What is it about Georgette Heyer that she can turn imagination into language so brilliantly?I reread another Georgette Heyer, before reading Simon the Coldheart, and found myself skipping large sections of it. I think time has made me a little uncomfortable with the romance that she portrays. I squirm more than a little, and run my eyes over the pages sometimes, without reading much. I realise I don't like her ideas of mastery in romance or the way in which so many of the heroines just seem to give in.Yet, I enjoy Georgette Heyer.Why?Each page sparkles with fun. I love the humour; laughter rises to my throat time and time again. Those are the answers that come to me instinctively.But Simon the Coldheart is not one of those novels. It's not one of those with joyous gurgles of laughter. It's one in which the romantic element kicks in quite late in the novel. But I read on and on, … [Read more...]
The Worry Tree
I remember having a conversation with a friend about the challenges faced by each generation. "Our grandparents had to work hard - physically," I said. "My grandmother has so many stories of how difficult it was to make dosa batter and things like that. Our parents had financial difficulties, more than anything else. What about us?" "We have emotional and intellectual issues," my friend said, thoughtfully, "basically about who we are and what we want from life."In that sense, I think The Worry Tree reaches out to the children of this generation. Children who are worried. Children who sometimes don't realise that problems around them aren't their fault.I loved the idea of the book, reading page after page with a half-smile. I love the pages at the end where the child who owns the book can write down his or her own worries, hang them up on the worry tree, so to speak.I took about an … [Read more...]
Pegasus
What a mixed bag of emotions!Pegasus was wonderfully imagined. I loved the ideas of feather-tip fingers, strong human hands and flexible wrists, being bound to the pegasi of the sweet green land... Beautiful! There was a kind of raw beauty that reached out and touched me, page after page. The beauty of the Caves - the Caves that are so full - I want to see them too! I feel shivers at the thought of beauty that is so profound that you cannot see it. Rather, you feel it, if you distance yourself from space and time. It was an experience of bliss, reading Pegasus.There has to be a 'but', though. It was long, a little too long, I thought. Maybe not too long, actually. Long in ways that it should not have been long, but not long enough when it came to knowing what happened. I want to know more. It ended all wrong for me.The biggest enemy of beauty is not ugliness. It is … [Read more...]
The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club fits so perfectly under the heading 'unusual'. It's unusual in every way. The language is unusual. The structure is unusual. The name is unusual.I love the idea of stories of motherhood, and I love stories that do not have a simplistic conclusion. Each story in this collection is the story of a mother and her daughter against a Chinese-American socio-cultural backdrop. Mother and daughter struggle to fit in, while retaining a Chinese identity. Mother and daughter speak a foreign tongue. Mother tries to curl her tongue around ideas that do not have their equivalent in the new language. Daughter tries to achieve, tries to over-achieve, tries to find a place. Mother wants the best for her daughter and tries to find the balance between two nations separated by an ocean.Going back home to China means travelling westwards to reach the east. Of course the novel … [Read more...]
On Two Feet and Wings
I'm a slow reader. Despite the fact that I love reading, I take my time over books. Sometimes, I take weeks to finish a book, even one I enjoy.On Two Feet and Wings was not like that. I would never have expected a book based on a true story to have transported me into a world I do not know at all. Powerful, moving, pacy - what cliched words these are! But each of them is apt.I started reading Abbas Kazerooni's story only because someone gave me On Two Feet and Wings for my birthday. When I started reading it, I didn't know what to expect.But I loved every moment and every page - I'm tempted to say that I loved every word.The innocence and pathos in the story reached out to me - I haven't been touched like that in a long time.I saw the dirty alleys of Istanbul, smelled the dank sheets, drank the tea and cringed at the cockroaches in the bathroom. I saw a precocious nine-year-old … [Read more...]
Indian Summer
As I read Indian Summer by Pratima Mitchell, I kept oscillating between approval and disgust.There were parts that were so real that they reached out to me and made me think, "That's exactly, perfectly captured!" And there were parts that were so real that they made me curl my lip and think, "Why do people write about things that are so mundane?"I rolled my eyes at parts of the book because I found them utterly inane. I found myself enjoying parts of the story and its telling so much that I wondered to whom I could recommend it because it was so good.It's a strange experience reading a novel like Indian Summer. When you finish it, all you feel is, "Hmm. Okay. But it's not perfect." … [Read more...]
Animal Farm
Animal Farm is the kind of book that I could read over and over again.It was written in just a few months and it's less than a hundred pages long.I was revolted and fascinated by it the first time I read it and I'm revolted and fascinated even now as I teach it. What a fabulous book it has to be to evoke a response time and time again! How rich it is, and yet, how simple!When the pigs begin the gentle takeover, I squirm within, but believe how it could happen. I am enthralled (more than a little guiltily) by the very idea of their power. It's frightening how easy it is to manipulate the truth by abusing the language of power. It makes me shiver and shake my head. Succinct and complete - this one is most certainly a classic. … [Read more...]
Chalkline
I recently read Neil Gaiman's views on escapism: I hear the term bandied about as if it's a bad thing. As if "escapist" fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in. If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control ...And that's the way I feel when I leave a book like Jane Mitchell's Chalkline unfinished. I have nothing against the way it's written. It's powerful, hugely moving and terribly disturbing.And that's just why I could … [Read more...]
The Children’s Hour
I picked up the DVD about nine years ago because I saw Audrey Hepburn's picture on the cover. I like Hepburn. I knew I would like the film.I did not know how much it would haunt me, though.The Children's Hour is one of those very few movies whose story I have retold time and time again. Watching it again a couple of days ago, I was as disturbed as I was the first time I watched it. I was moved to tears more than once. Emotion, passion, frustration, desire, love, fear - everything comes together in The Children's Hour.I knew what was going to happen and sobbed in anticipation. I saw what happened and something within me seemed to wither.It's not a film that should have a blurb because anything you say is either insufficient or too much.I would leave it at this - I had no idea that a black and white film made in the 60s could be so bold, powerful and disturbing. … [Read more...]
Running Wild
I don't usually like thick hardbound books. They are daunting and, usually, boring. As soon as I make that statement, though, I realise how many exceptions there are.Running Wild is one of them. It has pages and pages of description, but not once was I bored.Morpurgo, at the end of the book, talks of his motivation for this novel. He talks about The Jungle Book, about his fascination for elephants, about the Iraq war, the Indonesian tsunami and the impending extinction of orangutans. Running Wild brings together all these. After a long time, I felt rage, a lump in my throat, relief, joy and excitement in the course of a single story. I was excited about, filled with grief for, repelled by and at peace with the story of a young boy in a jungle in Indonesia. Oona the elephant won my heart over and over again making me wonder if it's possible to look at an … [Read more...]