ThispiecewasfirststartedinAprilof2017. Then,Iwasadifferentpersonwithadifferentlife,butthefeelingsofthetimeremainasrealtomeasever. IwantedtoexpressasentimentinmymothertonguethatIcouldnotinmynativeone,but—rustyfromdisuse—Icouldnotcompletethispoem. Therewereseveralattempts through the years, capturedbytherevisionhistory. ItwasnotuntilatripinBeijing,whenmyinnervoicesignificantlyswitchedpartiallytoMandarin,thatIcouldsitdownwiththiswritingagain,andfinallywrapupapoem8yearsinthe making.
This review will be totally biased given my penchant for:
Multigenerational stories (Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude)
Female protagonist / point of view
Anything set in India and/or written by an Indian author
Set in the state of Kerala, along the Malabar coast, this is a watery, evocative novel that takes its time to meander through the river of life. It begins as a bildungsroman of Big Ammachi (as a young bride), branching into multiple characters, interconnected by relationships, maladies, and themes of love, loss, grief, redemption — you know, the usual.
All this is against a backdrop of the Saint Thomas Christian community in Kerala, and historical events spanning the 20th century: British colonialisation and eventual independence, rise of Naxalism, and the shifts – or lack of – in the caste system.
I recommend this for an immersive read, if you want to be convincingly pulled into a tale of heartbreak and hope, of human strength and weaknesses. And especially if you enjoy novels set vividly in a particular place, time, and culture.
To read Solaris (Stanisław Lem) and The Lathe of Heaven (Ursula K. Le Guin) one after another is akin to having a chain of fever dreams. Both center around bringing creation through imagination, hallucination and dreams; both feature a psychlogiest, and an alien species. Yet, despite their superficial similarities, the two slim novels could not be more different.
Solaris — timeless, sterile, didactic — is a philosophical exposition on belief, religion, and unknowability of an alien being. The Lathe of Heaven — decidedly vintage, with all the fixings of a 70s sci-fi — explores the ethics of human influence and the dangers of playing God.
I first read Solaris, told from the perspective of a psychologist in space, Kelvin, who finds himself unable (or unwilling) to separate reality from hallucination. The narrative cuts in and out from the current setting to pedantic excerpts from history and research.
I say pedantic not negatively: up in space, amidst the eerie and unfamiliar, you’re submerged in the surreal, and to intersperse this suffocating surrealism with clinical diatribes was a clever move by Lem. The sharp contrast brings you away from the plot, which is a mere vehicle to greater questions the author is asking:
How do we reckon with and pretend to understand a foreign entity – whose motivations, composition and, in fact, fundamental cellular structure so greatly differ from ours? How does our understanding of god, belief, a higher being, reinforce the need to understand and interact with the utter unknown?
Lem has publicly denounced the overwrought film adaptation by Tarkovsky (Solaris, 1972), and along this thread, I genuinely believe he would have turned a few in his grave when Interstellar hit the screens.
But enough of Solaris. We now come to The Lathe of Heaven.
“Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes….”
TLoH was a delightful read. Here, plot and idealogy play equal role in moving the narrative, and Le Guin took her liberties and had fun with it. (If you can call multiple ways of envisioning an apocalypse / dystopia fun.) Characters were meticulously and colorfully built.
In both novels, you can truly only name three signficant characters.
Yet unlike the desolation and isolation pervading Solaris, you find breaths of hope and warmth in TLoH. That is not to say you will not be broken by reminders that we are, as human, essentially hapless – despite and because of the influence we can exert on reality.
I love Le Guin’s works and this one did not disappoint. It could very well vie for my top spot from her repertoire (currently, The Dispossessed).
I enjoyed the reading of TLoH, but have to say that because Solaris was so minimalist and atmospheric, it stuck in my mind for much longer. While I did not set out to read these two in succession, I’m glad I did and highly recommend both novels, and reading them together.
By the recommendation of a dear friend, I picked up this compact novel — a delightful morsel I devoured in two days, putting me in a mood that lasted for even more.
A reviewer described this as a ‘pastoral dystopia’, which is a succinct, accurate description of the setting. I say ‘setting’ specifically, than ‘genre’, because its true genre stripped of the sci-fi cloak, is that of humanness and humanity.
At its core, it is about finding meaning: what it means to be human in context of others, within a community, and especially to be a human woman. It is about how memory, hope, loss, loneliness, and death informs this search.
The dystopian setting is but an excellent vehicle and vessel in the exploration of these themes. The plot is driven by the whats, hows and whys. The characters and reader alike are kept desperate to know the truth of what led to their present. Rather than tiresome philosophical musings of ‘humanness’, these questions naturally arise in the more tantalizing and concrete search for clues on what had happened in this post-apocalyptic not-Earth.
It is a tightly written novel, every word serving their purpose. And in its simplicity of prose, the depth of our narrator’s frustrations, joys, and aloneness rings clear — a note of tragedy you cannot rid of in your head after.
Harpman meticulously constructs a world that gives the nostalgia a unique flavor: the narrator always had enough for survival. There was no real, explicit danger. She experienced and witnessed love and companionship, she had a vague concept of a ‘normal life’, though always second-hand and beyond her comprehension. She had a community for most of her life, yet it was fragile, tenuous, and steadily frittering away.
The implicit confusion, longing, and displacement of the unnamed narrator is reminiscent of Kathy H’s yearnings in Never Let Me Go (to be human, woman, loved). And the other 39 women and their opaque, not quite reachable memories of a past life? They are a neat parallel to one of my favorite post-pandemic wasteland fics, Station Eleven. If you liked either books, you will likely enjoy this title.
I recommend listening to the Carpenter’s rendition of The End of The World as you read, or after you read this. It will do a number to your heart.
Now if you have a masochistic streak and want to sink into the sublime pit of dystopian nostalgia (yup, join the gang), try also Anyone Who Knows What Love Is, a choice pick from one of the earlier Black Mirror episodes.
It is after 26 years as a self-professed avid reader (after my first self-read book at 5, on the Teletubbies), that i made the stunning revelation that I do not, in fact, love to read. It is a good story that I love.
Before I go into the catalyst for this realization, let’s comb through the various clues to this I should have picked up.
This is why I spend hours on Reddit, disregarding my husband’s scoffing that these supposed happenings are ‘not real’. So what? I’m in it for the story.
This is why I find personal blogs just as absorbing as novels – if not more so – because they have the additional allure of being real, and raw.
This is why I relish reading Wikipedia summaries of book and movie plots.
This is why I read primarily fiction. The skill of reading was developed out of mere necessity owed to my thirst for stories.
This is why I can and have read tons of research papers and non-fiction, but each is one too many because they are, truly, a spectacular yawn and a half to me.
Why then don’t I love other forms of story-telling as much? Why do movies and shows, or even audio books, not hold as much intrigue? I think it is because I love so much a good story that their re-telling must be borne solely out of my imagination to be perfectly as I want it to be imagined. It is not the effects, the acting, the screenplay that moves me, but the core of it; the story. I watch something onscreen when I want to enjoy one of those. When I want a story, I read.
Now back to the catalyst. At dinner just awhile ago, K alludes to a story he is reading in enticing bits and pieces. I know neither the context, the middle, nor the end. I instinctively knew this was a juicy morsel of a story, I felt that tang of anticipation of my tongue I get when I sink into a story I just knew would be good: ironic, surprising, teasing, satisfying.
Experiencing a deep envy that I could not ‘have’ this story (it is written in Polish), what came next was a self-reflexive understanding of my lust for the story. Not just to have something to read, but to have this story be told in an exciting, immersive way.
A slow, passionate, depraved, descent into madness.
Elsa Morante is a master at writing characters to life: each of them with their secret desires and fears unspooling like tangled yarn, knitted together into a quilt of inextricable insanity.
And borrowing from her genius, our dear, ‘poor’ Elisa – by-product and narrator of the insanity – inherits the masterful metafictional writing of Elsa in her own retelling. At no point of her narration did I doubt the necessity of Elisa’s enervating and painful detailing of her memory.
For those brave enough to venture forth into this complex multi-generational family drama, let it be foretold: the last two parts (400 pages long) felt like being trapped in a fever dream; a dream in which you descend an infinite and illusory stairwell that never ends and is the same as the last turn.
Yet, it all made sense in context of Elisa’s position and motive: while Elsa is an ingenious writer (and cannot be forgiven were she the narrator), Elisa is decidedly not one. This is the reason I not merely tolerated, but perversely relished, the spiraling labyrinth of delirium that spanned 300 pages when it could have been 3.
I love flawed characters, and in this novel you will be hard-pressed to find a single character not flagrantly flawed. I surprised myself by finding the capacity to be heartbroken for some of them (namely Francesco, Alessandra), and noted that this is not a reflection of any redeeming qualities they may have, but the depth of cruelty others’ flaws have flagellated them by.
Indeed, this is a story about heartbreak, cruelty, delusion, derision, and obsession disguised as love. I loved it, docking one star only because I feared that if it were 2 pages longer I would have myself succumbed to lunacy.
As its title suggests, the novel is one of seeming paradoxes that come into focus as perfect parallels. Milan Kundera’s works are at once Brechtian yet decidedly romantic. The Unbearable Lightness is a concise testament to his literary style. The exposing of fictive and literary techniques; the non-chronological narrative placing the climax and ending ahead of its traditional time in a plot; the constant exposition of political ideas, beliefs about relationships, humans, love, life, death, and loss.
While the characters are moulded to be vehicles of Kundera’s exploration of themes / ideals, they are no less nuanced and complex – in fact, much more so – than a character in any other fictional work. Just as with Immortality, it is challenging to not identify and feel strongly for the fictive persons of Kundera’s imagination (borne of an image, a gesture, a sound, a feeling within himself) despite and because of their faults and very human-ness.
I am in love especially with an excerpt in the last page of this novel. You can say I’m pleasantly surprised at how melancholic yet romantic Kundera made the ending. It verges on kitsch, which most of the book expounded on (mostly against). Which makes it suspect as a deliberate and self-reflexive literary choice on the author’s part. After all, as Kundera himself believes, no one can escape kitsch.
She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
Kundera crafted a delectable seven-course literary masterpiece. The amount of control he has over the narrative – every dialogue, character, gesture, structure – is astounding. And with this control comes the most self-aware, perfectly orchestrated novel I’ve read in a long time. Like a Brechtian play, the ropes and pulleys are laid out: our heroine is not only fictional, but borne of a gesture the author glanced from another. Weaved into the story are the author’s muses, the story but a vehicle and device.
Yet, you cannot help being drawn in.
I especially related to Agnes, our protagonist. Her easy irritation at noise, bodies, negativity, modern chaos. Her need to disappear, to be alone, to not be inconvenienced outside of her own control.
I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them.
For posterity: some sections and quotes from the book I held my breath through.
On Imagology.
Are you objecting that advertising and propaganda cannot be compared, because one serves commerce and the other ideology? […] Some one hundred years ago in Russia, persecuted Marxists began to secretly gather in small circles in order to study Marx’s manifesto; they simplified the contents of this simple ideology in order to disseminate it to other circles, whose members, simplifying it further and further, this simplification of the simple kept passing it on and on, so that Marxism became known and powerful on the whole planet all that was left of it was a collection of six or seven slogans, so poorly linked that it can hardly be called an ideology. And precisely because the remnants of Marx no longer form any logical systems of ideas, but only a series of suggestive images and slogans (of smiling worker with a hammer, black, white and yellow men and so on), we can rightfully talk of gradual, general, planetary transformation of ideology into imagology.
Ideology was like a set of enormous wheels at the back of the stage, turning and setting in motion wars revolutions, reforms. The wheels of imagology turn without having any effect upon history. Ideologies fought with one another and each of them was capable of filling a whole epoch with its thinking. Imagology organizes peaceful alternation of its systems in lively seasonal rhythms. […] Ideology belonged to history, while the reign of imagology begins where history ends.
On human rights.
Human rights once again found their place in the vocabulary of our times; I don’t know a single politician who doesn’t mention ten times a day ‘the fight for human rights’ or ‘violation of human rights’. But because people in the West are not threatened by concentration camps and are free to say and write what they want, the more the fight for human rights gains in popularity the more it loses any concrete content, becoming a kind of universal stance of everyone towards everything, a kind of energy that turns all human desires into rights. The world has become the men’s right and everything in it has become a right: the desire for love the right to love, the desire for rest the right to rest, the desire for friendship the right to friendship, the desire to exceed the speed limit the right to exceed the speed limit, the desire for happiness the right to happiness, the desire to publish a book the right to publish a book, the desire to shout in the street in the middle of the night the right to shout in the street in the middle of the night.
On Rationality.
In all languages derived from Latin, the word “reason” (ratio, raison, ragione) has a double meaning: first, it designates the ability to think, and only second, the cause. Therefore reason in the sense of a cause is always understood as something rational. A reason the rationality of which is not transparent would seem to be incapable of causing an effect. But in German, a reason in the sense of a cause is called Grund, a word having nothing to do with the Latin ratio and originally meaning “soil” and later “basis”. […] Such a Grund is inscribed deep in all of us, it is the ever-present cause of our actions, it is the soil from which our fate grows.
On Novels.
The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programmes, or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, they have to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted [or] retold.
On Being.
A special, unforgettable moment: She was forgetting her self, losing her self, she was without a self; and that was happiness.
What is unbearable in life is not being but being one’s self.
Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world.
But being, being is happiness. Being: becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.
This book was picked up on the whim: I wanted something to read by the pool, on a holiday in Chiang Mai. Chosen purely because it was the one book sitting snug and new in a wrapper, in the bookstore I chanced by.
An orphan of a novel, Orwell himself disowned it and was displeased by its continued publication. My theory: he had set out to write something satirical — an absurd situation and life — only to find it an embarrassingly accurate depiction (of a woman’s life). Put off by the unintended veracity (curses! i am a satirical political writer, not a feminist! thought he.) he disavowed and swore against the title thereafter.
But boy am I glad it was written.
There was something deeply immersive about the inner world and adventures – or misadventures – of Dorothy. The phases in the novel are crisp and concise: her former life, hops picking, as a school teacher, etc. Each section compelling; necessary; brilliantly paced and placed.
What was intended to be a light poolside read had me hooked – on a vacation! I read for hours in the balcony, the pool, the airport, on the plane and savoured each page till the last.
This book doesn’t get lost in itself – it is controlled, coming back to a full circle. Despite all Dorothy has experienced and overcome, she is back at ground zero. This despairing ending by her will and choice, not by her stupidity nor forces of plot. Yet, it was wholly relatable. The entire story has been built so you understand Dorothy’s upbringing, environment, inner beliefs, thoughts, and progression, and how it could have hit that brick wall when the ultimate decision was to be made.
I would go as far as to say this was one of the most raw and truthful depiction of a small town woman’s life in 1930s England I have read.
Now as for the surrounding characters: as much as they were caricatures, Orwell’s satire did a remarkable job at fleshing each one out. True, they were vehicles carrying highly specific socio-political messages. But really, everyone has an entirely disagreeable Rector Hare, a free-spirited and selfish Mr Waburton, and a shit-stirring gossip-monger Mrs Semprill, in their lives. Chances are they play to their caricatures all too well.
My verdict: Every woman should give A Clergyman’s Daughter a read, and find yourself both despairing and relieved. That there are aspects of Dorothy’s helplessness we can relate to; that we have the illusion of choice at times, but in fact not at all. But also that we have come really, really far from where Dorothy was. We have agency and choices that, even when difficult, is freedom in themselves.
In the minute I was born, three other events took place, of which two were significant and one altered the subsequent course of my life.
These were what happened:
1. An author penned the first word of her first novel, without realising the fact
2. A chain of GATCs lined up in a sequence unique in the history of our Universe
3. A tomato rolled off the wagon, squashed to a green pulp under the farmer’s boot
The day was simultaneously hot and cold depending on where you were. At the place of my birth, heat seared into skin like knives dragged over bare skin. Elsewhere, winter chill did the same.
I favor the derivative, ‘Space’. ‘Outer Space’ suggests that there is an ‘Inner Space’ – Earth. But there is no space here. Only gaps. Gaps between this land and the other; gaps between humans on the subway (if you are so lucky). Gaps between teeth, thighs, and logic. The infinitesimal gap between atoms of futilely clasped hands.
When I say “I need space,” no one knows the picture in my head:
I am floating in subzero, waiting for a speck of space dust to shatter my brittle body into the vacuum.
Leaves have their wisdom too.
Their shape, size and color; their thirst and lust for closeness to the sun, are singularly governed by the task of respiration. Untethered they are by Living, or Meaning. They brown and shed when needed and suffer no existentialism.
Q 