Maus
Source: Zoozoo's Facebook Photo's
Categories: books · general gyan
Tagged: maus, mypix, vodafone, zoozoo
Its been a long dry spell. Why? Well… its not like school. I don’t have to give excuses.
Really. I don’t.
So on to topic of post. Nothing deep.
I read a thriller type book that kept me occupied. That I was reading it after only mildly amusing tibetan mythology and definitely unamusing Black Swan, might have helped, but something tells me this one would have been a hit anyway.
Steig Larsson’s ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ is definitely readable. Whoever did the translation keeps using the ‘anon’ for soon which sent me into happy fits. I’m sure one can nit pick and say bad things about this series but the author, as they say prominently in the blurb, died soon after giving his publisher three manuscripts. Takes all the fun out of playing critic if one is criticizing recently and tragically dead guy. Sigh.
But really. Good book for a weekend. Go get it while I go see if someone is selling the next one in India.
Categories: books
Its been a great run with the books recently. It all began with the Landmark sale that we stumbled into while hunting for the car. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, The Road and Summerland were all acquired there. Suttree too. But I’m saving that up for leaner times.
Michael Chabon was first discovered in 2003 or so with Wonderboys. Had dumped it into the basket on a hurried visit to the Elooru (i miss that dank corner of infantry road and the amount of saving i had to do to be able to afford the blasted place). I didn’t want to return the book. ‘Sobriety is a highly over-rated state of consciousness’ said Mr. Chabon and I agreed. What with the high from reading him. 
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is a slick book. Mr Chabon takes the case of an essay he had written on finding a ‘Say it in Yiddish’ book, and stretches it. What if a little corner of Alaska had become Israel, and in the final days before the reversion to the United States, there was the murder of a drug addict /former chess prodigy / maybe messiah. What would a down on his luck Yid policeman, who has lost his wife and is about to lose his life do? Written in a noir style, this book is unputdowneable. You twist and turn with Meyer Landsman as he tries to work around his ex-wife (now boss), the Jewish mob, former CIA agents, his own memories and a collapsing community to a satisfying denouement plus happy ending for Meyerle and his Jewess. So on a scale of 1 to buy it. Buy it!
Wonderboys though, just had more soul to it. How to decide that? I could re-read Wonderboys everytime I forget enough of the plot. I can’t say quite the same for the YPU. The way a perfectly good noir book melts into happy endings and sappy lines is 
. e.g. ’My homeland is in my hat. Its in my ex-wife’s tote bag’. In defence of the line, ex-wife redeems the tote bag by pulling everything from meals to first aid to kevlar vests out of it. But still, I wish Meyerle had channeled Bruce Willis till the end instead of turning into a bit of a sap.
Thats all for today folks. Hopefully shall manage to condense all the complimentary adjectives I have for the Road into a review some day. Till then…
Categories: books
Definitely poem of the day. How did The Writer’s Almanac know? It was so lovely to have (some) thoughts of the morning crystallized and delivered onto screen in this…
<!– (from Long for This World: New and Selected Poems) –>
Sometimes I wish I drank coffee
or smoked Marlboros, or maybe cigars—
yes, a hand-rolled Havana cigar
in its thick, manly wrapping,
the flash of the match between
worn matchbook and stained forefinger,
the cup of the palm at the tip,
the intake of air, and the slow and
luxuriant, potent and pleasurable
exhale. Shall we say also a glass
of claret? Or some sherry with its
dark star, the smoke blown into the bowl
of the glass, like fog on portentous
morning, the rich man-smell of gabardine
and wool, of money it its gold clip?
Sometimes I wish I had habits
a man wouldn’t kick, faults a good man could
be proud of. I’d be an expatriate from
myself, all ink-pen and paper in a Paris café
where the waiters were elegant and surly,
the women relaxed and extravagant
with their bobbed hair and bonbons, their
perfumed Galoises, their oysters and canapés,
and I’d be writing about war and old losses—
man things-and not where I am, in this
pristine and sensitive vessel, all
fizzy water, reticence, and care, all reduced
fat and purified air, behind my deprived
computer, where I can’t manage even
a decaf cap, a mild Tiparillo, a glass of
great-taste-less-filling light beer.
I challenge anyone to read Cormac McCarthy and not want to be a manly, hunter type.I certainly want to be.
Sometime in the past 4 weeks, somewhere between three cities, I seem to have misplaced my driving license. Sigh. Under other circs this would not be so bad. However have just acquired car, it is EXTREMELY inconvenient to not be able to drive. Most errands right now involve getting vehicle from point a to b to c. I’m ready to brain everyone (self included) for having to wait and plan my life around ‘who-has-a-valid-license-and-is-free’
There is nothing more irritating than dependence.
Consolation is in Divisadero. Storyline so far is pretty close to an M&B – young love comes to an end when father of girl discovers couple together, beats boy almost to death, takes screaming girl away from her one true love. Girl grown up translating things in France. Boy practicing card sharp. So far so nice and if it were M&B they would find their way back to each other and happy endings would happen.
But this is Ondaatje. While every page reads like rough, uncut verse sending shivers through my brain, a happy ending is unlikely. Fat Consolation this is going to be.
Imaginary conversation in schizophrenic brain (SB). A symptom of reading diet consisting of McCarthy and Palahnuik with an India-Pakistan in nuclear holocaust essay thrown in for the light stuff between the two.
SB1: When I was 18 I had all my existential crises in my head. Didn’t act them out. Actually even the ones I had weren’t violent.
SB2: Yeah. That is because you were having them to the tune of Milan Kundera and Emily Dickinson. You can only have sensible epiphanies on the nature of life. It leads you to virtuous, old-fashionedly optimistic choices. If you had been more with it, reading Palahnuik or even the damn newspaper often enough you would have managed a more modern angst. It would have been edgy. You would have acquired and acted out a nice doped out violent streak.
SB1: But it would have been more expensive. I mean, there wasn’t a single character in this Palahnuik that wasn’t a walking pharmacy. I couldn’t have afforded those things. And even if I had managed to scrape together the resources, it would have ended up like ‘The Joke’. Downing laxatives when you meant to commit suicide with some sleeping pill thing. I wouldn’t have known which pills to swallow for a headache, let alone to get a high.
SB2: Haven’t you heard of google?
SB1: Oh Yeah. The good student way to becoming druggie. Google your way through a lit survey. Shortlist drugs of choice. Stock. Then snort, swallow or syringe as appropriate.
SB2: Uh. Yeah. You have to start somewhere. If you want something done right, have to do it yourself in nice organised fashion. And its not like the peer group is overflowing with people that can help.
SB1: But what about guns? Not possible to do good rampage without accessories.
SB2: Kitchen Knife?
Page 35 of my first Cormac McCarthy and my enthusiasm is boundless. Given the mood I’m in, pleases me to read book where people die at frequent intervals. It pleases me even more that its all described in perfect, sparse sentences. And such inventive invective…
‘There is no description of a fool, he said, that you fail to satisfy. Now you’re goin to die.’
Categories: books
Tipping Point. Many adjectives come to mind. If I were a good MBA, I would love this book. But I’m not.
What xkcd says about lit crit is but after reading Mr. Gladwell think sociology get a little more respect than it deserves.
Categories: books
Yup. My not so truth scenario ended up being the truth scenario. And how. P couldn’t stop laughing when I reported 102 Fahrenheit and how displeased I was with it. Chortled in most evil fashion and said I had got what I deserved. So much for sympathy from friends. Family though is another matter. Suitable quantities of Kashaayam and Molagu Rasam and Paavam happening to make me happy. Or I would be happy if I could stop feeling so (s)ick!
I’m not sure if ‘The Silent Raga’ was the right book for a sick me to read this weekend. For one, blurb starts with ‘Where do middle-class, Tamil Brahmin girls go when they turn eighteen?’ and purports to tell the tale of Janaki who ran away to escape her dad’s plans for an arranged marriage and ends up with her ‘Cinderella’ like happily ever after as the successful, respected, veena-maestro second wife of a Muslim film actor. (I’m past 18, but should I?!). The Cinderella comparisons should not stop there. The Janaki of this story is taken out of school and made the ‘unpaid domestic’ at the tender age of thirteen upon her mother’s death, because ’someone-has-to-take-care-of-the-house’. The tales of her life of drudgery in the agraharam with only music and a couple of equally ill-fated friends for company is told in flashback as she swans about South Bombay giving interviews to top women’s magazines, and doing mannats at Haji Ali. All this flashback brought on by her plan to go back home after ten years to meet her sister, Mallika.
The Mallika in the meanwhile, does flashback of her own story, remembering the gently domineering but life-saving Akka, who abandoned her suddenly one day and left her to deal with a father who was going increasingly insane and the aunt with whom he had been having an adulterous affair for years. Mallika is now a USIS librarian / counselor in Madras, supervising many into the upper-middle class Tamilian dream of ‘MS in US’ and ‘Green Card’.
I can’t help but be critical of the author and the way he documents the Tam-Bram girl experience. I read the book straight through (despite the sniffles and the fever) which is the good part. But I kept nit-picking. Good Tam-bram girls do not boast of their garlic selection skills. The description of ‘menses’ and all that goes with it was awfully off. A certain flatness in the description of Janaki’s latter life in Bombay. For all that though, he did manage to pick up the way that the households work. The power of the unsaid rules that every insider knows but can’t quite explain. The little hypocrisies. Well done Mr. Aseem Merchant. More particularly since you are Mr. Aseem Merchant.
With the previous break a fast fading memory, the next one too far away and my mind too blunted and sensible to come up with good escapist fantasy, I am BORED. Yes. I could work. But I don’t want to. I have caught up on all the blogs, the cartoons, the webzines and now that I have descended to reading reviews of Jap restaurants in New York (consider the uselessness of this.. I’m unlikely to visit East Village in the near future AND I am vegetarian) it is perhaps time I gave in and left. All those books from the Oxford Bookstore are calling out to me. Sigh. But going back to the aerie not possible. If I return I shall be questioned. Imaginary dialogue would go, so:
X: “Wow! You are back early!”
knitted brow as realisation of how early happens.
X: “Is everything okay? Are you not well? Have you got your period?
Me: (in truth scenario) “No. I just wanted to read the books I bought”
X: “Oh. Then you can come with me to buy the shoe rack. And the cupboard. Or why don’t you clean your clothes shelf out and sort the things you are not going to use. And … “
Me: (in not so truth scenario) “Yeah. Feeling a little off. I’m just going to lie down and relax (code for read a book)
X: “I told you not to wash your hair and go out without drying it. I will make some kashayam for you. And sleep! Your eyes will fall out one day from reading so much. Just like your patti. Tchah. This vamsham… “
Oh well. I better find a decent semi-dry park / footpath and hope Salman Khan is not going to drive over it. Its the only place that Mohsin Hamid and I can be alone.
