Reading between the lines

 Over the past year, I read a few books written by African authors and after having completed the fourth one, I thought it is time to write a blog post about them. In sequence, they were Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Devil that Danced on the Water by Aminatta Forna, Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou and Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah. All of them beautifully written and in some ways deeply moving. Initially, I thought of writing a blog to compare them, but I realized that Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was a masterpiece that deserved a dedicated post. So this post is all about this gem. I have tried my best to remove any spoilers and extract isolated quotes without giving away the plot. But for those who like what they read, it would be advisable to stop before reaching the end of the blog post, as it might become obvious how the book will end. The book is rich with tribal culture, their beliefs, their closeness to nature and also shows the brutality of tribal life with s

My second book by Kazuo Ishiguro after The Remains of the Day. Written in the usual style of Ishiguro with beautiful but simple language and leaves you with unanswered questions. The book is about Artificial Friends (AFs) – robots with ability to understand human emotion besides the usual speech and mobility. These AFs are for “lifted children” – those who have been genetically altered to enhance their intelligence. The practice of lifting by then had become fairly common to the extent that many elite universities had closed their doors to those who had not been lifted. However, lifting comes at a cost – leaves the children weak and mortality rates are high. And of course, there is damned if you do damned if you don’t scenario for parents – should they lift their children in the hope for better opportunities and risk losing them or should they let them be? SPOILER ALERT, if you have not read it and would rather not know what it is about before you read it, stop reading right now. It

A heartbreaking story based on real events surrounding a murder case in the 1800s with the accused being Grace Marks. The story as told by Margaret Atwood is however a work of fiction retold using the same places and dates as the actual story. As I read the book, I thought of a Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. The story begins with Grace Marks as a child in Ireland. Her father an abusive alcoholic and her mother bearing children after children, the family is supported to some extent by Grace’s aunt and uncle. Finally fed up of supporting this ever-growing family, the uncle suggests a migration to Canada and to their luck, Grace’s father has been getting into some trouble with the law due to which he takes up the proposition. Unfortunately, Grace’s mother dies on the journey and is buried at sea. Grace later regrets using her mother’s second best blanket to wrap her dead body. Coming to Canada, life gets a bit better as she finds herself a maid in a

This was the first book of Iris Murdoch’s that I read and might be the last. For some reason, Iris Murdoch’s quotes appeared quite a few times within one week (perhaps it was her birthday some day that week) on some Facebook page on literature that I had subscribed to. The book was quite a disappointment set in London among a group of friends and family. Almost like a soap opera, everyone had slept with almost everyone else, and the ones whom they had not slept with, they were deeply in love with. As always, spoiler alert. Stop here if you don’t want to know any part of the story. Not too far into the book, a fairly interesting part does turn up. There are two brothers Lucas and Clement. Lucas was initially adopted by their parents who had given up hope on having their own child. But after several years, they do indeed have their own – Clement. Initially, Lucas was the focus of all their love and attention but once Clement was born, the parents apparently diverted

For some reason I have been putting off reading this book for a long time and I never watched the movie because it seemed so “colonial English”. A lot of the book is quite mundane and about the ways of the English thinking adorably of the “British empire”. The book is a sad story if not an outright tragedy about dedicating your life to the wrong causes and the wrong people. The main character is Stevens who is the butler at Darlington Hall and spent most of his life serving Lord Darlington. The lord eventually dies and the house has been bought by an American as after the second world war, it was the Americans who grabbed most of the spoils. The American doesn’t entertain as often as Darlington did and for that matter spends most of his time in America leaving large parts of Darlington Hall under wraps and with a skeletal staff on duty to maintain the house. Under these diminished circumstances, the butler Stevens recollects nostalgic memories of old times and even

This is a book of Nikos Kazantzakis that I found a bit disappointing but then I guess the book was set in a gloomy time in the history of Crete. An island occupied by Turkey but with Greek ancestry, it is about the freedom struggle of Crete. Crete has seen several uprisings and the book is set probably towards the end of the 1800s or the early 1900s just before the First World War. The book takes the reader through the uprising, how it started, the feeling that culminated in fighting and the foregone conclusion. As usual, spoiler alerts. At the heart of the novel is Captain Michales who is like the Braveheart in this novel. A humorless man, he feels nothing but pain and agony with Crete being occupied. He has fought in a previous uprising and survived. Was given amnesty and safe passage to escape to Greece but refused to go. “Freedom or Death” was his slogan. And eventually his agony causes him to begin the fighting by provoking the Turks. After a few retaliations,