Found this interesting link at Gangadhar’s films review blog. Ram Gopal Verma has made the Hindi version of Vladimir Nabokov’s classic Lolita. Another interesting fact is that Amitabh Bachchan is playing Professor Humbert Humbert. As an actor he should be able to do justice to the conflict of the character. I’ve always felt his talent has never been exploited by our talentless film-makers. I wish he had worked under someone like Guru Datt.
I plan to read the novel again. When I read it I mostly did so for the "sex" aspect and I wasn’t bothered much about the literature part of it. Now I’ll read it as a literary exercise. I wonder how honest Ramu has been with the subject considering the reservations that plague the Indian mindset when it comes to sex. I’ll’ share my thoughts about the book once I’ve re-read it.
OK, Salman Rushdie seems to have lost his touch. When I was reading The Ground Beneath Her Feet I couldn’t reach the end of it — it was so uninteresting as a story. At least this time I could finish Shalimar the Clown. He still possesses his ingenious style I must admit, and amongst current writers nobody writes the way he does, and this adds a sad dimension to his literary genius. Add to this gems like Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh and you’ll know where I’m coming from. Once you know a writer can do so much better, once you know what he or she is capable of, it is crushing to see his or her slide into the pit of mediocrity. Salman Rushdie has always been my boyhood hero and I still hold him in high regard, but he is certainly not like Dostoyevsky, whom I read no matter how badly he has written.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’m currently reading Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog. Yes, I finally completed Shalimar the Clown this weekend — I’ll write about it this week.
I’ve just read 15 pages of Yellow Dog so I haven’t got much to say. I’ve been thinking of reading Amis for more than a year. I had no idea what the book was about; randomly selected it. Right now my take is that…well…I wonder why he is such a talked about author. The 15 pages have bored me so far, but I’ll read the whole book and only then I’ll say what I think about him, or about his book. Right now his pondering seems like a collection of incoherent, broken sentences.
Reading Salman Rushdie’s non-fiction literature is always a treat. I cannot say the same for his fiction work although his Midnight’s Children still remains amongst my all time favorites. In the morning I got to read his interesting account 
of the evolution of this marvelous novel. His beginning of the essay is quite encyclopaedic:
Read the rest of this entry »
This time I finished reading On Beauty in record time; record time in terms of my reading speed. I took a week to read the first 15 pages, and then I read the entire book this weekend.
On Beauty more or less defines my taste. This is what I like to read; this is the stuff that tickles my literary taste buds. I like bland food that is devoid of all embellishments and masalas but when it comes to reading literature — whether fiction or non-fiction — it has to contain the masala elements. I don’t like bland literature. I don’t like “simple facts of life beautifully written in small sentences.” No. I like my reading complicated. I don’t mind if a sentence stretches to a paragraph and there are at least 3-4 words in that paragraph that are incomprehensible to most readers. This is the pickle for me that make the book, the reading material in it, tasty. I like writers who can juggle with words and orchestrate intricately beautiful patterns with them. OK, if you are Kundera, it’s totally a different matter. But then, enough with my stylistic proclivities.
The book is mostly about the university life of Wellington — a posh, laidback American suburb near Boston. A black family having a white, British father lives there. The father, Howard, is a Rembrandt scholar and is the professor of liberal arts in the university, and is at loggerheads with another black professor — Monty Kipps — a thoroughly Anglicized Trinidadian scholar of Rembrandt, again, and hence the conflict, who is hell bent upon taking the word “liberal” out of liberal arts.
Howard’s family consists of a big-black-but-beautiful wife Kiki, the eldest son Jerome who falls in love with Monty Kipps’ daughter Victoria (who is out to get laid by all and sundry throughout the novel), a daughter named Zora who is a pseudo-scholastic intellectual pursuing arts studies in the same university, and the youngest son named Levi who tries to get to the root of his black identity in a white neighborhood and ends up with a group of Haitian thieves. And of course, they have a dog named Murdoch.
The underlying theme of the novel seems to highlight that you can never be too sure of your ideologies and intellectual pursuits. Almost all the characters are proven wrong in the end whether throughout the book you agree with their opinions or not. Levi (who cannot go out without his iPod), while all the time trying to fight for the cause of the underpaid Haitians, ends up a thief. Zora all the time defends her father’s infidelity but in the end finds she was on the wrong side of the debate. The only stable person in the novel is Jerome, with whose emails to his father the novel begins (ummm…I wonder if this is a right sentence). In a series of emails to his father — who doesn’t seem to be replying because Jerome has decided to go to London and work under his rival, Monty Kipps — Jerome reveals that he and Kipps’ daughter are getting married. It’s from here that the story moves forward.
You can call it a saga of intellectual hypocrisy — this book — with both opposing professors having no moral clue of exactly what they think. Both end up having sex with their students without emotional ties, both are selfish and self-obsessed and not particularly interested in the affairs of their families. Howard cannot even put up a decent fight with his wife because all the time either he is guilt-ridden, or too genteel to show aggression. He even tries to justify to Kiki why he ended up in bed with their common friend (a 50-year-old professor of modern poetry in the same university). I think he is also uncomfortable with his predominantly black family (all the children are dark or semi-dark) although it is never mentioned in the novel.
The same is true for the Wellington University. They claim to espouse for liberalism and openness while wallowing in the same old mud of prejudice, raw ambition, arrogance, deceit and exploitation.
Even when Kiki and Howard’s daughter, Zora, tries to help a street rapper, Carl, to get some decent college education, her underlying motive is to portray herself as a highly sophisticated crusader, to get some romantic attention from the handsome rapper.
On Beauty does not have a central character: all the characters pursue their individual obfuscations and contribute to the overall deceitfulness of their natures
A few reviews I’ve read suggest Zadie Smith got inspired by EM Forster’s Howards End. I’ve never read Forster so I cannot draw qualified parallels, but she knows how to write. She is a Bohemian expressionist, you may say. She doesn’t dabble with the hyperbole and remains rooted to the ground. Despite her literary grip and command she doesn’t get carried away and concentrates more on the narrative and lets the style effervesce at its own discretion. This book is worth a read.
Last Monday we saw The Ring and this Monday we saw The Dawn of the Dead. I guess they are showing horror movies every Monday on HBO.
The Ring was quite nice. Horror movies no longer scare me, but this movie had a character and at some places they have really tried to scare the audience. The video that they play in the movie seems like a true nightmare of non-linear visuals. Whoever sees the video dies within seven days. So there is this female protagonist who doesn’t just wait to die. She tries to unravel the mystery and go to the root of the curse. Her quest leads her to a cursed teenage girl who is out to kill anybody who does not share her story with someone else. The scary part was when the girl performs a The Demons act and comes out of the TV screen.
The Dawn of the Dead was a poor inspiration of The Night of the Living Dead — a classic in this genre. But it was a well-made movie, with a decent cast and a pace that breaks nowhere. All of a sudden one morning people turn into zombies, and as it happens in every zombie movie (yawn yawn yawn), whomever they bite turns into a zombie too. Except for the main cast of the movie and some other dispensable characters, very soon the entire civilization turns into swarms of zombies. The movie had a storyline, and unlike other lesser movies, it was not merely a litany of mindless blood and gore.
I like this genre as a fiction writing idea. I think it is very challenging to scare people by the written word. I have never read any of Stephen King’s novels so I don’t know whether they scare you or not, but as a teenager when I read The Hound of the Baskervilles I found some parts scary, especially when Doyle describes Sir Hugo standing over a hill during one dark night.
A group of statisticians have been laboring for months to figure out what makes a top selling novel and according to their formula, surprisingly, The Da Vinci Code should have been a flop. According to this article in the Guardian Unlimited the formula showed all Charles Dickens novels mediocre accept for a lesser known Christmas story The Battle of Life.
The formula says it mostly depends on the title how the book fares. The statisticians, along with a few programmers, studied 54 years of the top sellers in the New York Times and the BBC’s Big Read poll. The researchers say:
Comparing these with a control group of less successful novels by the same authors, they found that the winning books had three common features; they had metaphorical, or figurative titles instead of literal ones; the first word was a pronoun, a verb, an adjective or a greeting; and their grammar patterns took the form either of a possessive case with a noun, or of an adjective and noun or of the words The … of …
The research was conducted to help customers of the UK wing of the self-publishing website, Lulu.com.
Once in an interview Arundhati Roy said: Write only when you really have something to say. I think Dostoyevsky would certainly beg to differ, for his mega-book The Brothers Karamazov has nothing particular to say. Even the characters come and go haphazardly, whereas the speciality of the classics, so far I’ve observed during my meager reading vocation, is that no character is without purpose. To be frank I’m disappointed, the same way I was disappointed after reading Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. I consider both writers my literary gurus and seeing such works from them, didn’t shake my faith in their ability, but yes, it did sadden me. Saddened not by the quality, for how could Dostoyevsky write but with brilliance, but by the lack of clarity. What did he want to say? Sometimes writers, even genius writers, get carried away with their skill and take the readers for granted. I agree there can be some theological and ideological differences, but still, there has to be some meat in the story to satiate the hunger of the reader. But then the thing is, I don’t, really, I don’t consider myself a learned reader. Incidentally, Freud loved The Brothers Karamazov. If nothing else, it is an enchanting literary tour.
The Brothers Karamazov is the story of three brothers and their vile father. The novel is a saga depicting a conflict between religion and evil. It oscillates between the frontiers of imperturbable and rather radical religious enlightenment and dark mental disorders. There is a nefarious landlord — Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov — who becomes rich by fraudulently marrying a runaway rich girl and swindling from her twenty five thousand roubles that she brings as dowry. After purloining her money he goes back to his old ways of chasing anything in skirts and hence totally forgets her. She dies, leaving a 3-year-old boy, Mitya behind, who, practically abandoned by his insalubrious father, is taken care of by the old and faithful man servant of the house, Grigory. Then he is sent off to his mother’s relatives.
The next time Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov marries a poor girl, and in 8 years of marriage they together produce two sons, namely Ivan and Alyosha, after which the wife either runs away (how she fades away has no bearing over the plot whatsoever) or dies. The two kids are brusquely adopted by the previous employer of their mother, who before dying, leaves thousand roubles each for both the brothers. Another family takes care of them after that.
The youngest brother, Alyosha, is the angel of the story. Whoever comes in his contact develops an instant liking for him; so much so that when he goes to meet his father after turning 18, even the loathsome Fyodor Pavlovitch falls for his innocent charms and lets him stay in his own house.
There is a fourth probable son, Smerdyakov. Fyodor Pavlovitch never accepts him as his son, but keeps him as his servant.
As the novel progresses, all three brothers end up in the same town where their father lives and the entire story unfolds, narrated by the narrator, the author who lives in the town and seems to be close to the brothers, although nowhere in the story he appears directly and hence becomes a part of the story.
The eldest son, Mitya, born of the first wife, detests the father and believes that the father owes him money. Mitya is in town to retrieve that amount. There’s another reason why he is in direct conflict with his father: both are madly in love with a girl, Grushenka, who is the cause of the eventual ruin the book encapsulates. Mitya at this point is already betrothed to another woman named Katerina Ivanovna whom he had once helped in the time of financial need and who has by a stroke of serendipity inherited great wealth from a distant aunt. It is unclear throughout the story (at least to my perception) whether she agrees to marry him due to love or a sense of gratitude for the timely help.
I cannot recall clearly why Ivan comes there. Perhaps he came to mediate between his father and brother Mitya. Ivan has turned out to be quite an intellectual; he gets published in various publications and he has something profound to say about almost everything, including religion, despite being an atheist (he believes in God, but doesn’t believe in the world created by Him).
Alyosha is there because he wants to visit his mother’s grave. Upon coming to the town, he visits a monastery, gets highly influenced by the Elder Zossima of the monastery, and decides to be a monk, and start spending all his time with the Elder. So this is from where the story takes off.
The entire novel is like an intricately woven pattern of smaller stories constantly approaching towards a cataclysmic confluence. The incidents, one way or they other, affect the other incidents, they define the central characters of the story, but their elaboration could have easily been pruned…sometimes they go on and one. Take for instance the dialog between Alyosha and Ivan in a tavern. Alyosha asks his brother various questions primarily centered around theology and Ivan answers with tranquil conviction. He wants to recite a poem that he wrote, and before reciting it, he talks about it for so many pages that I even forgot that he was talking about a poem. On second thought, it seems Dostoyevsky is trying to talk through his characters and is conveying his thoughts — whether articulate or vague — his thoughts on religion and God, and the Russian concept of Christianity in particular. When I say many things in the novel are “needless” I’m merely expressing a particular state of mind that prompts you to skip through the pages unless they comprise of action, whether mental or physical. If you like — as I do most of the time — lots of literary stimulation, you are going to love this books: it gives you lots to think. And there I contradict myself.
Amidst a flurry of confusions Fyodor Pavlovitch is murdered and Mitya is arrested for the crime, as all circumstantial and non-circumstantial evidences scream out loud that he was the perpetrated. In the beginning of the inquisitions Mitya thinks that he is being inquisitioned for the murder of the old servant, Grigory. In fact he is so much tormented by the thought that he has murdered another man, that he decides to squander away the night carousing with Grushenka (who is at the inn with an old lover of hers) and then kill himself in the morning. His relief is sans bounds when he hears that the servant is alive. Then he is told that he being suspected of parricide, which he thinks is a big joke. He says, although he would have loved killing that old sick man, in fact many a time he has fancied killing him, he has not killed him. From here onwards the tragedy begins.
The story is replete with prolonged monologues, punctuated by ideological and moral obfuscations of the characters. The thoughts of socialism had started germinating when Dostoyevski was writing this novel. He took socialism with a pinch of sarcasm as is evident here:
He was so good as to express the opinion that, if I don’t go in for the career of an archimandrite in the immediate future and don’t become a monk, I shall be sure to go to Petersburg and get on to some solid magazine as a reviewer, that I shall write for the next ten years, and in the end become the owner of the magazine, and bring it out on the liberal and atheistic side, with a socialistic tinge, with a tiny gloss of socialism, but keeping a sharp lookout all the time, that is, keeping in with both sides and hoodwinking the fools. According to your brother’s account, the tinge of socialism won’t hinder me from laying by the proceeds and investing them under the guidance of some Jew, till at the end of my career I build a great house in Petersburg and move my publishing offices to it, and let out the upper stories to lodgers. He has even chosen the place for it, near the new stone bridge across the Neva, which they say is to be built in Petersburg.
On the other hand, through a boy of 13 he expresses that socialism in Russia is just at a nascent state:
‘Oh, yes, everything…. That is… Why do you suppose I shouldn’t understand it? There’s a lot of nastiness in it, of course…. Of course I can understand that it’s a philosophical novel and written to advocate an idea….’ Kolya was getting mixed by now. ‘I am a Socialist, Karamazov, I am an incurable Socialist,’ he announced suddenly, apropos of nothing.
‘A Socialist?’ laughed Alyosha. ‘But when have you had time to become one? Why, I thought you were only thirteen?’
Not a very good story, but this book is a good read.
According to this new revelation the book Oliver Twist was inspired by the story of a real boy named Robert Blincoe, who
at the turn of the 19th century spent four grim years in the workhouse before he was packed off to a cotton mill - with more abuse, regular beatings and hours of back-breaking work.
So far the Dickens scholars have been thinking that Oliver was an imagined character. I haven’t read the book but have heard a lot about it. It is somewhere in the house and I’ll read it soon, as I intend not to leave any of Charles Dickens’ books unread.
Oh yes, I have, at long last, finished reading The Brothers Karamazov. I’ll soon post a blog on this book. Currently I’m reading Umberto Eco’s Misreadings which is an anthology of his works published in magazines or newspapers. Most stories/essays are humorous and satirical. For instance, the first story, Granita is a caricature of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita that I read a couple of years ago, and will read it again to be able to write a blog post on it. Contrary to professor Humbert’s obsession with young nornettes, the character in Granita is erotically obsessed with octogenarian, salivating, toothless grannies (hence the title, Granita). I kept reading many passages to Alka amidst her disgusted protestations complimented with abundant laughter. The book has been gathering dust on the shelves for years. When I first started reading it, I had to stop because the language was too tough for me. I’ll write more about it upon completion.
During the weekend I read another 400+ page of The Brothers Karamazov in some marathon reading sessions — yes, reading 400 pages for me does tantamount to marathon reading for me, although people finish 2-3 books during their weekends. I hope to improve my tally during the coming months.
I recon writing about this book is going to be a bit difficult, because, although there is a single ongoing plot, this one plot is made up of multiple sub-plots and almost all characters are individual novels in themselves. The underlying theme of course is a constant conflict between the conscience, morality and sin. The Karamazovs, excluding the father, are three brothers, and it is only the youngest one who is devoid of any sinful notion and hence, does not suffer from any internal conflict; and he is a monk in the initial stage of the novel. All the other characters commit sins one way or the other. They are either unrepentant, or are so remorseful that their melodramas go on and on for pages and pages, to an extent it begins to sound dreary. But all in all, it is going to be one of the best books I’ve read so far (incidentally, there are more than 15 books that come under “one of the best” category).
RSS Feeds
My Social Media Links