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I read Harry Potter last year.
Twenty years too late, someone commented when I proudly updated my facebook status after finishing the first book. Despite the delay something magical happened after I read the book and then the entire series. Suddenly many more jokes, references and Internet memes started making sense. Suddenly there were new people with whom I had an assured topic of conversation. While I did not quite become a Potterhead, definitely not to the extent of actually navigating through Pottermore (a horrible UX according to the product manager in me, but probably intentional so that only the most devoted get access to the magical treasures hidden there) for all related content, I was now a part of the big family of Harry Potter readers and fans. I was an insider. I could now grin mischievously as I muttered Harry’s signature “Expelliarmus”, or “Petrificus Totalus”, or even the evil “Avada Kedavra”.
Harry Potter enriched my social life. Reading popular books almost always does that. Even if you didn’t like them. I found Life of Pi by Yann Martel to be a ridiculous book. But since it is so popular, even in my dislike, I found companions. More of them online than offline, but I did.
Reading classics has a similar effect, though sometimes in smaller measure. Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and Charles Dickens are sure to give you several evening-coffees’ worth of conversations with people. Even a Doctor Zhivago works pretty well for the online world.
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn became a social book in India for the simple reason that the movie was released here and was widely talked about too. Besides, the movie was quite faithful to the book.. So, it was possible to discuss it with movie-goers even though they hadn’t read the book and I hadn’t watched the movie. Not many books can really work that way. Harry Potter movies just didn’t have the details the books did. It wouldn’t be possible for only the book-readers and only the movie-watchers to come together for it. But Gone Girl produced good harmony between the two groups!
These are the social books. I’ll be talking about Lonely Books in my next post. Which social books do you really love or hate and why?
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“Neelima found a book that she thought I’d like,” said Srishti.
This is how you lose her is by Junot Diaz is the kind of book that Srishti would like as it doesn’t have pages and pages about the curtains. Plus Diaz makes his characters talk crass. ” Diaz’s characters have no filter and you cringe at the kind of slang he uses. For instance, the word nigger shows up repeatedly.”
The central theme is about a womanizer and relationships, in the context of Hispanic day to day struggles in the U.S. “It’s a bunch of short stories that are all connected in the end. “The first chapter was sappy. But then it got interesting. Junot Diaz talks about many social issues like women who always have to work harder and the idea of male privilege.”
I liked the way this story continued what Shyamala Rao talked about when she discussed her book Sonia Sotomayor: Supreme Court Justice by Carmen T. Bernier-Grand. In This is how you lose her , there are many sad immigrants’ tales in this book– the story of a useless teenager who doesn’t help his mom in any way, the story of a guy who leaves his family behind, and the awful living conditions of women in who live in small spaces, cramped together, saving for a better future.” This story is very different from the kind of immigrants Jhumpa Lahiri talks about. They are a more privileged class and they don’t face the kind of problems that Diaz talks about. Junot Diaz uses crass language to reflect the reality of the world inhabited by his characters,” Shyamala said.
“If you want crass writing from India, I suggest you read Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English August,” Arun said. “It’s the story of an IAS officer in a small town, whose life is a series of very ‘colorful’ vocabulary, if you get my point.”
Vaishali agreed, “It was impossible to enjoy the book the first time round, but I enjoyed reading it much later.”
The story of crass vocabulary reflecting dire circumstances relates to the theme of the book party we had in September. Some people like Sonya Sotomayor rise above their circumstances, some people never get out of the rut as in Junot Diaz’s book, some have no hope as we saw in the bleak book White Tiger, and some no longer understand what their parents and grandparents fought for. One such book was Pema and the Yak by Siofran O’ Donovan; the story of the displaced community is one filled with grief, hope and a kind of futility.
“What matters most is home, ” said Baara Al Mansour, the Syrian writer.
On that note, we wound up a long party (Read Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 if you haven’t already) one of the best yet. The next time you read a book, why not discuss it
with a friend? You never know where books will lead you.
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You can read Part 1, 2 and 3 as well. this is turning out to be one long book party!
In my quest for the perfect fantasy novel, I chanced upon Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea. She is a magician, I think. Fantasy writing is very challenging- the characters need to have magical qualities and achieve magical feats. Le Guin’s character Sparrowhawk’s rites of passage is a coming of age story of a boy who becomes a wizard. So he has all the qualities that a wizard needs except that he is ambitious and extremely human. Le Guin’s craft lies in how she makes words magical as well and she gives a premise for the entire world that she creates. It is not just a make-believe world- the logic of all magic lies in the True Speech, the basic words that give the one who utters them great power. I particularly enjoyed the Dragon of Pendor; what is a fantasy without dragons?
Jaya has been reading a couple of not-so fantasy novels, but novels that deal with the unreal all the same like the Game of Thrones series and the irresistible Harry Potter, though after reading Le Guin, it feels like you’ve been through all the sorcerer apprentice adventure stories created.”I don’t know if Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy counts, but it was an other-wordly book!” said Jaya.
“No one beats Terri Pratchetts’s Discworld series,” Veena said, “If you want to explore the fantasy genre, start there.”
“And Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card if you want a dash of military sci-fi,” Abhaya said.
Done with dragons, we moved to a much darker terrain of poverty in a book called The White Tiger that Anil, the software engineer, was reading. Since the book was a Booker winner, he thought he’d have a go with it. It was the first serious piece of literature that he had tackled and it wasn’t exactly the right choice. The White Tiger has many admirers and many detractors as well. Some criticized it for its rawness and treatment of extreme poverty. Some praised his effort to translate something so stark and bleak. It’s not that literature has never mentioned poverty- take Charles Dickens, but Dickens was an optimist and Adiga can not sugarcoat his voice.
“There are parallels to Slumdog Millionaire. It isn’t a question of why India is depicted as poor, but how the depiction has been done in the first place. Phanishwar Nath Renu is a writer who tells reality as it is but he is an insider to the grim reality, so his voice is authentic,” Jaya said. “It’s not the depiction of unpleasantness that is jarring, it’s how it is depicted.”
“So a book like Em and the Big Hoom is a sad book but Jerry Pinto’s treatment is so touching, he changes your perception of the subject matter,” Arun said, “In fact, we interviewed many authors and to our surprise we found that most authors write without keeping an audience in mind.”
Baraa Al Manour, the Syrian writer, agreed,” If you think of what others want to hear, you will not write.There would be just one book, if we focused only on the reader.”
Dragons and white tigers later, Abhaya talked about his journey with Samanth Subramanium’s book called Following Fish. Being a fishitarian, the book was enlightening. “Subramanium takes us along the edge of the peninsula in nine essays and explores not just fish as cuisine but fish as industry. He talks about the bar food in Kerala, the different kinds of cuisines in Mumbai and the very secretive angling community in Goa.”
What you eat says a lot, doesn’t it? What are you reading today?
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Vaishali, who co-hosted the party with us, was in search of August, the Month of Winds (Translated from the Russian by Raissa Bobrova). It was a book that she read when she was young, the kind of story that makes an imprint on you, one so deep, that when she spoke of the blind boy in a serious story for children it was almost as though she were flying a kite of her imagination and the story though unavailable to her any longer as a physical copy was forever accessible in a single heart.
Language has a remarkable ability to transport one elsewhere, even in translation. Baraa Al Mansour, a Syrian writer of a book called Look Around You spoke about how Arabic is a language of emotion. “Once when I was in China,” she said “I saw and beautiful girl and told her that she was beautiful like the moon. That was a little too much, I later understood.” Although she writes in English, her sentiment translates another language.
Shyamala, the wildlife artist, agreed that Arabic was more like French. “May Sarton, a French writer, preferred to write poetry in French as poetry was too easy. The craft came to her in English”
Baraa expressed how translation could create a distance from true meaning, but even awkward literal translations worked better sometimes as it was closer home to the real thing.
Abhaya who is an ardent reader of Hindi poetry prefers raw untranslated mother tongue as far as poetry goes, “Nothing beats Braj Bhasha poetry,” he said bringing up the true Hindi speech which has ever since been diluted by multiple tongues. He found the case of Kamala Das intriguing. She wrote a great deal of poetry in English and prose in Malayalam, her mother tongue, Malayalam, a language of southern India as well. The book that Abhaya was reading at the time was a translated version of her prose called My Story, a controversial book. “Perhaps she was able to say things in English poetry that she couldn’t express in Malayalam,” he mused.
“Well as they, you can speak French to your lover, English to an accountant and German to your horse,” Shyamala said. In terms of precision, there is no better language than German as the adage goes.
In one of the books I had got to the party How to Read a Book (by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren), there was a section about how to read poetry. I’ve talked about this book earlier on this blog— it’s a mandatory read for readers of books, as so many times we read books in a hurry and words are lost on us. Instead of reading becoming an exercise in futility, it is best if we pay attention when we are reading by using a highlighter or a pencil.
When you read a poem, it is best to read it aloud (even plays should be read, Abhaya added). What sounds like gobbledygook makes sense when you listen to the rhythm of the words. A poet wouldn’t necessarily want to make sense in a rational way, so she must be read and listened to with an open mind. Incidentally Shyamala mentioned a book by Adler which focused on how to listen. The book is called How to Speak How to Listen. The interesting thing about listening is how it can be an exercise in formulating your own response rather than paying attention to what the other person is saying.
Attentive listening reaps rewards. The post script to this party was that Nilesh dug up August, The Month of Winds, a book that Vaishali so much craved.
Have you had any happy book surprises you want to share?
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