NADEEM ASLAM's MAPS FOR LOST LOVERS

CHANDINI SANTOSH

Reviews

NADEEM ASLAM's


MAPS FOR LOST LOVERS



Nadeem Aslam became famous after the publication of ‘Maps for Lost Lovers’ in 2004. He had published ‘The Season of the Rainbirds’ in 19993. Born in Pakistan, Aslam now lives in England.

The story is about an honor killing that takes place in an unnamed English town. Jugnu and his lover Chanda have disappeared. Rumors abound in the close knit Pakistani community, and then on a snow covered morning Chanda’s brothers are arrested for their murder. The book tells the story that unfolds in the next twelve months.

‘Maps for Lost lovers’ opens the heart of a family at the crossroads of culture, community, nationality and religion, while expressing their personal pain in a language that is almost always poetic.

Honor killing is nothing new to sub continental readers, it keeps happening most of the time.
‘In this book, filled with stories of cruelty, injustice, bigotry and ignorance, love never steps out of the picture. It gleams on the edges of even the deepest wounds…A remarkable achievement.’ Kamila Shamsie, Guardian.

It needs great courage to turn one’s back on one’s culture and religion, as some of us would certainly understand. Some of us have gone through all this and perhaps more. As against people who show the courage to seek and find truth, there are those who dare not step out of the circle of religious and cultural bias, but live with their convictions, however tormenting life might be. It is this irony that is captured well in the ‘tender and vivid portrait of the strict Islamic mother, isolated by her unassailable belief.’ Alan Hollinghurst, Guardian.

‘It depicts an extraordinary panorama of life within a Muslim community…Thoughtful, revealing, lushly written and painful, this timely book deserves the widest audience.’ David Mitchell, Mail on Sunday.

Critics go breathless revealing the intricacies of this book. The telling commentary of expatriates in the UK is as disturbing as it is revealing. It is not coincidental that the story also depicts the clash of religion.

The story is exotic and is written in a nuanced language full of lyrical images. In fact, so thick are the interwoven imagery that the violence seems out of place and context. But as I completed reading the Map, I realized that if not for the lilting imagery, the brutalities pictured here might have been too much to digest. Though Aslam’s poetic language jars at times, I come to the conclusion that it was necessary, not because neither is violence restricted to the subcontinent nor to any community or religion throughout the history of humanity. As I look at it. History is the retelling of unimaginable cruelty practiced in the name of religion and ethnicity. As is evidenced from another book I am reading at present: FROM THE HOLY MOUNTAIN by WILLIAM DARYMPLE.

No religion is exempt from violence and bigotry.

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P. S : As I completed reading Aslam’s ‘Maps for Lost Lovers’, there were reports that an honor killing had shook a village in Haryana, which is fast developing district in the northern region of India. Haryana was formerly a part of the Punjab Province, but later broke away as most people belonging to that area spoke Hindi rather than Punjabi. Punjab is the prosperous district on the Indo – Pakistan border, which had achieved self reliance in food decades ago. Their agricultural poweress are well documented. Their love for the good life, their good looks, their millions, and their zest for life also are well known. In matters regarding health too Punjab has come up brilliantly. Punjab is richest state in The Republic of India.

But this does not naturally mean that the state of Punjab is the best state of the Union. You might wonder why. Let me explain. Kerala has the highest literacy in the whole of India. Population growth stands at zero. Health indices are of world standards. Cleanliness is a way of life. But all this is wiped out when you realize that superstition and religious intolerance have slowly crept into the fabric of our society. Joblessness is rampant, as most of the IT related educated youths come from this rather small state, thus the ensuing high density of population. Kerala is a major tourist attraction, as its beaches and greenery are both exotic as well as industrious. Yet, the locals always stare at foreign tourists, worse, they harass them too. We may be tolerant towards other religions, but not to ethnic minorities. We are willing to practice only white collar jobs, but the moment the working class arrive from our neighboring states of Tamil Nadu, or Karnataka, we raise a hue and cry. It is very funny, as what the proletariat demands is the reverse of what you may imagine. They say why the Tamils should work for the less wages instead of the grossly upward swinging labor wages that we practice over here. Sikhs are hooted for their turbans, without understanding that they are practicing what their religion demands of them. The whole of South India is as different from the North as chalk and cheese. The country is so diverse that one cannot keep up with the several languages and cultures. There are twenty six official languages at the last count.

Being a secular and thriving democracy has its benefits. In fact, I firmly believe that it is this democratic and secular set up that has foisted India on to the world stage.

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THE STONE RAFT

CHANDINI SANTOSH

Reviews

JOSE SARAMAGO's


THE STONE RAFT

Jose Saramago amazes me each time I read him. THE STONE RAFT is the fourth novel of Saramago I have read and believe me dear readers, these are four of the hundred books you should have read in your lifetime. I do not mean to exaggerate. Harold Bloom, eminent literary critic has rightly called Saramago, ‘the most important living writer’ of our times.

Reading any of Jose Saramago’s books is no easy task. He is not for the average reader. Add to it, his unusual punctuation, and you have difficult reading on your hands. Though his topics are metaphysical and fantastic, Saramago embellishes his writings with unbelievably realistic details. Not even for a moment does the reader feel that he is reading a fantasy, or a tale narrated in the magical realistic genre, which they definitely are.

In SEEING, a democratic election throws up more than eighty percent of blank votes, jeopardizing the polity into frenzy. It is a politician’s ultimate nightmare. (After I read it, I badly wanted something of the sort to happen in my democratic country, but as always, people of India rise to the occasion, saving democracy as well as our faith in electoral politics.) In BLINDNESS, a whole city plunges into a white blindness, an allegory unparalled in imagination. This book was later made into a movie by the same name, which unfortunately did not do well. ( I have not watched the movie, though the DVD is available to those who buy the book on line.) THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO CHRIST is written in a style which cannot be delinked from history, though it is fictionalized. (This is my favorite Saramago, so far.)

THE STONE RAFT which I finished reading yesterday is a splendidly imagined epic voyage, written in the quirky Saramago narrative style, that I have grown to like immensely. It is enchanted prose.

The Iberian Peninsula, comprising of some parts of Spain and parts of Portugal gets fractured and unmoors from the European continent and begins to float in the Atlantic with a will of its own. The broken away land resembles a stone raft gliding on sea, raising several questions, political, social and emotional. Three men, two women and a dog begin a voyage leading to nowhere in a country in great turmoil.

Impossible situations abound in the book, but they are covered in highly realistic details. It has to be read to be believed.

Told in a deceptively simple, naïve style this tale of fixed points and shifting goals is a superb vehicle for Jose Saramago’s shrewd and witty dissection of contemporary Europe.

‘Confirms Saramago’s reputation as Portugal’s leading novelist…Tremendous wit is always apparent in his imaginative conceits, comic digressions and verbal and narrative games’ IAN CRITCHLEY in SUNDAY TIMES.

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NADEEM ASLAM

CHANDINI SANTOSH

Reviews

NADEEM ASLAM's


THE WASTED VIGIL




Nadeem Aslam became a name to reckon with after his second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers hit the reading public and won the Kiriyama Prize as well as the Encore Award, and was later short listed for the British Book award in2005. It was long listed for the Man Booker Prize as well in the same year. His latest novel, The Wasted Vigil, is set in modern - day Afghanistan, the scene of a long line of war - torn country side.

The story spans nearly a quarter century, often interweaving and overlapping. The narrative vividly describes the terrible afflictions that have plagued Afghanistan since the time of Soviet invasions in 1979 when Kalashnikovisation of Afghanistan began in earnest and later when radical Islam reared its ugly head in the form of Taliban.

A Russian woman named Lara arrives at the house of Marcus Caldwel, an English doctor and widower, who lives in an old and abandoned perfume factory beneath the shadow of the Tora Bora Mountains. Their painful histories are interlinked. It is possible that Marcus’s daughter Zameen born of an Afghan woman named Qatrina may have known Lara’s brother, a soldier in the Soviet Army. Both Qatrina and Zameen are dead, becoming victims of the age in which they were born.

More people follow them in the following days, including two men from the CIA, Dunia, a young Afghan teacher and Casa, a radicalized youth intent on his mission. Casa is the atypical Islamic fundamentalist, having been indoctrinated since childhood into the cadre of a jihadi. The inner turmoil of all these characters, linked inextricably together, forms the crux of the plot.

The unrelenting and unforgiving landscape of Afghanistan and its steppe came alive in the novels of Afghan writer Khaled Hossieni in his novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. Aslam takes up the rest of the narrative in what has come to be known as the worst human tragedies of present day. The violent news stories and the clippings that we read about in the newspapers and watch rushing past in front of our eyes on the television screens. With the arrival of the Taliban, the story takes on the colors of terrible tragedy and this comes alive in Aslam’s novel, as though it was part of a modern day parable. The thought that it could be real, comes as a jolt to people like me, living as I do in a zone where war is a gory drama staged in the visual media, as far removed from reality as the horrendous landscapes of human misery and medieval violence. More so because these atrocities are practiced on women, the all time soft target of mankind from the dark ages, in the name of religion. I have enough reasons to augment my belief that there exists no god, and if at all there is one, it must be a man. It is for the very same reason that no religion has ever been founded by a woman – thanks be to women.

I reproduce here some of the unforgiving acts of brutality ever practiced on the face of this planet from this book by Nadeem Aslam.

‘Women are always dying in repeated childbirth because the husbands didn’t listen – Qatrina had to struggle with the mosques because they said birth control was the west’s attempt at reducing the number of Muslims in the world. And then the Communist regime came and closed down the family planning centers, saying it was an Imperialist policy to detract attention from the real causes of poverty’.

Lara herself had failed yet again to carry a pregnancy to full term. For a Russian woman an abortion was one of the more obvious options when it came to birth control, the men not agreeing to consider any preventive methods themselves …

‘A man from Usha kept making his wife pregnant year after year. The young woman was twenty – two and had seven children in six years. He never allowed her body to recover, despite warnings and pleadings from Qatrina. When he brought his wife to us for an eighth time, she was almost dead’.

David saw a woman in a silkworm village being paraded naked through the streets. She cowered as she was beaten by several men for having committed adultery, for having taken a Russian lover… he watched as a man came forward and placed around her neck one of the Korans he had brought.

Qatrina, a doctor and Marcus’s wife is flogged and forcibly made to amputate her own husband’s right hand, with the threat that if she does not relent, he would be shot dead. Their crime is that she is a Muslim who dared to marry a British doctor, but also because their marriage was sanctified by a woman. A microphone is thrust on her howling mouth as a crowd of Taliban automatons cheer around them.

Aslam does not take sides, as his critics have pointed out. But the condemnations of such mindless violence do take on a slant towards Western sensibilities. No doubt that these acts are condemnable, but there is a thread of overzealousness in Aslam’s narrative. The Wasted Vigil is neither for the weak hearted nor for the passionately patriotic. He writes with a quaint lyricism and the book is littered with peculiarly fresh imagery. Paradoxically, I felt that the kind of lyrical narrative does not fit inside a novel about violence spanning three decades.

Western critics have many times recorded the lush lyricism of the orient, but at times, it palls for no reason whatsoever. As I said, perhaps the subject does not suit either the subject or the narrative. I am told that Nadeem Aslam’s much acclaimed earlier novel Maps for Lost Lovers which is the story of an honor killing, does indeed warrant lyricism of the kind Aslam dabbles in.
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The painting that you see above is done in pastels and depicts the front cover of Nadeem Aslam’s book. I think it has come out rather well. It shows ripe pomegranates, with one of them wrenched open and beginning to rot.

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THE ISLAND

BOOKS AND READING

REVIEWS OF FOUR NOVELS

By

CHANDINI SANTOSH




I have been reading at a hectic pace. I gobbled up four books in two weeks and am looking for more. As I have told you before, I have a voracious appetite when it comes to reading.

IDENTITY
By
MILAN KUNDERA

The first one was a novella by French writer, Milan Kundera titled IDENTITY. Kundera is ranked among the greatest novelists of post – war Europe. He has built the novella from a significant moment in life and has placed it on the resulting panic and confusion, set in motion by a series of incidents bordering on fantasy and reality. Like a tennis ball, the narrative moves from the real to the surreal and at times to dizzying heights of hyper reality.

It did not move me, dear readers. May be because it does not touch upon reality as much as it should have. Post – War Europe perhaps demanded calisthenics of a different kind, but the world has moved on from the surreal to the virtual.

ONITSHA
By
J.M.G.CLEZIO

The second one, again by a French author, J.M.G. Le Clezio. ONITSHA won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008. It tells the story of Fintan, a youth who travels to Africa in 1948 with his Italian mother to join his English father he has never met. The boy is initially enchanted by the exotic world he discovers in Onitsha, a bustling city prominently situated on the eastern bank of Niger. But gradually he comes to recognize the intolerance and brutality of the colonial system in Nigeria. His view provides the novel with a close to real and horrified perspective on racism and colonialism.

The narrative is intensely lyrical. But for a few lines, intensely horrific on the treatment of slaves, chained to each other with their hands on the others’ neck, while their masters think nothing of having their luncheon spread out on the verandah and laughing at the nakedness of the slaves, the novel does not come alive. Dear readers, too much lyricism mars the work. Lyricism does not suit the subject nor does it lilt you to see the actuality. The pain of apartheid does not come clear.

THE COLOR PURPLE
By
ALICE WALKER

The third book, by Alice Walker, THE COLOR PURPLE, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, also follows a similar theme. Written by an African American, (I do not know whether the term is politically correct), it explores the arid life of Celia, a young black girl born into poverty and segregation. Raped repeatedly by the man she calls ‘father’, she has two children taken away from her, is separated from her beloved sister, Nettie, and is trapped into an ugly marriage. But then she meets the glamorous Shug Avery, singer and magic maker – a woman who has taken charge of her own identity. Gradually she discovers the power and joy of her own spirit, freeing her from her past and reuniting her with those she loves. Set in the deep American South, and written in the colloquial South lingo, the book is average at best. The heavy ethnic ‘accent’ jars after a few pages and the human element is missing.

TO KILL A MOCKING BIRD
By
HARPER LEE

It is this universal human element that is present abundantly in Harper Lee’s TO KILL A MOCKING BIRD. This eternal classic has come to me a bit late in the day, but true to its word, the novel stuns you into realizing one’s own worth in a society steeped in prejudice.

Narrated from the view point of two young children, Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the deep American South of the thirties. Their father, a lawyer by profession, fights a one man battle against racial prejudice, violence and hypocrisy. It is an epic struggle for justice at all costs. The narrative is laced with spontaneous humor, which is the essential backbone of any and all good writing. The book won the Pulitzer Prize.

A MUST read for all age groups and manner of people residing anywhere on this planet.
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New Life

New Life


By
CHANDINI SANTOSH





I drove out of my h (OM) e and it took just under thirty minutes to bring me to the city of my birth and my life changed. If this line sounds familiar, it’s because you and I have read the mesmerizing opening lines of Orhan Pamuk’s novel, ‘The New Life’, which runs like this – I read a book one day and it changed my life.

I am happy I took the decision to drive out.

It is not as easy as it sounds. I mean if you were to shift your residence to a place just half an hour’s drive away, life would not change. It would surely have to be a miracle in motion. But the theater and the drama behind the shifting and a tiny slice of juxtaposed past would explain to you what you would otherwise not comprehend.

I was born here in Kannur, the northernmost tip of ‘God’s Own Country’, but we grew up in Delhi. Now New Delhi is not what it used to be. It is a buzzing Metro and the capital of India. Kannur is also not what it used to be. It is a city on the rise. Even then you would doubt about where the punch lies. The punch line is that I lived in a sprawling village since my marriage to the day I drove out. As you know, a city is a mindset, but so is a village. If you go down to the brass tacks, all modern amenities that a city dweller enjoys can also be found in a village. And without sounding too much of a braggart, you may safely assume that there are no real villages in Kerala, at least not the kind you would visualize in a Third World country. Now, physical reality is altogether different from emotional as well as rational reality. And this is where the crux of the matter lies. A village is a village because it has a parochial DNA cored on its brain map, which cannot be erased even after the Time Machine has dropped us on Mars and back.

That is the difference that changes lives in just under thirty minutes.

Ensconed here in the seventh storey apartment I find that some coconut trees have grown to this level and that is pleasant information, since all coconut pluckers are in great demand as they have all fled to Dubai. But what has surprised me is the sea level. As I see it, the sea stands much higher than the windows of my apartment, perhaps at the eighth floor level. At times I wonder too why the sea does not come toppling down over the beach and the roads and the coconut trees. Of course, that would be termed the tsunami. We experienced a mild tsunami two years back on a full moon day and it had created havoc in our neighboring state. So tsunami is out of question.

The rooms are sunny and windy and if any of you are interested, I can give you dollops of both these items in a carry bag, free of cost. Like happiness, wind and the sun can only increase, not decrease.

My paintings too feel happy. The painted boat on a painted sea is reveling at its safety away from the turbulence of the sea. Shekure faces the sea and she does a thud thud against the wall, though she still looks haughty. Some are like that. Ruya is serene and as usual gives me immense happiness and an unusual camaraderie, mavericks that we are. Maria Sharapova has pride of place and enjoys her exalted status. Still life of fruits and one of vegetables look well entrenched. Tiger burns only at nights. I might as well gift it to the Society for preserving tigers. They are fast fading from the face of this planet.

Earlier I looked up at every Tom Dick and Harry – shall we change those names – Mohamed Prashant and Sajan, but now I can afford to look down on them. From this height, men look like squirrels scurrying past. (The names are chosen randomly though there is a design in the madness, all three are from different religions.) If the left over ones feel the pinch, they are free to lodge a complaint at Lekha.com. Yes, she is my younger sis and all of five feet eight inches and when she walks majestically in her heels, she looks supremely confident. So now you have to queue up at her door for a pass.

What fun!


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The pix above was clicked by my classmate Pravin Madhavan when he landed up at OM last year.

JOSE SARAMAGO

CHANDINI SANTOSH

Reviews

JOSE SARAMAGO's

'THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS CHRIST

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‘The Gospel according to Jesus Christ’ is the most controversial and daring of Jose Saramago’s novel yet. The book more or less follows the chronological paths of the earlier gospels, though it dwells more on Jesus’ childhood rather than the later part of canonization where Jesus metamorphoses as Jesus Christ. Saramago re – imagines the life of Christ in an epochal work, no less important than all the other gospels, but is essentially a fictional and alternate history.

In Saramago’s own words, ‘My Gospel tries to fill the blank spaces between the various episodes of Jesus’ life as narrated in other gospels – with some interpretations of my own’. This would be an understatement since the novel literally shook the very foundations of Christianity, with all its dichotomies.

The ‘Gospel’ follows the life of Jesus Christ from conception to crucifixion, while focusing on a naïve Jesus, who is as human as any other of his times. He is pictured as entirely susceptible to human desires and inclinations.

Jesus is born to a devoted Jewish carpenter Joseph and his young wife Mary. The subtle eroticism in which Saramago portrays Jesus’ conception hacks down all former illogical theories surrounding Jesus’ birth. Just before Jesus is born the census of Rome decrees that all citizens need to register themselves at the original place of their birth. Joseph sets off with his very pregnant Mary towards Galilee, his native place. Mary gives birth to Jesus at Bethlehem in a cave assisted by Salome, a lowly maid. King Herod, who is visited by demons with the news that the future King of the Jews has already taken birth, orders his henchmen to kill all children aged below three. Here, I am reminded of the birth of Krishna, and the imprisonment of his parents, and the decree of the king to kill all new born children. Joseph hastens to save his firstborn forgetting his first duty as a human being. He forgets to warn the others of the impending disaster and is plagued by nightmares all his life, making him an insomniac in the bargain. He believes that he alone has been instrumental in the macabre killings of twenty five innocent children.

Jesus inherits his father’s legacy – the horrendous nightmares, after Joseph is mistakenly crucified along with thirty nine other rebels, who had rebelled against Roman occupation and cruelty. The transferal of Joseph’s perplexing guilt to his son ‘injects the story with the substance of modern day psychology’. This is where the despotic god, thirsty for blood and power, resurrects a celestial tyrant from the annals of the Old Testament.

Before Jesus’ tryst with god in a desert, Jesus has already met and lived with the devil and chosen to cohabit with Mary Magdalene. The miracles are narrated with a tongue in cheek technique, where Jesus himself is surprised with the results that he achieves. There is a fine interlacing of ‘somber realism, grotesque fantasy and wry humor’. The identity of the mysterious beggar at the Annunciation and the strangely compassionate shepherd with whom the wandering Jesus spends his formative years, provide a unique and unnerving twist to the traditional version of the gospel story. This leads in turn to the reconsideration of the age old debate on good and evil.

Narrated in glorious prose, ‘The Gospel according to Jesus Christ’ is an intriguing investigation into the worth of Christianity by ‘the most gifted novelist alive in the world today’ according to literary critic, Harold Bloom. The book portrays Jesus Christ as an innocent human caught in the machinations of god and devil. The provocative conclusions which can be drawn most transparently from the reading of the novel is not surprising to any reader well versed in the writings of Saramago, who reposts all glories to the human spirit. Brutally atheistic, Saramago vilifies religion – religion is always a very offensive institution to intellectual beings.

The novel ends with Jesus defying god’s orders as an angst ridden Jesus rebels by getting himself crucified by proclaiming that he is King of the Jews, rather than bowing to god’s dictum that Jesus proclaim himself as the Son of God. Jesus’ last word on the crucifix is a telling commentary on his rebellion. ‘Men, forgive Him, He knows not what He has done’. At all times I wonder why the nobility that human beings possess and practices is never highlighted as against the unbelievable qualities attributed to god.

The Gospel according to Jesus Christ’ is threaded with unveiled challenges and is designed to provoke. Provoke it did, as it became so controversial that the Portuguese Government had to withdraw the nomination of the book from The European Literary Prize in 1992. Jose Saramago went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998.

Reading Saramago is an intellectual challenge to all readers, except for those who are severely bent towards dogmatic religionism.

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ISMAIL KADARE

Agamamnon's Daughter

ISMAIL KADARE



Reading ‘Agamemnon’s Daughter’ (Winner of The Man Booker Prize 2005) written by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare was a revelation to me. A novella which hardly runs into a hundred odd pages is packed with the vitality of human life, which is the subject Kadare delves into.

Agamemnon is also ‘a searing story of love denied, then shattered under the chilling wheels of the state’. Kadare interlaces the story of a budding liberal media person and his love for the Suzana, the daughter of a highly placed official, who is tipped to become the head of the state. To attain that exalted and dictatorial post, a sacrifice is elicited from him, crueler than the mythical sacrifice of Ipigenia, daughter of Agamemnon at the altar of enthronement. The lesson that is dinned into the confused independence – craving society is that to be able to reach such a state almost on par with Stalin, one must also sacrifice their own children as Stalin sacrificed his only son, Yakov. ‘Yakov …had not been sacrificed so as to suffer the same fate as any other Russian soldier, as the dictator had claimed, but to give Stalin the right to demand the life of anyone else’.

All natural human activities are curtailed in the Communist Utopia of Albania in the name of socialism. Any dissent is dealt with an iron hand. Ismail Kadare writes, ‘Dissent was not possible. You risked being shot. Not, condemned, but shot for a word against the regime. A single word’.

As I would not like to be a killjoy by quoting much from either the novella or the blurbs on the covers, I would leave it to you dear readers, to read and enjoy the beauty of the brutally direct narration and the amazing vision that is captured in a text that is as tight as a new water tap.

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BLINDNESS by JOSE SARAMAGO

BLINDNESS

Jose Saramago wrote BLINDNESS much before SEEING, but one who has read both these mesmerizing works can identify them as political parables of ingenuity. Call them parables, fables, allegories written in the vein of magical realism, they are of immense value to the times we live in.

A man is struck blind at the traffic signals as suddenly as lightening. Several others, in fact the whole city is plunged into this epidemic of blindness, except for one. The first batch of the blind are negotiated into a mental asylum. Truly biblical in its parameters, the story unfolds on the unimaginably brutal life that awaits the blind. Saramago, at one point tells you how this must have been like the times when life began at the beginning of time. That must be the time when scrapings of civilization must have dawned on human beings. Saramago takes you to a world ruled by jungle laws. The blind rule the blind, it is the blind themselves who obliterate the lives of others, and it is the blind themselves who fight their way through this chaos.

Each paragraph abounds in maxims, some well worn, some twisted by Saramago in wily humor, but we must finally agree that yes the world is such a place. There is burning fatalism at every stage, yet the parable does not contain a single word that could take you out of the narrative for a breath of air. It is dark, it is BLINDNESS.

I always knew women were the stronger of the two, but Saramago seems to revel in capturing women at the zenith of their strength. Paradoxically, it is also the women who provide the reader with the much needed respite as well the bouts of scathingly dark comedy. From the highest point of evolution, men whimper back to the stone age while women wait and bide for their time. Women wait patiently to strike at the right time.

Among these two scorching novels, I preferred SEEING, since the scope of SEEING is much larger compared to BLINDNESS. But there is no doubt as to the strength of BLINDNESS, because it gives a garrulous glimpse of the beginning of time and takes you right into the dark corners of times beyond civilization. When this happens right in earnest amongst us, who pride themselves as being civilized, it has that brutal edge to it that we deny feebly.

Though New Year began with a tiny mishap, reading has put me back on track. When there are authors like Saramago, who can transport you to the unlit corners of one’s mind, there is not a second to be wasted crying, however dark the painted world might be.

So if you can see – Look. If you can look – Observe. We might come to learn that perhaps we are blind people after all who can just about see, but prefer not to.

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The above pix was clicked at the time I joined the Chinmaya Mission College as a Junior Lecture in English after completing my Post Graduation. One of colleagues pictured here was the HOD of the Dept. of History and the other was my Senior in the Dept. of English.

Jose Saramago

Jose Saramago - SEEING

I read SEEING, Saramago’s new novel in June this year and I have not yet come out of its impact on me. In fact I feel that I might go into the withdrawal mode if I do not look it up every other day on my book shelf.

Jose Saramago has recreated the politician’s ultimate nightmare in his novel, SEEING. The disillusionment that renders the entire democratic system defunct at one go. SEEING explores how this could be done in the most simplistic manner and what it could achieve and how devastating the results could be.

Despite a heavy and incessant rain, the presiding officer at Polling Station 14 finds that only a handful of voters have turned to vote, by mid day. Soon after 4 pm an avalanche of voters arrive at the polling station, not just at Polling Station 14, but at all the other voting stations. It is as though consensus of time and action is reached at unilaterally by the citizens, without ever airing even once their secret opinion on the same. Puzzlement swiftly escalates to shock, when the final counting of votes reveals that seventy percent of votes are blank votes – not spoiled, but left simply and stunningly blank. National law decrees a reelection. The results are more shocking and stunning than the first – eighty three percent of votes are blank. The government, seized with panic, decamps from the capital city and declares a state of emergency. What follows is not unimaginable chaos, as we might reflect, but the true reign of the people, by the people, for the people.

Because SEEING is more thrilling than any crime thriller I have ever read, I certainly would not take the narrative forward. I have written this earlier, and I write it again, seeing is not believing, reading SEEING is. Sounds awfully tame, but I assure you that you will not forget the book for a long, long time. Why forget, we must remember. That is what I feel.

I am awed. Living in the largest democracy in the world, I have long been disillusioned by the system, which never seems to work according to the citizen’s will and wish. We are controlled by habit, but there are times when we can and do stand together.

When the Emergency was clamped on our Sovereign Republic in 1975, it was the illiterate farmers, rickshaw pullers, barbers and the silent middle class that came up with a mandate that stunned not just the politicians, but us. We managed to rescue democracy, snatch it from the hands of the so called invincible Indira Gandhi. So who are today’s a politician in front of a seething, live democracy?

Recently we proved it yet again after the Mumbai Terror attacks. Politicians of all colors have been made to look comical, rightly so, and people seemed to realize that they actually had power over those politicians whom we had voted to power. And we gave full vent to our angst.

Returning to SEEING, here are some of the reviews that the book received.

‘A brilliant, cruelly ironic, surreal expose of what we think of as civil society.’ John Burnside, Scotland on Sunday.

‘Nothing I can remember reading tells me more, and with such arresting humor and simplicity, about the impostor of the times we live in.’ Independent

‘In this dense, dark and occasionally brutal book Saramago never forgets the satirist’s duty to be funny. A profound fable.’ New Statesman

‘A novel that says more about the days we are living in than any book I have read.’ Guardian


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Arundhati Roy

The God of Small Things

I first read Roy’s Booker Prize Winner, ‘The God of Small things’ in 1999 while undergoing the worst trauma of my life. Roy had a halo at the time, especially for us Keralites. No, this is not to say that we should look at things, especially fiction, through parochial eyes.

I read ‘The God of Small Things’ in what was later to be termed in a patchy manner due to the circumstances prevailing in my personal life at the time. It talked of a village in Kerala and used Malayalam words rampantly. There were the rivers, the ponds, the lotuses in full bloom, the pickles, childhood and everything else you would have encountered here in Kerala as a child, growing up in the sixties and seventies.

I was mesmerized with the book for sure, though I had read it in between huge gaps while going in and out of hospitals, which is surely not the way to read any book, leave alone a Booker Winner. But that is how it was.

I reread ‘The God of Small Things’ again last week. It took three days, but the worst part was that I grew impatient and wanted to know what actually happened and so I skipped paragraphs and moved on in this manner till the very end. I sighed. I am confused and unhappy. I do not want to ‘rejoin’ the Roy - bashing bandwagon, yet I will state that it is not as wonderful as I had thought it to be. As l said, l am confused and a little unhappy.

This happens with many books, it is not something that does not happen to others, especially with people like me who is reading and rereading books all the time, when not writing. There is no doubt on Roy’s magnificent plot and the way in which she has narrated it, stretching language till it doesn’t break.

Just before rereading Roy, I had been reading Jose Saramago’s ‘Seeing’. For days on end after that l felt as though l was living inside a bubble and it would burst, while showing me the real world for the first time. The grip that SEEING had on me is in a way all about what good books aught to do to a serious reader. The opening lines of Orhan Pamuk’s ‘The New World’ – l read a book one day and my whole life was changed – holds true for this transcendental work by Saramago.

It taught me that SEEING is not BELIEVING. Reading is.

I reread SEEING again and it still left me gaping, mesmerized, and roused beyond the usual levels of succor. I am madly hunting for his other works like ‘Blindness’, which l am told is a precursor to ‘Seeing’.

Just before reading ‘Seeing’, l went through Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s magnum opus, ‘Crime and Punishment’ for the nth time and believe me it moved me yet again, with its maxims on human behavior and its world vision.

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Aravinda Adiga

Just now I finished reading Aravind Adiga's Booker prize Winner, 'The White Tiger' and found it one of the most amazing read among the books I have been reading lately.

This one is a must for everyone who has even a spark of literature in their souls. The book is a complete antithesis of what other Indian Writing in English is all about. Each line sends a knife up your belly. It does not let you relax.

Amazingly brutal and completely unhypocritical.

The Bad Girl

The Bad Girl
Mario Vargas Llosa’s latest novel The Bad Girl is all bout multifaceted woman, practical to the T but endearing. It is also about Ricardo Somocurcio, who is in love with the Bad Girl. She appears in the novel in different names and disguises, taking immense risks while pursuing money and happiness.

The forty year old romance begins with both the protagonists at the tender age of fifteen. Ricardo falls in inextricable love with her, though she treats him with utter disregard and obvious cruelty. As a teenager, he falls in love with Lily, the Chilean Girl, who keeps wiping her past with her dangerous liaisons. Next. Ricardo meets her in France, where she appears as the enchanting Comrade Arlette, an activist en route to Cuba. They become lovers, albeit an icy and remote one, disappearing at her will. She resurfaces as Madame Robert Arnoux, the wife of a high ranking UNESCO official and then as Kurico, the mistress of sinister Japanese businessman. But however poorly The Bad Girl treats him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her.

The novel proceeds to end with a twist in the tale, throwing up some of the answers at Ricardo. What is it that is bad about the Bad Girl which makes her irresistible to Ricardo? Are the answers worth the reading? Surely not.

Llosa’s latest work is a parable kind of story, with the characters drawn in deep charcoal gray. The good and the bad gets mixed up in this tremendously readable novel, though the explicit sexual acts jar the reader at times.

I have by now read three works of Llosa and found one of them reader worthy – the biographical masterpiece, The Way to Paradise. This book is only a shadow of Mario Vargas Llosa. Llosa is a Latin American writer, born and brought up in poverty ridden Peru.

Teacher Man

Teacher Man
Just like the lines on paradise (If there is a paradise on earth, this is it!) is written for the incomparable beauty of Kashmir, the first dramatic lines of Pamuk’s The New Life, (I read a book and it changed my whole life), has indeed been written for Frank McCourt’s Trilogy.

When Angela’s Ashes came out in 1996, it became a huge hit and McCourt became an overnight sensation. The book is in the form of a memoir, recounting the author’s poverty ridden life in Limerick in Ireland. One would have thought that the recipe could not have been portrayed with such flair, unless it was a tear jerker. But McCourt wrote with an élan, looking at his miserable existence with sunny humor. The tragedy and the pathos of everyday life is portrayed in a language that has the stamp of unputdownability about it.

McCourt’s second book, ‘Tis is as absorbing, if not more. ‘Tis chronicles his life as a young man in New York. McCourt did not intend to write a trilogy, but after his first book turned out to be a hit, people started recognizing him on the streets of New York, they advised him to write a sequel to it, and then another one to chronicle his experiences of being a teacher. The third of the trilogy is aptly titled Teacher Man.

School life is eulogized by people later in their life, but a teacher’s life, and in New York at that, could at best be as dull as a paraplegic’s life, if not more so. McCourt made changes in his curriculum to make life easier for him and to escape the monotony of teaching adolescents not interested in the English language.

The irony is that Teacher man comes out as dull as McCourt’s teaching days were. Perhaps it was meant to be so. He does not delve into his personal life as much as he did in his earlier works, concentrating more on his hormone packed young students.

For a man whose one and only dream was to write just one book, McCourt has come a long way. If you have not read them, you have not read the best there is.

The New Life

ORHAN PAMUK

'I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.'

Orhan Pamuk's second major novel, The New Life begins as dramatically as do all his other novels. Sadly enough, that miracle does not happen with this 'book in a book.' It is written in the manner of a parable, and like all parables, it does not attain greatness. A good book is one which reminds the reader of the whole world. This one reminds you only of the existential angst of the double heroes, Osman and Nahit only. And at some point in time, of the anguish of Turkey.

Though most reviews including the blurbs say it is a novel about Identity, as all of Pamuk's novels broadly are, I would say, it is more about the effects of globalisation on young and vulnerable minds.

There are two central characters who undergo the same predicament and their tragic lives are traced against the winds of change that began to change societies all over the world. They see paradise opened up in front of their eyes, but to reach the same, they have to shed their old selves and metamorph themselves into a new life and new identity.

Broadly however, the book is about Turkey - a world torn between the absurd tragedy of its own past of caramels and Kerosene lamps and the new tragedy beckoning them with Hamburgers and Coca Cola. Even Lux soaps. The tug of war between the East and the West which characterises Turkey infuses this entire book. By the end, we are filled with the Turkey's restless, unrequited and unfulfilled love for that which was, and the progress that Turkey could never manage to achieve.

The protagonist, Osman a young and vulnerable 22 year old is ensnared into the new world through a book by Janan and her lover, Nahit, who is later found dead in an accident. Janan, along with the newly recruited Osman leave on a journey to nowhwere, cutting the cord of their past lives in the bargain. Osman's journey of self destruction lands him at the mansion of Dr. Fine, who is waging a lone battle against Western forces through his coterie of private detectives who kept a close watch on his only son before he fled the coupe. He happens to be the former lover of Janan.

The New Life is a Post modernist Parable in so far as it dels with the phenomenal exploration of identity and happiness. But it is the book which is given a magical importance. Later the book is described as one written by a person who himself does not have the confidence in what he extols. He could have been pursuaded to write the book by the CIA itself.

What is the book all about? Is it a new message by a new Prophet? Is it a revised and embellished Quran? In the poetic metaphor of a parable, it is not easy to find answers.

Pamuk's philosophical and lyrical style remains the same, though the joy of reading and the deeply mystifying sense of drama that his other works abound in, are missing in this book.

I have been enthralled by Orhan Pamuk. I have read all his major novels, including MY Name is Red, The Black Book, Snow and Istanbul. This book could be given the miss - except for its opening lines. Read those lines and be awed.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

MOHSIN HAMID

Mohsin Hamid's second novel, 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist', captures 'the recent episode of distrust between the East ant West'. (Kiran Desai) More than that, it explores the psyche of germinating fundamentalism in an educated, well placed Muslim youth - the genre that haunts and pulverise the minds of all modern and educated masses who pride themselves as being above all manner of parochialism and fanaticism.

The narrative is stunningly simple. A bearded Pakistani converses with an American in a downtown cafe in the buzzling city of Lahore. As the day progresses towards dusk and the darkness of the night, the story of the bearded young man comes out in a monologue. The American is a captive listener in what is a stunning portrayal of the schism that created the biggest divide in history - after the Inquisition - the terror strikes on the twin towers of WTC.

Changez, among the brightest and the best of the graduating class at Princeton University, is snapped up by Underwood Samson, an elite firm that specialises in valuation of companies ripe for acquisition. The symbolism of 'acquisition' is replete with insinuations. Parallel to the story of Changez's climbing the corporate ladder is his deep and passionate love for Erica, an all American girl, who is sadly still living in the past in a lost identity, and is prone to schizophrenia.
After 9/11 Changez's identity is also changing, in a seismic shift as well, 'unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power and perhaps even love.'

Till the end, the identity of the American is not revealed. Mohsin Hamid writes in a rivetting style, building up an eerie suspense and controlled irony. It is a tale of love and hatred in unequal measure, though there is a constant balancing of the political with the personal. 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist', although a complex portraiture, does not delve deep into the workings of the mind in such an altruistic situation. Yet, it is a reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling, the breakdown of communication and religious intolerance.

Mohsin Hamid grew up in Lahore, Pakistan and attended Princeton University and the Harvard Law School. His first novel, 'Moth Smoke' was described as a 'brisk, absorbing' novel. He writes about world politics from a Muslim point of view.

Tailpiece - There are some parts in the otherwise well written novel that are jarring. After the mammoth tragedy that takes place on 9/11, the author does not seem to notice the larger tragedy - of lost human lives - instead he is shown to be paranoid about his lady love, although the way in which the author describes the spontaneous reaction of Changez while watching on television the collapse of the WTO twin towers is magically remniscent of most viewers of the scene, outside of America. But as far as his observations of India are concerned, as an agressor - neighbor, who is bent on overtaking Pakistan seem childish. At one one point, Hamid questions the arrogance of the American army fighting a war on terror on the Pakistan soil, of not retaliating to India, though they, Pakistan and America are fighting on the same side! Indian readers would guffaw on this one, for sure.

Two Paradises

The Way to Paradise
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

As soon as my eyes fell on the cover of Llosa's 'The Way to Paradise', I knew I had to read it and read it fast. The cover photograph showed Paul Gauguin's master piece painting 'Manao Tupapao' - The Spirit of the Dead Witches. More surprises were in store for me - the novel turned out to be biographical in nature - featuring Paul Gauguin, Post Impressionistic Painter and of Flora Tristan, his grandmother. A little research and it rather stunned me to realise that the dates, paintings and the the names of characters mentioned were true to a T. Even then Llosa's Docu-novel is more fiction than real. As I read the book, I could think of nothing better to describe it than those oft quoted lines, Life is stranger than fiction and at times, truly Fiction is sranger than Life.

The two protagonists, Flora Tristan and Paul Gauguin, both in search of their own Paradises. Paradises so different that time seems suspended between the travails of the two. The novel alternates between the two in a unique style, which I have not read so far - the narrative, powerful and turbulent - seems to zig- zag between the two.
Flora Tristan embarked on a tour of France in 1844 to compaign for worker's and women's rights. Her grandson, Paul Gauguin set sail for Tahiti in 1891, determined to escape from civilisation and seek inspiration for his primitive masterpieces. Flora is the illegitimate child of a a wealthy Peruvian father and French mother. Flora grows up in utter poverty and after fleeing a brutal husband, journeys to Peru to demand her inheritance, which she is denied. On her return she makes a name and space for herself as a writer and champion of the depraved and the dispossessed. Flora's arduous journey to achieve her goal is breathtaking and stupendous in its very inception. She tours the vast countrysides of France to recruit members for her Worker's Union.
On the other side, there is Paul Gauguin whose journey brings him to Tahiti, and to an entirely different way of life. He has abandoned a cushy bourgeosie job as a stock broker at Paris Stock Exchange, though he remembers his mother Alina and daughter of the same name. Alina, his mother was brutally raped by her own father to avenge Flora Tristan's escape from the hell she underwent in her marriage. Gauguin in his search for Paradise, looses all his civiity but sruggles against poverty, syphilis and the stifling forces of French Colonialism, though he has his pick of teenaged Tahitian lovers. As a profligate painter, using vibrant colors, Paul paints some of his greatest masterpieces.
Both Flora and Paul are are fired by ambition and determinedly pursue greatness in the face of illness, death and destructive forces. But there the comparison ends. Paul's degenerate life throws up no vision, though he is a profligate painter who achieved fame after his death in 1903. Flora Tritan's sstory looms in front of the reader as the penultimate story of a born fighter in search of an impossible dream and and an unimaginable paradise.
Llosa's work is a rare study in passion, ambition and the determined pursuit of greatness. This work shows that Llosa is the contemporary genius and a master story teller.

Earlier I had not got a chance to read 'Lust for Life' based on the life of Vincent Van Gogh. In Paradise, there are several references to Van Gogh, the mutilation at Arles ( Van Gogh had cut off a portion of his ears and presented it to his favorite prostitute as paynent ) and his suicide later by shooting himself. Gauguin calls Van Gogh, the mad Dutchman. We call him the Mad Genius. In the same vein, Gauguin is referred to as the original Western savage.

I am left stunned at the mastery of Llosa - the desriptive and knowledge power that is packed into every line of the book. Every point being well researched or is it perhaps intuition that takes over when a writer of such caliber puts pen to paper? The four stages of Syphilis described in meticulous detail, the daring of Flora as she battles for life with a bullet lodged in her feeble chest, her hatred of men and sex, her trysts with lesbianism as also Paul's encounter with homosexuality - every color is etched on to the canvas with an unwavering pen.

A great work. A must read.

Albert Camus

I read Camus' 'The Plague' years back as an undergraduate. As I had read Camus' much aclaimed novel, 'The Outsider' earlier, and not having been impressed with the same, I was in two minds about reading the same. But after reading the first two pages, I could not put it aside, literally. I was eerily entranced by the unfolding saga of a city in the grips of plague. Though the existential novel is written in a realistic vein, it was meant to be a metaphysical and surreal experience.
I was neither moved to tears or mesmerised by the actual beaty of narration. The sheer scenario left me spellbound.
At the time I was unaware of the nihilistic view of the world that Camus, Nietzhe, Sartre, Jenet etc presented in their literary works, I could not disagree with them either. If today literature is all about looking ahead, rejecting hopelessness and nihilistic tendencies altogether, it used to be the reigning romance of the seventies. Even then I would rate 'The Plague' as one of the 1000 books that one must read in one's lifetime.

Snow

I recently read Pamuk's Snow. As the blurbs rightly pointed out, Snow is essential reading for our times. Snow is eerily prescient, both in its analyses of fundamentalism as well as the conflicts arising out of Westernization. It catches the pulse of a nation, Turkey, in eternal transit.It takes us on an in depth tour of the divided, hopeful, desolate and mystifying Turkish soul.
Among all his novels, Snow is closest to realism, but told in an unconventional and sardonoic manner. It is a political allegory, stitched around a melancholy poet cum jounalist. During a week's stay in a small, provincial town of Turkey, Ka the Hero comes up against the shocking suicides of young girls, referred to sardonically as the head scarf girls. The thing that sends shock waves and frightens Ka is the manner in which these girls had killed themselves - abruptly, without ritual or warning, in the midst of their everyday routine of life. These girls maintain that their arcane beliefs need not be challenged with rationale. Also that men may have several means of protest, but women have none - except to die. It is against the backdrop of such a decaying city reeling under the onslaught of the crisis of identity, that love blooms.
It is a tragic love story, all the more so because they are a departure from Pamuk's earlier heroines who were idealised objects of desire as Shekure is in My Name is Red, and Ruya is In The Black Book. The female characters in Snow are strong and hold opinions of their own and they are not willing to trade it for their own pleasure. They have responsiblities from which they do not want to escape, which is what men do, faced with black circumstances like these.
There are flashes of black comedy as also all the other elements that make Pamuk what he is. It is a thrilling and dark journey into the all too familiar Pamuk territory - of mysterious deaths, innovative killings, where the murderer talks his mind to the to be murdered, a format Pamuk has patented in Red. It is also about faith, identity, betrayal and solitude.
In the final act, stright out of a Brechtian play, infact a play inside a play, the leader of the head scarf girl bares her hair and the editor of the small time newspaper who has employed Kar in the first place, actually kills himself on stage, while the audience who do not understand the black humour of it gapes and is then faced with gunfire and bombs. It is a staged coup that has been enacted on stage. Take the case of the unusual character of the editor who writes the story even before it happens. I was reminded of an MT film with Mammtty as the hero when he, a newspaperman, in the clutches of a mortal sickness,stumbles upon his own obituary written neatly and readied for publication.
Ka the outsider leaves the Turkey without realising his dream of taking Ipek, his former girlfriend to Germany. His dreams of living with Ipek away from Turkey is dashed to the ground by Ipek's own denial os self abettment. I shall not leave Turkey or my old father for the sake of my safety and happiness - that is her final argument. There the tragedy sets in.
Snow is also the most contemporary novel of Pamuk, nearer to The New Life which is a commentary against the ills of globalisation.
Like I said at the beginning, Snow is essential reading of our times. Check it out.

Medical Ignorances

Kerala is supposed to be the most literate state in India, so much so that its health standards, maternal mortality, social equality etc are considered on par with the First World. But when it comes to common fallacies regarding sickness, lots of superstitions abound. The commonest fallacy is that of catching a cold after having been in the rain for a few minutes, which could actually cause you no harm, especially to people who take bath twice a day. Common cold as we all know is caused by a virus and virus is present everywhere. When someone with a cold virus sneezes, he releases millions of the virus and if one is standing near to the person in a closed environment like a bus, lift etc. the chances of him catching cold is multiplied. Sure enough, the moisture in the air due to rain makes for an easy carrier for germs and viruses. Other than that rain is definitely not to be blamed.