Reading between the lines

Though not much might be in common between these two men and their principal works, I found these two books and the men who wrote them greatly admirable. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, a crusader against the caste system in India, a man born in the lowest caste and attained the highest educational degrees despite being denied opportunities to learn, he is a symbol to so many Indians and yet quite sadly still looked down upon by upper caste India. Niccolo Machiavelli, who held public office in turbulent times in Italy, was forced out of office due to a change of regime but spent his days in exile writing The Prince in th hope of gaining favour with the new regime and getting his position back. Both were great thinkers, visionaries, way ahead of their time and quite sadly both men died disappointed and bitter. Ambedkar was never able to see the caste system set aside and Machiavelli never got his position back and Italy was as divided as ever. Annihilation of Case: What rep...

Been a while since I posted. Been reading on and off and have not been capturing quotes with the same frequency as most of my readings have been when I travel. Over the past month, I read three books - God of Small Things by Arundatti Roy, Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. All of them brilliantly written and fairly depressing but then again I prefer depressing books as they force you to think. Handmaid's Tale and Brave New World share the context of a dystopian future but somehow I felt God of Small Things seem to have a similar approach to life. In the God of Small Things, the story gradually unravels on the rather tragic adventures of twins Estha and Rahel and with their cousin Sophie. I guess that is where the title comes from - how a seemingly harmless childish adventure goes horribly wrong and destroys an entire family. But more that this adventure, Arundatti Roy captures the social problems of the time which is what probably lau...

 A fantastic book by an author I have never read before. I was trying to find authors similar to J.M. Coetzee and Andre Brink showed up. The book is set in apartheid Africa and describes the injustice of the times. In that silence, behind the events of the afternoon and the uncommitted light of the sun, lay the memory of Gordon, small and maimed in his coffin in the cool bare room, his grey claws folded on his narrow chest. The rest seemed interchangeable, transferable, unessential: but that remained. And, with it, the aching awareness of something stirred into sluggish but ineluctable motion. From a very early age one accepts, or believes or it told, that certain things exist in a certain manner. For example: that society is based on order, on reason, on justice. And that, whenever anything goes wrong, one can appeal to an innate decency, or commonsense, or a notion of legality in people to rectify the error and offer redress. Then, without warning you discover that what you ...

This amazing book by an author I regret never having read before, has a similar feel to Orhan Pamuk's books. The struggle with faith, of believing but not knowing whether belief lead to anything. Set in Poland in the seventeenth century at a time when war and massacres were routine, the book is a beautiful story about a man who becomes a slave but even after achieving freedom, realizes he can never be free again. He continues to believe but his belief is shaken by all that he sees around him. Ceaselessly he prayed for death; he had even contemplated self-destruction. But now that mood had passed, and he had become inured to living among strangers, distant from his home, doing hard labour. It was difficult to believe in God's mercy when murderers buried children alive. In Jacob's case the normal order of things had been reversed. It was God who spoke in simplest language while evil overflowed with learned quotations. How long did one live in this world? How long was one...

This book seems a bit similar to "The life and times of Michael K" as it looks at a human isolated and how in that isolation, connection to the land, with the natives and even with the concept of God take a very different meaning. Like all of Coetzee's works, a fantastic read. All my life I have been left lying about, forgotten, dusty, like an old shoe, or when I have been used, used as a tool, to bring the house to order, to regiment the servants. But I have quite another sense of myself, glimmering tentatively somewhere in my inner darkness: myself as a sheath, as a matrix, as protectrix of a vacant inner space. I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blackness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going. For the other kind of story, the weave of reminiscence in the dozing space of the mind, can never be mine. My life is not past, my art cannot be the art of memory. My learning has ...

An absolute masterpiece that I read in close succession to another masterpiece "The Stranger". Hard to understand how this genius could create stories like this. But the plague forced inactivity on them, limiting their movements to the same dull round inside the town, and throwing them, day after day, on the illusive solace of their memories. For in their aimless walks they kept on coming back to the same streets and usually, owing to the smallness of the town, these were streets in which, in happier days, they had walked with those who now were absent. It was undoubtedly the feeling of exile, that sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire. In short, we returned to our prison-house, we had nothing left us but the past, and even if some were tempted to live in the future, they had speedily to abandon the idea anyhow, as...

Reading "Kafka on the Shore" by Murakami was probably not as much of an impact as Norwegian Wood. But for some reason, the passages seemed to strike so very close. Far too close to add my comments to the passages. Sometimes, fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing direction. You change direction, but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine. ...