that he is hired by a New
Zeeland woman named Hope MacMaster, who wants to trace her biological parents.
Hope is English but immigrated to New Zeeland with her parents—the Winfields—at
a very young age. All that Hope knows about her background is that the
Winefields—who lived in Leeds—were her adoptive parents, and that her birth
name was Nicola, which the parents changed to Hope when they adopted her.
Jackson Brodie is tasked with the job of tracing, if possible, Hope’s
biological family. Jackson Brodie arrives in Leeds and his first port of call
is Linda Pallister, now nearing retirement, who is still in charge of adoption
and foster care in the Social Services. Linda however proves very elusive and
Brodie begins to suspect that she is going out of her way to avoid her. In a
situation that is possible only in detective fiction Brodie manages to gain
access to Pallister’s office and goes through her files; and discovers the name
Carole Braithwaite written on the Winfield folder, along with a photograph of a
young girl who he thinks could be Hope when she was a baby. Soon Brodie
discovers three more things: (1) Tracy Waterhouse was present when Carole
Braithwaite was found murdered (Tracy proves as elusive as Linda when he tries
to arrange a meeting with her); (2) another man by the name of B. Jackson,
calling himself a private detective, is also going about making inquiries; and
(3) he (i.e. Jackson Brodie) is being followed, probably by the other Jackson.
Tracy, in the meanwhile, does not take long to figure out that she herself is
being followed by leather-jacket wearing thugs who will not hesitate from using
violence. Then there is a bunch of retired police officers, more shifty than the
people featuring in BBC documentaries with titles like ‘Fake Britain’, who, you
are not surprised to learn, have direct or indirect connections with the
Braithwaite murder. Finally, to add more spice to what is already turning to be
a vindaloo, there is a dementing actress called Kitty, who is filming—you have
guessed it—a detective serial in which Brodie’s second ex-wife, Julia, is also
playing a role. The dementing Kitty is in the mall when the prostitute is
mistreating the child (did I tell you that the prostitute, in due course, also snuffs
it?). It all gets resolved in due course and leads up to the corruption at the
heart of the police force.</span><br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If all of the above has given you the impression that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Started
Early, Took My Dog</i></b> is a taut thriller with suspense leaking out of
every page, you would be partially correct. There is, as must be evident, from
the summery above, a lot of suspense, but the story has a meandering feel to
it. What I like to see (or read) in a detective novel is the writer getting on
with the various strands of the story at a brisk pace. What I don’t necessary
want to read is pages of descriptions of the protagonist’s (Brodie) previous
failed marriages, his difficult relationship with his teen-age daughter, his
impoverished childhood etcetera. It does not add much to the story-line (which
is essentially an old-fashioned detective / murder mystery) in a way that is
meaningful. Having read only one previous novel in the series (and forgotten
about it), it was impossible for me to link this with the plots of previous Jackson
Brodie novels (if there was a link); neither do these descriptions offer any
great insight into Brodie’s personality make-up (he spends much part of the
novel being duped by one or the other person). I think this has happened
because <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Started Early, Took My Dog</i></b> is a detective novel with literary
ambitions. Nothing wrong in that. Graham Greene and John Le Carre and Len
Deighton have done it with great success in the past. What is dissatisfying is
the two have not gelled together neatly.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The alter on which a detective / crime novel will succeed or
fail is the skill with which the mystery is resolved. For me a satisfactory
detective novel is one in which there are no loose ends; the explanation of the
events taking place is plausible; and when secret is revealed in the final
pages, it is as if you have emerged from a mist. Unfortunately, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Started
Early, Took My Dog</i></b>, fails this litmus test. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dénouement</i>, when it comes, fails to give you the
emerging-from-the-mist feeling. Atkinson ratchets up the tempo several fold
towards the end, and the narrative, which, for the best part is trundling along
at just about manageable pace is, in the last fifty odd pages, suddenly full of
action and melodrama not out of place in a Bollywood pot-boiler. This gives the
reader a bit of a jolt as, until then, it has the pretention of being an
erudite, intelligent psychological thriller. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There are too many loose ends in the story-line that has
holes big enough to drive a schooner through. For example, one of the two major
strands of the novel, the kidnapping of the possibly-already-kidnapped girl by
Tracy Waterhouse, has no evident link to the other strand of the story, the
murder of Carole Braithwaite. It is as if there are two novels within the novel
that are running a parallel course, and never converge. Tracy’s action (of
stealing the girl) remains ultimately unfathomable. Despite reams of pages
devoted to her actions, we are still left in the dark as to why the staid and
solid Tracy decides to risk everything for a girl on whom her gaze happens to
alight in the mall. (Most people, when they see a kid being mistreated in a
public place by woman who seems to be off her heads on drugs, would phone the
police, not ‘buy’ the kid. There is nothing in Tracy’s background and family
situation that prepares the reader for this highly unusual step the former
policewoman takes. The girl (four years old), in turn, begins her clandestine
existence with Tracy, whom she has never met in life, without batting an
eyelid.)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What saves the novel from being a total let-down is
Atkinson’s prose which sparkles with smart and waggish observation. That does
not quite make up, though, for the weak story. Six out of ten. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-56161512863646270632018-07-22T23:01:00.000-07:002018-07-22T23:01:53.491-07:00Book of the Month: Stoner (John Williams)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yRHtUMv1_Pw/W1VvGWOmPGI/AAAAAAAABok/xduBBg-foisjDOcHLW7V2nPF2Atb0_RBQCLcBGAs/s1600/John%2BWilliams.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1147" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yRHtUMv1_Pw/W1VvGWOmPGI/AAAAAAAABok/xduBBg-foisjDOcHLW7V2nPF2Atb0_RBQCLcBGAs/s320/John%2BWilliams.jpg" width="223" /></a></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stoner</i></b> is a 1965 novel by the American author, John Williams,
who published only four novels in his life, none of which sold well (although
the last one, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Augustus</i></b>, won the US National Book Award in 1973, the first
time in the history of the National Book Award, when the award was jointly
shared by two novels). After <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Augustus</i></b>, Williams, a professor of
English in Denver, Colorado, did not publish any novel for the remaining 21
years of his life.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stoner</i></b> was Williams’s third novel. First published in 1965, the
novel attracted modestly favourable critical reviews; did not sell much; and sank
into obscurity. It was re-published in 2013, almost fifty years after its
original not-very-successful publication (and nineteen years after Williams’s
death); and guess what? It is now heralded as some sort of classic.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The eponymous hero of Williams’s novel is William Stoner.
Stoner is born to impoverished farmers in central Missouri, near Columbia. In
1910, at the age of nineteen Stoner enters the University of Missouri as a
freshman. He stays at the university for the next four decades, until his death
of cancer, in 1956. He does not rise beyond the rank of the Assistant Professor
(not because he can’t cut the mustard, I shall request you to keep in mind, but
because of departmental politics), and is not particularly renowned for his
teaching method. He marries Edith, who has the kind of personality that would
keep a Freudian analyst in business for years, and produces a daughter named
Grace. Stoner’s career, like Greece’s economy, does not go anywhere; his
marriage is not happy; and his daughter turns out to be a disappointment.
Stoner takes an occasional initiative, like having an affair with a
departmental colleague, a woman named Katherine Driscoll, who is several years
his junior; but, does not have the courage to take it to its conclusion
(although he loves with as much passion as his nature would allow) and lets her
go, sinking back into the ennui of his dispiriting marriage and job. As he is
nearing his retirement (his boss, Lomax, with whom Stoner has been forced to
wage a long war of attrition, for reasons that are laughably trivial, can’t
wait to send Stoner on his way) Stoner develops intestinal cancer. It would
have been an injustice to Stoner’s sad life—with its sad trajectory until
then—if the cancer were treatable. It isn’t; and Stoner, on the last page of
the novel, dies.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stoner</i></b> is a novel about an unremarkable farm-boy, who goes to
college and becomes a teacher. Nothing of real significance happens in his
life, which, by conventional standards, occupies the position between failure
and disappointment. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The problem with <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stoner</i></b> is that its protagonist does
not come to life. He lives no impression as you close the novel. Nothing about
his personality or behaviour or attitude either stands out. His inner life,
emotional ambience of his mind, if you will, is never lit up. The guy, as the
cliché goes, is dull as ditchwater. His motivations remain largely obscure.
Take his marriage to Edith, whom he sees for the first time at a University party.
The woman is colder than the Antarctic. It is not clear what her attraction is
to Stoner, what it is that drives him towards the woman other than an innate
trait of masochism. (Equally, why Edith, the daughter of a rich banker—the
father would, predictably, lose his wealth in the Great Depression of the 1930s
and—yawn, yawn—kill himself; but that is, at the time of Edith’s first meeting
with Stoner, is decades away—decides to marry Stoner, who was financially never
going to be able to match her parents’ wealth on his University salary, and,
who has nothing whatsoever about him raising him above the mediocrity, is left
unexplained.) Williams spends good many pages describing Edith’s erratic
behaviour most, if not all of which is, it is strongly hinted, directed at<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>making Stoner’s life a misery and driving a
wedge between him and their daughter, Grace. Yet, Edith’s motivations remain
obscure. Is she nasty? Is she just on this side of madness? I couldn’t care.
Then there’s Stoner’s great feud with Lomax, the physically handicapped
chairman of the department. It all starts with some shyster student, also
physically challenged, who Lomax thinks is the next Samuel Johnson, while
Stoner thinks he is a waste of space. Stoner, despite urging from Lomax, fails
the shyster. That puts paid to Stoner’s ambitions—if he has any—of becoming a
professor of English. He then, as is in the nature of these things, starts
shagging a younger colleague, who, going by her behaviour, seems to have a
striking similarity to the temperament of Stoner’s wife Edith, in that it is
not based on a<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>series of good and bad
days, but good and abd moments.. The affair limps on for a few months. Edith
becomes aware of it, but, curiously, is not bothered. The affair ends when
Lomax tries to . . . I have actually forgotten what it is that Lomax attempts;
however, the upshot is Katherine Driscoll packs her bags and leaves. Stoner
watches her go and . . . well, that’s about it: the character of Katherine
Driscoll has served whatever obscure purpose Williams has in mind for her, and
she is banished out of the story. As regards Stoner’s daughter, Grace, it would
have been a miracle if a child brought up by two oddballs—an alexithymic father
with water instead of blood in his veins, and a mother who is so
caricaturesque, she couldn’t be real—turned out to be a well-adjusted
personality. Grace doesn’t. She gets her bun in the oven at a young age; forces
the hapless boy to marry her; the boy has the decency to die in the Second
World War; and Grace becomes an alcoholic.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stoner</i></b>, a novel about an obscure American academic (not unlike
its creator) in the first half of twentieth century, who endures a series of
personal and professional misfortunes (at least some of which are
self-inflicted), it would be fair to say, is not a joyous novel. I don’t have a
problem with that. My problem with the novel is: I did not find it riveting.
Stoner, rather than coming across as a man who embraces whatever shit life
throws at him (and there is a lot of it, let’s face it) with the equanimity and
stoicism of a Yoga practitioner (or a recovering alcoholic), which, I suspect,
is the author’s intention, comes across as a man constitutionally enervated of
vitality. There aren’t any depths here that deserve prolonged attention.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Williams’s prose is precise and adequate, and, like the
protagonist of the novel, bloodless. You feel indifferent to it, perhaps
because it is indifferent to the man it depicts. It is monotonous and never
shifts out of the slow lane. Stoner is a man of few words, but you do not get
the feeling that he selects his words judiciously and delivers them expertly;
rather he comes across as a dull man who has, for the most part, nothing
interesting to say.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stoner</i></b> is not a bad novel, but I can’t understand what all the
fuss is about. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: calibri;"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-64457323296122698932018-06-30T10:07:00.000-07:002018-07-22T23:09:36.327-07:00Book of the Month: blueeyedboy (Joanna Harris)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZwTSiSO28MU/Wze4JPYhidI/AAAAAAAABoY/kn96L8NgmZsPr5ISQtA5WP4FBkqjMPVXACLcBGAs/s1600/Joanna-Harris.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="250" data-original-width="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZwTSiSO28MU/Wze4JPYhidI/AAAAAAAABoY/kn96L8NgmZsPr5ISQtA5WP4FBkqjMPVXACLcBGAs/s1600/Joanna-Harris.jpg" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Joanne Harris’s 2005 novel, <b><i>Gentlemen
and Players</i></b>, was a departure of kind for her, who first shot to fame
with her hugely successful 1999 novel, <b><i>Chocolat</i></b>. The theme of <b><i>Gentlemen
and Player</i></b> was much darker than Harris’s earlier novels. Harris set out
to write a thriller and wrote a gripping thriller which came with the <i>de
rigueur</i> twist at the end.</span><br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Harris seems to have taken a liking for
this genre. Her novel, <b><i>blueeyedboy</i></b>, is also a story full of
suspense, intrigue and treachery that holds the reader in its thrall almost
till the end. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The setting of <b><i>blueeyedboy</i></b>
is a Yorkshire village. If you thought nothing possibly could be happening in a
Northern British village that could be of interest to anyone who does not have
a passion for church fetes and voluntary work in the village shop of <i>bric-a-bracs</i>,
you would be compelled to think again after reading <b><i>blueeyedboy</i></b>.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There are some very strange things
happening in the outwardly tranquil village of Malbry (pronounced <i>maw-bry</i>—the
reader is informed). For a start, there are rather a lot of people meeting
their maker in sudden accidents. Or, are they, really? Because nothing is what
it seems in this novel that has the most unreliable narrator since Toni Blair
announced that Saddam’s weapons of mass destructions could strike London in 45
minutes.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The eponymous narrator of Joanne
Harris’s novel is a 42-year-old single man bent on privacy and lonesome
pursuits. Needless to say, he has very few friends in the real world (and, as
the novel progresses, you are thankful on behalf of the rest of the humanity
that this is so). Why is he called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i>?
Because that is the identity he has assumed on the Internet. Blue is his
colour, assigned to him when he was a child by his domineering mother. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i> keeps a web-journal, or
weejay. It is, as he describes early in the novel, a ‘site for all seasonings’.
You can make public entries on the site; and, for personal enjoyment, you can
make restricted entries. Weejay is the only place, in a manner of speaking,
where <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i> can vent as he
pleases, confess without fear of censure, where he can be himself, or someone
else. It is a world, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i>
informs the reader with some relish, where no one is quite what they seem. This
anonymity is very important for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i>,
who, by his own admission, is a very bad boy. He has created a weejay community
called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">badguysrock</i>. The name says it
all; however, in case you haven’t grasped it, it is a forum for bad guys to
glory in their crimes, to wear their villainy with pride, and to celebrate
beyond the reach of police. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">blueyedboy </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">posts
regularly on <i>badguysrocks</i>, and his public entries—he calls them <i>fic</i><span style="margin: 0px;">,</span> a diminutive for fiction. He also
makes restricted entries. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy’s</i>
public entries, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fics</i>, have
spawned a small community of loyal followers, which includes the obligatory
psycho and a very fat and lonely woman from the USA, as well as a sad bloke
from Leeds, UK, who is obsessed with big breasts and is addicted to reading
pornography. These are the peripheral characters in the novel and we need not
concern ourselves with them. There are two more followers, both women: one has
the Internet identity of <i>ClairDeLune</i> while the other calls herself <i>Albertine</i>.
And both these women live in Malbry. What are the chances of that, eh? A sad,
lonely, possibly mentally unhinged, man, living in a Yorkshire village that is
five miles away from civilization in every direction, starts a web-journal
devoted to villainy, and in its handful of followers are two women who live in
the same village. You could not find a more tightly wedged pair of
coincidences. Of the two women, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ClairDelune</i>
knows <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i> in real life too,
and is the daughter of a family friend. She teaches on a creative
self-expression course in the local collage and her interest in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i> is literature-linked
(although you would be hard-placed to describe <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy’s</i> <i>fics</i> as literature). She reads his <i>fics</i>
on <i>badguysrocks</i> and posts comments calculated to encourage him in the
same way a primary school teacher might encourage a <i>bricolage</i> created by
a dullard in her class (but not dull enough to be shifted out of mainstream
school). <i>Albertine</i> too posts on the weejay, but refrains from passing
any comments on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy’s</i>
entries. Finally there is <i>JennyTricks</i>, who posts comments on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy’s</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fics </i>of such vituperativeness that he is obliged to delete them.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The reason <i>JennyTricks</i> is so
outraged by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy’s</i> <i>fics</i>
is because of their verisimilitude to real life characters from the village,
all of whom have died in circumstances more mysterious than the one surrounding
the death of David Kelly. Also, they are all in some way or the other linked to
<i>blueeyedboy</i> or his mother, Gloria Winter, so he says, and have committed
the cardinal sin of insulting or offending or letting down the mother or the
son in some or the other manner. If you were thinking that <i>blueeyedboy</i>
and his mother are close, you would be wrong. True, they live in close
proximity, in the same house, in fact. However, it would be fair to say that
the relationship between the two is tortured. Gloria Winter, judging from
descriptions provided by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i>—and
we have already established that he has an unusual relationship with truth—, is
a wicked-witch character straight out of books for children aged 8 to 12. The
woman is more temperamental than my old banger and seems to have child rearing
practices calculated to create what the counsellors call esteem issues in her
children. Gloria Winter believes in the dictum that the best way to make your
children obey you is to bit the shit out of them, a dictum she follows even in <i>blueeyedboy’s</i>
adulthood. At the same time the woman is canny and is capable of low level
cunning and petty subterfuge you wouldn’t usually associate with a woman who
has spent the best part of her adult life cleaning houses in a Northern English
village. Little surprise, then, that <i>blueeyedboy</i>, considers her to be
about as trustworthy as a hungry python. In fact he would like her dead. He is
devising a most intricate plot that would have had Hercule Poirot scratching
his head (unless he remembers <b><i>Curtain</i></b>) to have the old biddy
bumped off. And so clever and twisted is he that he is planning to implicate <i>Albertine</i>
in his mother’s murder, killing two birds in one stone so to speak.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What has <i>blueeyedboy </i>got against
<i>Albertine</i>? It all goes back to, you will not be surprised to learn,
their childhoods. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Albertine</i>, the
reader is informed, has grown up in the same village and has known <i>blueeyedboy</i>
as a child. As an adult she was the girlfriend of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy’s </i>elder brother, Nigel. Nigel dies in a road traffic
accident at the beginning of the novel, having left <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Albertine’s</i> house in a rage after receiving a letter <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i> claims in his <i>fic</i> he wrote.
(Needless to say, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i> hates
his brother and is not at all sorry that he is dead.) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i> is one of three brothers, but the other two have died
in uncongenial circumstances. (Did I forget to mention this? I hope you will
excuse me; there is so much happening in the 500 plus pages of this novel, so
many twists and turns, that it is very difficult to keep track of everything
that has gone on in the sad life and sordid mind of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i>.) Then there is the blind girl, Emily White, a ghost
from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy’s</i> childhood. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blueeyedboy</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Albertine</i> are both connected to Emily. Emily’s mother, whom <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i> nicknames Baby Blue (on
account of her suffering from post-natal depression) in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fics</i>, is so neurotic she makes Bridget
Jones a paragon of maturity and stability in comparison. The snobbish Mrs White
once employed Gloria Winter (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy’s</i>
mother) as a cleaner and earned her lifelong enmity by dropping her for
something trivial. (So, of course, she deserves to die.) Emily White and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i> are both ‘sensitive’
children. Not in the sense you and I understand sensitivity but in the sense
that sends the boffins salivating to their journals. They both are gifted, or
say they are gifted, with the unusual neurological condition called synaesthesia,
in which stimulation of one sensory pathway involuntarily activates another
sensory pathway so that the sufferers—although I am not sure that is the
correct word—can taste sounds or hear colours. A local eccentric named Dr.
Peacock takes great interest in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i>,
only to drop him unceremoniously—thus sealing his fate—when Emily White turns
up (who is doomed, too). But then is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i>
really the one who he claims to be—a synaesthate—in the public entries on his
weejay, or was the unusually ‘sensitive’ boy his brother whose identity <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyeed</i> boy has taken on in the
Web-journal? And if <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy </i>is
not, at least not as a child, who he claims to be, then does he have any other special
neurological condition of his own? As it happens, he does:
mirror-touch-synaesthesia? How uncanny is that?</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If all of this is getting a tad
confusing, you wouldn’t be alone. I am getting confused myself, trying to keep
track of so many characters that may or may not be linked with one another; may
or may not be alive; and, if not alive, may or may not have died as a result of
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy’s</i> machinations; and if he
indeed was responsible for their deaths—and he might not be (responsible), and
they might not be (dead)—it may or may not have anything to do with incidents
involving <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i>—who, of course may
not be who he claims to be—and his mother, who may or may not be keeping tabs
on our narrator including his Internet activities. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Harris knows how to spin a good yarn.
The story of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i> unfolds gradually,
in small fragments, with titbits of information and misinformation being
drip-fed, which serve the dual function of keeping the reader engrossed (well,
almost) and confusing him into the bargain. Harris does not let the pace of the
narrative slacken and keeps the novel (and the reader) jollying along,
administering medium voltage revelatory shocks at unpredictable intervals.
However, there comes a time—and I reached it about page 200—when you are so
psyched out by the twin onslaught of ghastly murders and their mutually
contradictory explanations offered by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i>
in his public and private journals that when you are presented with the 73<sup>rd</sup>
twist on page 370, you just take a gulp and steady yourself for the next bit of
revelation which you know is going to be even bigger. It is all a bit too much.
Some of the twists are so fantastic that you may wonder whether they had any
purpose other than shocking the reader. For example, the true identity of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i> is different from what he
leads the followers of his public web-journal to believe. Yet, two of the
followers—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ClairDelune</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Albertine</i>—live in the same village and
have known the narrator from his childhood; so they must have known who he is
all along. Moreover they know him as the person who has taken on this persona,
since both <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Albertine</i> attend a creative writing
group run by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ClairDelune</i>, where <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i> blathers on about his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fics</i>. The true identity of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i>, when it is revealed roughly
halfway through the novel, does shock the reader, but it does not fit neatly
into the plot. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Harris has obviously taken great
efforts to develop the character of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i>—the
tormented and tormenting narrator, more twisted than a coat-hanger. By contrast
the supporting characters—including <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Albertine</i>
and Gloria Winter who are pivotal to the story—strike as two dimensional, their
motives abstruse. Despite the reams of pages devoted to them, their inner lives
simply do not light up. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Albertine’s</i>
relationship with Nigel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy’s</i>
elder brother, is one of the many weak elements of the story. <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>The subplots involving Emily White and the
neurological conditions, while interesting in themselves, are appendages which
add to the bulkiness of the novel but little else. Perhaps they could have been
subjects of another novel. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Harris’s prose is deceptively simple,
yet it has the power of sucking the reader in with its gentle, balanced rhythm
that is, for most part, enticing. Occasionally, though, it becomes a bit syrupy
and cloying. As <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i> releases
yet another entry into the ether of the Internet, describing the colour scheme
(various shades of blue) into which he has neatly divided his victims, or the
taste and smell sensations evoked by colour words, the reader can be excused
for resignedly thinking, here he goes again. If the purpose was to give the
reader a first-hand experience of the sensory overload to which <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blueeyedboy</i> is routinely subjected,
Harris has done it brilliantly. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Blueeyedboy</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"> may
be a (long, at times ponderous, non-linear) cautionary tale of how it is easy
to lose the boundaries between the real and the fiction, to fade out your
personal identity and take on an online persona on the Internet. It may be a
tale of damaged childhoods casting their shadows into adulthoods. It may be a
convoluted tale of murders. It may be a tale woven round exotic neurological
conditions called synaesthesia and mirror-touch synaesthesia that (sans the
murders) wouldn’t be out of place in an Oliver Sachs book. Finally, as Harris
said in an interview, it may be a black comedy.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That is a problem with the novel: it
tries to cram in too many themes and ends up being too clever by half.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span></span></span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-83974481760363368642018-05-26T03:20:00.000-07:002018-05-26T03:20:11.925-07:00Philip Roth<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GVO0-TSPazk/Wwk0eABcvXI/AAAAAAAABn4/9hAEQapGtgQ58Bql4F-irw1Sdd0bPFckQCLcBGAs/s1600/Philip%2BRoth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="750" height="213" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GVO0-TSPazk/Wwk0eABcvXI/AAAAAAAABn4/9hAEQapGtgQ58Bql4F-irw1Sdd0bPFckQCLcBGAs/s320/Philip%2BRoth.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Philip Roth, who died earlier this week, was one of my most
favourite writers. I believe he was also one of the greatest fiction writers,
not just of his generation, but in the last five decades.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Roth’s literary career was of great longevity. His first
book, a novella (<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Goodbye Columbus</i></b>), was published in 1959. His last novel, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nemesis</i></b>,
came out in 2010. He was also a writer of astonishing fecundity. Over a period
of five decades, Roth published more than thirty novels. <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When Roth declared in 2012 that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nemesis</i></b> would be his last
novel, I had mixed emotions. As a great admirer of Roth and his prose style, I
did not want him to stop. At the same time <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nemesis</i></b> had not exactly blown off my
socks, and <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Humbling</i></b>, the novel which came out a year before <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nemesis</i></b>,
had left me feeling underwhelmed. We discussed <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nemesis</i></b> a few years ago,
in our book-club. It turned out that I was the odd person out; everyone else
loved it. Those, who, like me, had read several of Roth’s earlier novels, felt
that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nemesis</i></b>
was up there with the very best of Roth novels. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Roth created several protagonists in his novels, the most
famous of whom was Alexander Portnoy, the priapic, Jewish, American who can’t
stop wanking (and can’t stop talking about it<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">). Portnoy’s Complaint</i></b> is
one of the funniest novels I have read. The novel brought fame and notoriety to
its author in equal measures. Over the years, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Portnoy’s Complaint</i></b> has
deservedly taken its place in the pantheon of the great novels of the twentieth
century. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Nathan Zukerman is another of Roth’s famous creation. Zukerman
features in several of Roth’s novels, though not in all as the main protagonist,
I think. The last of the Zukerman novels, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Exit Ghost</i></b>, came out in 2006 (which
I have not read). The first three Zukerman novels: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ghost Writer</i></b>, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Zukerman
Unbound</i></b> and <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Anatomy Lesson</i></b>, along with the epilogue (<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Prague Orgy</i></b>) were published in one volume (<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Zukerman Bound</i></b>). These
are some of my very favourite novels. The novels have, like many of Roth’s
other novels, autobiographical elements, which, over the years, generated
enthusiastic speculations about the extent to which Nathan Zukerman is an
alter-ego of Roth (in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Zukerman Unbound</i></b>, for example, Nathan
Zukerman achieves spectacular fame following a publication of a sexually
explicit coming-of-age novel—not dissimilar to Roth—the fictional novel of
Zukerman and its style being a departure from his (Zukerman’s) earlier, Jamesian
style (I don’t think Roth can ever be accused of imitating the prose-style of
Henry James, or, for that matter, any other novelists. Roth had a style of his
own, which influenced other novelists). </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Operation Shylock</i></b> was the first Philip Roth novel I read. The
novel totally blew me away. I had not read anything like it before. <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>The narrator of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Operation Shylock</i></b> is ‘Philip
Roth’. The fictional Philip Roth is in Israel, attending the trial of a
notorious war criminal called John Demjanjuk. (John Demjanjuk, born Ivan
Demjanjuk, is one of the several real-life charcaters which populate the novel.
Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian born soldier in the Soviet Red Army during the Second
World War and was also a POW of Germany.After the Second World War he emigrated
to America, in the 1950s. Demjanjuk was deported to Israel in the 1980s to face
the charges of war crimes when several holocaust survivors identified him as
the notorious ‘Ivan the terrible’ in the Treblinka Extermination Camp the Nazis
built in Poland. He was initially convicted and sentenced to death, but the
sentence was overturned by the Israeli supreme court which decided that there
were reasonable doubts as to whether John Demjanjuk was indeed the notorious ‘Ivan
the terrible’ in Treblinka. New evidence emerged in 2001 that Demjanjuk might
have worked as a guard in another concentration camp in Germany. He was
eventually deported to Germany from America; tried; found guilty of war crimes;
and sentenced to five years in prison (he was 92 at the time). Demjanjuk was
granted appeal against his conviction, and died, a free and innocent man in the
eyes of the law, while the appeal was still pending). <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Operation Shylock</i></b> follows
the first trial of Demjanjuk, in Israel in the 1980s, covered, in the novel, by
the fictional Philip Roth. While in Israel, the fictional Philip Roth, to his initial
astonishment which soon turns into horror, comes across an imposter, who has the
same facial features as Philip Roth (the fictional Philip Roth), and—you will
have guessed it—is also called Philip Roth. So, there are two Philip Roths in
the novel; one ‘real’ and the other an imposter, who is planning to steal the
identity of the ‘real’ Philip Roth. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Operation Shylock</i></b>, which has the
backdrop of the Demjajnjuk trial and the First Intifada, narrates the battle of
wits between the two Philip Roths, as the imposter tries to destroy the ‘real’
Philip Roth (that is the other fictional Philip Roth in the novel) and spread the
counter-Zionist ideology, is an extraordinary novel. It is very difficult to
sperate the real from the fictional in this novel, the full title of which is <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Operation
Shylock: A Confession</i></b>. You might say that it is a bit narcissistic to
create not one but two alter egos in one novel. John Updike apparently wrote in
a sardonic review of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Operation Shylock</i></b> that readers should
read the novel if they were interested in Philip Roth (Martin Amis levelled a
similar charge while reviewing a Zukerman novel). I can say without hesitation
that I wasn’t. Until I read <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Operation Shylock</i></b>, which got me
greatly interested in Philip Roth, and I went on to read several more. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">‘Philip Roth’ appears in a few other novels, the last of
which, I think, is the 2004 <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Plot Against America</i></b>. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Plot Against America</i></b> is narrated by the child Philip Roth (though I can’t
now remember if the narrator identifies himself as Philip Roth). The novel narrates
an alternative history of America spanning the Second World War period.
Franklin D Roosevelt is defeated in the 1940 general election by Charles
Lindbergh, who, in real life espoused non-intervention in the European war and
was a member of the America First Committee (AFC) which was a
non-interventionist pressure group (dissolved after the attack on Pearl
Harbour). As was typical of the novels Roth wrote during this phase of his
career, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Plot Against America</i></b> novel is bereft of humour, and,
relentlessly bleak and grim. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Plot Against America</i></b> was also the last of the Roth novels which
greatly impressed me. Starting in 2006, Roth produced a novel a year, a total
of four novels ending with <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nemesis</i></b>. These four novels are
frequently described as Nemesis novels—presumably because they have the common
theme of end and degradation. I was not hugely impressed by them and would not
call them as Roth’s major novels. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Indignation</i></b>, which tells the story
of a young Jewish man who is drafted in the Korean war in the 1950s and dies,
was probably the best, and <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Humbling</i></b> the least impressive. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sabbath’s Theatre</i></b>, Roth’s 1995 novel, is, for me, his last
funny novel, the story of Mickey Sabbath, an out-of-work puppeteer and a penchant
for whores, which shows no signs of moderating with the advancing years. It is
also his last novel which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. The novel had
everything I had come to expect of a Philip Roth novel: coruscating wit,
erudition and prurience. The novel was dirtier than the whole stack of Carry On
films. Mickey Sabbath, without doubt, is a memorable creation. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sabbath’s
Theatre</i></b> is grotesque and unputdownable. It won the National Book award and
was a finalist for the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Roth won the Pulitzer for the first time for his next novel,
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American
Pastoral</i></b>, considered by many to be a great novel. The novel is narrated
by Nathan Zukerman, but Zukerman is not the protagonist of the novel. The
protagonist is Seymour Levov, a successful Jewish businessman (all the
protagonists of Roth’s novels are Jewish, though not all successful). With this
novel began a period in Roth’s career, which is often described as his second
wind. He was in his sixties, a time in life which, for many artists, is the
beginning of declining creative powers. But not for Roth. Starting with <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American
Pastoral</i></b>, he published ten novels over the next decade. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American
Pastoral</i></b> and the novels that followed also marked a departure of sorts
in Roth’s prose style. Gone was the humour which made his earlier novels such a
delight to read. Roth had a great comic gift. It is difficult to say whether it
deserted him or whether he chose not to use it any longer (I read a few
obituaries of Roth, but no one commented on it). Roth had a very bitter divorce
from his second wife, the British actress Claire Bloom, in 1995 (she wrote a
memoir, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Leaving A Doll’s House</i></b>, of her disastrous marriage to Roth, in
which, needless to say, Bloom did not have many kind words to say about Roth).
One wonders whether these bitter experiences had anything to do with the
interminable bleakness and despair that seemed to pervade Roth’s later novels. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American
Pastoral</i></b> was followed by <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I Married A Communist</i></b>, another acclaimed
novel narrated by Nathan Zukerman, this time about Ira Ringold. Viewed along
with <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American
Pastoral</i></b> and <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Human Stain</i></b> (which came out after
it), <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I
Married A Communist</i></b> is often considered as one of the trilogy in which
Roth depicted post Second World War history of Jewish men (majority of Roth’s
novels have male protagonists) in America, particularly in New Jersey and
Newark, with the backdrop of socio-political changes taking place in that
country. When I first read <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Pastoral</i></b>, the story of the
tragic life of Seymour Levov, destroyed by the folly of his daughter, who sets
off a bomb in 1968 to protest the Vietnam war (and, later in the novel, becomes
a Jain, a little-known religion in India, often mistaken to be a sect of Hinduism),
I did not really know what to make of it. I could see that it was a remarkable
book, with the riveting backdrop of the social upheaval in America in the 1960s
and 1970s. But I did not like it. This was also the first Roth book I had read
in which humour was completely absent. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I Married A Communist</i></b> confirmed for
me, sadly, what I had suspected when I’d read <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Pastoral</i></b>: Roth
was taking a long hiatus from humour, prurience and libidinousness (he did not
return to it till the end). I liked <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I Married A Communist</i></b> more than <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American
Pastoral</i></b> and the slightly unconvincing <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Human Stain</i></b>. Some reviewers
said that Eva Frame, the wife of Ira Ringold in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I Married A Communist</i></b>, was
a barely disguised (and not very flattering) portrait of Clair Bloom from whom
Roth was divorced a few years earlier. If that were the case, then Roth’s
portrait of his ex-wife was, all said and done, sympathetic, I thought
(although Eva Frame destroys Ira Ringold). </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When Roth was awarded the International Man Booker Prize in
2011, in a display of arresting churlishness, mean-spiritedness, and petty-mindedness,
Carmen Callil, the founder of the Virago Press and one of the judges on the
panel, resigned in protest (she disagreed vehemently with the choice of Philip
Roth, but was overruled by the other two judges on the panel), and, on the day
the award was announced, wrote a dyspeptic article in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Guardian</i></b>, in which
she animadverted Roth’s fiction. Roth, she put it to the readers of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Guardian</i></b>, wrote only about himself. Or something to that effect. Callil
was not the first one to level this accusation at Roth. Many of Roth’s novels, particularly
the early ones are autobiographical. Indeed, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Zukerman Bound</i></b> was
described by Martin Amis, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as an autobiographical
novel about an autobiographical novel. Outside of the personal experiences,
Roth mainly wrote about post Second World War Jewish men in America, tormented
by several matters including but not limited to their libidos. That is as may
be. To me, Roth wrote brilliantly. He was a master at creating a kind of quiet
hysteria which sucked the reader in. Afterwards (as in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Humbling</i></b> and <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nemesis</i></b>)
the reader might wonder ‘was that it?’ or ‘what was all the fuss about?’. But
not while they were reading the novel. Even when, to my disappointment, the
humour went AWOL from Roth’s novels, with very few exceptions, I never found
his novels less than riveting. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Philip Roth won many prestigious literary awards in his career,
but not the Nobel. I have no doubt in my mind that Roth was overlooked (as was
John Updike, whom I rate slightly lower than Roth) because of the anti-American
bias in the Nobel committee for more than a decade, beginning in the 1990s. For
more than twenty-five years, during this period, not a single American author
was awarded the Nobel, while European writers and poets, who were not known
outside of their buildings, struck lucky. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Philip Roth was a great writer. A literary giant. His novels
brought joy to my life. In her article in <b><i>The</i></b> <b><i>Guardian</i></b> in 2011, Carmen Callil
predicted that no one would read Philip Roth in forty years. I think Callil could
not be more wrong. Fifty years from now Roth would still be read and his work would
continue to enthral future generations of readers. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: calibri;"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-26870294718177672272018-04-28T09:37:00.001-07:002018-04-28T23:39:38.598-07:00Body Positivity<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Two Falstaffian women appeared recently on a breakfast-show
to promote body positivity. One of them was a journalist who I believe has
published memoirs, chronicling, I am sure, her heroic struggles against drugs,
weight, the ennui of a privileged upbringing, the unhappiness of being sent to
a posh boarding school— swimming, as they say, like a shrimp in cocktail sauce,
in her misery, a product, probably, of inwardly directed florid imagination. <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Misery can be like cocaine; when you develop a
taste for it, you can’t have enough of it. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the breakfast show, the journalist was joined by another
woman, who was introduced as a plus-size model. What’s wrong in that,
you may ask. There is no law against chunky people appearing on television. That would be discrimination. You might be interested to know that the ‘two fat ladies’ appeared in the breakfast-show
wearing only their undergarments. Obviously, there is no law against that either; however, you might think that that was a tad unusual. By and large people
do not present in a partial state of undress when they appear in public. Call
me old fashioned, but I think that there is some merit in the idea that you
should be adequately covered in public places unless you are at a swimming pool
or a beach or in a sauna. In addition, if your stomach has reached the dimensions where it
looks as if it is hiding a football stadium, there is an outside chance that
you will attract ridicule if you went around in public only in your frillies. Fair? Probably
not; but such is life. If life were fair, Bashar-Al-Assad would realise the
folly of his ways and immediately hand himself over to the Western forces; the
Islamists would accept that blowing themselves up in Western cities is terribly
messy and not fair on the road-sweepers; Putin would appreciate that the
British get awfully upset when you poison people on their soil; and the
bar-maid would be complimentary when your ordered the third pint of lager and a
plate of onion rings. But life, regrettably, is not fair. People have
stereotyped ideas about aesthetics. So, when it comes to human beauty, for most
it is skin-dip. Only a minority of human population would find the sight of
someone, who looks like they have enough body fat to keep a village in
Afghanistan going for a few months, arousing. I know. Not cricket. But there it
is. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Why did the two women appear on the breakfast show? <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>They appeared on the breakfast show to inform
the viewers that they were planning to run the London marathon the next day. In
their undies. That was the news. The women were threatening to strip
down to their underclothes and run 26 or whatever are the required miles for
marathon.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Why were the women planning to run a marathon in their
underclothes? They explained, the journalist and the model, their underwear roomy enough
to hold a Tory party conference, and their rumps filling every inch of the
seats of the plastic chairs which looked in danger of crumbling any minute. The
aim, they informed, was not to gain cheap publicity—perish the thought. They
wanted to promote body positivity. They wanted to prove that exercise is for
everyone—small, big, tall, short, size 8, size 18; that you don’t have to be an
athlete to run a marathon; that a runner’s body comes in all shapes and sizes! </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Give me a f**king break. You don’t have to make a spectacle
of yourself to prove that even fat people can and should—indeed must be forced to—exercise
and get fitter (spare a thought for our NHS). If you are so intent on doing
exercise, go to a f**king gym and get on a treadmill. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What was the message? The two roly-polies said they were planning to enter a marathon
and not a donut eating competition. Which suggested that that at least one message was
that it is good to do regular exercises. One can’t take issue with that. Why is
it good to do regular exercise? Because it will make you healthy. It will make you fit. And, if you become fit because of these endeavours—I am going to go
out on a limb and make a wild guess, here—maybe you will not resemble a bouncy castle.
</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As you watched the two women, neither appearing to lack egotism,
you could be excused for wondering whether it was necessary to parade gigantic
abdomens and elephantine thighs on national television only to prove that anyone,
even the obese, can run a marathon. People by and large do not have difficulties
in determining the size and shape of things unless, I don’t know, they are
visually impaired, or are afflicted by one of those rare exotic neurological
conditions Oliver Sachs used to write books about. It is, how shall I put it, an
innate ability people possess. Therefore, just as trying to camouflage the
layers of fat by wearing black clothes (a delusion shared by many lard-arses; squeezing your excess luggage into black jeans and hoping that it will somehow make your lardy arse vanish is about as optimistic as farting in a party with your palm pressed to your butt and hoping no one will notice; it fools no one) is
futile, there is no need, really, to strip down to your underclothes and run a marathon,
resembling (from behind) a marshmallow doing hurdles, to promote body positivity. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The women were described by some as brave. The viewers were invited to consider that they were
displaying courage. That’s a load of codswallop. What was on display was
the size of their ego, bigger than their baps. The narcissism, masquerading as some
sort of feminism, made you despair for the future of our race. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Why is this going on? Why are such people still around?
Small Pox is gone. Polio has disappeared. Rickets is on its way out. German
Democratic Republic disappeared. Yugoslavia imploded. Soviet Union vanished.
But these self-publicists are not going away. They continue to hog British television
time. It is enough to make you want to emigrate to North Korea. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I don’t believe that the two women decided to strip to
promote body positivity and increase awareness of the importance of exercise
for everyone. They are depressing examples of the length to which some p-grade
celebrities—gasping for publicity like an asthmatic gasping for air—will go to
get five seconds of air-time.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-41087787771590413572018-04-20T12:18:00.000-07:002018-04-20T12:18:46.793-07:00Book of the Month: Untold Story (Monica Ali)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Afyvi9BuHdc/Wto5-_5-NtI/AAAAAAAABnk/qvm4cn0tH0YhfBhcmgo3QY1xG2hZFSNcQCLcBGAs/s1600/Monica%2BAli.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1249" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Afyvi9BuHdc/Wto5-_5-NtI/AAAAAAAABnk/qvm4cn0tH0YhfBhcmgo3QY1xG2hZFSNcQCLcBGAs/s320/Monica%2BAli.jpg" width="249" /></a></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Monica Ali is not an easy writer to pigeonhole. She has
published 4 books—3 novels and a book of short stories—so far, all on very
different subjects.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ali’s debut novel, the best-selling <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brick Lane</i></b> (short-listed
for the Booker Prize and also made into a film, I think), was about the
experience of a girl, who had an English mother and a Bangla Deshi father. This
was followed by a book of short stories set in Portugal. She followed it up
with <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In
the Kitchen</i></b>, which, as the title suggested, was set in a hotel kitchen
and told the story of a feckless but likeable chef.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Untold Story</i></b>, Ali’s 2011 novel, has the late Diana, the
Princess of Wales, at its centre.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Untold Story</i></b> is a ‘what if’ novel. It is also a pot-boiler.
What if Lady Diana, the ‘people’s princess’ (as described by Tony
Blair), did not die in 1997, while fleeing the paparazzi, in a Parisian tunnel?
What if she survived the crash, but, being totally fed up of living constantly
under the spot-light of the world, faked her own death? What if, after
successfully faking her death, she began living under an assumed identity, a
life of total anonymity, in a small-town in America? And what if, by chance, a
photographer who had ‘papped’ her on numerous occasions in her former life
spotted her and threatened to blow her cover?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you are curious to find out answers to the above
(hypothetical) questions, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Untold Story</i></b> is the novel for you.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Diana has faked her own death with the help of a loyal aide
who is (conveniently enough) dying of cancer (so he won’t be around long
to spill the beans). While holidaying in the South American seas on the yacht
of her most recent paramour, Diana goes for an early morning swim and
‘disappears’. Her body is never found and she is declared dead. What has in
fact happened is she is picked up and stays incognito in Brazil for a while.
From there she goes to America and finally washes up in a small town, called
appropriately enough, Kensington. She has lived in Kensington for a few years
under the name Lydia Snaresbrook. Not possessing anything useful in the way of
academic degrees (like the real Diana, apparently, who flunked her exams),
Lydia tries her hand at first being a beautician. However she discovers that "pulling hair out of people’s crotches" is not how she wants to earn a living.
She is now working for an animal charity (awww!). She has made a few friends in
Kensington, all women, heroically battling to keep at bay the advancing middle
age. She is also in a relationship of sorts—with a man named Carson who has a
sob story of his own. Carson would like to have a long-term relationship with
Lydia, but she is not so sure, partly because she is worried that once she is
in a relationship she might drop her guard and he will guess her big secret (although
you can’t help thinking she is worrying unnecessarily; Carson strikes you as
the soppiest person in the town, the kind of guy who believes everything said
in the advertisements for men’s shaving blades). Lydia / Diana is of course
devastated that she has left her two sons behind in England, whom, in all
probabilities, she will never meet. She has—what’s the word?—guilt feelings (and
the poor woman can’t even enter therapy because it’s a secret.) Then out of the
blue arrives in Kensington a photographer called Grabowski. Grabowski has
photographed Lydia in her previous life on innumerable occasions, not always
with her permission and cooperation. Why is Grabowski in Kensington? Even he doesn’t
know. He is drifting around from place to place in America (as you do), having
accepted an advance from a publishing house for a book of photographs of Diana
he has taken over the years, and Kensington is as good a place as any to
hibernate. In Kensington Grabowski spots Lydia and something rings a bell. From
here on, the novel ratchets up its tempo and reads like a thriller. A cat and
mouse game develops between Lydia and Grabowski. Grabowski is certain that
Lydia is in fact Diana, but is not sure whether she knows that he knows; and
tries his best not to make her suspicious until he is ready with all the
evidence. Lydia recognizes Grabowski the moment she lays eyes on him. For a
while she tries to convince herself that he hasn’t recognized her, and behaves
so as to not let him know that she knows who he is. Lydia’s doubts about
Grabowski’s intentions are removed once she learns that he is snooping around with
her friends and employer. It all, as you will have guessed, is heading for a
spectacular climax; and Ali duly delivers it with a degree of panache, if
rather too neatly. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Untold Story</i></b> is a well crafted novel that flows smoothly most
of the time. Monica Ali has an accomplished way of turning out a phrase and
keeps up a steady supply of witty asides throughout the narration. Although the
main theme of the novel (I think) is what if Diana had not died in 1997, a
substantial proportion of the first part of the novel is devoted to how she
manages her escape with the help of faithful Lawrence. This is in the form of a
diary Lawrence keeps in the months leading to his demise. Not a great deal of
explanation is provided, however, as to why the fictional Diana decides to
leave behind her glamorous existence and live a life of total anonymity for
which, it would be fair to assume, life has not prepared her until then,
and which would per force involve separation—possibly permanently—from
her two sons for ever. I wouldn’t have thought any woman who is devoted to her
children would take the decision of faking her death and being separated from them for
ever— ightly. All that is provided in the way of explanation is that the
fictional Diana is fed up of being hounded by the paparazzi. While a celebrity
might occasionally wish for a life of anonymity away from the glare of the
media, for her to take the drastic step as Monica Ali’s Diana does, something
more, you’d imagine, needs to be there. (The real Diana on whom the fictional
Diana is based was not exactly shy of publicity.) <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>The picture of Diana that emerges from
Lawrence’s personal diary is commensurate with that which was associated with
the real Diana in at least some section of the media: an emotionally unhinged,
insecure and manipulative little creature trying to find comfort in disordered
eating, therapies and unwise sexual liaisons; not what you'd readily describe as a well-balanced personality. The
Lydia who lives in Kensington, USA, is a rational, considerate, reliable, and
stable. Quite how this transformation in Diana's personality comes about is also
left unexplained. One would have thought that being forced to fend for herself
without any support would be a recipe for disaster for an inadequate woman who,
in her Royal life, was used to giving orders and probably thought halibuts swim
in the fish section of Harrods. For the fictional Diana, it is her making; she
finds deep resources of resolve in herself to triumph, as they say, over
adversity. That is all very well, but it is a tad unconvincing. The Diana in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Untold
Story</i></b> is a figure you almost feel sorry for. Similarly, Ali has
resisted the temptation of depicting Grabowski, the other protagonist in the
novel, in crude generalization of the paparazzi. Grabowski is not an evil man.
He is a paparazzi photographer—believe it or not—with a conscience. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Untold Story</i></b> possibly shows the direction Monica Ali’s fiction
might take: commercial and entertaining. If you are looking for <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Untold
Story</i></b> to provide you with an insight into the life of Diana, you will
be disappointed. If you are looking to read a well-written book that is also an
above average thriller, this is your ticket. Read it on a long train journey; you
won’t know how the time will fly. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-64838202831962350872018-03-31T02:27:00.001-07:002018-03-31T02:27:59.560-07:00Book of the Month: An Officer and a Spy (Robert Harris)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dDy2nqZOnuI/Wr9UftsST_I/AAAAAAAABnQ/hVr2iexPKgI9MILEJYyDYazk_L6IQZXiQCLcBGAs/s1600/Robert%2BHarris.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="284" data-original-width="474" height="191" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dDy2nqZOnuI/Wr9UftsST_I/AAAAAAAABnQ/hVr2iexPKgI9MILEJYyDYazk_L6IQZXiQCLcBGAs/s320/Robert%2BHarris.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An Officer and A Spy</i></b> is the first novel I read of Robert
Harris. Harris shot to international fame with his debut novel, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fatherland</i></b>,
and, as the cliché goes, has never looked back, since. Harris, when he was a BBC-reporter
in the 1980s, wrote a few non-fiction books, one of which was the endlessly
riveting <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Selling Hitler</i></b>, which I have reviewed on this blog.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I picked up <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An Officer and A Spy</i></b>, not so much
because it was written by Harris, or, not entirely because of that, as because
the subject interested me. The Drefus Affair, which took place in France at the
turn of last century, is one of those historical event, I should imagine, many
would be aware of, or, heard of, but of which, most would not know the details.
(That Harris wrote the novel also made the decision easy; I might not have been
inclined to read the book if it were written by someone whose name I did not
recognise).</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Alfred Drefus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was
convicted in 1895 of treason. Drefus was found guilty of passing on French army
secrets to the Germans. He was sentenced to solitary confinement on the Devil’s
Island, an ice-free island near the north-eastern tip of the Antarctic
Peninsula (near Venezuela), where he was subjected to emotional torture of very
impressive proportions—Drefus was forbidden to speak to anyone during the
entire period of his incarceration. The Drefus affair, as it came to be known,
aroused strong public emotions in France at the time, and public opinion was
sharply divided as to whether justice was done. Latent Anti-Semitism as well as
hurt French pride and the inevitable French paranoia towards the Germans,
following the heavy defeat of the French army by the Germans in the 1870 war (resulting
in Germany appropriating French regions bordering with Germany), played a vital
part in how Drefus was treated and viewed throughout the trial. That Drefus was
a German Jewish did not help. The Drefus case is considered as a great
miscarriage of justice in French history. Emil Zola was one of the many
influential intellectuals in the French public life who were disturbed by the
handling of the investigation by the French army, and took up the case of the
convicted Jewish officer, which eventually led to the exoneration of Drefus. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is highly likely that the higher echelons of the French
army were aware that Drefus was innocent, but allowed, nevertheless, for him to
be the fall-guy, and, when they became aware that truth might come out, went to
great length to suppress it.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It would, however, be wrong to say that everyone in the
French army was complicit in the conspiracy (and, by association, an anti-Semite).
There were French army officers who were uneasy about what happened to Drefus,
and showed great courage and righteousness, in the face of intimidation and
threats by the increasingly unsettled French army, in revealing truth.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The French army-officer who played a major role in the
re-trial and eventual exoneration of Alfred Drefus, whose name has disappeared
under the sand of time, was Colonel Georges Picquart, the protagonist of
Harris’s absorbing novel. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The story is narrated from the eyes of Colonel Georges
Picquart, of French army. Picquart comes to hold the belief that Alfred Derfus
did not receive a fair trial. Picaquart, a member of French army’s General
Staff, has witnessed the court martial of Drefus in his capacity as a reporter.
Within six months of Drefus’s conviction Picaquart is promoted to the position
of the chief of the operational arm of French army’s intelligence section, known
as statistical section. Picquart has no, or not many, warm feelings towards Drefus.
Drefus is a graduate of the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole de Guerre
(French army’s war college) where Picquart was his teacher. Drefus, with his
somewhat standoffish manner and a tendency towards viewing any unfavourable
decision as resulting from crypto-anti-Semitism, has not made it easy for
others to develop warm feelings towards him, and Picquart is no exception. Picquart,
the novel hints, might have had a smidgen of anti-Semitism in him—all the more
remarkable, then, that he fights tenaciously and even risks his own military
career to prove the innocence of Drefus, once he is satisfied that Drefus is
the fall guy, and the real traitor is someone else. Picquart has always
believed that the case against Drefus was weak—he has told the French war
minister, General Mercier, who has had Drefus arrested in an unseemly hurry in
the absence of any clear proof of Drefus’s guilt, that Drefus’s acquittal was
the likely outcome of the court martial. Picquart is, therefore, surprised and
uneasy when Drefus is found guilty. When Picquart takes over the reins of the
statistical section he sees the photocopy of the letter, which was considered
in the court martial to be the incontrovertible evidence of Drefus’s guilt.
Picquart realises that the handwriting is not Drefus’s but that of one Major
Ferdinand Esterhazy, a feckless, inveterate liar, whom Picquart suspects to be
the man who was passing the secrets to Germans. This had indeed been the case.
At the time of the court martial several hand-writing experts had rejected the
notion that handwriting in the letter was Drefus’s, until an obliging one came
along and gave the army the opinion they wanted to hear. An army officer lied
to the tribunal, and, just in case if this was not enough, a secret file, full
of forged documents and confirming Drefus’s guilt, was passed on to the
tribunal, with full knowledge of Mercier, keeping the legal team representing
Drefus completely in the dark. As Picquart’s suspicions grow that the wrong man
has been sent to gaol, he also begins to suspect that those who conspired to
frame Drefus are in his own department and, backed up by the powerful army
brass, will do the same to him. Picquart begins to carry out his secret
investigation. As Picquart delves deeper into he realises that the rot goes
right to the top of the French army. Picquart begins his fight against echelons
of French army to prove the innocence of a man he has disliked but who, Picquart
believes, is innocent.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Robert Harris has narrated a gripping tale that conflates
the historical narrative as well as the personal perspective (of Picquart). Harris’s
prose is dry, sardonic, but also elegant. The Georges Picquart that emerges from
this narrative is emotionally aloof, at times cynical, but also someone with a
strong sense of where his moral compass should be and uncompromising on his
principles once he makes up his mind. <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>If
I have to make criticism I’d say that the novel does not give you a good enough
idea of the rabid anti-Semitism that was affecting at least part of the French
society at the time. One, therefore, might wonder whether the decision of the
French army to make Drefus the fall guy was motivated only by cynical opportunism
of the army combined with the determination of the army generals to not be seen
to have made a mistake or whether some of the higher army officers were also
affected by the anti-Semite fervour. <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Harris
made the decision to make Picquart, and not Drefus, the hero of his story. Picquart,
in some ways an army-insider himself, and, more pertinently, is focused on the
injustice he felt was done to Drefus. Picquart is uninterested in the wider,
cultural ramifications of anti-Semitism that might have influenced the decision
of the French army to scapegoat Drefus. The absence of the details of
historical backdrop to the Drefus affair, thus, is understandable, but it still
seems like a gap.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Drefus affair might have happened more than a century
ago, but it is still relevant in the twenty-first century. in the As I type
this, the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is embroiled in a controversy
whereby he stands accused of either deliberately being or allowing himself to
be the figurehead of racist Anti-Semitism within the Labour Party, particularly
amongst his noisy supporters). </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An Officer and A Spy</i></b> is a very satisfying read. It is a
historical novel which reads like a thriller. Very much recommended. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: calibri;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-26804165980797328842018-03-01T12:45:00.000-08:002018-03-01T13:00:14.833-08:00Brexit Madness<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4i0VKYLiHl4/WphllvNwO8I/AAAAAAAABmk/Yegzv7qfRDwiBbJ58lw2qhObEjwBdy_fgCLcBGAs/s1600/Brexit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1164" data-original-width="1600" height="232" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4i0VKYLiHl4/WphllvNwO8I/AAAAAAAABmk/Yegzv7qfRDwiBbJ58lw2qhObEjwBdy_fgCLcBGAs/s320/Brexit.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Britain’s painful and protracted divorce from the European
Union (EU) grinds on. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You don’t need to be blessed with clairvoyance to figure out
that Brexit is going to cause economic damage to both the parties. The EU is
going to lose the second biggest contributor (after Germany) to its budget once
the UK leaves. As for the UK, barring the bonkers Brexiteers from the
Conservative party—madder than a stadium-full of hatters (on acid)—no one
thinks that Brexit won’t cause significant damage to the country’s economy.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The latest twist to what is already a high-octane melodrama
is the shift announced by Comrade Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, the
main opposition party in the UK, in its position towards the customs union. A
couple of days before the Comrade’s speech, Labour’s Brexit Secretary, Keir
Starmer (who wears the lugubrious expression of someone who buried his mother
in the morning), announced in a television interview that under a Labour
Government, Britain would stay in a customs union and single market. Starmer also
informed in the BBC interview (with the air of the doctor breaking the news of
advance cancer) that free movement of people would have to end; however, he
added, there would be ‘easy movement’ of people (the doctor explaining that
there were first-rate hospices). He neglected to explain what this ‘easy’ movement
would look like. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, who, by consensus, is
born in the wrong decade and in the wrong country—he would have been so much happier
if he were born as McDonnellowich and been Stalin’s henchman—revealed himself
to be a cunning linguist, and helpfully clarified that Starmer used the
indefinite article ‘a’ instead the definite article ‘the’ while discussing customs
union and single market.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What did McDennellowich mean? His leader, Comrade Corbyn—once
described by an Iranian freedom of speech, whom Corbyn inadvertently exposed in
an interview on live Iranian television and who ended up spending time in Iranian
prison (reputed to be only slightly better than Luton), as a useful idiot—clarified
a day later in a speech, while inexpertly reading from the autocue. Labour
would negotiate a bespoke customs union (and presumably a bespoke single
market) with the EU. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Comrade Corbyn invited us to believe that under the bespoke
customs union there would be frictionless trade between not just Northern
Ireland and republic of Ireland, but also between the UK and the EU. The good
news does not stop here. The UK will be able to strike bilateral deals with
other countries (while remaining in ‘a’ customs union) at the same time, and EU
bureaucrats would nod their heads, give an indulgent smile, and say, ‘Go on you
rascals!’</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Quite how this ‘bespoke’ arrangement would look like Corbyn
did not care to explain in the speech, perhaps because he was keeping his cards
too close to his chest, or, more likely, because he had no clue (McDennellowich
had not explained that to him). But we are not to question this. We must have
the faith that the Messiah will deliver. If you don’t you are obviously a
capitalist traitor, who, no doubt, supported Iraq war and Blair.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Corbyn’s about-turn on customs union predictably raised the
hackles of the Tory nutters who are in the grip of Revanchist fury (turned on
themselves) ever since the referendum happened (almost two years ago). The
foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, took himself to air, the BBC Radio 4, the next
day, and removed the last vestiges of doubts from the listeners’ minds that his
grasp of Brexit was slightly worse than Donald Trump’s grasp on . . . well,
pretty much everything. When the interviewer Mishal Husain (she of seductive
voice) asked Johnson about the border between Northern Ireland and Republic of
Ireland, Johnson launched into a long-winded blather, which, even by his high
standards, was a spectacular twaddle. He compared the border situation between
Northern Ireland and the Republic Ireland to that of two Burroughs of London,
and went on to crow how he, Boris, when he was the mayor of London, saved the
situation by bringing congestion charges! Husain, unwilling to accept that the
foreign secretary was serious, asked Johnson whether he was serious, and
Johnson assured her that he couldn’t be more serious. I have seen and heard a
few interviews of Boris Johnson (which always leave the interviewers, from
Jeremy Paxman to Mishal Husain, shaking their heads in disbelief), and have
always wondered whether he is like a not-altogether-stupid-but-lazy-as-f**k
pupil, who never takes the trouble to prepare the subject, and hopes to get
through by verbiage (hoping that bullshit, when continued without pause, will always
baffle brain). It rarely works, but Johnson seems incapable of learning and
changing his indolent ways. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the BBC interview, Johnson was frothing at the mouth at
what he saw as Comrade Corbyn’s treachery over the customs union (guessing,
probably with good reason, that the ‘useful idiot’ would be persuaded, next, by
Starmer (and those in Labour who have some brains) to change his stance over
the single market (replacing with ‘a’ single market). Johnson, no doubt
trembling with righteous indignation, accused Comrade Corbyn of cynical
opportunism, because Corbyn had shifted Labour’s position to that announced in
Labour’s manifesto in the 2016 general election: Labour would leave the customs
union. Johnson accusing Corbyn of cynical opportunism is a bit like Trump
accusing the North Korean potato-head of being mentally deranged. It also
suggested the innocent assumption that people bother themselves with manifestos
of political parties (and remember them after a year). Finally, it also
indicated that Johnson had not cottoned on to the difference between the
definite and indefinite articles, as elucidated by the linguist McDennellowich
(to be fair to Johnson, no one had). </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The trouble for Johnson and Dr Fox, the International Trade Secretary (he is an idiot, alright,
but difficult to see what use he can be of to anyone), is that so far there is
not so much as a whiff of the free trade deals we have been hearing so much
about, and which Dr Fox is presenting to the heads of different countries round
the globe (including but not limited to the dictator in Philippines, who once
referred to Barak Obama as one can only assume his (the dictator’s, not Obama’s)
favourite part of female anatomy). </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It was left to Sir Martin Donnelly, a highly experienced civil
servant, who, until last year, was the permanent secretary in Dr Fox’s Department
of International Trade, to tell some home truths to the fantasists in the two
parties. Brexit and giving up membership of single market and customs union for
future free trade deals elsewhere, Mr Donnelly said, was like giving up a three-course
meal now for a packet of crisps and promise of future. Three-fifth of the UK’s current
trade, Mr Donnelley explained, was with the EU or countries with which the EU
(as a bloc) has preferential deals with. It beggars belief that the hard
Brexiteers are prepared to piss on this in the delusion that the rest of the
world is queuing up to strike deals with the UK. As for Corbyn’s nonsense about
‘frictionless trade’ Donnelley warned that it is not even a legal term. Having your
cake and eating it, as Donnelley rightly observed, is not an option in the real
world, not that it will penetrate Corbyn’s thick skull.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Theresa May might go to India and wear as many bright-coloured
saris as she wants, or she might go to China and pose next to the Chinese
dragon (looking only marginally more scary), there is no sign, yet, that these
two Asian giants are in a mood to give any definite assurance to the UK. As for
America, with whom the UK politicians fondly believe we have a special
relationship, with Trump in the White House, we will soon find out that the
special relationship is the same as the McDonald’s has with cows. Trump does not believe
in special relationships. He believes in deals. And any deal Trump has anything
to do with has only one winner. Trump. </span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AuJoiDuVMP0/WphmMh8aH_I/AAAAAAAABmw/mVCDnR2CCqs6NSDG5CQwPEh4DhlEiAXZQCLcBGAs/s1600/Theresa%2BMay%2B%2526%2BDragon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="438" data-original-width="780" height="179" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AuJoiDuVMP0/WphmMh8aH_I/AAAAAAAABmw/mVCDnR2CCqs6NSDG5CQwPEh4DhlEiAXZQCLcBGAs/s320/Theresa%2BMay%2B%2526%2BDragon.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<u><span style="color: #000120;"><br /></span></u></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial";"><br /></span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-37767581943455687812018-02-18T11:55:00.000-08:002018-02-18T11:55:04.859-08:00Book of the Month: Sex and Stravinsky (Barbara Trapido)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hDx3jF_3dVU/WonZgO0yvhI/AAAAAAAABmU/Cv3I4UBaFGIu6c1TH9ERFBq3DYzo-uaeQCLcBGAs/s1600/Barbara%2BTrapido.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="390" data-original-width="260" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hDx3jF_3dVU/WonZgO0yvhI/AAAAAAAABmU/Cv3I4UBaFGIu6c1TH9ERFBq3DYzo-uaeQCLcBGAs/s320/Barbara%2BTrapido.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">V.S. Naipaul attracted a lot of flak when, in an interview a few
years ago, he claimed that men and women wrote different kinds of novels. He
went on to claim that he could make out within the first few pages of a novel
whether it was written by a man or a woman.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I would have had no difficulty in guessing within the first five
pages of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sex and Stravinsky</i></b> that it was written by a woman. Why? Read
this paragraph on page six:<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> '</span></span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.
. . she knows the uses of coconut milk and cardamom pods. While her
contemporaries stuck with pulses and tinned pilchards, and mounds of oily
grated cheddar she is already making her own pesto with fresh basil which she
grows from seeds in flowerpots and her careful student budgeting allows for
tiny bags of pine nuts and pecorino cheese. . . She makes glazed fruit tarts.
She makes fruit mousse, mixing dried apricots, stewed and pureed, with
gelatine, whipped cream and frothed egg whites. For Josh she makes an airy
angel whip.’</span></span></i></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As you read on, there are detailed descriptions of clothes worn by
some or more female protagonists, descriptions of the dressing rooms of houses,
so on and so forth. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As it happened I did not have to guess, as I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">knew</i> that the novel was written by a woman, Barbara Trapido, who,
while she will not feature in the top-ten list of my favourite novelists, is a
writer I have time for.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Sex and Stravinsky</span></i></b><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"> is Trapido’s first novel since
the 2002’s <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Frankie and Stankie</i></b>, which I thought was brilliant. The
autobiographical novel which told the story of two white girls growing up in
the apartheid era South Africa was something of a departure for Trapido, whose
earlier novels could be best described as romantic comedies or comedies of
error. I have read two of them. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Brother of the More Famous Jack</i></b>,
Trapido’s debut novel which won the Whitbread (now Costa) award, and <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Travelling Horn Player</i></b>, which came out in 1998 and was very well
received critically. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Brother of the More Famous Jack</i></b>
was, I thought, thematically very similar to an earlier novel by Margaret
Drabble (<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jerusalem the Golden</i></b>), although Trapido’s treatment of the
subject matter was different and was characterised by what was to become her
trademark—light and comic touch. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Travelling Horn Player</i></b> was an
effervescent novel which did not linger on in your mind.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sex and Stravinsky</i></b> Trapido has returned to her <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">terra firma</i>—romantic comedies. The
setting of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sex and Stravinsky</i></b> is South Africa (where Trapido was born and
grew up) and Oxford (where she has spent most of her adult life). Like her
earlier romantic comedies (for example <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Travelling Horn Player</i></b>), <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sex
and Stravinsky</i></b> is breezy and cheerful, with—in tandem, perhaps, with
the mood of the novel—carefree unconcern for realism. Her comedy is almost
Shakespearean in this sense, full of chance meetings and coincidences. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The main characters in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sex and Stravinsky</i></b> meet one another
from time to time, without knowing that they are connected, the pattern hidden
behind their movements and decisions being governed by the all-seeing
omnipresent fate, or, the writer. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is the story of two couples Josh and Caroline, and Hattie and
Herman. Caroline is an Ozzie while the others are South Africans. Hattie is
Josh’s first love but she declined to accompany him to England when he wins a
scholarship to study ballet dancing in England. In England Josh meets the
super-efficient Caroline and marries her, forgetting, with the passage of time,
his first love. Hattie is locked in an outwardly successful but increasingly
loveless marriage to Herman who is an acquaintance of Josh at the University
and is different from him in every conceivable way. They have three children,
of whom the youngest, Kate, or Cat, is at home. Cat, who despises her mother with
a passion, is tentatively embarking on what promises to be a successful career
in bulimia. Hattie writes moderately successful children’s books on—you have
guessed it— ballet dancing. In the meanwhile, Josh and Caroline, in England,
are happily married—or so they think. Josh is a dance academic while Caroline
is a head-mistress and can command everyone except her caricaturesquely
obnoxious mother, who, no matter what Caroline does to please her, is never
pleased and always favours the younger daughter, Janet, who lives in Australia
and wants nothing to do with her. Josh and Caroline, too, have a daughter,
named Zoe who is a minor neurotic. These are the main characters in the drama.
Then there is the supporting cast. It includes, in no particular order,
Caroline’s ghoulish mother (already mentioned) and ghastly sister (ditto);
Josh’s parents—Josh is their adopted son—who are Jewish and are anti-apartheid
activists in South Africa; and Jack, the illegitimate son of their Black maid,
Gertrude. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As the novel progresses, we learn more about the lives of the
protagonists. Caroline, who has gone out of her way to be subservient to her
mother and has subjected her family to sacrifices in order to keep her mother
sweet but has always been the less loved, unfavoured daughter, discovers that
she was adopted (in a manner of speaking—she was given to Caroline’s mother,
adoptive mother that is, on a bus in Sydney). This knowledge about her
provenance triggers the kind of upheaval in Caroline’s attitude to everything,
compared to which the revolution in Russia was a tea party. She turns up in
South Africa with her daughter to inform Josh, who has travelled there to
participate in a conference, that her mother, though she wasn’t her real mother,
had died (although why the news couldn’t wait—seeing as Caroline has decided
that the woman was a bitch— till Josh returned from the conference is not
clear). And whom should Caroline run into upon landing in South Africa? Why,
Herman, Hattie’s husband, who, in the tradition of randy White South African
men, is always looking for opportunities to get his leg over. Caroline and
Herman hit it off straightaway and the woman whose boldest decision until that
time was to add a twist to a lemon meringue pie, allows herself to be taken
first to Herman’s house (which is also Hattie’s house), and then to be, well,
taken. Josh in the meanwhile has run into Hattie at a local café, and the two
ex-but-about-to-be-current lovers are visiting museums and galleries and
animatedly discussing finer points of Stravinsky’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pulcinella</i>. It doesn’t end here: Herman and Hattie have a lodger
named Giacomo, who is none other than Jack, the son of the maid who worked for
Josh’s parents. And the man who impregnated the Black maid was none other than
Hattie’s reprobate brother James when she worked for her parents, although
neither Hattie nor Josh is aware of this link till the very end. Have I missed
any more co-incidences? I might have. This is a novel so full of co-incidences
that you are left wondering whether co-incidences aren’t travelling around
looking for their lost twins.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I shall not be giving away any secrets, I hope, when I say that it
all ends happily with the main protagonists realigning themselves with each
other’s partners, the arrangements and exchanges taking place more smoothly
than a transaction at the Tesco counter. <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Trapido employs the tried and tested literary tropes—secret
paternity and adoption, sibling rivalries—to embellish the narrative, mostly to
impressive effect. The prose is elegant and has a kind of rhythm and flow to it
which, for the most part, carries the novel through.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Nevertheless, reading <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sex and Stravinsky</i></b> is a strange
experience. The characters are contemporary; the story takes place mostly in
the here-and-now, and when it deals with the past, it’s still twentieth century.
The problems and dilemmas faced by the protagonists are real enough; yet they
are dealt with in a manner that is very unreal. Towards the end, especially
after Caroline’s discovery that her mother was a manipulative harridan, the
pace of the novel increases, the co-incidences and chance encounters come thick
and fast, so much so that the plot runs the danger of appearing contrived. The
narrative tone, throughout, is facetious, almost fatuous; and the resolution of
the mismatched relationships is slapdash. It is almost as if the author is
begging you not to take any of it seriously because she herself isn’t treating
it seriously. There is a token nod to the apartheid inequalities in South
Africa, but here, too, in contrast to the superb <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Frankie and Stankie</i></b>, in
which the heroines come slowly to realise the inequalities of the world around
them in which they enjoy privileged positions, the matter is treated with about
as much gravity as in a Christmas pantomime. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The title of the novel is a tad misleading. There is no sex and
Stravinsky’s Pulcinella has no bearing on the narrative; it plays no pivotal
part and is mentioned almost as an aside—a ballet Hattie likes. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Reading <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sex and Stravinsky</i></b> is like eating a
happy meal at McDonald’s: it is cheap and cheerful, it will fill your stomach;
but if you want a gourmet experience, you will need to look elsewhere. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-59634236438367375312018-01-29T12:07:00.001-08:002018-01-29T12:07:53.957-08:00Book of the Month: Small World (Matt Beaumont)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--GsF__1mE8c/Wm9-407YVyI/AAAAAAAABl8/J7ig2KinN9MDzCp8G5cnquBLoqtxY4iewCLcBGAs/s1600/Matthew_Beaumont_pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="144" data-original-width="110" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--GsF__1mE8c/Wm9-407YVyI/AAAAAAAABl8/J7ig2KinN9MDzCp8G5cnquBLoqtxY4iewCLcBGAs/s1600/Matthew_Beaumont_pic.jpg" /></a></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="margin: 0px;">Small World</span></i></b><span style="margin: 0px;"> is British novelist Matt Beaumont’s sixth
novel. The story takes place in North London, and involves a long list of
characters: a washed up political journalist and his wife (who runs an art and
craft shop), their marriage increasingly coming under strain as they try one
unsuccessful IVF attempt after another; a stand-up comedian—he steals lines
from an Indian waiter, who is his fan—and his (the comedian’s) wife, who is a
full-time mother and unofficial agony aunt to her friends, who include the
infertile woman; a workaholic, control-freak woman, who is an HR executive—she
has become friends with the comedian’s wife at the antenatal classes—and her
(HR executive’s) very odd husband who calls himself a graphic designer but has
not worked in years, and has a secret crush on the infertile woman, whom he
spies on every day for months from the Star Bucks opposite her shop. The
infertile woman, who does not know the HR executive woman, has noticed him of
course, but she is not sure whether the weirdo is stalking her or her eighteen
year old assistant</span><span style="margin: 0px;">,</span><span style="margin: 0px;"> who
comes from a dysfunctional family and hangs out with kids from backgrounds
similar to her, one of whom is a tall (and gorgeous despite, or perhaps because
of, dread-locks) black boy, whose mother works as a nurse in the Accident &
Emergency Department of one of the hospitals in London. The HR executive has an
Aussie nanny who, incredibly, does not do drugs, but has an Aussie friend who
is also a nanny and does drugs. Then there is a policeman who is more bitter
and disillusioned than the share-holders of the Royal Bank of Scotland; his
live-in girlfriend is the PA of the HR executive woman. Have I missed anyone?
Oh yes! There is an alcoholic bum who does not let his constant inebriation
come in the way of stealing things, and possibly raping and murdering (not at
the same time) young women; a Czech baby sitter who has a nose longer than the
Sidney Harbour bridge and is saving money for a nose job; and a Northern woman
who comes to London after her husband has a pulmonary embolism while he is
attending a conference—well, not strictly during the conference; he gets the
embolism in the evening, after the conference</span><span style="margin: 0px;">,</span><span style="margin: 0px;"> when he is visiting a prostitute, and is
admitted on the same ward of the hospital where the infertile woman is also
admitted after she experiences unexpected complications of her treatment in a
private clinic (which by the way is lousy), the same hospital in the A & E
department of which the black kid’s mother works, the department to which the
Aussie nanny brings the son of the HR executive woman twice in space of two
weeks—once when he has pneumonia and another time when her druggy Aussie friend
inadvertently gives the kid ecstasy. Is this all getting a bit confusing? I
don’t blame you; I am getting confused myself. All these characters either meet
each other or run into each other—some because they know each other, others by
chance—so often that you begin to wonder, like the weirdo husband of the HR
executive, whether their lives and meetings are not following an invisible programme,
their movements manipulated by an unseen hand (the God or the author?). </span></span><span style="margin: 0px;"></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="margin: 0px;">This has of course
been done before—a long list of characters, many of whom do not know each other
but keep on bumping into each other</span><span style="margin: 0px;">,</span><span style="margin: 0px;"> and
vitally influence the course of events. Paul Theroux did it in the seventies in
his novel, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Family Arsenal</i></b>. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Small World</i></b> follows the same format
as that which Beaumont employed in one of his earlier novels, the hilarious <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Book, the Film, the T shirt</i></b>: the story moves forward via first person
monologues or narratives of all the characters.<span style="margin: 0px;">
</span>There are more characters in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Small World</i></b> than in EastEnders, and
they all like to talk uninhibitedly. To Beaumont’s credit, he juggles them
adroitly and does not allow at any time the pace of the narrative slacken.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>He does not narrate the same incident from
the point of view of different persons; rather a given scenario is taken
forward by the first-person narratives of the characters involved. Beaumont has
the knack of dramatizing the happenings and the misunderstandings, which
further enhances the impact. There are enough twists and dramatic scenes which
keep the readers’ interests going. </span></span><span style="margin: 0px;"></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This book is something
of a departure for Beaumont, who made his debut in 2000 with <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">e</i></b>,
the first novel, his official website informs, written entirely in e-mails.
Whereas his previous novels were out and out comedies, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Small World</i></b> is a
potpourri of many emotions; it is not your routine feel-good novel. None of the
characters, with the possible exception of the Aussie nanny, is particularly
likeable; some are downright creepy. For the same reason, perhaps, they are
very believable: the three middle class couples in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Small World</i></b> could be your
next-door neighbours. While extremely funny in parts, the novel essentially
holds a mirror to the bleak lives of the materialistic and outwardly
conventional middle classes (or to be more specific, the materialistic and
outwardly conventional middle classes who live in London). The humour—a lot of
it is in the dialogues rather than in the situations—has an edge to it. The
casual racism of the police, for example, when they speak about and deal with black
and other minorities, manages to make the reader laugh and feel unnerved at the
same time. Beaumont makes liberal (and effective) use of irony. He also tries,
with a degree of success, big emotions. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Small World</i></b> is like a big
roller-coaster ride that is good fun but nonetheless leaves you feeling dizzy
at the end:<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>a laugh-out-loud section is
immediately (and unexpectedly) followed by tragedy, or love followed by
violence. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A great strength of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Small
World</i></b> is its narrative style. Beaumont follows the dictum of keeping
the vocabulary simple, as though mindful of the other pressures and constraints
on his readers’ time. It works well and the novel, despite being, at four
hundred plus pages, humongous, does not weary its reader. Beaumont has
effectively captured the lingo of the teenagers, which gives it a pulse of
authenticity. (This is not an easy skill to master. Some years ago, I had read
a novel by Justin Cartwright, titled <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Promise of Happiness</i></b>: the novel
was about everything but happiness, and Cartwright had attempted to portray the
speaking style of the younger generation by repeated use of ‘like’, which only
made the sentences awkward.)</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="margin: 0px;">Small World</span></i></b><span style="margin: 0px;"> does not pretend to give a big message, at
least not directly or obviously. It does not attempt to ponder on the
imponderables. What it does is entertain you with a riveting story</span><span style="margin: 0px;">,</span><span style="margin: 0px;"> told flowingly, which has believable
characters, which throws enough surprises to keep your interest sustained, and
which has a bit of twist at the end. It may not be the greatest novel ever
written; neither is the format the most original; but it is an easy read and for
the most part very entertaining. Not many novels can be said to do it. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(I wonder where Matt Beaumont has disappeared. Following the publication
of his first novel in 2000, he published six novels in the next nine years, a
very impressive rate. He seems to have fallen silent in the past nine years.)</span></span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-10369599819939876232018-01-24T12:03:00.001-08:002018-01-24T12:07:11.245-08:00Books Read in 2017<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Below is the list of books I managed to
read in 2017.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Fiction</span></b></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<ol start="1" style="margin-top: 0cm;" type="1">
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">My Year of Meats (Ruth Ozeki)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Sellout (Paul Beatty)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Hope—A Tragedy (Shalom Auslander)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">We (Yevgeny Zamyatin)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Epitaph for a Spy (Eric Ambler)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Ragtime (E.L. Doctorow)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">My Brilliant Friend (Elena Ferrante)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The Rose of Tibet (Lionel Davidson)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Shylock is My Name (Howard Jacobson) </span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Our Kind of Traitor (John Le Carre)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The Evenings (Gerard Reve)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Madonna in Fur Coat (Sabhattin Ali)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Ghosts (Cesar Aira)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Sweet Caress (William Boyd)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Re-read) (Ken
Kesey)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Amsterdam (Re-read) (Ian McEwan)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">SS-GB (Len Deighton)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">After the Divorce (Grazia Deledda) </span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">In Love (Alfred Hayes)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The Woman who went to Bed for A Year (Sue
Townsend)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The Prime of Mrs Jean Brodie (Re-read) (Muriel
Spark)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The Outsider (Albert Camus)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Here I Am (Jonathan Saffron Foer)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Oranges are not the Only Fruit (Jannette
Winterson)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">An Officer and A Spy (Robert Harris)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Different Class (Joanna Harris)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The Laughing Monsters (Denis Johnson)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Days of Abandonment (Elena Ferrante)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Conclave (Robert Harris)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">This Must be the Place (Maggie O’Farrell)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Em and the Big Hoom (Jerry Pinto)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Mr Hire’s Engagement (Georges Simenon)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Autumn (Ali Smith)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The End (Hanif Kureishi)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">UFO in Her Eyes<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>
(Xiaolu Guo)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Electric Michael Angelo<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>(Sarah Hall)</span></li>
</ol>
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Non-Fiction</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<ol start="1" style="margin-top: 0cm;" type="1">
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Peas and Queues (Sandy Toksvig)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Forever Erma (Erma Bombeck)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">All Out War (Tim Shipman)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">This Boy (Alan Johnson)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Munich Art Hoard (Catherine Heckley)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Politics of Washing (Polly Coles)</span></li>
<li style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The Renaissance (JH Plumb)</span></li>
</ol>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">I have taken to buying books from
Kindle. I don’t know whether it has become an addiction. It probably is going
that way. I have got books on Kindle I bought more than three years previously,
and not got round to reading them. You come across names on Kindle you’ve not heard
before. You quickly go through some of the readers’ reviews, read the
description of the book, and decide to buy the book the author of which you
know nothing about. Sometimes the gamble works. Sometimes it doesn’t, as
happened with my purchase of Erma Bombeck’s collection of newspaper columns. I
can’t now remember what made me buy this collection of Bombeck whose name I had
not heard until then (I later discovered thanks to Wikipedia that she was a
popular American columnist); probably because it was described as witty. It is not often
that I give up on a book, but this book was an exception—a big yawn from
beginning to about 20% of the e-book at which time I decided that enough was
enough. Sandi Toksvig’s <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Peas and
Queues</i></b> was similarly a disappointment (although I can’t say that I had
not heard of Toksvig, who is a British comedian of reasonable repute). The
Italian Renaissance by JC Plumb (another name I had not heard), on the other
hand, was first rate—excellently written and very accessible. <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Munich Art Hoard</i></b> is a
well-researched account of how an elderly German recluse came to inherit
immoral, if not illegal, wealth in the form of paintings of famous artists
(Monet, Manet, Chagall, and Munch among others) obtained by his father,
quarter-Jewish himself, from the desperate Jewish families hoping to escape the
Nazi clutches. The story of Hilderbrand Gurlitt is a lesson of how people who
are not inherently evil get corrupted by greed and lose moral scruples. The
author of this riveting book is Catherine Hickley who, I was interested to
read, is an expert in looted art. I can understand someone being an art-critic
or art-expert. What might an expertise in looted art entail? Tracing the
provenance of a work of art suspected to have been stolen is a detective work,
I would have thought. Perhaps the art expert can confirm whether the discovered
piece of art, purporting to be the work of a famous artist is genuine or not. I
discovered that there is even a commission for ‘Looted Art’ in Europe, mostly
relating to the art looted by the Nazis. Anyway, <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Munich Art Hoard</i></b> is highly recommended even if you don’t
have a great deal of interest in what the Nazis got up to. Hickley tells this
morally complex story without taking a ride in the morality-hot-air-balloon. The
book is an engrossing piece of investigative journalism (it remains that for
the best part), but there are passages in the book describing the reclusive
Cornelius Hilderbrand (from whom the hidden stash was recovered) which would be
worthy to be in a monograph of character analysis by an astute psychologist. I
was not a great fan of Alan Johnson, the Labour leader, who was the home
secretary for a year towards the end of Gordon Brown’s government. At one point
his name was mentioned as the leader of the Labour Party. He has appeared from
time to time in the long running satirical quiz on the BBC<b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, Have I Got News for You</i></b>. In it he comes across as an affable, relaxed man with a gentle sense of humour, who is not
exactly groaning under the weight of his personality—one of those men who are
nondescript in the sense there is, really, nothing to describe. His memoir, <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This Boy: A Life</i></b>, was a revelation. The
memoir, which chronicles Johnsons’ growing years, is a moving account of his
childhood ridden with indigence, burns with a quiet cadence. It is difficult to
believe what Johnson describes was happening not in Victorian times but only sixty
years back. Simply written, the memoir is incredibly moving and burns with a
quiet cadence. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Another memoir, except that it was
packaged as a novel, which I found very affecting was <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Em and the Big Hoom</i></b>, the debut novel
of the Indian author Jerry Pinto. I came across this novel in the library. I
picked it up because the blurb described it as howlingly funny. The novel is
not howlingly funny, I should clarify, and could probably have done with better
editing. In it Pinto tells the story of his manic-depressive mother (the ‘Em’
in the novel) and her marvellously devoted (and stoic) husband (‘the Big
Hoom’). The novel is written with great affection, in simple and tasteful
prose, sprinkled with zephyr-like humour. Highly recommended.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">My
Year of Meats</span></i></b><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"> was the first novel that I read in
2017. It was also the first novel of its American-Japanese author, Ruth Ozeki, which
I read; and it is Ozeki’s first novel. A lot of firsts. What it was not was a
first-rate novel. It wasn’t the most dreadful novel that I have read. It had a
good stab at being intelligent and humane. It gave some gut-wrenching (and not
wholly germane to the plot) information about cattle ranching and beef treated
with hormones (which I suspect are author’s pet topics), but, sadly, I didn’t
find it extraordinary, as promised by one of the (selectively edited) reviews on
its dust jacket. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Ragtime</span></i></b><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"> is the outstanding novel of the American novelist E
L Doctorow. Teeming with real-life and fictional characters Ragtime, which
starts with the sensational murder (dubbed as the murder of the century), is a
riveting account of an important epoch in the twentieth century America. It
captures the zeitgeist of the times perfectly. This is a novel about a rapidly
changing America and, keeping with the theme, the pace of the narrative doesn’t
slacken. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">I read two Man Booker Prize winners last
year: <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sellout</i></b>, which won the
2016 prize; and <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lincoln in the Bardo</i></b>,
which won the 2017 award. Neither of the novels appealed much to me. <i><b>Lincoln in
the Bardo</b></i> is a slender novel with not much of a plot. There is a bizarre and
surreal feel to it, and, at times you feel that the bizarreness is an end in
itself. <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sellout</i></b>, on the other
hand, has a sprawling canvas, and proceeds at a break-neck speed. It is a
potpourri of heavy sarcasm, unsubtle messages about the racial tensions in
modern day America, and humour like a sledgehammer. A bit too much for me. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Here
I Am</span></i></b><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">, the third novel of Jonathan Saffron
Foer, is a reflection on what it means to be a modern man in a modern world. Not just any man, but a Jewish man. Better
than Foer’s second novel, though not perfect. It is at times an exhausting
novel to read, not least because of several subplots and characters, which
disappear for long periods only to reappear without warning, which leaves the
reader scratching his head.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">An
Officer and A Spy</span></i></b><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"> was the first novel I read of the
multi-million-copies-selling Robert Harris. Years ago, I had read <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Selling Hitler</i></b> (reviewed on this
blog) a cracking account of how a small-time thug swindled one of the biggest
newspapers in Germany by selling them Hitler’s forged diaries. <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An Officer and A Spy</i></b> is a historical novel of the Drefus Affair in France at the turn of the last century. The
novel, written from the point of view of Georges Picquart, the army officer who
risked his career to prove Drefus’s innocence, is superb. I therefore read
another of Harris’s novel, <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Conclave</i></b>. Not as riveting as An Officer and A Spy, but, still, very
readable. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">I read <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">SS-GB</i></b>, the masterpiece of Len Deighton (a very favourite writer
of my father) after I watched the BBC drama. I did not really understand it,
not only because the plot was more convoluted than my intestines but also because all the actors
mumbled. I like convoluted plots. When I read them, they make me feel
intelligent. And plots don’t get more convoluted than Deighton’s alternative
history of the Second World War. A smashing read. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Orange
are not the Only Fruit</span></i></b><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"> is the autobiographical
debut novel of the British writer Jannette Winterson. It is a coming of age
story of a girl, raised by a religious-nutcase adoptive mother, who discovers her
sexuality (the girl, that is, not the mother). The novel progresses at two
levels. The first (far more accessible and crackling with dry wit) is the story
of Jannette (Winterson gives the protagonist of this ‘fiction’ her own name);
the second is a fable. Quite what the relations of the fable is to the life of
Jannette (the fictional protagonist) was not clear to me. The novel is narrated
in a style that keeps the emotions at arm’s length. I don’t know whether this
is Winterson’s prose-style in general (I have not read her other novels) or
whether she adopted this style specifically for this novel. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">I read <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">My Brilliant Friend</i></b>, the first of the Italian author Elena
Ferrante’s four-volume Neapolitan novels, because it was chosen by the book club
of which I am a member. The book was not appreciated by the book club, the main
criticism being the supporting characters in the novel lacked individuality.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>I don’t know about that. What I do know that
I loved the novel. It is the story about two girls from a working-class suburb
of Naples, their friendship and rivalry and aspirations. This is an expansive
novel, with a large cast of characters, told in a luxuriant prose (full marks
to the translator, too). I was so immersed in the novel, Scarlet Johansson could have walked into the room in the altogether and I wouldn’t have looked up. I
vowed to read the other three volumes. Instead I read <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Days of Abandonment</i></b>, Ferrante’s debut novel. It is an
extraordinary novel of the disintegration of a marriage. The novel is almost
too painful to read in part. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Albert Camus’s <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Outsider</i></b> (<b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Stranger</i></b>,
in some English translations) starts with the famous line (apparently translated
differently in different translations): ‘[My] mother died today. Or maybe
yesterday, I don’t know’. It sets the tone of the rest of this short novel.
Camus, as has been pointed out in many learned reviews of the novel, explores
many philosophical strands in the novel, such as absurdism or existentialism.
The protagonist of Camus’s novel is a profoundly bored, uninterested and
apathetic man, who, as he himself observes towards the end of the novel, is
condemned because he is not able to react to situations in a manner that is
deemed to be socially appropriate.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Xiaolu Guo was chosen by Granta as one
of the best British young novelists, in 2013. Guo, who grew up in China learnt
English as an adult. <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">UFO in Her Eyes</i></b>
is a gentle satire, and the theme is alienation. It is a well-crafted, easily
accessible novel suffused with mild humour. <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Finally, I re-read a few novels last
year, which re-affirmed my original impressions. <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Amsterdam</i></b>: disappointing; <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Prime of Ms Jean Brodie</i></b>: superb; <b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest</i></b>: entertaining, if slightly
dated.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">This is the third or fourth year in a
row in which I did not manage to read an average of one book per week. Oh well.
Below are my top ten novels of 2017:</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">1.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Days of Abandonment</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">2.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The Prime of Miss Jean Broadie</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">3.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">An Officer and A Spy</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">4.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">My Brilliant Friend</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">5.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Em and the Big Hoom</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">6.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Ragtime</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">7.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">SS-GB</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">8.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">The Outsider</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">9.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">Epitaph for A Spy</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 48px; text-indent: -18pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;">10.<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt "Times New Roman"; margin: 0px;">
</span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; margin: 0px;">One flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-78209197824109048292017-12-21T06:27:00.000-08:002017-12-21T06:27:23.858-08:00Book of the Month: Trumpet (Jackie Kay)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8shaL87_QZ0/WjvDGlPxsyI/AAAAAAAABlk/6dbxGeqR1l4h_8trto_GcAoUfcQWrhPvgCLcBGAs/s1600/Jackie-Kay-001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="276" data-original-width="460" height="192" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8shaL87_QZ0/WjvDGlPxsyI/AAAAAAAABlk/6dbxGeqR1l4h_8trto_GcAoUfcQWrhPvgCLcBGAs/s320/Jackie-Kay-001.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="margin: 0px;">Trumpet</span></i></b><span style="margin: 0px;"> is the debut (and so far the only) novel of
the British poet Jackie Kay. First published in 1998, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trumpet</i></b> won the Guardian
Fiction Prize.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The protagonist of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trumpet</i></b>
is a renowned jazz musician called Joss Moody. Moody is a famous trumpet player. Joss Moody around whom the novel revolves never speaks directly
to the reader because he is dead. As the novel starts the reader learns that Moody has died, leaving behind his widow, Millie, and his adopted son, Colman. The
world of Jazz music has lost one of its great exponents. However, this is
not the only reason why Moody, in his death, is dominating the headlines in the
tabloids. In his death Joss Moody can no longer keep the secret he lived
with all his life. Moody, who lived life as a man, and was married and adopted<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>a son, was born a woman. Anatomically, he remained a woman all his/her life.<span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>The discovery of Moody’s true gender attracts
lots of unwarranted media attention, complete with prurient speculations about
the sex lives (and sexual orientations) of Moody and 'his widow'.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="margin: 0px;">Trumpet</span></i></b><span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>tells Joss Moody's story through different voices: the funeral director (who
discovers the true sex of the famous trumpeter); the drummer in Moody's band; an avaricious journalist who is trying to make a name for
herself out of the drama of Moody’s life with the sensitivity of an elephant trampling the jungle in <i>Jumanji</i>; <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Millie, Moody’s 'wife', who knew all along that her 'husband' was a woman; and last, but
not the least, his son Coleman, who doesn’t know that the man he thought was
his father was in fact a woman. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The premise of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trumpet</i></b>
is not as preposterous as it might seem. The novel is based on the life of a
real life American Jazz musician called Billie Tipton. Tipton was born a
woman—Dorothy Tipton. A piano player, Tipton started her musical career in the
1930s. She used to appear as a man during public performance, but, by 1940,
began living as a man even in private. Tipton went on to have a series of
relationships with women, some of which lasted for several years. Tipton
adopted three sons in the 1960s when 'he' was in a relationship with a woman,
and, upon separating from her, carried on living with his three sons who remained blissfully unaware that their father was in fact a woman even
when they reached adolescence. The sons became aware of their father’s anatomy
when Tipton, at the age of 74 became ill (he had resisted for months going to
the hospital) and paramedics were called. Tipton never explained or left behind
any note explaining why he chose to live the way he did. It has been speculated
that the scene of Jazz music was dominated by men in the 1930s when Tipton
started out, and s/he probably felt it necessary to take on the persona of a
man in order to have a career. Some of his professional colleagues felt that
Dorothy Tipton was a lesbian because during the years when she was appearing as
a man only during public performances, she lived with another woman. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="margin: 0px;">Trumpet</span></i></b><span style="margin: 0px;"> makes no attempt to explain the fictional Joss
Moody’s sexuality. Was Moody a lesbian? A transvestite? A transsexual? Kay is
not interested in spelling this out for the readers. Just as Dorothy Tipton,
the real life inspiration of Joss Moody, never explained what motivated her to
live the most whole life as a man, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trumpet</i></b> leaves it for the reader to
speculate why Moody lived his life the way he did. What Kay is interested in
are identity and love, and she explores these themes with great subtlety. On
the one hand we have the dead Joss Moody who, for all outward appearances, had
no conflict in his mind about his identity, which, to most, would seem more
complicated than Christopher Nolan’s <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inception</i></b>; on the other hand there
is Moody’s adopted son, Coleman, whose sexual identity is straightforward enough,
but who has struggled all his life to come out of the shadow of his famous
father, and, not having any musical (or any other skills) to speak of, is
drifting in search of an identity. The revelation of his father’s gender
triggers a riot of emotions in Coleman’s mind compared to which the Bolshevik
revolution was a tea party, and makes his struggle for identity more
convoluted. Coleman’s struggle to accept his father for what he was is a
powerful strand of the novel. Millie, Moody’s widow, is also grappling with the
issue of identity, though there is no confusion in her mind. Millie, who has
always known that Joss was a woman, views herself as straight, and does not
accept the media’s depiction of her as a lesbian. To Millie it matters not a
jot that Joss Moody was anatomically a woman. She loved Joss for what he was. Although
not explicitly stated, it is implied that Joss Moody considered himself a man,
and that is good enough for Millie. The sections describing the relationship
between Joss and Millie are very moving without ever descending into the
maudlin. The ending has a twist but it’s not gimmicky. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="margin: 0px;">Trumpet</span></i></b><span style="margin: 0px;">, at its heart, is a love story; but it is also
a psychological thriller and an exposition of identity. Jackie Kay is a
renowned poet and has an extraordinary feel for language. She knows how to
select, what to focus on, how make her characters sparkle and how to make her
scenes vivid. The different voices of the novel are handled with great aplomb
and are utterly convincing. All—even the slightly stereotypical, unlikeable
journalist—are treated with compassion. Not an easy thing to pull off, one
would have thought, but Kay manages it. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 13.33px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="margin: 0px;">Trumpet</span></i></b><span style="margin: 0px;"> is a wonderful novel. Humane, poignant, wise
and insightful, it’s one of those novels that give you a rich sense of
satisfaction when you reach the last page. </span></span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: calibri;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-72201556091673926242017-12-16T03:09:00.002-08:002017-12-16T23:24:42.560-08:00Demise of Quotation Marks<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I recently finished reading <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Autumn</i></b>, the recent
novel of the British novelist Ali Smith. The novel was short-listed for the
2017 Man-Booker Prize.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I am not planning to review <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Autumn</i></b> in this post; I
shall do it some other time. Suffice to say that I did not like the novel. It
was reasonably riveting in parts; it even brought a smile to my face a couple
of time; however, it lacked focus and coherent narrative, I thought. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Smith has a peculiar writing style. Not my cup of tea, I have
to say. I have read reviews of Smith’s novels, which are encomiastic of Smith’s
narrative style. Smith’s writing is often described as lyrical. I find the
sentence structures clunky. Smith sometimes uses words, which, while they broadly
convey the accepted meanings, are employed to perform syntactic roles that are
unconventional. For example, in <i><b>Autumn</b></i>, Smith uses the word ‘maudlin’ as a noun,
and not as an adjective which is its accepted role.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I can live with that. Thus when a character in <i><b>Autumn</b></i> declares that she is descending into 'the maudlin' I have no difficulty in understanding what is being conveyed.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What I find not easy to countenance is Smith’s use of punctuation marks which could be described, depending on your turn of mind, quirky or maddening. In <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Autumn</i></b> Smith has dispensed entirely with quotation marks. I can’t remember whether she has
done this in her earlier novels. I had read a novel of Smith a few years
ago, the unusually named <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">There but for The</i></b>. I don’t remember
anything about this novel other than that it was (like <i><b>Autumn</b></i>) an easy enough
read, mildly amusing in parts, but overall, something of a let-down. Perhaps
Smith did not use any quotation marks in that novel either.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Smith is not the only novelist who has decided that
quotation marks, like NHS and EU-membership, are indulgences the British public
can do without (although, throughout <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Autumn</i></b> (the novel, that is, not the
season) there is an undercurrent of despair at the UK’s exit from the EU, which suggests that Smith is not as much against the EU-membership as against quotation marks). There
are other novelists, including some American novelists, who have stopped using
quotation marks in their novels. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I don’t know about you, but I find reading books which do
not use quotation marks while directly quoting someone irksome. You can argue
that the quotation marks are not necessary to indicate a dialogue; anyone with two
neurones to rub together will understand a dialogue even when there are no
quotation marks. I wold say that quotation marks make it easy and obvious to
the reader when a dialogue is being reported or quoted in the book. Absence of
quotation marks makes reading a bit more tiring (and tiresome) for me. In Smith’s novel, for
example (as in some other novels I have read but can’t remember), a comma
serves the purpose of indicating to the reader that the character in the novel
is speaking. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I read an article in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Guardian</i></b> which suggested that the
practice of not using quotation marks is relatively recent. The <i><b>Guardian</b></i> traced
it to an issue of Granta magazine, in 2012, when its then editor, the American
novelist John Freeman, decided to remove all the quotation marks in the magazine.
Freeman’s purported intention was to make the writing ‘more immediate, more
with it’. I have no idea what Freeman meant by this. I also wonder whether
Freeman envisaged that some novelists would take to this practice like Damian
Green to Internet porn and make a bonfire of quotation marks. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Authors going back as far as the first century have used
some or the other symbol to indicate noteworthy text, so I read in the article
in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the
Guardian</i></b>. The quotation marks as we know them have been used for close
to two centuries. They were preceded by double commas to indicate quotations.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Some novelists like Ali Smith are doing away with at least
two centuries of conventions when they dispense with quotation marks in their
novels. One can only speculate what their intentions are; perhaps, like John
Freeman who started this trend, they feel that their writing becomes more
direct to the reader when they remove quotation marks. To this reader the
writing does not become more direct when quotation marks are removed. It becomes irritating. I am glad that this
practice is not widespread. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 10.66px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1574758710938575832.post-80393924547529788952017-11-25T10:42:00.000-08:002017-11-26T03:26:33.900-08:00Double Negatives<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tRYQbgu3DJk/Whm4teRDwGI/AAAAAAAABlI/uAyOQjE0PhQafd6GXOl7x46LBpu_aZ41gCLcBGAs/s1600/Double%2BNegative%2B2.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="227" data-original-width="300" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tRYQbgu3DJk/Whm4teRDwGI/AAAAAAAABlI/uAyOQjE0PhQafd6GXOl7x46LBpu_aZ41gCLcBGAs/s1600/Double%2BNegative%2B2.gif" /></a></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What determines class? I would say it’s the language. If you
have to summon every ounce of your will power not to wince when someone uses a subjunctive
wrongly, you are probably middle class. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What about double negatives? </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The litotes is of course a figure of speech, unique, I think,
to English, whereby an affirmative is expressed using a negative. When this
figure of speech is employed while speaking or writing, one uses double
negatives. Two wrongs might not make a right, but, in figurative speech, two
negatives, one succeeding the other, make a positive. Or do they?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Why would one want to use double negatives to express a
positive? Why not express the affirmative with the boldness of a teenager
parading lardy mid-riff and traumatised naval? Why be mealy-mouthed when you
want to express something positive?</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The litotes use the double negatives as understatements, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not infrequently</i>, in an ironic manner. Many
a times, though, you feel that the double negatives are employed in a way that
makes the responses ambiguous at best. What does the answer “Not too bad” to
the question “How are you?” convey? Does it mean that the person is feeling “good”?
Or does it mean that the person is feeling bad, but not to a great degree, as suggested
by the adverb “too”? <span style="margin: 0px;"> </span>Are there degrees
of badness, then, from moderately tolerable to immoderately tolerable (also
known as intolerable)? The answer is often delivered with a smile. What does <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i> mean? Is the person phlegmatically
surviving whatever badness that is afflicting him with quiet fortitude, showing
commendable self-restraint in the face of great adversity, which would send
many others to the Samaritans? It probably reveals nothing more than an
enchanting ignorance of figurative speech. In other words, it is something which
the people say, without giving it much thought, comfortable in the knowledge
that the person asking the question isn’t really bothered about the state of
your wellbeing and is making the inquiry as a nicety. That’s what polite,
middle-class people do when they meet other nice, middle-class people.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I am currently reading Rebecca Gowers’s excellent <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Horrible Words—A Guide to the Misuse of
English</i>, in which Ms Gowers feels obliged to devote an entire chapter to
the double negatives. In it I came across an interesting example of double negative. The sentence is quoted from an article which appeared
in the <i>Guardian</i> (why does this not surprise me?) and goes like this: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Few doubt that certain views pervade, and
practices persists, but even fewer will own up to holding or following them. </i>The
sentence leaves you nodding your head in admiration at the
linguistic dexterity of the author.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Often, the double negatives are used, not as understatements
but, to emphasise a point, like Al Johnson, who announced in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jazz Singer</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You ain’t heard nothing yet, folks</i>. This, I think, is not a
standard use of the double negative. Rebecca Gowers gives another example; of
Louis Armstrong, who declared: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The music
ain’t worth nothing if you can’t lay it on the public</i>. What was Armstrong
trying to convey when he said <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ain’t worth
nothing</i>? If you use the rule of litotes, you might conclude that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ain’t worth nothing</i> means <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">worth everything</i>. But Armstrong follows
it with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">if you</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">can’t lay</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">it on the public</i>
(that’s the third negative in the sentence). So, using the litotes mathematics,
you will conclude that Armstrong was saying that music is worth <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">everything</i> if you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">can’t</i> lay it on the public. But that does not make much sense
either, because you get the feeling that what Armstrong is saying is the
opposite of what you might take him to be saying (if you apply the standard rule
of litotes to the sentence): <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The music ain’t
worth anything if you can’t lay it on the public</i>. Does this imply that
Armstrong was simultaneously using another figure of speech, irony, conveying
the exact opposite of what he was saying? The same goes for Al Johnson’s
declaration in the Jazz Singer. What Johnson is telling the audience is that
the folks haven’t heard <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anything</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">yet </i>when he says <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You ain’t heard nothing yet</i>. Armstrong, arguably (or should it be
unarguably?), was a great jazz singer; but was the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pops</i>’s grasp on the figures of speech as firm as his grasp on the
trumpet? I don’t know. Armstrong was perhaps using the double negatives in an
unorthodox manner to emphasize a point. Or, maybe, he didn’t know what he was
talking about. Or, he did know what he wanted to say, and chose to say it, out
of ignorance of the litotes, in a manner that Simon Heffer, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Simply English</i>, described as vulgar. Or,
Armstrong didn’t give a tinker’s cuss about what Rebecca Gowers charmingly
refers to as “the gripers” thought about the misuse of English, and deliberately
used the double negative in this manner to express his contempt for the purists
and their dogmas. Or, Armstrong said what he said without giving much thought
to what he was saying; it was a slip of the tongue. We shall never know. Armstrong
died in 1971 and is not available, now, to explain. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This kind of use of double negatives, in a non-standard
manner, usually for emphasis, is more often heard or read, in my experience, in
American English. This was noticed and commented upon by Henry Mencken, the
great American satirist, cultural critic and scholar of American English, in
his book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The American Language</i>. Mencken,
who once said he was inspired by the “argot” of the streets of Baltimore, considered
phrases such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I don’t see nobody</i>,
or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I couldn’t hardly walk</i> as examples
of vulgar American English. (Mencken died in 1956. Had he lived longer, I would
not have thought he would have been impressed by the lyrics of some of the iconic songs that came out in the subsequent decades: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I
can’t get no satisfaction</i> (Rolling Stones) or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I don’t need no education</i> (Pink Floyd)). </span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There are examples of double negatives using pre-fixes such
as ‘ir’, ‘in’, ‘non’, ‘un’. We often read phrases such as ‘not insignificant’
or ‘not uncommon’, which do not jar our (at least my) sensibilities, although I
think it is neither necessary nor particularly stylistic. They are what I
consider to be straightforward uses of litotes to express affirmatives. You
might wonder whether such use isn’t (or should it be ‘is’?) pretentious. Occasionally, however, you come across words, which throw you. Take <i>irregardless</i>, which, when it is
used, appears to be used in place of the conventional ‘regardless’, and conveys the same meaning. Kingsley Amis, in his superb <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The King’s English </i>(reviewed on this blog), railed against <i>irregardless</i> and
described it as a kind of illiteracy. According to Merriam Webster’s online
dictionary, ‘irreagrdless’ was popularised in American dialect in the early
twentieth century, and spread over other parts of English speaking world. The
dictionary informs that the word is not widely accepted and advises to use ‘regardless’
instead. For Rebecca Gowers, Amis, like Heffer, is a griper (she seems to use
this word to imply that Amis and Heffer are pedants and fussbudgets, which is
ironic, I thought, from an author who takes seventeen pages to discuss the
difference between slipslops and malapropisms in her highly readable <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Horrible Words—A Guide to the Misuse of English</i>).
Gowers attempts to put forth her view, which, insofar as I can see, is ‘there
is no need, really, to hyperventilate about these things, which have been going on for centuries’ by giving convincing
examples which show that the words and word-usages scorned by the likes of Amis and Heffer
have been in usage for centuries (though not frequent), and not, as the "gripers" imply,
relatively recent addition to the lexicon, say in the twentieth century, by the philistine. 'Brothel', for example, once meant prostitute, and not its current meaning (although, regarding ‘irregardless’, Gowers can’t go further
back in time than 1865, and the example she comes up with is its American usage).</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It seems to me that whether you will consider the use of a
word or a phrase or an idiom or a figure of speech as vulgar or cultured will
often depend on what appears right to your ears. It probably also depends on
what you think is the correct use of the word. I will always baulk at using ‘irregardless’
(‘regardless’ would do very nicely, thank you), but the word does exist, though
not so far in wide usage. It is also true that a catachresis, once it begins to
be used in spoken and written language regularly, is no longer a catachresis (a point Rebecca Gowers makes convincingly).</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Coming back to double negatives, I think I shall carry on
using them (or, as Bart Simpson declared, “I won’t use no double negatives”) to
express an affirmative in a figurative manner, and not to emphasize a point,
the way many Americans do. Use of multiple negatives in a sentence is confusing,
if not vulgar, and is to be desisted. </span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wyKci-Xfi0c/Whm40sbb3II/AAAAAAAABlM/0_ZWxMBN0HwuRvdtcaw7jj9V5ueQ1560wCLcBGAs/s1600/Double%2BNegatives.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="272" data-original-width="367" height="237" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wyKci-Xfi0c/Whm40sbb3II/AAAAAAAABlM/0_ZWxMBN0HwuRvdtcaw7jj9V5ueQ1560wCLcBGAs/s320/Double%2BNegatives.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "arial";"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0px 0px 11px;">
<br /></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span></div>
Bookthrifthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08806192893686677977noreply@blogger.com