Feb. 7

Dora Bruder, Patrick Modiano

There is in the book only this: a sense that while walking the streets of Paris it is easier than it should be to forget that in that city were perpetrated crimes so great that they were not just committed against persons, but against all of humanity.

Modiano writes about the disappearance of a girl, and how little we know about her. He speaks also about his own father’s experience as a Jewish person in the time of the second world war. He compares his own experience of having run away from his home to that of a girl who had also run away, years earlier and in a circumstance more impossibly difficult. The way we remember these things is almost divorced from reality - because 

When we walk down roads, we never think about the other things that have happened on those roads. And so we let the horrors of the past fade into a murky grey stain on our thoughts.

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Salman Rushdie

Rushdie's latest book is terrific for many reasons, but here's my favourite: it is a return to his manic, crazy storytelling that I fell in love with when I read Haroun and the Sea of Stories. There is no subtlety to Rushdie's satire in this book, but it's funnier for it. The entire novel is told, which is to say it is written in the style of a speaking person. In fact, it's written in the style of the kind of Indian speaking person that also characterises Midnight's Children. The first lines of that book contain that same wildness - in which the narrator seems to overwrite and clarify himself with every sentence.

"Oh, spell it out, spell it out," the narrator says in that book's first paragraph, so annoyed with his own inability to be clear that he admonishes himself even as he begins what is one of the most authoritative novels ever written.

I loved this book.

The Sleeper and The Spindle, Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell

Riddell's art is made all the more disturbing for Gaiman's words. Gaiman's words become all the more weird next to Riddell's art. Here's a fairytale worth reading.

*

Feb. 7 - Books 5, 6 and 7

Jan. 24

I've read three very different books in the last three weeks. I think part of the reason I enjoy reading weird books is that they give you a window into lives you've no idea about. A good author makes the window a door, a great one makes the door lead into a house.

The Devotion of Suspect X - Higashino Keigo

This is not normally the kind of book you think about when you imagine a mystery novel.  I've never really been able to read whodunnits and catch whatever nuance points to a specific person as the killer. But Higashino's book tells you right off the bat who the killer is, and the rest of the book is about whether or not the police figure it out.

Hitchcock has a fascinating view on suspense. He says that suspense is not about keeping something hidden from the audience, so that they are on the edge of their seat wondering if anything will happen. Suspense is about  telling the audience that something will happen, and letting them deal with the fact that nobody in the scene knows that it's about to happen.

Higashino's novel is a masterful exercise in this sort of suspense - where the reader knows what has happened (though, admittedly, not the details of the happening). Well worth a read.

The House of Blue Mangoes - David Davidar

A great book. Halfway through I found out that my father and his siblings read it while an uncle of mine had cancer. I guess what I'm saying is that I cannot, having known that, really be objective about this. 

What I can tell you is that some of his imagery is stunningly evocative, the subtlety of his treatment of caste only makes it more powerful, and that I cannot help but feel that the subtitle of this book should have been "a book for Mamidipudis".

Aya: Life in Yop City - Marguerite Abouet & Clement Oubrerie

The other two books I read in the last few weeks were about places and people I at least had some familiarity with. Urban Tokyo is not unrepresented in the media I consume (even if some of the mange and anime I read and watch portray a clearly exaggerated version of it), and neither is pre-Independence India.

Abidjan - the largest city of Cote d'Ivoire - is completely unknown to me. 

Which is why I found Aya a really terrific read. It felt as if I was not reading about people with whom I have nothing in common. The behaviours and mannerisms of Aya and her friends reflect the ways that my own friends and I do things. The fact that it's set in the 1980's, in a part of West Africa that I may never visit, almost did not matter. The ways I learnt about Aya's world were less explicit. They made themselves obvious in the maquis that all the characters drank at, or the "hotel of a thousand stars" that serves as the clandestine meeting place for secret lovers.

Really quite a thing. 

(This is a graphic novel, by the way. I can't wait for the second half of this series.)

*

2016 - Books 2, 3, and 4

Stoner - John Williams

This is a book that is beautiful, desolate, and filled with perhaps two glimmers of hope that only make the rest of it all the more depressing. For the last four days I have felt that my laptop has had a monster in it because of this book; every time I opened it I would see my Kindle app stare out at me, waiting for me to slay it.

 It is so remarkably difficult to read that I struggle to even think about it, to talk about it. On Page 1 of this novel the reader is assured that the subject of the book, William Stoner, led a perfectly unremarkable and indeed mediocre life in which he had almost no effect on anybody. His colleagues at the University of Missouri never held him in any esteem, and neither did his family. This singular act infuses the rest of the book with the knowledge that everything is going to collapse.

And it really does collapse - but I will not tell you how. I can only urge you to read this book. Read it, and marvel at it. I will be busy weeping in a corner of the room.

*

2016 - Book 1