Monthly Archives: May 2017

Tales from the Kathasaritsagara: Somadeva (translated by Arshia Sattar)

28 Sunday May 2017

Posted by in Books in translation

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Kathasaritsagara can be translated as the “ocean of the sea of stories”. This is the mother lode of stories, composed by Somadeva around 1070 CE for the Kashmiri queen, Suryavati. But many of these had been around for a long time, so Somadeva was more of a compiler than a creator. They are full of unfaithful wives, conniving spirits, magic and intrigue. There are no morals here—these narratives celebrate life, in all its forms.

It starts with Parvati, the consort of the god Siva, asking him to tell her a story that no one has heard before. The story Siva tells her is overheard by his attendant, who then tells it to his wife, Parvati’s door keeper. The wife repeats it to Parvati, who is furious that she was told something that her door keeper knew. The attendant is then cursed to be reborn as a human and to tell the story over and over.

Many of the stories are about vidhyadharas, sky-dwellers with the ability to change shape, who are sent down to earth for some misdeed (like Siva’s attendant). Once they have fulfilled their destiny, they are released from the curse through death. Death is not an end here, merely a return to one’s true nature.

The original Kathasaritsagara runs into several volumes, and this book is a selection of the stories. Each chapter has a framing story, within which is another, within which is another, and so on. This gives the narrative a flow and continuity, like a river’s tributaries flowing into the sea. These are stories to get lost in, to enter another world where anything can happen.

The Pledge: Friedrich Dürrenmatt, translated by Joel Agee

14 Sunday May 2017

Posted by in Books in translation, Crime / Thriller, Fiction, The reading challenge

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The book starts with the narrator travelling to Chur in Switzerland to give a lecture on the art of writing detective stories. The talk is not a success, and the writer meets Dr. H., a ex-chief of police in the canton of Zurich. Dr. H offers to drive the writer to Zurich. On the way they stop at a gas station. An old man is sitting on a bench outside: “unshaven and unwashed”, smelling of alcohol and wearing “dark, grease-spotted trousers that had once been part of a tuxedo”.

After they leave, Dr. H. tells the writer that the old man, Matthaï, was once a brilliant policeman who didn’t smoke or drink. Some years ago, he was assigned to travel to Jordan to help reorganize the police there. Just a couple of days before he was due to leave, a call came from Mägendorf about the murder of a child, Gritli Moser. Matthaï was asked to lead the case until his departure.

Matthaï interviews the parents and is about to walk away, when Mrs. Moser makes him promise that he will find the murderer. Wanting nothing more than to get away from the place, Matthaï makes the promise, not really intending to keep it. But when he gets to the airport to catch his flight to Jordan, he has a crisis of conscience and turns back. He had made a promise to the mother, and he intended to keep it.

Matthaï throws himself into the case. He is convinced that the killer is not a local but a serial killer operating in the area. He sets out to lure him into a trap, using any means available. He goes against procedure and his superiors. He is eventually taken off the case but cannot let go. Slowly, his obsession destroys him, until he becomes the half-crazy wreck sitting outside a gas station.

This book is tautly plotted and fairly grim. There are no neat resolutions, just messy endings. Friedrich Dürrenmatt uses language economically and creates a sense of oppression. When he describes Chur and northern Switzerland in the winter, it is no winter wonderland: Chur is covered with “dense, sluggishly lumbering, snow-filled clouds” through which you could see a “patch of metallic sky”. A snow-covered valley is “rigid with cold.” His description of Matthaï’s gradual breakdown is compelling.

This book was made into a film with Jack Nicholson. Even if you have seen the film, you should read this book—it is better than the film.

 

Of Love and Other Demons: Gabriel García Márquez

08 Monday May 2017

Posted by in Books in translation, Fiction

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of love and other demonsOnce, under a stifling October sun, Gabriel García Márquez, the great Latin American writer, observed the unceremonious wrenching open of a centuries-old tomb.  As the sacred stones were smashed into rubble, bundles of luminescent golden hair tumbled through the suffocating atmosphere of dust.  Measuring 22 meters and 11 centimetres, it was attached to the adolescent skull of a girl whose given names were still legible in the etched stone: Sierva María de Todos Los Ángeles.

A young journalist at this point, Márquez recognised something immediately.  A story had been interred in this catacomb, dormant for long years.  And so, decades later, he did what all writers do, he wrote it.

What emerged is a powerful, moving, homage to the desolate hopelessness of love.  ‘For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.’  Beautiful and enchanting, it spins the sad tale of a girl bitten by a rabid dog on the eve of her 12th birthday.   She was the forgotten and hated daughter of a wretched addict and a feeble old Marquise presiding over the final disintegration of a family fortune built on the back of illicit slave trading.  Suddenly under the threat of rabies, in a flash of inspiration, her father endeavours to save the child.  Sierva María is drawn out of the family she has known her life long, the African slaves whose languages she speaks and by whom she was raised, and cast into the hands of all manner of healers.  Eventually coming to the attention of the Holy Office, the bright and bedazzled young girl is thought to be possessed.

Love, we find here, is the true madness.  But ironically, just as it enslaves, it is also the force which sets us free.  This is the demon which sweeps through the lives of Márquez’s cast.  Like Sierva’s mother, driven to cacao addiction and wild orgies with hired slaves in a bid to reclaim her dead lover.

For the first time since I can remember, as soon as I closed the final page, instead of placing this fable back on a shelf, I began again.  Coming to the end of a second reading, it might be difficult to hold off a third.  Márquez’s prose is gentle.  Even in translation, it flows with a warm rhythm that belies a sometimes harsh message.  As he says, ‘the more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.’

There are echoes here of José Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher who chronicles the solitude that essentially defines true love.  ‘The warm companionship which love intends to be… is an attempt to create a union between my solitude, the genuineness of my life, and that of another; it is the fusing of two solitudes as such into one solitude made up of two.’[1]  This gulf in the heart of the individual is elegantly rendered by Márquez.  In his world, life truly begins when a person turns to love, when they invest their solitude in that of another.  But this beginning is also the end of something; because it is dangerous, it takes us beyond our own control, ‘O sweet treasures, discovered to my sorrow.’  Yet it is also the ultimate risk worth taking.  The Marquise realises this when he sees his daughter sleeping.  ‘He adjusted the mosquito netting so the bats would not drain her blood, he covered her so she would not cough and he kept watch next to the bed, feeling the new joy of knowing he loved her as he had never loved in this world.’

This book is highly recommended.

[1] José Ortega y Gasset, translated by Mildred Adams, Man and crisis, 1958, New York, Norton, p. 92.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft—Stephen King

01 Monday May 2017

Posted by in About reading, writing and books, Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Non-Fiction

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This book on writing starts with two contradictory epigraphs: “Honesty is the best policy” and “Liars prosper”. Good fiction is a mix of the two. Writers invent, but also draw upon what they know.

This book is far more than a primer on writing well. Stephen King starts and ends the book with a series of vignettes from his life. He describes his memories as a “fogged-out landscape from which occasional memories appear like isolated trees . . . the kind that look as if they might like to grab and eat you”. You follow him from his childhood as a budding writer all the way to his huge success, his marriage, his battle with alcohol and drugs, and going clean. All of this made him the writer he is. Sometimes his books give a a glimpse into what he was going through when he wrote them: for example, Jack, the main character in The Shining is an alcoholic writer.

In the last section, he writes about a terrible accident he had halfway through writing this book. He was hit by van and almost died. Recovery was slow and painful and finishing the book helped him through it.

King leads into the “how to” part of the book with a piece about his grandfather’s toolbox: a large handmade wooden box, with three levels and a silk lining of “pinkish-red cabbage roses fading into a smog of grease and dirt”. King says that a writer needs to have a similar toolbox, with the first level containing the “common tools”: grammar and vocabulary: “as the whore said to the bashful sailor, ‘It ain’t how much you’ve got, honey, it’s how you use it’”.

He makes two points: one is that “good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals”; and the second that with hard work, dedication and timely help, it is possible to make a good writer out of a competent one. The hard work is critical—there are no shortcuts. And if you want to be a writer, you must read voraciously.

There is a lot more good advice here, which I won’t go into. I like King’s style—he addresses the reader throughout, and feels strongly about most things. He hates adverbs and the passive tense with a passion (and people who say “That’s so cool!”). I loved his passion about his craft, although I didn’t always agree with him.

At the end of the book—normally the annexes, but here referred to as “And Furthermore”—King shares a first draft of his writing and the edited version. As an editor, I found this fascinating. He also shares a list of must-read books. An interesting list, but with a handful of exceptions, it lists mostly Anglophone writers from the West.

If you want to write, I suggest you read this book. Once you have mastered the fundamentals and figured out your genre and style, you need to throw in some stardust. King’s earliest memory is “of imagining I was someone else”. Most children do this, or have an imaginary friend (I did). We start out with the wonderful ability to imagine and create our own worlds, but sooner or later, many of us allow life to knock it out of us. Being creative is keeping that ability and wonder alive. As King says, “We are talking about tools and carpentry, about words and style. . . but…you’d do well to remember that we are also talking about magic.”