must read – Reviews and Rambles

October 8, 2017May 13, 2018

A Treat of a Book – A Man Called Ove | Fredrik Backman

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Slice of Life

Let me start with this fact.
One of the major characters in this book is a cat and Ove (the grumpy old man who’s the lead, as is evident from the title) has a name for said cat.
There. For those who find this information enough, I wish you pleasant reading as you make your way to your favorite bookstore to get a copy.

Meanwhile, I’ll try to present a better case for why this books is hands-down the sweetest book I’ve ever read. This is a book that restored my trust in humanity. No kidding. It’s not to be read for some thrilling plot or an edge-of-a-cliff storyline, but to explore the characters and know more about them with every turn of the page. And even though the story is as everyday as it gets, you’ll still find yourself surprised by the small connections and the small moments that inevitably strike a chord in your heart.

Then there is the viewpoint of Ove – an old, painfully righteous, man living alone. Ove, as the book itself puts, is the type of person you just don’t find in the world anymore, except in the grandfather age generation, maybe; the type that will find a nasty way of saying the nicest things; the type that are completely misunderstood despite meaning so well; the type that find that easily get irritated but still go out of their way to help others; the type that will never accept that they mean well even if you tie them to a railway line and threaten their lives. And that gives a completely fresh and unique perspective to the story.

Reading ‘A man called Ove’ is like returning to your home at the end of a tiring day and finding your loved ones sitting at the dinner table waiting for you, Imagine that feeling and multiply it with the number of chapters in the book, and that might give an estimation of how I felt about this book. This is how my thoughts went while reading it (in similar order):

#1
I swear this is a book about my grandfather

#2
Wait. Why am I relating so much to a grumpy old man who doesn’t like espresso machines?

#3
I wonder if all old people are like this.

#4
Awww….

Literally. This is how I felt at the end. I realized that there is as little we understand of the people we know as we are quick to form opinions about them. I started as the salesman at the electronic store who was ready to hand Ove the ‘Most Annoying Customer of the Day’ title and ended up as the kid who’d paint the entire world in monotone and just Ove in colour.

Reading this book is like loving someone, and as Sonja (Ove’s wife) puts it

“Loving someone is like moving into a house. At first you fall in love with all the new things, amazed every morning that all this belongs to you, as if fearing that someone would suddenly come rushing in through the door to explain that a terrible mistake had been made, you weren’t actually supposed to live in a wonderful place like this. Then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of all its perfection, but rather for its imperfections. You get to know all the nooks and crannies. How to avoid getting the key caught in the lock when it’s cold outside. Which of the floorboards flex slightly when one steps on them or exactly how to open the wardrobe doors without them creaking. These are the little secrets that make it your home.”

Backman has such a talent for putting feelings into words that it leaves you speechless. Like all your life, you’ve been wanting to say the same thing but didn’t know how. And he comes along and frames those thoughts into sentences more true and beautiful than poetry.

The humor is one thing I felt the writing fell short of. The prose is often interposed by lines of dry humor which barely draw a chuckle. Still, a bit of it can be justified by Ove’s character which might lean more towards humor of this kind. I chose to give Backman the benefit of doubt in this case because the writing and story is beyond such small tidbits.

If you like indie music and slice-of-life series; and your catchphrase is cut-the-drama, you’ll probably like ‘A man called Ove’. Even if it’s not and you’re looking for a slow read, I’ll highly recommend this.

April 19, 2017August 20, 2017

[Comikist] All about Craig Thompson

Have you read Craig Thompson yet? And I swear I’m not cheating by putting the name of an artist here instead of a list of comics. It’s not like I don’t have a list. Pfft… How could you even think that? It’s just that the list is two specific books by Craig Thompson – Blankets and Habibi. In that particular order.

Blankets by Craig Thompson

Habibi by Craig Thompson

Thompson’s work, I believe, exemplifies comics as an art. I don’t know where to start talking about it – the exotic stories or the art that merges seamlessly into words. The ink splattered goodness is so heavenly, you can literally tear off every page of the comic (if you have the heart to), get them framed and hang them on your walls. I have lost count of the number of seconds (err… minutes) I have spent lost in a single page while reading the book. And not just while reading, but afterwords. Like googling a quote you’re itching to remember, I’m often stuck looking for a particular page from one of the books, or trying to replicate it by drawing it myself when I can’t get enough of it.

Blankets

Habibi

Books are supposed to teleport us into worlds different from our own. Most do it through stories and in novels, the writing style makes all of it happen. Comics, on the other hand, become a double-edged sword. While the images might complement the story, they might even be distracting for the reader, because there is a lot of input to the brain, the flashy images, the stills, the dialog boxes and the words themselves. Craig Thompson executes the style perfectly; so that you feel like the protagonist is holding your hand and leading you through all the confusion that is their story while still have time to swoon over the art.

Then their is the story. Or stories. All of them. The ones I have read till now and the ones I am saving for later, all of them justify the beautiful art they are soaked in. Be it Blankets, where Craig weaves you a story of his first love, each thread spun with nostalgia, or Habibi, a story of slaves and sheikhs as bitter as folklore. If the art is beautiful, the stories enchanting, and tempting you to peak into the future by turning just a few pages.

Even if you don’t read comics, I would urge you to make this one author an exception. If you’re looking for a comfortable spot to edge into the comic world, this is a good way to ease your foot in the door. For starters, I’ll recommend Blankets. And only of you absolutely love Thompson’s style, move to Habibi.

While Blankets is at the end a story – a fond remembrance of Thompson’s first love, Habibi is more of an artistic expression. At many places, it feels like a peak into the author’s mind and his drawing style rather than just a story. I liked the book, but a huge reason behind it is my admiration for Thompson’s art, which made occasional expansions and digressions in the book interesting as it let him expand on how he draws. But for readers who are just interested in the story, these diversions just put them off. In Blankets, the pace of the story is more suited to the readers.

So the verdict is, read Blankets for sure. And if you feel like you start craving more of Thompson’s style, give Habibi a shot.

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.

May 31, 2014

The Siege – The Attack on the Taj(Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark)

With 166 dead and around 300 injured, the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai was one of the most ghastly and sinister experiences of independent India, which shook both the nation and the world, with the perpetrator count being a mere 10 fidayeen(Lashkar-e-Toiba’s units which are ‘trained to sacrifice’).

Google Earth, Internet telephony network and satellite TV were what kept up the attacks and the slow response of the higher authorities was what scaled it to monstrous levels, searing its existence into all those who were unfortunate enough to witness or become a victim to it. For most of us Indians, it was something that just happened, like so many other events. It was something we saw on our Television screens, with the news reporters in the forefront drawing our attention to a burning Taj in the background. Not that it was needed, it was already impossible to tear one’s eyes away from it; the Taj was a sight to behold. The mighty hotel with smoke ensuing out of it, perhaps, was a metaphor to the Indian Institution which had bitterly failed in its duties to its citizens for both combating and later, investigating the horrible attacks. For all those involved in it, all those who lost their loved ones to it, or were injured for life, it was something which they probably cannot forget for all of their remaining lives.

tsc

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark did a wonderful job of piecing all the events that happened before and during the 26/11 attacks into a linear timeline. They then began at the very start, the recruiting and training of the 10 fidayeen soldiers and ended at the retaking of the Taj by the Indian NSG(National Security Guard). The NSG was deployed to Mumbai a full 10 hours after the commencement of the attacks and in the meantime, it was the local authorities(who were helpless devoid of proper ammunition to face the loaded and battle trained fidayeen units), the Taj security guard and the Taj staff that held the fort, losing their men to secure guests who were stuck in the hotel. The Taj staff went out of their way to ensure the security of their guests, even going as far as risking their own lives.

To attribute a genre to The Siege, I would call it a thriller. But it is a thriller like no other. It is a thriller in which a reader already knows what was going to happen, but the question that is answered a little with each turn of the page, is how. It is chilling to the bone because after every few moments it hit again that everything written down in the book actually happened. All the carnage and horror inked down in those pages is not a figment of someone’s imagination, but infact a story of people who actually lived(or gave their all to live) through it.

The absence of the police force coerced the people into taking matters into their own hands. A pair of soldiers successfully led a large group of foreigners(largely Koreans) out of the Taj Towers with the help of a Taj Security Chief member, a Taj General Manager did the same and then went back in to assist other guests, and the most wondrous of them were the Chefs who built a human chain to safely escort the guests through corridors. One of the staff members who was stuck inside a room was kept alive by a stranger who kept her conscious by talking to her through her mobile phone for all the thirty-six hours she was stuck there. In the midst of all the terror and cold ruthlessness, there were people who demonstrated such courage and selflessness that make you wonder at human tenacity.

What the The Siege does is relay the untold story of all the innocent people who were caught in the wild schemes of an organization which ultimately sought to serve its own goals of terrorizing the world, and these also included the young people who were allured with warped promises and assurances of religion and carefully trained to die. A particular exchange still rings in mind:

(Ajmal Kasab after being shown the mutilated bodies of his comrades)
“Ajmal turned furiously to his police guard, his world imploding:’Take me away’. He was driven back to his solitary cell, where his interrogator was waiting for him. ‘So, Ajmal,’ he said, smiling. ‘Did you see the glow on their faces and smell the fragrance of roses rising from their bodies?’
Bitterly, Ajmal wept.”

Here are two of some other incidents mentioned in the afterword:

At Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, where Ajmal Kasab and his accomplice gunned down fifty-eight commuters, wounding another 104, a thirteen year old boy was saved from the firing and taken to a hospital where doctors calculated when to tell him that his parents, an uncle and three cousins had perished.

*****

After the bodies of thirty-two staff and guests were recovered from the Trident-Oberoi Hotels, a Turkish Muslim couple, Seyfi and Meltem Muezzinoglu, held captive for eight hours, recalled how they burst into mourning after watching the gunmen execute a group of female hostages. “We stepped forward, opened our hands and said our prayers out loud,” Seyfi said. “And you know what happened? One of the gunmen was staring at us with big eyes. He didn’t believe it and started looking at the floor. He was ashamed. We spoke our prayers in Arabic, and we spoke them loud, hand in hand in front of those bodies.”

The Siege is the first book of its kind that I liked. I have a hard time reading journalism books. I find them hard to appreciate. But this one is an exception, maybe because the events were carefully arranged into how a storyteller would tell them without compromising the facts, or maybe because the stories themselves surpassed my aversion to these kind of books. Whatever the reason, the Siege gives us a box office view of the Taj Attacks, revealing facts and heart-wrenching stories and feats that our television sets failed to. Above all, it is a book that should be read once, atleast by every Indian.

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.