Reply 1988

Reply 1988 is an absolute masterpiece.

Writing this is like ripping my heart to shreds but whatever.

So, Reply 1988 a wholesome story of five families who live in the same street. It takes place in Seoul, South Korea and the year is 1988. Korea is hosting the Olympics that year and our female lead Sung Deok-sun is plaque holder for Madagascar. Deok-sun is cheery middle child of three kids, easy-go-lucky high schooler and is known for livening up any place.

I could relate to Deok-sun’s character so frickin much! She’s the kind of person who has “7 years of bad luck for anyone who touches this book” written on her books, always zoned out during classes, and but has a heart of pure gold. She tries to study hard but fails miserably and ranks very low for university admission, and is in the verge of not getting accepted to any university. So, her mother visits a fortune-teller asking for advice. The fortune-teller councils her mother to change Deok-sun’s name to Soo-yeon. It’s hilarious watching everyone get accustomed to Soo-yeon from Deok-sun but after a few months, Deok-sun Soo-yeon still fails her exams. Her mother learns about this from the class-teacher during a PTA meeting. Next-time, her mom sees Soo-yeon, she goes back to calling her Deok-sun. This scene was utterly heartbreaking because after that Deok-sun literally begs her mom to go back to calling her Soo-yeon and that she will study well from then now but her mom just walks away saying “it’s okay”.

Pins and needles in my already terrible heart. I have been a victim to so many such situations. Especially after maths answer sheets were distributed at school and we had to get them signed from our parents that day and submit it next day.

But Deok-sun’s life is better than mine. She has four close friends who live in the same street – Sung Sun-woo, Kim Jung-hwan, Dong-ryong, and Choi Taek. Sun-woo is the model child – hardworking, studious, kind-hearted and mother’s favorite. Jung-hwan is the exact opposite of Deok-sun. Like Sun-woo he’s studious, he loves his family a lot but never expresses it, and a AGMARK certified introvert. Coming to Dong-ryong, he’s neglected child of workaholic parents that he’s often seen dining and hanging out at either of one of the four other families, hates school, loves dancing and English songs. Finally Choi Taek – Taek is the neighborhood’s priced possession. He’s a world-class baduk player and is almost never home for anything and when he’s home, his friends make sure to pamper him with ramyeon, Hollywood movies, and Korean version of Monopoly.

This show vividly portrays everyday lives of these five families, how closely each family are knit to one another, and how the children of each family make it to adulthood through university entrance exams, teenage crushes, days of Walkman, trying out KFC for the first time and so on. Initially Reply 1988 may come off as a husband-search game for Deok-sun but the show is much more than that. Each of the 20 episodes span over 175 mins and they are all heavily packed with feelings, sharp dialogues and stellar acting. The actors have put out such a good show that it takes barely a couple of episodes to get emotionally and mentally invested in it. I found the daily struggles faced by each family very relatable albeit the show depicting a Korean lifestyle in the 1980s.

Personally, this is just the second Korean drama that I am watching so it also was a learning curve on Korean culture, cuisine, and their moral values for me. I was one of the few people who used to hold up their nose at Korean entertainment and man, do I deeply regret that! They have dead brilliant actors. And their story arcs are like no other. One of the things that stuck out in Reply 1988 was how subtly the director placed cliffhangers throughout and ever-so-smoothly reconnected to it later.

Reply 1988 is definitely of the shows that I’m going to be recommending for the next 5 years at the least! to anyone who asks me for recommendation. It’s physically painful to write about this show without spoiling anything (in case anyone decides to watch) but man, I laughed out loud, bawled my eyes out, so many scenes had such an emotional impact and made me think a lot! This writing does zero justice to the show but then again when I have the most to say, words fail me.

One Part Woman

One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


One Part Woman (Maadhuorubagan in Tamil, also won the Sahitya Academy award) is a short, gripping tale of Kaliappa and Ponnayi, a “childless” married couple of 12 years. Through the years, Kali and Ponnu face severe verbal lashes from every single person they meet, sometimes straight to their face and sometimes cloaked in innuendos for their inability to spawn a child.

This novel unfolds the couple’s diurnal life, the community rituals and sacrifices they make, and so on. Although to a non-Tamil person reading this, it’s unlikely that the translated version will strike a chord. Nevertheless, this is a must-read to understand (from an insiders point of view) a typical problem faced by childless married couples in the Southern part of India, back in the days.



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Murakami’s Men

In vain efforts to amp my long-lost reading habit, I’d joined an online book-club three months ago. There aren’t any stringent rules to follow but there are themes for every month. You can choose any book you like to read (pertaining to that theme, of course) and it’s up to your wish to discuss it during the weekly meeting. For February, the theme is surrealism. And the only unread books I had under that genre were Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs and Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami.

It was not a quandary picking out one from the two. I loved every single Murakami novel I’ve ever read – started with Norwegian Woods, read Sputnik Sweetheart a month later, and finished Kafka on the Shore in 2018; it made sense to start Killing Commendatore.

Like every other Murakami novel, Killing Commendatore starts in a strikingly similar fashion – the protagonist is moving out of/running away from/leaving Tokyo. In Killing Commendatore the protagonist’s marriage ends in the first few pages of the book. As a panacea to heartbreak and to reconcile with the fact that his wife had been indulging in infidelity – he aimlessly drives around coastal Japan at the risk of looking like a desperado. For a whole month. He has just a couple of t-shirts, a few clean pants and a jumper in his duffel bag. And some savings left in the bank with which he moves in to numerous lodgings at some towns that smell of diesel and fresh fish, as he makes his pit-stops. Our protagonist is a portrait painter, not so famous but renowned enough to be commissioned by business moguls to paint their portrait.

After a month of continuous driving and dwindling savings, he takes his things and moves into his friend’s forsaken cottage on a hill, far from civilization. To make some money, he teaches painting classes once in every week at the local community school. One night, from nowhere, a bell starts ringing at 1:30 am right outside his house and continues every night but his meagre attempts to find out who that is goes to vain as he cannot gather anything. With the help of his neighbor Wataru Menshiki (also a recluse) for whom he also did a portrait, they find that the sound is coming from under the rocks of settlement, near his house. Immediately, they arrange to remove the stones and on digging deeper, they find something completely unexpected and shocking.

Murakami takes about 4-5 pages to pitch his protagonist’s character. And only while reading Killing Commendatore, it slowly it dawned on me – almost all his main characters have the same fundamental features. It’s a neatly packed trait-toolkit – like a minimal double-layered bento lunchbox of (i) introspection – all his characters (pertinent to the ones I’ve read) are always pensive and contemplative about something, (ii) financial acumen – money always flows in somehow, well-enough to support their sustenance, (iii) carnal activities – it’s surprising to me actually because they are put forth as mediocre, slightly-above average looking men but very good looking women with apparently even more amazing private parts throw themselves at the protagonists, (iv) weird fetishes – they, in one way or another, makes sexual references with respect to their family members. In Kafka on the Shore, Tamura refers to his sister and mother. In Killing Commendatore, it’s the painter’s dead sister, (v) western operas – I am so grateful for this. Thanks to winter Olympics, I was introduced to Mahler, Tchaikovsky and Bizet and now thanks to Murakami, I can’t stop listening to Verdi and Jonas Kaufmann. Finally, (vi) coffee and sandwiches. In a Murakami novel, you can always count on the leads to have a coffee and sandwiches at least once in every 15 pages.

But I think, this is where Murakami’s genius maneuvers into play. When I jot down these traits so seriously, it looks appalling and leads one to think “who would read a book with such repulsive characters?” but whilst reading the book, Murakami draws you into his head and weaves his world in such a way that everything sounds very normal. His books are mostly magical-surrealism – there are raining frogs, talking cats, mystical worlds underground, dead Buddhist monk augmenting into an “Idea” and so on. The characters are on about death, purgatory, coffee and sandwiches, books and Japanese art, Japanese history and their thought processes is so scintillating. I sometimes envy these characters and partly why I love Murakami’s books so much despite borderline persona repetition and disconcerting traits is because there is a kind of sadness, a lot of intellect, their replies are always laconic but copious with meaning, they have such discipline and routine towards life. I could sit for hours and hours and listen to a person like that. And personally, every time after I read a book, I’m affected (for lack of a better word) by “character-syndrome”; I start thinking like I’m the protagonist. I hope this is not just me! 0_o But my point here is, after every Murakami novel, it’s like looking at the world through a different lens. It almost feels like meditating. And I think this is one of the reasons why everyone should read Haruki Murakami’s works.

In the words of the man himself, “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

A Little Life

I have never cried so much after finishing a book as this one. It’s been about 6 hours and an Accounting seminar later, since that happened. But now the book has got me thinking if the 700 odd pages were actually worth my sob-fest?

A Little Life is very, very, utterly depressing book where if you’re penetrable enough – every other page can make you cry. It’s about the lives of 4 friends – Jude, Willhem, Malcolm and JB. The timeline is anachronistic, the narrators change now and then among 6-7 characters. At first, it was challenging to even have an idea of who’s narrating the chapter but once you got the hang of Hanya Yanagihara’s style of storytelling – it is manageable.

4-5 months ago, I joined an online book-club and made some amazing friends. About 90% of them recommended A Little Life to me. They said “brace yourself”, “get your box of Kleenex”, this and that. And honest to their word, the book really is beyond morose. It was not just the ending of the book that was depressing but also parts in between where I just had to close the book, sit in silence for a few minutes and tell myself, “I can come back to the book later to avoid the surging melancholy in me.” But it’s hard to put a book down when you’re invested by 400/720 pages into it. The book really forces sorrow on you and despite all the heads-up from my book-club, it got to me. Sometimes, it feels like the author just isn’t there. It’s just the characters swimming in your head doing things written on the page in front.

Moreover, when you read a book as dense as this in a couple of sittings, it takes a mental toll on you. Reality becomes purgatory, fluttering between actuality and the fictional life you’ve been in for the past 15-17 hours. Making a normal conversation feels like a task because the characters from the book are still in your head, having a conversation of their own. If a book can make you feel like that, it’s a 5/5. A Little Life did that to me.

It’s mainly the story of Jude St. Francis, his friendship with Willhem, Malcolm and JB. They all meet each other for the first time when they’re 17 years old while studying at a rich Massachusetts college (Harvard probably). These 4 are inseparable. They spend holidays at Malcolm and JB’s house alternatively during their college years. Sometimes they travel together to different parts of America, exploring. Jude and Willhem are orphans – Willhem loses his parents during his college second year and you never really know anything about Jude’s family because he was found near a dumpster as a newborn baby 17 years ago. Among secrets, sweatshirts, ramen noodles, weed, and money – they all share their common undying love and care for Jude. Jude has problems with his leg and sometimes the pain is so excruciating that he collapses instantly in the next available piece of furniture. And no matter what – Willhem, Malcolm and JB make sure they’re there for him. Their friendship is borderline enviable. This trio would later be joined by Andy, a doctor who also starts tending for Jude and his deteriorating health.

Their friendship blossoms slowly, Jude and Willhem – initially poor end up becoming a well-paid litigator and an actor, respectively. Whereas Malcolm, a black guy trying to come to terms with him growing up very rich in an affluent, white-race populated uptown society in New York City while people of his race still fought for equality, becomes a famous architect. That leaves JB. Jean-Baptiste (JB) is the son of an immigrant from Haiti, his family does well enough in America to put him in a private school for his education. Through the first few chapters of the book, you’re led into believing that JB (who becomes a mildly popular artist) would be the one to fare well in life. But he succumbs to cocaine and eventually ruins everything for himself. Slowly, these 4 drift into adulthood and also drift apart. But Jude and Willhem despite all odds only get closer.

The next 400 pages are about Jude. Jude is almost a troglodyte, he likes to keep to himself, minds his own business as a corporate litigator, always wears full-hand shirts, never wears shorts, very good at maths, decorously behaved and can do everything possible at a professional level: from cooking to plumbing to tutoring to stitching. Although he’s very close to his 3 friends, Andy and his professor Harold from law school, no one really knows about his past or why he wears full-handed shirt even on a 40 degree Celsius summer day. Due to a car accident, he loses his ability to walk normally so sometimes Jude uses a wheelchair or a cane. Slowly, via many incidents where Jude let’s his aloofness slip up: Willhem realizes many things about him. How Jude’s arms are full of self-harm through razors and blades, how he deliberately drove his car into a tree just so he could feel pain.

What Willhem doesn’t know is that Jude’s so overwrought with trauma from his childhood, he harms himself as a defense-mechanism against falling into a spiral of unbearably spine-chilling nostalgia. But despite all that and more, Willhem sticks with Jude. Through thick and thin. Some people say this book is about friendship, some say it’s about love. I really don’t know. But either friendship or love – Jude gets the extremes of both affections and sometimes I found myself yearning for something like that, not realizing that I’m just reading a book.

A Little Life deals with surreal graphic depictions of depravity, self-harm, child abuse and mental trauma and how hard it is to recover from it. Sometimes, it’s almost like Jude’s pain seeps through the pages. But at the same time, this does not come off as excessive or sensational – it just is. This novel drove me mad and I hated reading it, at times. I don’t think I will read it again, frankly. But giving credit where it’s due – reading A Little Life was the most immersive experience I have ever had while reading a book.

The Daily Degeneration Game: Trainspotting

After reading this book, calling someone a c**t looks almost like a term of endearment.

Trainspotting is an absolutely brilliant, cerebral novel. It’s caustic in tone – severely reprimanding the bourgeoisie of Great Britain by a syndicate of young Scots in Leith, Edinburgh, promoted by their common love for injecting drugs up their veins. One of the guys, Mark Renton (played by Ewan McGregor in the movie adaption) goes as far as shooting junk through his genitals since all other options for an unharmed vein is used up. Who also gives this book the best, unanticipated ending possible.

This cult-classic is a story of young, middle-class Scots in the age of Iggy Pop, unemployment, surging HIV and a crippling drug addiction. There are four main characters – Rents (Mark Renton), Sick Boy (Simon), Spud (Danny) and Begbie (the Beggar). Each has their own palate for what life has to offer. Rents is a vegetarian, smack-addict known to transmute into a swish, well-read Scot from the upper-society of Edinburgh just to break out of trouble and get back to his flat to cook up more meth. Sick Boy is a wee more affluent than his peers and known for his way around women. But as said, their common-ground of love for meth gets Sick Boy and Rents best buddies. I love Spud the most – always out of his mind, recrudesced thoughts and speech, and pure at heart. And coming to Begbie, I absolutely abhorred that character. He’s the sort of person who feeds of other people’s praise on him, expects his friends to deify him but in turn treats them like scums of the earth. But karma eventually gets to him and the ending was satisfying enough. Oddly, Trainspotting is actually written throughout in a Scottish dialect. It was extremely challenging to get the hang of it initially but once I did get the grip, it was harder to put the book down. My thoughts now are in Scottish vernacular. Sometimes it’s Ewan McGregor’s voice narrating, sometimes it’s Andy Robertson. A mighty fine way to narrate one’s life, I say.

This is the first Irvine Welsh novel I’ve read. His writing is incredible. It jumps in electric spasms between lowly expletives-fueled diatribes coalescing to well-formed, articulate soliloquy spouted by each character, mostly Mark Renton’s. Typically the soliloquies are on their hatred for the high-class, the politicians, and their need for money to eventually buy drugs, and mostly their crushing, constant dependency on drugs to even get through a simple conversation. And yes, the lack of sexual action in their lives. The book is at times depressing – for instance, a wee baby dies cold on the cot from lack of attention as her parents are doped to their eyes in acid and forget that there’s a baby in their possession. And it’s the same meth again, measuring out their grief, trying to dissipate the raging hurricane of their misery. The rawness of this book hurts. It’s so real, and to realize that such lives did exist and does still in parts of the world is profoundly sad.

Unlike numerous books whose prose have been adapted to unjust films, Trainspotting’s movie adaption is equally sublime. Danny Boyle’s done justice to the novel.

Honoring the wise-words of Renton from one of his best monologues when he OD’d, I say:

Choose conventions. Choose algorithm-led, brain-corroding social media. Choose gluten. Choose being an obsequious sycophant. Choose to be gloomy at the slightest inconvenience. Choose shitty sit-coms. Choose pop-music. Choose your ego. Choose the schisms your ego leads to. Choose to stare at MS Excel’s pixelated cuboids as your hair grays and teeth rots. Choose fixed deposits. Choose to spawning children so they can go through this all over again. But they why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose conventions. I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got real books and long runs?

Black Swan Green

“Good moods’re fragile as eggs.

    Bad moods’re fragile as bricks.”

“Black Swan Green” by David Mitchell is definitely one of the best second-hand books I own. I rarely buy new books. In fact, apart from the Game of Thrones box-set, Famous Five-Secret Seven-Nancy Drew-Twilight collection (got them at Oxford, Trichy Road when the bookstore still existed) and the books I bought for academics (Amazon 99% of the time.) – Most of my books are previously used. The thing with used books are that they’re damn cheap but they’ve got to be dealt with utmost care. In my inventory, the used-book in its worst condition is “Social Life in the Insect World” by J. H. Fabre. There’s just one edition of this book and was published in 1939. Every time I attempt to read this book – I end up with a fit of sneezes from the dust collected.

Social Life in the Insect World by J.H. Fabre

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (a used book from St. Francis’ College at London (apparently?))

And as you can see – “Black Swan Green” is miles better! Not only is the packaging of this book remarkable, the book is sensational as well. It’s about a 13 year old Jason Taylor (brownie points for him a Liverpool FC fan), living in Black Swan Green, Worcestershire in the 1980s ((ironically, a swan has never been spotted there). He stutters when he talks and calls his stutter Hangman. The books goes about his 13^th year in life – his family (mom – Helena who’s a home make initially but goes on to work for a gallery, dad – Greenland stores manager, sister – Julia, 18 years old who moves out to college), his “friends”, coping with his stutter through a class full of bullies, peer-pressure to look cool and his poetry. Although the book is predominantly England-based and was challenging to relate to much of this book, there were bits that did hit close to home.

I loved the part of “Black Swan Green” where Jason has these weekend sessions with this bohemian lady Mrs. Crommelyncks. The thing is, Jason loves writing poetry but in Worcestershire, 13 year olds writing poetry was considered not-so-cool and gay. So, Jason writes under a pseudonym – Eliot Bolivar and the vicar’s magazine publishes it. Mrs. Crommelyncks, a really old French expat – invites Jason (Eliot Bolivar actually) to talk about everything wrong with his poetry.  David Mitchell weaves magic in these pages, the stuff of sublimity.

“The sequence of doors we passed made me think of all the rooms of my past and future. The hospital ward I was born in, classrooms, tents, churches, offices, hotels, museums, nursing homes, the room I’ll die in. Car’re rooms. So are woods. Skies’re ceilings. Wombs’re made of mothers. Graves’re rooms made of soil.

    That music was swelling.”

The scenes with schools were pretty much relatable. In my school, as a response to unruly behavior, my teachers would call the class a “fish market” and the “worst batch I’ve ever seen”. Worcestershire is posh. The teachers instead call it a “zoo of hooligans”. Jason pretty much spends his entire time by the lake, walking here and there, going to local fairs and so with his friend – Moran. The book is an assortment of genres. A dog steals his homework. Gypsies save him. He gets bet up in the woods at night and lands up in a strange house where an old demented lady treats his broken arm but locks him up in a room right after. Being 13 years old is hard but the author writes beautifully about this age where you tip from obliviousness to the cusp of actual “life”.

Nineteen-Eighty-Four

“I’ve been writing a four-part article for Field Newspaper Syndicate at
the beginning of each year for several years now and in 1980, mindful of 
the approach of the year 1984, FNS asked me to write a thorough critique of
George Orwell’s novel 1984.
   I was reluctant. I remembered almost nothing of the book and said so –
but Denison Demac, the lovely young woman who is my contact at FNS, simply
sent me a copy of it and said, ‘Read it.’
   So I read it and found myself absolutely astonished at what I read. I
wondered how many people who talked about the novel so glibly had ever read
it; or if they had, whether they remembered it at all.
   I felt I would have to write the critique if only to set people straight.
(I’m sorry; I love setting people straight.)”

– Issac Asimov

You are on your way to Somewhere Street and you see a group of people looking up, without a thought you look up too. This is the herd instinct. Like Rolf Dobelli says “individuals feel they are behaving correctly when they act the same as other people. In other words, when more people follow a certain idea, the better (truer) we deem the idea to be.”

This classic dystopian allegory, i.e 1984 – a novelette of neoteric domination of helots that blew almost everyone’s mind manifesting prognostication of the Future did not appeal to me. I am sorry, I did not like 1984. It is a bad novel but rather a great essay – a description based on his perception of the totalitarian movement of the 1930s (maybe a take on Mao, Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler), their propaganda of control of the media, censorship, re-writing the past, secret informants, plain denial of facts to suit ideology and mass murder and all that lay in there.  There are numerable NY Times, the Guardian etcetera articles entailing a 1984 world in the 21^st century. In the world of 1984, the technology was suppressed, maybe deliberately even. Apart from the telescreens and cameras mainly for the surveillance of the citizens, the technological doldrums is evident. The book is shelved under Sci-Fi but it’s more of a socio-political commentary which took on demagogues masquerading as national saviours, which is probably why Issac Asimov disapproved of the book.

Basically the book firstly shows how a Government (the Party) exploits the citizens through brutal, evil means of exerting power, stringent rules calling for total commitment/devotion to the Party and the Big Brother (their authoritarian symbol), second – the past is continuously redacted so as to look favourable to the Party which leaves no concrete “past” as such. Thirdly the truth is distorted, altogether leaving zilch veritable data on people’s lifestyle, the government regimes and so on for the people of 1984 to compare their machinelike, time-tabled robotic lives to something else.

And then the language – they alter that too. The language of the 1984 dystopian world is Newsspeak where the words English language are clipped and glued as per the Big Brother’s wishes to favour the Party and limn the language so as to support their maxims like doublethink, thought-crime to mention two. The world (which is sufficiently divided into three parts) – Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia are constantly in war with each other. The people of Oceania – where there is the authoritarian, despotic rule have a decree which states that if you act or even think against the vices of the Party, you will be taken to the Ministry of Love (contradictory to its verbatim) where they are imprisoned and made to undergo brutish punishments, starvation and mental torture until they are made to believe the principles of the Party and truly revere and love the Big Brother wherein then they are “set free”.

(Okay, George. If you say so.)

Now coming to the heroine – Julia, who’s hands down the most boring love interests in a book I’ve come across. She’s supposedly very attractive, captivating and hot as hell. She is very active in clubs like Junior Anti Sex League, pure in propagandizing slogans, games, community hikes and processions of the Party in the hope that she doesn’t get killed off being a thought-criminal (a Newsspeak word for thinking against the Party) because deep inside her heart she wants to be free – wild and running in a meadow chasing butterflies than wearing a blue overall every single day of her life and write plots of fiction that promotes the Party. That’s all. She couldn’t care less about the tyrannical regime or anything along the lines of politics, that she falls asleep immediately in absolutely whatever position she is in when Winston tries to educate her about the government, politics, Big Brother, how they should revolt against the Party when they know they’ll eventually be thrown in Ministry of Love before they even spell the word ‘revolution’. So they just connivingly sleep together now and then in the first floor of a house owned by a poor prole (Newsspeak for proletariat) and talk about the civilized barbaric regime with the “politics” of it averted of course, because – Julia would fall asleep.

(yes, you can stand in the corner and roll your eyes.)

Spoiler alert / fun fact: The Julia character was purportedly based on a childhood friend (Jacintha Buddicom) of George Orwell (the author) whom he fell in love with eventually but Jacintha vehemently disapproved of him and stopped any contact with him altogether in the future. Why? Because an adolescent Orwell forced himself upon her one holiday and made her a victim of sexual abuse. And illogically, Orwell starts hating her which drives him to create Julia whom Winston denounces when they are locked up in the Ministry of Love and subjects her to ruthless punishments. Quelle surprise.

I don’t want to spoil of the little that’s left for you and review this book beyond repair: but 1984 has a very predictable, lousy ending. I’m sorry if this is one of your favorite books and if you cried at “under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me.” or shivered at “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” and if you are a firm believer of the “21^st century heading to 1984” theory. Nonetheless (despite rock-bottom probability, at least according to me) if the theory turns out favouring of that cognitive content then we’re royally done for, aren’t we?

The Good Luck of Right Now!

The Good Luck of Right Now by Matthew Quick

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A beautiful book!
This epistolatory novel, another witty one from the author of Silver Linings Playbook charms you with its raw emotions, disarrays of people dealing with mental issues, their lives and so on. The protagonist, Bartholomew Neil (fatherless, introvert, jobless and aged over forty), recently loses his mother to brain cancer, finds coping with life harder than usual. His mom, during her last days, binge-watches Pretty Woman and ends up dedicating her every fibre of last days to Richard Gere, she keeps up with his happenings, follows him up and eventually ends up calling Bartholomew -Richard.

Owing to this, as a respite, Bartholomew starts writing letters to Richard Gere elaborating his daily life as it happens. The story spans further into an amusing tale when his priest Father McNamee (recently defrocked from his priesthood) moves into his apartment as Wendy, his grief counselor lies her way into getting Bartholomew indulge in group-therapy session where he befriends Max, a man equally aged as Bartholomew, who takes counseling grieving over his dead cat Alice and on an average Max’s four-worded sentence would contain two expletives. Previously, though inadvertently Bartholomew falls in love with a girl he sees regularly at the library whom, he later comes to know as Max’s sister.

The Good Luck of Right Now proceeds further as letters to Richard Gere on the adventures sometimes cheerless, embarked by the four; Bartholomew, Father McNamee, Max and Elizabeth (library girl/ the Girlibrarian). And in this book of Jung, Buddhism, synchronicity and Richard Gere, the author Matthew Quick tries to slip in philosophy, the harmonious working of our world the-yin-and-yang, and so much more.

Bottomline: Wouldn’t read it again but it was worth the time I spent reading it the first time.

Favorite quote from the book: “The universe hiccups, and we poor fools try to figure out why.”

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the Girl at the Lion d’Or

The Girl at the Lion d’Or by Sebastian Faulks

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The first Faulks’ book that I read was Engleby, it took my breath away. Many critiqued it quite negatively but I loved it for personal reasons.

The Girl at the Lion D’or, set in 1930s France narrates the story of young Anne and her rendezvous with love and adultery. The story is poignant, very picturesque (of course, French countryside in all its glory) and kind of fast-paced, but I’m not complaining. There are few, all very relatable characters and the storyline also has other things in its mind apart from romance like the repercussions of the World War and little tales from Anne and flashbacks from Charles Hartmann (the male-lead).

It starts with Anne moving from Paris to Janvilliers, with the prospect of a job at the Lion d’Or where she befriends Mattlin, the adequate villain of this novel who’s friend is Charles Hartmann, Anne falls in love with. The gimmick being; Hartmann is married. The story revolves around the dark past of Anne, Hartmann’s doomed marriage, the assorted lives of those working in Lion d’Or and so on.

Faulks, despite bringing his characters to life and leading the plot gracefully, misses something that wouldn’t make me reread it.

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A commentary on psyche and suffering

“Why, at such a time as this, I ought to snap my fingers at aestheticism and all the rest of it; and yet, I am all at once as particular as a dog looking for a corner?”

After a series of relentless obstacles from a severe fit of cold ripening to a fever, to vacationing in hill-stations and conning the science of “making perfectly round dosas and chappatis” so I don’t bring ignominy to my family as I step into another (insert face-palm gif raised to infinity) I ended up finishing Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment with a pang of bittersweetness; bitter for it is always devastating to end a splendid book and sweet (kind of) for an edifying ending.

To write that this book is good or even excellent would be an understatement. Crime and Punishment is glorious. It is not your Mills&Boons for a light read on a park bench, for a short flight and it’s definitely not worth for skimming and flitting. You have got to soak it all in- well, you will- because Dostoyevsky’s narration of the mental constitution just has so much to offer, the composition is impeccable-looking like something that was conjured by a spell- it makes you think how we live our lives, what makes us human, perceptions of despotism, poverty, the mind of all, nihilism and a civilization to mention a few.

The fascinating thing about this is that Dostoyevsky traverses his whole psychoanalysis in a book, as the scrutiny of a man who commits a murder and how he is, in turn, punished for it. Despite a lot of characters all sounding similar with a syllable or two for distinction- Dmitri Prokofych Razumikhin, Porfiry Petrovich, Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin- Dostoyevsky takes the reader deep into the character’s mind, like it is similar to a commentary on the psyche of the mind and suffering and why we suffer like we do.

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.”

 

Brownie points if you got this.

Even though Crime and Punishment is a minefield of remarkable quotes, I chose this below and the one at the beginning:

“When choosing between the river and confession, why had he preferred the latter? Was the desire to live so difficult to conquer?”