Library

FROM MY BOOKSHELF {FICTION}

“Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”
Marcel Proust

ONITSHA By J M G Le Clezio
Onitsha is not a place to start your journey into Clezio. It is his only work I’ve read so far, yet I feel this isn’t the first one to be picked from his shelf. Somehow the young Fintan’s excitement about the exotic Africa and its ribbon of shores, the ‘real red and ochre land, with foaming reefs’ fail to keep me engaged in the book. So did the central plot of the journey of a mother and son to their man who had grown stranger in the years in a hot and humid African town. Clezio has worked hard for two hundred odd pages to evoke the intolerance and brutality of the colonial system. His words do sing. His sentences are lucid and sometimes magical. Yet the work is just a pale produce of a wonderful mind. Onitsha fails to refine or reform me, or remind me of greater truths about which I want to be told. Colonial inhumanity deserves a fresh look, not a cliched wrap-up tale like this one.

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV By Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A sheer waste of time. David Magarshack’s translation; some who have read the original in Russian blame it on the translator. It’s not just the translation. How can I pardon Dosto deary, for all those monastic interpolations and pamphleteering on the Christian ideas of virtue added to all those meandering monologues stuffed with some life stories which have nothing to contribute to the book, while the tale remains where it began? Going by the pace at which the real story in the book evaporates, it should have been a 100-page book, succinctly told. Mikhail Bakhtin called it the most polyphonic of the novels, with so many voices and tones. Well, I think it’s a waste of time.

ANNA KARENINA By Leo Tolstoy
Something that stays with you through your life. A superbly raised universe within, where you meet any number of people, who’d be more vivid to you than your real neighbours. I prefer the older translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude.

THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS By Arundhati Roy
Here, a language gets reinvented by a clever writer. But the book is affected by an overdose of tricks. I still can’t figure out what these two chapters are doing in the novel: Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen, Mrs. Rajagopalan and Kochu Thomban. This novel could have been cut to half of its present size for glorious results.

HEART OF DARKNESS By Joseph Conrad
One that lights up a lot of corners of human mind. Easy reading. One would see where Naipaul the writer comes from.

THE BLUE BEDSPREAD By Raj Kamal Jha
The only Indian writer of fiction who inspires me, after Narayan of course. This is Jha’s first and the best.

CATHEDRAL By Raymond Carver
Literary gems.

THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL By V S Naipaul
It’s a wonder!

LITERARY OCCASIONS By V S Naipaul
Have it on your shelf. Dive into it when you feel lost.

A TURN IN THE SOUTH By V S Naipaul (Non-fiction / Travel)
I wonder about his incisive mind that travels and takes notes and sees more than what appears to us. Brilliantly lucid, deceptively simple prose. A writer’s writer indeed.

GUERILLAS By V S Naipaul
Like he said: the violence is in the tone.

A WAY IN THE WORLD By V S Naipaul
The one that questions your idea of a novel. Good for writers.

THE MIMIC MEN By V S Naipaul
Amazingly sharp prose that cuts through hidden psyche.

IN A FREE STATE By V S Naipaul
Easy prose; but nothing to remember about.

A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS By V S Naipaul
A lucid reflection on a profound theme: belonging.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT By Fyodor Dostoevsky
A soul’s cry; an eternal, immortal work of depth and might.

MAO II By Don Delillo
Sometimes telegraphic, other times winding, this book takes you into acidic realms of mass mind. Astonishing imagery. But Delillo sometimes comes across as clever a writer who constructs a prose that’s too much prepared, too much crafted.

DISGRACE By J M Coetzee
Clear, crisp river of thought. Chilling with its honesty. Simply brilliant!

VINTAGE CISNEROS By Sandra Cisneros
A good place to begin your discovery of this US-based Latino writer. Reading Cisneros is as delicious as biting on a big slice of a ripe and juicy mango.

DON QUIXOTE By Cervantes; Translated by Edith Grossman
This new translation is something I keep on savouring. I haven’t reached the end of the adventure. But this lucid translation, I must say, has saved the original master’s words from the earlier crude version in English. It only gained in translation.

EMBERS By Sandor Marai
Reminiscent of Gothic writing; slowly cuts through the innards of the character psyche. You’ll only know what it means to understand the other once you finish reading it. Mermerizing and original writing.

IN BETWEEN THE SHEETS By Ian McEwan
Surprisingly, the only McEwan book I’ve liked so far. ‘Reflections of a kept ape’, the story, made me want to write mine. A deep and seeking prose that unearths as well as unsettles your ambitions while reading.

INTRUDER IN THE DUST BY William Faulkner
One that elevates you to a new class among humans. A murder mystery and a methodical slingshot at the idea of injustice.

SILK By Alexandro Baricco
An absolutely captivating book. Pearls of prose. And a magical tale. But one that ends with a twist which spoils the entire charm of the work.

LADDERS TO FIRE By Anais Nin
A novel that’s built up of metaphors. One that says more than that’s written. A book that’s to be revisited at different stages of your life. Sample: “All things were born anew when her dress fell on the floor of his room.”

IN PRAISE OF THE STEPMOTHER By Mario Vargas Llosa
The most sublime erotic book I’ve read. It loves to penetrate your skin, flesh, and saturate your thoughts for days entirely with the cosmos that grows in you.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A feast to your senses indeed!

THE MOOR’S LAST SIGH By Salman Rushdie
Highly ambitious novel. But couldn’t he have saved us from all those exclamation marks? The vigour, length and breadth of thoughts and actions he portrays, the winding way of narration etc somehow make me think that Rushdie is actually a Persian prince who makes a living by weaving up tales. He’s got something in him, that has to do with the heat, the sun, and the dust of the Old Persia.

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING By Milan Kundera
Magical in the true sense of the word. Imitable style, but highly inflammable construct of parallel lives within ourselves.

SHEPHERDS OF THE NIGHT By Jorge Amado
Hilarious, delicious, erotic, and alluring like a big-bossomed Latina who stands there giggling at you, provoking you.

THE BOOK OF DISQUIET By Fernando Pessoa (Non-fiction / Musings)
One of the most astonishing books I’ve laid my hands on. When you touch this wonderous work, you are touching the deepest core of human soul. Inimitable, inquiring, refreshing. A marvel of a creation from a genius less known around the world. One that I keep re-visiting at times. I don’t intend to reach the last page, for the fear of finishing it. Warning: it’s too bleak at times.

BOOKS BY FRIENDS

A JOURNEY INTERRUPTED : BEING INDIAN IN PAKISTAN
By Farzana Versey

This book is not your conventional travelogue. Through these vignettes you see Versey, a brilliant writer, struggling with her own identity as an Indian Muslim woman in an Islamic state: ‘When I was on soil of the land of the pure, my impurity struck me. I was the emotional mulatto.’

SEANCE ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON
By Shinie Antony
The Hindu Literary Review says: Shinie Antony is a gifted writer because four stories in this anthology are unforgettable… Antony’s writing style is refreshing precisely because she has absolutely no interest in the ‘feel good’ presentations of a host of Indian writers busy interpreting middle class Indian virtues and vices to an Anglo-American readership across the seven seas..

The title story begins this way: Rontu (pet name) Mukherjee’s girlfriend had told him what she had been trying to say all of last month by not calling him, by not calling him back, by not being free to meet, by forgetting to meet, by standing him up because of a million other, more pressing engagements — fuck off!