why do we like horrible movies?

I have spent at least the past three weeks being bothered by this. There is no easy answer. 

I shall first give you context. When I was sick, I watched a lot of things on TV. Initially, I thought I would use this time productively, catch up on some good reading, all the TV shows I've been putting off and so on. 

Instead, I discovered a new love for cheesy crappy, horrible telugu movies. I FF-ed through most of the violence and music, but the fact is that it is a legitimately new love. It bothers me that I find these films amusing, and that I was entertained by chauvinistic, violent, sexist, thoroughly feudal plot-lines. It bothers me that slapping Brahmanandam is what passes off for humour. (Dookudu, anyone?) I do have standards though. I discovered through trial-and-error that some films are too bad even for my taste. (R.. Rajkumar, for example). 

I write about this today because I have reached a breaking point. I watched Dhoom 3 twice. Twice. And I will recommend it to anyone who wants to watch it. Happily.

One of the explanations I heard for why we like horrible movies is that we are socialized into it. It is an explanation I like, but can't prescribe. We grew up to the steadily deteriorating plots of Chiranjeevi and Balakrishna. As children, our parents let us like their songs and watch their films. How did we end up at nearly every hero marrying his maradalu and fighting for his family honour (any Prabhas, Ravi Teja, Pawan Kalyan film)? We like that these men can kill hundreds and talk about why not killing is a good quality to have in men. We like that their idea of recreation is being aloof from women, as some sort of power trip. But I see these problems with these films and like them anyway (Attarintiki Daaredi? Best mainstream Telugu film of the year, imho). 

The thing is, I don't necessarily need films to have any of these elements (Godavari!! which is NOT a horrible film). I love films that aren't like this at all more. Which doesn't take away from the fact that I genuinely like horrible films. 

So I seek another explanation. 

Why did I like Dhoom 3? Because Aamir Khan is invincible, even in death. Because it's emotionally stupid, and has you rooting for a character. Because its "brilliant" moments are crazy. Because it is earnest and cute, and really the kind of movie I want to watch when I need to be cheered up. I'm not saying leave-your-brain-at-home. You don't have to. I like it because it's stupid and I find it silly because I like bad movies. Because he has a tush I want to slap. Especially when it is in the middle of the screen. (Is slapping someone's butt also something we like to enjoy because of bad Telugu movies? I don't know. Do we learn to sexualize from how we see sexualization? I don't know!!)

All these horrible Telugu and Tamil films are now being made in Hindi too, so obviously there is an audience for films that think like this. Films like Chennai Express, Rowdy Rathore or any Sonakshi Sinha film really are either remakes or being written along these lines. Whether as satire or as films that are meant to honestly be like this, it is a disturbing phenomenon. I don't want to think that these films are getting produced over and over again because that's what people are like. I only say this because even I enjoy some of them, and I can't get over the fact that I do. 

Why do we like horrible movies?

tigana and last light of the sun

by Guy Gavriel Kay

Sometimes, I have trouble thinking of Guy Gavriel Kay's work as fantasy. I suppose it is warranted, considering how rich it is in its historical research. 

I read Tigana last month, and was thoroughly impressed by it. Almost every single review I have read makes a mention of its size, but not once through the book did I feel like I was reading a really large book. (It might have something to do with reading it as an ebook). I say this because of how crisp the writing was. I don't think there is a single sentence in the whole book that doesn't have to be there. It's a story that tells itself through how it is structured, adding layer upon layer to every tale told. 

I finished reading Last Light of the Sun today, and while this book isn't as large as Tigana is, it is engaging and thorough as Tigana. Again, not a single sentence out of place, and a story whose structure is made for marveling at. 

The most amazing thing about Kay is how he writes characters you always want to root for. In both books, he tells a story from several opposing points of view, and makes you love every person in the story. It takes real skill to pull something of such complexity off, and Kay does it. 

The other amazing thing about both books is how he tells a story that is set in a context he has researched extensively, but at no point does the story take a backseat to the research itself. One could treat it as an entirely imagined universe, and not miss anything (or if I did, I didn't really feel too bad about it).  

One of the most interesting authors I've read all year, for sure. 

Edit: Forgot to add, Tigana is absolutely completely heart breaking. THAT has to be in every review.

sick reading

I've spent the past six weeks at home, mostly in bed. (Before you ask, I am entirely well now. There was never anything to worry about). This post contains my brief observations about reading while sick.

1. When one is really unwell, reading is better time pass than watching television. This has something to do with the light hurting your constantly sleepy eyes, I think.

2. Contrary to what I used to think, even if one is doing absolutely nothing all day for weeks, it is difficult to spend much of that time productively. For me, this was because all I really wanted to do was sleep. (For the first couple of weeks, even listening to music was tiring. Cue - something profound about how much we take our energy for these things for granted).

3. When one is unwell, one wants to read crap. That's right. I didn't want to focus. I didn't want to think or worry or feel for characters or admire clever writing. I wanted to read crap. So what I appreciated the most is the Philippa Gregory book. And the Mills and Boons book.

3.1 When I felt horrible about what I was reading, I read a LOT of Terry Pratchett. I went through nearly my entire collection. It definitely made me feel better. And then I read every single thing Kate Griffin ever wrote (as Kate Griffin). Which completely erased my guilt while also making me happy.

4. Having access to other people's Kindle accounts feels like being in a candy store where everything is free. (This observation is also applicable to non-sick people).

5. Better than reading is watching Prabhas films. I am entirely serious.

book!

FULL WHOLE BOOK!

whee!

(It took me missing three whole deadlines to give up on looking at my laptop and read the first thing I got my hands on. Give it up for The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna!)

rereading

it's that time of the year again, ladies and gentlemen.

i'm rereading fantasy.

until last year, i spent my rereading fantasy time secretly and guiltily reading wheel of time. now, since that is pointless and patrick rothfuss is only two books long and abercrombie is only three and i'm not exactly sure about jim butcher and i have none of my jasper ffordes with me in delhi (and i'll probably go jump somewhere before i reread game of thrones), i'm looking for new and awesome fantasy things to read.

suggestions are welcome.

xo

a cool dark place/em and the big hoom

(A Cool Dark Place by Supriya Dravid; Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto)

I just finished reading A Cool Dark Place. I bought it on one end of a flight journey in the airport bookshop, and finished it by the time my taxi pulled into the gate.

What is a book with only beauty? I don't know, really. It may not be a good thing. Because make no mistake, A Cool Dark Place is beautiful. It is made purely of emotion, it seemed to me. How can characters who are supposed to be so empty be people so full of life? She does so many things right: so many characters, so many moments, so much love, so much brokenness. Such poetry in so many places, so flawlessly.

But I have to ask, how much is too much? I ask this as a reader averse to books that carry too much emotion to begin with. (So this might not be the case for a non-loony reader).

For example, this is one of the first couple of sentences in the book that I thought "wow" about  - "For a long time before my father ended his life, he'd hidden himself in the darkness. So my mother had hidden there with him, in the forlorn shadow of his helium heart, in the never-ending nuclear light, under sunken iron beds and love-sewn quilts. I think she hoped her Olympic tolerance would help him may his way back to the living, and destroy the lonely world, the Prozac paradise he had cocooned himself in." But I read it again, rolling the words in my mouth, and I wasn't sure if I knew what I thought of it.

For a long time before my father ended his life, he'd hidden himself in the darkness. So my mother had hidden there with him, in the forlorn shadow of his helium heart, in the never-ending nuclear light, under sunken iron beds and love-sewn quilts. I think she hoped her Olympic tolerance would help him map his way back to the living, and destroy the lonely world, the Prozac paradise he had cocooned himself in.

I'll tell you what this book makes me want to do the most: It makes me want to write a belated review of Em and the Big Hoom. Apart from the fact that both of these books are about broken families trying to grapple with their darknesses, there are two reasons I want to write about Em and the Big Hoom instead. I probably shouldn't compare (so I'm going to try my best not to) but while I was reading, it was all I could do.  

The first is how both of them deal with similarly rebellious, off the path love stories. The second is that when I imagined Gravy, I could only think of him as the Big Hoom: holding the world together with his strength and love.

About halfway through the book, this book made me want to also write a belated review of Em and the Big Hoom.

Apart from the fact that both of these books are about broken families trying to grapple with their darknesses, there are two reasons I want to write about Em and the Big Hoom along with this.

The first is how both of them deal with similarly rebellious, off the path love stories.The second is that when I imagined Gravy, I could only think of him as the Big Hoom: holding the world together with his strength and love.

Both of them write of a disparate world in which they fit and don't with at the same time. In both their worlds, we constantly make obscure references to poets and literary geniuses in our daily lives, find pasts and futures that we can only imagine. 

What Pinto managed to do for me is this: He was convincing of a universe in which a boy lives with a mother who's not all there. He's convincing of their triumphs and their depression, he makes us believe in the times in between. I guess what I am trying to say is this - he gives us context. He gives us quirks of language, he gives us cultures, he gives us conflict.

Dravid, on the other hand, who writes mad characters with booming laughter, doesn't quite cut that. 

She gives us tiny hints about where these people are coming from, of course - the bobbing up and down of a priest conducting a funeral, the book of Marathi short stories, names of places: Madras, Delhi, Gokarna. 

She does little else to moor her characters in any sort of context. Not a time or a place, not a reference I can place. This would not have been disconcerting to me if not for all the other that I could. (For example, a "part-Gatsby, part-Hemingway" man who runs away regularly to Europe for business; him throwing regular Lurhmann-like Gatsby-ian parties in the middle of Madras - I can imagine it, but I'm not convinced by this madness or this alcoholic, opiate, (Prozaic?) universe.)

But the real question, I suppose, is whether she means for us to be at all. These details are meant to be lost in the cobwebs of old chandeliers and jenga-like three storeyed houses with plastic life-size Ambassadors. And while I see what she is trying to do, I don't know if it works for me completely. 

So I have to ask again: how much beauty is too much? Because there may be such a thing as too much.


**

Is there Prozac in India? I always thought of it as an American thing till now.

oops

just went a month without finishing a book.

good time for a vacation!

bleh

rumi is the best poetry to read when writing anything.

rumi is the best poetry to read when agonizing over every line of poetry one is editing from a year ago.

rumi is the best poetry to read to get into the writing mood.

rumi is the best poetry to read when one is thinking about melancholy, myth and language. 

rumi is the worst poetry to read as an ebook.

so tell me, who the fuck took my fat rumi book and didn't give it back?

the book thief

by markus zusak

when i finished reading this book, i decided i wouldn't write about it. or read it again. i just don't want to revisit the memory of the book in any way, unless i want to give myself another good cry. because i was actually sobbing by the end of it. actual sobs. 

there is an undefined moment while you are reading something in which what you are reading stops being words and sentences. from that moment onwards, the book is an experience: sights, sounds, smells, voices in your head. 

in a book as intense and emotionally overwhelming as zusak's book thief, the whole book becomes feeling. from the very beginning, you are feeling colours, beasts of skies, cold cold death. so i look at it now in my bookshelf, and i can only see a room full of bookshelves in nazi germany. i see the book thief, and i know exactly what she went through. and it is for this reason that i don't want it again. it's a great book, but the kind of greatness that i don't have space for in my own tangled emotions. it's the kind of greatness i'd rather stow away, like parts of your childhood you don't know happened because they are too cruel for you to remember.

so instead of writing about the content of the book (which i actually just did, but we'll pretend i didn't) i just want to register two points of surprise: one, that i've had this book on hold for so long. it's not so surprising considering i've been putting off anything but fantasy all this while, but it's surprising considering the (deceptive) simplicity of the narration and the fact that it was on the nyt bestsellers list for some years. two, that it's been listed as young adult fiction. i can see why, but i really sort of can't.

cross posted - ocean at the end of the lane

crossposted from here: c. pindimiriyam

by Neil Gaiman

My least favorite thing about this book is that it has turned Neil Gaiman into a pop star. In my mind, he went from being indie and poor to a stadium-concert-level rockstar and it's annoying the hell out of me. </snob> (I know perfectly well that he was pretty famous even before this book. Psh.) My most favorite thing about this book is that it deals with one of the most interesting contradictions; of the magicness of magic.

Most good fantasy deals with it in one way or the other: that it exists, and people who don't know this are just not cool enough to be in on it; or that it is so in your face that it's not really magic anymore. Neil Gaiman takes a third route with his latest.

He sets it up by telling his story as a flashback. An adult is visiting the town he grew up in, walks to the end of the lane where his best friend used to live, meets her mother and gets talking. As he is talking, he is allowed to remember what really/"really" happened to them as children. By the middle of the book, you know why it's a Neil Gaiman book.

You know it because he has expertly managed to trick you into assuming that he is telling the first kind of fantasy story (in which you only know about magic because you're that cool) and then suddenly makes the switch into the second kind of fantasy story (in which everything is so magical anyway that it's not really magic anymore).

About three quarters in, you have no idea what you're dealing with. You don't know what sort of world this is set in, you don't know if you're meant to know, you don't know if it's just the delirium of a man at a funeral (although, if we're guessing, somebody's surely on something.) But the truth is, you're so into the magic of the book itself that you don't want to think of it in any other way. At least, that's the way it was for me.

He lays out this first contradiction alongside the adult/child contradiction in the flashback. What the adult assumes, a child questions. What the child knows, the adult is undecided. This is important in this context, because most of us have it all the time. You are taught to demagick yourself as you grow up. You start to see the world differently. The way you saw it as a child is either forgotten or dismissed. You never once think like that again. (I'm not even slightly comparing, but the best set of books that brings out this contradiction is Pullman's His Dark Materials.)

So read it, and tell me what you think!

THIS.

A Softer World's 1000th comic, and HOW.

Oh Joey Comeau and Emily Horne, how you sing to me.
How one day if I write like this, I'd be happy.
How.

"I miss something I have never known."

Sigh. *purrs*

yeahisawthatalready

For the past many months, my obsession with wanting to write consistently, daily and well has resulted in my reading stuff* on the internet like a mad person. What I have learnt from this is: the internet is unfathomably vast. Its vastness is something you cannot really fathom at all. It is so vast, your power to fathom anything at all just falls incredibly short. When I was much younger, I was once told that anything you could possibly conceive of was already there on the internet. If you dig deep enough, you'll find little crevices or caves in which people discuss/believe in the most mindblowing of things. (The thing that has managed to blow my mind the most in the past couple of months is of course Otherkin. But, dear reader, let this not limit your imagination as to how blown your mind can be by the internet.) 

So what began as an every morning adventure to find stuff to read immediately after my newspapers spiraled horribly into an obsessive need to read everything I could possibly lay my hands on that day. I realized how much of a problem it was when four Fridays ago Longreads posted their weekly Top 5 posts, and I had read most of them already. I realized it was a problem when, I would get emails from friends about interesting things they'd read that day or week, and I would have already read it. I realized it was a problem when I was having dinner with some friends and I had read everything they were discussing. 

I realized that the problem wasn't that I had already read it, the problem was that I wasn't sure if I was actually processing anything I was reading. It had has reached a point where I'm reading stuff because I think I need to just read stuff, and not because I want to read stuff. It's almost as if I read it, bookmark it and file it away. For most of what I read, I don't even do what I used to do even two months ago: Make mental notes in the margins, follow up, write about it, wonder what happened of it. None of that at all.

Is it just the curse of the vastness of the internet that leaves me with a mountain of things to read, and not much time to read it with? So many people with such interesting things to say, so many articles and essays that are painstakingly well put together, so many things that people say anyway, so many things that I think I need to know or opinions I need to hear - How can I leave reading these to the accidents of social interactions, emails or drunken dinners? 

But at the same time, what's the point of reading it and then not remembering even seeing it the next time someone brings it up? Just for the joy of "yeah, I saw that already"?

Does anyone else have these problems?

**

*i say "stuff" because i really don't know a more appropriate word for the melange of things people read on the internet

adi parva

by Amruta Patil

My love for Amruta Patil's work is too personal for me to share. Kari spoke to me in ways that I will never speak about. In a tiny corner of my heart live boatmen, disappearing lanes and prickly heartbreaks; panels, dialogues and journeys that have defined entire relationships for me.

But Adi Parva is different from the very beginning. A much grander tale, Patil goes from telling the story of a girl in a city to retelling an epic. While it is still a deeply personal work (a painstaking labour of love), it is not personal in the story but in the telling. And this is where Amruta Patil excels. It has taken me forever to start writing about this book. Mostly because I really don't know where to begin.

How do you write about a book that is so vast in its scope and beautiful in its rendering? How do you write about the possibilities it explores, the mythologies it breaks down, the narratives it builds? How do you talk about storytelling that is about storytelling? How do you ask the questions that it asks? And what is the use of a book without pictures? 

It opens in redness: blood red, vultures and death. 

It opens: "There are somethings your forefathers didn't want you to forget. So they sent the story down through the mouths of the sutradhaar - storytellers who carry the thread. We are an unbroken lineage of storyteller nested within storyteller. When I open my mouth, you can hear the echo of storytellers past. ..."

It opens in poetry and art, and compelling narrative. 

And it effortlessly holds you to it. 

Adi Parva also arrives at a time when there is an immense interest in retelling or reimagining mythology. So many people are doing it, yet not too many of them manage Patil's depth or articulation. And hardly anybody else I have read so far (except two that come to mind immediately) has done it with as much self consciousness of the politics of the work. 

I remember reading Kamala Subramaniam's version of the Mahabharata when I was in school. It remains one of my most favorite versions of the story, but its task seemed much simpler. It told a story we all knew, and asked very few questions of it. (I say "very few" because Subramaniam's treatment of a lot of characters is quite nuanced. Karna, for example, is the real hero of her story and Duryodhana is wronged by almost everyone he loved.) Around the same time, I also read Ashok Banker's version of the Ramayana and I remember being absolutely stunned by it. Here was a man who took another story we all knew and completely changed it around. He asked questions. Wondered how the hell some of the things that happened could have possibly happened. Traced histories. Rewrote characters. Asked questions. Found loopholes. Messed with language. Turned the Ramayana into a fantasy series. He changed how I saw the telling of epics at all. 

Amruta Patil is a different kind of artist and writer. She asks questions not only of how the story is told, but also of how we see it. She asks who sees it and why. She asks how histories shape stories, and how generations reimagine them. And she does this with so much passion. 

And how. 

Add caption

Creation is leela. Amusement, play, reverie.

ocean at the end of the lane

by Neil Gaiman

It's a good book. Heck, it's a brilliant book. 

But is it as good as any of his really fantastic, absolutely great books? Um. 

One way to say this is - It's not fair to compare. 

This Gaiman isn't the same Gaiman who wrote Sandman, clearly. Sandman is one the most amazing things to ever even have been imagined; to then go on and write it and get it illustrated and all that is not something a regular human being could have achieved. 

It would be stupid and laughable  to even think to compare anything to Neverwhere. Period.

Let's also not compare it to American Gods. That book is a terrific and insanely intelligent critique of the internet-age, capitalism, globalization, mythology; and all this is done with that beautifully Gaiman-esque quality of magic and beauty. For the same reasons, not even to Anansi Boys. 

Shall we compare it to something he did that I could think of as similar, may be? Coraline? Coraline literally gave me nightmares. For three nights. To this day, I can't look at that book and not feel something physically turn my stomach. So I suppose not even Coraline, then.

So the bottomline is, don't compare it to anything else he's written. 

But does he inspire magic, wit, wonder? Yes. Does he make you want to turn every page thinking, "thisissolovelythisissolovely." Oh. Yeah. 

Should that be enough?

I guess. 

if on a winter's night a traveller

by Italo Calvino

I have never encountered a book so mad and beautiful at the same time as Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller. As a book, it inspires you to read it over and over again. It is almost the reason highlighters, post-it flags and annotation in books was even invented. It's that mad. And beautiful. At the same time. 

I want to say that reading it is like sitting in a train, looking out a window, wrapped in a blanket, sipping coffee. (With your feet up, of course). But that's too obvious. And not enough. It's fragmented, and even half way through, you can only begin to see it coming together - fragments of a novel, a pattern in it, somewhere. But you're not convinced. The author (by which I mean Calvino) keeps throwing unresolved, mad, fragmented bits at you; and you, you have no choice but to give yourself up to them. Besides, Calvino describes it bestest himself, anyway. (Because this book is that good.) Right in the beginning, and you think he is saying it to tease you, but he's actually giving you a warning, he says: "Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears." 

Of course I underlined it immediately and put a little smiley face next to it. Of. Course. I did. Little did I know. 

The whole book, in its fragments goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. And all you can do is sigh, feel like you're being cheated, but plough on regardless because this is a master at his craft you're reading. And he's pulling tricks nobody has ever pulled before, like a true magician who doesn't need to show off, but ends up doing it anyway. 

You can only watch, enthralled, and hope that there is, somewhere in the horizon, a reward for listening to this mad man's story.

why i love

Nicholson Baker

quote

I read Aminatta Forna's Memory of Love sometime last year, I think. 

The New Yorker has an article this week about "The Curse of Reading and Forgetting" and I feel nothing but comfort and joy at this. I feel like I am not alone in this - that other people also pick up books, happily read through atleast half or more than half of the book before realising that they've already read this. 

I nearly cried when I read that other people also have the same problem I do in social situations - that they have an intense urge to say "Yeah, I read that book! I loved it! It was so brilliant! etc etc" but they don't do it in constant fear of the other person bringing up plot details or dialogues or characters - none of which they will remember. Infact, I thought about what Ian Crouch quotes Nabokov for - rereading - and I figured that, really, the only books that I do remember anything about are books that I have reread. (The best example for this unfortunately, is Harry Potter and strangely enough, not Murakami.) 

Anyway, what I wanted to say about Aminatta Forna's Memory of Love is this - i loved it it was so brilliant she's my favorite author of the year last year etc etc - but there are very few things I remember about the book. Except for this line:

"People are wrong when they talk of love at first sight. It is neither love nor lust. No. As she walks away from you, what you feel is loss. A premonition of loss." 

I can quote that line in my sleep, almost. I know it like I know Cummings' Since Feeling Is First.  (Because I don't understand the whole of it. Not really.) 

A premonition of loss. 

I think it is because I spent a long time thinking about what she could have meant by a premonition of loss.

Because I got feeling love and loss. I felt it, deeply. I knew what she was talking about.  But a premonition of loss? I failed to understand it. I left this to my unconventional experiences of love. I thought, well, I don't know what it feels like, so I probably don't understand it.

The thing is - I think I get it now. A premonition of loss.  As she walks away from you, of possibilities and hope, of things coming together and falling apart. A premonition of loss. Not of loss, simply. Not a life you can have, by itself. But both. Simultaneously. A feeling of something wrenching at your gut, of something that you can have but something you can't hold.

A premonition of loss.

avoiding the tragic

For the past few years, I've been avoiding books set in the real world, especially if they're sad or tragic which is often the case. Often, I have wondered if, as a strategy, this works especially because I seem to be missing out on a large chunk of books that everybody else is reading and loves. 

For much of last year, I read all the fantasy and graphic novels I could lay my hands on. I also read a fair amount of children's fiction. Some noir fiction - Chandler, Hammett; some random other things like Scarlett Thomas (who I won't recommend to anyone) or Arun Joshi (who I could write a few songs for, he's that awesome). I discovered Borges and Calvino, both of whom changed my life.  I fell head over heels in love with Fitzgerald. I still think Murakami is possibly one of the greatest writers ever, but I'm not as mad about him as I was before. I like Ishiguro now, which is not something I could have said two years ago.

Since January this year, I have been in recovery. (I mean this about my personal life, I'm not being dramatic.) I've also been diversifying my reading. I'm still to read something that is sad (I don't think Em and the Big Hoom counts because it's one of the funniest, cleverest, most beautiful books I've read this year inspite of what it is about), but I'm making progress. 

Books I thought I might have to give up midway because of what I thought they might be about weren't as bad as I imagined - The Good Muslim, for example. Books I didn't think would be a problem turned out not so well - Thing Around Your Neck, NW. I just started reading Toni Morrison, and this is someone I'm extremely apprehensive about too. (I also stopped reading Book Thief by the fifteenth page - but this has nothing to do with the book itself. The book seems to be more amazing than I can imagine. I was reading this off an e-book and it was formatted badly - and much of this book is in the formatting. So Fact and Fiction, here I come!) I loved Americanah and Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (both of which are books that are set in the real world, and are books about diaspora in America). I still haven't been able to go back to Reading Lolita though. Or Leila Aboulela.

The point is - this year, I've been reading lots of things about real people in real worlds that don't have real dragons in them. And I'm enjoying myself so far.

That's all. 

americanah

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In a surprise twist to my life, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie just turned up at my doorstep today. I ordered it on Flipkart more than three months ago, so it was quite an unexpected treat. What should be of no surprise to anyone is that I just spent the past seven hours eating this book right up. 

It's a remarkable book, to say the very least. (Aside - I've been mulling over using phrases like it's a remarkable book, or it's an alluring piece of work, or she's an attractive woman. So I'm remarking its remarkability? Being allured by its alluring quality? Getting attracted to her attractiveness? These are such vague things to say! It's like describing something as "interesting". But I remember reading someone recently who wrote about the use of the word "interesting" in a long academic sort of book in which she spends laborious amounts of space talking about it as an "aesthetic category.") But anyway, it's a remarkable book. Absolutely brilliant, in what it sets out to do, what it manages to achieve, how much it manages to say and how easily.  

What I have always loved about Adichie is how political her writings are. She writes in such a self-aware manner, rich and complex, bold and brave. This book is nothing different. While in Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, she wrote about Nigeria and Biafra, about the politics of being a girl, a child, a woman, sexual, Igbo, rich, privileged, poor, African; in Americanah, the book is about being Black, African and Diaspora. It is self-consciously about race: the main character writes a blog called 'Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known As Negroes) By a Non-American Black'. It is about politics of identity, and how these politics colour everything.

I gave myself a snarky little smile when Adichie brought up a grouse I often have with people I talk to or read.  At some point in the book, while Ifemelu is getting her hair done, she has a conversation about a book with a white woman (whose race I'm emphasizing because the book does). The woman says, "It's just so honest, the most honest book I've read about Africa." But Ifemelu doesn't agree with her, and gives her a "mini-lecture" about how she doesn't think the book is about Africa at all. It is, she argues, about "Europe or the longing for Europe." 

The woman then replies - "Oh, well, I see why you would read a novel like that."

"And I see why you would read it like you did," Ifemelu says. 

Adichie then goes on to say "...this girl (who) somehow believed that she was miraculously neutral in how she read books, while other people read emotionally."

Somewhere along the way, I had a thought about the content of the book - it isn't historical or political in an overt and obvious way like her previous two books. But it's more grown up, so much more layered, just, so much more. It might be a reflection of my own growing up (the first time I read Adichie was six whole years ago!), but I would really like to think that it's also Adichie who's writing better than before now.

But essentially, this book is a long, beautifully written (to the point of making me cry) love story. It is the story of longing, loss and seperation. It is a story of love for a person, a country, a feeling; one that is so full of life and vibrancy that even in its dark moments, it makes you want to hold on to a sense of a happy ending.  This is a new and enjoyable feature of Adichie's writing - one of resolution. In Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun (actually, in most of her short stories as well), the endings are often ambiguous, leaving much to your own reading of the story. This one isn't like that - it ends well, and happily (which I loved) and this also works for its love-story-esque quality.

I just read this - and I feel like I'm talking about Adichie more than I'm talking about the book itself. Which is just so, because that's what the book felt like in so many ways. My very first thought about the book at the very first sentence of the book, which is about the smell (or lack thereof) of Princeton, was - is this something Adichie felt herself when she was in Princeton? For me, this is one of the reasons why this book works so well. It's because she puts herself squarely in her book - she makes it about her. 

I'll leave you with this description of loneliness and depression that I have now read for the fourth time in the past nine hours:

"She woke up torpid each morning, slowed by sadness, frightened by the endless stretch of day that lay ahead. Everything had thickened. She was swallowed, lost in a viscious haze, shrouded in a soup of nothingness. Between her and what she should feel, there was a gap. She cared about nothing. She wanted to care, but she no longer knew how; it had slipped from her memory, the ability to care. ... Her days were stilled by silence and snow."

trains

do wonders for reading.

also, loved loved loved em and the big hoom. no idea why i postponed this for so long. so brilliant, so beautiful.

block

I haven't finished a book in a month.

First there was Nicholson Baker's Mezzanine. I loved it. I love it. I'm reading it slowly, taking it by the page, scrutinizing every footnote, taking in the history of every little thing he likes to talk about. But I've been at it for two weeks now, I think. It's not healthy, but it's what it is.

Then there's The Once and Future King, TH White. I've read three chapters, think it's nice, but my aunt whose iPad I was reading it on, took it with her to Uganda for a week. Now she's back, but I haven't had the time to go back to it.

Then there was Em and the Big Hoom, which I've been meaning to read for six months now. Read two pages. Now I don't have the time to go back to it, because everytime I try reading, I read Mezzanine - which takes me on tours of the internet about little, useless things. (I spent three hours on the internet last week reading up about the history of straws.)

Kari, which I've been reading all month just because. 

I also feel the need to mention brainpickings.org. I spend much of my non-work day reading stuff she recommends. Which is fun, but I don't end up reading whole books because they're too dense. I just read sections. Which may be acceptable on other days, just not on days that I look at this blog.

synecdoche, new york

I first watched this film about two summers ago. 

It was a strange narrative, in its own time and more excitingly and interestingly, in its own space. I didn't understand even a quarter of what was going on. I simply didn't get it. I thought about giving it up at least three times during the movie. It seemed to be one of those things that was absolutely beyond comprehension. And it just kept getting more and more convoluted, confusing, self-reflexive. 

At some point, this guy yells at Caden, "It's been seventeen years! Are we ever getting an audience in here?" That's what I was thinking at the time. It didn't seem like a film that was meant to be for an audience. It seemed to want me to be in it, not outside it - it wasn't the kind of film that wanted me to figure out what was happening in it, it looked like it was trying to figure out what was happening to me. (At the same time, it also really didn't seem to care about me. So what if I didn't understand it? It just kept going.) At no time whatsoever did I have to opportunity to think - fucking brilliant! let's applaud! 

I watched it again last night. I started watching it at 2 AM, considerably drunk and terribly sleepy. I don't know why I chose this film. (It was either this or Coraline.) It may have had something to do with wanting to fall asleep midway. 

I didn't fall asleep. I stayed with it. I don't think I understand any of it even now. 

See, it starts off as a regular film. It has all the elements of being a story, a simple plot, something you can just watch. There's a man, a woman and a child. They seem to be a dysfunctional sort of family, but which family isn't. Then she leaves him. And he gets some grant. He wants to do something big with it. Nothing suspicious yet. And then it starts getting bigger. She's painting miniatures, but he's building New York in a warehouse. He's building a warehouse within a warehouse within a warehouse. He has a double who has a double. The double falls in love with the original. 

There's a man who's an actor playing himself - "Walk like yourself, Tom." "Wait! Let me show you, is this okay?"

This man has to be my favorite character. (After Olive, who I don't understand one bit). This man is my key to understanding the film. Not that I have, but if I have to, I think I'll start there. A man in a warehouse that's a theatre set (is it a set?) who's an actor playing himself - asking the director if that's the way the man walks.

And then there's Ellen. If the man who is an actor playing himself is my favorite character, Ellen has to be the most perplexing. Ellen is everything this film is. If the play had to be given a title, I'd have called it Ellen. Because at Ellen, I am lost. Because by the time we come to Ellen, the film has me holding on to the final threads of my seeming comprehension of the film's plot. Because Ellen, oh I don't even know what she is. Or he is. Or it is. Nobody's seen the Ellen that Ellen is playing. (Except in a painting by Adele.) But the actress playing Ellen is the perfect Ellen. Who then plays Caden. And then she becomes Caden. And Caden becomes Ellen, living in the warehouse, living by directions whispered into his ear. 

I am resisting an urge to drawl deeeeeeep and roll my eyes. 

But that's what the film is. Deep. 

And if you understand it, we should sit down and talk about it. 

mezzanine

by Nicholson Baker

I'm three pages in and I might already have a new favorite author.

More later.

xo

god delusion

By Richard Dawkins

Reading Richard Dawkins (God Delusion, Magic of Reality) makes me want to write about my own atheism. Especially because I disagree so much with Dawkins. Not on whether the science argument on the origins of the universe is valid; but on the posturing of the God v. Science debate. 

In an argument I had with a friend about this recently, she asked me the inevitable "so what do you think was there before the Big Bang then?" 

I could have said simply emptiness. Nothing. But that's not what I want to say.

I wanted to instead ask why the origins argument is so crucial. 

I would think that it is a question that reads back into thousands of years of history can not be thought of as a question that is being asked in the context of today. I argued with her that even asking this question in terms of creation of the universe is a predominantly Christian way to think about God (as creator, omnipresent, omniscient and so on) and so the rational scientific answer which then falls back on evolution and the Big Bang to explain away Adam and Eve (or Brahma or whatever else one may believe created the universe) the arguments always succumb to the same trap of thinking about a definite moment of origin to explain the nature of the universe. (Which then would either "prove" whether God exists or not). 

To think about religion on religion's terms would be to think about it in terms of faith, and to think about science on science's terms would be to think about it in terms of reason and rationalism. To apply one's terms to the other is definitely not something that may have merit. Imagine telling a child that you need to believe in the atom just because. I think it's about as ridiculous to try and "prove" or "disprove" God using terms that have been defined for and by science. This is the root of my discomfort with Dawkins.  

What I did enjoy about his writing was the way he outlines and classifies every kind of thought there is on god and religion. This systematic summary of arguments was quite interesting to read. By the end of the third chapter though, all his arguments fall into a similar style of dismissal. He relies on Darwin and the theory of evolution to dismiss the creationist arguments. He regularly makes tongue in cheek comments about things he may not have great arguments for. He repeatedly uses quotes from Douglas Adams' interviews to spice these up. (Somewhere in the middle of Chapter 4, after a long Adams quote, he suddenly says "Douglas, I miss you." At this point I just went AAAAA! very loudly.)  

Says he, "I am not advocating some sort of narrowly scientistic way of thinking. But the very least that any honest quest for truth must have in setting out to explain such monstrosities of improbability as a rainforest, a coral reef, or a universe is a crane and not a skyhook. The crane doesn't have to be natural selection. Admittedly, nobody has ever thought of a better one. But there could be others yet to be discovered."

This quest for "truth" though is a quest that has been laid out in direct opposition to what religion offers as a belief system based on faith (I guess). It makes it boring and uncomfortable for me to argue in direct contradictions, especially because it often results in running around in circles, calling names and in all parties involved feeling like the other's a bit of an idiot. (Actually, wait, which argument doesn't?)

It's a good read though, something I definitely would suggest to someone who is thinking about their own belief system.

Edit.

From Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams. Excerpt from an interview with American Atheists:

"Well, in history, even though the understanding of events, of cause and effect, is a matter of interpretation, and even though interpretation is in many ways a matter of opinion, nevertheless those opinions and interpretations are honed to within an inch of their lives in the withering crossfire of argument and counterargument, and those that are still standing are then subject to a whole new round of challenges of fact and logic from the next generation historians and so on. All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.

So I was already familiar with and (I'm afraid) accepting the view that you couldn't apply the logic of physics to religion, that they were dealing with different types of truth. (I now think this is baloney, but to continue...) What astonished me, however, was the realization that the arguments in favor of religious ideas were so feeble and silly next to the arguments of something as interpretive and opinionated as history. In fact they were embarrassingly childish. They were never subject to the kind of outright challenge which was the normal stock of trade f any other area of intellectual endeavour whatsoever."

 

facing the mirror: lesbian writing from india

Ashwini Sukthankar (ed.)

(I can't find a copy of it to buy online, but find extracts here: Google Books)

This is a collection of short stories that I read some five years ago. I found it in the library at TISS, borrowed it immediately and swallowed it whole. I don't remember too many of those stories right now to write about the book, but I do remember feeling a sense of amazement and revolution when I read it.  

I'm only making a note of it here because I tried to remember the name of this collection about five months ago but I couldn't. I came across it all of a sudden when I was reading something else entirely. 

If you do find it somewhere, please either buy me a copy or be a pirate and send me a photocopy!

tender is the night

by F Scott Fitzgerald

Close to the end of this book, I got very very sad. It wasn't really a tearing-up kind of sadness. It was a more moving sadness about loneliness, love, age, powerlessness, about loss and failure; but not any of these things by themselves. And then, when I finished reading the book, I did something I haven't done in a long time. I flipped it and started over. I started to read it again, watching for depth where earlier I only read with curiosity.

I fell in love with this book about at the same point at which everyone in the book fell in love with the Divers: at their party on the terrace. But the moments leading up to it, the flirting so to speak, was exquisite. The passage about Nicole in her garden, for instance:

"Along the walls on the village side all was dusty, the wriggling vines, the lemon and eucalyptus trees, the casual wheel-barrow, left only a moment since, but already grown into the path, atrophied and faintly rotten."

And then, the party reached its climax: there were fireflies by the cliff, and the table they were sitting at seemed to have risen towards the sky like a mechanical dancing platform.

There's so many little things that I love about this book.

"Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?"  

It's such a beautiful line. Used in so many ways. Used for so many things. Used for one thing, most of all. Rosemary. The first time I came across it, I giggled a little. It is the first time Dick imagines Rosemary with someone else:

"Only the image of a third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was needed to throw him off his balance and send through him waves of pain, misery, desire, desperation. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary’s cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret warmth within.

- Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

- Please do. It's too light in here."

(Although my favorite usage is where he says it at the end of a chapter. Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?)

It's very difficult to try and write about a book that is considered a classic. People have read in so many ways that I can't even count, and they've been doing it for the better part of a century. I feel really out of my depth, even trying. The last time I felt like this about something I fell in love with was when I watched Rear Window and Birds. Even before I could think about something to say about it, I was bombarded with hundreds of exciting people saying exciting things about Hitchcock. (I googled Tender is the Night and one of the first things I came across was "Metaphysics of Style and Tender is the Night." Really?!)

I know this is a very fractured post that isn't really saying anything but that's the way I feel about this book right now. I'm very moved, and I really don't know how to talk about it.

Anyway, I'm a bit obsessed with this book and Fitzgerald for the moment. There's that.

bookstores

I love bookstores.

Big, chain ones with outlets all over the country; small, tiny ones in which only one person can actually fit; lovely, comfortable ones that play the blues in a corner; beautiful bookstores for which I am willing to visit a whole new country; bookstores with reading rooms that even F Scott Fitzgerald used to frequent; stalls that sell second-hand books or pirated books; vendors on footpaths with old, fraying books; bookstores whose books only the shopkeepers can find. 

You can gauge reading habits of a whole town from its bookstores, sometimes. 

I know that Landmark in Hyderabad has a horrible collection, but Landmark in Madras is always rich in the books they have. Blossoms in Bangalore is possibly my most favorite bookstore of all time. Bookstores in Delhi are usually eclectic. They have shelves and shelves full of academic books (neatly arranged by printing press) often just behind the section with poetry or graphic novels. They'll have three different translations of Marx or Dostoevsky and depending on how the bookshop owner leans politically, he'll tell you which one to buy. (I've come across very few women who sell books. Barring the Full Circle in GK, I can't remember a single one). Bombay is strange about its bookstores. They're commercial and mindless, except may be Strand when it's in a good mood. I never found a bookstore I liked in all my time in Bombay.

Bookstores are how I find new things to read. They are where I experiment. They open my eyes to new books, writers, genres, ideas, styles like nothing else. I have never made a friend in a bookstore, but I've never needed anybody's company but my own in one. Sure, I buy more off Flipkart and Infibeam these days, but I mostly buy books that I've already looked longingly at in a bookstore or read parts of in a library or borrowed from someone else. But I do it only because the discounts are amazing when I buy them online. (Student, okay?) 

Bookstores make me happy in any shape and form. 

They make me happy because I always end up looking at more books than I can buy. (They make me sad for about the same reason). I have found the strangest, loveliest books just browsing in bookstores. It's how I found American Gods by Neil Gaiman (at Blossoms, was I 15?). It's how I found Kari by Amruta Patil (in Chennai, I was bored), Em and the Big Hoom, Hush, Sita's Ramayana (all in Yodakin while waiting for people to show up). Spending hours and hours in bookstores with friends or cousins, before or after or during coffee also yielded great results. I was introduced to lots of wonderful books like this: Nick Hornby, Aminatta Forna, Sandman (frikkin' Sandman!), Jasper Fforde. Actually, if I think about it, that's how I spent much of my time as a kid in Walden, with my grandfather.  

Bookstores make me happy for the smell of old paper and the promise of a new book. I know it's a romantic thing to say and we're all against the idea of being romantic about bookstores these days, but I don't think I'm going to apologise for it. I love bookstores because I can get lost in them. (Not like a library, where the book isn't yours to write your name in and hide in your cupboard or write little notes in and stick pretty flags in).

Bookstores make me happy, and that's about that.

south asian women writing

Aisi at freeze-dried along with Aishwarya S has started a challenge called the South Asian Women Writer's Challenge where they've asked participants to read and review books written by South Asian women.

I've signed up for Level 2 which is read 6 and review 3.

This month, I've already read Adi Parva by Amruta Patil and Love Stories by Annie Zaidi. I definitely want to write about the very beautiful, very evocative Adi Parva (every panel of which I want to own as a poster or a print). On my list for next month is Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie. Kuzhali Manickavel's Insects Are Just Like You And Me Except Some Of Them Have Wings has been on my list for more than two years now. I just haven't gotten around to it out of sheer laziness.

I can't think of more writers I want to read just yet.

From Bangladesh, I have only read Tahmima Anam. I haven't read any fiction from Sri Lanka at all (whether written by men or women, unless Ondaatje counts). From Pakistan, I've only read men: Mohammed Hanif, Mohsin Hamid, Daniyal Mueenuddin and Hanif Kureishi. It's not something I had thought about before now. 

Suggestions as we go are welcome.

Also, please go and sign up for it if you can!

reading is bliss

In a week that I've been thinking about how integral reading is to my life, Maria Popova's literary jukebox threw up this:

"Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss."

-  Nora Ephron in I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

:)  

Mixtape

by Praveen K, Devaki Neogi, Archana Sreenivasan, Manoj A Menon, Tina Thomas, Sachin Somasundaran, Jasjyot Singh Hans, Pratheek Thomas, Prabha Mallya.

Manta Ray Comics.

(Buy here.)

I remember when I first read Hush. In a tiny bookstore that was discretely playing some blues, I sat on a stair just looking at the first couple of pages. Eventually, the pages started to turn. Page after page, I kept thinking that I must put it back in the bookshelf – That if I read anymore of it, I’d be teary eyed and awkward in an almost cramped public place. But I read it anyway, because not reading wasn’t much of a choice.

I say “read”, because I am not sure what the better word for it would be. Obviously I bought it before I left the store. I needed for it to stay in my cupboard, even though I couldn’t say if I would really read it again. (Not because it wasn’t beautiful. It was. It’s just not the kind of story that I can bear myself to, again for the lack of a better word, experience for a second time)

When I got an email telling me that they were coming out with more of these comics, I was curious. Curious, because I had assumed Hush was what it was because of what it was dealing with. In its own way, it was a silent story about silences. But the very concept of whole stories being told without words, it was something that I was really excited about. So on the first weekend since the email that I had to myself, I bought the book.

Mixtape is, quite literally, heart-wrenching. But this time, I was prepared. I locked the door to my room. I made myself a cup of cocoa. I put on an extra pair of socks and snuggled into my blanket. And the book, it didn’t disappoint. (Even if it got over quicker than I wanted for it to).

It opens with Silver Spider, a story about a boy who does the sort of thing boys do and a story about a spider that doesn’t do the kind of thing that spiders do. I thought it was brilliant and twisted and dark and (yes, it’s true) funny! Stoopidkidsalwaysthinkingtheycangetawaywithstuff. Ha.

And then, well, and then. I was sitting there all pleased and stuff. I drank some of my cocoa and turned the page. I would have said that some warning would have been nice. But in all honesty, I was warned. Just a look at the cover would have been warning enough. The second story, Rather Lovely Thing. I don’t even know what to say about it. It took my breath away.

I wish I could say that I did justice to any of the stories that followed. I wish I could say that I was as moved by them.

I was clearly more impressed by them: Voyeur, worked a fun, sexy plot. I loved the irritation and rage on the man’s face. I loved how you’re expecting some sort of showdown. I’d like to think that I was the real voyeur. And I can’t say it enough, twisted and funny.

‘My Beloved’ seemed a little out of place. The art itself, for starters, was so much more full of detail than the rest of the stories. I’m not yet sure if I liked it. I feel like, as a plot, it had much more potential. I thought the first half was working up to something entirely different.

This little book packs quite a punch. I like the direction that it is taking Indian comic books to. I like that we’re growing up from Amar Chitra Katha, and Kari is not the singular standalone piece of work that was doing something amazing and downright brilliant. I like that I can look forward to things like Mixtape on a regular basis. (May I say, that Twelve in my head is already awesome?)

So go. Buy it. Make a cup of cocoa. Read it. If you don’t fall in love with it, I’ll give you your 55 rupees back.

a memory of light

robert jordan and brandon sanderson

this feels nice.

getting done, i mean.

and mat cauthon is my hero! on any. given. day.

sigh.

(if i ever get tangled up in a 14 book long series, in which each book is not less than 900 pages, and to which the prologue book comes out before epilogue; especially if the author who originally started to write such a series may happen to die somewhere in between; and which may demand my enthusiasm, time, emotion and interest for around nine years; ever again, please just punch me in my face okay?)

would i recommend reading the series from start to finish to anyone? 

probably not. 

except for those mat cauthon moments through pretty much the entire series, possibly.

would i watch it if they made it into some game of thrones-esque tv show?

probably.