Miscellany

It’s been a while since this blog has seen some action. There have been books, a few movies. Average stuff, not worth a visit to blogger I think. Unless you have an evening to spare and wish to drive away tedium by inflicting your opinion on a silent web page.

Shashi Deshpande is an Indian writer I had never read. I picked up That Long Silence because I came across her name in a magazine that described her as one of the foremost Indian women writers in English. It’s a tedious read. When Jaya’s husband is accused of fraud, the couple coops down in an old flat in Dadar to tide the time through. In those two weeks, Jaya has enough time (her kids are away with a friend) to think about her life and the relationships that make it up. Surprisingly there is no one except her dead father who she seems to care for. Her childhood comes across as a dreary one with family politics holding sway. The matriarchs on either side of the family rule the roost and they come across as unsympathetic and stern beyond forbearance. And when her father dies, Jaya’s life is pretty much made joyless. She marries Mohan, has two kids and puts her writing career on hold. At the end of the book though, she attempts to break her long silence when she reaches some kind of realization – that she herself will need to make the effort to make relationships work, to change the situation of her life. It’s a pretty sudden insight with no big events that shape it. I guess life is that way – a slow movement towards some kind of understanding of a bigger picture.

Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time is quite a different place and time. As in the best of McEwan’s books, there is one shocking incident that transforms the protagonist and his circumstances. In this case, the protagonist is Stephen Lewis, a children’s writer and the incident is the kidnapping of his daughter from a supermarket just in a few moments when his back is turned. Both he and his wife have different ways of coping with it. He goes ballistic trying to find her, even after everyone begins to realize that little Kate is not coming back. His wife withdraws… into her books and art and music. This is complemented by Stephen’s friend Charles descent into childhood – almost a replacement for the lost child. It is a slow internal recovery process for Stephen. But he does eventually get there, happily with his wife in tow. Charles is however not so lucky. It’s vintage McEwan. Liked it quite a bit, though it never comes even close to the emotional punch Atonement gave me.

Then there was the strange book called The Silent Raga by Ameen Merchant. Strange because it is written by someone called Merchant and it describes a hard-core Tamil Brahmin lifestyle, almost flawlessly. It is Merchant’s debut novel and it is a pretty decent one at that. At least it starts off well. With Janaki Venkatakrishnan, her sister Mallika and her father in their Sripuram agrahaaram. The death of her mother when she is 13, means Janaki has to drop out of school and look after the house. In this she is helped by her widowed chithi (her mother’s younger sister) who she realizes in a shocking revelation is having an affair with her father. Her hatred for her chithi, her hopelessness in her future and the suicide of her best friend Kamala lead Janaki to do the unimaginable in a traditional Brahmin household – she runs away and gets married to a Muslim actor. Her father disowns her and it is left to her younger sister Mallika to piece the family together again. Janaki’s return prompted by a plea for monetary help from her chithi for her father’s medical needs brings mixed feelings in Mallika. Mallika can never completely forgive her sister for abandoning her to her father and aunt. But there is finally a realization that both of them were caught in the same trap – of stultifying tradition and narrow-minded provincialism. The strength of the book in my opinion is the description of the life in an agrahaaram in small town Tamil Nadu. The kolams and the daavanis and the maamis, the classical music that is so much a part of daily life, the early morning wait for the milk van, the ponnu paarkal with the veena in hand… it brought back Madras in vivid detail. Nostalgia is a good enough reason for a book, I think.

Amsterdam

By Ian McEwan

I like Ian McEwan and Atonement is one of my all-time favourite books. Which is why I surprised myself when I disliked this one, a Booker winner to boot.

It started off promising. A dead character, Molly Lane with 3 ex-lovers and a husband at her funeral. Two of those ex-lovers are deep friends – Vernon Halliday, the editor of Judge, a newspaper with a falling circulation and a need for an infusion of newness and dynamism; and Clive Linley, a music composer with aspirations of becoming the British Beethovan. Both of them hate the other ex-lover Julian Garmony, a right-wing politician with ambitions of becoming the next Prime Minister. And dislike Molly’s husband George intensely.

Molly’s death makes Vernon and Clive make a pact with each other about their own lives and how they would wish to end them. In the weeks following Molly’s death, both Vernon and Clive are faced with moral choices that they make a hash of. And when these choices make them turn against each other, they proceed to Amsterdam to fulfil their pact - ensuring a denouement that reads straight out of Sydney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight.

What surprises is McEwan’s absolute lack of sympathy for any of his characters. There is not a single one you could instinctively like. The plot is racy, almost thriller-like. And his language still is exquisite. But a Booker for this? Stay away unless you are a die-hard McEwan fan.

Atonement

Love stories. I am a sucker for them, especially the doomed ones and the unrequited ones, the searing passionate ones. Think Heathcliff and Catherine in Wuthering Heights, Count Lazlo and Katherine in The English Patient, Dr. Zhivago and Lara, Sydney Carton and Lucie in The Tale of Two Cities, the Vicomte and Madame de Tourvel in Dangerous Liaisons.

It therefore was no surprise when I found myself choking up when I saw Atonement this weekend on DVD. Ian McEwan’s classic book I had already read. And loved enough to rank among my top 10 favourites of all time. So I had approached the movie with a great amount of trepidation - I normally hate movie adaptations of books I love. But the movie was pretty much a faithful rendition of the book and it had actors who I thought were pretty brilliant – so it wasn’t at all bad. Of course it does not have that absolute ‘punch in your guts’ kind of feel that the book leaves you with. But I would recommend it very highly for anyone without the patience to read the book.

Atonement is at heart a love story between a rich society girl Cecilia Tallis and Robbie Turner the son of the household help. It is a love that is interrupted by a seemingly precocious but confused thirteen year old, the narrator of the story. Briony Tallis is Cee’s little sister who harbours dreams of writer-hood and of Robbie himself. She starts to notice the chemistry between her sister and Robbie, reads a note that he writes Cecilia but never meant to send, sees them making passionate love in the library – and then in her confused teenage mind convinces herself and the world that Robbie is guilty of a crime he never committed. It is a lie that changes their lives – sends Robbie to prison and then to war, alienates Cecilia from her family forever and condemns Briony to a lifetime of guilt. Briony writes the book as her last act of penitance, but in a heart-breaking final chapter (and the final scenes in the movie), we realize why there really can be no atonement for her.

Watch this movie or better still, read the book. It is a wrenching story, one that stayed with me for a very long time; with Cee and Robbie entering my pantheon of all-time favourite doomed love stories.

On Chesil Beach

By Ian McEwan

It is 1962 England. The sexual revolution is still a few years away. Two young people in love get married and celebrate their honeymoon on Chesil Beach. It is their wedding night and neither of them have had sex before. It is a tortuous, intense situation and who better than McEwan to describe it in his vivid precise manner.

“Why were these lovers in a modern age so timid and innocent?” he asks. It is this question that is at the heart of this novella. “Social change never proceeds at an even pace”, he explains later. And so when the world was rapidly proceeding towards the pill, easy sex, dope and rock and roll, there is this corner in England that remains untouched.

It is a tragedy, because neither Florence nor Edward has gotten over Victorian restraint to make the physical relationship work. They are in love, impatient for their lives to get started and their future is within their grasp. But they flounder. In his exquisite way McEwan asks, “And what stood in their way? Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself.”

The night is a disaster. Florence’s fear and guilt coupled with Edward’s impatience drive them away from each other. The debacle that would not have seemed one in a few weeks or months had they stuck it out, changes the course of their lives forever. Florence runs away and Edward is too proud to follow. And at the end of an ordinary life, it is left to Edward to reminisce about the girl with the violin he had let go. “Love and patience – if only he had had them both at once – would surely have seen them both through…This is how the entire course of a life can be changed…by doing nothing.” And if only he had known or cared to know…Florence would have been his, if he had only called out to her in her distress.

It is a short tale but quite an evocative one. McEwan tells it with razor sharp precision and unbelievable compassion.

Novellas

Two slim volumes were my staple during the last week of the year - Ian Mcewan’s quite uncharacteristic The Daydreamer and Milan Kundera’s Slowness. Two very different books with very different sensibilities that brought my year to a close.

The Daydreamer is a book that is bound to resonate with anyone who has ever daydreamed away endless hours as a child. The ability to just sit around, stare into space and imagine a whole different world was for me the best part of childhood. McEwan brings alive the fascination and wonder of those times and through the stories of the daydreamer Peter, gives the word possibility a whole new dimension.

Peter Fortune is a 10 year old very quiet boy, with a set of busy parents and a kid sister Kate whom he alternatively adores and despises. All in all, a pretty normal boring sort of suburban kid life. But Peter’s world is anything but normal and boring and with his child’s imagination, he conjures up stories and worlds in his mind from the most innocuous things and people around him.

Not all the stories are nice and pretty – there are elements of Roald Dahl in the story The Dolls, where Kate’s dolls want to exchange his life for theirs, starting with taking over his room. Most of the stories have Peter putting himself in someone else’s shoes – either the old dying cat, the doll, a detested baby cousin or an inexplicable adult. Some of these work beautifully – I particularly liked the story of the cat, where the cat is dying and Peter exchanges his soul with the cat’s for one day. He gets to bring alive his fantasies of cat life while gifting his life to the cat for one day. Touching and kind and lovely. Others like The Baby and The Grownup fall slightly flat. Stereotypical anecdotes of a baby world and a grown up world kind of mar the formula.

All in all, this is a refreshing children’s book that did appeal to a grownup like me too. Unlike the current fascination of kiddie books with alternative worlds – witches and daemons and such like, this book takes a real and normal boy’s life and weaves in exciting possibilities.

I cannot be this enthusiastic about the second novella though. Kundera requires more reading before I can judge whether I like this kind of writing or not. Slowness is about an idea – the idea that ‘the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory, the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.’ We are a generation obsessed with speed, because what we are trying to do is speed away from unpleasantness. While slowness is a mark of memory, when we are trying to remember something. And what Kundera tries to do is have conversations with the reader about ideas like this.

He kind of illustrates this with two stories of seduction set 200 years apart. In one, an 18^th century noblewoman seduces a young man simply for pleasure, an Epicurean ideal. In the other, a 20th century academic’s seduction game is messed up, turns out more comic and foolish than expected. The 18^th century seduced nobleman savours the memory of his amorous night while the academic bikes away speedily to forget his.

It’s a bit too metaphysical for my taste. But it’s different enough a novel to intrigue me into reading other Kundera works in the new year.