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.