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. 

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Creation is leela. Amusement, play, reverie.