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http://textpattern.com/?v=4.0.8 LitPundit - Editor’s Reviews http://read.litpundit.com/ Home of all things literary Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:16:56 GMT Too Loud A Solitude I love traveling and spend a lot of time on the road. In every trip, no matter how short and in every city, no matter how beautiful - I visit the bookshops. Prague was no exception. People fondly recall many things after they return from a trip to Prague – after all, it is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe - but I remember the bookshops the most. There were so many of them, and so many Czech authors whose books I had struggled to find elsewhere. From Jan Neruda to Josef Barák to Jaroslav Seifert and of course, the Kafka, I returned with two bag-loads more than I left with.

Today, I will write about Too Loud a Solitude. Of all the books I picked up, this one tugged at my heart strings a little bit more than the rest. For Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude is a book which is deceiving in its simplicity, scathing in its humor and uncompromising in its honesty, but most of all, it is profound in a way that makes you think about it for a long time even after you have turned its last page.

From the very first line,

“For thirty-five years now I’ve been in wastepaper, and it’s my love story.”

I was hooked. Fortunately, the book was short enough that I did not have to skip too many meals to finish it one sitting.

The book is about Hanta, an old man who has spent his entire life compacting paper, but is overflowing with ideas.

“I am jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me.”

An unusual character, the book explores his world in minute detail and within the narrow perspective of his vision, which rarely expands beyond the compacting mill in the cellar, rife with mice and his home, that is so full of books that it might he collapse if he turns in his sleep.

Hanta is also an alcoholic, claiming that he has “drunk so much beer over the past thirty-five years that it could fill an Olympic pool, an entire fish hatchery”, but it is only to “muster the strength for his godly labors”. Despite his job of destroying books, he has saved quite a lot of them from the evil shredder – either giving away or selling, but mostly just stacking up in his tiny home. But Hanta, who may be a nitwit according to his boss, is also a fountain of knowledge, from which can sprout Talmud, Hegel, Kant or Lao-Tzu.

“Because when I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing through the veins to the root of each blood vessel”

In Hanta – the destroyer of the written word, yet also its perpetrator - Hrabal has found the perfect setting to examine the permanence and abstraction of ideas, the inevitable march of time which threatens the relevance of all of us, the different kinds of relationships one can have with the written word and the myopic nature of an individual’s perspectives.

“And so everything I see in this world, it all moves backward and forward at the same time, like a blacksmith's bellows, like everything in my press, turning into its opposite at the command of red and green buttons, and that's what makes the world go round.”

The novel might have a narrow focus, but it also covers the gruesome details of Hanta’s existence, from the mice in his cellar to the details of his mother’s and uncle’s deaths and his haranguing boss. He also talks about his unlucky love life: of Manca, “who never having known glory, will never relinquish shame” and the nameless gypsy girls who “had their pictures taken everyday, but never saw a shot of themselves”.

Despite its short length and outlandish setting, the novel is rife with symbolism. It is as much a thought-provoking satire as it is a literary treat. If you haven’t read it yet, I don’t know what you are waiting for.

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http://read.litpundit.com/editors-reviews/too-loud-a-solitude Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:04:17 GMT Pundit tag:read.litpundit.com,2009-03-20:d0291631e7d70d241b09b63d36564e16/f67d0ba5c9d66f09a7a13183476301d8
The Plague I just read Albert Camus’ "The Plague" - Camus being Camus, I was ready for a slow read , but after part I (the book is divided into five parts), I could hardly put the book down. Consequently, I am done - in the literal sense of the word. But perhaps, not really. Even after starting on my next book, I feel my thoughts returning to the life and choices of the characters of The Plague.

For the uninitiated, The Plague is an account of life in Oran, a city in Algeria that finds itself, rather unexpectedly, in the middle of a deadly epidemic. The book follows the reactions of various individuals as well as the collective, as they progress through the various stages of the plague. I am not sure I would call it an existential classic, but it definitely does a phenomenal job of examining the absurdity of life, its irrationality and human reactions to anything that they have no control over.

One of the emotions that Camus paints beautifully, especially in the early stages of the plague, is the feeling of exile. The town walls have been closed and almost all means of communication have been stopped. Telegrams have become the only means of sending and receiving messages of any sort.

"Creatures bound together by mutual sympathy, by flesh and heart, were reduced to finding the signs of this ancient communion in a ten-word dispatch, all written in capitals. And since, as it happens, the forms of words that can be used in a telegram are quickly exhausted, before long whole lives together or painful passions were reduced to a periodic exchange of stock phrases such as "Am well", "Thinking of you", "Affectionately yours".

We don’t need to imagine a plague to appreciate the gravity of the message. Perhaps it has been exaggerated by the unusual circumstance, but it is hard to deny that this is increasingly relevant in our interconnected global world. Far from isolation we are, you might say. But then reducing exchanges to stock phrases must be all too familiar. Loved ones who knew every aspects of our lives are reduced to being recipients of abstract accounts of general happiness, on account of the distance that separates us. Friends are emailed that all is well and that the summer is bright. For, after all, how much distance and isolation can you conquer with a message, no matter how much it is filled with love?

Which brings me to abstraction. To not experience something is to, in a way, alleviate it to a level of general abstraction.

He tried to put together in his head what he knew about the disease. Figures drifted through his head and he thought that the thirty or so plagues recorded in history had caused nearly a hundred million deaths. But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has fought a war, one hardly knows what a dead person is. And if a dead man has no significance unless one has seen him dead, a hundred million bodies spread through history are just a mist drifting through the imagination. The doctor recalled the plague of Constantinopole which, according to Procopius, claimed ten thousand victims in one day. Ten thousand dead equals five times the audience in a large cinema. That’s what you should do. You should get all the people coming out of five cinemas, take them into a square in the town and make them die in a heap; then you would grasp it better.

Even after reading the book, the whole concept of the plague remains an abstraction to me, the removed reader. Just a means to understand the message, the object that is separate from the idea. And as long as I haven’t felt it, seen it, heard it, touched it, it will remain an abstraction. As will most things in life, some pleasant, some unpleasant. Such is the blessing of life, though perhaps one less acknowledged.

Tarrou, undeniably one of the more interesting characters in the book, notes in his diary:

Question: how can one manage not to lose time? Answer: experience it at its full length. Means: spend days in the dentist’s waiting room in an uncomfortable chair; listen to lectures in a language that one does not understand, …

If we want to save time, and if doing unpleasant things seem to stretch time, why don’t we do it? Sure, you can appeal to the conventional wisdom that the time you have is constant - 60 seconds is 60 seconds no matter what you do. But then, I could argue that fragmentation of time itself is artificial and really, just a convention. When you wish you had 48 hours in a day, you don’t wish for 48 equally fragmented segments of time, but that you could achieve double the amount of whatever it is that you wish to achieve in 24. The end goal is not to save time, but really to have the perception of saved time. Then why not do something that manages not to lose time, especially when it is so obvious and easy?

Paneloux, the priest, no less of an interesting character, first thinks of the plague as punishment from God. Towards the later part of the book, after coming in direct contact with the disease, he delivers a controversial sermon, where he claims in effect, that there is no middle way - either you love God, or you hate God. Either you accept or you reject. Or more eloquently,

When innocence has its eyes gouged out, a Christian must lose his faith or accept the gouging out of eyes.

In other words,

If a priest consults a doctor, there is a contradiction.

The book reaches its epitome of eloquence in Rieux’s thoughts, almost towards the end of the plague, when the town had begun rejoicing over the imminent freedom from pestilence:

But what had he, Rieux, won? All he gained was to have known the plague and to remember it, to have known affection, and to have one day to remember it. All than a man could win in the game of plague and life was knowledge and memory. Perhaps that was what Tarrou called winning the game! But if that is what it meant to win the game, how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, deprived of what one hopes.

Perhaps the book was an allegory on France’s Nazi occupation. Perhaps it was a fictional account crafted as a medium for exposition on the absurdity of life. Perhaps it was meant to exposit and acknowledge the sterility of life without illusions. Perhaps what I had read from it was nothing which the writer intended.

Does it matter really?

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http://read.litpundit.com/editors-reviews/the-plague Sun, 05 Aug 2007 19:18:34 GMT Pundit tag:read.litpundit.com,2007-08-05:d0291631e7d70d241b09b63d36564e16/8045153022cc2f180b54d0e777787655
The Outsider The first sentence of "The Outsider"/"The Stranger" (from the French L’Étranger) is one of the most catching and enigmatic of the first sentences I have read, but what caught me more was the last part of the last sentence of the book.

(...) my last wish was that there sould be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.

The 'weirdness' of the sentence summarises the tone and depth of Albert Camus's novel, often classified as existential. The novel examines the life of Meursault who ends up committing a murder and is waiting to be executed. During the trial he seems to be persecuted more for not feeling sorrow that his mother has passed away recently or that he had not cried at the funeral, an entirely normal occurrence as far as Meursaulti is concerned, than for killing a man.

It is one of those classic novels that has been analysed and reviewed to death and I am not going to add to that list. "The Outsider" seems to be one of those books (like "Atlas Shrugged") that formed the staple diet of boys and girls during their growing up phase. I seemed to have missed that boat and am strangely thankful for it because it is one of the books that seems to grow deeper with age. While "The Outsider" has not had the effect of converting me to existentialism, it sure has given me an opportunity to think of its philosophical stance.

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http://read.litpundit.com/editors-reviews/the-outsider Sun, 01 Jul 2007 07:09:02 GMT Pundit tag:read.litpundit.com,2007-06-10:d0291631e7d70d241b09b63d36564e16/6d8f66ca4993b0a6441ddc05266010df
Everyman Everyman is a rather depressing narrative about an old man coming face to face with his physical vulnerabilities and eventually, his own mortality. The book opens with a funeral scene at a run-down Jewish cemetery, where the protagonist's family is gathered for his funeral. The beginning sets the tone for the rest of the book. At times, it seems to be a never ending narrative of someone's predictably uninteresting medical history. There is not much that even the best of writers can do to make hernia followed by appendicitis followed by carotid artery surgery and angioplasty and six stents interesting. At other times, it is his attempts to come to terms with the life he had lived, for the decisions he made, for the family he could have had.

Perhaps, this is where I let my own personal judgment cloud the literary appreciation of the book, but I just couldn't identify with the protagonist enough to appreciate his worries, anxieties and vulnerabilities. A womanizer who leaves his first wife and two resentful sons for a woman, who by his own admission, was his perfect companion, whom he leaves again to marry a Danish model nearly 20 years his junior, and for whom the only passion, even when he is living in a retirement village, seems to be the young women jogging by his home and not even the art which he had decided to dedicate his retirement to. Perhaps it is that my age and gender combined are too big an obstacle in appreciating this book, perhaps I expect something of substance from a character whose introspections I read page after page, and if that substance is lacking perhaps I look for an explanation, may be even an apology even. But then, I am willing to admit that I might be the one missing the point here because after all the book is about everyman, the average Joe, and a man, not a woman.

As can be expected of a book about the subject, the book does have its snippets of wisdom. When Roth tells us that life's most disturbing intensity is death or when he observes that old age isn't a battle, but a massacre, we are forced to put down the book for a moment and think over the gravity of what we have just read. The devil, they say, is in the details and there are plenty of them, more often beautifully delivered than not. For one, I could not have imagined one could describe for two pages on how a grave is dug and still keep a reader turning the pages. And then, of course, there is the unforgettable narrative where he ponders about what could have been the thoughts that must have preceded his friend who had committed suicide, as an escape from the grueling pain that disease had brought upon her.

Not every part of the book is depressing. There is the occasional joy that he finds in remembering the joys of his youth and the vitality of his body.

The mark of any great book is its ability to make readers think, and if the thoughts continue to haunt them even after they have put down the book, the better it is. And on that count, Everyman scores very high. So much so, I am going to bore you, my dear readers, with some of my own nagging thoughts inspired by the book.

Recently, after a very long time, I met my great aunt, who is enjoying reasonably good health if you consider she is in her late nineties and discount some amount of memory loss. While the first thought that entered my mind when I met her was that I would be very lucky if I was like her when I am her age, she kept constantly reminding me that old age is a curse, even for someone like her. I guess it is. And I can only guess. And perhaps that is the real reason I didn't particularly enjoy this book.

I like to live in my own delusion that when old age comes around, I will enjoy it and I will be happy to move into that phase of my life. After all, if I was happy to move from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence into adulthood, why would the next transition be any more difficult? Admittedly, one has more ailments and physical vulnerabilities, but I would hope one is surer of one's place in the world, is proud of what one has achieved in his or her lifetime, and in general, is looking forward to a happy time, devoid of pressing demands and responsibilities.

I have reason to hope that the only topics that seem to be interest 'everyman' beyond the age of sixty are not nostalgically turning over their lives past events or trying hard not to stare at young women in jogging suits. Sure, the older you are, the more you are allowed to reminisce, and the frailer your health, the more time you spend realizing how important it is. But still. Perhaps I am too young or just naïve, but does old age have to be so depressing?

All in all, this book was not for me. May be it will be, when I am older and wiser. Or perhaps, it is not meant to be a book for any one, but one meant to jolt you from your daily life and make you look at the inevitable, in a not so kindly way. And in that sense, may be it is, after all, a book for everyman.

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http://read.litpundit.com/editors-reviews/everyman Sat, 16 Jun 2007 06:29:56 GMT Pundit tag:read.litpundit.com,2007-06-16:d0291631e7d70d241b09b63d36564e16/19e80156fcb617cf989961a37ee2ccc0
The Reluctant Fundamentalist It had been a long time since I had finished a book in one sitting, until I read Mohsin Hamid's recently published The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It would be easy to attribute it to the rather short length of the novel, but it is much more than that. The narrative makes you feel like part of a conversation, part of a setting that is highly captivating even while being complex, which you just don't want to peel yourself away from. The protagonist, Changez, is involved in a monologue with someone who seems to be an American visiting Lahore. And as Changez captivates his audience and keeps him in his seat through the long evening, you find yourself listening in, enthralled.

I must admit that when I first read the synopsis on the back jacket of the book, I wasn't that excited about reading it. After all, it seemed to be one of the several post 9/11 novels that seem to be sprouting up around the themes of immigrant identity and allegiance in the context of America's changing international relations. But what makes this book different? It has to be the powerful and engaging voice and the complexity of the carefully created characters. Changez would have been unbelievable if a less talented writer had written the story. But in Hamid's hands, we empathize with the 22 year old, who leaves his home in Lahore, builds a successful life first in Princeton and then in Corporate America, until he is dramatically affected by the turn of events following 9/11. It is interesting to note that Hamid had completed the first draft of the novel in the summer of 2001, and later changed it to include the events that followed.

Another haunting character in the book is Erica, Changez's frail American girl friend. A typical privileged American girl, Erica is different in that she has suffered a tragedy and is unable to pull herself out of it enough to let Changez in her life. Again, Erica remains somewhat of an unbelievable character until you suddenly realize that the author probably meant Erica as an allegorical representation for America '(I) Am Erica' and then it all falls into place. America, caught up in its own past and struggling with its own nostalgia, is unable to accept Change(z). Clever, if you ask me. This may sound a bit too carefully constructed and artificial to some, but let me hasten to add, such carefully planned allegories and symbolism, which are rife throughout this book, do not in any way hamper the reading. If anything, the subtlety makes the message softer, yet more striking and gives the reader a curious intellectual satisfaction of being a crucial part in comprehending the message. Unlike many books in this genre, The Reluctant Fundamentalist does magic in illuminating the prejudices and misunderstandings between the east and the west, without distastefully throwing them at our face.

A worthy review of this book should perhaps be a few pages long; there are so many interesting facets, from the literary accomplishment of writing a monologue the length of a novel to tackling complex political and social sensitivities in a delicate but powerful manner to employing subtle symbolism to involve and enthrall the reader to the unusual ending which is oddly satisfying despite its ambiguity. But for now, let me just say, do not be reluctant to pick up this book - engaging, unsettling and provocative, this is indeed a novel of our times.

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http://read.litpundit.com/editors-reviews/the-reluctant-fundamentalist Sat, 09 Jun 2007 06:20:31 GMT Pundit tag:read.litpundit.com,2007-06-09:d0291631e7d70d241b09b63d36564e16/e6c755f03541f113e99637eeb6b292e0