I was convinced by Dragos’s very enthusiastic review to try this book, so I went out and got it at the very first chance. And I did like it, but I can’t say I loved it. Somehow, it strikes me as the kind of book you like better a while after you’re read it – its meditative and lyrical tone are not exactly the stuff to keep you hooked, but more to get you thinking. Usually the second alternative is better, but since it’s (almost) December and thoughts of holidays, presents and treats are filling my head it would have been better to have gone for something light & fun. But at least now I know that’s what I want to read this month

In short, the book is about 2 generations of villagers and their plights. Most of the names are biblical – like Matthew the land owner, the Siamese twins Moses & Elias, Joseph (both father & son, both shepherds), Solomon, old man Gabriel and Judas, owner of the local tavern – but it is not God that rules over this small patch of land but the devil. Women, though ever-present in the book and just as caught in the implacable destiny are unnamed and, had I known more about the Bible, I would have been able (perhaps) to think up reasons why. The book is beautifully written and very poetically charged, there are repetitive passages, meditations on human condition and on death that are touching and worth remembering and the prose is graceful and effortless – reminding me a bit of Jose Saramago (in fact, Mr. Peixoto won the Jose Saramago literary prize).

I think: perhaps the sky is a huge sea of fresh water and we, instead of walking under it, walk on top of it; perhaps we see everything upside down and earth is a kind of sky, so that when we die, when we die, we fall and sink into the sky.

Each chapter begins with a 3^rd person narration of the main events, followed by a 1^st person perspective of the actors involved, so that you end up seeing from all the angles and understanding on several levels. It’s a nice trick, making you, as reader, feel omniscient – even more than the narrator. At the same time, the individual voices are not that different, they are all pained, all flawed, all wronged by the greater force who decided their path. The whole book ends up being a meditation on destiny, death and the ephemeral nature of life. The devil is a malevolent force and, in such a space devoid of faith, it is almost too easy for it to instill doubt and anger in people’s hearts. The little love that can be found is unrequited, untold or abruptly cut.

There really is nothing new to say at this point, except how excited I was on Tuesday and how nervous I was on Wednesday right before he signed my book (books actually, I brought 2, both with a personal significance: Fury because it was my introduction to the wonderful wonderful world of Salman Rushdie, and The ground beneath her feet, because that’s where I snatched my blog name from ).

He was such a nice and down to earth person (and slightly self-deprecating too) that I can only like him more. I love that he’s planning to write till he drops, how he talked about his literary influences (many of whom I’ve read and loved myself, some of which I plan to read from now on – like Saadat Hasan Manto) and how fun he was with his musings on superheroes and his coolness as a father. I’m sure they’re stories he’s told many times, but it’s different when you’re there. Of course, the reading was fun (and I’m a  sucker for his accent) and I appreciated how he underlined that there is a lot of humor in his work. It’s quite true that most people don’t expect it – all the more reason to try and discover him.

What I didn’t like….oh, but who cares! It was a great idea and I hope that this is only the beginning and that I’ll be seeing more of my favorite writers in Bucharest. Being subjective about the author (a fan, as I’ve said quite a few times before) I was sure I’d enjoy these 2 days, but I’m glad I wasn’t alone: at least Dragos and Ionuca seem to have been rather charmed

It’s that time of the year when spirits are running rather too high for my comfort – the elections. But, because I’m not heavily invested in either side, I can celebrate the fact that my little blog just turned 2. ‘course I didn’t think it would make it this far, but I’m glad it did so I plan to keep it going. For a while at least, until my laziness gets the better of me

It’s only fitting that on an anniversary I get to write about an author I love. No, not Salman R. this time, but Neil Gaiman (wouldn’t it be great if he came around here? I bet he’d be tons of fun ) and Neverwhere. Before anything else though, I think I’m really in love with the title. There’s  magic in it, it’s not nowhere, it’s neverwhere, an incantation to transport you. That’s why I don’t particularly like the translation (nicaieri) - it doesn’t convey the same feeling of wonder.

Richard Mayhew is a regular guy, with a 9 to 5 job, a demanding girlfriend and a rather submissive demeanor. One day, a hurt girl appears right in front of him and he chooses to care for her, instead of following his girlfriend to a very important business dinner. From then on, he becomes part of the London Below, a place of mythical creatures, angels, powerful rats and their human servants – the rat speakers. Plus 2 criminal yet well spoken thugs – Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, Door, the eldest daughter of Lord Portico (part of a family who possessed the ability to open pretty much anything) a Marquis and an Earl. In this London Below are all the people who have fallen through the cracks, people for whom time, the world, its dangers and its stakes are not the same as in London Above. And I love how Mr. Gaiman gives new meanings (or literal meanings) to things part of the everyday existence (the tube stations – Blackfriars, Earl’s Court, the floating markets held in Harrods or Belfast Tower etc) – the whole affair vaguely reminded me of Harry Potter.

It’s great fun, this book, and I had no idea it was written as a companion to the TV series (I actually thought it was the other way around). A while ago I tried watching it, but I honestly have to say I didn’t go through the whole show because it looked pretty bad…so I might hold out for the movie, if it ever gets done.

Today, the very lovely (and funny) Allison Janney is 50. I can only hope she’ll do many more movies & that she’ll be part of whatever it is that will mark Mr. Sorkin’s return to TV (I read about it this morning, I can honestly say I was super excited. I do miss the walk & talk ).

Right then….about White Teeth…it turned out to be exactly my kind of story. Maybe a little too much so – like all the ingredients were there (murky family histories, immigrant families and their expectations, adjustment issues, political & relational differences etc) but a spark was missing. Hard to explain really – I had a good time reading it, it was fun, but perhaps not particularly memorable. Maybe Times listed it in the Top 100 books from 1923 to 2005, but I have a feeling it won’t be in a similar top 50 years from now. Still, the amazing thing is Ms Smith wrote it when she was only 24 (!!). 24 – that’s how old I am now, and nowhere near capable of such imagination…

At the center of the story there’s Archibald Jones and Samad Iqbal, WWII comrades. After his divorce, Archie tries to kill himself but is saved by sheer chance; feeling he has been given a new lease on life, he spontaneously stumbles into a party where he meets Clara Bowden. Three weeks later, the white, 40something Archie will marry the black, toothless 19-year-old Clara. Through the seemingly unbreakable friendship of the 2 men, the destinies of the Joneses and Iqbals will forever be entwined. Samad (himself also married to a much younger woman – Alsana) is born in Bangladesh and emigrates to the UK long after the war (in which he fought in the imperial forces) was over. Not knowing anyone else there, he looks up Archie and rekindles their relation. The 2 men share everything – much more than they do with their respective wives. Archie is always ready to admire Sam, always ready to listen to his neverending stories about his ancestor, Mangal Pande (who may have fired the first shot in the Indian mutiny against the British forces) – and Sam is always in need of such a sympathetic ear.

Then comes the second generation – Irie Jones and the twins Millat and Magid Iqbal. The boys’ destinies are heavily affected by their father’s inner turmoil and inadequacies as a Muslim: where he feels he is a failure, too heavily influenced by the lenient Anglican morals, he expects his sons to be entrenched in tradition. Unable to lead by example, ultimately unsure of what he really wants from them; Samad ends up being eternally disappointed, culminating with the decision to separate the 2 brothers: Millat will stay in London, while Magid will be sent off back to Bangladesh. Alsana is never involved or aware of the decision until after the fact – which only splits the household even further. Thus, Millat’s evolution to a teen thug and later to a Muslim fundamentalist (not pushed by higher ideals, but looking to belong to a group, like in the American mafia movies he so fervently loves) is no surprise to anyone (just as Irie’s hopeless passion for him).

While the Irie & Millat are in school, a third family will enter their lives – the Chalfens, intellectuals, British to the bone and set on straightening the two misguided kids. Going through the whole plot would take a while – and it wouldn’t be fair, because a lot of the fun comes from discovering what will go wrong next in these people’s lives. Suffice to say that, eventually, all 3 families and the various groups their members are affiliated to will finally converge to one place: new year, 1992, at the unveiling of Marcus Chalfen’s controversial genetic project. From then on, I felt the book had a very anticlimactic ending – almost like Ms Smith got bored and sent all her characters walking off into the sunset.

Although events take place in the span of about 20 years (mid 70s to early 90s) and capture a few historically significant moments, the narrative is neither linear, nor does it take on a serious tone (and I quite enjoyed the humor in it). Ms Smith plays jump rope with the timelines, skipping from present to past, exploring the roots and stories of Mangal Pande, of the WWII adventures of Archie & Sam, of the Bowden clan, their Jamaican heritage and their unyielding attachment to the Jehovah’s witnesses. And through it all, characters are constructed – some shallower (like Clara) some more rounded (like Samad who, though thoroughly unlikable, feels real in his dilemmas, contradictions, mistakes & punishments, ultimately embodying displacement), but all finding a niche in this sometimes dizzying book.

Never thought I’d use those two tags in the same post…

Now the tricky part is getting seats on Tuesday – I think we’re gonna need all the luck we can get

I’m realizing now that Mr. Bradbury is more of a poet than anything else – or at least, this is the side he chooses to display in Now and Forever. The book is actually composed of two unrelated novellas, Somewhere a band is playing and Leviathan 99. To me, the most interesting part was actually “behind the scenes” – how Somewhere… was written after the author saw Katherine Hepburn’s Summertime in the 50s and how he kept working on the story, hoping that someday he’ll be able to give it to her and she’s turn it into a movie. Young Ms Hepburn would have been great as Nef, the mysterious, charismatic, ageless female character and I’m sure they would have found someone just as good to play Mr. Cardiff. But would this lyrically charged atmosphere have come alive? I don’t know. While this particular quality does not attract me in prose, I did enjoy the actual poem, mostly because of its repetitive musicality – I could almost hear it playing in my head:

Somewhere a bad is playing/Playing the strangest tunes,/Of sunflower seeds and sailors/Who tide with the strangest moons.

While Somewhere is more fantasy than sci-fi, Leviathan 99 is a sort of cosmic Moby Dick. It’s interesting -  Quell the green, mind reading alien is a pretty rounded character, the image conjured by the lost city in space is haunting, as is the idea of the ancient funeral music, but Ishmael comes across as weak, indecisive and ultimately uninteresting and the mad Captain…I would have liked to see him harsher, stronger. And because I didn’t connect with the characters, I was very uninvolved in the whole story. Not to mention the fact that I didn’t read Moby Dick so I probably missed out on a lot of the story – I do know it’s a classic, but sea adventures are just not my thing.

Overall, I’m a bit less enthused about Mr. Bradbury than I was after reading The Illustrated Man. But I still have at least Farenheit 451 to go through.

Now, for actual reviews – go to NYTimes or The Times.

Specimen Days, much like The Hours before it, consists of 3 separate yet intertwining stories at the heart of which is the poetry of Walt Whitman. I should start by saying that I’m not particularly interested in poetry, so before this I hadn’t read anything by Mr. Whitman. And this book, though I enjoyed it, did nothing to spark my interest in the poet. Also, I definitely would choose The Hours over this any day, but probably because, at the time, I felt some kind of personal connection with it which I still can’t completely shake off. If anyone asked me about my favorite books, The Hours would be in there, so this was a tough act to follow; in fact, until reading Dragos’s post on the book, I didn’t really want to read another book by Mr. Cunningham for fear of being disappointed. But this is all really personal, and probably has nothing to do with literary value

These 3 stories happen in 3 different historical moments: past (late 1800s), present (early 200s) and future (some 150 years in the future) but in the same place: New York. A slightly different ode to the city than the ones Paul Auster usually practices, but an ode nonetheless – ode to permanent transformation, to the city’s ever-changing face and to the lives that feed it every day. Throughout the stories we encounter the same character types: a man (Simon in all 3), a woman (Catherine, Cat and Catareen) and a little boy (Lucas, Luke and Luke ), all caught in a never-ending cycle of destruction, loss, hardship and alienation.

In the machine – the first story has a 13-year-old boy at its center: Lucas. He takes his brother’s (Simon) place at the factory, after the machine caught and mauled his brother to death, thus becoming the sole breadwinner of the family. At the same time, he tries to protect his brother’s fiancée, Catherine, on whom he’s always had a crush and, though the unwillingly spouts verses from Walt Whitman, he does see a deeper meaning in them; he understands that despite the conditions he lives in, there still is great beauty in the world. In the end he saves Catherine from a fire at the company where she worked, but only by paying the ultimate price. This rising industrial backdrop reminded me of a Jack London story I once read and which, at the time (I must have been 12) impressed me a lot. Wonder what it was called….

In The children’s crusade Cat is a member of a police taskforce who receives calls from all the „loonies” who threaten to kill or blow people up and whose job is to identify what is worth investigating. When she misinterprets a phone call from a child, a bomb explodes somewhere in the city, killing a man. Before they can get to the bottom of it all, a second phone call is followed by a second bomb. The little terrorists quote Walt Whitman, justifying their actions by saying that they will return the world to a previous order. The third child comes to kill Cat, but he is not as convinced of his mission and she ends up taking him in. Not wishing to see him handed to the authorities, she runs away from her job and too-good-to-be-true boyfriend and takes the child to start a new life. Since he has no name, he says he’d like to be called Luke, like Cat’s other (now dead) son.

In Like beauty Simon is a humanoid machine (like the Jude Law character in A.I.), Catareen is a lizard-like alien who has found refuge on Earth and Luke – the little boy they find while being on the run from the corporations that now control the west of the US. It a post nuclear future (Jericho?) but not only; it’s the age of a new type of racism, of new beings to discriminate against, a new age where a robot can have romantic feelings of an alien.

There are a lot of elements that go through these stories, uniting them closely: the characters reflecting one another, the buildings and their changing functions, events that are now history (in the second story the fire at the company where Catherine worked is mentioned; while in the third story we find that the children’s crusade was a nation wide event) and, of course, Gaya’s store and the mysterious white bowl that passes through all the characters’ hands like a mark of the damned.

On a side note, my favorite Scissor Sisters song (and when I say favorite I actually mean “the only one I remotely like”) was inspired by the book, because the lead singer is a fan. It’s called Other Side (and the Doctor Who clip is the only one I found).

I couldn’t say I’m a fan of Bill Bryson’s – Shakespeare being the first book I ever completely read; but, having started A short history of nearly everything (I stopped at page 100-and-something and the fault is 100% mine), I could guess I’ll probably become a fan soon enough. I really like his style: it’s very matter of fact, direct and funny at the same time, without much stylistic flourishing. He manages to separate what is essential, from what is either speculation or from what would need in-depth study – a quality I appreciate immensely (you’d think it’s easy, but I know a lot of people who have a hard time discerning the main idea of a text/discussion). Plus, his books are informative and well researched, so it makes for a pleasant and instructive read.

I’m not exactly into biographies – I concede they are very interesting (some, anyways) but I can’t seem to get motivated to delve into them; I’d rather drift off into some imaginary world. So I started the book with almost zero background knowledge on Shakespeare; by the end of it, I can’t say I’ve particularly expanded my academic horizon; but at least I understand the context a bit better. It’s a good starting point either to make you curious to dig deeper into the Bard’s life (yes, I had to use the bard title at least once ) or if you’re like me and just want the big picture. The main thesis is not to describe Shakespeare’s life, but to point out how little truth we actually know of him or his contemporaries and how, even with the scarcity of facts, we happen to know a lot more of him than say Marlowe or Ben Johnson. This review in The Telegraph criticizes the lack of focus on the plays; personally, I didn’t mind since I didn’t come to this book for textual analysis or interpretation. Overall, you get a feel of the age and you get to have fun with a selection of crazy Shakespeare was someone else theories.

My “huh?” moments:

-         The face we know as Shakespeare may very well be some random guy.

-         What we truly know about his life could probably fit in a page. The thousands of books written are highly speculative. Shakespeare’s first biographer, Nicholas Rowe, wrote in his 1709 Life 11 pieces of information, 8 of which are false.

-         Shakespeare had 6 known signatures – all of which are different. Funnily enough, the name we use today is not one of them.

-         Elizabethan entertainment: horse riding chimpanzees chased and devoured by dogs. Had it not been for the animal protection agencies, we would have a reality show about that…

-         The term box-office once described an actual office where the box with the day’s theater earnings was stored. How very…literal.

-         Shakespeare at his worst borrowed almost mechanically- a passage in Henry V is taken more or less verbatim from Holinshed’s “Chronicles”.

-         A couple of words that were actually invented by S: dwindle, hereditary, excellent, assassination, zany – overall, a total of over 300. Plus expressions that we use on a daily basis (some of them turning into clichés): vanish into thin air, play fast and loose (seriously?), budge an inch, foul play, flesh and blood etc.

-         The mass appeal theaters had in the age.

-         Hamlet, for example, exists in 3 versions: 1603 & 1604 quartos and the 1623 folio. It’s not an isolated case; most plays as we know them now have been “reconstructed” based on several sources.

-         In 1840 PT Barnum had the idea to put Shakespeare’s home on wheels and have it tour the US. It was the push needed by the British authorities to turn it into a museum.

-         More famous proponents of the “Shakespeare was not really Shakespeare” theory include Freud, Orson Wells and John Galsworthy. Their preferences regarding the real author vary.

All I wanted was the chance to be a man – and for that, one murder was enough.

The White Tiger is an Indian success story, a model for local entrepreneurs and start-up dreamers – or so would Balram, our narrator and main character want you thinking for the first page or so. It quickly becomes obvious that it is, in fact, a story of extreme poverty, corruption inhumanity and murder. The social gap between East and West, between India and Europe (or India and fellow Asian Japan) is quite staggering. To think that this one country, a rising economy, contains about one sixth of the world population, a high percentage of which lives in The Darkness makes you wonder if it won’t eventually implode – like anything else built on an unsound foundation.

The contrast drawn between the darkness (mainland India, villages around the river Ganges – where Balram is born) and the light (coastal India, the big cities – Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai) is stark; but then again, there’s contrast even within the light: malls, office buildings, a whole “Electronics City” standing alongside widespread slums. Of course, none of this is actually news – but well-known facts about the world we live in; but to immerse in this world, even through a book, can be somewhat hard to digest and can certainly throw a new light on your own lifestyle.

Balram is by no measure an extraordinary character. His destiny is that of millions from the lower casts, a life of poverty, illiteracy and servitude to masters and elders of his family (Granny is quite the character; it would be easy to judge her as an evil witch on first sight, but if you delve deeper into her own background, you can see she hasn’t much choice but to be this way; it’s not a land where grandmothers make cookies and tell stories by the fire). As his US educated master would say, Balram is a half-baked man, but you can’t really hold that against him. The irony of fate is that, in order to become a man (a free man, on his on feet, as his father had once hoped he would), he has to slay another.

The tale of how he came to murder his master is put forth through letters he writes to China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, after hearing of his impending visit to India (of course, they are nothing but a literary device). In doing so, he describes many of the social injustices that have been infringed on him (or the likes of him), the corruption that flaws any aspect of public service (government, public health & education systems, elections etc), and his burgeoning thoughts of revenge in a darkly funny and straightforward manner. Sure, perhaps some characters are sketchy and somewhat grotesque (the other driver in Buckingham towers, the men shitting at the entrance in a slum) – but this doesn’t steal much from the authenticity of other episodes. It’s a bit like Crime and Punishment, but without the crippling guilt (which actually is the whole point of Crime…); Balram feels his killing was justified, he feels he’s been enlightened enough to see the bars of his cage of servitude and, in doing so, he sacrifices his entire family to escape (the remaining relatives of his master will have killed them).

Though insisting the big city corrupted him, Balram was never exactly an epitome of morality. The more he learns of the world, the more choices he has to make – and he usually makes them for his own advantage, not for any higher sense of righteousness or duty (denouncing a colleague’s Muslim faith in order to get ahead in a household he knew despised Muslims, not sending money to his family, calculating which attitude would bring him most advantage etc). So he is not “fallen” he is just a man who’s learnt what he was allowed to, and who one day rebelled.

My favorite metaphor was definitely the rooster coop, symbolizing the mindless enslavement of the lower castes: they are all aware of their fate and take it as is, without ever entertaining the possibility of change – just like chickens before the slaughter. This is really all that sets Balram apart.

By no means a perfect book (it starts off strong and then wavers a bit towards the middle and end), Mr. Adiga’s debut won him the Booker last year. I assume there’s got to be a bit of pressure on him to deliver the second time around and, personally, I’ll be looking out for his next book, since I definitely enjoyed this one.

Reviews: The Guardian, India Today, The Telegraph (-> I’m not so sure about their real India; but I liked what Mr. Adiga said in an interview: I simply wrote about the India I know, the one I live in. It’s not “alternative India” for me! It’s pretty mainstream, trust me)

Being spurred on by the movie coming out this December (which I’m still really anxious for, despite the awful tagline) and by the fact that the book was on sale – I had my first literary encounter with Mr. Holmes. Sherlock Holmes. And it was quite fun – up to a point at least

A study in scarlet is the first novel to feature Sherlock & Mr. Watson, and I really enjoyed getting first hand character descriptions. The detective is not at all like I imagined – I think I saw him as a bit of a gruff Poirot, but I liked his hands-on approach and his scientific background. Of course, just like Poirot, he’s all too conceited and impressed with himself, but at least it’s for good reason.

So after reading about 30 pages in the morning on my way to work, I couldn’t wait to get back home and see what happens next. However, I was pretty disappointed by the long backstory dedicated to our murderer and his motives – the wild west setting, the evil Mormons plot (with a special appearance by real life prominent Mormon Brigham Young) – it was all fairly dull and slightly sappy. Plus, Mr. Holmes makes things sound a bit too easy – I’d like to read more with him struggling harder to crack a case; so if anyone can promise me no more wild west stories, I’d give Sir Doyle another go

And speaking of sirs, I’ve seen a pretty funny interview with Salman Rushdie in Craig Ferguson’s show – plus, he talks a bit about his impending visit here (and Dracula’s castle, of course)