Judas by Amos Oz, Nicholas de Lange (Translator)

Emotions don't make you weak, it makes you more human.

This is an account of an emotional man struggling to find a way forward in Jerusalem. A man who wants to explore Judas as never before, and building his own world with the war and struggle in the background.

The characters look a bit complicated to understand specially the three who share a loss. But Shmuel is a lot different from the others with full of sympathy and emotions for the whole world. The one who aligns with revolutionary ideas as well as the romantic ones (if you consider them independent).

War is not a solution for anything but unfortunately anyone who is in the power may end up thinking otherwise. The loss of one person is loss of a whole world for a small family. We're beyond our survival instincts for a long time since we evolved to what we're today but somehow struggle/violence never leaves us. It is still something that someday we might evolve out of but till that time it is going to be around. We'll keep falling for the words like nation, patriots, culture, language and what not.

Love is another thing which finds its meaning in loss and not in the achievement. It's always the unfulfilled love that gives the hope to wait it out. And it is not just for the people.

Traitor is one the most common word which can be used relatively. Which means that depending on the speaker it changes its perception. It doesn't really identify a person but exposes the feelings/biases of a speaker. But this is one of the easiest to get confused with if the listener/reader doesn't have the access to the full account. So, if next time you hear Judas, listen carefully.

Peace

The Beginning and the End by Naguib Mahfouz

I am going real global in my reading because library is full of works from Noble prize winners.

I never read an Egyptian author before and was glad that I found this one. Not because it is from a Noble prize winner but because it tells you the stories of people from different countries and cultures.

But one this is for sure that the sad things are more or less same everywhere. This is a story of a middle class family who falls into chaos after the death of the head of the family.

It is full of emotions of growing up, love, loss, pride and absurdity of life. It has a tight narrative which leaves you on a high and dry note in the end.

We're what we choose willingly or otherwise (poverty, greed, love, pride) and no matter what, the world keeps going.

Peace

The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing

Never read anything about IRA and this was the first one but it was less focused on IRA but more on how people make revolutionary choices.

Alice, is a woman you can see around and it might be difficult to guess what they have on mind. And even if they align themselves to a cause they still remain a different personality. A person who takes care of maintaining the decorum, setup for normal living conditions, everyone's convenience, staying pleasant and of course look for warmth in friends and relationships.

Hence the title. These people don't fit the bill of being a terrorist but of a person who has independent thoughts but still having an internal struggle. The people who don't know how far they can go for the ideology they are committed to. One man's terrorist another man's freedom fighter.

Unfortunately, commitment to an ideology without any flexibility can potentially cause a lot of harm. It can make you short sighted or even blindsided for a lot of things which might have sound evil to a rational mind. Since, there is no fixed formula to gauge the affect of current actions on the future, people living in the moment can end up doing things which will look bad in the hindsight.

Love is priceless but you may not know what you will end up paying for it.

Love

The Stranger by Albert Camus, Matthew Ward (Translator)

Books like these make you wish you have known the language in which it was originally written. But if you actually start with this thought then it is going to be a lot of languages.

Camus had his own themes and designs when he wrote these masterpieces. Of course, it hits like an absurdity to a lot of people but it was not written for them and we are all entitled to our opinions.

This is fairly small with only 120 page but the one thing which I noticed was that the first part was quite dedicated to develop the characters and the second part goes into the signature thought process what Camus is known for.

The title sounds like that Meursault was the stranger but if you get into his shoes, everyone else will look like a stranger. A man who is different and indifferent. The worst part is that he is not even trying to fit in.

This is not a synopsis of a research proposal but it is very easy to drive a wide range of conclusions on this one and given the brevity of the text they all may get aligned with a few good enough points.

It is definitely worth reading, and should be subjected to individual analysis and thoughts.

Peace

Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee

This was picked in the same Noble spirit.

This could have been easily called the dead man. I didn't understand the meaning of the phrase "dead slow" till I read about Paul. A man with whose life seems to be changed after an accident and losing a leg. But it sounds more like a 60 year old man who is looking for a reason to live. Love and sex seem to be quite an appealing factors to him but a sense of shame after losing a limb overshadows every other desire.

Life is more complicated after a tragic accident and it is not easy to keep the spirits high specially with a leg less. Paul looked this less as a shrinkage of the world for him which was actually more of a mobility challenge. But then it would have sound like a motivational book.

And in this sorry state you start having those romantic notions. The melancholic life not only becomes amorous but even tries to find some knight like attitude to gloss over the much deeper thoughts and desires.

It was very much a younger sibling of "Disgrace" when it comes to the characters and their life choices. You can easily replace Paul with Lurie and everything will sound the same without a dog.

Maybe it was not the best shot.

Love

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

 A self destructive love is what it is.

The sense of disgrace in the characters come from different sources. This sense is so distant that it can only be in the heads. You look closer and it is just a self destructive commotion which has been put into action by some events in life.

You can't see the events which caused it but you just witness the out come of it in the light of eventualities (in front of committee and police). It is very much visible how Luries (father and daughter) act and decide in those moments.

It is not a pleasure to read specially when you're thinking that these characters should behave rationally but that is what makes them what they are.

Love

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

I was reading a lot of serious stuff that I made it a point to read something else just for the heck of reading something light.

I looked at this one and thought of one more movie which is going to be unwatched.

This is a monologue of a successful financial analyst in US. And the uncomfortable part of the narrative is that it moves as a knee jerk reaction. It is less surprising and more annoying to keep reading it this way. They call it metafictional and it sounds like an ornamental title.

It is more like a one sided love story, a lot critical of US foreign policy, psychological derangement, and construed plot of a geographical war. I could've said it has a good pacing but it was regularly interrupted by schoolgirls, chai, snacks, jalebi, kababs, family and the waiter at the hotel who don't add anything to the plot or ambience.

I guess the movie might have been different (which will stay unwatched) given the kind of medium it is but the book can be excused.

Peace

The Grandmothers by Doris Lessing

 The noble-ity continues.

Another master piece. This is a collection of four short novels and "The Grandmothers" is one of them.

All four of them reach out to you in a different way and leaves you with a different emotion.

Can't say anything about the plots and characters but it is worth a read.

Love

Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots by Deborah Feldman

Of course I wanted to read since there was a series on it.

I could have seen it with New York Times bestseller tag but I went with it anyway.

The books touches a sensitive topic but not sure if it does the justice. A lot of passages sound incoherent and out of place.  And rather than developing the characters it sounded more like blaming everyone else around. Looking at all the pictures from childhood to marriage to motherhood it is difficult to connect the narrative to them.

We carry our crosses and some of us come out shining to tell the tale. But this was not the tale.

Peace

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro

 This is going to be that Nobel laureate time.

This is a compilation of five stories around the music and nightfall. And I must say that these two fits into every story very well.

I was very keen on the music part of it and it was good to see that not all of them are musicians. Few of them were just music lovers but that doesn't falter the momentum of the narrative.

Second thing, it being about music I was looking for something around the cello. I don't know why but cello and piano sound more like music to me than guitar. Glad to find it in the last but the splendid story.

Music is something which is mostly conceptualise as an art form but that sounds like a narrow look from the listener. For a musician it might just be the way of life. Any kind of thought needs a reciprocation or at least a recognition. In case of music it is not required because music is something which can exist without any medium. It will sound abstract as long as the idea is limited only to the music that we listen to irrespective of the genre. Music is beyond existence which is impossible to convey by any material means.

I'll not go into each one of them but it was definitely a great read.

Love

New Selected Stories by Alice Munro

Alice Munro is a Nobel Prize winner for literature. I was not aware of it until I picked this book. And I was not really sure if the Nobel prize was given for the story writers. I don't know why but I thought it was given to the novelists and poets. While looking for more information I saw that it was given to Bob Dylan for poetry and songwriting. This was a breather to know that it is not limited to the larger formats like novels only.

Well I read this, and was amazed how beautiful these stories are. I read these stories and felt that every single one of them has the potential to be a novel but that doesn't diminish the affect of the story. It only enhances the art of narration in brevity.

The best part that all the characters in these stories sound so real. It is possible that you might not have heard of any such real person around you but reading about them creates that sense of familiarity which can be attributed to the brilliance of the author.

One thing which I encountered was a claim that a she is a feminist writer, and I saw one of her interviews where she says "I never think about being a feminist writer, but of course I wouldn’t know." I understand that this is as good as a writer can say about her/his style of choosing the story they want to tell. If they choose to pick a protagonist of a different gender than it would have been equally strong in the stories.

I definitely loved this one, and would be looking out for more or her works.

Love

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

 I saw this in a corner and kind of looked cute with an off-white cover and title printed in Golden colour.

There was not much information about the author or the content of the book, and in the first look it looked like a self motivation kind of a book given the words printed on back of the cover "Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it end."

I am a bit biased against self help books but this one looked good given the above line and I just picked it up. A 200+ pages don't take much time.

I read the first five pages and I realised what I picked. It was a memoir recording the death of a husband and a daughter on the death bed. It had the death written all over and there were thoughts of not continuing further. Not because it is a sensitive topic but it sounded a bit intrusive as a reader.

As a rule I don't search for author or the book online if I already don't know it and when I finished it the first thing I did was to search the author. A wife couldn't do much for her husband in his last moments and a mother who was helpless in front of her comatose daughter who was in and out of ICUs.

Death is a strange event in life. The departed don't have much of a say afterwards (given a chance they wouldn't have agreed to it) but the survivors have their lives turned upside down. This is a situation for which nothing can prepare you not even witnessing multiple deaths of loved ones. Every death is a road closed in the journey of life. A road that you never believed to be closed. You expected turns, obstacles and what not but never a closure.

It was specially strange when in the last one I was reading was about someone who just wanted to let go of life and in this one they can't let go of dead. And yes they are totally different letting go. In one you are a participant and in the other you're just the observer.

Peace

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

 Never say no to a recommended book specially if it is recommended by strangers.

This one was recommended by two different people and I just looked it up in the local library and found it. It was a bit strange to go to the library with a knowledge of what you're going to pick.

This was a light read for sure. It is a story of a bad day leading to an out-worldly experiences for Nora Seed.

It was going well until the author did the Christopher Nolan hat and jumped into explaining multiverse and quantum physics. And later morphed into a lot of quotations for good life.

Positivity is never a problem and specially in a story revolving around depression and personal loss it is even better until a fictional work starts sounding like a self help book. But you can never question the author because it was not written for you.

Choice is a small word with lifelong consequences. But nobody knows the future, and we all are good at making bad choices. And it is not about choosing the education, friends, jobs, partners which play a big part but even things like what we choose as a hobby, ideas we perceive and why not even the civic duties. But the more important aspect is how we react to any outcomes of all the action/inaction in our lives.

Decent read but if you don't then you'll not miss much.

Love

Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories by A.S. Byatt

 I couldn't finish this. I just couldn't go beyond 350 out of 430 pages. And this is the one in a real long time that I couldn't see till the end.

This is the second book from A S Byatt that I picked (first was Ragnarok) and the idea was that the short stories would be good from such an imaginary writer. I don't know how I reached that conclusion but that was the first thought.

However, it was too much of the abstract narrations. I really enjoy a writer painting a picture with the words but than I was not looking for a palette. There were too much of colors which kind of led to the edge.  Ornamentation is an integral part of any narration but what if there are just ornaments and nothing else.

I can't really say if I liked any of the stories and the introduction was full of praises, even claiming that there are multiple styles of writing which some of the great writers had shown in their genius works. It sounded like an oversell and yes it was. An average reader like me don't read for the style of the writers but because their work speak to you. A reader can't connect with everything but a good book is a sign that writer was saying something which resonates with you. Also, a writer is free to write whatever s/he wants to write but so are the choices of a reader.

I never cared about the style. I actually don't understand when they say lyrical prose, magical realism, complex structures and what not. The complexities doesn't make things beautiful but it is the simplicity which brings the true beauty in any work irrespective of the style or medium.

I'm not sure if I'll be picking up anything again from her work but this was a really difficult one.

Love

Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020 by Salman Rushdie

I've read three of his books and this is fourth and I'm writing it here not as a fan but someone who appreciates his style of writing. I never found them magical even if they call them magical realism. All I was looking for was a good story and it never disappoints you.

This one is a non-fiction which is a collection of essays, memoirs, and anecdotes. It is more of thoughts on stories rather than being a story. So, you can call it a story of stories if that helps.

Saying things in the easiest way possible is the sign of genius. A thing well said is half done. And this simplicity I have always enjoyed in his writing and when I was reading this one it was easy to understand without a lot of pomp. It never dulls the reading and keeps you engaged with the content rather than getting stuck in deciphering the content.

A world of stories is always fascinating and a good story is good irrespective of language or time it was told. A good one is going to be timeless and it is not just the moral ones that survive. They may have stood strong through the test of time but even the not so moral ones survived for long. These stories tell you the things which you may not hear otherwise. It is the attraction of the unknown that brings us to them. A lot of stories specially which are autobiographical in treatment may lead to some voyeuristic pleasures but in a whole they are just stories.

I hope we keep celebrating these stories not just for the entertainment but how they define us as a human being - the only storyteller among all the inhabitants of this planet.

Peace

Interpreter of Maladies and Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

I got a combo of two books and just picked it up. I was interested in Namesake more but a collection of stories doesn't hurt.

So, Namesake was on the list since the movie was out more than a decade ago. I watched it long back and wanted to read the book. So, here I got it.

But before Namesake I read the stories and one of which became the title of the story collection (interpreter of maladies).

Most of the stories have immigrants as the main characters, and I was not surprised to see that Namesake sounds more like the extension of these stories because it has a similar theme. You can practically say that the stories were the trailer for Namesake.

First thing, the movie has cut down a lot of details and built on some others but that has more to do with the medium (book vs movie).

Second thing, the book is definitely worth a read if you liked the movie.

Last thing, is more of a thought on immigrants. Do all the immigrants are bitten by that travel bug which brings you to these countries where you don't have anything in common but your curiosity got you there? Or this is just a better job/life prospects that bring you here? Is it an act of refuge to get away from anything that you are facing right now? The list can be longer because everyone has their own reason. And it is very common to see them struggle, be in denial, being miserable or even being successful which is all part of a game.

So if you're there, just hang on and don't forget why did you come in the first place.

Love

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

In a royal conflict it is always obscure to pinpoint a single reason which is responsible for the whole mayhem. It can be anything from jealousy, lust, or rivalry to power, domination or greed. I do hear the arguments as the justifications that this is a primitive human nature which we couldn't evolve from. The whole idea of being an authority/power in the name of divine or intellectual is a botched attempt to over simplify the things which does more harm than the actual events.

I read the 600+ pages in a real long time because a lot of time it was difficult to focus on the plot when you don't remember the dynamics between the different characters (coming form a family or a camp or neutral). This revolves around the England in 1520 and what role did Thomas Cromwell played in the politics of kings, queens, church and noble men.

I don't have the courage to give a brief of such a big book here but the reasons I mentioned above can pretty much summarises how most of the characters behave. Their actions are based on one of the above irrespective of their stature in the society. They are always chasing one or the other oblivion to the other things until they face the consequences. 

As of now I'm still digesting it and not sure if I like this or not but this is the first book in the trilogy which Hilary Mantel has written and I'm not going to read the rest of them.

Peace

Under the Wave at Waimea by Paul Theroux

This is a story of a surfer Joe Sharky whose best days are behind him. A surfer who didn't anything in his life apart from surfing. Surfing sounds exotic for the story but if you replace him with any other trade the story would have left you the same way.

The turning point of the story is definitely an accident and how it jolted his routine life to bring him to introspection.

There are some minor characters who are portrayed as eager to exchange lives with our surfer because he is presumed to have the best of lives. But that again comes back to the point that he might have been an singer, dancer, painter or what not and people would have said the things (in the novel too).

The downside was that in the 400 pages it was a bit repetitive a lot. But that can be the writer's style as well.

Maybe not the best one but I did get to know some words in Hawaiian which has a really deep meaning. And yes, Pakalolo :) 

Love

The Food of the Gods by H.G. Wells

 Not a fan of science fiction but why not sometimes.

So, I picked this up and any fan of sci-fi fantasies would swear by Wells. He brought up so many of the concepts which were not only ingenious but also philosophical in nature. It brings a different kind of reality to the forefront which leaves you comparing your current reality to it, and being successful in finding some of the definite matches.

This one revolves around a scientific invention which make the ordinary subjects of giant size. This chemical is called food of the gods because this puts the mere humans to an inhumanly growth.

It was all going fine until one day the humans start seeing these giants as their rival. A threat to their own existence. A crisis which can end the current form of humans as the giants roam the earth.

If you look closely the giants are just humans with a bigger body. They have the same thoughts, feelings, and hunger as any other human of a different size. But this difference goes deeper than just being the physical one. It brings out the fear of a society which only understands the language of power. A grammar of victor and the loser. And before it goes out of hand they want to do what power tells you to do - crush what you don't understand.

Different species on the planet respond to their survival calls. Which is one of the reason that we see the clash between the hunter and the hunted. But it is not always the strongest that survive. It is always the adaptable who see it to the end.

But that is more rational thought and in the real world people go with prejudice and group thinking. Which means that there is no thought.

I don't consider this last line as a spoiler but the book doesn't have a traditional ending which gives you a champion but it ends on a note that opens up the possibilities of choice, and that is a fine ending.

Peace

Chances Are... by Richard Russo

 Hell we love a story well told.

This sounds too dramatic sometimes with love, friendship, college days, vacations, a lot crazy and music all mixed up in one with a bit of suspense in between.

But it is all worth reading the book.

How far do we go for our love and friends. It may take a lifetime to know the value of it. Also, does the unsuccessful love stories make the lives better. Maybe just that one unfulfilled desire keeps you going. Not waiting for anything to happen but still waiting that if it ever comes to happening you are still around to witness it.

Worth a read if you're looking for a good story.

Love!