My progress with The Brothers Karamazov is epic in the sense that it has taken me more than 4 months to read around 400 pages of it. Agreed, it’s a fat book and just picking it up seems daunting, but I love the book for two reasons: first, it is written by Dostoyevsky, and second, it is really a good book. It is an interwoven creation of philosophy and murder mystery. Dostoyevsky is a brilliant story teller, although I feel he could have done it with less talking. I guess by the time he wrote this book (I think it is one of his last books, and in this he has tried to reconcile with the Church) he was quite famous and hence, people would read (they still do) whatever he wrote.
I have vowed to finish it next week because it is stopping me from reading other books.
Steve of This Space talks about how literary fiction is perceived, here. What I think is, fiction can be bifurcated into two parts: pulp fiction and literary fiction. The Brothers Karamazov is literary fiction (which I haven’t touched for a long time after reading more than 300 pages) and If Tomorrow Comes is pulp fiction.
Both kinds of fictions are not defined by the kind of things they tell, but by the way they tell things. Most pulp fiction books narrate stories of love, passion and crime. But so do most of the classics that are the epitomes of literature, be it Tolstoy, Garcia or Hemingway. Our own Indian classics are replete with romance and intrigue. Talking about Indian literature, literary fiction is less esoteric here. You cannot compare Dickens with Munshi Premchand. Premchand mostly depicted poverty, illiteracy, backwardness and their associated miseries in rural India whereas Dickens mostly wrote dreamy romances in the backdrop of putrefying English society.
Literary fiction makes you a part of the story, and pulp fiction tells you a story. I don’t want to go into the debate that literary fiction is more intelligent and pulp fiction is less but one can easily make out the difference. The readers of pulp fiction want to read the book like a quickie — be done with it. They don’t care how the words are used, how the sentences are constructed, and how the droplets of tiny incidents are turned into a wave of imagination. They want everything understandable, and they don’t want to use their brains — at least while reading pulp fiction.
No, easy language does not mean dull writing. Hemingway — I’ve never read him — is known for using very simple expressions to write very complex thoughts.
Literary fiction readers on the other hand look for a deeper satisfaction. It may not be immediate, but the intellectual pleasure they derive is long-lasting. You always end up learning something new. You are not merely a viewer; you get involved with the nerration. The writers of literary fiction make ample use of extensive research. Take for instance White Mughals; the author, William Dalrymple, spent 9 years researching for the book and travelled to multiple continents in order to glean valuable but deeply hidden details. Can a pulp fiction writer do that, or afford to do that? I doubt it.
Just now I stumbled upon this wonderful blog titled The Comic Project via balancing life. The blog attempts to revive the old charm of all those Indrajal Comics heroes that enthralled us during our growing years. Before Diamond Comics captured a major portion of the market, Indrajal Comics was the main staple for us comic-hungry kids.
Among Bahadur, Flash Gordan, Mandrake, Vetal etc., Vetal (Phantom) who lived in the dark jungles of Denkali used to be my favorite. They used to call him chalta phirta pret — the walking phantom. I had a fat comic that traced the history of all the five generations of the phantom, but can’t remember where or how I lost that gem.
When I used to live with my grandparents in Ambala, whenever my mother came visiting me, she used to bring some Indrajal comics that she would buy at the railway station for me. Those comics were the fragments of my life that I had left behind in Delhi. I couldn’t read much, but with some concentration I could follow the story. The mere sight of the logo used to incite the feeling of that room in our Delhi house where many a time I had flipped through the pages of such comics and read the story through the sketches. Since I couldn’t read much, I constructed the stories from the sketches of the comics.
Since Hindi was (still is, to some degree) closer to me, I mostly read Hindi comics; in fact where we lived, we never saw English comics.
This is the cover of Saddam Hussain’s new book whose title somewhat translates to: Get Out, You Damned One. According to The New York Times the cover depicts Satan’s hold over Babylon, and an Arab liberator. I’m sure he had Bush and his marauding troops in mind when he conceived the idea.
You can read the review of the book here but you may have to login in case you don’t have an account there. Anyway, you can enlarge the image here.
I‘ve been book-Tagged by Sunil Laxman of balancing life. Although I’ve been occupied by my inexorable software woes plus deadlines, I’ve been morbidly (Garcia says you shouldn’t use the “ly??? adjective often) observing this book-tagging frenzy. It seemed the more popular you are, the more people tag you. I was on the verge of vociferating: Oh, I’m so lonely, nobody tags me! when Sunil appeared from the pastures of salvation and tagged me :-). I’ve already been writing about my meagre bibliophilism, but for the sake of the fraternity, here it goes:
The number of books I have
Personally? Not more than ten. In the cabinet adjacent to the chair from where I work, there are roughly 100 odd books, but they have been brought/bought by either my wife or my sister. We got the cabinet for the big encyclopaedia and the monthly edition of National Geographic. When we saw lots of space still unoccupied, we put our books there.
On some literary blogs I read people have more than 4000 books, or they have had to shift to bigger houses to accommodate their mounting collections. How much money they must have! I mean, buying or renting bigger houses to place books is beyond my current need and capability. I don’t think I’ll ever have that many books with me even if I can afford them.
The book I’m currently reading
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. Although I’d like to write in my own way, but if I ever decide to emulate an author, by all means it’ll be Fyodor Dostoyevsky. This book is hard to read, at least for me, with it’s interminable religious discourses. I never skip a page, I even read the prefaces and the introductions when I start reading the book. So reading all those pages talking about religious morality is a bit tedious. I’m reading those pages just because they’ve been written by Dostoyevsky.
Last book I bought
Milan Kundera’s The Joke. It’s one of the most impressive and literary books I’ve ever read (not that I’ve read many books). I wish I had read it a long time back. I plan to read it again some day.
Last book I read
Living To Tell The Tale by Gabriel García Márquez. I wrote it’s review here.
Five books that have meant a lot to me
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I know, this is everybody’s favorite, but then, there’s no escaping from it. I have read it four times: once as a reader, and thrice as a learning writer.
- Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. One of the saddest books I’ve read by my all time favorite author. It tells you how your only mental fragilities can utterly destroy your aspirations. A beautifully written book.
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Again, I first read this book as a reader and then as a learning writer. An exceptional book that takes you to the crux of Dostoyevsky’s genius.
- Bahut Din Huye a collection of short stories in Hindi. It’s one of the first books that I read and all its stories clung to my reminiscences for a long, long time. I must find it, if it is still in our house.
- The Castle by Franz Kafka. This is an exceptional book in the sense that I never completed reading it. I have always wanted to read it because of its epic depiction of ordinary helplessness. If you want to get the true essence of Kafkaesque writing, you must read this book (apart from reading The Metamorphosis).
Actually I have many more books to add to this list, for instance, To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Dafoe, and Nemesis by Agatha Christie, but since they say it only has to be five book, so be it.
Oh, now the tagging part: not many people are left, but I can include the following if they haven’t already been tagged:
Ok, ok, I know there are only 4, but most I’d like to include have already been tagged.
The review of Salman Rushdie’s new book Shalimar the Clown can be read here (via Moorish Girl). The reviewer has made an interesting note at the end:
The Swedes won’t dare to offend Islam by giving Rushdie the Nobel Prize he deserves more than any other living writer. Injustice rules.
So true! 
As I learned to read quite late (well after my 10th year), my thirst to read books had reached a prodigal proportion by the time I could flip pages and understand what beautiful thoughts were contained in there. I can still remember the first few books that I read. The first book that comes to my memory was a Hindi book of short stories for children — Bahut din huai, which means, A long time back. There were a few stories from The Mahabharata including the one in which the Kauravas hatch a plan to burn the Pandavas alive. One story was of Gautam Buddha. I found the book so fascinating that I read it many times. All the stories seemed beautiful, ancient, and hence, melancholic. I was directly interacting with people who had existed thousands of years ago. They were mythical, a few of them were even demonic, but they instilled in me a craving to plunge into those times and be with them. Still when I think of that book, I’m imbrued with surrealistic longing.
The next book that comes to my mind is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It was read (translated in Hindi) to the class by a substitute teacher with a phenomenally theatrical perspicacity. It was an abridged version of the original classic, but the macabre tale was narrated in such a spectacular manner that the teacher who had come to take care of our class for just twenty days ended up spending her next twenty years in our school: we just wouldn’t let any other teacher teach us. So naturally it was the first book I took from my class library (we had miniature libraries in individual classes) once I was capable of reading it. Some day I’ll write about our class library. I’ll also some day write about the teacher mentioned above, because it was she who forcibly made me read English books during my various recalcitrant phases.
Since I started reading when I was quite old and since I could already speak Hindi, and to an extent English with some degree of ease, learning to read was a rapid process. Within six months I was reading detective novels in Hindi and The Famous Five, The Hardy Boys and other books in English. I no longer had to pretend reading books (another story) but could actually read them.
Those were the times of detective pocket books in Hindi. Pulp fiction authors did a brisk business writing two to three books almost every month. They were mostly hackneyed, run-of-the-mill sorts but I devoured them like anything. In fact the seeds of writing were sowed during the lazy June afternoons when everybody in the house slept and I read the detective novels under the infernal shadow of the tree in front of our balcony. There was another friend of mine who briefly shared with me the passion for reading and writing but as he grew up, he not only developed other friendships, he also abandoned the literary passion. Together we almost planned around fifty ineffably bloodcurdling plots that would have revolutionized the then contemporary detective fiction genre.
It was very easy to get new books to read. We could easily rent the books at 25-paise-a-day and I could read two books in a day sometimes especially during the holidays.
Sadly, these days I observe children as well as adults least interested in reading books. People wrongly attribute this insouciance towards books to busy lifestyle and the television. I think this is not purely correct. Books require a basic level of intelligence that lacks these days and this amply gets manifested in the crass plagiarism of old Hindi songs. To understand books, you need to know words and to know words, you need to invest your time in learning them. You also need patience. These two attributes seem to be commodities in scant supply. Books also require internal silence that again is missing amidst us.
Right now I’m reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky — one of my favorite authors. At this moment it reads like a religious discourse on morality and Christianity, and with 1000+ pages, I have no idea how I’ll write about this book. There is another book that solely talks about how this book should be interpreted!
By Gabriel García Márquez
Finally I completed Living To Tell The Tale yesterday and I must say it ended abruptly. It might disconcert a less aware reader who does not know that the book is a part of a series of autobiographical books Garcia plans to get published. If you don’t practice a little patience you might cast the book aside and move on to some other book. I remember going through the same experience when I was reading Albert Camus’s The Plague. Again and again I abandoned reading it; it took me some two months to get interested in it but once I did, it was worth my while all till the last page.
Contrary to what I had mentioned in a previous post, I hadn’t lost the book. In fact it was lying right in the drawer of the table where I work. I took it as a good sign and resumed reading the book with a renewed vigor. “Renewed vigor” doesn’t mean I embarked upon a marathon reading binge and devoured the book in two days. It took me more than three weeks to complete the remaining part.
If I haven’t mentioned it already, the story begins with Garcia’s journey with his mother to his native place where his mother wants to sell the old house to get some money. Garcia calls this journey historic because the idea of working on a novel came to him during this journey. Garcia was so poor that he had to borrow the fare from a friend who could only give him 6 pesos of the 10 pesos he had asked for.
In the fermenting heat of the Colombian countryside they both travel from Barranquilla (where he worked for the newspaper ‘El Heraldo’) over a putrid waterway to the parental village of Aracataca, and hence moves forward the narrative. Although the novel has been written in typical Garcia style with his penchant for quixotic depiction of (‘this thing had a lifelong impact…’ appear quite too often throughout the breath and length of the novel) plebeian events, it is quite different from his other books I have read. It reads less of a novel and more of a personal journal. There are too many names and too many places and too many incidents that might seem extraordinary to him but trite to a reader. But then of course if it is Garcia even his visit to the toilet is something worth reading just for the sake of reading a phenomenal writer of our creativity-starved times.
Garcia was born in March 1927 to Luisa Santiaga and Gabriel Eligio, who had courted telegraphically (if I remember correctly) for years and then tied the knot against the wishes of Luisa’s family.
Garcia brings up his overwhelming poverty with a stark sense of casualness again and again as poverty dominated his way of life till the end of the novel. His family was so poor that meeting both the ends used to be difficult sometimes. But he doesn’t get emotional anywhere in the novel. Only at one place I feel an indifferent despondency:
I realized only then that I had not had anything to eat or drink since my meagre breakfast in Barranquilla. My legs were giving way because of hunger, but I would have been content if the landlady had taken my suitcase and allowed me to sleep in the hotel that one night, even if it was on the armchair in the sitting room. The watchman laughed at my innocence.
“Don’t be an asshole!” he said in raw Caribbean. “With the piles of money that madam has, she goes to sleep at seven and gets up the next day at eleven.”
The argument seemed so legitimate to me that I sat on a bench in the Parque de Bolívar, on the other side of the street, and waited for my friends to arrive, not bothering anyone.
Garcia, as most writers, was an avid reader. He would hire cheap rooms, even in brothels, to read great books by great writers even at the time when he hadn’t seriously decided to become a writer. In fact this almost pushed me to the precipice of literary depression: if such a great writer read so much just to understand and learn how various writers wrote, how can I ever claim that I can write sufficiently well? He had an amazing environment to blossom into the person he became. Despite the interminable poverty (which sometimes seems inexplicable, especially when he wrote so much for the newspaper and the magazine he worked for), he single-mindedly pursued his passion for reading and writing.
It was a sexually, hyperactive society where Garcia grew up. His father had children from all the places, and even Garcia himself defied death in order to satisfy the nocturnal cravings of his groins. He writes about visiting brothels and sleeping with prostitutes as casually as going to the nearest joint and buying soda ice-cream. No wonder he had had two bouts of gonorrhoea by the time he was 23. Once he almost got shot by the husband of a lady with whom he was caught in bed in his birthday suit.
There were so many people at that time who were passionate about poetry, literature and journalism. Most of his close friends were journalists and writers and they often got together at various places to discuss prodigal poets and writers such as Naruda, William Faulkner, Homer, etc. It almost sounds like the classical era of Socrates and Plato when young men congregated in the evening to talk about philosophy, religion, economy, literature and politics. They didn’t have money to eat and cloth themselves, but they had plenty of literature to read and good songs to sing and carouse.
The socio-political environment of Colombia left an indelible mark on Garcia’s personality. The country seemed to be in a perpetual turmoil and this too was a reason why the circle of poverty was impossible to breach. More than 200,000 people perished during the long civil war. Government censorship never allowed Garcia and his friends to write the way they wanted to write and this taught them an extremely valuable lesson: convey your message even if it appears in an expurgated form. He nowhere glorifies his inner fears (he suffered from debilitating nightmares and writer’s blocks) and angst but while chronicling the memoirs, he almost segues into the realms of the unreal, and then he cannot resist the magical realism he is known to have pioneered. Many of his memories consist of people who seem to be the chimerical phantoms of a nebulous world. Amazingly he can recollect almost all the names of those people.
He worked resiliently and with great determination to earn a living as a writer, and this is amplified here:
I did not earn a centavo except with the typewriter, and this seems more meritorious than one might think, because the first royalties that allowed me to live on my stories and novels were paid to me when I was in my forties, after I had published four books with the most abject earnings. Before that, my life was always agitated by a tangle of tricks, feints, and illusions intended to outwit the countless lures that tried to turn me into anything but a writer.
The unpredictable torrents of his vicissitudes took him from one place to another, but wherever he landed, he carved out a place for himself.
Although you won’t enjoy the book as much as you must have enjoyed his other books that intermittently dabble with exotic surrealism, if you really want to get an insight into the tumultuous life of this exceptional writer, I highly recommend it.
My intention here is not to summarize the entire book. These are just my thoughts — random as well as organized. Had I read more books (I’m trying to do that now) my review would have been more analytical.
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