Give me Herman Wouk any day. Now I definitely want to reread “Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance”.
–Kamakshi
Fall of Giants and Winter of the World
29 Friday Nov 2013
Monthly Archives: November 2013
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail: Cheryl Strayed
28 Thursday Nov 2013
Posted in Non-Fiction, Travel
This is an amazing book about a woman’s journey to heal herself. Cheryl Strayed’s world collapses when she loses her beloved mother to cancer. Her marriage to a man she loves breaks up. And without her mother to hold them together, her family drifts apart. When her divorce comes through, she chooses the surname Strayed because that’s exactly how she feels.
One day at a gas station, she buys a book on hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. This impulsive act is the start of a momentous journey. It takes a few years for her to finally decide to do it—alone. She is not an experienced hiker but what she has in buckets is the sheer determination to see it through. Her rucksack is so heavy that she is barely able to lift it off the ground, which earns it the name Monster. She loses six toenails to the trail, as
well as her hiking boots, one of which goes over the edge of a ravine. Not to be deterred, she duct tapes flip flops to her feet and walks to the next town.
With Monster her only constant companion, Strayed hikes over a thousand miles from the Mojave desert to the border between Oregan and Washington State through snow, deserts and forests. She is unflinchingly honest, both about her weakness and the pain—both emotional and physical—that she goes through. She writes so vividly that you feel like you’re on the hike with her. You feel her pain (I found myself checking my toenails!), and delight with her in luxuries like a shower, a bottle of soda and a proper hot meal.
Strayed describes the people she meets on the trail with a lot of warmth. Her fellow hikers, whom she keeps running into on the trail, become good friends. She is amazed by the kindness of complete strangers, including people she sometimes hitches rides with. By the time she reaches the end of her journey and collapses on bench with a well-deserved ice-cream, she is exhausted, her feet are wrecked, but she is stronger both physically and emotionally, having worked through her anguish and faced off her demons.
The Casual Vacancy: J.K. Rowlings
09 Saturday Nov 2013
Posted in Fiction
This is about as far as you can get from the magical world of Harry Potter. There are no Dumbledores or Hagrids here, much less any wizardry. The book takes you to a small unmagical town (Pagford), with small self-absorbed people who lack empathy or wisdom. Depite this, it is a testimony to J.K. Rowling’s talen
t that she is able to keep the reader—this reader, at any rate!—deeply absorbed.
The book starts with a death—that of Pagford’s parish councillor, Barry Fairbrother, who seems to be the nicest person in the book. His presence, though, is felt throughout the book. The death starts a political struggle for the councillor’s seat, the “casual vacancy” of the title. Pagford parish is divided into two factions, one that wants to keep “the Fields”—a housing project—in Pagford, and the other that wants to fob it off on a nearby town called Yarvil. Pagford’s traditionalists reject the Fields, seeing it as a hotbed of junkies and criminals. But the “liberals”, led by Barry, see the Fields—built on land belonging to a local landowner—as part of Pagford. They want the Fields’ children to have, like Barry, a chance at a better life.
Rowling’s book has a large set of characters, each playing a key role. Her most sympathetic people are teenagers who cope with personal problems, many of which are not of their making. The book’s characters are not drawn in great detail—but that is not the point of the book. This is a scathing social commentary and looks largely at how we, as a society, treat those who have odds stacked against them. Parts of the book are funny, but there is a lot of anger here.
I read some of the negative reviews that the book received. Part of the problem, I think, is that it is written by J.K. Rowling, the woman who was hugely successful with the Harry Potter series. So take my advice, forget the author and enjoy the book!
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
06 Wednesday Nov 2013
Kamakshi Balasubramaniam
Terse and lyrical, Galloway’s novel about the siege of Sarajevo shows with deep poignancy how war shortens lives but expands to the point of unbearable pain each moment lived in anticipation of tragedy.
A man’s life consists of fetching drinking water daily for his family and a neighbor. He must avoid becoming a target for a sniper. Whether one is an accidental target or a sniper has picked one out is of little consequence, when crossing a street means to dodge death. Blood flows, libraries burn, a bullet grazes you but leaves you unhurt. In this siege of hatred and violence, what do people live by?
“That something could be almost erased from existence in the landscape of a ruined city, and then rebuilt until it is new and worthwhile, gives him hope. A hope that, now, is one of a limited number of things remaining for the besieged citizens of Sarajevo, and for many, dwindles each day.”
With this hope, a cellist decides to play an adagio for 22 days to memorialize 22 citizens of Sarajevo. This symbolic act by a lone individual might seem of no practical consequence. To the enemy, however, this is too defiant an act to be allowed. The cellist is going to be shot, but he must be saved.
As one of the characters says: “If this city is to die, it won’t be because of the men on the hills, it will be because of the people in the valley. When they’re content to live with death, to become what the men on the hills want them to be, then Sarajevo will die.”
During a war strange things thrive. Speculators ride around in powerful motor cars. A black market flourishes.
Equally, hope lives on in the ruins of falling things, despite broken lives, in the destroyed “promise of a happy life that seemed almost inviolable” not long ago.
“They will put every brick back, replace every window, patch every hole. They will rebuild the city without knowing whether this is the last time it will be done. They will earn the right to do this, any way they can, and when it is done, they’ll rest.”
I am not a fan of quoting from books, but I couldn’t help myself because it is not possible to paraphrase any part of Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo, a marvelous and memorable book.
Desultory reading
02 Saturday Nov 2013
Usha Raman
One of the things about travel is that it affords the opportunity to read–especially when one is on a plane without a personal video screen and movies on demand! A couple of weeks ago on one such flight I started a book that I had received as a birthday present and managed to finish it before my return flight three days later. “The story of beautiful girl” by Rachel Simon (Random House, 2011) was a book that I might not have picked up on my own. I would have wondered about the missing article in the title, and dismissed it. Teaches one not to judge a book and all that. I was pleasantly surprised.
The book begins with a cliche–a woman standing at her door watching the rain fall in sheets while a woman is dragged away by some men who appear to be security guards. And the sort of line you tell beginning writers to never use–“The November day had seemed as ordinary as any….”
But I stuck with it, and, as I said, I continued to be surprised, and drawn further into the story even though I had to keep myself from cringing at some awkward prose. The story takes one into the lives of two young differently abled people and an elderly widow, and spans four decades, from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. Apart from offering a remarkable tale of resistance to what we now recognize as the brutality of homes for the “mentally deficient” and “feeble minded”, the book also outlines the history of the disability rights movement in the United States.
“Beautiful Girl” is the name given by her hearing-impaired lover to a young woman with moderate cognitive and speech impairment who has been admitted to such a home and subsequently forgotten by her family. The two meet in the Home and an unlikely romance blossoms. They run away, she is caught and taken back, and he disappears. There is a child, not his, but hers, the outcome of rape in the institution they call “the school”. The baby is left with the widow, and the rest of the story takes us on a journey that confronts bigotry and cruelties of various hues, but ultimately, there is hope and rediscovery.
While it is not the best written novel I’ve read, it certainly keeps one going. Not a bad read for a plane journey.
