And Then I read ...Dance

Dance by M Mukundan is a literary piece ,not a pop fiction.
This is what the one of the few book reviews online,(from Hindu) had to say about the book :- “Dance” is not merely about dance.

"..It is multi-layered. It is about the borderless world. It speaks about the colonisation of bodies. The changing face of art and its commercialisation also finds mention..."

, Multi -layered or not , I managed to fionish reading it in 2 hours flat.It helped that this was not novel ,just a novella.And you could say,whether I captured all the layers mentioned by Hindu.


The novella is translation of authors work in Malayalam,Nruttam,released in 2000.For years I was sckeptical of reading transaltion,mainly ,beliveing in adage "lost in transaltion".The first major transaltion work I read ,rather accidently" was O.N.V Kurup's master piece "The Legends of Kasak".Though I may may missed the significance of Magical realism and other literary devices in the novel(which I may put down to my lack of classical edcuation),I could totaaly recreate the visula imagery the thor wanted ,in my head.Over the next few years I got introduced to Haruki Marukami,who rapidly ended up being one of my most favorauite writers.

Coming back to the novel,here are my takeways from the books :

One of tha main reasons I am attracted to M.Mukundan's works are narrative novelties in his works.i got introduced to him through Kesavan's Lamentation ,which had the unique plot device of novel within a novel.In this novel ,Mukundan tries to carrry the narritive forward through a set of mail communications.which is quite impressive considering it was writteen in early 2000 ,when the internet was just starting to bloom in India.

Towards the end of the novella one of the main protagoinsts,a immigrant Indian dancer,says the following while comparing himself with other fellow immigrants

"...The only similarity between them and me was the colur of the body.They used their body like a polythene bag to fill food.I created magic with mine...".Though not direct,I found that a crique of the way I have been living my live over the past few years.Those dumbells gathering dust,the skipping rope lying idle on the shelves.Those unused running shoes.All these needs to change.Time for a mid year resolution.(That reminds me the last time I had this resolution was 5 years back when I saw Taxi Driver and heard Rob DeNiro utter those lines

"....I gotta get in shape now.
Too much sitting has ruined my body.

Too much abuse has gone on for too long.
From now on it'll be pushups each morning.
Fifty pull-ups.
There will be no more pills, no more bad food...
no more destroyers of my body.
From now on it'll be total organization. Every muscle must be fight.
Wow! Look at the size of that.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Oh, if looks so good.
It's getting harder and harder.
It's throbbing now.
The idea had been growing in my brain for some time.
True force. All the king's men...
cannot put if back together again..."

Novel again has a lonely male protagoinst.sort of Alone in a crowd guy.Just get a feeling that This partciular trait si something I am finding again and again in most of novels I have been redaing these days.And most of these guys are writers(though not in this case).Also English professor seems like a common occupation for your every day novel hero.


Couple of open questions I still have (Spoilers)
How did Agni contract AIDS?Was it through Rudolph or Teresa.What happend at the end to Teresa??

And Then I Read - Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy, And the Bomb

It was one of those days,when i was blind surfing,searching for nothing in particular,that i came across a blog about the US diplomatic handling of the nuclear flash point of 1998.The blog had a few passages from a book, of which it was an review .
My interest was triggered ,by the sheer action that seems to be taking place in the diplomatic circle of an country trying to meddle into the affairs of two other countries to safe guard its interests, and I ended up hunting the book down.It was Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy, And the Bomb.

The book is an memoir of sorts and presents the perspective of an individual from Clinton administration(Strobe Talbott). Whatever is mentioned in the books might not be absolute truth,but rather,but what what the individual things is happening and what he deduces to be the possible P.O.V of other parties involved.Keeping in mind there are other narratives possible is the right context to read this non fiction.
I did have to say the book did manage to hold my interest till the end,possibly due to the fact that i am trying to formalize my views on India.

One of the Key I have from this book is change in my opinion about the senior statesman of BJP,Mr.Jaswant Singh.For me through its term at the helm of Indian affairs ,i always considered Jaswant Singh to be a peripheral figure,with more of the actions being handled by Vajpayee,Advani Fernandes et al.But the book seems to indicate the sort of clout Jawant had over the govt and more so the trust Vajpayee had on him.

Jaswant Sing also comes across as a suave ,urbane and quite sophisticated gentleman.Whoever uses words like "principle variable in the calculus","vivisected","find modus vivendi" definitely has to be termed as a sophisticated man.A unintended side effect of reading this book is that i have ended up buying Jaswant Singh's memoirs "A call to Honor" ,to get his perspective of the NDA days and events mentioned by Mr.Talbott.

Also in the book,I found a few interesting tid bits ,inter spread across the pages in the book. like how the Foreign office was rather pissed off that they came to know the news about Indian nuclear tests from CNN,How George vented his feelings about being strip searched in US airports as a reply to an innocuous comment from US delegation,how there were clues about impending nuclear tests in a Sikh newsletter ,how N.Rao had to abandon the initial plans of the nuclear test as U.S found the Satellite images of the blast preparations beforehand, leading to a more discreet and successful second attempt.

Also of interest is the mention of a what I believe to be the back story of the Jallianwallah massacre by Genral Dwyer,(Further research needed).


There are also a couple of interesting quotes that I will take way from the book

"Author of memorandum of conversation never comes across second best-Dean Acheson"

"Jis gaon nahin jaana, uska raasta mat poocho"

When I read - "Hear the Wind Sing"

It was one fine afternoon, while enjoying a game of baseball, that Marukami decided to he wanted to be writer and started work on his literary work. The work ended up in the form of the “Hear the Wind Sing”. In Japanese of course.

For some strange reason (which I believe strongly is related to brand marketing),English translation of this novel is not available outside the Japan.Partly due to the bibliomanical tendencies that has been coming in lately and partly due to the aim to have a collectable ,I ended buying the novel online directly from Japan.

“Hear the Wind Sing” is not a novel. With just around 120 pages in a pocket-sized, at four by six inches book, the book can only be categorized as novella.

Like all other Marukami book, even this one has a male ,20 something drifter as the chief protagonist.
A Biology graduate waiting for the summer term to end. Novella is a trip through 18 days pf his life. With a mostly first person P.O.V, the novella takes us though 18 days of the protagonist life with couple of his friends and three ladies in his life.

The novel start of with “…There’s no such thing as perfect writing. Just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair “and then he go on with a monologue on his views on writing all of ,which I believe will be the only thing from the novel that will stay with me novel few months down the line.

.

"....What I can set down here in writing only amounts to a catalog. Not a novel,not literature,not even art. Just a notebook with a line ruled down the center.And maybe a lesson or two in it somewhere.
If it's art or literature you are looking for,you'd do well to read what the Greeks wrote.In order for there to be true art,there necessarily has to be slavery.Thats how it was with the ancient Greeks:while the slaves worked the fields,prepared the meals,and rowed the ships,the citizens would bask beneath the Mediterranean sun,rapt in poetical composition or engaged in their mathematics.That's how it is with heart.
Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.
and that includes me.
Those people digging around in the refrigerator at 3am, those are the only people I can write for...."

Ahh...to be an Intellectual manqué ? ....

So why the new blog now!!

Started reading (and I mean not your prescribed text book) pretty late in life. Over the last 10- 12 years have been reading books liking it or hating it completely on the emotional connect the book makes.
And that makes me, as an IIT aspirant once, devour Chetan Bhagats debut novel, even as the knowledgeable critics tore into it.
After reading "Midnight Children" all I could think was "Implausible Storyline, Too many native words". And then it went on to win the Booker of Bookers,
I read Legends of Khasak and felt it was just a story of a drifter in a fictional town and wondered why all the brouhaha about Malayalam new wave and magical realism was all about.

I know I am missing out of a lot of good thing in process of reading. I knew nothing of the literary devices, the various genres and other techniques on to which the writers put a whole lot of energy. So I am ready to educate myself.

Over the next 10 years I plan to document my reading experience to figure out the novels I read, things I take away from it and hopefully come up with a point of view at the end of it.

I plan to use guides in the process of reading from literary big wigs like Thomas C. Foster, Adler, Von Doren,Susan Bauer and Harold Bloom.
The following books mainly to compile the reading list over the period. Apart from these I plan to use the blog to put across a few words of all those books that still lie in the book shelf and also the impulse buys I will indulge in the coming years.

So here hoping for a bon voyage.