book reviews – Reviews and Rambles

December 19, 2017May 13, 2018

Musical Stories Spellbindingly Narrated – Nocturnes | Kazuo Ishiguro

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Short Stories, Music

Kazuo Ishiguro is a name that has gained quite a lot of favor in the literary world recently owing to his Booker Prize winner – Never Let me Go. So it is of no surprise that when I spotted a hardcopy with a pretty cover and a tagline ‘Five Stories of Music and Nightfall’ authored by Kazuo Ishiguro, I instinctively picked it up.

Nocturnes is a collection of five short stories, spinning around music in Europe, nostalgically narrated and abruptly ended. I vaguely remember reading An Artist of the Floating World by Ishiguro, but these stories have a similar charm to them – a style that inexplicably weaves the reader into the narrator’s world.

A common thread across these stories is a love or pursuit of music and fame or the desire for recognition Then there are the troubled couples, lovers whom life has slowly clinched apart and those who are still inching closer and finding each other. But they only form a part of the story, a background tune. Rather, it’s the fleeting moments shared between strangers connected through music that form the chorus, with the impending goodbye as the crescendo.

In some ways, these stories are about travelling and meeting new people – who you never really know except in the few hours that they decide to spend with you. It’s about people who you wish you could have known better or people that bring out a different side to you – sometimes they are inviting and mysterious like a tune you can’t get out of your head, and then, as suddenly as they appeared, they disappear and become another of those strangers you might catch a glimpse of from afar.

Nocturnes builds up a rhythm of its own. It has the kind of stories you would exchange with unfamiliar faces across a campfire, a bit to impress but really to avoid forgetting them yourself. These are stories that don’t necessarily lead to a well-formed ending but have still somehow stayed with the narrator all along – eternal mysteries wrapped around quirks in a stranger’s behavior.

The book is a light read that draws you in and shows you the colorful, vibrant and nostalgic world of a stray musician – full of lies and dreams. Even if you’re not the short story kind, if you’re looking for a change of pace and love music enough to experiment with it, Nocturnes is definitely a go-ahead. And if you’ve read anything else by Ishiguro, I wouldn’t mind a recommendation myself.

P.S. This was slow in coming to me but I finally remember why the title sounds strangely familiar. Think Neil Gaiman and his graphic novel Sandman – no wonder then that this nocturnes has a dream-like aura itself!

January 18, 2017August 20, 2017

Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehesi Coates)

Once in a while, you run into a book you know you’ll cherish for the rest of your life. A book which speaks to you, which feels more like a conversation than a storytelling, which makes you feel like you’ve known someone through its pages more intimately than you could have through any conversation. Only in this case, that someone was just another black living in America. Only, this is the first time I have heard the story from the other side – the story I could only watch on news from halfway across the world.

I believe that this book needs to be read. Because we are so used to single sources of information, articles squeezed into the familiar pattern, audience oriented news pieces, that we forget to think, to feel, to understand. We overlook. We forget. We pretend ignorance. We instinctively distance ourselves from topics too difficult to talk about because we believe we are too caught up chasing our own dreams.

Out of all this book leaves me with, there is a strong respect for Ta-Nehisi Coates, and it is not just because he confronts the daily dread of being black in America and scribbles it down for other people to understand, but because of the way he does it, his reasoning, the pain, helplessness, rage, frustration resonating in every sentence which tries to answer the one question that any bystander or victim of such pointless violence is left reeling in – why – a question which the assailant cannot understand.

Coates’ account is at once fascinating, revolting and heartbreaking – fascinating because of his analysis, his compelling theory of what drives this blind violence, this feigned ignorance and abject disparity; revolting because it reveals to you all the forms that violence can take and heartbreaking because of the way Coates puts it into words and because of the unfairness of it all.

There is so much that this book has conveyed to me which I had no way of knowing from elsewhere, that I am scared of translating it into my own words lest I should alter the meaning in any way. Because these thoughts are Coates’ own and he must be the one to tell you about them. Here is a bit of an excerpt.

Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world – which is really the only world she can ever know – ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains – whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

I couldn’t help thinking about Macklemore’s song White Privilege II at more than one point. I remember reading somewhere that it is a small book, easy to read in a few sittings, but for me, it is one of the heaviest I have ever read.

February 22, 2014August 20, 2017

A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)

“God sometimes tells lies. We spread our hands out to these lies and live with them”[1]

In what seems to be a long long time(even though it was just three days). I have finally reached the end of A Fine Balance. What remains now is a profound sadness, but also a slight confusion, that I try to dispel as I write.

What I can say about the book is that it drips with life, or better, tries to replicate life itself: complete with its miseries, struggles, incomprehensibilities, meetings, joys, stagnancies, and of course, goodbyes.It begins with a meeting, which, while pulling the characters out of their immediate predicaments, ends up as a prelude to unforeseen but consequential events.Fate brings them together and need binds them, albeit with a cord so frayed it threatens to break at the slightest of innocent pressure.

Still, like the memories that refuse to be forgotten, the book keeps bringing up their pasts, which they uselessly try to put behind them. A curious group of misfits(a middle-aged widow trying to live without depending on her brother; a college going student who has weathered severe bullying and violent student unions; a kind-hearted man and his hot-headed nephew, who have dearly paid the casualties of being in the lower chamaar caste in their native village), the house where they live becomes a haven to them which they viciously protect.

From the beginning, Mistry makes us fall in love with the characters. It has been a while since I’ve empathized with the characters to the extent that I’m impatient to know where their lives will take them next; and yet increasingly reluctant as the end approached, maybe because I could sense the impending doom and recognize the subtle forebodings.

All people are but a product of their circumstances. They all have their own reasons, beliefs, stories, moral codes and breaking points, and Mistry does well to explore these to their darkest depths. The setting of the book (1970s – 1980s) when India was fraught with political uprisings, caste based riots and, above all, the consequences of the Emergency (forced sterilization camps, destruction of slums, and effectively, the withdrawal of all human rights for those without money or powerful backing) helped this generously, but was not half-heartedly done. Above everything else, Mistry shows India ruthlessly, glorifying in all its twisted sensibilities and heartlessness, but all the while preserving the kindness and love people inherently retain in their hearts, perhaps to prove their humanity to a society which will not give them their due.

The book does not have a happy ending, so to say. There is, after all, a limit to how far people can walk a tightrope while continuously glancing behind their backs. Their pasts inevitably catches up with them and smashes them back to where they began. Yet, that does not refute the short refuge they enjoyed when together with one another, making it one of the most beautiful time of their lives.

And what do I myself have to say about the time spent reading the book? Simply that, along with giving an interesting glimpse into the 1970s India, it taught me a lot of things I had no other way of knowing. I am a different person now from when I picked it up, and for that it deserves my respect and gratitude.

HEADS-UP: Look forward to plenty of unusual allegories and motifs, but not to a happy ending. Take your time savoring this book, it has a lot to offer(literally, it’s 614 pages, in fine print). It’s gonna get an easily accessible place on my shelf. And most importantly, do give it a shot, but remember, it is not for the weak-hearted.

QUOTES: A Fine Balance is more of a paragraph-quotes book, if you know what I mean. Still, here are some of my favorite picks:

As always, feel free to discuss your opinions/suggestions.

[1] Kamisama ga uso o tsuku by Kaori Ozaki

November 8, 2013August 20, 2017

The Giver (Lois Lowry)

“Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.”

And if you take people to a world far far away from sadness, you’re inevitably separating them their happiness. What will the people in such a world come to, how will they begin to behave, understand, comprehend things? What else will they loose?

Summary: Jonas’ world is perfect. Everything is under control. There is no war or fear or pain. There are no choices. Every person is assigned a role in the Community. When Jonas turns twelve, he is singled out to receive special training from The Giver. The Giver alone holds the memories of the true pain and pleasure of life. Now, it is time for Jonas to receive the truth. There is no turning back.[Source: Goodreads]

From the get go, the Giver puts us in a ‘perfect’ world. A world where there is absolute equality, where no one is left to die of hunger, where there is no pain, no fear, no violence no fights. But still, it has a weird feeling about it, and Jonas feels it too. There is the absurd system of all parents being ‘assigned’ children, the place called ‘Elsewhere’, mysterious ‘releases’ of old people and people who break the stringent rules of the community, the rules that in themselves make us uncomfortable, a number of rules, both strict and minor, the rule about apologizing, the rule of dream-tellling, the rule to not lie, the rule against coming out of your houses in night-time, against speaking the name of those released, against locked doors, against bragging. These rules are the ones that begin to dispel my illusion of this society being a Utopian one at first, for a world with so many rules to be called perfect doesn’t really seem right. It shows a community built on equality brought about these rules, an equality so absolute that it does not even permit the existence of colors.

Our apprehensions are slowly given a firmer base. As our protagonist, Jonas, on spending more time with his mentor, slowly learns about the workings of the community, and as we spend more time with the book ourselves, the horrors of the community are slowly revealed to us. Even the word ‘horror’ barely covers the nothingness, hollowness of the community. Slowly, we are shown, matter-of-factly, those things that are foreign to the society, those things that are so much everyday to us that we don’t even acknowledge their existence. The Giver gives to us Dystopia through a Utopia all the while making us treasure and love more than ever all the little things that surround us: by completely ignoring them at first and then conjuring them up, one after the other, defining them and experiencing them.

The Giver is not just an average book, it is a masterpiece, and like any wonderful piece of art there is nothing that can be said about it that will do it justice and yet there is so much that demands to be said as it slowly leads one into the vault of thoughts and imagination. It is not a book to be read halfheartedly as it breaks boundaries in making us think and it gives a voice to all those things that we have always taken for granted. And as all other great stories, it is labelled as a ‘Children’s book’.

And, of course, it reminded me a lot of 1984 by George Orwell which had a Dystopian setting with similar features.