Category Archive: Book review

on Books

Posted by Ankit On January 20th, 2015

I am interested in what people read because it is a decent indicator of both their intellectual development and their priorities in life. And I am interested in figuring out if the reading that people have done has endowed them with additional desirable abilities: creative and independent thought, a wider worldview, more universal explanations, skeptical attitude etc. If one doesn't develop these qualities, one might as well not have read anything. These are qualities which are neither taught in school, nor in real life. Life, in general, is mostly just following orders, unless one chooses to do something about it. And one will be left richer for trying.

I remember the first serious book that I read was A Study in Scarlet by Conan Doyle. It was suggested by a friend of mine who was four years younger than I was (I must have been about 14). I was, therefore, highly impressed by the literary repertoire of that friend considering his age. I ended up buying the complete works of Conan Doyle (Oxford edition) from a bookshop in Nainital where I had gone for a summer vacation with my family. Apart from that book which contains 4 novels and around 50 short stories, I do not remember reading anything seriously till the time I started my undergrad education. During this period my reading mostly comprised of dreary volumes on Math, Physics, and the worst subject of them all, Chemistry. In some sense, however, these books were better than the ones that I came to read during my undergrad. Those four years were spent on the books which I now associate with being on the absolute bottom ladder of literature: sensationalist fiction of the kind that authors like Jefferey Archer, Frederick Forsyth, Sydney Sheldon, and Robin Cook write. These are books which can be safely considered utter trash and should not be brought up in polite conversations among civilized folks. It wasn't until I graduated and moved on that I realized how much there is to know and learn and read.

I think there is a general rule of thumb which applies to a every facet of life, that there is a lot of noise out there. Most people do not know what they are talking about and, therefore, one has to carefully choose whom to listen to. When it comes to books then I have found it extremely helpful to immediately ignore the advice that most people give me on which are the good books out there. Similarly it has been a very good decision of mine to stay clear of Top 100 lists and other such balderdash. I have, however, taken the advice of those whom I consider very intelligent and very well read people, the first one being an old friend of mine whom I have lost touch with, named Basava. Rather than introducing me to specific authors he introduced me to the general possibility that there exists serious and extremely satisfying literature out there. But I suppose the people whom I am most indebted to are some fellow PhD students from UCSD. Aneesh, Kowsik, and Rathina, all of whom, curiously enough, come from the Southern part of India. I learned about Russian, German, French, and Spanish authors from them and developed an interest in philosophy, psychology to some extent, semi-technical science from areas different than mine, politics, economics, chess etc. I had engaging conversations with them which I remember with a lot of fondness now. Apart from the reading suggestions which I received, explicitly or implicitly, from these people I remember only a few other book suggestion which I found interesting (Great House, Infinite Jest ). All other suggestions, I am happy to say, were ignored. Nowadays my contact with these people has been minimized but I have found myself taking the recommendations of those whose brilliance is second to none in this world. Berlin's recommendation of Herzen, Nietzsche's recommendation of Dostoevsky, Krauthammer's recommendation of Berlin and John Stuart Mill, Nabokov's recommendation of Joyce and Dickens etc.

Midnight's Children

Posted by Ankit On August 24th, 2014

So many brilliant men and women have practiced the art of storytelling over the many past centuries that it has become, as I imagine, very difficult to tell a story and tell it in a fashion which is uniquely new and refreshing. Midnight's Children comes as close as any other to pulling off this nearly impossible task. It's an inspired book, as tired old reviewers looking for adequate superlatives and failing to find them would say, a towering achievement of a singular intellect. It is the story of Saleem who was born at the stroke of India's independence and whose destiny, as it were, becomes intricately tied to the destiny of India itself through the coincidence of his birth. In his quest for painting a rich tapestry, Rushdie draws amply and resourcefully from the truncated din that India is. He delves deep into her many zany characters, her tryst with her imagined predestined glory, her pottering and graceless fumbles as she marches unflatteringly towards it.

The story is a first person narrative of Saleem who happens to be an unreliable narrator. He looks back at his own life and manages to connect the course of its evolution to the destiny of the nation in which he was born. He sees in his personal ups and downs, victories and failings, the flows and ebbs of India. He believes in his imagination to such an extent that national history becomes nothing more than an imitation, albeit on a much larger scale, of his own little story. Tolstoy wrote War and Peace primarily as a critique of the traditional method of doing history where only the important sounding events are treated as if they had a force of inevitability devoid of individual desires and mistakes. History, as it turns out, can be traced back to insignificant events and petty little personal motivations. Saleem is the culmination of this alternative historical vision. He knows that it is possible to view history in a different way and has the madness and imagination to do justice to this vision. What we have then is a book like no other (none in my experience at least). A story which spans, often within the same sentence, the most intricate personal details and the most grandiose public ones connected together with the tenuous neuronal connections of a man who may or may not be clinically deranged. The style, if I may make the comparison, is distinctly un-Joycean. Ulysses and this book lie at two extremes of a particular kind of spectrum. While the former is a stunning treatment of locality, small spaces, personal anecdotes, and limitations of time, Midnight's children is an amazing exercise in the vast scales of time, space, and imagination. It is written within the same sort of magical framework as Murakami's Kafka on the shore but while the latter fails miserably as a good and coherent work, MC succeeds admirably. It has a disjointed logic of its own but that logic has discernible laws for its operation. It's book where the supernatural is not used to disguise the paucity of talent of its author.

Reading

Posted by Ankit On November 30th, 2013

I have often wondered as to how seriously should one's reading habits be taken when it comes to making a tentative assessment of the depth of one's personality. It's a sensitive question on which I gravitate too easily on the side of quick and stern judgments before I find myself arresting such temptations. The hesitations result from the same organic fountainhead from which result all of my other hesitations. I believe that this complex chatter and argumentation is the accumulated result of a long chain of thought processes which has extended through many years and has been refined and molded by some of my own reading habits.

There is a certain period of time in everyone's life when they don't have to make conscious efforts to be interesting. They are young and enthusiastic about the world around them and there's a childlike curiosity which characterizes that time. This is a time which, while it is not known for the best of judgments and the greatest of insights, is nevertheless known for an easily accessible fountain of excitement and a sense of great adventure. However, life catches up much more quickly than one imagines it would and suddenly one is besotted by its practical considerations. It is at this critical juncture when I feel it becomes important to confront what sort of a person one would hope to become. Our personalities appear cumulative but they appear to show diminishing effects of more recent events. This is to say that we are liable to get frozen in a way of thinking and in our set of judgments as time progresses. There is a certain kind of philosophic comfort and some sense of safety in stagnation which perhaps encourages such stultification. However, I maintain that such a state of existence is an objectively ridiculous state because it prevents us from having new experiences for what they are worth and encourages us to judge others rather unfairly. It also makes us behave in petty ways because we come to think that our structures of thought, our creed, and our philosophies are worthy of protection and must be preserved. Before we realize, such narrow-mindedness closes in on us in ways and from directions which are surprisingly numerous and subtle. And we become rather sad shadows of our former selves with a monotonous and unchanging world-view lacking the excitement which is inherent in change and its acceptance.

Coming back to the original question, I feel that cultivating a reasonably complex reading habit tends to offset this degeneration. In a sense such a habit is not very different from cultivating other non-trivial talents which require patience, application, and dedication - they all instill very admirable values which are also very practical. But reading additionally/often requires the considerable application of the mental apparatus as well. It exposes one to the thinking of very accomplished thinkers across centuries and from around the world. It underlines the unity of the human experience and shows, embarrassingly clearly, the existence of an infinity of personalities and a multitude of thought processes. It lays bare the exciting spectrum of life, its humming and buzzing tune. It gives a much needed perspective to our own thought processes. Of course I am talking about a certain kind of reading material which unfortunately does not include easy literature like the American detective novel or genre novels which have become rather popular of late. They are merely entertainment and like all other entertainment there is a sinister side to them. The side which sucks up time and energy and the creative impulse and the side which induces us to think in very simple generalizations. In fact the side which is the very apparatus which accelerates the degeneration mentioned above.

I do think that the existence of a complex and respectable reading habit tells something rather definitive about the depth of one's thoughts. However, a lack thereof doesn't necessarily tell much because different people draw upon different aspects of their lives to develop their own understandings. There is, however, a sharp and an elitist demarcation to be drawn between easy and complex literature and it is a demarcation which I have absolutely no qualms in drawing.

Cosmicomics

Posted by Ankit On June 8th, 2013

Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics is a brilliant selection of his short stories. Each story takes a scientific fact and weaves a very imaginative fantasy around it. All these stories are told from the point of view of a know-it-all and ever present narrator called Qfwfq. Some of the stories are a little bit of a stretch in terms of the patience required of the reader but most of them are just pure inspired storytelling of the highest order. What I find amazing about his stories is a certain kind of absurdist humor which I have found in some other places (most conspicuously in Woody Allen's insanity defense, Alice in Wonderland, parts of Catch-22, and to some extent in Vonnegut and Douglas Adams)  and which, in my opinion, is incredibly hard to do well.

As an example, his story 'All at one point' begins with the scientific fact that back in the day all the matter in the universe was concentrated at one point (Big Bang) which is followed by Qfwfq casually saying 'naturally, we were all there.' The story goes from there but to me there is something amazing about that first sentence as well. It represents a discontinuous leap of imagination which makes possible lines of fiction which are unattainable to most of us. There is a certain logic behind it (I mean, of course everybody was there!) which makes this line so much more funny than a scenario which doesn't necessarily have a logic of its own (like a man falling over a banana peel). The story carries forth this style which is the hallmark of such absurdist humor. In which characters behave in manners which appear highly unnatural to the reader but which make complete sense to the characters themselves. These characters state the most jaw dropping of facts in the most natural manner and often find themselves in situations which are perilous but ultimately ridiculous. It is their incapacity to tell how ridiculous their situation is which makes their stories so funny. Which makes me think, if there is a God looking down at humans he must be having a damn good time. I find that in such stories, as important and satisfying as the actual fantasy is, it is almost more important and funnier how the author maintains that internal logic of the characters themselves. The former part appealing to the creative side and the latter to the rational one.

Such internal logic is also necessary because it shows that just because the book is a fantasy the author is not taking the reader for a ride by freeing himself of all rules. This, I feel, is what makes it so difficult to write good fantasy because a good fantasy must have an additional responsibility to be coherent and logical since it is so easy to write something which isn't. Any Tom, Dick, and Harry can come along and spew his dreams and nightmares over the sorry pages of a novel. Unfortunately when that happens the world has to make room in the cosmic trashcan for another 'Kafka on the shore'. Guided with beautiful logic, however, we get Calvino's book which treads the trembling and faint line between believability and absurdity with such finesse that reading his stories becomes a pleasure.

Book Review of Pale Fire

Posted by Ankit On November 6th, 2012

Book review in Spark magazine

Posted by Ankit On September 5th, 2012

How much I admire Ayn Rand

Posted by Ankit On August 13th, 2012

Not at all.

Now what is it that makes great characters and a great story? And why is Ayn Rand such an awful writer? I have often wondered why my bile starts boiling at the thought of some writers who are so widely regarded. Ayn Rand is one such writer. The interesting thing is that when I actually read The Fountainhead at the age of 15 I was completely enthralled by it. I was swept away by the character of Howard Roark and saw in him all that was pure about the human spirit and noble about the human struggle. I saw in him what most people see, an inspiring and uncompromising man who was ready to go to any lengths of sufferings to stay pure to his own principles and just like other people I hated the mediocre world which was being an impediment to him in his pursuits of perfection. I saw the world in the black and white colors that Rand wanted from her disciples and I really did believe that pure characters like Roark existed in real life and even if they did not exist, I felt that Roark was an ideal which must be aspired for. What a bunch of bollocks, I have since realized.

I must say that Rand must be admired for the success that her creations have achieved but if one really wants to talk about her on artistic terms, she must be flayed and with vengeance. So what is it that really makes a great character?  George Carlin, in one of those rare moments of overt sympathy, once said that you can see the universe in everyone’s eyes if you really look. I really do believe that each one of us is potentially a great character just waiting for our stories to be told by a competent and observant enough storyteller. What makes each of us fascinating has less to do with what we end up saying in conversations but has so much more to do with all that we never mention. What we say and what we feel are tremendously dependent upon a host of factors that would be hard to list. From our general upbringing to specific instances in the past, from the current company that we keep to our economic situations, there is almost an infinite number of factors which go consciously or subconsciously into explaining why we chose to keep quiet when a heated discussion on, say, the Palestinian conflict was going on. We snicker in disapproval and we are smitten with envy, we applaud inwardly and we dismiss with contempt but often we say only those things which would keep the wheels of social interaction in motion. We think about betrayal and we think about the ghastliest of things and we often do not mention all the sentimental love that we feel for the fear of ridicule. Against this background of the tremendous emotional turbulence we try to put up a face which is proper and graceful and strong and self-confident. Some of us are better than others at hiding our imperfections and some are better able to ignore the presence of such imperfections but they are present in all us and those character flaws are precisely the interesting bits in each of us.

Who wants to hear the story of the perfect being? We heard it a few times in the past and they still plague so many of us with their unreasonable ideals. The really great characters, I feel, are the flawed ones and especially those who are confused and contradictory in their flaws because that’s what people really are like. The great characters differ from boring people in the conviction that they have but they often do not understand the repercussions of acting upon their convictions. They are driven by true passion, just like Howard Roark, but there is none of that pathetic moral high ground in them which Roark seems to suffer from. Unlike Roark, they are not faced with a world whose sole purpose of existence seems to be stopping them from achieving their goals. They live in a world which is merely and appropriately apathetic and which has other characters as ‘right’ as them. They lead lives which are unfair to them despite all their best attempts and which often do not even compensate in the last few pages. Ayn Rand, on the other hand, creates easy worlds which appeal to our easy sympathies and automatic ideas. She creates worlds for those who want merely an escape and who are fine with missing all the variety and all the color of real life for the certainties of the simple stories which we have been fed with since time immemorial.

I hate her books so much that I had to rage delete my accounts from Orkut and Facebook because of all the people who had Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead in their favorite books list. Rather than going around the city and bashing kittens to take my anger out, I thought it was just better that I ignored that such people actually existed. There, I think those few lines of irrational anger make me incredibly interesting. I’m just waiting for a Tolstoy now!

A mid-journey report from the Ulysses

Posted by Ankit On June 23rd, 2011

Joyce's Ulysses. How should I describe it? The book is too great to be spoken of in words bound within the sorry perimeters of rationality. It's turbulence itself. It's the ravings of a supremely eloquent madman, a continuous fear of falling from a cliff as you tread carefully a ridge infinitely high and extremely thin. It's the disintegrated shards of a spent bullet. It's alternatively Beethoven and Duchamp and the regularity with which it changes character leaves you asphyxiated and disoriented. It's at once a supreme effort in vanity and contempt, a relentless dissection of orthodoxy, an erudite commentary on history and art, a squirming message written on the walls of a school lavatory, a mockery of custom, an inexcusable experiment! It's like a dream whose essence and beauty can only be remembered in parts and whose memory and understanding escapes you as soon as you try to grip it too hard. It's one of those great great pieces of art which restore your faith in the towering human intellect and make you feel privileged to belong to a specie which has the potential to think at such a level. But more than anything else, it's the purest form of individual expression - untethered from the morass of custom it reaches the giddy heights and suffocating depths which normal people do not even know exist. It's not for nothing that Ulysses is almost unanimously considered the greatest English book ever written.

And it's been 3 months and I'm still only half way through.

In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way

Posted by Ankit On March 5th, 2011

I have often wondered why is it that English translations of Russian authors seem to be much more widely available and read than writers from other languages. We have all heard of the great triad of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gogol and have come across the names of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gorki, Nabokov and more but our familiarity with literature from other parts of the world is composed of randomly scattered, sparsely populated and vaguely remembered names of books and authors. So while Gabriel Garcia Marquez holds the torch for the entire region of Latin America and the literature emanating from there is spoken off in broad generalizations of 'Magical Realism,' it is Miguel de Cervantes with his heartbreakingly naive hero Don Quixote who dispenses off with the requisite responsibility from Spain. Germany is represented by the mighty Kafka, Italy by Dante and Eco, France by Camus, and Japan by Murakami. Other smaller countries, and vast regions from Asia and the middle east do not evoke appreciable neural impulses in my mind to list them here. The most important reason why this may be the case, in my assessment, is the fact that Russian literature dealt with the facets of life which are very immediate to the common man. The broad subject of a life which in reality is contradictory to its idealized version which exists in our minds is as universal as they come. It may take the shape of an unsatisfying marriage, a stifling economic situation, or unrequited love but one can be sure that any and all of such situations have the potential to appeal to almost every human being. The Russians, maybe driven by the severity of weather, the relentless wars, the constant bleakness of an autocratic rule, have expatiated on this general subject extremely comprehensively.

Nevertheless, I decided to check for myself what the rest of the world has been up to and I chanced upon this wikipedia list of the most acclaimed books from around the world and found a book by the french author Marcel Proust titled 'In Search of Lost Time.' The book is in seven volumes and I completed the first one, as translated by Lydia Davis. I have discovered that Proust's meandering discourse, his delectable remembrances, and his exquisite sensitivity, with which the book is replete, are some of the finest things I have come across in life. This book is absolutely not for those whose idea of good literature is coherence both in plot and language and who feel frustrated when they cannot decipher an underlying order. But if there are certain things in life which endows one with an unbearable happiness, pure and poignant, which are absolutely useless in the worldly sense, almost trivial in objective assessment, and yet they are the wellspring of such pleasure and giddy euphoria that one is left stunned at their acuteness and unexplainable origins; this book will be a treasure to that person. Like an exquisitely crafted piece of dessert whose charm is more than the sum total of the perfection of its ingredients both in quality and proportion, whose appeal lies as much in taste as in other intangibles including its geometrical and chromatic harmonies, in whose essence lies, as one might imagine, hundreds upon thousands of years of suffocated human protests against the utilitarian gauge of efficiency, this book encompasses within its bound covers both a torrential outpouring of emotions and a surgical dissection of life.

As an example, Proust is describing a lady who is removed from her lover,

'And I watched her, as she returned from some walk along a road where she had known that he would not appear, drawing from her submissive fingers long gloves of a precious, useless charm.'

and the image of a beautiful girl dressed elegantly in black waiting for her lover instantly flashes in my mind. She knows, by intuition and social conditioning, that her actions are relentlessly dissected in this great game of matchmaking and that they stand for much more than what is dictated by mere utility. Her eyes, those merry vehicles of infinite suggestion, are leaping ahead of her conscious self, and her gestures are the sharp edges of a whole which was especially constructed to be a dagger in many a hearts. Her graceful action of pulling out the gloves from her fingers, therefore, is as suggestive and charming an action as such an exquisite creature can ever by accused of committing. The fact that there is no one to see it , at least none towards whom it might be subconsciously directed, makes it oddly sad and useless!

to Be or Not to Be

Posted by Ankit On October 31st, 2010

? That is the question - as Hamlet soliloquizes in one of the deepest, most biting reflections on the absurdity of life. His father has been murdered, his mother is married to the killer - which is the slain king's own brother, and Hamlet, writhing under the agony of inaction and helplessness, ponders lyrically over whether he should end his own ridiculous existence. He is wary of the uncertainty of death and attributes it to the only reason why a man who,

...would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office...

can still not gather courage enough to end it all. He concludes with the brilliant observation,

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;

And just like that, we have another of those absolute gems with which Shakespeare's Hamlet is replete.

Reading Shakespeare is a tricky deal - and not just because his language, by virtue of its chronological distance from the present and its own eloquence, is quite removed from our current comprehension. Reading Shakespeare is tricky because one always feels enormously burdened by the weight of his reputation. It almost feels like an insult to one's own intelligence if the 'expected' awe and respect for his work is not automatically generated. Because let's face it, 500 years of literature after his time and enormous giants of the field since him cite inspiration from his pen. Therefore, I was quite dismayed when I read 'Midsummer Night's dream.' The language was brilliant, needless to say, but I found the plot, the story, the characters - almost everything except the language to be quite pedestrian. The primary emotion that I felt after reading the play was 'Why even bother writing something this mediocre?' And then I decided to read his most famous work and I am not disappointed at all.

Hamlet reminds me of a line from the movie Fight Club. Brad Pitt says to Edward Norton, 'We are God's middle children... with no special place in history and no special attention.' He indicates how our generation has not really had any great wars, any great challenges, and how our concerns and our tragedies dwarf when compared to what history had to face. Since art reflects life, (If, for a moment, I take the liberty of going against the great Oscar Wilde) the greatest challenges our heroes have to face today are merely contemporary. I'm not denigrating the efforts of one who tries to survive the tough life of a call center, or one who is trying to make sense of the quagmire of love, but I think we can agree that what our current stories have gained in realism and subtlety, they have lost in magnificence and grandeur. Which is why Hamlet was such a joy to read.

It is an eternal mirror to life inasmuch that life's core issues of revenge, conceit, disloyalty, anger, treachery, moral corruption, and individual conflict remain ever present. But that mirror reflects a particularly radiant gleam and is set in a beautifully adorned, intricate and larger than life frame. In much the same way that our current literature might slyly reference pop culture, Hamlet harks back to the Greek gods. The canvas on which Shakespeare has painted Hamlet's tragedy is a palimpsest from which nothing less than divinity itself has been erased. And just like the Greek gods which, quite refreshingly, were great and mighty and mean and capricious, characters in Hamlet are all in shades of gray. Only writers who have their own axe to grind paint characters which are either good or bad. Such writers are not only mediocre themselves, but they only appeal to a simple minded reader (Ms. Ayn Rand for example). I quite loved the fact that Shakespeare, in this epic tragedy, gave us characters which left me quite unsure as to where my loyalties lay.

I would have recommended reading the play but I can very easily understand how a lot of people might find it dreary. I have a special fascination with language and I like when things are unnecessarily beautiful and complex. Every line of Hamlet (indeed any other play by Shakespeare, I'm guessing) requires effort to disentangle and I understand how most people would consider it not worth the effort. But regardless of this fact, it would not be out of place for me to recommend watching the play. I myself am looking forward to it the first opportunity I get.

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