book review – Tabula Rasa

Best Books of 2022

I haven’t read as much as I wanted to this year, but I’ve miraculously loved almost all the books that I’ve read. So, quality matters, right? It’s been a good year. Here are the highlights:

Biggest Comfort Read: The Ship of Magic (The Liveships Trilogy) by Robin Hobb

Robin Hobb made my year this year! The Liveship Trilogy by Robin Hobb was the greatest source of warmth, love, and adventure. The incredibly immersive writing made every 900+ page tome a breeze to read.

Robin Hobb’s writing has such a cinematic feel. Every character brought their own charm, and I just wanted to keep reading and see where the pages took them. Highly recommended if you like fantasy, dragons, ships, and sweeping, character-driven stories.

Most Surprising Find: Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba

I have tried reading graphic novels before but it somehow never stuck. Daytripper was a haunting, beautiful turning point! The story offers glimpses from the life of a Brazilian obituary writer – a man who writes about other lives when he can barely make sense of his own.

What are the moments that matter the most in his life? How will he write his own obituary? The book tells you: the important moments in life are when you’re alive. It’s the only lesson that counts.

Most Layered Read: The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

Has a book ever made you feel like you’re travelling through a maze? The back cover says that it’s the story of a North Korean man named Pak Jun Doe, the son of the orphan master, who must escape the orphanage and find his one true love. But that’s not even the tip of the iceberg of what this book offers!

This is one of those novels that are crafted, not just written. North Korea makes for a dreary setting and the dark humor gives you guilty laughs. Hope, when it does peer through, seems like an illusion. I will need time to peel back every layer.

Favourite New Author: The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam

Which is to say, I’ve spent days devouring interviews and would love to read more of his writing, even though some parts of this book did not fully satisfy me.

The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam is about five people living in post-9/11 Afghanistan. The writing is deeply metaphorical, ambitious, and emotionally-charged. A quote:

“His shoes are worn the way the edges of erasers become rounded with use. As though he walks around correcting his mistakes.”

Best Accidental Find: The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed

In post-climate disaster Alberta, a woman infected with a mysterious parasite must choose between a rare opportunity to work far from home or help rebuild her community.

The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed moved me to tears in a way that no book has in a long time. There was just something about its innocence and brutality.

It came as a Scribd suggested read and the name and cover intrigued me enough to pick it up. What an amazing find. I do hope the world continues to unravel in a series.

Favourite Non-fiction: Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton

The story of an English-speaking woman who moved to Japan to become a literary translator.

Thought, theory, and ideation corroborate with experience. She writes as a linguist, but also a learner, teacher, and a true translator of cultures and people, along with words. Each chapter represents a sound word and memories she associates with it.

Her writing is candid, chaotic, and often self-deprecating, but I found it easy to relate to, and even in moments when she’s not her best.

What have you been reading in the past year?

The Snow Leopard and the Goat: Politics of Conservation in the Western Himalayas by Shafqat Hussain

One of those obscure books that I can’t tell you why I picked up, but I can assure you I’m glad I read it.

We (urban animal-loving folk) tend to talk about conservation in black and white terms devoid of socio-political content. The book questions this tendency. It reminded me of a quote from Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.

“Who are these people, I wondered, who love animals so much that they are willing to kill us for them? …This whole world had become a place of animals, and our fault, our crime, was that we were just human beings, trying to live as human beings always have, from the water and the soil.”

The author goes a step further in The Snow Leopard and the Goat. He says that the conversationist spectacle of free wild animals roaming in vast stretches of wild forest presumes that animals cannot coexist with humans. However, historical data and years of research states otherwise. He points out that the real conflict is not between animals and humans encroaching on their habitat, but urban conservationists and farmers settled near wildlife zones. He writes,

“In Baltistan I have encountered numerous situations in which villagers openly demanded that since people in New York and London want to protect the snow leopards, they should take the animals away with them.”

A key takeaway is that we cannot generalise the behaviour of all animals in the wild. The reasons for tiger endangerment may be different from snow leopard endangerment, depending on the ecological roles, habitats, preferences of that species. The writer argues that the primary reason for the declining number of wild snow leopards is not human encroachment, but hunting and the sale of exotic products like pelts. Snow leopards used to destroy local game animals, and therefore were seen as vermin. These practices were carried out by the same class of social elites that are now proponents of conservation.

Furthermore, there is no use denying that farming has encroached upon habitats. But even here, why does subsistence farming by villagers bear the brunt of the blame? In fact, the majority of habitat degradation is a direct effect of the increased consumption by industrial societies. Yet, we don’t bat an eyelid when entire rural settlements are cleared and rehabilitated to create safe wildlife zones. Either way, villagers bear the costs of our conservation effort. The author discusses how working with the farmers, through schemes like insurance of their livestock, has a better chance of success than “raising awareness.”

The Snow Leopard and the Goat forces you to reconsider assumptions. How are conservation projects marketed? Who are the major donors? When countries work together for conservation, are they really working together? What information do the donors get of the difference they make? Would conservation groups benefit from under-reporting wild animal population numbers? Why not? Why is our idea of the wilderness devoid of humans?

The book douses your conservationist’s passion with some layered facts and references. Not everything the author says rings palatable or unbiased. It’s also a little tedious for someone who isn’t an expert in snow leopards or conservation. But it gives what it promises: a glimpse into the politics of animal conservation. The larger lesson here is: question what information you are fed and whose interest it serves.

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

The other day, I finished reading a book called Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, a study in sexuality, romance, abuse, and identity. It is a short story collection with well-crafted stories that fall somewhere in the realm of gothic fiction, psychological horror, dark fantasy, magical realism, and weird fiction. Go figure, right? I found myself drawing comparisons to the writings of Angela Carter. For weeks now, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this book.

The book is intensely imaginative and plays with form and structure to a fault. As I read, I felt like I was trying to force-fit explanations onto the different narratives in the book, to consciously make meaning. Is that how anyone reads magical realism? Or am I so dull and obtuse that I need this process? What questions do you ask to tease out the meaning in a dense, perhaps inaccessible, text? Is there a toolkit for this genre that will make me a better reader? Would love to hear your thoughts. Meanwhile, here’s what I thought about some of the stories in the book.

Real Women Have Bodies

In this story, Machado tackles the use of body positivity as a handy marketing technique and the notion of selling clothes for “real bodies.” In this fantastical story, there is a new epidemic on the block. Women are fading away. Literally, turning translucent, and then, transparent. Not dying, just becoming incorporeal. Machado asks us, how would fashion respond to this crisis? Will the fashion industry survive when women have no bodies? But wait, doesn’t fashion thrive on existential crises?

The main character is a salesgirl at a clothing boutique, who falls in love with a fading woman. It is through her eyes that we uncover the underbelly of the fashion world. What happens to the fading women, their minds, their identities? Their fate seems to tell us that we are what we wear, style and fashion make us relevant, our bodies make us real. What is a woman without a body? What is a woman?

The Resident

The narrator goes to an artists’ retreat at Devil’s Throat, which is the site where she’d suffered a childhood trauma, a place in the mountains where she’d once visited as a Girl Scout. In the present day, in the form of a surreal half-fantasy, she finds herself revisiting her past and reliving it, facing it and learning about herself in an effort to slowly come to terms with her mind.

Machado has dissected the gothic trope of the ‘madwoman in the attic’ – think Jane Eyre or Rebecca. She asks, what’s worse: being locked outside of your mind or locked inside it? What is worse: writing a trope or being one? What about being more than one? The narrator undertakes a bold journey into the deep recesses of her mind, commands your respect. Machado allows the madwoman in the attic to assert her identity, to revel in it, and her self-reclamation is cathartic.

Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU

still from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit with Chris Meloni and Mariska Hargitay

Now, to start off, I haven’t watched Law & Order, but I have watched my share of detective / police procedural series that go on and on for decades. Machado has written this story in the form of episode synopses across 12 seasons on Law & Order, borrowing the characters Stabler and Benson from the series. What we get is an over-arching love story between the detective partners as they solve the grizzliest crime cases, mostly comprising of violence against women.

And that’s how most of these crime dramas are, aren’t they? Gruesome violence packaged as entertainment. Every new episode showcases new depravity, and you’re supposed to quickly rejoice when they find the rapist or the killer. And then you move on the bar scene when they bond over their drinks, and that’s what you care the most about; the tension between the detectives, their family troubles, these well-worn narratives that get increasingly convoluted with every new season. All on the backdrop of what should have been the real focus, i.e., the crimes themselves.

Every once in a while, they give you an episode that truly makes you think, and cringe, and seriously consider these pertinent social and psychological issues. But those episodes are rare, and they’re not the hot topic when the newest episode comes out, and you wonder, for the umpteenth time, just when Booth will finally kiss Bones or Lucifer will confess his love for Chloe.

Machado mimics that detective-partners’ chemistry arch in her story, creating the most cloying and tangled romance. She makes you shudder and wonder why you’d ever watch something so glib. Meanwhile, her characters are haunted by the true nature of their jobs; something that most TV shows would hesitate to show us.

Other Stories

This is a collection of eight powerful stories, I’ve only found space to talk about three. I’m still chewing on all of them. There is a story about eating disorders and body image called Eight Bites, inspired by the advice that it takes eight bites to get a sense of what you’re eating, and that’s enough. A story that hits too close to home! The first story, The Husband Stitch is one of the best stories I have ever read, but I can’t bring myself to write about it. Instead, I share this Electric Lit article shared by a friend that prompted me to buy this book in the first place.

Takeaway

Overall, there are several layers to peel back when reading this book. The experience has made me intensely aware of being a woman, not something I’m used to thinking over. I felt seen and heard, guilty, unabashed, and emotionally satisfied. Those seem like just hollow labels and for now, that’s all they’ll remain.

Machado’s writing demands that I take many steps forward for every step that she took. I am not yet ready to go to some of the places where she tried to lead me. I may return to the book, someday, and allow myself to be carried down those uncharted passages of my mind. Not something to look forward to.

Ich war dabei: Short stories by Gudrun Pausewang

The title, Ich war dabei, is German for ‘I was there.’ The subtitle is a haunting summary of what the book is all about – Geschichten gegen das Vergessen – literally stories against forgetting, or like a battle for remembrance.

So, what is this book about? This is a collection of stories written from the perspective of people who were children (preteens and teens) during the Nazi regime, in different parts of Germany, Poland and Czech. It’s a book that documents the indoctrination and the casual horror of the Third Reich.

Some of the stories refuse to leave my mind…

In the very first story titled, ‘Er war noch warm’ or ‘It was still warm,’ we witness the confusion of a child as his family visits a neighbour’s house to eat the lunch laid out on their table. They are one of many neighbours flocking in to pick and choose from the things left behind by the Jewish family when they’re taken away.

In the story, ‘Die Wertvollen und die Minderwertigen,’ a woman recalls a high school lesson on the physical differences between ‘the superior and inferior races.’ She’s been singled out by her teacher, who points out that the child has ‘typical oriental features,’ therefore labelling her inferior. She talks about that day as having given her that first blossoming feeling of rebellion.

I can’t forget the story about the silent house where no one lived… and the village which buried its past ‘for the sake of the tourists.’ The story about the young boy and his first ‘kill’ and about the old Polish couple who traced their way back to the house they had abandoned years ago for one last glimpse of something that no longer existed.

It was difficult to contain my shock at the purposeful sincerity and candid narrative style. I know that my lack of German fluency must have failed me a few times. I would like to reread the book to discover the nuances I have missed. I wonder if there is an English translation – I would love to share this with students.

It is interesting to explore a bit about the writer here, and about why I chose to read this book. Gudrun Pausewang was a German author of young adult and children’s literature. According to a Spiegel obituary, Pausewang was born in 1928 in Mladkov, which is now in the Czech, and fled to West Germany with her family after the war. She was a teacher, and taught in schools in South America before coming back to Germany. Her writings revolve around war, climate change, privilege, and a myriad other battles in life.

It was one such children’s book that inspired me to look up this author. I have inherited (read: stolen) a set of German storybooks from my aunt, who was a German teacher. Among these is an dark and richly illustrated board-book called ‘Die Kinder in der Erde,’ or ‘The Children in the Earth.’ It is a beautiful little fairytale about a conversation between the earth and man, through the innocence of children. Sharing the cover illustration and the first couple of pages here –

I will certainly be looking up more by this writer. And I would love to know if there are English translations of any of her books, so that I can immerse myself better in the message of her books.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

I was so looking forward to this book! The premise is excellent – it’s exactly my kind of Faustian story. A young woman makes a deal with a dark god – she wants to be free… escape her village and her marriage… and live forever… The devil answers her prayer. Except, no deal is quite that straightforward. And so, while she escapes from her small life, she is cursed to remain alone, forgotten. No one remembers her, and anything she says, writes or makes is wiped from the world, from memory and history. She is not only out of the grasp of time, she’s cut out of life itself. Three hundred years of anonymity until… she meets him. Henry. And he remembers her.

The Good: You know, I expected it to be as cheesy as any period / fantasy romance. A good kind of cheesy! The book did start out that way. Those sweeping parallel storylines flitting between the 1700s and somewhere close to now, 2014, New York. Rich, silken prose dripping off the pages, vivid descriptions of the city-life and art and poetry… It was all so Ooh! But Ooh! is all there was.

The Bad: Pages and pages, and some more pages, of: nothing. Repetitive lines, overused similes, cluttered ideas, name-dropping, and so much maudlin drama. Here’s what I mean. These two lines are set in 17-something Paris (I guess) –

He does not say he will walk her home. And if it were midday, she would scorn the offer just to spite him. But it is late, and only one kind of woman walks alone at night.

You know what that last line means, don’t you? You know exactly what she means by a certain kind of woman – what it says about her, him, their times, the world. And yet, what the author gives us is two more paragraphs about it:

Addie has learn that women – at least, women of a certain class – never venture forth alone, even during the day. They are kept inside like potted plants, tucked behind the curtains of their homes. And when they do go out, they go in groups, safe within the cages of each other’s company, and always in the light of day.

To walk alone in the morning is a scandal, but to walk alone at night, that is something else. Addie knows. She has felt their looks, their judgment, from every side. The women scorn her from their windows, the men try to buy her on the streets, and the devout, they try to save her soul, as if she hasn’t already sold it. She has said yes to the church, on more than one occasion, but only for the shelter, never for the salvation.

I mean why – WHY – was that needed? This happens all the time in the book. What she has already said in ten words, she dwells on for forty more, throwing in the misplaced metaphors and the inconsequential details.. why? Because it sounds good? Does it even manage that? Half the book could have easily been chopped – the great premise was throttled by bad editing.

The Ugly: And yet, the lack of editing was not the biggest of my concerns. The most annoying bit was how all the existential questions that the book raised went conveniently unanswered in the end. What was the point of this book? What was the grand takeaway? It’s not a surprise to me that the author writes for young adults, because this book reads like YA, except with sex and a 300 year old character – wait no, it reads exactly like YA.

P.S. No issues with YA, I read it – just didn’t expect this to fall into that bracket.

Reading Novels in Verse by Kwame Alexander

Man, I wish someone had introduced me to Kwame Alexander’s writing when I was a kid. Growing up, poems meant Wordsworth and Frost – the first I would never grow to love, and the second was never taught as more than a maudlin, sentimental version of what he had to offer. Poems were distant, archaic and dull. I was too obtuse for poetry and poetry took itself too seriously for me.

About two years into my teaching career, I stumbled upon The Crossover by Kwame Alexander. I had been looking for “books about sports for boys” – such a common request from parents of reluctant readers who hate to empty their pockets (not surprisingly) on the favourite Wimpy Kids and Captain Underpants-es. The Goodreads blurb of the book sounded too good to be true. It goes something like:

Summary – “With a bolt of lightning on my kicks . . .The court is SIZZLING. My sweat is DRIZZLING. Stop all that quivering. Cuz tonight I’m delivering,” announces dread-locked, 12-year old Josh Bell. He and his twin brother Jordan are awesome on the court. But Josh has more than basketball in his blood, he’s got mad beats, too, that tell his family’s story in verse, in this fast and furious middle grade novel of family and brotherhood. Josh and Jordan must come to grips with growing up on and off the court to realize breaking the rules comes at a terrible price, as their story’s heart-stopping climax proves a game-changer for the entire family.

What a fitting search result to my query. I looked up The Crossover with some apprehension, because I don’t exactly understand basketball, or any sport for that matter; not entirely sure I understand the mind of a 12-year-old reluctant reader. But it was the middle of the school year and I was out of options for this kid, so I picked it up. And there was no coming back! Enter: unapologetic 27-year-old fangirl.

Last month I read the “second instalment” in the series called Booked, an unrelated story, this one about a young soccer player, but a similar pattern of writing. I knew what I was going into, and it didn’t quite have the same impact as The Crossover, but it was pretty good nonetheless.

Kwame Alexander does what I wish someone had done when I was a kid – he makes poetry seamless, flowing and fun. I thought that the verse would be a part of the book that I’d get used to, you know, something I’d learn to ignore after a while. But NO. I loved it! The ridiculously no-holds-barred experimentation in writing; it was so enjoyable. He pulled out all the stops. You leave these books with a new understanding of the narrative breadth and depth of poems. Here’s what I mean:

The writing is simple, without being simplistic. It’s clear. It comes from a good place, but it’s not preachy. It sounds unapologetically like its characters; not like what grown-ups think kids sound like… It has a casual sense of humour. And it does a very serious job of promoting the exploration of language as a means of expression, and family values and friendship, and bullying, and life-choices… and it does all that without a hint of self-indulgence or pretension!

Favourite Books of 2021 – Part 2

The past three months have been unreal. No words can describe my whirlwind of self-inflicted life changes – but it does reflect in the dark, dark reading choices. In no particular order, Part 2 of My Favourite Books of 2021 –

1. Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong – a story of Alzheimer’s, caring for the old, caring for the young, unrequited love and coming to terms with death. It’s about all of this and still, breaks any of the stereotypes you may have associated with these themes. Khong’s charming, quirky, sad writing style is difficult not to like. Link to my review.

2. Lost Gods by Brom – WHERE HAS THIS BOOK BEEN! No, seriously. Why am I reading this now? Lost Gods is a story of a man who finds himself in the land of the dead and has to push his way out of Purgatory to save his family. It’s peppered with art by the author himself (who is an artist) and is just so incredibly detailed, it makes your skin crawl!

3. Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie – A modern adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone, this is the story of a pair of British Muslim sisters whose brother has left the family on a terrorist path, following in the footsteps of their father. It’s the story of a family’s loss and the little, big things that make up identity – language, food, nationality, what you wear, whom you marry. A haunting tragedy. Full review here.

4. Nightbooks by J.A. White – A little boy who loves to write horror stories finds himself trapped in a witch’s lair. In an Arabian Nights fashion, the only thing that keeps him alive is entertaining the old witch with his ghost stories. What happens when he faces the dreaded writer’s block? I wish I had access to such delicious, and also tasteful, horror when I was in middle school. I loved this book!

5. The Dark Interval by Rainer Maria Rilke – Self help in my world often takes the form of writings by Rainer Maria Rilke. The Dark Interval is about life and death. It’s a set of letters that Rilke had written to his grieving friends. Beautiful… that someone could be so sweet, sensitive and practical, and say the right things, in the face of loss… where most of us would just blubber and grimace.

6. Peter the Great: His Life and Times by Robert K Massie – Wow, I’ve spent two months on this monster of a book! It is absolutely incredible just how much detail, intrigue and character Massie has managed to squeeze into the roughly 1200 pages of this book – not a word is superfluous. It’s an account, not just of the life of Peter the Great, but a biography of the whole of Europe during the long reign of this Russian Tsar. I will write more soon.

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

I have not been reading much this year. But what I did manage to read, was devoured with the furtive urgency of a starving stray – excuse the crude metaphor. I started and finished Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie yesterday. Initial thoughts? This was my third read by her. Now, I want to read every other work of fiction she has ever written. Here’s why –

Summary: Home Fire is a modern-day reimagining of Sophocles’ Antigone. The story follows two British Muslim sisters, Isma and Aneeka, and the people who flavour and mould their lives. At the beginning of the story, we see Isma Pasha move to the United States for her PhD, while her sister Aneeka pursues a law degree back home in London. The two sisters are close, except for a brewing conflict about Aneeka’s twin brother, Parvaiz. who has disappeared, seemingly to follow in the footsteps of their jihadist father. The sisterhood bursts at its seams when Aneeka uncovers a dark truth about Isma’s involvement in their brother’s disappearance. Aneeka attempts to seek help for Parvaiz and finds uncanny hope in a young Muslim man who happens to be the Home Secretary’s son. But the political climate is such that Aneeka has many obstacles in her way, including her very own sister Isma.

My thoughts: The story is anything but comforting. So, it might be strange when I say this: Kamila Shamsie’s writing sends through me the same radiating warmth as a steaming cup of tea on a rainy afternoon. It’s comforting. I don’t know what it is about the flow, the words or the characters that creates this impression. She’s a fantastic storyteller and the book is engaging, even in its most horrific moments.

Well crafted, well rounded, meaty characters. Shamsie flits between five perspectives in this book – the two sisters, the young man and his politician father, and the lost brother Parvaiz. Not only does each character sound different – but every one of them is the star of their own little corner of the world. They justify their actions and stance to themselves as anyone would, caught up in their own struggles. They are coloured by their own biases. There is no authorial judgement, no narrator’s bias. As a reader, you really are left to draw your own inferences and allegiances. A lot of responsibility to put on the reader!

It is a throbbing discomfort to know that, in a sea of possibilities, it is Isma’s character I most easily identify with. Her preferred choice of action is the least obstructive, most pragmatic way out of every conflict.

The more obvious themes are: draconian citizenship laws, identity politics, Islamophobia, diversity, culture shock, loss of language identity, living up to and breaking stereotypes, fear-mongering, privilege. Lots of drama, but it’s a short book! Another plus: the book manages to avoid making sweeping generalizations. It keeps contextualising these issues within the boundaries of this story, using characters who really represent all sides of the argument. This is why I wouldn’t call it a ‘political’ novel – it doesn’t push its own agenda.

There is something very interesting that Shamsie does through this book. She builds a reflection of… not the current political landscape, but a political soundscape. Throughout the story, she uses sound imagery and sound metaphors in the most interesting ways. The sounds of Urdu, the sound of Urdu-tinted English, the sounds of London, the sounds of the twins chatting with each other, the ‘ping’ of a Skype call, a Pakistani pop song, the sounds of men screaming as they die, a girl howling with grief, sounds of torture, of love, of fire crackling, walkie-talkies crackling. And, no one listening to all of it, not really. Everyone is tuned in to their own version of reality. All that noise. We hear it, but do we listen?

The book is also about family – parental figures, and absent parents. It is about being saddled down with legacies. About love – misguided, overpowering, selfish, transactional, passionate and cruel love. Odd chapters here and there are only snippets off the internet. Articles, hashtags, tweets, taking reality and twisting it into its own viral anti-reality. What is true? What is real? Who cares?

Every once in a while, they heard the whump! of a section of dislodged snow landing on the ground, but it felt safe to keep going. Their talk was insubstantial – but even so, the Englishness of his humour, and his cultural references, were a greater treat than she would have expected. Small talk came more naturally to him than to her, but he was careful not to dominate the conversation – listening with interest to even her most banal conversations, asking follow-up questions rather than using her lines as springboards to monologues of his own…

Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong

I’m moving home, and reminding myself constantly that, “coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving,” (Terry Pratchett said that.) I stayed up reading overnight yesterday; or this morning. It felt good. Been a while since I did that. Then I ranted about the book on Goodreads. Sharing the rant here, too! A rare long review.

Amazon Blurb: Ruth is thirty and her life is falling apart: she and her fiancé are moving house, but he’s moving out to live with another woman; her career is going nowhere; and then she learns that her father, a history professor beloved by his students, has Alzheimer’s. At Christmas, her mother begs her to stay on and help. For a year. Goodbye, Vitamin is the wry, beautifully observed story of a woman at a crossroads, as Ruth and her friends attempt to shore up her father’s career; she and her mother obsess over the ambiguous health benefits – in the absence of a cure – of dried jellyfish supplements and vitamin pills; and they all try to forge a new relationship with the brilliant, childlike, irascible man her father has become

Disclaimer-ish: Okay, I want to get this out of the way – this book is nothing like the ‘kind of books’ I read, if all those many kinds can somehow be clubbed together as one thing that this book is not. Which is also to say that if this book were a ‘typical’ example of some genre, I am fairly certain I have no clue which, or how it lives up to others like it. Yep, the strange and uncalled-for disclaimer ends here. The obsessing and fawning and oohing begins –

Rant: I LOVE THE BOOK. It is so emotional. This is going to sound like a tangent, but bear with me. One of my favourite high school teaching moments is asking students to decide what the ‘sigh’ at the end of Frost’s Road Not Taken stands for – is it regret, relief, frustration, helplessness, or just a resigned acceptance, even an ironic celebration, of the inevitability of life taking its course. For me, it’s the last, always has been. This book is Frost’s resigned sigh stretched/packed into a novel.

I am someone who tends to live in the past, if I can help it; against my own better judgement. Tonight (or this morning, it’s past sunrise!) I am delighted that the book found me – on the precipice of a major life change, I think I needed to be told that I should salvage the present, and look up and away from that inevitable yearning for the past. I couldn’t stop reading it! I think I might read it all over again, just to see what I missed in my haste to devour it.

Khong does interesting things with language. She describes the main character’s attempts to make a relationship work as “grotesque, like trying to tuck an elephant into pants.” I came to a halt here at the ridiculous image. A simile shouldn’t distract you from the main prose and make you pause and puzzle over it, should it? Isn’t seamlessness a desired quality in a narrative? But. Tell me this didn’t make you smile! What a weird thing to say. Then there’s a passing comment about gutsy seagulls which look like Jack Nicholson, what with their piercing stares. I don’t think I will ever be able to look at a seagull or Jack Nicholson the same.

I made so many notes! Invented yoga poses, sabre-toothed squirrels, jokes hinged on a play on punctuation, and pronunciation, and pink loofahs. I just couldn’t steal away from the book to update my highlights on Goodreads or anything – and that’s a good sign right there.

An interjection of quotes:

Today we walked past a café’s colorful chalkboard and you asked me,
“Why is that sun wearing a bra on his face?”
“Those are sunglasses,” I told you.

~
“I’m just saying, if I were you, I’d forget about him,” she said. If I were you is something I’ve never really understood. Why say, “If I were you”? Why say, “If I were you,” when the problem is you’re not me? I wish people would say, “Since I am me,” followed by whatever advice it is they have.

~
I rip up the page. I mean to throw the pieces away but can’t. I put the pieces into my pocket to throw away later, or to forget to take out of my pocket and have destroyed by the washing machine.
It’s all so messed up. I think what it is, is that when I was young, my mother was her best version of herself. And here I am, now, a shitty grown-up, and messing it all up, and a disappointment.
What imperfect carriers of love we are, and what imperfect givers. That the reasons we can care for one another can have nothing to do with the person cared for. That it has only to do with who we were around that person—what we felt about that person.
Here’s the fear: she gave to us, and we took from her, until she disappeared.

Rating: So why 4 stars? Some parts of the book are stretched a little too thin. One has to take the level of detail with a pinch of salt – the narrator’s dad’s journals chronicling her childhood weirdnesses are too unrealistic. Children do absurd things, but no child does so many absurd things, so consistently, all in one day – for so many days. It’s quirky, but the narrative framework is a flimsy support for it. The “fake classroom sessions” set up for the narrator’s dad also are impossible to pull off with such non-chalance. All the “side characters” unite in a mission to keep up a semblance of ‘normalcy’ for this man suffering from dementia; and the lengths they go to do it are over the top and forced. A small issue. If it was a book that was driven by the plot, it would matter more – but it’s not.

Recommendation: The book is not ‘ha-ha’ funny, but funny in the same sense as “life is funny!” A summary wouldn’t do this book justice, so I haven’t written one. I mean – what’s up there in the description is as much as anyone could say and it’s not enough. It’s not a book about breakups, or parents, or health, or Alzheimer’s or loss or memory – though it has all of that. You need not satisfy specific ‘experience credentials’ to get this book. You just need to have lived a little.

Favourite Books of 2021 – Part 1

Have I been reading as much as I wanted? Not quite. But I’m happy with the books I’ve read so far this year.

1. King Rat by China Mieville – an urban fairytale retelling of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. King Rat is set in London, as so many of Mieville’s books and it unearths a lot that the city has to hide, and some that it fails to. This is how I effervesced about it to a friend when I was reading it – “It’s like someone took a bunch of Neil Gaiman books, put them through a grinder and something messier came out.”

2. The Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta – A tea master’s apprentice in a dystopian future, the debut novel by a Finnish writer. Uncanny, tragic and a beautifully seamless translation, done by the author herself. Sharing a quote –

“We are children of water, and water is death’s close companion. The two cannot be separated from us, for we are made of the versatility of water and the closeness of death. They go together always, in the world and in us, and the time will come when our water runs dry.”

3. Steve and Me by Terri Irwin – This one was like revisiting my childhood, and I somehow now have even more love for the crocodile hunter, the family, the Australia Zoo staff and their escapades! This book is an autobiography of a marriage like few others…

4. Broken Places and Outer Spaces by Nnedi Okorafor – I have since read fiction by Nnedi, but this memoir will never cease to put me in awe. The science fiction writer talks about her struggle with paralysis, race and how she found her stories. The very real hidden magic of our world, animated through the eyes of a writer… is just something else.

5. Love, Loss and What We Ate by Padma Lakshmi – The third memoir on this list, how! I knew very little about Padma Lakshmi going into the book – Salman Rushdie’s ex wife would have been one my top descriptions, followed by Top Chef. This book really made me think about the tiny realities that populate the big stories around us. Her story is generously peppered with anecdotes starring a ragtag band of charming, meddlesome characters, brimming with that very Indian matter-of-factly-ness; she has brought to life her childhood through the vivid sights, and all the smells and the tastes.

6. Ranmitra by Dr. Prakash Amte – The first book I’ve managed to complete, in my mother tongue. I can choose to be embarrassed about it, or I can choose to be glad. I’m glad! A life worth reading. This book is a collection of stories [experiences and learnings] gathered while raising rescued or orphaned wild animals, from leopards and bears to even crocodiles… peppered with the loveliest pictures. Read this article to know more about Amte’s Ark.