The Red Haired Woman (by Orhan Pamuk)

 

                    

Pamuk is obsessed with colours and colour names, I am obsessed with Pamuk's writing.

This novel deals with the story of a young boy (Cem) whose father has abandoned him and his mother without any plausible explanation. Is it his political leanings or one of his many mistresses that takes him away from the family? The young boy is struggling to come to terms with the change is his lifestyle when he and his mother are abandoned without any solid financial means. Cem spends the rest of his life – consciously or unconsciously searching for a father figure in his life. But when in his attempt to earn  money for his further education, he turns into an apprentice for an old well digger,  he does come across such a figure -  it is his turn now to abandon the old man. It feels like he is seeking revenge from life for being abandoned by abandoning the old man at his most vulnerable stage.  And how does he resolve this guilt that he carries for the rest of his life?  As the boy Cem grows up in and around Pamuk’s romantic Istanbul, going through college and life in general, he turns into a young man obsessed with the two stories – one of Homer’s Oedipus – where Oedipus who is abandoned by his father at birth, later unknowingly kills his father and marries his own mother to even go ahead and have children with her. Ultimately when he realizes what he has done, he is horrified at his own actions eventually kills himself. The second story is of Rustom and Sohrab – another poignant father son saga in which the father and son who have been separated early on in life finally meet in a fierce duel – ignorant of their relation to each other - the son is brutally killed by the father. The father is filled with remorse when he realizes what he has done but it is too late.  The protagonist Cem is consumed by these tales of tormented father son relationships as his own psyche gets drowned in the burden of guilt and anger. The presence of the mysterious red-haired woman throughout the novel adds intrigue to this fascinating tale. A constant tenor in the novel seeks to unravel the identity of the red-haired woman – to find out who she is and what role does she have in the making and unmaking of the protagonist’s life. Her connection to the lives of Cem, Cem’s father, the father like figure of the well digger and ultimately Cem’ s son runs through the novel like an unseen thread – not always smooth but knotted at times yet unbroken.

The novel explores the Oedipean father-mother-son archetype in a deep narrative that the reader can easily drown in. Pamuk’s inimitable style of creating intrigue and mystery makes this a yet another fascinating tale from this modern master of storytelling. This one deserves a neat 4/5.

Sea of Poppies ( Amitav Ghosh)

 

 

                           

If you are looking for a light, fun read to lighten up your mood and freshen up your weekend, then do not read this book. A gripping and engrossing tale whose protagonist is a ship sailing in the Ganga towards the Indian ocean to go to the land of Mareech (Malaysia). Opium. A prince. An addict. A chamar. A farmer’s wife. A French missy born in India and bought up on a diet of Bengali by her wet nurse. A young wanna-be lascar lad. A convict.  A hideaway pirate. A carpenter-turned-seaman Black American. An English officer. A shrewd money lender in search of moksha. White. Black. Indian. British. Hindu. Brahmin. Muslim. Bengali. American. Parsi-Chinese. Each one as different from the other. Each one from a different part of the world. True identities. Assumed identities. Various events – some likely some unlikely bring these people in close proximity to each other. What are the circumstances that intertwine the lives of such a motley of individuals on the eastern coast of India?

In the first book of his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh doesn’t disappoint. The opium trade, the atrocities of the British Raj, the plight of the poor farmers, the curse of poverty and illiteracy, the hunger for power – each of these forms an important element in the tapestry of this beautifully woven narrative. The novel takes you to sea, slow and languid at times, turbulent at other just like the huge ship Ibis that sails in the Ganga towards the Bay of Bengal and further.  Ghosh has created a gripping narrative of a cultural potpourri which is colourful and quite tantalizing at times. An extremely well researched novel, freely interspersedl with desi dialects and the ‘firang slang’  which brings to the reader Bengal  of the mid-nineteenth century  makes for an intense read.

My Struggle Book 1

A Death in the Family 

                    -Karl Ove Knausgard

If someone had told me something about the style of the author earlier, I might have not picked up this book. Thankfully, when I started reading Knausgard, all I knew was that its a series of 6 novels in an autobiographical format and the writing w
as damn good. I picked it up tentatively with the thought that if I do not enjoy it or understand it, my next read is ready. Once I started reading however, i was pulled into the story and the writing style. There's so much the author wants to say...he says it in as many words. It feels like Knausgard is letting you peep in through the window of his house to see all that is happening inside right from the drawing room, the kitchen, the TV room ...including the bathrooms at times. In the same way, he is letting you peep into the window of his mind, allowing you to see all the thoughts..not just thoughts but feelings going on in his mind in an unfiltered form. He lays himself bare to the reader in an extremely raw form - and as a reader one gets so engrossed in his narration that there is no need left to judge him or his feelings and thoughts. On the contrary the reader becomes a part of his everyday life, a companion, living his life with him. That a most mundane narration of everyday life can turn into an engrossing read kept surprising me at moments in between the book. And yet at the end of it all, what the author is doing is searching for his silence through the medium of words. As for me, My struggle Book 2 is already on its way through Amazon.

Virginia Woolf

 

I am coming to the end of the third book by Virginia Woolf. My attempt was to write a review of To the Lighthouse – but as I began typing away at the keys on the keyboard- I realised that I do not intend to write about the book – but my thoughts are more about woolf. Before reading this book, I had already  read her essay “ A room of one’s own” as well as her most famous “Mrs. Dalloway”. Woolf’s protagonists are often women – in my eyes, they just happen to be. They could have been men. That’s exactly my sentiment about woolf. She is a woman. She could have been a man. It wouldn’t make a difference. I think that was her pathos- she could slip into both genders very easily – gender didn’t matter to her- personalities did-people did. This didn’t bode very well for early 20th century Europe where roles were defined strongly by genders. She was not the conventional woman of her times by any standards. She didn’t want to be a man either. That’s why possibly she was able to love a man as well as a woman with equal intimacy. Gender didn’t matter to her – love did. She was just what she was- an intelligent, thinking, deeply sensitive human being with lots and lots of beautiful thoughts and images in her mind which came out through her words – never deeply enough.

As one reads her books, one is moved by her attempt to pour out the beauty she feels in her heart and soul onto paper. It was so deep that I feel she never managed to put it completely in words on paper. The influence of the French writer Marcel Proust is very telling on her works. She was an ardent admirer of Proust’s works. One wonders whether their personal struggles with their respective sexual orientations [proust was known to be a  homo-sexual while woolf was a bisexual – she is said to have had an intimate relationship with fellow author Vita Sackville West while being much married to Leonardo Woolf.  Here’s what she had to say about Proust’s writings “Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures—there’s something sexual in it—that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. “It’s almost like she found a kindred soul in Proust and some of his love for beauty of art and language got added to hers.

“Books are the mirrors of the soul” [Between the Acts – Virginia Woolf] A meditation on her writings makes it very apparent that there was a lot more from where it came. She was born far ahead of her times- actually no..i need to correct myself. She could have been born at any time and as any gender. Her thoughts and ideas hold good for all times – for all genders. Today a lot of her work is classified as feminist – in her times it was classified as radical- I firmly believe she didn’t mean to be both. Her thoughts and beliefs just were. She did not want to be radical. She did not try to be feminist. She felt whatever she wrote, she wrote whatever she felt.

Woolf’s suicide bothers me. She had a history of mental illness (she was institutionalised a few times) as well as two attempted suicides before succumbing to the third one. She is said to walked into the sea with her pockets filled with stones. As one of her diary entry states “ I am in a mood to dissolve in the sky”, she decided to dissolve her self in the water. Sometimes I wonder, did she really need the stones to drown her? The pathos that she carried in terms of unresolved thoughts and emotions, the burden of words not said nor written down, the “shadows of the universe” that she carried under her skin- would not the unbearable weight of all this been enough to drown her?

The Mountains Sing

 

                                     

  The Mountains Sing (Author : Nguyen Phan Que Mai)

 

“No, my mother died when I was ten. She was a Corps diplomat and was murdered trying to negotiate a truce with the enemy.”
“The enemy in that war you fought in?”
“Yes. It’s why I joined up. I was young and naïve and somehow thought I could avenge her death.”
“You couldn’t because you lost the war?”
“No, we won – but there’s no vengeance to be found in war. Turns out, it doesn’t work that way.”
― Felicia Watson, The Risks of Dead Reckoning

 

War has never been a solution to anything yet somehow, world over, across the ages that’s what men have turned to in their hunger for power. Each war, whether won or lost extracts a heavy price from those fighting it. We like to portray stories of bravery, valour, sacrifice and victory, making a war sound a noble cause in the name of the motherland. Deep hidden are stories of horror, loot, rape, murder, loss and unspeakable grief. Young lives gone too soon, brutally. Young men forced to draft against their and their family’s will, younger generation misled by false propaganda depending on the whims and fancies of those in power, using brutal force on its own citizens and those of the so-called enemies – all these are devices used by the power hungry to ensure that their power remains intact.

The book in reference – The mountains sing – is the author’s debut novel and tells the story of a family whose four generations are ravaged by the Vietnam War in the two decades from 1955-1975. What is narrated as a story of one family is clearly the reality for a lot of families whose lives have been ravaged by war across the world.

The novel begins with the life of two protagonists – an elderly woman who is a school teacher and her young granddaughter who is her responsibility while the rest of her able children – her two sons, her daughter and her son in law are on the battle field – fighting against the South Vietnamese and American troops. Bomb attacks, rushing for safety in bomb shelters, black outs and starvation are an everyday part of their life.

As the novel progresses, we get to hear the complete story of the Tran family who began life as wealthy landowners in the fifties. They have earned their wealth through sheer hard work and honest labour- a progressive family that values education for its boys and girls along with the value of hard work and believes in sharing their wealth. Everything is destroyed when the Land Reforms Act blindly states that every wealthy farmer is an exploiter and their land needs to be confiscated and distributed among the poor. Not to stop at that, the authorities also have a target number of landowners to be tortured and killed to prove their adherence to the law. This forces the matriarch of the Tran family to escape with her young children to the capital city of Ha Noi.

The story talks about her and her children’s life as they fight for survival and growth in a war ravaged country. It talks about those who go out and fight on the battle field, those who stay back and wait for their loved ones to come home, it talks about those who run away and escape to so called greener pastures. It talks about ghosts that haunt all of the above. It also gives us a window into the language and culture of Vietnam. The use of proverbs in the regular conversation adds a very poetic touch to the lovely prose

The author, a Vietnamese poet, has lived herself through this turbulent and painful times and depicts the pathos of the war in a raw and moving manner. She has chosen to write this in English which is for her an acquired language but in no way disappoints.

Books read in 2021

 Books I read in 2021 

1) The Silent Patient – Alex Miachaelides

2) The Soul of A woman – Isabel Allende

3) Zaadazadti – Vishwas Patil (Marathi)

4) Time Regained – Marcel Proust

5) The Captive and The Fugitive – Marcel Proust

6) Sodom and Gomorrah – Marcel Proust

7) Monsieur Proust – Celeste Albaret

8) Sun After Dark – Pico Iyer

9) The Man Within My Head – Pico Iyer

10) Disgrace – J M Coetzee

11) Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Doestoevsky

12) Dork – The incredible adventures of Robin (Einstein)Varghese- Sidin Vadukut

13) Hindu – Bhalchandra Nemade (Marathi)

14) Trial By Silence – Perumal Murugan

15) Burning Bright – Tracy Chevalier

16) Silas Marner – George Eliot

17) Nausea – Jean Paul Sartre

18) The Lady and the Monk – Pico Iyer

                                                                                                                

19) From the Holy Mountain – William Dalrymple

20) The Dragons of Eden – Carl Sagan

21) The Surrender Experiment – Miachel Singer

22) When we were Orphans – Kazuo Ishiguro

23) I am David – Anne Holm

24) The Fellowship of the Ring – J R R Tolkien

25) The Two Towers – J R R Tolkien

26) Germinal – Emile Zola

27) Spy Stories- Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott Clark

28) The Stationery Shop of Tehran- Marjan Kamali

29) No One writes to the Colonel- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

30) Em and the Big Hoom – Jerry Pinto

 Em and the Big Hoom

-          By Jerry Pinto

 

“ And what does mental health mean in a nation that wants an injection to put it back on its feet next morning?”

A mother who loves you to no end also matter of factly tells you that her mental illness “tap” began to drip the day you were born. Does that hurt!

Bipolar disorder. Schizophrenia. Nervous Disorder. Nerves. Nervous breakdown. Mental disorder. Depression. Sometimes just stark mad. All words from our rational vocabulary that we like to enrich ourselves with.

How is it to live with a person who helplessly goes through this? I know it first hand, having lived in the same house with my aunt for 15 years who, at that point of time as we knew it, used to have nervous breakdowns. The word ‘schizophrenia’ entered my vocabulary at least 10 years later. It used to be very confusing and scary at times, we kids would enter the house on tip toe when we knew she had had one of her ‘attacks’ Yet, it was easy to dissociate. An aunt is not a mother, right? In the book, Em and the Big Hoom, narrates the story like it is the story of a friend living next door. It is not fiction. It could be the story of anyone you and I know..maybe the story of my own cousin. For me, in certain ways it was my childhood relieved.

Narrated as a  story of a Goan Catholic family that has now settled in Mahim, Pinto takes us through the life of a young boy growing up in the 70s Mumbai in a family of four- his depressive mother, his stoic father and an elder sister who is as helpless as he is. How does one accept that a parent is not whole. How does a child end up learning to  parent his own parent early in life? Can the saddest moments of our life bring us joy? Can the deepest secrets of our life be held in the lightest manner? Can that which drowns us to the darkest of despair lift us to the heights of happiness? All that this amazing text does is leave you with questions…and more questions! Answers? They are yours to discover. Or you may ask more questions.

 A profound story which surprisingly made a light read- I finished the 235 page novel in a single day over a Mumbai – Bangalore flight (inclusive of waiting period at the airport). I don’t usually say this of all books I read – but this one is a must read for everyone.