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Short Book Review: The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant

The Birth of Venus by Sarah DunantSBR: The prolog, along with the first sentence of the first chapter, seems to give away the story of this historical novel. But The Birth of Venus becomes interesting towards the middle before turning disappointing again in the last few pages. However, the recreation of the madness and ecstasy of Renaissance Florence, a city bubbling with art and masterful human creations, is admirable; and that kept me reading through the book.
To read or not to read: Yes, for the historical setting, even though the fiction falters.

Short Book Review: Dusklands by J. M. Coetzee

Dusklands by J. M. CoetzeeSBR: Dusklands‘ language is beautiful to the extent that it can be hard to read sometimes. But the darkness explored through the themes of imperialism, war, and adventurous exploration in the two stories of the book has the ability to send a chill down your spine. I suppose I don’t need to make more of a case for a Nobel-prize winning writer.
To read or not to read: Yes, unless you spurn darkness in your reading material.

Short Book Review: Three Daughters by Consuelo Saah Baehr

Three Daughters by Consuelo Saah BaehrSBR: Three Daughters is interesting in the beginning. Set at the turn of 20th century in a Christian village near Jerusalem, it takes you to a time and culture you may not know much about (remember, this is pre-Israel). But as a long multi-generational saga (The three daughters of the title are from three generations) it later becomes repetitive, boring and pointless. I would have been happy to read the story of the just the first daughter and then a half, with more information on how historical changes of unprecedented magnitude were affecting people in the region. As for the daughters themselves, the author’s approach to their love life, which initially seemed like a way to assert a woman’s desires and sexuality, later turned into sordid, gratuitous sex scenes. Despite initial promise, the length and multi-generational story is the undoing of the book.
To read or not to read: Skip, unless you really have lots of time to kill.

Short Book Review: A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne

A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne BerneSBR: A Crime in the Neighborhood has a story that promises revelations, but ends up being the tale of a young girl strangely unapologetic about destroying an innocent man’s life. There is some charm in the description of a quiet, middle-class neighborhood, everything ordinary, petty and pointless about the life there on display. But it becomes too much pretty quickly. Beyond a point, I wasn’t sure why I was reading the book.
To read or not to read: I don’t see the point of it unless you are nostalgic about life in a Washington DC suburb in the 1970s.

Exile and Justice @ BYOB Party in June 2017 (Part 7)

I’m in the process of reading Roberto Bolaño’s Last Evenings on Earth, his first short-story collection in English. The stories have a dreamy quality to them and speak about nameless faceless characters, probably signifying the feeling of exile and conflict that the Chilean exiled diaspora is so familiar with. I particularly enjoyed his stories about failed writers who grapple with failings within themselves and on a lighter note with poor marketing skills. I was excited to find this story about Bolaño’s writing style and watch this video about the man himself.

While Bolaño explored how the lack of justice could fragment societies and individuals, Michael Sandel writes about what exactly justice means. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? by Michael Sandel is a book based on a Harvard course taught by this esteemed professor. Sandel brings clarity to various issues in America including affirmative action, the conflict between utilitarianism and libertarianism, limits of the market, etc, and he links it to theories of justice by Aristotle, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, etc.  “We need something like this pertaining to the Indian context,” Abhaya said.  Satish mentioned a surprising anecdote about the games he used to play as a thirteen-year-old, which included visiting an older intellectual friend who did very much what Sandel is doing in this book- outlining difficult cases and discussing for solutions. Apurba, a lawyer herself, talked about a case similar to one that Abhaya had picked out of the book and she compared the situation to the one in the book and movie Life of Pi.

Abhaya also talked about the fictional representation of the paradox of utilitarianism in Ursula Le Guin’s powerful short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.

And with that, we have come to the end of an intense BYOB Party. Looking forward to the next one!

Coffee Shops, Kabul and Elephant Whisperers @ BYOB Party in June 2017 (Part 6)

Ranjini got what one of the regulars of BYOB Party calls a light book. We can’t have a BYOB Party without that sort of book- light on the mind and easy to read. She picked up The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul, a book by Deborah Rodriguez, from Blossom Book House, Bangalore’s most well-known second-hand bookshop.

Although the title of the book seems ironical today as one would not associate coffee shops with Kabul, the author has worked in this part of the world and created a beauty salon to empower women living there (she’s also written a book about this called The Kabul Beauty School). War is the backdrop of her story but the characters she talks about are five women- Sunny, the proprietor of the cafe; Yazimina, a young pregnant woman; Candace, an American woman with an Afghan lover; Isabel, a journalist and Halajan, a sixty-year-old, with a unique love affair and a difficult relationship with her son. The book can’t be categorized as chick lit as the situation that the women find themselves in is grave at times. It was interesting to read about Halajan’s relationship with society- she was a product of less conservative times and so she has her hair cut short and has a lover, all every embarrassing behavior as far as her son, a product of more conservative times, is concerned. The conversation veered to how different Afghanistan was once upon a time and how when the Russian tanks rolled in, the country rewrote its story.

Divya got a very different book called The Elephant Whisperer: Learning About Life, Loyalty and Freedom from a Remarkable Herd of Elephants by Lawrence Anthony, a conservationist. This is a true story of how the author was asked to accept a herd of rogue elephants at the Thila Thula game reserve in Zululand and in spite of the risks involves, he went ahead as this was the last chance for the herd to survive. Anthony writes about the relationships that he observed among the elephants and the relationship that he forged with the animals themselves.

Elephant lovers may like this link to a story by Jose Saramago now adapted into a play in Hindi about an elephant that trudged 3000 kms from Lisbon through Spain, the Alps and Vienna. Gajab Kahani tells the story of Solomon the elephant and Subhro, an imagined Bengali mahout.

Also, a story excerpt featuring an elephant, from Kanish Tharoor’s book Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories by Kanishk Tharoor.

Family Trees, Rocks and Monkey Trial @ BYOB Party in June 2017 (Part 5)

Aravind Chandramohan and Meera Iyer who are the co-founders of the heritage exploration company Carnelian spoke about the books they were immersed in at the time.

Aravind got a Kannada book called Vamshavriksha by S. L. Bhyrappa.  In Kannada, the title refers to the term family tree. This family saga spreads across three generations of the Rao and Shrotri households in Mysore.  Bhyrappa is well-respected in Kannada literature. This professor of philosophy is the recipient of many prestigious writing awards as well as the Padma Shri and many of his books have been translated and made into movies as well. Being a teacher of philosophy his books grapple with existential questions and deal with religious issues. He’s the Stephen King of Kannada literature, one of the readers said in the group, referring to his prolific output. Discussion of Kannada literature led to mention of  Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag and an anthropological study on the politics of the palaces of Mysore. Koshy’s, the popular restaurant and hangout on St. Marks Road, was also discussed as is inevitable in any discussion pertaining to Bangalore. Two camps emerged-one in favor of the conversation and discussion at this hotel with a history and the other more disillusioned camp who did not understand what magic Koshy’s had at all and why they had missed it.

Meera got a book called Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent by Pranay Lal. She was delighted to be gifted this book as it was the first of its kind in India. Hardly any books feature the natural history of the country or talk so passionately about our own rocks that we seldom admire for their age, but quarry instead. “The first few pages talk about the Nandi hills and the rocks at Lal Bagh. Can you guess how old they are?”

There was silence. No one was prepared to hear that the rock beneath our feet was three billion years old. Meera then educated us about various terms including the Dharwar Craton, the Deccan Traps, Gondwana and magma chambers. The book is comprehensive and filled with photographs, artwork and maps. Apart from a few editing issues and references that he has made primarily because he is a biochemist and not a geologist, Indica tells a wonderful tale of our geological creation history.  If more people who governed read books such as these, we would be on more solid ground.

The conversation ultimately deviated to belief systems and Meera, the storyteller that she is, told us about the Scopes trial. It was formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial. John Scopes was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. The trial was the first of its sort to be broadcast on radio and threw light on the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. Then as now, the US was sharply divided about theological truth and scientific fact.

Truth and belief are seldom friends.

Twin Paradox and Lost Umbrellas@ BYOB Party in June 2017 (Part 4)

Now for some books with strange elements.

Ratnakar brought in an element of science fiction into the BYOB Party with the book Time For the Stars, a book published in 1956 from his Juveniles series, a series with young heroes set in the near future. Heinlein was one of the most important science fiction writers of the time along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. In this book, Heinlein examines the Twin Paradox, a thought experiment that explains how relativity works. The premise is if one out of a pair of identical twins is accelerated away from Earth and the other stays on Earth, more time passes on Earth and so the twin who remains on earth grows older while the space twin will not have aged that much. Twins are also said to have twin telepathy so they can communicate faster than the speed of light. Although the book may seem outdated today, the premise is strong enough to convince the hard-boiled cynic. Some interesting conversation did come up revolving around twins, communication and physics.

Watch this if you want to see what one of the world’s most foremost science fiction writers had to say about Apollo 11 space mission.

Satish got a fantasy read. He’s a big fan of China Miéville and loves his YA books the most. Not many people in the room had heard of China Miéville, a sensational science fiction writer who has won two Arthur C Clarke awards and several other prizes as well.  Un Lun Dun or Un-London is a place below London. The story revolves around the adventures of Zanna and Deeba. They find a door to another London, one filled with old computers and obsolete technology and an army of umbrellas. Miéville’s linguistic prowess- his puns and nomenclatures- and bizarre characters keep the reader riveted. His illustrations add richness to the book. Satish read out a passage of a part where Deeba climbs up a ladder in a library. He saw her act of climbing into books as allegorical in a way and this is typical of many of China’s novels. Another one he mentioned was Railsea, an allegory of Moby Dick, where the search is for a white mole, rather than a white whale. Comparisons were made to another popular British author Neil Gaiman. You might like to listen to this fascinating interview of this writer who has also confessed his attachment to garbage and octopuses and trains.

 

Short Book Review: The Second Girl by David Swinson

The Second Girl by David SwinsonSBR: The Second Girl is an interesting piece of crime fiction featuring a closeted drug-addict ex-cop as the private investigator. Not much can be said without revealing the plot, but it makes an entertaining read. You may not like the protagonist. That is not a bad thing in my world, but some readers seem put off by that.

To read or not to read: Yes, if you are looking for a light, entertaining read.

The Many Shades of Roy @ BYOB Party in June 2017 (Part 3)

When Amrutha showed us the book that she was reading, there was a collective gasp of excitement.

Arundhati Roy’s Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Amrutha is very eloquent about her admiration of this writer. For her, The God of Small Things is nothing less than a Bible, compulsory reading on days when the world ceases to make sense. And now after twenty years of monochromatic non-fiction, Roy is back, and this made her pre-order a copy.

The book is now well-known for the number of reviews it has garnered. Amrutha has no complaint about the lyricism of the book. For the first two hundred pages of the book, Anjum the transgender character occupies center stage. At some point in the novel, Amrutha says that so many characters make their presence felt that you feel you are in a train into which a stream of people continuously flows into.

Unlike the India in the books by Khushwant Singh and Salman Rushdie, Roy’s India is easy to relate to, especially to millennials as it is the India of the Maoists, Kejriwal, Kashmir, Ayodhya, corruption, Anna Hazare and this becomes the problem with Anjum’s story for Amruta. She fears that the book ends in propaganda and that Roy’s view is a little too uni-dimensional for a country as vast and complicated as India. “It was when the book stopped being fictional that I felt betrayed that she had masqueraded Anjum’s story as a fiction. If I wanted to read about the problems our country faces, I could read the newspaper!” she said.

So this is what a betrayed fan looks like.

As is the case in many BYOB Parties, readers subconsciously pick books that showcase similar authors. So Sonali got Annihilation of Caste by B.R. Ambedkar with an introduction written by Roy. Unlike Amruta, Sonali is more taken by Arundhati Roy’s monochromatic non-fiction.

The Annihilation of Caste shows two contrasting leaders- one the saintly Gandhi who removes his upper garment to identify with the masses and the other the maverick Ambedkar who wears a suit to challenge casteism. Both of them believe that they have the answers about how the country is to be led and what values should constitute the Indian rubric.

The premise of the book is a story in itself. A Hindu reformist group invited Dr. B.R. Ambedkar to deliver a lecture but since they knew that the man was audacious they requested for an advanced copy. Their doubts proved true. Ambedkar had planned to use the lecture as an opportunity to denounce Hinduism and its caste system. Since this was unacceptable to them, they de-invited him and true to Ambedkar’s fiery nature, he published the speech instead. He also responded to the Mahatma’s justification of caste.

What Sonali admires about the book is the coherence of the arguments that Ambedkar presents. He provided a scholarly critique of the Shastras and disagrees with Gandhi’s sugar-coated version of casteism. Even today Ambedkar’s views remain controversial and some of his opinions border on scandalous.

Watch this video where Roy debunks what she calls the Gandhi myth.