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.)

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2016 - Books 2, 3, and 4