Reviewing | Jaya's blog

Of diaries and YA literature

One of the most famous diaries to have been kept by a teenager has to be thirteen-year-old Anne Frank’s Diary, maintained during World War II. Years later it continues to be powerful. ( In fact her lesser known writings were published last year – Tales from the Secret Annexe, a collection of short stories, fables, personal reminiscences, and an unfinished novel, Cady’s Life. )

Recently the diary form has caught the imagination of many writers. An influential factor on this genre has been Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid series. The story began online but was soon published as a diary, with scribbles and illustrations taking nearly 50% of the space in the book. Earlier this month, the latest volume, Hard Luck, was published. According to the publishers, Penguin Books India, it immediately zipped to the top and is No. 1. It is understandable. Frank conversations, angst about “losing” a friend to a girl friend, bullying etc. It is fun to read. In fact the moment a mother saw the book in my hand, she pushed off to the bookstore to buy her daughter a copy!

According to the promotional poster for the book this is a book that has done exceedingly well. Yet there are other titles in this genre for young adults. Some of the recent ones are: Shamini Flint’s diaries of sports “men” ( Diary of a Soccer Star, Diary of a Cricket God, and Diary of a Taekwondo Star); Paro Anand’s The Secret Diary of the World’s Worst Genius and a favourite of mine – Mayil will not be quiet ( by Niveditha Subramanian and Soumya Rajendran). The latter was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award for children’s literature but never won. (Actually no one won that year!) It is a sensitively told book, touching upon various issues dear to a teenager, whose hormones are already out of control but is a sharp and perceptive observer of the world around them. Some of the challenges that can bewilder anyone, especially a teenager, are of sexual attraction, recognition of domestic violence victims but how to address it, privacy and basic social arrangements. It is very well told, sensitively too, without being patronising and can easily be accepted especially in the Indian milieu.

Oh! And how can I forget the Hank Zipser series, which follows the “everyday adventures of a bright boy with learning challenges”. ( http://www.hankzipzer.com/ ) Written and based upon Henry Winkler’s dyslexia, these books have been on the New York Time’s bestseller list as well. Stories worth reading. ( FYI: Henry Winkler played the role of Fonz in the long-running and hugely popular TV series, Happy Days.) In fact in September 2013, CBBC announced that a new show, “Hank Zipser”, has been commissioned. It will feature Henry Winkler in it. ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2013/hank-zipzer-announced.html )

“Mirrored Mind” Vikram Chandra

27 11 , 2013 No Comments

Sometimes the sheer vastness of what I want to put into fiction terrifies me. I survive by not thinking about the whole. I write my 400 words this day, and then another 400 words the next. I find my way by feeling, by intuition, by the sounds of the words, by the characters’ passions, by trekking on to the next day, the next horizon, and then the next. I pay attention to the track of narratives I leave behind, and I look for openings ahead. I make shapes and I find shapes. I retrace my steps, go over draft after draft, trying to find something, I am not sure what until I begin to see it. I am trying to make an object, a model, a receptacle. What I am making will not be complete until I let go of it. (p.197)

‘It must be lonely being a writer,’ people have said to me. But I like being alone, at least for a goodly sized portion of every day. And working by myself on other things — programming for instance — is never painful. There is something else altogether that is peculiar to the process of fiction writing, a grinding discomfort that emerges from the act itself: it feels, to me, like a split in the self, a fracture that leaves raw edges exposed. ( p. 213)

It is always a pleasure to read/hear writers talk about their craft. Programmer and successful author like Vikram Chandra spends a couple of chapters — “Learning to Write” and ” The Language of Literature” — in his latest book, Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letters and Code. dwelling upon he found his way into writing fiction. He mulls over the similarities and complexities of language, a skill that is inherent to both professions and how one informs the other, while being so different as well. Two essays worth reading especially by new authors curious about the craft of writing.

Vikram Chandra Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letters and Code Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 2013. Hb. pp. 260 Rs. 499

Anthony Horowitz “Russian Roulette”

27 11 , 2013 No Comments

When the Cold War raged, there were plenty of spy novels being written. With the collapse of USSR, the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of a polarised world even novelists who specialised in this genre were at a loss. In fact it was after many years that John Le Carre released a new book — A Delicate Truth— in 2013. ( My review https://jayabhattacharjirose.com/jaya/2013/06/01/a-delicate-truth-john-le-carre-june-2013/ ) But children’s and YA literature has continued to have an appetite for espionage fiction. The new Alex Rider novel, Russian Roulette, is a fine example of it. It is a “prequel” to the hugely popular Alex Rider series. It is about the young Russian man, Yassen Gregorovich who is sent to America to kill the fourteen-year-old spy, Alex Rider. While on the mission he reminisces about his childhood in the village of Estrov, his parents, the chemical warfare and his induction into becoming a lethal contract killer.

Russian Roulette required a fair amount of research especially for the Russian sections of the book. As he mentions in the book – ” So much changed between 1995 and 2000 — the approximate setting of the story — that I’ve been forced to use a certain amount of dramatic licence.” But Anthony Horowitz is a marvellous storyteller that he is able to tell the story with finesse.

Anthony Horowitz Russian Roulette Walker India, Walker Books, 2013. Pb. pp. 410 Rs. 350

“Looking for Jesus, the man” ( An interview with Reza Aslan, the Hindu, 16 Nov 2013)

16 11 , 2013 No Comments

( I was asked by the Hindu to interview Reza Aslan. Earlier this year he published Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. It was released in India by HarperCollins in Sept 2013. The interview that was conducted via email has been published online on 16 Nov 2013 and in the paper edition on 17 Nov 2013. Here is the url http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/looking-for-jesus-the-man/article5357812.ece?homepage=true . I am c&p the text below. )

Dr. Reza Aslan on why he wrote his new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

Dr. Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, is the author ofZealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, which was in the news a few months ago and also reached the number one slot on The New York Times Bestseller List.

He is the founder of AslanMedia.com, an online journal and co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of BoomGen Studios, an entertainment brand for creative content from and about the Greater Middle East. His first book No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, was translated into 13 languages. His other works include How to Win a Cosmic War(published in paperback as Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in a Globalized Age) and Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East and Muslims and Jews in America: Commonalties, Contentions, and Complexities.

Excerpts from an interview:

How long did it take you to write this book?

I have been researching for more than two decades, ever since I began my academic work on the New Testament as an undergraduate at Santa Clara University in California. Of course the quest for the historical Jesus has been going on for 200 years. Countless scholars and academics have written about the Jesus of history. The methodology for that is more or less written in stone by this point. I have distilled these two centuries of debate and analysis and rendered it in an appealing and accessible way for a general audience.

What was the target audience you had in mind?

I wanted to give those who worship Jesus as God a different perspective of him as a man. Of course, Christians believe that Jesus was both God and man, yet they rarely understand the implications of that belief. If Jesus was also a man, it means he lived in a specific time and place, and that time and place shaped who he was. This book is an introduction to that time and place. But I also wanted to write to a non-Christian audience to help explain why, 2000 years later, this man and his teachings and actions are still so significant.

Has your upbringing influenced your thinking?

My upbringing taught me to take faith seriously, to respect it and not denigrate it, even when I am questioning some of the most fundamental tenets of that faith.

What was the most surprising thing that you discovered?

I suppose the most surprising thing about Jesus and his time was just how many other messiahs there were around the first century, many of whom were far more popular and far more successful in their lifetime than Jesus was.

What is the difference, if any, between the men who claimed to be messiahs in Jesus’ time and the many god men (across religions) today?

I suppose if you believe that all religious experience is a matter of the psyche, then there is not much of a difference.

In the “Author’s Note, you state that you “have chosen not to delve too deeply into the so-called Gnostic gospels… they do not shed much light on the historical Jesus himself”. But did not the Gnostic gospels actually reveal much more about the man we know as Christ, including that he probably belonged to the Essene sect? So would not a close reading have helped you “reclaim” the historical Jesus before he became synonymous with Christianity?

The Gnostic Gospels were written in the second and third centuries. While they shed light on the enormous diversity of Christianity in the years following the death of Jesus, they do not give us much information about the historical Jesus himself. Neither does the Gospel of John, which by the way was written between 100 and 120 A.D. These texts are simply too late to be of much use to those looking for the Jesus of history.

The Jews attached great importance to writing things down. Yet the testaments were written only some 70 years after Jesus’ death. Muhammad knew the importance of writing things down, yet the Quran ended up being a careful reconstruction of his words. In your opinion, why isn’t there a Book of Jesus?

Mostly because nobody could have written it. Jesus and his disciples were Galilean peasants. None of them could read or write.

Was your choice of Christ as a subject a natural result of being a scholar of religion or did it have something to do with the number of books on the topic, including Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ and Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary?

I think Jesus has always been an interesting character and always will be. While some argue that there has been a sudden flood of books about Jesus recently, the truth is that such books have been appearing every few years for some time.

Do you think that the days when men could start major world religions are over?

On the contrary, take Mormonism, which is only 150 years old and already a major world religion. I think the same could be said about Scientology one day. Religions are born all the time. Who knows which one will be seen as “great” one day?

Reza Aslan Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth Harper Element, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers India, Delhi, 2013. Hb. pp. 300. Rs. 499

“The Siege: The Attack on the Taj”

12 11 , 2013 No Comments

When 26/11 happened it was unnerving to see the drama that was being shown live on televisions. During the attacks I was with a colleague at a national security agency to discuss an academic journal. Before beginning the meeting, we spent a few minutes watching the drama being shown on the television. It was a little disconcerting to get a running commentary from the security experts on the tactics, the guns being used by the armed forces etc. They were analysing the situation and figuring out what to do next. They had been trained to assess and act under such situations. But what happens when many ordinary citizens are ambushed by armed gunmen? You get a glimpse of it in The Siege. The panic and chaos exists, but also how well individuals can behave under extraordinary pressure.

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark have written a “non-fiction thriller” called The Siege. It is a reconstruction of the events of 26 November 2008 (or 26/11 as it is popularly referred to) attacks in Mumbai. This is a book based upon innumerable interviews, reports, conversations, audio files, mobile phone text messages etc. They even obtained “audio files and transcripts from the wiretaps placed on the gunmen’s phones from India, US and British security sources, the most complete to be assembled, which includes matter never published before.” (p.297) Later they add — “Inevitably, some of these reconstructed events will jar with individual memories that placed a person somewhere else, at a different time, as might some of the dialogue, although we have tried to show some accuracy. A few quotations have been compared to or directly extracted from interview survivors gave at the time to cable news channels and newspapers, so as to capture the authenticity of that moment – the thoughts that they had back then, rather than with the benefit of hindsight.” (p.299)

In an interview to the Outlook ( http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?288414 ) they say “It would be wrong to rewrite the truth but one thing is clear that a whole lot more of the threat was known than anyone let on. Incredible details were provided because, as we now know, the US intelligence community, was all over Lashkar-e-Toiba. Hotels, especially wonderful historic hotels, like the Taj, are theatres. They need to balance the desire for spectacle, being the House of Magic, with the safety of their guests. In this case, the hotel, the upper echelons of the police, and the intelligence services fought each other, and undermined the value of the early warnings they received. That is undeniable….A truth that emerges here is the police on the ground did what they could with the resources they were allocated. But in reality there were insufficient — shoes, bullets, helmets, guns jackets and patrol boats — to protect this one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world, where private money builds sky scrapers and is not ploughed back into the municipality — that teeters.”

The Siege is not easy to read. The writing in the first few pages is stodgy, but after a while it is forgotten, and it is easier to read. For a lay reader it is a fascinating document that reconstructs the events of 26/11. Of the many recent attempts (including accounts in newspapers and magazines) are retelling or attempting to fathom what happened in the terrorist attacks of 26/11, this is a book that will often be referred to since it marshals together evidence in one place. A technique that the authors are familiar with, having applied it in their previous book, The Meadow which was on the kidnapping of the ten western journalists in Kashmir. But The Siege needs to be read/reviewed by security experts for their comments.

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark The Siege: The Attack on the Taj Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 2013. Pb. pp. 320 Rs. 499

Masha Gessen ( from The Economic Times, 31 Oct 2013)

31 10 , 2013 No Comments

( Last year I read Masha Gessen’s book on Putin- The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. It was a powerful book and well written. I recommended it to friends but never wrote a review of it. In today’s The Economic Times Ullekh NP has written a column about Masha Gessen, her books, including her forthcoming one on the feminist punk group, Pussy Riot – Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot. Here is the original url to the article: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/et-cetera/goodbye-to-vladimir-putins-russia/articleshow/24957553.cms but I am also c&p it below. )

Masha Gessen, who wrote a hard-hitting book on Putin and has another on Pussy Riot up her sleeve, now prepares to leave a homophobic Moscow

When several of his opponents began calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “kleptomaniac” for allegedly looting the country’s wealth, writer and journalist Masha Gessen came up with an exotic term: “pleonexia”.

She didn’t find kleptomania — which refers to a pathological desire to possess things for which one has little use — apt enough to describe the characteristics of Russia’s most powerful man, she says. Pleonexia refers to an insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others.

“That is the right term,” says Gessen, who chronicled Putin’s rapid rise from a low-level KGB operative to the country’s president, in The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, published last year. When the book came out, well-wishers asked her to leave Russia — but she didn’t.

Don’t Want to Lose Kids

Gessen, who is now working on a book on the feminist punk band Pussy Riot, which captured world attention by protesting against Putin, confirms that now she has decided to leave Russia for good. It is not out of fear of retribution, but because Russian authorities are in the process of bringing in a law that could see same-sex couples lose custody of their children. She and her girlfriend will move to New York along with their children shortly.

“I don’t want to lose my children,” she says.

Gessen, author of books as stellar as Perfect Rigour: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century, a riveting account of how Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman solved the complex Poincare Conjecture, is now highly pessimistic about the future of the Russian economy.

After three years of crackdown on pro-democracy protests in the country — the past one year was the worst — Gessen says she has lost hope about the largest country in the world getting back on track anytime soon. “On all fronts, there is failure,” she says, about the system which persecutes journalists and others who run afoul of the government. Her book on Putin offers a chilling account of, among others, the killing of journalist Anna Politkovskayaand the death of journalist-turned-FSB officer Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko, both in 2006.

Pussy Riot vs Putin

Gessen — whose books and articles have dwelt at length on why entrepreneurs such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former chief of Russian oil giant Yukos, often end up in jail in Putin’s Russia — says that none of them was punished for their excesses or shady business deals but, instead, for standing up against Putin.

“Khodorkovsky will stay in jail until Putin is removed,” she says, adding that an economic upheaval is necessary to effect a change in Russia. She, however, doesn’t see Putin’s “military-political project” getting derailed in the short term.

The 46-year-old says that she often had to chase her “sources” for years. One of them was St Petersburg-based politician Marina Salye who fled to the countryside after she received threats. According to Gessen, a probe led by Salye almost unearthed Putin’s alleged corruption deals before he was thrust to the prime minister’s post by Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle in 1999.

Gessen argues that the arrest of Pussy Riot members for protesting against Putin last February marked the beginning of the most oppressive era of post-USSR Russia. After five members of the feminist punk group staged a “protest performance” in a Moscow church, three of them were charged with hooliganism and two among them — Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina — were sent to jail for a two-year term. Gessen’s book on the band, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, will be out in February next year.

Ullekh NP

31 Oct 2013

Ayana Mathis, “Twelve Tribes of Hattie”

05 10 , 2013 No Comments

( My review of Ayana Mathis’s Twelve Tribes of Hattie has been published in the Hindu Literary Review. Online on 5 Oct 2013 and in print on 6 Oct 2013. Here is the link to the original url http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/historys-brood/article5200369.ece?homepage=true . It was titled “History’s Brood”. I am c&p the full text of the review below.)

Hattie was stronger than Bell could ever be. She didn’t know how to tend to her children’s souls, but she fought to keep them alive and to keep herself alive. (p.217) … Fate had plucked Hattie out of Georgia to birth eleven children and establish them in the North, but she was only a child herself, utterly inadequate to the task she’d been given. (p.236)

The novel is about the “high yellow girl” Hattie Shepherd who began courting August when she was fifteen because he was a secret from her Mama and “because it thrilled her to go out with a country boy beneath her”. They married when Hattie discovered she was pregnant with her twins, Philadelphia and Jubilee. Unfortunately it is 1925, before penicillin has been discovered and the infants succumb to pneumonia before they turn one. “Not a day went by that Hattie did not feel their absence in the world, the empty space where her children’s lives should have been.” The nine other children she goes on to have consider their mother to be cold and frosty, yet she finally learns to (according to Willie, the witch doctor) wrestle down her “restless soul”. Hattie’s tribe of twelve consists of her children and one grandchild in particular, Sala.

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is fiction but set across sixty crucial years of North American history. The story starts during Prohibition, slavery and racial segregation existed in Georgia to conclude in 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected President. Ayana Mathis sketches brilliantly the evangelical gatherings in the revival tents where Six delivers his first sermon, the blues-jazz music that Floyd plays, war in Vietnam that Franklin experiences firsthand, child sexual abuse that Billups keeps as a deep secret, Bell’s slide down the social ladder into deep poverty and her near brush with death due to consumption, and Cassie’s schizophrenia. Each chapter is told well. They are absorbing to read but what is disconcerting is that the stories remain like threads swirling around Hattie. This is where the Hagar myth that looms large in African-American literature resonates well. Sarah, Abraham’s wife, offered her Egyptian slave to her husband when she was barren. Hagar had Ishmael by Abraham. Later when Sarah had Isaiah, God promised Hagar that her son, Ishmael, would create a nation. Similarly Hattie’s children spread far and wide, across the nation and the social ladder to leave their mark.

It is not historical fiction but there are details in the novel that document history accurately – the revival tents for evangelical gatherings, discovery of Penicillin, the recognition that schizophrenia required medical treatment and not taking the patient to a religious gathering for the devil to be exorcised, the limitations of a witch doctor, the social acceptance of a black doctor as with Alice’s husband. Ayana Mathis is a powerful storyteller, ( the painful description of the dying twins or of Cassie’s schizophrenia or Bell’s tuberculosis slowly killing her) the chapters come together as a powerful novel and explains why Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club. Yet it is impossible to get away from the feeling that this is a brilliant product of a creative writing course. The sketches, the accuracy to detail, creation of atmosphere are powerful but the random use of minor character or even the sporadic appearance of the siblings does not make much sense.

Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie Knopf Publishing House, Random House, Great Britain, 2013. Pb. Pp. 245 Rs. 550

5 Oct 2013

“The Lowland”, Jhumpa Lahiri

03 10 , 2013 No Comments

The most ordinary details of his life which would have made no impression on a girl from Calcutta, were what made him distinctive to her.
( p.76)

Subhash and Udayan, brothers, a little over a year apart are academically very bright students who join Presidency College and Jadavpur respectively. Everyone, in the neighbourhood and their parents, are delighted. Subhash later goes to USA for his Ph.D. Udayan joins the Naxal movement. Hardly surprising given that this is Calcutta of the late 1960s. Lowland is about the brothers who were extremely close but their lives charted a course diametrically opposite to each other. Subhash has the predictable, straightforward, middle class life whereas Udayan a naxal is killed in a police encounter.

The Lowland was released with a tremendous amount of hype. The unveiling of the book cover ( at least in India) was done dramatically with press releases and social media chatter. The anticipation of reading a new novel by Jhumpa Lahiri was nerve-wracking. (Ever since her debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, I have admired her writing.) Before the book was released on 8 Sept 2013, there were the usual number of articles, interviews, and profiles of her. The extract published in the New Yorker on 10 Jun 2013 was promising. (http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2013/06/10/130610fi_fiction_lahiri) Her interview on 5 Sept 2013 in the New York Times stands out. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/books/review/jhumpa-lahiri-by-the-book.html?pagewanted=all ) In it she refuted all claims of writing “immigrant fiction”. Her reply:

I don’t know what to make of the term “immigrant fiction.” Writers have always tended to write about the worlds they come from. And it just so happens that many writers originate from different parts of the world than the ones they end up living in, either by choice or by necessity or by circumstance, and therefore, write about those experiences. If certain books are to be termed immigrant fiction, what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn’t agree with me. Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction. Hawthorne writes about immigrants. So does Willa Cather. From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

Jhumpa Lahiri is always good in noting the particular. It requires a remarkable strength of observation, to detail and then recreate it in a different land. It could not be an easy task. Her detailing is restricted to the physical landscape, that is easily done, with a conscious practice of the art. it is conveying the atmosphere that takes discipline.

In The Lowland the story struggles to be heard between the vast passages of history lessons that the reader has to endure. It makes the novel very tedious to read. Probably it is due to the subject she has chosen — Naxalism. In the novel, her treatment of the movement is distant and unfresh neatened up in a story. For those familiar with the movement, in the 1960s, it was fairly simple in it being a peasant uprising launched by Charu Majumdar. (http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/NM2/History-of-Naxalism/Article1-6545.aspx). Today, the Indian newspapers are dominated by news emerging from parts of India affected by naxals. In an email to me about naxalism in India, Sudeep Chakravarti of Red Sun fame, writes “The maoist rebellion in low to high intensity can now be said to exist in between 106 districts. this does not include areas where propaganda and recruitment are on but as yet there is no conflict (for example, several indian cities, Haryana, Punjab). Numbers too are down. It is today a relatively more weakened force than, say, in 2006. but it’s a phase. the movement is nowhere near dead. I expect to take new shapes and strategies — in many ways that is already happening.”

Lowland is on the shortlist for ManBooker Prize 2013 and longlist of the National Book Award 2013. Jhumpa Lahiri’s talent has always been to tell a story, capturing the “thingyness of things”, but in Lowland she fails. One always lives in hope. At heart she is a good storyteller, but Lowland will not be her calling card as an author, that place is reserved firmly for Interpreter of Maladies.

3 Oct 2013

Jhumpa Lahiri The Lowland Random House India, India, 2013. Hb. pp. 350

Jim Crace, “Harvest”

25 09 , 2013 No Comments

“…life should be allowed to proceed in its natural and logical order.” (p.226)

Philip Crace’s novel Harvest is set in 16C England. At a time when unenclosed commons were being converted into enclosures, owned by an individual. It was a sweeping agricultural change that was changing the character of the villages and a way of life familiar to villagers. Harvest is narrated by Walter Thirsk, an outsider to the village who was brought here when his master, Master Kent, married the daughter of the manor. Twelve years on, both the men are widowers, and within seven days there is a massive transformation in the village that they had begun to know well. With the arrival of strangers — a couple, including a woman with a magnetic personality, a chart maker, and the new owner of the manor who had come to stake his claim– there is utter confusion in the small community. In the space of seven days the village and its community is destroyed, the houses burnt to rubble and the people have fled.

It is probably no coincidence that there are very strong Biblical parallels in the story and in the imagery used. If Jim Crace had not made it clear in an interview ( http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/jim-crace-author-of-bookershortlisted-quarantine-im-leaving-craceland-8488415.html ) that he has never read any novels by Thomas Hardy, I could have sworn that the landscape he has created is very Hardy-esque. The form and structure is so reserved and sophisticated, at times you miss the violence and destruction that it is conveying — the accusations of sorcery and witchcraft, the disappearance of the women and the five-year-old Gleaning Queen, the unnecessary brutal slaughter of Master Kent’s horse, the burning of the manor, the near lynching of Master Jordan’s groom etc.

Harvest is on the ManBooker shortlist. The winner will be announced on 15 Oct 2013. My bet is that this novel will be a strong contender.

Jim Crace Harvest Picador, London, 2013. Pb. pp. 275 £ 12.99

Pam Grout, E Squared

25 09 , 2013 No Comments

This is one of those books that are quick to read but stay with you forever. The premise is quite simple. Think positive and you will be rewarded well. It could be in any form. An opportunity or a material request fulfilled. According to Pam Grout, thinking positively unleashes positive energies swirling around you and make things happen in your favour. She argues that never underestimate the power of your thoughts and what you wish for, it can come true.

There are nine chapters based upon nine experiments. One of those being the Abracadabra principle. The literal translation being that ” I will create as I speak”. For Pam Grout this is a powerful concept. It is the positive attitude that changes one’s outlook and earns rewards.

The book is mostly anecdotal but it is strangely comforting to read. Much like the articles that were published once upon a time in Reader’s Digest. When you are down in the dumps, reading and being inspired by such pep-me-up kind of literature may not be a bad thing at all. It is a confidence building measure. Read it.

Pam Grout E2 HayHouse, New Delhi, India, 2013. Pb. pp. 164 Rs. 250

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