My First Book

Perhaps it’s apropos for a week in which the London Book Fair kicks off to write this blog post.

This is a post about reading. And about the very first book that I ever read, by myself, to myself. 

This happened many, many years ago. It was an oddly iridescent autumnal afternoon in New York City. I was in the library of a school on the Upper East Side, surrounded by classmates as we made our way through our readers. I remember looking at a hardbound book, the cover an odd aquamarine green, with a large brown/white chick on it, purportedly frolicking in a treetop nest.

It was a book I knew well; I had been introduced to it some weeks back by a South Korean classmate who could already read. She had read it out to me, the story a tragic one of a bird that hatched while its mother was away and who then went on a long, arduous quest that covered several pages encountering strange and wonderful animals and machines, to which it always posed the same, distraught question.

Shawn had read the story out to me, one to one. We had already decided that we were dating. So what if we were only six? This was life in the Big Apple, and one moved quickly, before a Puerto Rican called Carlos or a New England WASP called Douglas moved in. Her name was Shawn, and she was a child model for magazines and catalogues. Yes, it was that kind of school. (To be fair, we were both the best looking ones in that class, and it was inevitable we’d have ended up together. Not to mention the fact that her mother, on having met me on a number of parent-student occasions, was in love with me too)

Anyway, I digress. Shawn had read out the contents of this book to me, and I was stricken. Madly in love with the idea of being able to pick up a book, any book, and being able to read, to decipher it, to understand what mysteries it held within, held a strange and wonderful allure.

Several weeks after that first instance, I found myself standing in the same library, my eyes looking for that green hardbound cover in a sea of books that lined the bookshelves. I had applied myself to understanding the power of the written word with great diligence, keen to impress upon Shawn that I was not a laggard, but merely that I had spent the past several months travelling the South Asian continent whilst she had been learning how to read during a hot New York summer month (yes, Asian children are overachievers.)

I still recall my eye catching that cover, seeing the distinctive (almost feathered) lettering and pulling out the book. I can still close my eyes and remember the feel of that book, its cover having absorbed the dust of several years of grubby schoolchildren fingers into its paper, holding out a slightly grainy feel. I can see myself opening the book, my chubby six-year old finger tracing the letters of the title as I mouthed out the words that I had learnt together made a sentence.

“Are You My Mother?”

And so was born the greatest love affair of my life. The love of reading; the love of the written word, the love of finding a book to read all by myself, no matter where I was, how lonely or scared or unhappy or bored or tired or unwell or happy or content or just there.

A love to last a lifetime. 

The Art of Forgetting

Memory and the art of remembering is something that writers and philosophers choose to dwell on at great length - perhaps because in so many cases the creative process itself is a means of commemorating a past, and the act of creating a story is often the path to remembering something. Over the past two hundred years, authors ranging such as Kafka, Kundera, Borges and Murakami have spent a great deal of intellectual horsepower on what it means to remember, and what it means to forget.

Following this noble and illustrious line of storytelling is The Amnesiac, by Sam Taylor. The narrative opens in Amsterdam, where the protagonist, James Purdew, is recovering from a broken ankle. Living an apparently satisfactory life (he has a stable job, a loving girlfriend, an apartment in the heart of Amsterdam) his veneer of contentment is perpetually ruffled at the edges by premonitions of his past, and the fact that he has no memory of approximately three years of his life. What happened to him when he was a university student in the English town of H.? Why is he haunted by the strains of a tune that he cannot remember more than two lines of? And above all things, who is Anna?

Ankle healed, relationship with Dutch girlfriend Ingrid terminated, James returns to H. (why can’t we call it Hull and be done with?) to try to find out more about his past, and to (both figuratively and literally) find a key to unlock his past – because of all the diaries he’s ever kept throughout his life, the ones pertaining to the three years he cannot remember are in a locked black box, and he cannot find (or even remember) where the key is. From here on the novel begins its tortured tour through the past of a life that is at once fascinating and also equally dull and pointless. For Purdew’s life is very bourgeois, with all the trappings of a traditional English childhood in the seventies and eighties – the bad hairstyles, the quaint television shows on the BBC, the agony and the ecstasy of first love, sex and death. Add to this mix an ongoing renovation project that Purdew takes on (how could a novel so thoroughly English leave out the persistent English obsession with home equity?) and you have a classically English novel for our times. Through all these events, clues towards unlocking the past slowly accumulate; references (almost tongue in cheek) zip past as we hurtle along the narrative as the author throws in clues to the denouement.

Taylor does well in creating a haunting reality, almost Camus-like in his emphasis on duality; his one passage on how hope and fear, light and dark, are potentially merely two sides of the same emotion is very reminiscent of The Absurd. Taylor veers between different times and narratives, choosing to work in several voices (the hidden observer, the narrator, the first person) to move the story forward. Over the course of nearly four hundred pages, Taylor moves (sometimes smoothly, other times not) between genres, going from nihilistic twentieth century self-reflexive novel to Robin Cook-like medical thriller involving large sterile corridors and doctors with mind-altering chemicals speaking in hushed tones through to nineteenth century Victorian murder mystery, tracing its path through the narrow side alleys behind Waterloo.

But alas, that is where the good times end. The extended references to Borges are cute to start with but soon belabour the point, and there are sections where he insists on discussing philosophy that could have been handled with more subtlety; either readers will already know about solipsism, or they will have the good grace to find out; you don’t need to explain it a la Philosophy for Dummies. And perhaps most disappointingly, after all the build-up, the denouement is completely unsatisfactory; loose ends come together a little too neatly, the whodunit solved cleanly, all the pieces falling into place too well, but the overall conclusion is like the English football team (who also make an appearance, albeit tangentially, alongside Doctor Who) – just not good enough. And if you rely on Borges’ trick of nothing being as it seems, surely there was some way to keep the ending as engaging as Borges?

Despite its flaws, The Amnesiac is an engaging read; Taylor writes cleanly, albeit a little too consciously and cerebrally, and his prose is crisp and engaging. One has to acknowledge that despite the shortcomings, The Amnesiac is better than a lot of what passes as literary fiction these days, and Taylor knows how to dot his literary i’s and cross his cultural t’s; he just needs to do it with a little more aplomb. Maybe he'll remember that for next time?

(The Amnesiac is published by Faber in the UK and Penguin the US)

How now, Sir Salman?

Given the hullabaloo in our literary orchards recently over the be-knighting of the writer formerly known as Salman, I was trying to get my head around why I think he deserves the honour. Because when I heard that news that he was to be made a knight, I didn't think it out of place, or disagree with it at all. It just seemed appropriate. So while I was chewing over why I think its a good idea, I thought it would be good to try to express why I supported the knighthood.

Sunny Singh, however, managed to capture my thoughts pretty succinctly. I'm sure they're really her thoughts, but I just agreed with everything she said. So rather than repost, or try to say it all over again, I'm going to cop out and just redirect you to her article instead.

Oh, and by the way, can you imagine Padma Lakshmi as the first supermodel/ TV celebrity chef to become a lady? If only she'd married the man when she had the chance!

Anyway, snide comments aside, the one thing that really bugs me as a liberal Indian capitalist is the fact that India continues to be one of a handful of countries that maintains the ban of The Satanic Verses. (Most of the others are tin pot Islamic fundamentalist whackos like Iran & Pakistan). It goes against every grain of what it means to be a democracy to put in place bans like that. And that extends to ridiculous things like the MF Hussain mess, the Chandramohan fiasco, etc. What is with the stupid moral-religious police?!?! I find actions like that incredibly invasive of my personal decisions to read what I want, say what I like, and basically express my fundamental rights of freedom of choice & expression.

I'm tempted to start a campaign to un-ban the book in India...so watch this space.

(Image pinched from Ultrabrown)

What happens After Dark?

Children of the night; dark alleyways. Lives small and limited, but simultaneously interconnected and expansive. Coincidence, destiny, chance encounters, randomness.A series of unrelated concepts & events unfolding through the course of one night. Spare, precise prose. Japanese minimalism, white walls, brushed sand, polished river pebbles.

But perhaps, most of all, a haze. That slightly nauseating dizziness, a sense walking through clouds, where images don't seem quite solid, when moving figures seem lose shape as they pass through air thicker than mercury, where the boundaries that define images begin to blur, when nothing seems real anymore. The intoxication brought on by insomnia, by fatigue, by watching the change from dark to light as a new day breaks.

All of these permeate After Dark, Haruki Murakami's latest novella. And it is a novella of several firsts. For starters, it is a short work by most standards, but doubly so for one by Murakami, whose novels tend to be long and complex narratives that allow the reader the luxury of many, many pages of the sparse prose so characteristic of his writing. Another departure for Murakami is the time span of the story, starting just before midnight and ending soon after dawn breaks the next morning. The one thing that Murakami retains is his the simplicity and honesty of his characters; their utterly ordinary lives, which are at the same time unique & quixotic.

If that seems oxymoronic, it is, because in true Murakami style, while initially each character appears, at least on the surface, to be totally unexceptional, it is when you get under their skin that their unique circumstances paint them in a more unique light. It's almost like you're walking down the street and ignore the ordinary masses all around you, but suddenly have one deconstructed in front of you to reveal the complexity within.

And then, there is the emergence of Murakami the voyeur, the film-maker. His prose veers eerily close to the tightness of a crafted script, minutely filling out the mise-en-scene; the music in the background, the colour of her jumper, the half eaten sandwich on a plate. There are directions for the cameraman, of when to pan out and take in the room, of when to focus in on the twitch of her lips as she sleeps.

What is the story? To be honest, it doesn't matter. The specifics of the events that take place during the night are irrelevant to the overall writing. There is meaning and symbolism in everything, but at the end, do the events of the night make a difference?

Ask someone who spends the entire night awake, only to see the morning wipe away all the fantasies that the darkness allows.

Shopping...

So after finishing my exams last week, I finally have control over my own free time again. No more needing to lug study notes around on the London tube, or wake up on weekends workplanning my study schedules for the day. So to celebrate, I walked into a bookstore earlier this week, and sort of went a little mad...

First I saw this, which I just HAD to buy...


And my excitement was further heightened when I saw this one:




I was somewhat disappointed to know that this one isn't going to be out in the UK until September, but then soon overcame that when I realised I could buy it from Amazon and have it shipped out from the US.



So that came in today!

I'm already almost through with the Murakami - and I find it fascinating to see how his writing style has evolved over the years. It's still the same spare, whittled down prose that is classically Japanese in its minimalism, but he is suddenly so much more attentive towards the mise-en-scene. At times I get the sense that I'm not so much reading a novel as I am a screenplay - each scene, each frame is composed in his mind and almost effortlessly communicated...

Watch this space for the reviews....

Waxing Poetic...

A classic from ee cummings...

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

This one's been done to death in popular culture (remeber Cameron Diaz reciting this to Toni Collette in In Her Shoes? Or Abby reciting it to Luca in ER) Despite all that, it's still an amazing poem, and one worth sharing...