smoke and mirrors. lost and found.

what price, insight?

if a slowly ripening cynicism, recognizing that life has jagged edges and glossed over cracks in unexpected places is a sign of growing up, then i am yet to attain it. if the test of good writing is in its capacity to jolt one out of mental and moral complacence, then lisa moore's collection of ten short stories 'open' more than sufficiently does so.

i uncover each sentence like a secret bar of chocolate, to be savored till it melts away. i don't want the book to end. the sharpness and uncomfortable honesty of her prose threatens to distort the benign image of the adult world that i still defend. yet, all the cruelty and sadness and flashes of love and tenderness that she writes about with unsentimental detachment, is what makes this unforgettable. reminds me of a nell freudenberger story 'the tutor' that i had read in Granta-82 once and could not get out of my mind hence. an interview here.




from 'Craving':


i realise now, totally zonked that i have always believed the flaws of men are born of a stupidity for which they, men, can't be held accountable. i recognize in a flash that all my relations with men have been guided by this generous and condescending premise. i see now that the theory comes from the lack of courage required to face the truth, which is that men are pricks.
they're aware women like me exist, women who believe they have been shafted in terms of a moral spine, and these men welcome these women's low opinions of themselves, and capitalize on it.


and later;


i have forsaken the promises of our adolescence; hiding near the warm tires of parked cars while playing spotlight at dusk, holding still while curling irons burn our scalps, splashes of silver raining from the disco balls in the parish hall, mashed banana emollients, face scrubs with twigs and bits of apricot, ears pierced with an ice cube and sewing needle, and the disquieting loss of a belief in God. the saturated aura, a kinetic field of blue light, that surrounded a silent phone while we willed it to ring. our periods. dusk, all by itself, dusk, walking home from school after a volleyball game and the light withdrawing from the pavement. 
i look at my husband, i try to feel dissatisfied but i can't, he is a beautiful man.

iGot! iGloat!

The loot so far.

THE CHRISTMAS MYSTERY - Jostein Gardner 

I'll forgive him 'Sophie's World' if this turns out well. One and only chance, before I get seriously prejudiced, Gardner. Historical/Theological Mystery. New Genre.

MY SUMMER OF LOVE - Helen Cross 

starring 15 year old Mona, a drinker, thief and fruit-machine addict, who meets well-endowed, posh Tamsin who has an acress mother and a sister who's died of starvation. black comedy expected.

BLOODY WOMEN, IRELAND'S FEMALE KILLERS - David M. Kiely 

women murderers, my favourite yet being Kate Webster, the one who boiled the dismembered bits of her victim and tried to sell off the fat as 'the best dripping'.

PRINCE OF THE CLOUDS - Gianni Riotta

Supposedly "even more enchanting than 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin'". Promises post-WW2 Sicily, a battle scene and a beautiful Russian woman.

THE FALL - Joyce Carol Oates 

My first Oates novel. Portrait of an American family in crisis, set in the mid-20th century. The plot is quite original, to say the least. Post a disastrous honeymoon night, a young woman's newly-minted husband throws himself into the Niagara. :-)

SMALL GODS - Terry Pratchett

The sight of this one among all those lurid lurve stories taught me what 'paralyzed with pleasure' means.

AH, SWEET MYSTERY OF LIFE - Roald Dahl

Neither juvenile fiction, nor macabre short stories, this one is a side of the master i've yet to encounter. Here he writes of the eccentricities of rural life.

1066 AND ALL THAT - W.C.Sellar and R. J. Yeatman

The much-longed-for, never-expected-to-be-owned satire on textbook history.

UNDER THE EYE OF THE CLOCK - Christopher Nolan

The brilliant, handicapped young writer's autobiography, almost.

LONGITUDE - Dava Sobel

Beautiful, beautiful, hardback. Coincidentally, right when the kids and i are working on the 'imaginary lines' too.

GOODFELLAS - Nicholas Pileggi

A look into the career and machinations of Henry Hill, a New York mobster, turned Federal Witness, turned one of the most hunted men of our times.

TOMORROW - Graham Swift

An intimate story. A look at long-standing marriage, parenthood and the fabric of families.

THE TEENAGE WORRIER'S GUIDE TO LURVE - Ros Asquith

If this is anything like Adrian Mole, then i'm blessed to have found this, being surrounded as i am, by tiny people with hormones doing funny things to them.

MISS PURDY'S CLASS - Annie Murray

Young schoolmarm in the early 1900s in the poorest area of Birmingham, and all the troubled children she comes to know and love. Inspirational almost-chick-lit. Got a nagging feeling the Hollywood factory has already moviefied this.

OPEN - Lisa Moore

Getting compared to Annie Proulx is no mean achievement. A collection of 10 stories.

THE BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE - Stephen Fry/Alan Davies

If a book says 'George Washington's teeth previously belonged to a hippopotamus', i've discovered i'll buy it.
 

101 THINGS TO DO BEFORE YOU'RE OLD AND BORING - Richard Horne and Helen Szirtes

I guess a frog-in-the well provincial could be bettered by some armchair inspiration.

ROAD RAGE - Ruth Rendell

She, and she alone knows how to make a whodunnit moving, literate, insightful and thrilling. The best there is.
 

E IS FOR EVIDENCE - Sue Grafton

Kinsey Millhone, my favorite kick-ass sleuth, in another of her adventures. 

 

if i needed any more evidence of approaching senility, this is it. more non-fiction here than fiction.



Notice:

Amoeba, Stuts, B, Gunji;

I will NOT share. Unless, of course, you buy a few and share with me first.

Hyper-critical, Reader-on-a-Mission Sailor Man;

keep your comments to yourself.

iBuy and then iThink

one should not covet a book by its cover, but one does.
i am such a sucker for catchy design and colour.

the Hachette editions of Alexander Mc.call Smith's Mma. Ramotswe books have such excellent woodcut-style cover art by Hannah Firmin, that i cannot help going into a trance imagining them on my bookshelf and wake up to find that i have bought them.
not that i'm complaining.

the gentle rhythm of the narrative and the contemplative pace of the stories bring to mind vacations spent lying stomach-down, reading and eating, to the accompaniment of the rain pattering down outside. Dusty Botswana of the sleepy, sweet-smelling cattle is a far cry from the robust lushness of my Malabar Coast, but the abundance of good food - the produce fresh from the garden - the chickens picking away in yards, the possibility of pausing whatever one is doing to just 'sit and talk'...all of that is the same.

  

 




sadly, leisure is such a lost art nowadays.
noone seems to know what to do without a computer or a cell-phone or a television to amuse oneself. why are all the realms that one could cross, in the snugness of one's thoughts so out of bounds for so many now?

i had once asked my students to think of a few things they could do to amuse themselves on a dark rainy evening, with the electricity cut off. they just could not! except for scaring people in the dark, and for telling scary stories to each other by torchlight, that is.

i wonder if we have taken away something vital from our children. the connection to the soil they stand upon, and that which has made all of us.

Wisdom, and the places to find it.

time was when i used to think wisdom lay at the threshold of turning twenty and entering the magical world of adulthood. all gawkiness, social misery and lack fo witty repartee would be things of the past. blushes would never again drown me in red pools of mortification, nor would the foot-in-mouth syndrome strike with such alarming regularity.

well, it seems i was -yet again- wrong.

i have found this most underrated quality of the human race in the most unexpected of places. in the sharply observed one-liners from my mother which condense a character to its essence; the startling see-all gaze of a child which cuts throught layers of feigned interest; the quiet understanding of old friends when they let one rant a self-righteous soliloquy; the solid common sense of old people; sometimes in the most unlikeliest of them all - in myself.

still, for someone who lives in words, wisdom is a rare commodity nowadays. all is dash and flourish and clever sentences. intelligent perhaps, but not wise.

one writer who is a contrary delight is Alexander Mc.Call Smith. the gentle humour - not ascerbic but sympathetic, the keen observing eye, the deft characterisation and the feel of leisure his writing brings, i have yet to find it all in another's writing, except perhaps, that of J0anne Harris. even now, i am struck by the -that word again- wisdom of his lines.

perhaps there was no real point to our existence -or none that we could discern- and that meant that the real question that had to be asked was this: how can i make my life more bearable? we are here whether we like it or not, and by and large we seem to have a need to continue. in that case, the real question to be addressed is: how are we going to make the experience of being here as fulfilling, as good as possible?

or,

we all fall in love, and some of us are sentenced to unrequited love, talking about it over cups of coffee in flats like this, with friends just like this, and oddly comforted by the process.

the worm turns

Read: 'love and longing in bombay' by vikram chandra - dark, funny, intimate, poetic, realistic, all at once. he takes the claustrophobic closeness and familiarity of bombay (i love him for calling the city that. glad he did not make it sound like the middle-aged-maharashtrian-housewifely sounding mum'bai') and makes a glowing collection of interconnected short stories out of it all. a long time since i really enjoyed reading indian authors writing in english. don't get me wrong. some (like rohinton mistry) are a delight, but the familiarity of the subject matters sometimes put me off. i am seriously looking forward to chandra's next. it is a nice thing. this looking forward.

Also read: 'ladies coupe' by anita nair. good in parts, with some really well formed sentences, but i cant help feeling that it is a bit too forced sometimes in its effort to be realistic. and the ending does not fit at all. the characterization goes all wrong there. middle-aged straitlaced spinster having a change of heart overnight, and suddenly becoming a new woman, and celebrating this new found emancipation by seducing a young man she just met on a beach? improbable, to say the least.  

Re-read: 'kari' by amruta patil. the graphic novel is beautifully laid out in black and white and an occasional splash of colour. i read it more for the look than for the story. the story is indeed interesting, and told through the tongue-in-cheeky, vulnerable, yearning voice of the boy-girl protagonist, but it is the graphic effect that is more pleasurable to me. 

i miss having illustrations in the books that i read. who decided that adults dont like to look at pictures as they read? no fair.

Also re-reading: 'persepolis' by marjane satrapi. i have a feeling i shall be doing a few more of this re-reading stuff. of the same book, i mean. the graphics are lovely, and the text is both direct and intelligently funny. i loved this book.  

Reading: 'wyrd sisters' by terry pratchett. what can i say? pratchett is king. i hope (a) he never dies or, (b) if he does, he does it very, very, very many years later. 

Also reading: 'literature and the child' by lee galda and bernice e.cullinan. it covers all genres of childrens'/young adults' literature, offers author profiles, exhaustive booklists and teaching ideas. thought provoking and detailed, galda and cullinan take a good look at how some of the deepest issues known to us are addressed through literature and how our children respond to it. themes like racism, incest, death, identity-crisis, perspectives, self-worth and adolescence are a part of the warp and weft of all literature, and they need to be sensitively treated while in the hands and minds of a child. it is rather steeply priced, though. sometimes i wish i had pots of money. allright, one pot at an opportune moment would do as well.

Dying to read: 'the naked man' by desmond morris. purely scientific interest. and it has some very, shall we say, interestingly named chapters. only thing is, this will be an exchange book. the old ek hath le, ek hath de, kind of deal. to get my paws on this, i'll have to temporarily part with morris's 'the naked ape'. the thought hurts me a great deal. not the getting part, but the giving part. my heart bleeds. i hate lending books. if i had a baby, i might lend her/him to someone for a little while quite gladly, but lending books is beyond me. what this says about my depraved state of womanliness i cannot say, but there it is.

the gang plus one husband and two kids home for dinner. glad they came. the day was not a total washout after all.
a very nice morning today. dewy. drops kept falling onto our faces and arms as bro drove me to the bus. frosted windows.

things are looking up.







waiting for summer. pomegranates. very oriental. very my name is red. fruit salad time.






reading teesta's manga shakespeare version of romeo and juliet. liking it. plan to use it next year to design a unit on the bard. also thinking of using excerpts from the original, some abridged peices and baz luhrmann's william shakespeare's romeo+juliet. should be fun.

here is a review of the book - readingyear.blogspot.com

the cover looks thus:

gorefest

just finished reading elizabeth kostova's 'the historian'.

very enjoyable. almost gothic in the terror department. one will almost forgive stoker the dracula influx into pop culture, if it in any way inspired this book. it is both literary and entertaining at the same time. kostova creates atmosphere admirably. mountains, monastries, architecture, food, travel, east european countries, filial love, the impact of the iron curtain, religions and the superstitions they foster, and above all, the power of evil are all delt with, with a wonderful acuity.maintaining the suspence through such a long book cannot be easy,that too in one's first book, but she manages to capture one's attention and hold it. all the research -ten year's worth- is put to great use.there are the occassional, lovely turns of phrase.a very compulsive read. rather in the league of 'the rule of four'.


went rakhi shopping with shraddha today. just the right thing to do when u have a huge assignment to submit tomorrow and u haven't yet done a thing. when facing deadline, shop!

hp7 atlast

i just got the HP7(that's Harry Potter 7 for the uninitiated) today!

Read 2 chapters while gulping down some snacks, drinking some scalding coffee, tying my shoelaces, combing my hair and wearing my jacket (quite gymnastic of me,what?) prior to rushing to school for the sadela DTT.

at this rate, i might start rivalling shraddha at time management. till now, the mad hatter and i shared the same idea about time- a kind of hopeless exasperation. i'd even started thinking of time as a very malicious 'he'.

saw the sun after three rainwashed days. nice to see the smiling face of Phoebus.
and oh! i just blew out the fuse of the bedrooms. again. lucky i had to come to school today. escaped the customary tonguelashing from mom. this is what they call the silver lining, i guess.(or is this particular dog having her day atlast?)
whatever.