Request for the admins on this blog.....specially SSM. Please help!

Hello - I'm currently listed on the OLD "Dud Sea Scrolls" on Blogger as well as the "Booked, Indefinitely !" blogs.

Could SSM or someone else who's authorized KINDLY REMOVE me from those blogs? Thanks!

The Line of Beauty

To be honest, when I first began reading The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, I found it a bit difficult to embrace.

I had picked up the book mainly because I had read an article regarding the Booker prize contenders, and how very close the competition had been.

I was determined to give it another go only because I cannot bear to leave any book half-read. And when I turned the last page yesterday, it was with a sense of reluctant relinquishment that I put down the book.

The story is about young gay Nick Guest, who moves into the home of his Oxford classmate and crush, Toby Fedden, whose father Gerald is an ambitious Tory MP, with lovely wife Rachel, and manic-depressive daughter Catherine.

Nick slips easily into the indolent and luxurious life of the rich and famous: he loves the beautiful things life has to offer, he snorts coke, he loses his virginity to a black council worker he picks up from the classifieds; he finds himself a wealthy lover of Lebanese origin, with whom he attempts a foray into publishing and films. The backdrop of Tory conservatism, AIDS, and the scandals that break out inevitably provide a rich foil to his story.

What makes this book so eminently readable is the superbly cool elegance of the prose. It is almost languorous and makes you feel heady, like after a glass of wine. It is neither harsh nor maudlin; there are no rude jerks or sudden peaks; no flourishes or swaggers; it is gently undulating all the way. The phrases are crafted with the finesse of a master craftsman.

Consider
Perhaps being old friends didn't mean very much, they shared assumptions rather than lives.

or about a public telephone
So he had never breathed this terrible air, black plastic, dead piss, old smoke, the compound breath of the mouthpiece --

or about a pianist brought in for a recital
She had clearly been ferociously schooled, she was like those implacable little gymnasts who sprang out from behind the Iron Curtain, curling and vaulting along the keyboard.

Practically every page in the book is strewn with such gems, and it is richly rewarding to read this book at a leisurely pace, and it becomes almost mandatory to stop and admire every once in a while.

Some may find the gay stuff a little awkward. It was the first time I'd read such a book, and I felt it was treated most naturally, and I didn't feel the least bit uncomfortable.

I'd definitely recommend reading this if you love stylish prose.

The selfish gene

Am currently reading this book. Very very fascinating stuff.

It talks about how the first replicating entities might have evolved in the primordial nutrient soup, and how every organism might just be an elaborate defense mechanism built by each replicator to defend itself.

What is scary is to see the sheer number of conclusions of the selfish gene theory that are corroborated by evidence in nature.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of the book is the explanation of apparent altruism between competing selfish entities using concepts from game theory.

A few years back, I had jokingly modified Einstein's famous quote to say: "All God does is play dice". I think I need to revise it to: "All God does is play prisoner's dilemma". To know what the hell I'm talking about, read the book. :-)

The only beef I have with the book is that the author extends the concepts of the selfish gene theory into some pretty fuzzy la la lands. For example, the meme theory. The problem with this kind of extrapolation is that there is no way to corroborate or falsify it with evidence as it is all castles in the air.

Potpourri Review

Few Indian English books that I picked up recently: here are my scattered thoughts about them. Didn't want to put formal reviews, just wanted to share my observations.

Ladies Coupe by Anita Nair

Indian English authors keep on fascinating me (so do Indian regional language authors, but then I hardly know regional languages other than my mother tongue Marathi). So when I saw this book in the local library, I picked it up. I knew nothing about Anita Nair then, so didn't know what to expect. The book turned out to be worth the read though.

Ladies Coupe is the tale of Akhila, and five other women that she meets in train. The novel is split into multiple stories, interspersed by Akhila's own story, which can be a little distracting because of so many POV changes, but after a while, I got used to it. Most of the stories, and the characters are ordinary, as far as the literary value goes. But that's the success of Anita Nair's book IMO, because it becomes very easy to relate to or believe in in those stories. And although the plots are outright beaten, the perspective Anita throws on them is quite interesting. The same characters, that one would hardly notice if they come face to face to us in our daily lives, spin a surprise or two, as if saying there is more to me. She has done a good job of spinning these tails, making the reader think, and question. None of Anita's characters are feminist rebels, quite the contrary, and yet the novel ends up questioning the patriarchal equations. I think it's the kind of book that most Indian women should read, and so should most Indian men.

The day in shadow by Nayantara Sehgal

My wife picked this one up from the dusty shelf of our local library, and again neither of us had heard a thing about it. Later when I tried to search on net, I could hardly find any reviews, which I think is surprising considering the quality of the book. Written in the license raj times, the book tells the story of a divorcee lady, and a mother of pre-teen children, who is struggling to find life again. It's the story of resuming life, once paused -- telling us that it's never too late to restart living.

The central character is a bundle of contradictions -- of independence and dependence, of strength and weaknesses. It's one of the most alive characters that I've come across in my (no doubt, all too limited) reading of Indian English literature. The storyline itself is predictable and does not throw any surprises at all, but the book is certainly not about the story. It's about the nuances, of relationships, of perceptions -- and there are plenty of those. Most of the characters are well formed and believable, the dialogs engrossing. All in all a very very readable book.

Making The Minister Smile by Anurag Mathur

Yes, this is the same Anurag Mathur of The Inscrutable Americans fame. I have not read that book, so had no opinion about him, and going by this book, I would rather read that one before I have an opinion about him, for this book is pretty sterile, full of stereotypes, and utterly humorless. I don't know if it's intended to be humorous, but it definitely does not seem serious either. The characters are uninteresting, and of cardboard verity, the storyline is predictable till mid-way at which point I put the book away for good. I just hope someone reads this and tells me, hey, that's where it starts to get interesting. But if someone asks to bet my money on it, I definitely won't. I think the author is confused about what he wanted to do with the story -- make it hilarious or relevant. As it comes out, it's neither (unless again, the second half is where he picked up his acts). And although I rarely write review of books I didn't like (forget those which I didn't complete!), I decided to put this up anyway, for completing the potpourri.

Don Camillo and His Little World

I recently realized that one of my most cherished assumption about myself, that I'm decently well read, was quite off the mark. The realization has partly to do with a friend, herself a voracious reader, who made a similar remark. That did it. If even she ain't well read, where does that leave me? I decided to work on it.

This same friend lent me a few books from her collection, and I'm chewing at them, along with my normal quota of massively parallelized reading (which is the principal reason why I never finish any of the tens of books I'm reading at any time). So in a way, accidentally I stumbled onto Giovanni Guareschi and his (The) Little World of Don Camillo. For a change, I went into single book mode, and owing to the fact that the book is rather small, I finished it at a couple of goes. That in itself deserves a strong round of applause for the book! But the first thing I remembered was this SSM's book blog-site. I owe him a few reviews, and at the risk of reviewing an already well read book, I decided to go ahead.

For the uninitiated (like I was just a week back), Giovanni Guareschi is an Italian journalist, and novelist, whose biography if it's written (and I assume it must have been) should be more interesting than most fiction. However, he is better known (as I learnt) for his stories of a little village somewhere in the valley of the river Po. The central character is a Catholic Priest who is always ready to give back two punches for every one he receives, if the Lord, the Christ himself (but not The Christ, as Giovanni Guareschi would say) would let him get away with it. For Don Camillo, the Priest, talks to the Lord, and the Lord talks back to him. And Camillo's Lord has a fine sense of humour too!

Camillo's prime adversary in the village is a communist Mayor, Peppone, is in a certain sense a carbon copy of Camillo -- nice at heart, passionate about his belief system, and combative to the core. The stories could well be included into a fourth standard text-book, if one goes by the look and feel of it, but then that's the greatness of the author, who reduces the central conflict -- between a predominately religious orthrodox world-view and a godless communistic one -- into an almost cartoon world war, where the warm forces of humanity turn out to be the winners. The greatest achievement of the book has to be the liberal ethos it espouses without any preaching. A book probably more relevant to the present day India, deeply divided along multiple intellectual axes. And to hell with my rationing of the word, it's a poignant book -- if there was one. Welcome, to The Little World of Don Camillo.

Great Finds

A re-post of one of the blogs I wrote at sulekha, with a few additions...

The idea here is to compile a list of some non-mainstream gems that I ‘discovered’ in my affair-with-reading (partly to see if there's anybody out there who read any of these, and partly to get u folks to suggest some of your own :d). Some of these I found on friends’ bookshelves, others in second-hand book markets plus gut-feel...so here they come, in random order:

Azadi by Chaman Nahal
This book was mentioned in the comments to salonii's blog on partition. This is a very touching story of a well-to-do Indian family in Sialkot, and the toll partition takes on them. The characters are developed with parent-like care. And you see the partition through different pairs of eyes at different points in the book. The book has its hilarious moments, and its poignant ones too. The tone of the book is very neutral. Credit is given (to India and Pakistan) where its due.

What Men Really Think About Sex by Mark Mason
I’ll cherish this book for a long time to come. The author’s a brit and a debutante. Found it in a sale, read the first page (that’s how my gut-feel works…the blurb never works for me) and boy, am I happy I bought it. The whole book is about this outrageous bet that these two guys in a software company get into. An American lady, Clare Jordan, from their US office has been brought in for a particular project, and these two want to settle, through this bet, the matter of who gets the right to ask her out first. The reason for the bet? Avoid unnecessary competition in wooing her. They name it The-Clare Jordan-Five-And-Three-Quarters-Feet-Handicap-Stakes. (needless to say, the lady doesn’t and shouldn’t have a clue about this bet, and there is always the risk of her finding somebody while the stakes are on. And btw, 5’9” is Clare’s height, in case you haven’t figured it out by now). With a premise like that, it becomes difficult to avoid being funny :d…

The Girl by David Thomas
This is another rip-roariously funny book (dunno if such a word exists but it expresses the way I feel about the book perfectly). This author is a brit too and a debutante too. The story starts with a guy in a hospital for a tooth-removal operation, whose stretcher gets accidentally swapped while he’s sedated, with a transsexual’s who is about to have his/her penis-removal operation. A lot of people don’t see the humor in that :d…but the quote on the book cover sums it up best: “It made me laugh. It made me cry. It made me check in my pants.” You might wanna keep your brit-slang dictionaries by your side. There’s so much slang that you don’t understand (or maybe its just me)…

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
This book is a surprisingly simple story. The narrator’s a spiritually disillusioned guy who gets his spiritual comeuppance from a gorilla (yes, the wise-man in this book is actually a wise-primate). This makes the book sound ridiculous, but it is not. The person who suggested this book to me (the way he got his hands on the book is another freaky joke of fate) has summed my view of the book best for me, and I’ll quote him here: “this book gave me spiritual and metaphysical closure”. This is all very deep. But be warned, it might not have the same profound impact on you. In any case, it gives delightfully simple answers to very pressing issues ailing man and the world he’s living(?) in.

Moby Dick or The Whale by Herman Melville
(Well, it was a find for me ‘cos I wasn’t expecting anything. All I had was a vague recollection of the story from my 12-yr-old pocket-illustrated-classics days). Let it be said, for the uninitiated, that this book is regarded as one of the greatest works to have ever been churned out of the American Literature mills. And rightfully so. I’d picked it up from my university book co-op when I saw that it was selling for a throw-away price. I’m 2/3rds way through it right now, and I’ve to say it’s THE best book I’ve ever read. On the face of it, it’s a blow-by-blow account of a whaling voyage headed by a captain who’s almost maniacal about his need to find and kill a whale that whalers have christened ‘Moby Dick’. So yeah, rich content. But it’s the writing-style that’s the best part of the book. The vivid, often funny, descriptions of whaling practices, are in themselves enough to thrill you to bits. But the bugger doesn’t stop at that. He has to throw in choice doses of philosophy too. And his tools of the trade are metaphors and alliterations. He uses them to such good effect that you’ll have a tough time calling it prose and not poetry.

The Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson
This guy is one tale-spinner. The way he weds quantum physics concepts with several inter-looping, criss-crossing threads, is breath-taking to say the least. And he’s funny as hell. And the entire book is generously sprinkled with kick-ass insights. Here’s one I can think of, off the top of my head: We live in our fantasies and endure our realities.

There Should Have Been Castles by Herman Rocher
This is a typical Bollywood-ishtyle love-shtory…very clichéd and trite. But the best part is not the story itself, its the writing style. Extremely funny. So if you read it with the suspended disbelief that you reserve for the crappiest of Bollywood movies, you’d love it.

The Revised KamaSutra by Richard Krasta
This guy fits the Indian-author stereotype. Overly verbose writing style. But to his credit, nowhere is it unnecessarily so. Just a legacy of his colonial past, I guess. The book is very well-written and very funny at times, although the intention is to tell a story. The humor is incidental. (I just noticed this while writing this blog. I seem to have a nose for comedy…)

with that my friends i sit back, satisfied in the knowledge that i've opened a can of bookworms here :p...happy reading!

Voices of the old sea (actual review)

Here is the first part

The village where Norman Lewis stayed was called the 'cat village' as the whole place was filled with them. This was in contrast with another village, mostly filled with peasants, which was a dog village. So in a way, the ways of life of one village is completely out of sync with its immediate neighbour. Unlike their pets, the dog village was individualistic where as cat village was more community oriented.

One of the central person in the cat village was Grandmother. She had a lot of say in many matters. Considering the fact the NL was renting out a room from Grandmother, he had access to many things that would have been otherwise shut. NL's involvement in this village was further enhanced through the friendship he developed with the Grandmother's son-in-law, who incidentally was not wealthy enough to have his own home and hence lived with his mother-in-law. To make the matters worse, there has not been any grandchild. This further shrunk the little respect the SIL had and was completely under the thumb of G.

This village was very tolerant of idiosyncrasies of humans. The priest who had a mistress had a normal life, the village dress maker's undercover operation was prostitution but she was welcomed in any home. Later NL found out there have been a succession of such women in the past. This was to facilitate the young men who, NL says could not afford marriage till they were well into their thirties.

During their small talk at the village bar, SIL asked NL if he would like to fish with him. Soon both of them went out fishing. Just so that they do not upset the local fisherman, they fish another species. To add to their earning, they also decide to fish underwater as well by choosing a spot which made net fishing difficult.

So started the tale of this village, which was in a way linked to the peasant village through economic exchanges. One of the income generations for the peasant village was cork trees, which for some reason started to get sick and die thereby creating a calamity of sorts for both the villages. To make the matters worse, the dogs of the peasant village enter the community coop of the cat village and have a merry feast. This aggravated the relationships between these two villages increasing the economic strain that was already past the threshold limit as each one lost the market of the other.

So the narration goes on about the fight between these two, invitation of a mystic to usher in some economic growth by pointing out spots on the sea where the catch would be good, the village being under observation of the nationalistic police (Spain was under the dictator Franco) who warn NL that he does not have a license to fish and was prohibited for venturing into the sea, the local festivals that still have to be performed in spite of the economic strain, etc.

All this changed after a gangster decides to retire in this part of the world. He purchases a large house moves in with his entourage. After some quite living, he decides to redo his house and ask the village to change its ways so that his next venture - tourism - would bring in success and prosperity to very one.

The book then goes now how the people who initially were extremely reluctant to change their ways soon succumb to the economic benefits these tourists bring. Soon there were live performances in the village, the village idiot who waited at the tables of the local bar was taken away and someone who could assist the tourists in their selection of food and drink was employed.

It was also decided, by the gangster, to permit kissing and embracing, that were earlier made illegal by social regulation. He also used his 'contacts' to get a jetty constructed, re-did the beach front by buying up property through offers of prices that were unheard of in that area.

The book makes an interesting read for those interested in understanding how humans behave, Nl goes about his documentation like an anthropologist on an ethnographic study. Only that the report of his study is much more readable and much more thought provoking, minus the jargon.