Category: Books

The book is quite an easy read; so easy that you can almost skip-and-read vast chunks of it and yet not miss much. The pacing is quite inconsistent too as there is no consistency in how time is taken into account in the book. Short events may take a long time at times and long events are dispensed off in a sentence or two. That said, it is not a problem that is significant enough to make the book any less enjoyable a read, which it is.

The period covered in the book is the troubled 1800s when the old Chinese empire is on the wane, and under pressure from Europe. It is not a good book to read if you are looking for a historical perspective on what happened in that time period, as that aspect of the story only serves as a background with only just enough detail to provide context to Orchid, the main character’s, story.

Both the subject and the book had great potential to have been turned into something substantial, but Anchee Min does not succeed in doing that. You do get a pretty decent account of what eventually turns Orchid into who she becomes eventually, but it all feels very hurried.

I like reading an old-school well written lengthy story every now and then. I prefer it without any major metaphorical gymnastics and delivered straight and preferably on a vast canvas. In Leon Uris I found all that and more and I have to say that I am a fan.

The first thing that I noticed about the way Leon writes is how good he is at his craft. The pacing is just right and the research into the background extremely vast. There is a lot of effort that goes into his works beyond the heavy workload involved in the writing part alone.

[amazon_image id=”006109174X” link=”true” align=”left” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Redemption[/amazon_image]Redemption is a story that starts in New Zealand and works its way back to Ireland, which is where the story inevitably hurls all of its main characters. The background for the story is struggle for freedom in Ireland and the second world war. There are few parts of the story where it meanders a bit too much on the hero worshipping side, but it can be easily overlooked and before soon the importance of the characters soon slide into the background of the events that are unfurling around them.

[amazon_image id=”0553241605″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Mila 18[/amazon_image] Milla18 is a much smaller work compared to Redemption, but the scale of the events in it vastly overshadow the scope of what Redemption has on the table. Everything personal gets left behind in Mila 18, eclipsed by the events in Poland during the beginning of the second world war. The book goes into considerable detail in describing the slow (and intricately planned) dehumanization of human beings, which slowly builds up to the ‘final solution’ of the Nazis.

Reading Pankaj Mishra is often a repetitive experience where he is constantly poring over the facets of India that he chooses to look at a given point in time from a perspective that always sees the glass as half empty. I have read two of this works before, “Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India” and “The Romantics: A Novel” before getting my paws on “Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond”. All three books have the common thread of 'everything sucks' and the constant search of a life that exists only in his memories and a time long gone.

Frankly, it is easy to get depressed and suicidal if you read three of his books in a row. They show a world that is full of poverty, ugliness, near-zero happiness and all wrong things. Even though 'Temptations' is a work of non-fiction, gleaned from the expansive travelling Mishra has undertaken in the subcontinent, the book has a texture to it that is very fictional. It is amusing that when he writes fiction, the writer has so much of his own life in it that it looks like non-fiction and when he writes fiction, it reads much like fiction. What a predicament.

That said, the book is his strongest work of the three. It paraphrases his travel through India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Tibet from 2000. It is an interesting and captivating read, even after accounting for his constant obsession with the caste system and religious divides almost everywhere. He does touch on a variety of controversial topics — from killings and torture in Kashmir to muscle and money power in Indian politics — and spices up the narrative with a generous sprinkling of facts and anecdotes.

At close to 500 pages, the book does require you to spend some time with it. But Mishra's text is simple and he does not use the power of language to keep things away from everyone. If nothing else, the book is an interesting read to contrast the different Indias that we know of: the one reported in Indian media, the one that the West gets to see and the day-to-day India that most of us Indians live with at ground zero.

These days my reading habit is back with a vengeance and the past three days I have finished off some three books (not from start to end, but more like books that were already close to being finished) and have already started on a new one.

The first of the lot is Soul Mountain by Gao Xinjian. I have struggled to finish this one for a very very long time now. The book has kind of aged with me since I started with it in 2007 when I was spending a lot of time shuttling between Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore. The memories of flying back into Delhi on a late evening flight, reading through the hard-to-bite text still remains fresh in my memory. And it is one hard book to read, with the Gao trying at every turn to throw you off his trail.

The second one is Murakami and the music of words by Jay Rubin. Haruki Murakami has in the past two years become my outright favorite author. It is interesting to read a well-written book about the man whose books I really enjoy reading. It is easy to see the tremendous enjoyment Rubin has derived from the work. The research and the references are meticulous and the dots are amazingly well connected all over the book. I may just wind up reading The Windup Bird Chronicles again as a result of this. And I don't remember ever reading a book twice or wanting to do that with any other book.

The last one is Life Is Elsewhere, by Milan Kundera. I have tremendously enjoyed The Unbearable Lightness of Being, written by him before this. While Murakami can often mix in a lot of surrealism and fantasy to explain things and connect the dots, Kundera is deals strictly in the very real and often very abrasive version of it. There is only one part, the Xavier episode, where Kundera leans on fantasy to make a point. It is not an easy read and it will put you through the wringer with the detailed examinations of people and their connections.

And the book that I have started on is Doris Lessing's A Briefing for Descent into Hell. I tried reading this book over ten years ago during my college days and it entirely freaked me out. It is very rarely that a book does that to me and when I saw this book, after so many years, in the store I had to pick it up. Reading the first couple of pages it is easy to understand why it still scares the life out of me. But this time, I will persist.

With Gao and Doris, things have sort of come full circle for me. I have never taken over two years to finish a book, which has been the case with The Soul Mountain and I have never before walked away from a book because it has scared the crap out of me, which has been the case with the Lessing. In a manner of speaking, this is kind of closure. Now to get on with the reading.