I am not on an e-reader — not yet

Affordability should be the last reason to justify any acquisition. There is a merit in visiting this thought before every single purchase one makes. I think some of the world’s serious ills will get automatically solved if everyone were to follow this. For a while, I have been in a dilemma whether or not buy an e-reader. There were at least two occasions when I visited a couple of popular electronic stores to pick an e-reader but returned empty handed. There is nothing wrong with the current crop of e-readers from a features or capabilities perspective. Almost all of them that are available in the market are true to their promises on the conveniences they offer to provide. The motivation not to buy lies elsewhere. I am by any statistical measure an avid reader and this avidity has only been growing over the last decade making me an ideal proselyte so to speak. Yet in biting the bullet and acquiring one, something kept me in a hesitant mode. I think the single biggest dissuader in not buying an e-reader has been my reading style. At any point in time I toggle between two books. Beyond two books, I am lost. Given a chance, I would like to avoid this two book strategy too. The second book is there mostly as an assurance, an option or means to sustain freshness of reading experience and minimise any monotony that may arise out of a specific writing style, topic, theme or author. In fact, there is fair number of instances where I am with a single book from start to finish. In my reading temperament, I am like a single horse buggy with a penchant for long haul. So even though an e-reader can carry hundreds of books simultaneously, my need for them at a time is very limited. Even the single book that I am reading at any point in time, I prefer to carry on me in physical form. A physical book (with its cover visible to others around me) declares my taste in ways which can never be matched by an e-book reader. A bit of self-expression should not be construed as outright vanity.  Especially while traveling, whether it is a flight or a train, the book I carry has been an effective ice-breaker with strangers in initiating a conversation. I am not sure if an e- reader hidden in leather cover and exuding a mildly geeky aura can ever stand up to a book on that front. Yes, an e-reader can carry a lifetime supply of books and liberate enormous space which physical books tend to occupy and for those my answer is: books are not meant for decoration but they are the best things available for decoration

I am not on e-reader… not yet

How It All Began – Penelope Lively

In our increasingly interconnected lives, a minor incident involving individuals could lead to direct and unexpected consequences for people far removed from them. Unknown to the individual and people who get affected, the whimsical hand of randomness casts the die, the lot gets drawn and consequences unfold. Randomness has its say in the way an individual’s life trajectory gets defined and affected. Plodding on this trajectory people are wont to find their share of unexpected joys and unwanted tragedies. No man or woman can remain an island. That appears to be the conclusion of Penelope Lively’s latest novel “How It All Began”. Written with a poise, maturity and control, this novel is yet another bravura performance from Penelope Lively. I have read her Booker Winner “Moon Tiger” and also her Booker shortlisted “According to Mark”. “How It All Began” is effortlessly in the same league. Actually, I think it is a notch better than both the books

Charlotte, a retired teacher of English is mugged on London streets resulting in her temporary relocation to her daughter Rose and son-in-law Gerry’s house for a period of convalescence. Rose is personal assistant to Lord Henry Peter, an old school English aristocrat, stuck in his notion and views of twentieth century English politics but popular on lecture circuits for his first-hand knowledge of politics and personalities of his era. Charlotte’s presence at home forces Rose to skip a one day lecture tour of Henry resulting in him requesting his niece Marion to accompany him on the tour. To make place for this request, Marion cancels her appointment with her lover Jeremy Dalton by texting a message which falls in the eyes of Stella who is Jeremy’s wife. This enrages Stella who egged by her spinster sister Gill proceeds for a divorce. Marion, an interior decorator by profession meets George Harrington a London banker on the lecture circuit who gives her an assignment which at the outset looks like a much needed support to her sagging business. Execution of that assignment leads Marion deep into debt and forces her to reassess her continuation in her profession. Marion meets her childhood friend Laura who urges her to locate to a leafy little town where she meets Nigel (who is Laura’s brother) and marries him. Lord Henry Peter is humiliated on the lecture circuit and to repair his reputation he embarks on making a TV program with BBC on political quirks of his times. The attempt takes him nowhere but introduces him to Mark who conveniently uses Lord Peter to his personal purposes. Prior to her accident, Charlotte is engaged in adult literacy programs and her continuation of the same from the premises of Rose’s house brings, Anton, an economic migrant from Eastern Europe into the life of Rose. Rose gets attracted to Anton but has the good sense to keep it in control. Stella and Jeremy reconcile, Charlotte convalesces, Marion settles into her new life, Anton makes enormous progress on English language and gets a gainful employment as an accountant, Lord Peter plods through writing his memoirs and Mark continues to sponge and the unnamed mugger who unwittingly sets this chain of events rolling meets his nemesis by being mugged by another gang. As the reader is about to settle down for a happy ending Ms. Lively makes this wonderfully lucid conclusion:      

But of course this is not the end of the story, the stories. An ending is an artificial device; we like endings – they are satisfying, convenient – and a point has been made. But time does not end, and stories march in step with time. Equally chaos theory does not assume an ending; the ripple effect goes on and on. These stories do not end, but they spin away from one another, each on its own course

Penelope Lively employs a writing style that is intimate, easy, having a charming idiosyncrasy and allure of its own. The writing bobs between a careful observation of superfluous detail at one level and sudden plunge into something deep and noticeable at another level. The things she observes and writes so affectingly about are common place, universal and yet have missed the eye of the reader. I especially liked two of her brilliant observations:

She lives in an insistent present. But her thoughts are often of the past. The evanescent, pervasive, slippery internal landscape known to no one else, that vast accretion of data on which you depend – without it you would not be yourself. Impossible to share, and no one else could view it anyway. The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up year by year, decade by decade. It stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system. We remember in shreds, the tattered faulty contents of the mind. Life has added up to this: seventy seven moth eaten years

Wow! past as our ultimate privacy… how true it is!! …………………….and

Pain is in residence. Charlotte is a pain expert, or maybe connoisseur is a better term. She can rate pain on a scale of one to ten, as required in the hospital, even slipping in a half on occasion. ‘Six and half this morning,’ and the nurse’s pen falters – the charts do not allow this. But when you have lived for years with pain you are nicely tuned to that extra notch up or down. More than that, she is familiar with the way in which pain chases around the body, popping up where it should not be. Referred pain, this is called, a sly escape from the root site of the problem. Indeed – but Charlotte sees it also pain’s malign capacity to mutate, to advance and retreat, to behave like some bodily parasite with its own agenda, gnawing away when it feels like it, going into deceptive hibernation only to spring back grinning just when you thought the going was good.

Penelope Lively uses a narrative style in which the author herself is the omniscient narrator but she also generously allows Charlotte to act as the omniscient narrator at places. There is an effortless transition between the two narrators. The character delineations are wonderfully done barring Anton’s way of speaking English, which I am not sure reflects reality. There is subtle sense of humour all through the book which adds to the writing quality. Overall, a noteworthy writing effort and a cherishable reading experience

Is it a flawless novel? I am not sure

There is one quarrel I have with this thoroughly enjoyable and well written novel which is its premise: If human destiny is determined by random events, then what is the role of free will? Does it have a role to play at all? Are we puppets reduced to vagaries of the puppeteer? We may not be able to determine our destinies but are we not responsible and accountable for the choices we make? For example; does Rose not know that the growing attraction to Anton and her near physical involvement with him a well-designed powder keg ready to get ignited in time and rock her stable married life? Similarly, the extra-marital affair between Jeffrey and Marion has the potential to derail Jeffrey’s married life. Does Jeffrey not know how his neurotic wife Stella would react if she became aware of this clandestine activity of Jeffrey? Despite knowing it, Jeffrey takes his risks. Is there no truth in the adage: As you sow so you reap?  The role of chance is certainly overrated here. I believe that for random events to affect our lives there have to be enabling conditions and these conditions are created by our conscious choices and some of these choices can lead us to outcomes that can be destabilizing. I am convinced that human affairs and trajectories cannot be completely random as they are made out to be in this novel. The role of an artist, especially writers, is to explore imponderable and quirky themes and present points of view which can be up for silent mulling or heated debates and discussions. Penelope Lively does this brilliantly well.

I am certain that this novel will make it to the longlist of Booker and if it does not…. it deserves to without fail

After thought: No other group of writers are as obsessed with the topics of “memory” and “history” as writers from UK are. I wonder why it is so?

Rereading Oliver Twist

I want to read only  what I’ll want to reread—the definition of a book worth reading once – Susan Sontag

Leaving aside the definition of what constitutes a classic, it is my belief that whatever one chooses to define as a classic should be read at least twice (if not more) in one’s lifetime. Rereading books (after a meaningful time gap) which have affected one deeply during the first encounter has its benefits: it gives the reader an opportunity to reassess the relevance of the book in a changed context. It is not the book that changes but the reader who would have changed with time. There is a refreshing joy and a pleasant element of surprise in assessing this personal transformation. It is very similar to the joy we get when we look at our childhood photographs. Looking at a photograph one invariably says “Oh! I can’t believe I looked like that”. Rereading a book one has an opportunity to say “Can’t believe that I liked this stuff as a child” or “I understand now why this appealed to me so much then” or “How impressionable I have been in my younger days” or “The impulses that have affected me as a child continue to affect me even today – not bad at all” or “I am a little surprised that I did not like it then”. These reactions and conclusions are in some sense resultants of our life-experiences and snugly encompass our respective personal transformations or the lack of them

Rereading Charles Dickens’s “Oliver Twist” after a gap of nearly 25 years has given me an opportunity to assess where I stood with respect to this book. I remember liking it a lot then and now, I like it manifold more than I did in the past. It is a marvelous piece of fiction which is worth reading many times over  

Almost all of Dickens’s characters are generously endowed and exaggerated on specific human attributes: Bill Sikes is downright cruel and misanthropic till his last breath, Rose Maylie is all honey and milk without a trace of negativity, Fagin is an epitome of greed, cunning and graspiness, Fang, in his quest for dispensing justice, is impervious to acknowledgment that a human being is standing in front of him in the dock, Brownlow is unwaveringly consistent in holding his moral stance in an equilibrium which is perfect and unflapping, Charlie Bates can never be serious even if he is mortally threatened (barring in one scene in one of the last chapters where he rebels against Bill Sikes with a bitterness and anger that is surprising), Oliver is eternally tending towards honesty and kindness like a limit function in calculus, Noah Claypole is a shrunken version of Bill Sikes in his mental makeup – but complete in his own right, Mrs. Corney (who transforms into Mrs. Beadle) and Mrs. Sowerbury are perfect examples of what raspy shrews and born henpecks can be, Mr.Sowerbury, a role model of a henpecked, Toby Cratchit a perfect accomplice and side-kick. Mrs. Maylie and her son James are perfect mother-son pair – even the airing of their differences of opinions on the subject of Rose is a lecture in manners and civility for the readers. Only Nancy comes out as a real human being: an inherently good person driven to make a living by doing bad deeds forced by her company, association and upbringing – a genuine victim of her circumstances. Time and time again she reminds readers that she is aware of this position of hers and when there is an opportunity to redeem herself, like a majority of real human beings embraces it wholeheartedly. Despite a strong trace of caricaturization, practically all of Dickens characters are unforgettable and there is a puzzlingly inexplicable appeal to them. I think the writerly trick of Dickens lies in his containment of the degree of caricaturization which while being supremely successful in highlighting the targeted human trait, maintains a splendid balance and just does not roll off into excess which in the hands of any ordinary writer could lead to distortion and disbelief. It is this meticulous tightrope walk between purposeful highlighting and successful containment of potential excess the biggest appeal of Dickens’s characters

Dickens brings a wonderfully polyphonic nature to his writing. He dons the most appropriate writing hat depending on the need and situation. There is a chameleon like ability to alter the tone of writing through the book. Depending on the scene Dickens writes like: a zealous journalist – describing the London slums, the sprawling London city and its suburbs with a cinematic lens and haunting imagery; a passionate humanist – producing torrents of words, sentences and conversations with a power to captivate and move the reader; a dispassionate philosopher – gently ruminating the lot of human beings; an ardent reformer with a great sense of urgency and purpose, a natural mimic, an imitator of tones and a shrewd observer of human frailties – all with a wicked sense of comic, irony and sarcasm. There is an extra-ordinary ear for on-the-ground dialect. Oliver Twist is profuse with this variation in writing which is one of the great strengths of this novel. Here are a few superb examples that demonstrate this ability of Dickens to morph his writing to suit the context appropriately:

 Oliver is being prepared to be sent out as an apprentice to the chimneysweep Mr. Gamfield and the unconscionable cruelty of his potential master is portrayed like this:

‘Young boys have been smothered in chimneys before now,’ said another gentleman.

‘That’s acause they damped the straw afore they lit it in the chimbley to make ‘em come down again,’ said Gamfield; ‘that’s all smoke, and no blaze; vereas smoke ain’t o’ no use at all in making a boy come down, for it only sinds him to sleep, and that’s wot he likes. Boys is wery obstinit, and wery lazy, Gen’l'men, and there’s nothink like a good hot blaze to make ‘em come down vith a run. It’s humane too, gen’l'men, acause, even if they’ve stuck in the chimbley, roasting their feet makes ‘em struggle to hextricate theirselves.’

Gamfield is not even remotely conscious of the cruelty he is intending. (It is said that Victorian England was a place which was rampant with child labour, exploitation, prostitution and crime. However, there must have been a period in history when the Victorian society started to temper its vicious instincts to become more humane and inclusive. With 32% of Indian children malnourished and many more going hungry to bed, rampant corruption aided by crony capitalism, withdrawal of state from its fundamental responsibilities and a consistent mockery of democracy, it is urgent that this tempering mood sets in Indian society too. I am quite keen to know more about the impulses, enablers, drivers and mechanics of this transformative process)

 Here is another one as a conversation between Fagin and Noah Claypole (who hides behind a pseudonym of Morris Bolter) on their beliefs in self-interest and self-preservation

‘Every man’s his own friend, my dear,’ replied Fagin, with his most insinuating grin. ‘He hasn’t as good a one as himself anywhere.’
‘Except sometimes,’ replied Morris Bolter, assuming the air of a man of the world. ‘Some people are nobody’s enemies but their own, yer know.’
‘Don’t believe that,’ said Fagin. ‘When a man’s his own enemy, it’s only because he’s too much his own friend; not because he’s careful for everybody but himself. Pooh! pooh! There ain’t such a thing in nature.’
‘There oughn’t to be, if there is,’ replied Mr. Bolter.

 or

There are some promotions in life, which, independent of the more substantial rewards they offer, require peculiar value and dignity from the coats and waistcoats connected with them. A field-marshal has his uniform; a bishop his silk apron; a counselor his silk gown; a beadle his cocked hat. Strip the bishop of his apron, or the beadle of his hat and lace; what are they? Men. Mere men. Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

or

It was market-morning. The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area, and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, three or four deep. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass; the whistling of drovers, the barking dogs, the bellowing and plunging of the oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every public-house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant dim that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses.

Lastly,

‘Hush!’ said Barney: ‘stradegers id the next roob.’
‘Strangers!’ repeated the old man in a whisper.
‘Ah! Ad rub uds too,’ added Barney. ‘Frob the cuttry, but subthig in your way, or I’b bistaked.’

  (Barney is afflicted with common cold)

 The credibility of the plot is sustained with the help of coincidences which are one too many. The presence of Fagin at Three Cripples during the arrival of Noah Claypole and Charlotte, the journey of Oliver from the parish house to Mr. Brownlow’s house via Fagin’s mephitic den and then onto the comfort of Mrs.Maylie’s household after yet another detour through Fagin’s clutches, Monks as half-brother of Oliver are a little hard to believe. In a sense the plot is the weakest part of the novel

Despite dollops of sustained (and purposeful) exaggeration, caricaturization and theatrics, one comes out on the side of Dickens with a feeling that there is a larger motive to his writing beyond ordinary story telling: He is intentionally poking fun, laughing, shaming and mocking the inequities in Victorian England – all with a sense of large heartedness, authorial purpose and magnanimity which is staggering at one level and admirable at another level. There is a deep concern for the lives of people on the societal fringes: the poor, the destitute and especially the children. The underbelly of criminal London is brilliant in its portrayal. Fagin’s gang, although a microcosm, is a wonderful testimony to that. Dickens is at his best when he takes a dig at some of the institutions of his times and the practices they follow. The pomposity of the parish officialdom, the treatment of children living there, child-labour, the indifference of court officials while dispensing justice, self-importance of the on-duty policemen are simply unforgettable.

 Every age and every society has its peculiar ills and ailments. The role of an artist, among others, is to shed light on these ills and ensure that as many as possible see these ills vividly. As I read ‘Oliver Twist”, I felt that for Victorian England, Dickens upheld this role of an artist supremely well. Given the diversity and size of its ills, India too desperately needs its own Dickens- who can mock and laugh, tease and taunt, pull and poke, name and shame these ills. Wonder if this pressing need will be fulfilled at all!

I Too Had a Dream – Dr.Verghese Kurien

Environment and life experiences – both engender empathy while reading which sometimes is a critical pre-condition for appreciating a book. As the third son of a talented and committed veterinarian, I could get a ring-side view of various facets of animal husbandry. It is probably because of this, that I have grown fond of the writings of James Herriot. He was unique in his ability to tellingly portray the life of a vet in the dales of Yorkshire. The medley of real life characters of farmers and their families with their lovable idiosyncrasies he so sincerely and accurately outlined have always been a pleasure to read. I am not sure if there is any other writer who wrote so generously, so eloquently and so appealingly about the subject of animal husbandry as Herriot did. His ear for Yorkshire patois was second to none and was a delight to read. Herriot’s writings, while bringing out the charms of bucolic existence, also tellingly outlined the English village society and its interaction with the fast changing world outside. But the charms he portrayed are the charms of a first world farmer. In developing and third world countries, the life of an ordinary farmer is fraught with difficulties, frustrations and hopelessness. In India, despite all the pious noises one gets to hear about the efforts to make the life of farmers better, the on the ground reality is vastly different and hard to digest. Three individuals who have tried to make a fundamental difference to the lives of Indian farmers are Dr.Norman Borlaug – Father of Green Revolution, Dr.Verghese Kurien – The Father of White Revolution and Dr.M.S.Swaminathan

The book “I Too Had a Dream” by Dr.Verghese Kurien – is a brilliant and inspiring memoir from the man who transformed milk production and milk marketing landscape of India over five decades. It is a direct, honest and thoroughly readable account. For anybody interested in understanding grass root institution building and the challenges therein this is a lucid reference. The book is also a wonderful document which covers a facet of modern India’s developmental history and movement towards self-sufficiency in some areas of its basic needs like milk and dairy produce. Men who make a difference to society at large are obsessed by a certain thought, philosophy or idea and Dr.Kurien is no exception to this. His extraordinary achievement is driven by an unflinching faith in the inherent strengths of co-operative movement, a deep belief in the sagacity of the Indian farmer. Time and time again one gets to hear this message in the book. What makes the book appealing is the candid, unsparing and directness of the narrative. In the process of telling his story, Dr.Kurien throws light on very interesting tid-bits of history especially around some of India’s well known leaders and personalities.  Some interesting citings are: Nehru’s indifference to Sardar Patel’s daughter, Lal Bahadur Shastri’s simplicity, Morarji Desai & Indira Gandhi’s unstinted support to the efforts of building India’s dairy industry, TTK and Rajeev Gandhi’s enthusiasm to make a difference, agriculture minister Rao Birender Singh’s one-sided politics.

There are areas in the book which come out as a tad self-congratulatory. In an age and time when pygmies are parading as giants, Dr.Kurien’s giantish achievements and contributions deserve to be celebrated not only as an inspiration for all future generations but also as a reminder to the fact that there have been unsung heroes who contributed to nation building without any great expectations or motives of self-promotion.

Overall, a well-structured narrative and an inspirational read

Afterthought: In the recent past there have been demands to award India’s highest civilian award “The Bharat Ratna” to people whose achievements have had no major impact on the people of India. For all those ill-informed clamourers, here is an example of a well-deserved candidate to measure against

Pecan Nuts and a Christmas Memory

“Pecan Thieves in Georgia Enjoying a Windfall, at $1.50 a Pound” – screamed the article in NY Times. Till I read the complete article, I did not know that pecan nuts were grown on a commercial scale in the US in the state of Georgia. I first heard of pecan nuts in Truman Capote’s brilliant short story titled “A Christmas Memory”:

Three hours later we are back in the kitchen hulling a heaping buggyload of windfall pecans. Our backs hurt from gathering them: how hard they were to find (the main crop having been shaken off the trees and sold by the orchard owner’s, who are not us) among the concealing leaves, the frosted deceiving grass. Caarackle! A cheery crunch, scraps of miniature thunder sound as the shells collapse and the golden mound of sweet oily ivory meat mounts in the milk glass bowl.

 ”A Christmas Memory” is a strange and touching tale of two cousins – one a young lad of seven years and another an old lady of sixty years who despite their isolation, rejection and poverty go about celebrating the festival of Christmas with gusto and cheer away from the indifferent eyes of the world around them. Capote evokes the festive air of Christmas and the atmosphere of a cold country in a manner that is deeply touching and a great joy to read. I may not be wrong if I were to say that in this one story he transcends the work of Dickens in ‘A Christmas Carol” . The roar of the late November stove set to bake cakes, the baking of thirty delicious cakes full of pecan nuts, the yearlong effort to make and save money to buy the ingredients for the cakes, the procurement of whiskey for cakes in difficult times of prohibition from a scary, scarred and murderous looking bar owner (Ha! Ha! Jones – what a name!), the make-do gifts which they give each other on the eve of the festival hiding their disappointment of not being able to afford simple but heartfelt desires, the efforts in cutting, lugging and decorating the Christmas tree, the hustle and bustle to the run up of the actual day of Christmas, the love and bonding of two lonely relatives in the face of neglect and their eventual separation draws tears to one’s eyes.

The story is full of beautiful sentences and conversations which demonstrate Capote’s exquisite and effortless mastery over words. The description of the Christmas tree and the envy it evokes in a small town environs is by far the best that I’ve read:

“… we set about choosing a tree. “It should be,” muses my friend, “twice as tall as a boy. So a boy can’t steal the star.” The one we pick is twice as tall as me. A brave handsome brute that survives thirty hatchet strokes before it keels with a creaking rending cry. Lugging it like a kill, we commence the long treck out. Every few yards we abandon the struggle, sit down and pant. But we have the strength of triumphant huntsmen; that and the tree’s virile, icy perfume revive us, goad us on. Many compliments accompany our sunset return along the red clay road to town; but my friend is sly and noncommittal when passers-by praise the treasure perched on our buggy: what a fine tree and where did it come from? “Yonderways,” she murmurs vaguely. Once a car stops and the rich mill owner’s lazy wife leans out and whines: “Giveya two-bits cash for that ol tree.” Ordinarily my friend is afraid of saying no; but on this occasion she promptly shakes her head: “We wouldn’t take a dollar.” The mill owner’s wife persists. “A dollar, my foot! Fifty cents. That’s my last offer. Goodness, woman, you can get another one.” In answer my friend gently reflects: “I doubt it. There’s never two of anything.”

It is hard to believe that a pen which produced novels like “In Cold Blood” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” could produce a tale of enormous warmth, affection and human generosity. It is an effortlessly fantastic, memorable and moving tale that reinforces the spirit of Christmas in whoever has the good fortune to read it.

Book Closing For 2011

 2011 has been a satisfying year for my book reading pursuits. The gratifying development is that I edged forward on maturity, taste and consequently my choice of books to read. There is an amorphous but growing clarity on what literature should mean to me. In general, I am able to recognize what on an overall basis is good writing and differentiate it from not so good writing. My approach is increasingly aligning with what Oscar Wilde had to say about books and writing, which is that as a rule there are no good books or bad books; it is that books are well written or badly written. This distinction allows me to assay the material I read on ever refining, self-defined criteria of evaluation.  More importantly, I have begun to develop an independent view and courage to say boldly what of I read is to my liking and what is not. This has had a liberating impact in selecting books of my choice and reading them with a prior conviction and purpose which I am realizing is an often ignored but important prerequisite for any serious reading. I have just one life, so I have decided to take my chances and 2011 will go down as the year of acquiring this awareness

Wallace Stegner, Andrea Barret, Annie Proulx, Thornton Wilder, William Maxwell, William Styron, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Willa Cather, Susan Sontag, Bernard Malamud, Ray Bradbury are some of the new writers that I have read in 2011. Looking back this was also a year of scratching the surface of modern American fiction. To focus on this genre of fiction was a conscious choice. In non-fiction, Siddhartha Mukherjee‘s Pulitzer Prize winner “Emperor of All Maladies” has been a delightful read. Mukherjee writes this biography of cancer with an uncanny finesse of a historian despite being a medical man. This is an exhilarating book written with a narrative flourish that is rare, passionate and an endearing sense of compassion. Equally impressive was Sontag‘s “Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors“. Sontag writes with a clarity and passion that is breathtaking. I enjoyed this particular book immensely although at places the message tends to get repetitive

Somewhere during my engineering days I lost interest in science and kept away from reading anything that had to do with science. However, E.O.Wilson’s “The Creation” was a great read which reawakened my hunger for reading in science. I followed this up with five fantastic lectures of Prof. Vilayanur Ramachandran on the complexity and workings of human brain. Hopefully, 2012 will see more of this

Throughout the year my hunger for a well written word remained sustained and on some blessed days it almost bordered on a craving. Unless I read something intellectually and aesthetically stimulating, the restlessness remained unquenched. On such days I kept feeling like, Tony Castello, the out of work, odd jobs, hang-around-the-town alcoholic from John O Hara’s classic short story “We’ll Have Fun” who at one point declares poignantly  ” I’ve the rams”. I did too, but in my case the rams were strictly literary!

Newyorker, Paris Review, Guardian, NYBooks remained my favourite hunting grounds for literary material covering essays, short stories, book reviews and blogs. Truman Capote’s article on Marlan Brando “The Duke in his Domain”, Kazuo Ishiguro’s “A Village After Dark” were two pleasurable reads that I will remember prominently

The two literary prizes I followed closely this year were The Man Booker and The Hindu Literary Prize. From the shortlist of Booker, I found time to read Julian Barnes’s “The Sense Of An Ending”, A.D.Miller’s “Snowdrops”, Carol Birch’s “Jamrach’s Menagerie and Patrick Dewitt’s “Brother Sisters”. Of these “The Sense of an Ending” was by far the most moving, ruminative and thoroughly enjoyable read. The Hindu literary prize went to Rahul Bhattacharya for his book “The Sly Company Of People Who Care”. I especially liked the fanfare around this prize for it will go a long way in developing a platform which will encourage a lot more people in India to read and also write. There is some fantastic talent that is flowering here. I have no doubt in my mind that a decade from now there will be a rich crop of talented writers and a substantial body of writing coming out of India.

Supply, it is said, creates its own demand and this was true for books in 2011. Despite grumbles and complaints for lack of space to store books, I continued to buy books. My shelves have begun to creak and groan. I bought in excess of 40 books this year, thanks to www.flipkart.com which has grown in leaps and bounds in its ability to provide the books of my choice. May it remain profitable, healthy and continue on its path of progress!! . Books, I am coming to realize will be my amulet against the twin blights of ignorance and boredom

I resurrected the long paused work on my novella. Among other things, I realized that writing can be hugely cathartic. While I am near certain that it will join the ranks of the countless, nameless, mute, exhausted and defeated millions of mid-way abandoned attempts, the work I’ve done in stringing sentences together to make them coherent and meaningful has magnified my respect for the written word of others. There is a visceral realisation that creation and criticism reside on either end of the difficulty continuum and that a tablespoon of original creativity is far more valuable than a ton of erudite criticism

Noted with sadness the death of Christopher Hitchens. The few essays of his that I read and the numerous YouTube videos of his I have seen confirmed the exceptional mind and eclectic knowledge this man carried with him. Combative, sharp and ready for an informed debate he was a treat to watch. Hope to read more of his writings in 2012

It is said that there is a place and time for everything. Reading is no exception to that logic. Looking back, I realize I have wasted tremendous amount of time in my younger days which I could have gainfully employed in reading. I realize that I have not read many of the well-known classics and am determined to make the needed amends. For sure, I will read some works of Dickens, Hardy, Dumas, Stevenson, Melville and Bronte Sisters. The unread books and wasted time add to the suffocating burden of guilt

To reiterate, 2011, by and large was a satisfactory year for reading. However, there have been a few disappointments too and the notable two were: I wanted to start a book club but was not able to do so. I think, there are a lot of closet book lovers and I wanted to find a way to draw a handful of them out and get going. I have offset this disappointment by joining an online book club at Guardian (can’t fight? then float). As part of that group I read Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” which I enjoyed immensely. As an extension, I also read a collection of his short stories viz. ‘The Illustrated Man” which was brilliant to say the least and also his “Zen in the art of writing” – a collection of essays on the craft of writing which I must say was a stunner. The other big disappointment was not being able to read any of Shakespeare’s plays which I was keen on doing in 2011. Hopefully, I will cover some ground beginning 2012

What do I look for in 2012? Barring a few chosen classics which I will cover without fail, in general, I would like to remain wayward and uncontrolled in my reading. In the world of reading that is the surest approach to remain steady, heady and ready to tread a gainful path

Welcome……  2012!!

Miscellaneous Murmurs – Some Thoughts on Reading and Books

Over a period of time reading acquires a biologic trait akin to hunger. After a sumptuous read, there is a period of cud chewing followed by temporary inactivity and the cycle begins again. Moving through these cycles, the quality of hunger changes greatly. One starts to become choosy and almost certainly opinionated in picking what one opts to read. For every book I complete, there are atleast two I sample or leave mid-way.This is not bad in itself. It is helping me become a better selector of books- being able to pick good books for reading is an envious faculty to have in ones possession

In matters of literature and fiction, the world is willing to help in a big way those who want to educate themselves. Thanks to the web, there is a cornucopia of high quality archives, websites and digital content that is available for free which can last not just one lifetime but many lifetimes. All one needs is awareness, hunger, focus and curiosity. Put these things together and with a bit of luck the results could be magical

There is an indescribable pleasure in re-reading books especially books we classify for ourselves as classics. Not withstanding the great writing which in our eyes makes it a classic in the first place, a re-read also gives an opportunity to reassess the relevance of the book in a changed context. It is not the book that changes but we as readers who would have changed with time. There is a refreshing joy and an element of wonderment in assessing this personal transformation. It is similar to the joy we get when we look at our childhood photographs

The mark of all good fiction is that it has to be transformational in some form or other. We live our lives in certain loosely defined but concrete boundaries (societal and workplace rules, responsibilities that come with our place in the society etc.) and in that sense we are limited or confined. Fiction allows us to become aware of the areas where we can stretch these boundaries. Because in fiction you are peeping into someone else’s life and see what happens to them and how they address it. And the purest form of embracing fiction is through reading it. In that critical sense reading is life nourishing

An Unintended Beauty

Writers in one sense resemble intrepid explorers and frontiersmen. Explorers discovered unknown lands while writers among others discovered and continue to discover newer word associations. Consider this sentence by Ray Bradbury from his classic story “The Fog Horn”

“I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the “sadness of eternity” and the briefness of life”

Briefness of life – I can understand. But sadness of eternity – that beats me. How does one know that eternity is sad? Probably one does not, till one has read this sentence. On a closer look, the association sounds a tad doubtful  and everything in our know appears to suggest the opposite i.e. that eternity is not sad. The desire for fame and legacy are also desires for eternity and permanence. The well springs of human passion resulting in the expending of blood, sweat, toil and tears is for most of the times driven by the need for leaving a mark, a something to be remembered by and a generic hope for an extended existence beyond mortal life. Probably the most sought after thing in this world – an afterlife in heaven – also has a dimension of eternity deeply embedded in it. If eternity is sad then by a convoluted logic heaven may eventually not be a happy place to live in – and going by convention appears inverted. This then leads me to ask the question: is the word association used by Bradbury an appropriate one?

For all the thoughts I have, Bradbury makes this word association appear natural, effortless, easy, beautiful and extremely pleasing. The words sit so well in one another’s company as if they were age old pals full of harmony with no friction what so ever. I guess the genesis of this beauty lies not in reason but in aesthetics which in any case is beyond reason

Stories from The Illustrated Man – Ray Bradbury

2011 will go down as my year of knowing many fantastic writers I have never heard or read before. Foremost among them is Ray Bradbury. He is – I am coming to realize – a writer of extraordinary talent, range and prolificity. Novels, short stories, essays, literary criticism, plays, movie scripts and an odd poem here and there – his output is staggering. But above all he is an absolute pleasure to read. Here is a collection of his short stories viz. “The Illustrated Man” which I have read recently

The setting of his stories in this collection whether it is a noiseless and indifferent space, the alien landscape of Mars, time travel into past from future or our own but morphed earth is a beguiling façade, a ploy and a master writer’s technique to bring a necessary isolation and consequently an intense focus to the diverse human predicaments that are being observed, discussed and portrayed

Here are a few from the collection which I liked quite a lot and which I would not hesitate to read again. There is a beauty, effortlessness and a larger theme in the storytelling technique that Bradbury adopts

The Fire Balloons: As human beings we develop points of view which even in the most universal contexts are narrowly anthropocentric. This kind of thinking puts us on an unwitting path of presumptions. We assume that we have a monopoly on issues related to ethics, sin, soul, righteousness and puff up unwittingly. A group of church pastors travel to Mars to redeem the inhabitants – who appear as irradiant blue flames – by introducing the concept of sin, soul and God. It turns out that these inhabitants are evolved souls who have already reached a state of nirvana and bliss and do not need any instruments, processes and symbols of earthly spirituality. The revelation of this advanced state of evolution comes to the pastors in one long gentle monologue from one of the blue flames and there is an enjoyable touch of eastern and Zen like quality to this story. The conclusion of the earthlings is a pleasant shocker:

No he thought, we couldn’t build a church for the likes of you. You’re beauty yourself. What church could compete with the fireworks of the pure soul?

Probably the best story in the collection for the grandness of its philosophical bent and the simplicity of narration

The Long Rain: I always maintained that the greatest evocation of the feeling of rain was done by Maugham in his story “The Rain” – that is till I read this story of Ray Bradbury. The sheer verbal energy that Bradbury brings to a landscape battered by rain is superbly done in this story. Man’s need for safety against rain and the need for regular sunlight and how the weak hearted give up is brilliantly narrated. The story opens with this torrent of flawless words:

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and streaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping in the eyes, an undertow in the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped

Mildly frightening but thoroughly enjoyable

The Last Night Of the World: The job of a writer among others is to constantly point and remind us who we are as human beings, what is that makes us and what ticks us – the result could be a picture or a snapshot of the complex diversity that defines us. Bradbury does this extremely well in this story by demonstrating how we have become creatures of habit.

A couple is in the know that the world is coming to end at midnight. Yet they continue with the regular chores of a normal day including the trivial act of turning off the running tap in the kitchen even while the imminent and impending doomsday cataclysm is staring right into their faces. There is a wonderful sense of pathos and summing up that Bradbury brings to his characters through this simple yet powerful dialogue

“We haven’t been too bad, have we?”

“No, nor enormously good. I suppose that’s the trouble – we haven’t been very much of anything except us, while a big part of the world was busy being lots of quite awful things”

In some ways, isn’t this our state too?

 Kaleidoscope: A good question to ask is: How do we sum up our lives in the face of impending death? But a better question would be: Ideally what should the desirable summary be while summing up our life while facing death? This is a wonderful story of a group of astronauts on a failed and wrecked spaceship drifting apart from one another in the vastness of space in different directions to their unavoidable doom and talking to one another about life, death, living, memories on a weakening communication system. Misery, it is said, loves company but misery also brings out our inherent meanness and generosity to the fore in these last moments. This aspect is wonderfully portrayed in this story. Consider this snippet:

Lespere had lived a good full life, and it made him a different man now, and he, Hollis, had been as good as dead for many years. They came to death by separate paths and, in all likelihood, if there were kinds of death, their kinds of death would be as different as night from day. The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what was there to look for in dying for good and all, as he was now?

The narrator who is hurtling to earth with a feeling of remorse for letting life pass by in petty jealousies and frivolous attitudes consoles himself that he will be useful by becoming ash and spreading over the earth. A wonderfully poignant story which I read many times over for the sheer beauty of its storytelling

The Fox and the Forest: A couple time travel into past to avoid their world which is regimented, controlled, censored and full of war and induced disease. They are hunted back to future by agents of Govt. A moving portrayal of desperation to escape to a state which is civilized, gentle and above all human. There is place in the story where the husband sums up the world he lives which is eerily familiar and has immense resemblance to our current state

And we lived in a world that was evil. A world that was like a great black ship pulling away from the shore of sanity and civilization, roaring its black horn in the night, taking two billion people with it, whether they wanted to go or not, to death, to fall over the edge of the earth and sea into radioactive flames and madness

Two billion or Six Billion – are we any different?

Marionettes Inc.: I hope to meet a man or woman who despite unwavering belief in the institution of marriage would not confess to the occasional constraints and suffocation that marriage imposes on them. Here is a story of two friends in such a predicament and one of them tries to beat it by hiring an identical looking marionette to substitute his place while he plans to proceed on a long awaited holiday. However the marionette has its own evil plans. Inspired, the other friend also proceeds to procure a marionette for substitution but realises to his horror that his wife is already ahead of him in the game… a thoroughly enjoyable tale with a mildly chilling twist in the tale. – while the friends turn out to be gullible the marionette in the former case and the wife in the latter case turn out to be cleverer

No Particular Night or Morning: In general, we have romantic notions of space but space can be bewildering. It unhinges and disorients as it effectively robs one of a sense of dimension, a sense of time, notions of night and day and a feeling of intense isolation. A gruesome tale of a person who begins with enthusiastic love for space but gradually goes mad and ends up committing suicide on a spaceship

The City: A city that has been conquered, ravaged and left to dereliction by humans recoups itself over a period of twenty thousand years organizes itself to seek revenge on its perpetrators.  In ways it is also a parable to remind us how nature can seek revenge for human excesses. There is a movie like quality to this story

The Rocket Man: Industrialization and advancement has induced a strange bewitchment with the work we do. We define ourselves with the kind of work we do and carry on till our end doing so. Here is a poignant story of a man who is a space traveler and finds it hard to stay put on earth despite his family’s need for him only to end perishing in an accident while traveling to sun leaving his family in darkness

The Veldt: Probably the most chilling story of the collection. Two young kids whose parental needs are substituted by their all providing mechanical house plot and do their parents to death to avoid the threat of shutting down the mechanical house they love so much. The portrayal of a clinical indifference with which the children carry out their act is superbly done

Bradbury has written close to five hundred stories. One thing is for certain: I will read all of them from this cornucopia

Writers On Writing – Part 4

Here are some more interesting views on the craft of writing, reading, fiction and literature in general. Barring the last excerpt of Nabokov which I have taken from NewYorker rest all have been sourced from the magazine Paris Review

Interviewer: Is it old-fashioned to think that the purpose of literature is to educate us about life?

Susan Sontag: Well, it does educate us about life. I wouldn’t be the person I am, I wouldn’t understand what I understand, were it not for certain books. I’m thinking of the great question of nineteenth-century Russian literature: how should one live? A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.

 Interviewer: Does literature produce ecstasy?

Susan Sontag: Sure, but less reliably than music and dance; literature has more on its mind. One must be strict with books. I want to read only what I’ll want to reread—the definition of a book worth reading once

Interviewer: Do the novel and short story present different problems to you?

Ray Bradbury: Yes, the problem of the novel is to stay truthful. The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours. I try to encourage my student friends and my writer friends to write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it, its own intensity, its own life, its own reason for being. There’s a reason why the idea occurred to you at that hour anyway, so go with that and investigate it, get it down. Two or three thousand words in a few hours is not that hard. Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone. But a novel has all kinds of pitfalls because it takes longer and you are around people, and if you’re not careful you will talk about it. The novel is also hard to write in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay erect for two hundred days. So, get the big truth first. If you get the big truth, the small truths will accumulate around it. Let them be magnetized to it, drawn to it, and then cling to it.

 Interviewer: What do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle?

Ray Bradbury: Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

Interviewer: In the introduction to A Move Abroad you write, “There’s a degree of self-pleasuring in imaginative writing which is not even remotely assimilated by literary theory.” Can you give me an example of that?

 Ian McEwan: The joy is in the surprise. It can be as small as a felicitous coupling of noun and adjective. Or a whole new scene, or the sudden emergence of an unplanned character who simply grows out of a phrase. Literary criticism, which is bound to pursue meaning, can never really encompass the fact that some things are on the page because they gave the writer pleasure. A writer whose morning is going well, whose sentences are forming well, is experiencing a calm and private joy. This joy itself then liberates a richness of thought that can prompt new surprises. Writers crave these moments, these sessions. If I may quote the second page of Atonement, this is the project’s highest point of fulfillment. Nothing else—cheerful launch party, packed readings, positive reviews—will come near it for satisfaction.

Nabokov on the need for re-reading books

When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.