I became aware of the Booker Prize when Arundhati Roy won it for The God of Small Things. Salman Rushdie got it for Midnight’s Children. Both these books deserved the award, especially Midnight’s Children. Apart from these two, I have never read another Booker Prize winning entry. I purchased Disgrace last year but my sis-in-law borrowed it so I never got to read it (that’s why I don’t like exchanging books, not even the ones I have read). After reading this blog entry Alka vehemently protested that her sister had returned the book immediately after reading it and it was I who was not aware of that.
It is a well known fact that most prizes, including the Nobel, are politically and economically motivated. Personal prejudices of the selectors and the judges play a big role and often people who really deserve the prize, don’t get it. So the best prize is the reaction of the readers. If your book sells, it has earned its prize, judges be damned.
Some big names such as Martin Amis and VS Naipaul are missing from this year?s list. Critics have commented most of these writers? works are not up to the mark and some newer, lesser known artists who have done splendid jobs should be included. One of the judges, Rowan Pelling views the absence of big-name writers like VS Naipaul, Louis de Bernieres and Jeanette Winterson as a way to “deadhead the roses” and encourage new growth.
Whereas Scottish writers are complaining that some of them have been wrongly omitted due to the judges? bias against Scottish and working class writers, an Australian author has found her name in the list astonishing.
According BBC, the Booker panel has chosen 22 books from amongst 132 entries for the award, which will be announced on October 19. The judges say that this years list is mix of “serious and fun books”.
The 22 short-listed novels for the time being are:
- Chimamanda Ngozi - Purple Hibiscus
- Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers
- Nicola Barker - Clear: A Transparent Novel
- John Bemrose - The Island Walkers
- Ronan Bennett - Havoc, In Its Third Year
- Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
- Neil Cross - Always The Sun
- Achmat Dangor - Bitter Fruit
- Louise Dean - Becoming Strangers
- Lewis Desoto - A Blade of Grass
- Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo
- James Hamilton-Paterson - Cooking with Fernet Branca
- Justin Haythe - The Honeymoon
- Shirley Hazzard - The Great Fire
- Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty
- Gail Jones - Sixty Lights
- David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
- Sam North - The Unnumbered
- Nicholas Shakespeare - Snowleg
- Matt Thorne - Cherry
- Colm Toibin - The Master
- Gerard Woodward - I’ll Go To Bed at Noon
Six out of these, I guess, will be chosen for the final list.
Most of it I would say. Freedom of expression often takes bizarre turns in the art world when strange, unimaginative creations (if you can call them “creations”) are passed on as great pieces of work. As a result you have a broken chair standing on one leg, you have bucketsful of paint thrown at the canvass, you have biological art works that turn humans into creatures of the netherworld, and you have three round stones placed on a mound of sand. I’m not denying the importance of artistic expression. Some expressions are intricate and latent and demand a greater understanding but most of them are just blatant displays of shameless mediocrity.
When I think of an artist, a painter, I think of Raja Ravi Verma, I think of Michael Angelo, I think of Vincent van Gogh. These great artists poured their thoughts onto their canvasses without distorting them. Artists who expect people to spend hours trying to interpret what they are trying to convey is not art, expression it may be. Art is not splashing black and yellow paint and naming the panting as The Contrast. Art is when you paint a realistic yellow flower in a realistic dark room.
Recently a cleaner at London’s Tate Britain gallery threw out part of an art display by German-born artist Gustav Metzger because she thought a plastic bag filled with newspaper, cardboard and other items was rubbish. Metzger, who invented auto-destructive art in 1959 and defined it as “paintings, sculptures and constructions having a finite existence” said that his creation had been destroyed beyond recovery and will need to be replaced. Such a tragedy. He’ll have to arrange another transparent bag and more bits of cardboard to put them in the bag. It must be a traumatic event for the art heritage of the world. It breaks my heart to think how much time the indomitable artist must have spent in putting that precious piece of art together.
Read the stupid story here.
One of the most captivating books I have read in a long time, The Joke has re-affirmed my faith in Milan Kundera’s prowess as an exceptional author. And this is just the second book of his that I have read. I read it in two days. The only books that I have read so fast are Jude the Obscure and Crime and Punishment.
The Joke is not merely a story, it is a depiction of a time that not only changed the world, but also obliterated many individual destinies. It is an ideological struggle between the self and the circumstance. It also deals with nihility of vengeance. Written in first-person, the story is told by various characters, garbed in the shadows of their own polarities. But Ludvik is the main character that carries the burden of The Joke.
Kundera doesn’t believe in linear narrations and he mentioned it in Immortality which he wrote much later on, and which I read prior to reading The Joke. Although the story begins with Ludvik coming to his place-of-birth to take revenge, the entire story unfolds as a recall.
The recall starts in Czechoslovakia when communism is at its peak in the country. The vile bourgeois has been overthrown and the era of the proletariat has descended upon the civilization. You are either loyal to the state, or you are the enemy of the state — there is no middle path, there is no scope for ambiguity.
Ludvik is a university student as well as a respected office-bearer of the communist party. He is an active comrade. He has a girlfriend, Marketa, who also is a perpetually serious party worker. During the courtship, when the young Ludvik is craving to have a physical contact with Marketa, she is sent to a two-week party training course. While Ludvik seethes with frustration, she writes to him that she’s having a great time. In a fit a jealousy, he writes to her on a postcard:
Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik.
He considers it a joke and forgets about it. This joke changes his life forever.
The postcard falls in the hands of the authorities. After an unfair party trial where all his friends and acquaintances, including a very close acquaintance, Zemanek, raise their hands in favor of his expulsion from the university and banishment from the party. Marketa testifies against him. He is branded as the enemy of the cause. Not only that, he is sent to harsh military service where he has to work in a mine and where he goes through numerous humiliations and a traumatic love affair. He is left a bitter man.
He loses his trust in all human relations. There are no friends and no lovers for him. He exists only to take revenge. By the end of the story, he realizes how futile his pursuit has been.
Kundera wrote this novel when communist suppression was at its peak. He was not allowed to publish the original version of this book. His passport was confiscated (not necessarily for writing this) and he was not allowed to leave the country. He has attempted to convey through this novel how a noble ideology was transmogrified into a grotesque historical blot by power hungry, misguided communists.
Even when the translations were published in the UK and the US, they were not up to the mark — they were translated to cater to the taste of the market. This is the fifth edition that I read and Kundera said he was most satisfied by this.
Yesterday I heard a sad news. I teach math to an 8th-class girl. Yesterday her father came to meet me and told me her brother committed suicide this April. He was in 9th standard. He had performed badly in his yearly exams. When he came back with his result, there was nobody at home. He hanged himself.
This is so tragic. Why is so much pressure put on kids to perform well in studies? Is education to improve life, or stunt it? Everyday I see sullen kids toiling over their books. They don’t have time to play, they don’t have time to socialize. Our current education system has totally destroyed childhood. All the time everybody is busy completing the syllabus or preparing for the odd exams. The school-system is lousy and so are the teachers. They don’t give a damn about children. Ironically, the parents and the society pressurizes them to perform well. They are judged according to the marks they score or don’t score. They drive them up against the wall so much that sometimes they are driven to take the extreme step. What has been achieved by this?
As a parent I would never subject my child to such an inhuman practice. I’d be very careful about choosing the school and evaluating the teachers. Most teachers these days become teachers because either they are too lazy to do a regular job, or cannot get another job. As a result, they work less and put more burden on students. They take out their frustration on small children. At home the parents don’t take them seriously. They think students will always criticize their teachers. Or they are too busy to get their children’s school changed. But when it comes to flaunting the marks their children score, they don’t tire of backslapping themselves for providing them expensive education (it need not be quality education).
The death of that boy should have led to the closure of the school but nothing of that sort happened. The parents were too lenient (even the death of their son didn’t move them?) and their daughter is still in the same school, although they are planning to shift her to another.
Yesterday I wrote about Image and Impression. This is also a part of that. What matters is the marks, not the education. Because marks are displayable and education is intangible. It’s all about showing, not about doing; it’s all about becoming, and not about being.
I have finally completed The Plague. It lasted for two months and I hope I don’t repeat the feat. My target was to read at least one book every week and considering the way I live, it is not a Herculean task. Still, this particular book took such a long time.
This time I stuck to it. Mostly what had been happening was, whenever I couldn’t finish a book, I switched over to another book. This time I had decided I would not pick another literary book until I finished The Plague. In my previous post on this book I had mentioned the book had been written in a journalistic manner and hence, lacks the lyricism of an engaging work. I must take my words back. The book couldn’t have been written any other way.
As I have mentioned, this novel tells the story of a town named Oran, in colonial Algeria, hit by bubonic as well as pneumonic plague. First rats come out and die after vomiting blood and then people start dying like rats. Why I hadn’t liked the book initially was the way the protagonist, the doctor, had reacted to the screaming signs. When rats start dying en masse even a child can make out it is plague. How come the doctor doesn’t see it? Even when his concierge dies a horrible death he is not alarmed. Anyway, apart from this anomaly, this is an extraordinary depiction of how the town struggles as well as gives in. Right from the beginning till the end, you feel like a part of the populace. No emotion has been left untouched and no human aspect has been left unarticulated.
The town was first taken by surprise. But then everybody tried to fight death in his or her own way. As the gates of the town are shut to avoid the spread of the epidemic to other places, the ones who were inside are trapped inside, and the ones who had gone out couldn’t come back. The doctor’s own wife who had gone to a sanatorium to recover from TB, couldn’t see him again. The entire town goes through a collective feeling of sadness and separation. Over a prolonged period of ten months, the plague lays claims to thousands of lives.
The novel symbolizes the struggles humans are capable of. There are no heroes. There are not even villains. Even crooks have been mentioned in a positive vein. The only villain is the plague. It is ruthless. It is emotionless. It is often said that while writing, you should show not tell. Camus has done exactly that. In fact this is textbook novel for writers who think on these lines (I don’t and I do). There are no lengthy lines of speculative emotions. There are no melodramatic outbursts against the agonies inflicted upon the town. Even religion is taken at its face value — there are summons by a church father; accept them or reject them. People writhe in pain. Squirm in repulsion, become sad, or be indifferent.
In the end the author mentions this has been done purposely, just to focus on the epidemic and its social, economic and cultural impacts. When a town begins to die with plague and there 500-600 people dying everyday, who has time for literary words and finer emotions? On the other hand, there is a character in this novel named Grand. All through the novel he is working on the first sentence of the novel he aspires to write: One fine morning in May, a slim young horsewoman might have been seen riding a glossy sorrel mare along the avenues of the Bois, among the flowers… He is never satisfied by its construction. In the end the plague gets him and he tells the doctor to burn the manuscript. There are fifty pages. All the pages have different variations of the first sentence. Reluctantly the doctor burns the manuscript in the night and by the morning, Grand is all well, which incidentally, is the beginning of the decline of the epidemic. All Grand says is, “I was overhasty. But I’ll make another start. You’ll see, I can remember every word.” This remains my favorite part in the book.
Now I have started reading Kundera’s The Joke. I bought it when I was reading Immortality. I want to read all of his books. But now, I’m not going to read all of them in a row. I hope I finish it within a week and am able to write about it next Sunday.
Do you know or like people because of the things they have, or because of who they are? Very often I see TV commercials where they show people respecting the ones who own certain cars, certain pens, live in certain localities, eat at certain joints, wear certain clothes, etc. This quasi-cultural phenomenon is rampant, it seems, everywhere. We just want to impress people. The only thing that matters is, what impression you make on others (Hence expressions like: The first impression is the last impression). Rather than working on ourselves, we work on acquiring things.
I’m not against owning a snazzy car. I’d love to buy a Mercedes or a Volvo (I have always wanted to own a Volkswagen convertible) but not to command respect. I like them for the facilities and comfort they carry. I want a car in which I don’t get tired, in which my family is safe at the time of an accident, that gives me good mileage, and in which most functions are controlled by the press of buttons. I couldn’t care less if nobody knew I owned such a car. My self-esteem does not hinge upon other people’s reaction towards me. Even if it does, I certainly do not want to depend on a car to command respect; I want to do it on my own merit. In fact if I want to own a car because I want to show it off, I suffer from low self-esteem and I need counseling.
This is the thing that worries me when I see such commercials. Are there so many people suffering from low self-esteem? Why is it prestigious to own a car? They go to such extents that individual is totally absent. Only the car remains. In another advertisement Amitabh Bachchan screams that you don’t mean anything if you don’t own a Parker. It is another matter if you can write a single sentence with that pen or not. More and more companies are doing this. This means there is such an audience who appreciates and gets driven by such campaigns. And these are ordinary people we are talking about, not the likes of LN Mittal, the steel tycoon whose daughter’s lavish wedding in Paris became more known than his daughter.
We are constantly worried about what the others think of us. In this pursuit, we ignore the real growth. We just become puppets of mass psychologies and forget what we actually want to do in life. That is why there is so much mediocrity around. We don’t excel in arts, we don’t excel in sports, our cultural movements languish in the alleys of pretension, most of our inventions are money and fame driven. People want to be known by the things they own, by the people they know, by the properties they own. They have stopped working on themselves.
I never worried about materialism, but now I do. We might all turn into consumer zombies just to earn to pay to companies that sell us goods to enhance our prestige. The costlier the car, the higher the prestige. The costlier the car, the higher the effort to earn more. The higher the effort to earn more, more the money becomes important. More the money becomes important, lesser are the values (because I don’t equate money with wealth — they are two different things) and this goes on plummeting downwards. These tendencies are already glaringly evident in the number of crimes being committed just to make quick money.
These commercials do not even give a single indication of how a person can acquire such a car that brings prestige. They never show how that money is earned. They never show that the prestige is not for the car, but the hard work required to be in such a position that you can afford a luxury car. They focus on the light. You can spread light by painstakingly lighting thousands of candles. You can even quickly set a house on fire to create the same sort of effect. The majority goes for the latter option.
I forgot to read The Brothers Karamazov. I downloaded the PDF version of the novel long time back, maybe last year. I read more than 30 pages, and then decided to continue with a regular paperback or hardcover. Reading long streams of literature on computer screen is not only inconvenient, it doesn’t even give that feel. Holding a book, feeling the pages, turning them, using a book mark, they are all quintessential ingredients of the experience of book-reading. The only full-scaled novel I have read in digital format is Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham.
Then this year Alka got a paperback version of The Brothers Karamazov. I thought I’ll resume reading it after her. I remember about this today.
I think soon I’ll have a long list of half-read books. Oh! this is shameful!
This might be an old news but since I’m coming across it repeatedly, I might as well mention it here. Night M Shyamalan is being accused of plagiarizing by the publishers of a children’s book. When I first heard of the film, I had jokingly mentioned that I had also written a short story — The Village — and he might have taken a few portions from it.
My personal take on Shyamalan is that he might have produced a one block-buster film, namely The Sixth Sense, he is not that great a script-writer and a director he is made out to be. A critic somewhat rightly pointed out that it is intriguing how he manages to get top-notch actors for his intellectually mediocre flicks. Ok, I won’t say he is bad. He is way ahead of the silly showmen we have in Bombay. He tries to be intellectual and philosophical. He tries to convey a message, although lacking in profundity. I have partly seen The Unbreakable and completely seen The Sixth Sense and The Signs. I only liked the The Sixth Sense. The remaining two failed to incite an interest. In fact The Signs was extremely disappointing, especially after all the pre-show hype our movie channel had orchestrated. Fortunately it was Sunday and immediately after that there was a re-run of the Keanu Reeves flick Speed. Now that was some stimulating entertainment even when I was seeing the movie third time.
Shyamalan, irrespective of plagiarism or not, is a refined director. He has that thing in him. But he needs to work on his scripts more and he should stop being an intellectual. He has the potential.
Talking of plagiarism, I dug up an old satirical article of mine that was long time back published in the newspaper. Here it is.
The bell rings.
I: Hello.
A female voice.
Voice: Hello?
I: Yes, hello.
Voice: Hello? Yes?
I: Hello, hello. Can you hear me?
Voice: Yes.
I: OK. Whom do you want to talk to?
Voice: Deepak. Who are you?
I: Amrit.
Phone disconnected.
This is interesting:
In 440 B.C., a struggling young prose stylist named Herodotus wanted to publicize his newly composed account of the Persian Wars (it was the first work of written history?an experimental literary project if there ever was one). Rather than embark on a multi-city book tour?an expensive, time-consuming, and dangerous venture, dodging pirates and storms around the Aegean?the budding writer came up with a brilliant PR stroke. Why not premiere his work at the hallowed Olympic Games, when the entire social register of Greeks were gathered in one spot?
Read the rest of the essay.
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