A Curious Book about a Curious Boy

Such is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Finally read this book that I had been wanting to read for quite some time because it is praised so much. I liked it too. Christopher is an interesting character and he looks at the world in a very interesting way. Some of it is so surprisingly insightful: such as his observations on how likes and dislikes are meaningless but necessary so that we can make unimportant decisions faster (like which dish to order at the restaurant) and how humans sub-consciously fashion alien beings after themselves though for all we know, spaceships could be made of clouds instead of metal. And that logic presents the very interesting possibility that aliens are already amongst us but we just don't recognize them! The style of the book is nice and different too (the chapters are numbered according to the prime number series!).

I felt very bad about Christopher's inability to understand emotions more for the sake of his father than himself. I felt really bad that Christopher could not understand how much his father had done for him. I don't condone dog-killing under any circumstances but if Christopher had been emotionally mature, he might have understood that the lie was to protect him. Wouldn't it have hurt anyone to know that they were the reason their mother went away? Writing weekly letters is not the same as staying and dealing with the situation, and it was really sad to see his father being treated like a villain by everyone after all that he did for Christopher :( Anyway, it was good to see that things were slowly working out in the end and my happiness would have been complete if the mom and dad had got back together :D Another very positive thing in the end, though I'm not sure the author intended it so, was how Christopher's confidence increases and he plans an independent future for himself. Note how he talks about himself living in a flat and taking Sandy and his stuff but does not mention his parents. It sounds like he is ready to take on the world!

Partial Relief

One of my favouritest books in the world is Alice in Wonderland. It's so funny and so wonderfully imaginative with all those cute, easily offended animals. I love how reality, order and logic all go topsy-turvy, the crazy conversations Alice gets into with Wonderland inhabitants, and the language (especially the cute way in which the word 'very' is often stressed). Most importantly, it was my refuge when reality got too nasty or disturbing and I had made it an unofficial symbol of all that is innocent. The fact that Lewis Carroll was himself childlike and preferred the company of children made it even better!

That is why I was really upset when I read theories on him possibly being a paedophile. His relationship with Alice Liddell (who inspired Alice in Wonderland) and his photography of children led people to question the nature of his attachment to children. Thankfully, there were no instances of misbehaviour on his part so these remain speculations. Still, my doubt did not completely go away and I really wished there were some way to know about Lewis Carroll for sure!

Now recently, I read about this other crazy person called John Ruskin who was a great art critic, philosopher etc. Apparently, he did not consummate his marriage because real women turned out to be quite different from the marble statues he studied and he was not prepared for that (lol!). Then he went and fell in love with a nine year old girl :O This was really shocking but I think I understood what the problem with these people was. I think when these very intellectually advanced people live in an idealistic world of their own, their minds are distanced from their physical self. So when they are forced to confront with baser needs of their own and those of others, they are unable to understand it (because they try to understand/study it in the first place) and they are repelled by it. The conflict between their minds and bodies then exhibits itself in strange and often questionable behaviour of this sort. That is why both of them showed a more-than-natural attraction to children because relationships with children did not require any cunning or crudeness from them (I got this analysis partially from Wikipedia). So I don't think either of them ever meant to harm children: they were just two men sadly out of touch with reality and unable to cope with it in a healthy manner.

I think even Nikola Tesla might have been of this category because he never had intimate relationships with women and towards the end of his life, he is said to have fancied a pigeon. Now we all love children and animals for their innocence. But the problem with these men was their inability to accept life as it was which made them look at normal things in a warped way. So the sad and ironical thing here is that these geniuses have sort of tainted the very innocence they desperately tried to cling to! That is why I'm only partially relieved. (Disclaimer: I don't really know much about John Ruskin so all my rambling is speculation based on superficial knowledge only!) 

Books to Read

I'm really liking this 10 books game on Facebook! I'm learning about so many new books and also realizing that I have a looong way to go in terms of literature. My reading has been quite narrow so far: limited to the most famous classics and contemporary best-sellers. I still haven't read Ayn Rand or explored any different kind of writing. Of course, I have always believed that it is quality and not quantity that matters; I never want to read a book just so that I can say I have read it! I'll read only what I really feel like reading and no MBA admission interview is going to change that :D

Here are some books that I plan to read, compiled from lists of my Facebook friends:

• Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
• The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
• The Mother - Maxim Gorky
• Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
• The Great Gatsby - Scott F. Fitzgerald
• Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
• War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
• Heidi - Johanna Spyri
• Blandings series - P.G. Wodehouse
• A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
• Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
• The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
• Haruki Murakami
• Orhan Pamuk
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Metamorphosis - Frank Kafka
• Mrityunjay

That's all I can find for now! I'm sure there were more and I'm not able to remember who posted them :(

It was interesting to see how many people mentioned one of Khaled Hosseini's books. Considering he has written only 3-4, he should be proud of himself for making such an impact. Also, it was nice to see almost all readers giving due credit to Enid Blyton! I had thought people might feel she's too chindi to be mentioned. She has certainly made most of our childhoods though she has her share of critics (infact, even I have noticed she is a bit of a racist). But we can't ignore all the good she's done us!

Now, good luck to me with this list!

Ode to Saki

He is undoubtedly THE funniest author I have ever read!He is like a cross between Oscar Wilde and P.G. Wodehouse. The Clovis series reminds me of Bertie Wooster adventures with absolutely ridiculous things happening while the Reginald series reminds me of Oscar Wilde plays with all its sarcasm and biting social commentary (It's funny how well the old British aristocratic society lent itself to satire and how it was probably also one of the biggest consumers of this satire).

My favourites are the incredibly funny nieces who fooled people with their crazy tales and the scary little nephews who seriously knew how to punish aunts back :O God knows what Saki's aunts had to go through! I'm sure those stories are a little autobiographical :D

Anyway, he is one of the best authors I've read. I'm very grateful to my friends who gifted me his book!

Essay: Middlemarch

I have finished yet another George Eliot book with the feeling of having lived through a lifetime through it. Even though Middlemarch hardly covers a span of 3/4 years, the characters (especially Dorothea) have come a long way by the end of the story. I can't say that I loved it completely because many bits made me very impatient. I could not understand why G.E. goes deep into the nature and history of many very temporary characters! I just didn't feel interested enough in them to read all that. I wish she had given more time to the Fred and Mary romance which I loved best :D :D But she did do them justice in the Finale. I also could not get myself interested in the local politics of that time so I didn't enjoy reading those scenes either. I think many of the things that bored me would have had more significance and meaning for readers of those times. I wonder if the times I'm living in has made me more impatient of too much data that does not have any information in it ;) 

But apart from that, the book did move me a great deal. I was inspired especially by Dorothea's character and with what grace she dealt with the problems she faced, how unselfish she was. I hope I learn to deal with life in a more selfless and courageous way myself. In this book, Eliot has delved deep into the human mind and laid bare many little inconsistencies and anomalies of the human nature that we often would be ashamed to admit even to ourselves. I will cover those in the excerpts which should come up soon! She has again made it very hard to feel in a consistent way for any character by making them as complicated as people in real life are :) I began by disliking Will and even Dorothea but loved them towards the end! This really does set her apart from other writers who have their characters more or less aligned with either the good side or the bad. Even her most useless side-characters often make a surprising show of courage or generosity and stump you. In this book, I was really surprised by how Mrs. Bulstrode dealt with the truth about her husband. The most touching scene in the book was when she gives him her silent support and they sit and cry together :( But I noticed that Eliot, like quite a few other female authors, could not resist exposing the true sly nature of the blonde coquette that male authors love to worship as angels :D I don't blame them...men have an annoying way of blindly attributing every other virtue where they see beauty (even my good ol' Dickens would not have any contradiction between beauty in appearance and in character). By the way, Eliot's pretty, blonde characters are really dangerous! Rosamond and Hetty( from Adam Bede) are two ladies I would stay away from :O Has she seen someone like that in her life?

Another way in which this book brought to light the realities of human nature is by showing how even the closest relationships are not devoid of private motives and judgements. For example, Dorothea and Celia truly love each other but each has her private unfavourable notions about the other. Many of Lydgate's tender gestures towards Rosamond are more a result of personal motives than any real feeling on his part. And it was a little sad when Sir James did not think his baby flawless in appearance. I always thought parents loved their children blindly so this possibility was a little shocking. Next thing you know, even your dog is judging you :O

Anyway, I have Virginia Woolf to thank for her recommendation of this book (I think in one of her own essays). But I must again bring up the point that she made about Austen being awesome enough to not use a pseudonym! Seeing the kind of frankness about human nature that Eliot and the Brontes had in their writing, you really can't blame them! Austen always played it safe...she was sarcastic but didn't really say anything that a 'lady' is not supposed to or have anything really bad happen in her stories (the worst I know is Lydia's elopement with Wickham). These women show that they know more about the vileness of things than is acceptable for a proper lady to know. So really, they can't be compared! 

Middlemarch sure gave me a lott to think about but I will stop this long essay here and hopefully, come up with the excerpts soon.

The Yellow Wallpaper

What a delightful and disturbing read! Especially because I didn't know it was fictional and I thought someone actually went through all that.There is nothing much I want to say about it, except highly recommend it, because I'm unable to explain why I liked it so much. I think it was the crazy imagination and beautiful language (there was something about her language). And somehow, after I came to know that it was one of the earliest feminist works, I liked it much more. Funny because it doesn't explicitly say anything about female suppression or female rebellion: it's just a crazy lady describing in great detail the wallpaper she's obsessed with! But it somehow makes me feel as if something important has been said on behalf of women. Of course, it's purpose was to show how women with mental ailments were neglected in those times so it's not all that random. But it's a very, very subtle feminist work because to me atleast, there didn't seem to be any attempt to convey a message and it was just a crazy story :) One that has to be read!

And Khalid Hosseini does it again!

There is no doubt that he is a master storyteller, just like Saboor in 'And the Mountains Echoed'. In MBA language, story telling is his core competency :D 'And the Mountains Echoed' is yet another beautiful book but also a lot different from the first two because the sorrows faced by the characters are less intense. Unlike the first two, which in a way rely on Afghanistan's unbelievable tragedies to move the reader by their own merit, this book leaves more work to the author because it is more general and less tragic. I think the author is trying to break away from getting into a reptitive theme and context for his books. The narrative by Marcos proves that Hosseini is really a good writer and not just riding on his country's misfortunes to make moving stories. I guess he'll move more towards neutral stories and characters from now.

Rather than a single story, this book is full of multiple small stories from the perspective of different characters. It is so rich in the variety and depth of characters that it is almost like a handbook of the many types of people exisitng in this world. There are people who are strongly shaped by circumstance and people who strongly retain their core inspite of it. He shows how people are so very complicated and makes one wonder if it even makes sense to judge people anymore. I found Parwana and Idris to be two really complex characters. Both of them may have turned out well but they are beaten into being what they are by incidents in their life. Parwana's horrible betrayal of her sister, twice, shows how deeply she must have been affected by the neglect and negative comparison she has faced all her life. And somehow I don't even know if I can blame her for being the way she is: heaven knows how her mind slowly hardened over the years with the constant wounding to her esteem and heart. Idris is such a real character!One of those people whose righteous(or otherwise) anger is expressed through resentment towards all and sundry rather than fruitful action. I guess I'm one of those people too though ;) The relationship between Idris and Timur is so complex. Timur is shown as being a person who is really good at heart despite all his antics and yet he did contribute in making Idris the bitter person he was.

One surprising thing about Hosseini is how sensitive he seems to be to what a plain woman feels and the fact that he brought this situation up in two books. In this book it is Parwana and in 'A Thousand Splendid Suns', it was Mariam. Both are neglected because they are plain and Hosseini describes their reaction to it with a surprising amount of insight. I thought you would have to be in the shoes of such a person, or atleast a girl, to understand it but Hosseini does a great job. For instance, when he points out in the book that Parwana was not angry that the boys threw pebbles but that they threw them only on Masooma! But I wonder what his connection to it is. Or as usual, I'm reading too much into things :D

My favourite excerpt in the book: "Pari spots an old woman across the street, wearing  a plastic rain bonnet, labouring up the sidewalk trailed by a small tan terrier. Not for the first time, a little puff breaks rank from the collective fog of Pari's memories and slowly takes the shape of a dog. Not a little toy like the old woman's, but a big mean specimen, furry, dirty, with a severed tail and ears. Pari is unsure whether this, in fact, is a memory or the ghost of one or neither. She had asked Maman once if they had ever owned a dog in Kabul and Maman said, You know I don't like dogs. They have no self-respect. You kick them and they still love you. It's depressing."

When I kindly overlook Maman's idiotic opinion, this para gives me goosebumps for some reason. The contrast between the two dogs is much like the contrast between Paris and Kabul and the two very different lives of Pari. It's beautifully put. And I love the fact that it's a dog that still binds Pari to her remote past. Dogs are like that :)