a good run

I've had such a good run these past couple of months!

Firstly, I went to Turkey (!!!) and Istanbul, oh my god, is where it's AT.

Otherwise, the books I've been reading! SO good. After SUCH a long time.

I am Radar, which I am convinced is amazing:
"We can only witness the witnessing!"

**

The Sandglass by Romesh Gunasekara, which is as complex and lyrical a murder mystery as I've read:

"My father... would've said that arrack has been extremely lucrative for a hundred years, so someone must be (interested in it). It was the only route to real capital accumulation: cheap to produce, and a permanently addicted market. Why do you think the British introduced these taverns? It's like the opium dens."

or even:

"...selling the paradise experience between death camps and suicide bombers to tourists who didn't care."

**

Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut:

"Kilgore Trout once wrote a story called "This Means You". It was set in the Hawaiian Islands, the place where the lucky winners of Dwayne Hoover's contest in Midland City were supposed to go. Every bit of land on the islands was owned by only about 40 people, and, in the story, Trout had those people decide to exercise their property rights in full. They put up no tresspassing boards on everything.

This created terrible problems for the million other people on the islands. The law of gravity required that they stick somewhere on the surface. Either that, or they could go out into the water and bob offshore.

But then the Federal Government came through with an emergency program. It gave a big balloon full of helium to every man, woman and child who didn't own property."

(pp. 73; Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut.)

i am radar

by reif larsen

such. meticulous. detail.
such brilliant writing. (ok, also may be slightly sluggish in places, but i'm not one to complain. the illustrations and footnotes more than make up for it).
the kind of range reif larsen has is CRAZY. i think i have to read this book at least thrice over before i can see its bottom.
ACK.

ps. there is such a thing as post-book exhilaration. once it has passed, people are known to say different things about a book. for now i have to say this - i lived with this book for about three weeks. i read it in small doses every night and looked up a lot of things that he writes about. these things ranged from cambodian and serbian history to poetry, birds, theatre and wikipedia pages on quantum physics.  i want reif larsen's job!

neapolitan novels

by elena ferrante

Way too many conversations I had last month were rants about how new Indian fiction writers often write their characters too flatly: they write the "Indian" in contexts they hope break class barriers (in english) and in language that sounds like it is translated from the vernacular. Especially those who write women. I understand what they're trying to do. It's a part of a larger project of making the unnamed, undepicted in images, not only unspoken but unspeakable* speakable. It is to give voice to a subaltern, write those who aren't known, whose concerns aren't valued, whose lives aren't written. It's a project I'm fully convinced about - it definitely needs to be done. 

But what comes out of it (especially in India) worries me. I can't put my finger on what it is, exactly. I know it's condescending of me to say this, but it's not self-aware or political in the way that it engages with its subject. If one is writing a character in a village in Bihar, or a slum in Bombay, or an earthquake in Gujarat, or a shop in Andhra Pradesh, it isn't enough to merely write that character in that context, one also needs to write a person capable of abstraction, intellectuality, thought. It is so easy to lose yourself in recreating what you imagine this person's world to be (even if it is well-researched), that you forget what it is like to be the person. 

Such writing, in its urge to "capture" or "represent" what it imagines is "real", forgets that no text is neutral or apolitical in its engagement. You have to take a considered position. It is such consideration, in my view, that sets good writing apart from the mediocre. (If I may quote the awesome Alison Bechdel**, "I had set out to name the unnamed, to depict the undepicted, to make lesbians visible and I had done it! Wait a minute... I forgot to account for the observer effect! I've disrupted the space-time continuum. You can't pin things down without changing them somehow.")  

It's also, if I have to get to the core of my problem, pretty damn patronising to write like that. So if someone is poor, they can't be intelligent? They can't have motives that aren't base? They can't be aware of their bodies, their sexualities, their emotions? They don't have the capacity to challenge power? They can't see what you see? They can't speak beautifully, in sentences that are fluid? They can't be political, engage in discourse? Why is it that you can't write poor people as people? Why can't you imagine yourself, give them a voice that is closer to yours, more personal? 

Anyway, the reason I'm talking about all this here today is because I just finished Book 3 of the Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein). It's a powerful series written by someone who does exactly what is lacking - she writes women who are smart, challenging, complicated, intelligent and intellectual. I took some time to get caught up in the first book. I thought it read too much like a translation, often grappling with how much of the vernacular should sound that way. It annoyed me because I thought it was going to be a lot like these Indian writers and translations. (Where you hear the original language in your head and keep wondering how it may have read). The second book was good too, and I was really taken by the way she writes. The third book - the third book was spectacular. It felt like it was written by someone who knew what she was about. She was finally sinking her feet in and telling you what she really thought. It was more complete, more culled out. Less raw. Less intimidated. Fluid.

***

*"Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable." Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence.

**I only just started to read The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel.

Out on the open ground not far from the buildings
an abandoned newspaper has lain for months, full of events.
It grows old through nights and days in rain and sun,
on the way to becoming a plant, a cabbage head, on the way to being
            united with the earth.
Just as a memory is slowly transmuted into your own self.

—“About History” by Tomas Tranströmer (from Bells and Tracks)

flood of fire

amitav ghosh

ties up everything, and most beautifully.
brilliant book, all by itself.

more later.

notes: mr. reid! whattaguy! (i missed mr. chinnery, but this "affliction" was brilliant! i did miss more of ghosh's humour, though.)

the buried giant

by kazuo ishiguro

are we a sum of our memories? is history a sum of memories?

is it just me or is ishiguro just plain boring?

the more academic word for it is banal, apparently. but i feel like he's boring. uff. 

a poem for a monday

Reading this made me laugh. I love when poetry does that. :)  

Sarajevo to Dubrovnik

by Eileen Carney Hulme

Unintentionally we captured

a rainbow, the sky half dark

and the sun full of energy, mischievous

in an affectionate way. Perhaps

we had too many coffees or

the narrow roads and mountain

passes had raised our heartbeats

but here we are like go-betweens

carrying love letters or breathless

sighs from country to country

and this rainbow sneaking in

hitching a lift with no word

to the wind.

**

From Ink, Sweat and Tears. 

illicit happiness

This isn't really a post about the book. Having so disclaimed, I will write on. 

I just read my third* book this year in which a person commits suicide: The Illicit Happiness of Other People, by Manu Joseph.

The other two are Sense of an Ending (Julian Barnes) and Foreigner (Arun Joshi). I think  Arun Joshi and Julian Barnes are absolute geniuses. No question about it. I'm yet to make my mind up about Manu Joseph, although I must say I am veering towards pretty good. 

I started reading this book at my grandmother's funeral. I sat in a corner while everybody else did their own thing and read. It was slow progress. I got through about 100 pages over that week. I did more staring at the book than actual reading, but I was glad to have something to hold. When I picked it up, I didn't know it was a book about a dead person. It was only on the flight home when I pulled it out of my bag, my cousin told me with a wrong-choice sort of tone, "it's pretty intense book". She, herself, bought a book called 'Punjabi Parmesan' which also turned out to be a wrong choice. (It turned out to be non-fiction and nothing like the name suggests. Go on. Google it.) I don't think the being-about-death bothered me though. In the general state of mind I was in, any book would have taken me this long to finish. 

Immediately after the week I spent at home with my entire family doing our own thing and only reading about 100 pages, I was on a flight to Patna. I spent a whole week in Bihar at field work, mostly alone, living in okay hotel rooms in Gaya and really crappy hotel rooms in Muzaffarpur. During this time, I tried to read. Instead, I watched Homeland. (The first season. The second and third seasons I reserved for Muzaffarpur).  

I ended up reading more of this book when I was waiting for my train to Patna at the Gaya station. My suitcase, my backpack and I, we sat there for a whole couple of hours again making very slow progress at the whole reading thing. A man who was sitting next to me (whose efforts at putting his hand on my thigh I kept thwarting) eventually tried to make conversation with me: "Aankhein kharab ho jayenge. Idhar mat padho." I shot him my angriest look and turned up my headphones. Again, the book became something I only pretended to read till the train came while I listened to that week's All Songs Considered and seethed. 

The book has remained in my handbag since.

I only picked it up today because I wanted to do something that wouldn't involve my laptop (and as is evidenced by this blogpost, that didn't last very long), and didn't want to read something new because all the books I am in the middle of are making me very guilty. (There are a couple more on Kindle. Kindle is the worst, because I don't even remember which books I have started reading. Today, I clicked on a book called 'Thief's Magic by Trudi Caravan, and as I started to read it I realised I had actually finished reading the damn thing! I really need to go back to updating that list.)

And I finished it.

And I must say that it's quite good, this book.

Okay goodnight.





*I'm fairly sure there is a fourth. I just can't remember which.

diary of a bad year

j m coetze.

uff. still reeling from it. might not stop reeling from it. 

khakras and sanderson

i understand my 'i'mtoobusytoreadwhine' posts are getting boring.

instead, i give you a picture of where i woke up this morning. :) (it's a village called gajapura, about 80 kms from godhra, gujarat. i noticed only later that my finger got in the way.)

anyway, since i've been travelling, trains are reading conducive. but since i'm constantly exhausted, i've gone back to reading stock fantasy, and as a refreshing change (kill me later for using the term), chick lit.

so in the first half of the past ten days, i finished the books from stormlight archive by brandon sanderson (2 nos.) it was quite belatedly that i realized that this wasn't, in fact, the series that he has managed to finish just yet. which was quite a bummer because now i have to wait till spring 2016. suxx. it read like standard fantasy, and it was just what i needed because it wasn't too involving. the plot isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so it's easy to put it down and go to sleep. i understand that neither of those things is a compliment.

on the sixth day, i finished saba imtiaz's 'karachi, you're killing me'. like i kept telling everyone who asked - it was fun! i don't think it was meant to accomplish anything serious. and it was hugely predictable. but also cute! and fun! yay!

the next few days have been spent reading brandon sanderson's mistborn series (2 nos.) suffice to say, stormlight archive is way nicer. this is... okay, i guess. it keeps losing its sense of narrative often. but i look forward to starting on the third book nevertheless.

i also have a copy of nam le's 'the boat' that i'm lugging around everywhere. what can i say, reading sanderson off kindle on my phone is more convenient?

anyway, more khakras just arrived. and work, i'm not mentioning work.