Thursday 14 December 2017

#52 A retelling



This Wide Night  Sarvat Hasin


This is the debut novel of the author and came to my attention since it is a reworking of one my all time favourites Little Women, but this time set in Karachi, Pakistan. It had me intrigued. It was indeed a bold step to impose a time-honoured classic onto a 20thcentury family of young women in a conservational society.

Those who have read Little Women will find the plot strikingly similar. The Maliks live a life of relative freedom in 1970s Karachi: four beautiful sisters, Maria (Meg), Ayesha (Jo) Bina (Beth) and Leila(Amy), are  watched over by an unconventional mother, Mehrunnisa. Captain Malik is usually away, and so the women forge the rules of their own universe, taking in a few men: Amir, the professor who falls in love with Maria, and Jamal or Jimmy, the rich young orphan who lives with his grandfather. The curious young man is drawn in by all four sisters, and particularly towards the rebellious Ayesha.

Curiously it is through the eyes of Jimmy that the entire story unfolds.  It is divided into three parts with a prologue that begins his quest to discover “what had happened to the Malik sisters.” Hence, begins a sort of flashback. The story as such held no surprise, at least till the end, since it follows the story of Little Women but it took me a while to get involved. 

The first part slowly worked its way but I couldn’t really connect to the tale from the second half. It tediously plods through Jimmy’s boring stay in London where he constantly ponders over a miserable, lonely existence, devoid of any family or friends. All his thoughts revolve around the Malik sisters and Ayesha who are back home in Karachi. By the third part, where the setting shifts to Manora, an island off the coast of Karachi, the strangeness of the double tragedy that has struck the family leaves a lingering sadness behind, from which they never recover. The narrator nor the readers may fully understand it, but this story is his attempt to give it some meaning.

The slight glimpses we have of the women’s lives in Karachi, are not satisfying enough and leaves us wondering why the author chose a man’s point of view to narrate the tale of a group of eccentric , proud and vivacious women who leave an indelible mark on our minds. We are left yearning for more and also a less morbid tone at the ending.

Maybe I think the disservice to the unconventional debut is that we are comparing it the beloved original. Louisa May Alcott wrote in a tone filled with warmth and joy, Sarvat Hasin’s is a dark, cold and brooding one. Each may have its own beauty, but I am sticking with Alcott on this one.  

Tuesday 12 December 2017

#51 An author you discovered this year



   

Too Much Happiness  Alice Munro


Alice Munro is a Canadian short-story writer whose Chekovian touch to her stories has won her worldwide accolades – including the Man Booker International in 2009 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. She has almost always dealt with short stories exclusively, even her one novel Lives of Girls and Women is written in such a fragmentary form, almost like small stories fitted together. She is a master of her craft of short stories and very rightly so.

In Too Much Happiness, each story revolves around individuals who have had to encounter some unprecedented event in their lives which have altered them remarkably. Munro isn’t interested in standard literary aesthetics and her stories prove that point. They are not beautiful or inspiring, but they do surprise and dazzle us in their moments of revelations. Munro's best stories are not about moments, but lives—lives that began before and will continue after the period she chooses to show you.

“These are stories about manipulative men and the women who outwit them, about destructive marriages and curdled friendships, about mothers and sons, about moments which change or haunt a life” (taken from the blurb).

In the first tale ‘Dimensions’, a young woman, working as a cleaner in a motel, takes three buses to visit her husband, who is incarcerated in a mental facility. You think the story ends when you discover the terrible events that had placed him there. But no, the tale goes on, and seems to be about the terrible power he still has over her even after she should be free of him.

In other stories like 'Fiction', 'Deep Holes' and 'Too much Happiness' also, she makes you sit, and contemplate the choices/decisions taken by characters, at different points in their lives. Decisions, which if, were different from those taken, would have altered their living tremendously.

In ‘Free Radicals,’ a surprisingly resilient old lady copes with a home invasion, and in ‘Some Women,’ a teenage girl takes on a job as carer for a dying man. And in the most devastating story of all, ‘Child's Play,’ two girls who become best friends in summer camp then break off all contact; only at the very end, when one is old and the other dying, do we learn the reason why.

In the title story ‘Too much Happiness’, she embarks on a different route. She chronicles with mingled fiction, the true story of Sofia Kovalevskaya, the first female university professor in mathematics in Russia during the late-nineteenth-century. She rises to fame from a humble background. Her journey involving those decisions which help her find her place in the society.

Violence and sexuality lurk beneath many of the stories: family murders, a questionable death by drowning, a creepy fetishist etc. This showcases her brutal honesty regarding human nature. How human beings hurt each other, plan to kill, deceive and cheat, but beneath all that smaller evils also linger. This makes her stories a little unsettling because these natures and human behaviours are so strange, that they are all possibly true (if you get what I mean).

Ordinary people and extraordinary events that change them - this is the hallmark of her writing. She has a capacity to remind us that every individual’s life is a narrative that can be shaped in myriad ways and propels them to overcome or even live with the consequences of their choices.  

#50 A book from your favourite genre


The Little Prince  Antoine de Saint-Exupery


“All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.”

Much has been said regarding the timeless message in this beloved parable. However, one may find upon reading it that is in fact a really strange and often puzzling story.

The Little Prince, first published in 1943, is a novella, the most famous work of French aristocrat, writer, poet, and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It is a classic fable about a stranded pilot's encounter with a young Prince who travels from planet to planet in search of knowledge. As the young Prince narrates his experiences of his inter-galactic travel, he reveals strange encounters with various humans and non-humans. Earth seems to be the latest planet he has landed upon. Wherever he goes, he finds adults to be quite self-involved and unable to appreciate the beauty around them. The men the Prince meets on his journey to Earth like The Businessman, the Astronomer, even the poor Lamplighter, have become their occupations, and gone blind to the stars, to the beauty of the world outside.

The young Prince himself has traveled from his solitary home on a distant asteroid, where he lives alone with a single rose. He regrets leaving his rose behind and in the process of his visitations gets very deep and philosophical advice from a fox who he has tamed.

He also talks to a deadly desert snake, which again provides him with certain worldly insights. In the end he allows himself to be bitten by the snake. Though it could literally be meant to be a suicide, the entire poetic prose in which this book is written in, clearly hints at a deeper layer of meaning.

 After all, this parable isn’t always talking about a Prince, a fox, a snake, the world or the planet we live in. It has a deeper metaphorical symbolic allusion to life and its journey towards adulthood.  So, this book becomes a lot more than just a simple childish tale. This does not seem to me a book for children. It's for adults who remember being children and feel nostalgia for the simple comfort of childhood innocence but know they can never go back to it.
 
If we give it a chance to unfold its meaning, this little book can aid us in seeing the world again with our ‘true’ eyes wide open. Our real work is to see the world again, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”







Monday 11 December 2017

#49 A classroom drama



To Sir , With Love  – E.R. Braithwaite


This semi-autobiographical novel based on the author’s own teaching experiences sets out to show how one meaningful individual can change the lives of many.


 E. R. Braithwaite, a Guyanese author, diplomat and former Royal Air Force pilot due to the unavailability of any other job offers was forced to accept a teaching position. He also notes through this part-fiction part-memoir, the racial discrimination he suffered due to the colour of his skin.


In the book, an out of work engineer, Mark Thackeray is given a chance to teach in a tough inner-city London school. He finds it hard to be surrounded by undisciplined, unmotivated and unclean students. The students’ antisocial behaviour, casual racism, penchant for violence and, worst of all, self-hatred horrify him. However, his colleagues expect little of the pupils. Driven to a breaking point, he ultimately decides to look past the cynicism of the school management and the unruly nature of the students to teach them lessons in self-respect and integrity.


“I felt sick at heart, because it seemed that this latest act, above all others, was intended to show their utter disrespect for me. They seemed to have no sense of decency, these children; everything they said or did was colored by an ugly viciousness….they had pushed me about as far as I was willing to go; from now on I would do a little pushing on my own account.”


He starts giving them lessons from life rather than from textbooks. He takes them to museums and tells them about his childhood. He insist they call him ‘Sir’ and address each other with the prefix of ‘Miss’ or ‘Mr’, and asks them to respect themselves first. As he tells them, he would treat them as adults and in return they need to bestow the same kind of respect towards each other and their teachers. He gradually begins to gain their confidence, respect and trust.

Sidney Poitier portrayed the unconventional Mark Thackeray in the 1967 film

Published first in 1959, the beauty of ‘To Sir, With Love’ lies in the portrayal of relationship between a teacher and his students. The ups and downs in his life, his interactions with his class and their transformation from rowdy teenagers to young responsible adults makes this book a highly relevant chronicle for any teacher from any walk of life.



Sunday 10 December 2017

#48 A book by a Noble Laureate




Night  Ellie Wiesel (Nobel Peace Prize in 1985)


Ellie Wiesel’s autobiographical narrative is the first work written by him. He later went on to pen many more books but as he himself puts it:

“Just as the past lingers in the present, all my writings after Night, profoundly bear its stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works.”

Ellie Wiesel was a Romanian-born Jew whose home town of Sighet was occupied by the Hungarians for most of the WW II. In May 1944, all the Jews in the area were forced into cattle wagons and transported to Auschwitz. Eliezer (Ellie) Wiesel was just 15 years old when he was taken to Auschwitz along with the rest of his family. He is separated from his mother and younger sister at the very beginning, and never sees them again. Along with  his father he is taken to the concentration camp, where they are forced to survive in dehumanizing conditions. Young Ellie who once was an ardent student of the Talmud, has to come to terms with the ‘night’ that has fallen on his faith, and he has with immeasurable courage written a testimony of his memories of one of the darkest periods of his life. He does this because, he believes that as a witness and a survivor it was his moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory – “ allowing his crimes to be erased from  human memory.”

I read this slim book, the beginning of his trilogy (Night, Dawn, Day) earlier this year and have had time to contemplate on it. It is undoubtedly a book that will leave a powerful impact on you. It was originally written in Yiddish, then in French and subsequently translated into English. Apparently, when he submitted the first manuscript of this book which was at the time called I ‘And the World Remained Silent’ (definitely a title that would bother our collective conscience), nearly all major publishers rejected him. Only after months of tireless efforts by another Nobel laureate Francois Mauriac was this manuscript finally brought into print.
 
In the end Night provides a chilling testimony to what manifests in an individual’s core identity when the Anti-Semitism forces them to be robbed of their individuality. In the book, Wiesel and the other inmates were "told to roll up our left sleeves and file past the table. The three 'veteran' prisoners, needles in hands, tattooed numbers on our left arms. I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name."

Increasingly I am beginning to think a book cannot be effectively summarized. This book even more so. What can you tell about a haunting memoir of a sole survivor of a family who is led to question everything he believed in when he witnesses the horrors of the Holocaust? What can you say about a powerful testimony of courage and human resilience in the face of virulent hatred and dehumanization in one of the darkest periods of human history? What can one say?   

Suffice to state, that the history of that time contains a multitude, of which this memoir is surely a significant part.