Author: gege

I’m not being trite when I say this book is fabulous. Life of Pi is a fable – the story of a Bengal tiger, a mean hyena ugly without redemption, a feisty orangutan, a short-lived zebra, and the most dangerous animal of all – a 16 year old human. All of them hungry.

The author was hungry when he wrote the tale and he attempted to nourish himself and his readers with lessons in faith, survival, animal instinct and human emotions. 227 days in a 26 foot boat with the barest of supplies, the fiercest of animals, overcoming the most challenging circumstances, Piscine Patel, Pi, learned not just to survive but to find good in bad, hope where there seems to be none.

Where the story falls short is in its bodacious promise to change the way we believe in God. It’s just too fantastic to be taken as a challenge or affirmation of beliefs. But maybe that’s just me – I didn’t buy the spiritual undertones of Lord of the Rings either.

At best, it is an entertaining gem crafted by a skilled, albeit sometimes gimmicky, storyteller with a fearless imagination. If you do not take this too seriously, if you can enjoy the occasional humor, if you just appreciate this for what it is – a fantastic piece of fiction, then it is worth the read. Don’t look for anything faith shaking, life-changing, or mind-altering.

Still high after attending a reading group meeting for the first time, I felt drawn to buy the book. (It doesn’t take much to convince me to buy, believe me.)

Everything about the book screams chick lit – the tagline above the title (where the books end, the stories begin), the blurb (This is a real female-bonding novel in the very best sense; it’s witty and immediately engaging. – Glamour UK.), and the teal cover with the charming graphic. Well, it is chick lit; not always a bad thing. It is Desperate Housewives meets Hallmark Channel, the British version. 5 women, the usual suspects with the usual womanly problems – the philandering husband, the perfect but too-perfect husband, children, not being able to have children, divorce, marital boredom, you know the usual. Okay, the perfect husband is not the usual, but you know what I mean.

The Wisteria Lane women meet for gin rummy, but Harriet, Nicole, Polly, Susan, and Clare meet every month to discuss a book they take turns choosing. 12 chapters. 12 books to be discussed in 12 months. In January relative strangers meet to discuss Nora Ephron’s Heartburn. By December, when they discuss Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, their friendships have grown deeper. The book review meetings are not necessarily the highlight of this novel; rather they serve as a backdrop for the narration of these women’s lives, which interestingly enough, move parallel to the plots of the books they review.

As a housewife, sometimes desperate, and as a woman, I can certainly relate to their emotional issues. I especially like Harriet, who is far from the Nigella Lawson vision of perfection, whose all-purpose cure for every problem is chocolate, who has a husband whose heart of service can sometimes be a trigger for emotions of guilt and inadequacy. I feel Clare’s aching for a child. I root for Polly as she overcomes life’s mistakes and takes second chances.

Except for a few slight surprises, the book is utterly predictable. At the end, each character finds resolution. That is usually the case for most novels, but in this book, the endings are a bit too neatly, too conveniently wrapped up, and not all that convincing.

Good, light reading for my girl-alone-on-a-holiday jaunt. But not quite meaty enough as a reading group choice.

Mention the name Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the term magical realism is soon to follow. One would imagine then that his autobiography would employ that style. Even the title, Living to Tell the Tale conjures spellbinding narration heavy on mystical language, with the line between fact and fiction blurred. But such is the not the case.

For his autobiography, Marquez relied on his journalistic skills – acquired through his early years as a paid writer – to recount the events, people, and places, the 5 Ws of his life. More real, than magical. More reportage than editorial. Facts more than fiction. Probably why some reviewers found this book boring with its seemingly endless inventory of places –- Aracataca, Baranquilla, Bogota, Cartagena, Sucre; and people –- family members, teachers, classmates, co-writers, political figures, lovers, mentors, tormentors, and dozens and dozens of people named Guillermo, figuring in events that may or may not contribute to the whole narrative.

You will be awed at the painstakingly detailed accounts. He did not mention if he kept a journal or if he just pulled all these memories from his head. If it’s the latter, then he has an astonishing, functioning memory bank. These are not an old man’s ramblings, tinted with sentimentality. These are vivid, well-preserved memories of a man who lived an amazing life and lived to tell the tale in amazing detail.

This is not to say that this work is devoid of magic. The magic comes from the clarity of writing, this from a man who acknowledges that his style is convoluted and ethereal. Good writing so clear and fresh you can imagine traveling the Cienaga swamps, and looking at his old house in Aracataca with a mix of pain and nostalgia. You’re there living Marquez’s life as a student at the colegio and the liceo, experiencing Colombia’s tumultuous politics. You feel his desperation, living on the edge of poverty, finding shelter in parks, brothels, cafes, wherever his measly pesos can buy him a bed, hammock, or chair to lie on. You feel his hunger pangs as he starves his body while his mind is being enriched by his interactions with intellectuals and the most fascinating personalities.

The magic is not contrived, not produced by hypnotic literary manipulation. Yet it’s literature that enchants, sparks the imagination of the reader. With matter-of-fact writing, Marquez recounts a life, the telling of which requires the telling of two previous generations’ tales. A life markedly influenced by an eccentric family, the daily challenge of survival, a culture of poetry. A life accented with drama, romance, crime, passion. Reading it, you can almost see the movie adaptation, almost feel the dusty heat, and hear the soundtrack, which will be marvelous because Marquez’ life is filled with music, because he loves music almost as much as he loves writing.

His writing. His writing about his writing. That’s what I loved best about this book. To discover that he has an inferiority complex about his spelling. To know who influenced him in his writing – Borges, Neruda, Woolfe, Faulkner, among many others. He talks about his aversion to adverbs ending in –mente, and having two proximate words that rhyme. He talks about the life stories that inspired his written stories. Love in the Time of Cholera, for example, was based on his parents’ forbidden relationship. It is surprising, and it makes this writing legend seem very human, to know that his natural bashfulness extends to his writing, that he is afraid to write and afraid to share what he has written. On page 393 (Vintage edition), he says “that the terror of writing can be as intolerable as the terror of not writing.”

Except for a flashback or two, the story follows a mostly linear, chronological account from his birth in 1927 to some point in the late 50s when he proposed to his wife through a letter. The book closes without saying whether his proposal is accepted or not. A cliffhanger of sorts, leaving the readers hanging on, anticipating the next installation. Dear Lord, I hope Gabriel Garcia Marquez lives on and on so he can continue to tell his tale.

“You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”

I have heard of the term literary masturbation a few times before but I never really understood it until I read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Maybe this is what people refer to when they say “writing for writing’s sake.”

Beautiful, melodic prose. Wonderful weaving of words. A melee of metaphysical metaphors. Dizzying, dazzling details. Vivid imagery. Descriptions beyond the ordinary man’s ability to describe. Magical. Moving. But sadly, all these leaving me scratching my head thinking, what the fafaya is this guy talking about? Reading it, I had the feeling that someone somewhere is enjoying all these. But I’m not part of the fun. Hence, now I get what literary masturbation looks and uhm, feels like.

“The city that they speak of has much of what it needed to exist, whereas the city that exists on it site, exists less.”

In this novel, if you could call it that, the very thin and loose plot revolves around the conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Some exchanges are amusing. Silly, even. But mostly, it is about the cities. About the most fantastic ways anyone can ever describe cities.

The invisible cities Calvino talks about is really just one city: Venice. But he describes Venice in the most interesting, peculiar, perplexing of ways. He never calls Venice Venice. Instead he assigns dozens of exotic names. Each name presents a different aspect of the city. He describes the city through its architecture and structures; through its culture; its inhabitants – dead, alive, imaginary, human or otherwise; through objects, mundane or extraordinary; through its daily activities of commerce and human drama; through nature and its elements; through demarcation lines distinct or blurred; through dreams; through entrances and exits; through myths; through events; through seasons; through its pathways. If there is a way of describing a city, Calvino has used it.

“Not the labile mists of memory nor the dry transperence, but the charring of burned lives that forms a scab on the city, the sponge swollen with vital matter that no longer flows. the jam of past, present, future that blocks existence calcified in the illusion of movement: this is what you would feel at the end of your journey.”

Eventually, I warmed up to the story by the sheer beauty of language. By the time I got to the end, I felt like I had traveled a thousand miles, but still scratching my head with an ending as vague and confounding as the whole story itself. I still didn’t get it, but it sure was an amazing ride. To paraphrase a line from the book, “I regret having to leave the city when I barely graze it with my glance.”

In the brave new world that Huxley describes, human beings are decanted out of test tubes and demijohns that go through an assembly line in a place called a hatchery. From embryo to adulthood, people are divided by castes.

In our reading group that discussed Brave New World, there were divisions as well. The Alpha intellectuals, the Epsilon shallows, the in-betweens, the undecideds, and the posers (posing as shallows, not intellectuals). We were divided into sci-fi fans, and those who would never pick up this book in normal circumstances. Those who loved the book, those who hated it, and one who “luved it so much.” The optimists versus the pessimists. Those who read the book, and those who scanned spark notes the night before.

The reactions to the book and the ideas it sparked ran a very wide gamut. We certainly didn’t agree on much, but we agreed it was a great choice in inciting impassioned debate. The book is a minefield of topics for discussions on science, free will, religion, gods in lower case g, happiness, Malthusian economy, media propaganda, determinism, feminism, capitalism, consumerism, individualism and many other isms. Noses bled.

As for me, I bought the book early this year only because someone recommended it. And well, uhm, it was on sale, which is usually a good enough reason to buy anything. It was destined to stay in my TBR pile ever after. Until it was chosen as June’s reading group book. (That’s what you get when you force a molecular biologist to moderate.) So I had no choice but to actually read it. I almost thought I would not be able to get through the convoluted foreword written many years after the original novel was published. I suspect that the foreword was just a way for the author to say, “hey, my writing has improved.”

If you look at the novel as a literary piece, then you’ll be disappointed at the sophomoric writing and the one-dimensional characters. But if you lower your expectations and see it as an amusing satire on man’s burning desire to play God and control the world, then it is not all that bad. As one of the reading group members said, “I’ve read worse.”

To be fair, the book made me think, especially close to the end when Mustapha Mond explained a lot about the brave new world and the rationale for the way its creators made it to be. And the discussions that followed illuminated to me not so much what others think of the world, but what I want the world to be. But that’s for another discussion. Maybe over soma, er coffee.

I can’t remember when I read Lolita for the first time. I reread it this week in preparation for reading Reading Lolita in Tehran, our reading group’s book for December. And it was like reading it for the first time. I realized I was not ready to read it then; I guess I just couldn’t get over the disgusting theme of pedophilia to even appreciate the writing.

With a mind now more open to art’s jarring function and less insecure about my moral foundations, I discovered an exceedingly well-written book. Something that made my heart ache. It was while reading Milan Kundera’s The Unberable Lightness of Being that I first felt this dull ache in my heart. This ache I baptized writer’s envy. It comes from sadly realizing that I could never in this lifetime write that exquisitely, that skillfully. I felt the ache again while reading Lolita. Violent envy. Envy of writing so good that it enables the reader to overcome distaste for or indifference about a topic.

Lolita is the fictional autobiography of Humbert Humbert. It is written with such wit and intelligence and tenderness and romance that immediately you get on his side. You hate to admit but you like this sick, old man. You understand why he likes pubescent girls, what childhood deprivation has caused his adult depravity. You see the world from the view of a man who feels cheated by culture and law for their narrow rules against child love, something he considers natural and borne out of a pure desire to have what he was not able to have many years ago.

And then at some point, in between HH’s lines, you hear Nabokov’s sardonic voice, and you understand that intelligent and gentle as HH may be, he has serious delusions. Delusions about his sincere intentions, about his being attractive, about how Lolita was also in love with him.

The novel has many delicious parts of scaringly beautiful writing. In the text after the novel, Nabokov lists down some of these scenes that he calls “the nerves of the novel… the secret points…the subliminal co-ordinates.”

One of my favorite parts is Lolita’s and Humber Humbert’s road trip around Nabokov’s invented America. I can almost hear the soundtrack in this video montage of travels that start with “a series of wiggles and whorls in New England” through highways and motels, countryside, tilled plains, sagebrush patches, mountain ranges, deserts, picnic grounds, and roadside facilities. The travel writer wannabe in me hurts in envy.

One of the first publishers approached by Nabokov rejected the book because it has no good characters in it. It truly doesn’t. HH, despite his self characterization, his self justification, is really a sick, filthy, despicable, old man; I was totally revolted by his desire to impregnate Lolita so she could produce a litter of nymphets who shall provide him with a lifetime supply of carnal pleasure. Lolita has her own dysfunctions as well. I can see a younger Juliette Lewis playing her. And I detest Juliette Lewis. Although I would really be interested to read Lolita’s side of the story.

I have to say that of the books I’ve read, this has one of the best endings ever. As HH dwells on the life he lived with Lolita, he shushes his self-defending stream of thought, quiets the humorous narration, and seems to see the pain he has caused his step-daughter. No, he does not turn into a maudlin, death-row-repentant crying-out-for-the-forgiveness-of-his-sins sap, but he sees some of his illusions if not shattered, at least slightly provoked. Very subtly, he acknowledges his shame and despair, his brutality. Ah, when Lolita was crying, she was not just being petulant, she had strong reason to be depressed.

This poignant scene of rumination is juxtaposed with the bizarre, almost-slapstick, comedic account of HH’s jousts with Cue. Nabokov does bittersweet funny very well.

I am in complete awe of his writing. I’m glad he learned to write in English so he does not have to share the glory with a translator.

Nabokov says in his notes that he has no objective of moralizing. It’s just a story. Borne out of inspiration and combination. So, we should not take it as a defense of a pedophilia as well. It’s just a story. A well-written story. If one were to take lessons from this book, it would be to be alert to what goes on in the mind of elderly men, of uncles who touch with too much familiarity, who turn on the charm for little kids a tad too much.