The Last Samurai – Helen DeWitt

The Last Samurai handles so many complex themes that are close to my heart, I devoured it over a weekend. It begins as a narration by Sybella, an American living in London (she digitises books for a living) and in the second half is in the voice of her 11 year old child, Ludo. The book’s structure was a little hard to get used to at first; It starts in Sybella’s voice where she describes her daily life with her 2 year old kid Ludo. This part of the book has snippets from the Film criticism of ‘The Seven Samurai’ (Kurosowa’s classic which I haven’t watched yet), diary entries, streams of consciousness and cuts between different voices like a film. Sybella’s part was so fun to read, that I missed these manic shifts in tone in the second half, where in Ludo’s narration things get back to normal, very entertaining nonetheless. Second half is about Ludo’s search for an ideal father after being disgusted (just like his mother) by his biological dad’s banality. 

“The little wet fist fell, and small eyes glazed at a box on which brightly coloured cartoon characters consumed representations of the product”

The book handles so many of my pet themes. Nature of intelligence, random happenstances that shape people’s lives, various digressions on history, science and music, what is completion, the mediocrity that we put up with in our lives (both ours and that of people we encounter), our search for perfection in our lives, violence of authority and the morality of suicide. For all these heavy themes, a dark wit and black humor runs through the book, especially in the half with Sybella. All the scenes where the mom and kid interact with clueless members of the public are a hoot. I chuckled all the way through. 

“He is capable of logical thought, said Sib. It makes him appear exceptionally intelligent. The fact is that most people are illogical out of habit rather than stupidity, they could probably be rational quite easily if they were properly taught” 

Ludo is a genius, (so is his mom), he is homeschooled and he masters at least 15 different languages, well versed in history, science and philosophy. Although, the novel mostly hints that Ludo’s genius is not natural. It is because he has been nurtured to learn and his genuine curiosity in learning things was not extinguished by a banal society and that makes him extraordinary. That helps him stand out amidst the crowd that looks on in awe on his regular rides on the circle train.

“There is a strange taboo in our society against ending something merely because it is not pleasant”

But for all his apparent genius, Ludo is not depicted as socially stunted. He is warm and empathetic. It is especially heart breaking when Ludo handles a suicide with such tenderness and maturity. All his encounters with the 6 different characters he ‘auditions’ to be his father are superbly written and could even be stand alone stories I would love to read. He is extraordinary for his age (just like so many characters in the story exclaim!) and becomes a true samurai towards the end. Always reaching towards perfection and avoiding mediocrity. It would appear that the pedagogy of the prodigy is pretty successful. This is a work of beauty which no home should be without.

Abitha – La.Sa.Ramamrutham (அபிதா – லா.ச.ராமாமிர்தம்)

லா.ச.ரா அவர்களின் சௌந்தர்ய புத்தகத்தை நான் சமீபத்தில் படித்திருந்தேன். அந்த புத்தகம் ‘அபிதா’ நாவலின் ஒரு தொடர்ச்சி என அறிந்து இந்த நாவலையும் படித்து முடித்தேன். ‘அபிதா’, பெரும்பாலும் அக விவரணைகள் மட்டுமே கொண்ட சிறு நாவல். ‘Claustrophobia’ வரவைக்கக் கூடிய எழுத்து. கதைசொல்லி உணரும், மூச்சடைக்க வைக்க கூடிய, மனதை நெருக்கும் காதலை நமக்கு கடத்தும் அற்புத நடை கொண்டுள்ளது. மேலும் புறக்காட்சிகள் அனைத்தும் கதைசொல்லியின் அக உணர்ச்சியின் வெளிப்பாடாக தோன்றுகிறது. நாவலின் கதை மிகவும் பழைய, பழக்கப்பட்ட ஒன்றாக இருந்தாலும், மொழியின் உத்தி இதனை மிகவும் அழகானதாக மாற்றுகிறது. லா.ச.ராவின் மனம் விரும்பியபடி செல்கின்ற மொழி, ஒரு கனவு நிலையினை உருவாக்குகிறது. கதைசொல்லியின் ஏக்கம், தாபம், காதல், சுய இரக்கம் ஆகிய அத்தனையும் வெளிப்படும் கனவு வெளியைப் படைத்ததே இந்த நாவல் எனக்கு மிகவும் பிடிக்கக் காரணம். இந்த மொழி அனுபவத்திற்காகவே கண்டிப்பாக படிக்க வேண்டிய புத்தகம்.

Everybody Loves a Good Drought – P.Sainath

Half way through, ‘Everybody loves a good drought’, I almost made up my mind to not finish the book. All the anecdotes capturing the miserable lives of rural India cut too close. These were not stories that I could brush aside as having taken place 25 years before. The major causes of these wretched people’s predicament exist even today. The long line of displaced workers who walked out of Delhi when the Corona lockdown began comes to mind. Be it well intentioned government policies gone awry or the callousness and apathy of the government machinery or individual maliciousness towards people who do not have a voice, all these persist. The monstrous government machinery slowly grinds these people to dust. This is not to blame an abstract body and absolve ourselves of this brutality. The fact that I could sit on a comfortable bed and dispassionately look at these lives from afar made me realize the enormous privilege I have. Every one of these stories made me uneasy. From uneasiness grows empathy, I guess. The anecdotes cover tribal and oppressed people across the poorest districts in India 25 years back. It came as a surprise to me that Tamil Nadu was one of the top 5 states with the most people living below the poverty line around the time this book was written. Although it brings hope that a lot has changed since then in my state, I wonder how the other people fared. Did the people displaced for ‘development’ projects finally get their due? Do the Bondas of Odisha have a school their children can go to? Or what about the Koyas? Can they freely harvest bamboos for their trade or have they all been driven out, consumed by the paper companies’ greed? I wish I knew the answers. And if my cynical mind is right, these questions will have answers that do not taste sweet. I am glad that the book left me with so many questions though.

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle – Stuart Turton

 

What a way to make a debut! This is another novel I randomly came across when I saw a friend reading it. An amazing cocktail of a murder mystery, psychological thriller in a Victorian setting. Aiden Bishop (This is a spoiler in itself) arrives with no memories in an old English estate. He has 7 days to solve the death of Evelyn Hardcastle, whose homecoming party he is now at. But here is the catch. Evelyn kills herself at the end of every day. The day then resets, throwing Bishop’s consciousness into the body of another guest at the party. And if Bishop cannot solve the mystery of who kills Evelyn through a suicidal homicide by the end of 8 days, the whole damn thing resets, taking him to the beginning of the game. He has to do this while being chased by a homicidal Footman and a rival who wants to solve the mystery. Macabre Groundhog day for sure.

The plot is dense, intricate and delectably sinister. We are as bewildered as Bishop is at the beginning of the novel and it is amazing to read how all the various moving cogs of the novel fit together as we proceed through the 8 days. The shift is perspective as Bishop wakes up in another guest’s body is disorienting and jarring as much as to us as it is for poor Bishop. This is a brilliant plot device. Bishop has to fight with his own mind as well as with the consciousness of the guest, whose body he is subletting without any notice. The guests are all extremely different from one another; physically and in their mental faculties. The novel is as much a murder mystery as it is a psychological thriller. Bishop slowly loses the sense of his self towards the end, the barrier between his mind and his host breaking down as he desperately tries to solve the murder all the while fighting to save his sanity as well. I was disappointed to not have a single woman character as one of Bishop’s hosts. That could have been an interesting situation.

Besides the main plot device, the murder mystery is exquisitely layered. Everyone Bishop meets holds a secret and all these layers slowly reveal themselves to us as Bishop pieces together the happenings of the day. The mystery keeps us guessing, multiple rugs being pulled from under us in a satisfactory finale. I will eagerly wait for Turton’s next book.

Recursion – Blake Crouch

 

There is a serendipitous quality to reading a book that you run into at random. I was reading about a podcast called Mysterious Universe and by some weird chance ran into this book by an author I had not read or heard of before. The brief blurb I read seemed quite interesting and in a few minutes I had checked the book out for my kindle from the local library.  After a few sessions of reading over a long weekend, I managed to finish the book.

The book is a sci-fi thriller that reads like a mix of Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow and that delectable Netflix show Dark. Barry Scott, a detective at NYPD inadvertently begins to investigate an apparently mysterious disease called False Memory Syndrome that is spreading in NY.  People affected by it suddenly remember two different lives vividly but one of those lives appears to be a false narrative of their life. A decade earlier, Helena Smith, a scientist researching how memory works to help patients with Alzheimer’s, discovers a method to send people’s consciousness back in time.  Barry’ investigation of the source of this syndrome brings their life together and throws their life into chaos. 

The ‘how’ of the sci-fi premise seemed a lot of hokum to me. And personally, this affects how open I am towards embracing the book. There are books where I cannot suspend my disbelief enough to buy the author’s tale. And towards the second act, I thought Recursion was one of those books too where I am unable to get past the perceived flaw in the book’s central theme. But things take a dramatic turn in the third act and I’m glad to say that I really enjoyed the completely mad imagination of the author.  Time travel is one of my favorite sci-fi tropes and I guess this really played a role in my enjoyment of this book. I thought I felt an underlying vein of the book having been written with a movie/TV adaptation in mind. That was a little jarring for me even though I couldn’t really say why I felt that way. Anyway, it looks like I have found another author I could return to satisfy my sci-fi thriller appetite.  

Military Reminiscences, Extracted from a Journal of Nearly Forty Years’ Active Service in the East Indies – James Welsh

Google books is terrific. It has digitized thousands of books that are now in the public domain. They are available as searchable PDFs either for download or for online reading. You can also add them to your personal library on Google Books and read it on your phone, tablet or a computer. I was randomly browsing catalogue when I came across this book written by a Scotsman, James Welsh, who served in the East India Company. James Welsh has kept a detailed journal of his time in India and this is an account of his experience here. James Welsh starts with his arrival in Calcutta during the last decade of the 18th century and narrates his journey through the sub continent. Even though the book was written almost 200 years back, it is an extremely readable account of the early 19th century India. He served in the East India company’s Madras Army and was a part of the war against the Poligars, the Marudu brothers and the Mahrata War. He was also a part of the army headed by Arthur Wellesley who famously assailed the Gawilgurh fort during the Mahrata War. Welsh seems to be a fair man; he is generous in his praise of Katta Bomman (He is hilariously called Cat by Welsh; apparently that is how the Company referred him), feels that the way he was treated by the Company was not right. This is what he says about the imprisonment of Kattabomman and his family – “It is not for me to decide upon the justice or policy of such a measure, but I should have thought liberality and kindness would have been the best way to secure their allegiance.” He also seems to have been friends with the younger of the Marudu Brothers (Marudu Brothers and their entire family were brutally hung to death by the British for rebelling against the company) and helps send his youngest son Dora Swamy, a boy of 15 years to Penang. Welsh thinks he probably will not meet him again but fate has other plans. This is how Welsh describes meeting Dora Swamy again when he visits Penang – “It came like a dagger to my heart ; the conviction was instantaneous. My poor young prisoner stood before me ; changed, dreadfully changed in outward appearance, but still with the same mind, and cherishing the remembrance of former days and former friendships”.  This was truly an emotional chapter.

Welsh has almost lived the life of an adventurer. He arrives in India barely 20 years old and marches across the country from Madras to Tirunelveli to Colombo and back across the country from Palayamkottai to Poonah for the Mahrata war and back to Tirunelveli. Just typing that out made me breathless. There are descriptions of the country as he travels through the various provinces. Wild cats such as Tigers and Panthers seem to be everywhere, from Srirangam to Madurai (Tiruparankundram to be precise) and in Mahrata and Mysore provinces. Welsh even says the elder Marudu brother was such a huge and powerful man tha he was known to wrestle Tigers to death. Mysore and the Tirunelveli country are full of verdant land and deep forests and water tanks abound throughout. There are as many tanks as there are villages, Welsh says. The Mahrata country though, is in a famine, the landscape dry and hot and in a chilling scene, he describes thousands of people dead due to a famine in a village near Aurangabad. Another episode I found intriguing was how he randomly runs into the Shravana Belagola village while on his march back to Pallamcottah from Poonah. He is impressed by the Gomateshwara, (Gomethez as he calls it) but cannot comprehend such greatness from a nation of apparently backward people. In his own words – “I could hardly conceive how the hand of man, and that particularly of a race by no means either intelligent or educated, could have accomplished such a work of labour, and that too on the summit of a sterile rock” But I thought that the sad part was this. Welsh says, “No person on the spot seemed either to know or care when, or how, or by whom it was made”. I think this is still true in some ways. We as a nation are still not aware or care about our contributions to the world.

I had a lot of fun reading this book. I was on google maps, trying to chart Welsh’s journey on his journey across India and deciphering the names of Indian towns from his weird anglicised names like Ahmednugger, Punjalumcoorchy and Ookoor. I have one regret though; I never did manage to figure out where was Sherewele Jungle.

Rubber – Jeyamohan (ரப்பர் – ஜெயமோகன்)

 

Rubber charts the story of people in a multi generational family in a village in Kanyakumari district when the family’s patriarch is dying of old age. Set during the 90s, just about when India had opened her borders for trading this is a familiar theme that we can see used in many pieces in literature. A dying patriarch, the darkness in the family and the changing social landscape around them. I have read a lot of short stories and a few of the novels by Jeyamohan, which I found to be some of the best written in Tamil. This is his first novel. Each chapter follows a character in the family. The novel is extremely bleak and most of the characters live with hatred and hopelessness. Just like the rubber trees that don’t let any other plant grow near them, these characters are extremely unlikable, almost actively shunning any form of companionship. I love depressing, nihilistic depictions of life and this was something I appreciated. The episodes are non linear, jumping from perspective from one chapter to the other and also jumping generations. The novel also contains vivid descriptions of people and places which the author is known for. It has all of his pet themes like elephants, forests, worms and the Neelis. Some of the chapters are terrific; the exquisite detailing of Drace’s (Is that the name?) psychology of an infatuation, the scale of destruction conveyed in the chapter where Ponnu Peruvattar brings down a pristine meadow by setting it on fire, the scene with just children in it but which burns red hot with human malice; all of these amazing chapters come to mind. The language recalls the spectacularly bombastic prose he perfected in stories like ‘படுகை’ and ‘ஊமைச்செந்நாய்’ but the biggest problem I found with the novel was its fleeting nature. This is a short novel and so much life is condensed into vignettes that span generations of time and space. This made me fit more into the shoes of a historian observing the characters from afar than being a part of these people’s lives. Hence the philosophy that Francis experiences at the end of the book felt spurious and campy rather than being a life changing religious moment that it is supposed to feel like. Similarly, the final appeal to be in harmony with the world also does not ring true. Apart from these gripes of mine, I found this to be an astonishingly good debut novel. I still think his short stories are his greatest works yet and Rubber hasn’t made me change my mind.

Puyalilae Oru Thoni – P.Singaram (புயலிலே ஒரு தோணி)

P.Singaram, in my extremely limited opinion, is probably the only writer in Tamil that has so effortlessly put into paper, the random stream of thoughts that course through our heads. In a memorable scene, as the inebriated protagonist sets off in search of a whore, the present bleeds into the past and historic figures from Silappathikaram burst into life on the streets of 1940s Sumatra. Another scene in the middle of a raging storm in the sea, Singaram’ s words flow with consummate ease as he weaves through the description of the storm and the state of the hero’s mind. This is wizardry with a pen.

The novel, published with much difficulty in 1972, begins in the 1940s and follows Pandyan, a young Tamil expat working in Indonesia. Japanese forces invade Indonesia, as Pandyan moves to Penang and joins the Indian National Army. Singaram apparently had many friends working in the INA, and he gathered material for the book from them. And yes, Subash Chandra Bose does make an appearance. This is no wide eyed, star struck caricature, though. Pandyan meets him just the way he goes through life; with a strange detachment. That is not to say he is numb; He is extremely involved and strong in his convictions, yet the titular raft in the raging storm around him. And that I guess that is the point of the story.

Singaram must have had astounding knowledge in Tamil literature and it shows. The novel is abundantly filled with parodies and references to Tamil poetry; several of which even I could spot with my sparse knowledge. This is the work of an artist at his peak. I would gladly sell my soul to the devil to write a chapter like the Chinnamangalam chapters in this book. This is definitely a book that would reward multiple reads but also a book that would not translate well. That sucks because I feel this is one of the best that contemporary Tamil literature has to offer. What also sucks is that not many Tamil speaking people know about this book. (I was introduced to the novel when I chanced upon an interview of Vetrimaran in which he said he could never make this into a movie)

In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, there was a knife that you could use to cut through your reality and step into another. He was probably thinking of books like Puyalilae oru thoni. They are neat book shaped holes in our reality that transport us to another time and place. Books like these remind me why I read; they also remind me why I’ll never stop.

 

Zero History – William Gibson

I don’t know if everyone experiences it; my mind associates a specific sound or an image to the prose I read. Especially as I read more of the same author. Gibson, I associate with a rapid fire sound from an assault rifle and the image of an operating table; every tool on it used, nothing wasted; nothing extraneous. And I’m sure if you have read his books, you will realize where this comes from.  He uses his words like a doctor with a surgical blade. Incisions made to an incredible degree of precision. It is amazing how he creates so much with so less. Zero history is no exception.

Zero history is a straight sequel to Spook country and follows Hollis and Milgrim, two of the three protagonists of Spook country. There are also several recurring characters and a reveal at the end that will be underwhelming to those that haven’t read Pattern recognition. (You might say the entire novel is underwhelming, but that’s another debate)  Hollis is not a likeable protagonist; she has no edge, no personality to her that you either want to root for or despise. She just is. Had she been an actor, she would be described as lacking a screen presence. But Milgrim, a recovering drug addict was someone who I could root for; who is now patching his personality together to his surprise and ours. Hollis, tasked by Blue Ant’s CEO Bigend, is aided by Milgrim in a quest to find the maker of an obscure denim. And they go from London to Paris and back to London towards a climax that involves, in typical Gibson fashion, flying penguins, Ugly T-Shirts that help avoid facial recognition and a young femme fatale on a motorbike.

Gibson’s charm, for me at least, lies in his crystallized observations about today’s zeitgeist. Sample this line for example – “Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones”. And another one from Spook country – “The pixels in the cabinet’s wood-grain veneer were too large; you only got the high-resolution stuff in your better places”.  A remarkable metaphor that suggests how we have changed into a world that is rooted to technology; people obsessed with the virtual rather than the physical. This trilogy might not be a good introduction to Gibson’s work but I quite liked his move from Science fiction to something that takes place in the now.