Kite Runner

Very fast read. I finished the book in one go reading it through the night right up to the next morning well past break fast. Binge reading :-)

I can see why this book became as famous as it did. It is written in a very easy language. You don't need a dictionary to understand a single word. The story's backdrop is very different. It's exotic Afghanistan. A country associated with violence and mass killings and not even remotely linked to literature. The book shows very realistic portrayal of the place. The story is very well told. The central theme of the story - redemption and retribution for past sins - is very well handled and executed. There are various layers and sub plots and complications of life. 

But it reads like a Bollywood movie in places. Certain scenes happen only in Bollywood formula movies. Like the final scene with the Taliban Assef. It's a little difficult to believe really. Such things don't happen in reality.

Also every time you think X will happen after Y, it does not happen and something totally different happens like a Z. That's also a cliched Bollywood style these days. Surprise for the sake of surprise.

I can understand that such a book would be a bestseller because it has all the elements of a bestseller - an exotic locale, immigrant life, almost true and seems like autobiographical, redemption of guilt etc. But I can also see why it has never won any award anywhere in the world. This book will never become a classic. It can sell millions of copies though. Apparently the book was on top of the NYT best seller list for two years :-). I am not surprised. It has everything that will please an American audience. Hosseini is a master chef and knows the recipe for a good dish that would be a big hit. But he may not provide any nourishment for you.

PS: I learnt about a new type of people. I am afraid I had no clue about the Hazara minority of Afghanistan. May God save them.

Dubliners

There are many books on my book shelf that I have not read. Some I bought. Some I got as gifts over the years. Some are extremely desirable gifts. Some are more like dumping by booksellers who couldn't sell something (in fact I want to relay dump them on some unsuspecting wannabe reader). 

As I confessed somewhere, I have not been reading a lot in the last 30 years or so and quite a few of these unread books have piled up crowding my shelf. Every time I look at any one such title I feel guilty about it, particularly if it is a book that I really want to read. The Dubliners was top of the list of such unread books. 

I think it's there for more than 30 years now. Aisling gave it to me as a gift, I can't remember when. Possibly when I was in Mongar. I had read only Araby as part of my syllabus in college. I quite liked the story back then. But somehow when the book came I never quite got round to reading all the stories. So in lockdown I picked it up and made a mental resolve to read it, come what may. I am happy to say I have now finished reading it. 

How did I like it? Well confession again. I had to struggle through the book. First of all, these are not really stories. Nothing much happens in most of them. There are certain characters that react in a certain way to one another. It's a different style. Totally different. 

Also, to appreciate the stories you need to know about Dublin, the Irish people, classical music, the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism (is there such a word?) and also the Irish political scene of the 1930s. This particular edition has copious notes to make the context clear to readers like me. But if you have to refer to some 3 notes for each average page and they are at the end of the book then it becomes a very very slow process and the flow of reading is interrupted. So barring very few I did not refer to the notes. 

So I had to struggle through the book. The language is beautiful. I could identify certain scenes with the Calcutta of my childhood that filled my mind with joy but those moments were very few and far between. My mind was drifting away totally to something else from time to time. If I stopped reading for a while it would take me a long time to find out where exactly I had stopped. Boring is the right word perhaps but I am a little hesitant to use it because James Joyce is a big name in literature. 

Grapes of Wrath

I had purchased the Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck in 1996. That is what my scribbling on the book's title page says. It was a paperback edition. That is the year Monisha and I got married. I cannot remember exactly from where I bought it or why. But I bought it. I guess I read about it somewhere. Possibly in some must read before you die kind of list. Google was yet to be invented and the idea of an internet was known but was possibly not experienced. So I must have read it in some magazine or newspaper. It is entirely possible that I bought it from the book seller who used to come to the ET office with a suitcase full of books on the recommendation of one of the more erudite colleagues.

Anyway, without getting further into what made me buy the book or from where, let me confess that I did not know much about this book before I bought it. It is seen as an American classic is all that I knew. Prior to this, my knowledge about American writers was limited to Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway only. 

But as things turned out the newly married young man in Calcutta didn't find the time or could never get into the frame of mind to read the book in twenty four years. From time to time I made unsuccessful attempts but never went beyond the first few pages. I cannot analyse why it was so. Possibly I had grown bored with fiction. 

These attempts continued and the book somehow remained visible in my book shelf despite two relocation of residence during this period. Finally as a the Covid19 lockdown rolled into its third version I picked it up. By this time I had grown confident that I could easily scale those 500-pagers.  Just before picking it up I had finished To Kill A Mockingbird. The book, I found, had gone yellow. Cheaper editions use a kind of paper that leaks acid and the pages turn yellow after a few years by which time you are expected to finish reading it. Regardless of how late I was in picking it up, I picked it up.

I could never have chosen a better time to pick this book up. A time when millions of unfed, jobless, migrant labourers in India are going through extreme hardship. They are walking with their family and belongings for hundreds of kilometers to their homes in the villages of India. They are leaving the big cities where they had gone to work and are now going back or are trying to go back to their villages where they think they belong. 

Their hardship and misfortune is indescribable. From the comfort of our homes we are reading about them in the newspapers or watching the images on television and facebook. Some are carrying their old mothers on their backs. Some carrying their children on their shoulders. Some are even giving birth on the road side and then walking again. I saw the photograph of a man holding a table fan in his hand as he walks down the highway with his family. It seemed that was a very dear possession for him. This image somehow haunts me. I do not know why. The newspapers are full of incredibly sad stories of human tragedies. I will not get into those details here. I am tired of them. I feel sick. I feel guilty. Terribly guilty that while I read books from the comfort of my house these people are facing such insurmountable challenges. You could just google them up. 

While the Indians are trying to walk back to their illusive homes from their places of work, the Americans in this book are leaving their homes in the dust bowl in search of work in California - the promised land. Both are illusive - the work and better life in California for the Americans and the security and comfort of village homes for the Indians. Both are in an existential crisis. The Indians are not aware that they are not welcome back in their own villages. The resident villagers see them as a threat, being carriers of the disease and are scared of them. Trouble is breaking out in various villages over their unwelcome entry into their own homes. May be not headline news but they are happening. 

The Americans in this story are also not aware that they are not welcome in California. 

Here a family of extremely poor farmers from Oklahoma in the 30s' America, the Joads, dispossessed of their ancestral land and livelihood, are travelling to the promised land of California in search of steady work and a better life. Most incongruously for an Indian like me to conceive, the poor Americans are driving a car or truck, as they call it. No matter how "beat up" the car is it is impossible for me to imagine this in an Indian context. The poor, dispossessed, landless farmers in India cannot afford even a bicycle.  Here the Indian family in a similar situation would have travelled by train, perhaps without ticket. 

But the description of the American poverty is so realistic and palpable that one can soon recognise them as being indeed poor and the beat up car becomes more symbolic of their poverty than their relative affluence. Poor, rustic people think and behave in a similar way all over the world. If you have intimately mixed with a poor Indian family in any village, you will be able to identify with the Joads and see them as really poor farmers, despite their car. I have just accepted that to an American family a car is as common as an image of Kali or Laxmi in an Indian household. Everyone has it. In fact the Joads never had a car. They bought it for this journey and got cheated by the sucker of a used car salesman. Used car sellers are also similar across the world and adopt similar techniques to dupe their buyers or sellers :-) 

I am right now at around page 350. The entire book is 535. I will possibly need 3 more days. The Joads have reached California and the welcome has not been good. They have realised that their dream is already shattered. It is slowly breaking apart. They have learnt a new word Okies. They realise that they are Okies.

Page 385 - "The stars came down wonderfully close and the sky was soft. Death was a friend, and sleep was death's brother. I read these lines today (11th May, 2020) two days after that tragic accident in which a running goods train took away the lives of a family of 15 tired migrant labourers who had fallen asleep in the night on the railway lines near Aurangabad. They were walking towards their home some hundreds of miles away. I did not read the news for details. There are other similar deaths happening on the highways but this got bigger prominence due to the number of victims.

I finished reading the book last night. In the wee hours of this morning actually, Wednesday 13th May, 2020. I will write down my feelings a little later. I am off with the Dubliners now.