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Showing posts from 2012

The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass

An absolute gem by Grass. The book unfolds through most of before, during and after Second World War. The main character is Oskar. A character so hard to imagine but so vividly portrayed that you actually read the book through his eyes. Slowly my childhood - the childhood that means so much to me - slipped away. The pain in my gums, foreshadowing my first teeth, died down; tired, I leaned back: an adult hunchback, carefully though rather too warmly dressed, with a wristwatch, identification papers, a bundle of banknotes in his billfold. I put a cigarette between my lips, set a match to it, and trusted the tobacco to expel that obsessive taste of childhood from my oral cavity. Childhood is the best time of your life - so they say. But for so many, the memory of childhood is merely a burden. You carry so many "symbols of progress" that you wish to imagine all of it never happened. How can you purge it? If only it were as easy as blowing cigarette smoke out. Condemning the first

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

It wasn't the poverty or the helplessness that disturbed him; it was the thing he would see again and again during the days to come -in the empty windows of photography shops, in the frozen windows of the crowded teahouses where the city's unemployed passed the time playing cards, and in the city's empty snow-covered squares. These sights spoke of a strange and powerful loneliness. It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten, as if it were snowing at the end of the world. He read something else into the look his friend gave him, and it would stay with him for many years: Muhtar thought he deserved the beating he was about to get. Even with the certainty of his winning the election in four days' time, there was something so unsettling about his composure as to make him seem contrite for what had not yet happened; it was almost as if he were thinking, I deserve this beating not just for having insisted in settling in this godforsaken city but for ha

Youth by J.M. Coetzee

A work of genius. He would like to believe the last explanation. He would like to believe there is enough pity in the air for black people and their lot, enough of a desire to deal honourably with them, to make up for the cruelty of the laws. But he knows it is not so. Between black and white there is a gulf fixed. Deeper than pity, deeper than honourable dealings, deeper even than goodwill, lies and awareness on both sides that people like Paul and himself, with their pianos and violins, are here on this earth, the earth of South Africa, on the shakiest of pretexts. This very milkman, who a year ago must have been just a boy herding cattle in the deepest Transkei, must know it. In fact, from Africans in general, even the Coloured people, he feels a curious, amused tenderness emanating: a sense that he must be a simpleton, in need of protection, if he imagines he can get by on the basis of straight looks and honourable dealings when the ground beneath his feet is soaked with blood an

Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving

This is the third novel by Irving John that I read. A book about a father and son on the run and how it affects their lives or rather the lack of it. Some of the characters seem hard to believe and somehow that makes the book more interesting - the mix of characters. Danny knew that his father's life had been changed forever because of an ankle injury; a different accident, to the boy's young mother, had altered the course of his own childhood and changed his dad's life forever again. In a twelve-year old's world, change couldn't be good. Any change made Danny anxious - the way missing school made him anxious. Danny's father Dominic might have become a logger if not for that injury. His life had indeed changed, but for the better or for the worse? If not for the ankle injury, maybe he would have become like Ketchum - a hard riverman who lived among the elements and feared nothing. Instead he became a cook and a husband to a woman who was a school teacher. Throug

"A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini

"One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls." This is where the title of the novel comes from - an old poem. The novel has been dedicated to the women of Afghanistan and quite rightly should be as it brings out the agony and suffering of Afghan women in a way few other books or movies before have. The main characters of this book are Mariam and Laila who despite their vastly different upbringing end up sharing abuses in the same house. She feared she might say hurtful is she stayed: that she knew the jinn was a lie, that Jalil had told her that what Nana had was a disease with a name, that pills could make it better. She might have asked Nana why she refused to see Jalil's doctors, as he had insisted she do. why she hadn't taken the pills he had bought for her. If she could articulate it, she might have said to Nana that she was tired of being an instrument, lied to, laid claim to, used. That she w

The Dean's December by Saul Bellow

“The Dean's December” is an absolute dynamite of a book by Saul Bellow with incredibly powerful dialogues, self-introspection and analysis. The Dean here is Albert Corde who is with a university in Chicago. Though he is not a hard-core academic, his publication in a magazine ruffled the feathers of several powerful people in Chicago. The book is to a large extent a flashback of his life as he is cooped up in Bucharest with nothing to do. Corde, who led the life of an executive – wasn't a college dean a kind of executive? - found himself six or seven thousand miles from his base, in Bucharest, in winter, shut up in an old fashioned apartment. Here everyone was kind – family and friends, warmhearted people – he liked them very much, to him they were “old Europe.” But they had their own intense business. This was no ordinary visit. His wife's mother was dying. Corde had come to give support. But there was little he could do for Minna. Language was a problem.

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

My second Murakami novel after Norwegian Wood. The book is all about love and loneliness is modern times. Written in the first person, the main character tries to capture the love he felt for Sumire and depicts the love that she felt for another woman. Several biting pieces from the novel that I just couldn't resist quoting. It ends in tragedy finally as Sumire disappears mysteriously. In the spring of her twenty second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains – flattening everything in its path, tossing fields up int eh air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado's intensity doesn't abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and everything, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. T

Life & Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee

Another masterpiece by Coetzee. It tells the story of Michael K who escapes the city during a civil war with his ailing mother with aim of taking her back to the house where she grew up as a girl in the countryside. But eventually ends taking her ashes instead when she dies on the journey. The story vividly tells the day to day struggles of a man who survives the harsh countryside, trying to go back to the old ways of tending to a garden and growing his own food. He is eventually captured but has lost all the will to live in the "system". K closed his eyes and rested his face on his hands. It was clear to him that it was not soldiers who were camping at the dam, who had earlier camped at the house, but men from the mountains, men who blew up railway tracks and mined roads and attacked farmhouses and drove off stock and cut one town off from another, whom the radio reported exterminated in scores and newspapers published pictures in pools of their own blood. That was wh

A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carre

A good read with all the classic features of a Le Carre novel - characters trying to salvage themselves and their failed lives over something they eventually would have no control of. Brue took a slow tour around the room Why, on earth did you do it dear father of mine? Why, when all your life you traded on your good name and that of your forebears and lived by it in private and in public, in the higher traditions of Scottish caution, canniness and dependability: why put all that at risk for the sake of a bunch of crooks and carpetbaggers from the East whose one achievement had been to plunder their country's assets at the moment when it had most need of them? Why throw open you bank to them? -  your beloved bank, your most precious thing? Why offer safe haven to their ill-gained loot, along with unprecedented terms of secrecy and protection? Why stretch every norm and regulation to its snapping-point and beyond, in a desperate - and as Brue had perceived it, even at that t