“Never let school interfere with your education”. But of course, I didn’t heed Mark Twain’s advice. In the last two years of high school, I didn’t read a single work of fiction. Just Physics for Scientists and Engineers and Biology. But the years prior to 2007 were prolific in the reading dimension for me:
After a long break, the first step is always the toughest. I spent 6 months reading the first book. The rest were read during the brief holidays (after I had promenaded, convocated and graduated).
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
Indian girl falls in love with Nepali boy while Nepalis and Indians are fighting on the streets. Cliched story. But, absolutely beautiful writing. I loved it. However, be warned that I’m biased towards Indian novels. These books have just the right amount of recognizable cultural references and sufficiently exotic customs to be fascinating to me. I guess, that type of mixture is what you want in every part of life – books, movies, people.
The Gathering by Anne Enbright
A hazy novel about a unstable Irish woman exploring the reasons for her alcoholic, good-for-nothing, lovable brother’s demise. That woman happens to be the writer, chronicling her experiences. The funny thing about this is that half the stories told are fantasies. The imagined first meeting between her grandmother and grandfather. The imagined way by which her grandfather proposed. And the rest of the story is composed of digressions about other members of her large dysfunctional family (her mother had 12 children and 7 miscarriages).
Very melancholic yet thoroughly enjoyable.
The White Tiger by Arvind Adiga
You can read this from cover to cover in less than a day thanks to the simple, not-too-beautiful language. But it’s the story that makes this worth the read (and presumably, convinced the Booker panel). It’s about a young Indian man Balram who’s born in Bihar. If you know anything about Indian states, you would know that Bihar is right at the bottom of the list. Arvind Adiga, terms this region the “Darkness”. Eventually though, Balram cunningly works his way up and ends up as an entrepreneur in Bangalore, arguably the capital of the Light.
Whenever an Indian book that showcases the caste system and poverty rather than the “great Indian values and culture” gets released, people in India start grumbling. Pretty irritating. I mean, the story may not be completely accurate but at least, parts of it are true. My recent trip to India only validates the core themes of the book – oppression and servitude of lower castes, widespread corruption and the fakery of democracy. I particularly like the way Adiga describes the main inspiration to write this novel:
“I was buying furniture in New Delhi five years ago and the storeowner said, `Don’t give me cash, give me a deposit of Rs 1,000 , and give the rest to the man when he delivers it.’ So when the man came to my house — and he was a very poor man — he put down the furniture and then I paid him the money, Rs. 25000. Then he asked for a Rs 10 tip which I gave it him. I was amazed that this man who made a maximum of Rs 1,000 a month or perhaps even less, was taking a bundle of money to give to his master. I wondered what made this man and people like him honest?”
Even if you’re not at all interested in questions about social structure, how can you resist a book that starts off like this:
For the Desk of:
His Excellency Wen Jiabao,
The Premeir’s Office,
Beijing,
Capital of the Freedom-Loving Nation of ChinaFrom the Desk of:
‘The White Tiger’
A Thinking Man
And an entrepreneur
Living in the world’s centre of technology and outsourcing
Electronics City Phase 1 (just off Hosur Main Road),
Bangalore, India.Mr Premier,
Sir.
Neither you nor I can speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.
Between the Assassinations by Arvind Adiga
A collection of stories that take place in a southern Indian town in the 80s. Didn’t capture my imagination because (a) I don’t like short stories unless they are the New Yorker kind (b) 80s in a small Indian town were just too freaking dull. And (c) his style of writing is too simple and straightforward. It’s worse than Tom Friedman’s in Hot, Flat and Crowded. Throughout the entire book, you feel like you’re reading a newspaper! He keeps stating facts and reusing characters from The White Tiger.
Adiga has tried fiction, won the Booker Prize and now, in my humble opinion, he should go back to writing articles for Time or Financial Times or whatever he used to write for.
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The book. After you’ve read just a few pages, you’ll figure out that Junot Diaz is fucking crazy. But in a good way. His passionate narration alone could sustain the entire novel but there’s a tale, too. Oscar Wao is a fat Dominican nerd growing up in a New Jersey ghetto. He loves girls but (obviously) they don’t love him. His pathetic (copacetic according to Oscar) attempts at getting laid are what this book is mostly about, interspersed with the stories of his abeulo, madre, hermana and hermana del novio. Don’t worry; there’s even more Spanish in the book. Kiran Desai uses Hindi in her books but like most (sane) authors, she repeats the sentence in English. Bahar jao. Go outside. Not Junot Diaz, though. He probably doesn’t give a damn if you miss a crucial fact thanks to your less-than-perfect Spanish.
And to repeat what everyone tells you about this book – it’s filled with footnotes. On some pages, there are more footnotes than normal text. He uses these snippets to educate those “who missed [their] mandatory two seconds of Dominican history”. A lot of pop culture and comic book references, too. Not being a comicbook nerd, I didn’t get half the references and yet, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Best book of the year. It’s tough to pick a truly representative extract (because there are multiple narrators in the story) but here’s my try. This is Oscar’s hermana del novio writing:
Made my little gestures, of course. A meal once a week. Picked up his writings, five books to date, and tried to read some. Wasn’t my cup of tea - Drop the phaser, Arthurus Prime! - but even I could tell he had chops. Could write dialogue, crack snappy exposition, keep the narrative moving. Showed him some of my fiction too, all robberies and drug deals and Fuck you, Nando, and BLAU! BLAU! BLAU! He gave me four pages of comments for an eight-page story.
Did I try to help him with his girl situation? Share some of my playerly wisdom?
Of course I did. Problem was, when it came to the mujeres my roommate was like no one on the planet. On the one hand, he had the worst case of no-toto-itis I’d ever seen. The last person to even come close was this poor Salvadoran kid I knew in high school who was burned all over his face, couldn’t get no girls ever because he looked like the Phantom of the Opera. Well: Oscar had it worse than him. At least Jeffrey could claim an honest medical condition. What could Oscar claim? That it was Sauron’s fault? Dude weighed 307 pounds, for fuck’s sake! Talked like a Star Trek computer! The real irony was that you never met a kid who wanted a girl so fucking bad. I mean, shit, I thought I was into females, but no one and I mean no one, was into them the way Oscar was. To him they were the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, the DC and the Marvel. Homes had it bad; couldn’t so much as see a cute girl without breaking into shakes. Oscar’s idea of G was to talk about role-playing games! How fucking crazy is that? (My favorite was the day on the E bus when he informed some hot morena, If you were in my game I would give you an eighteen Charisma!)
2009
Hopefully, filled with books like the ones on my wishlist. And perhaps, some of those elusive Indonesian English novels. Do those even exist? I’ve been looking for years…
4 Comments
January 12, 2009 at 2:22 pm
[...] bookmarks tagged exotic Abimanyu Raja: Books of Last Year saved by 5 others iunfu bookmarked on 01/12/09 | [...]
January 13, 2009 at 12:15 am
I briefly met Junot Diaz through a literature class I took in college, while reading the book which immediately (or not-so-immediately preceded Oscar Wao. Diaz is as foul-mouthed in real life as his characters are in his books; he’s pretty unapologetic about it, too. Maybe it was accurate to the culture, but for me, that much that consistently over an entire book is more than I care for.
I also didn’t find it all that helpful that he dropped quotes around spoken words so much (all the time? memories faded very quickly); that just made it harder to read. Really what does this add to the story? Immediacy? It’s a poor substitute (or complement, as the case may be) to well-written prose.
Of course, the biggest problem is that I don’t find the stories themselves particularly interesting (I was reading his previous collection of short stories, whose name I can’t recall), so there wasn’t much to look forward to while reading. English classes always frustrated me for precisely this reason, especially when the followup was an essay whose thesis I either had to feign interest in or flat-out lie that I believed in my answer to the question at the heart of the essay. If you don’t believe your thesis is either correct or incorrect, it’s extremely difficult to write something that’s any good.
Anyway, enough semi-venting/semi-ranting about forced literature reading from me…
January 13, 2009 at 8:43 am
Jeff, thanks for the intriguing comment. I for one, having gone to high school in conservative Singapore, would love a foul-mouthed teacher. Oh! There’s an interesting Mozilla story to be told here. Last year, for one of my English papers, I described Mike Shaver’s “ten fucking days” imbroglio when I was talking about the power of open source and stuff. And when I got it back from my teacher, there was a huge red circle around the word. He even marked me a grade down for that! “It is amateur and unacademic” is what he said. I’m still pissed off that fuck – a crucial word in the modern vernacular – would provoke such a reaction. Anyway… yes, the missing quotes (all the time) are really annoying sometimes. You can’t figure out who’s talking to who. But then again, at other times, it’s nice not to have the “he said”, “she told” crap that permeates conversations in some books.
The short story book is Drown. I haven’t read it (I want to). But I did read a few of his stories on New Yorker and found them to be overly awesome. Alas, stories are a matter of personal taste.
May 7, 2009 at 6:20 pm
[...] I completely ripped off for this first essay. When I wrote it, I had just read his AMAZING book Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and I was completely fucking inspired by it. In fact, I did thank Junot Diaz with an appropriately [...]