“To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.”
I was torn between loving and hating this book but eventually I've come to like it a lot more with time. Love, because there are few writers with the gift of mixing fable and allegory, facts and fiction and metaphors into a delicious recipe called "the novel" like Kundera has shown here. Hate, because this, in my eyes, is where his misogyny was most open.
Like every other Kundera novel, the underlying theme of the writing lies in the title, meaning the book is about "immortality". This "immortality" isn't just mentioned in the physical concept of life and death but also in the form of fame and the impact a famous person leaves on humanity, their stubborn footprints left in the society in a war against time. The story has several characters, some history and thought-provoking fables, all describing the futile struggle of Man against the ephemeral quality of His image.
Initially, I wasn't familiar with the name Alistair MacLean until I came to know that he had penned Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare, both of which were adapted into films that inspired my early love for cinema. As it happens, we had this particular MacLean title at home and I really enjoyed perusing it as a child.
Fast-paced, sexy and a logic-defying thriller, Caravan to Vaccares is set in the 1960s and has a certain Neil Bowman investigating a number of disappearances in the Provence region of France, as gypsies gather around for their annual pilgrimage. Going undercover accompanying Cecile Dubois, a breathtakingly beautiful woman, as he investigates these shady circles, coming across bull rings, hidden graves and bloodthirsty gypsies with a secret to kill for.
Caravan to Vaccares was loosely adapted into a 1974 film starring David Birney and Charlotte Rampling
The book's writing may appear to be a bit dated in the 21st century. However, if you're looking for a fast-paced thriller devoid of logic, you can give this a try.
“If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”
Set in the middle of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), For Whom the Bell Tolls tells the tale of one Robert Jordan, an American who is given an assignment to work with a republican guerrilla unit to blow up a bridge during an attack on the city of Segovia.
The story explores various wartime sentiments such as thoughts of mortality, the possibility of suicide to escape torture and execution at the hands of enemy, camaraderie, betrayal, different political ideologies and bigotry.
Ernest Hemingway (center) in 1937 with Ilya Ehrenburg (Russian author, left) and Gustav Regler (German writer, right) during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)
The book garnered much attention for Hemingway's incorporation of a strange semi-archaic form of English to represent text translated from Spanish. Several real-life figures of Marxist background who played a part in the war are mentioned in the text as well. The book was unanimously recommended for the Pulitzer back in 1941 but the decision was controversially reversed by the board and no award was given that year.
Side-notes:
Hemingway himself was involved in the Spanish Civil War as a journalist. In 1937, Hemingway agreed to report on the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), arriving in Spain in March with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. Ivens was filming The Spanish Earth, a propaganda film in support of the Republican side. He wanted Hemingway to replace John Dos Passos as screenwriter, since Dos Passos had left the project when his friend José Robles was arrested and later executed.
Hemingway (center) with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and German writer Ludwig Renn (serving as an International Brigades officer) in Spain during Spanish Civil War, 1937
The book is divided into four parts containing poetry, prose, anecdotes and illustrations by Rupi Kaur. The four parts are:
- The hurting, dealing with abuse of women in society - The loving, dealing with relationships - The breaking, dealing with breakups - The healing, the fourth phase of recuperation
The book is filled with some interesting musings, some quite well-worded. The writing isn't properly punctuated or capitalized, making the reading experience difficult. The writings are awfully random and sound like edgy captions for Instagram posts. Some are just rants. And then there is the oddball that catches your attention and makes you feel differently and then you're bombarded with more of the underwhelming musings.
I'm not saying I'm anti-feminist. I respect her advocacy for menstrual cycle awareness. I also liked some of the pieces in the "hurting" collection but most of these are just bad writing. Moreover, the lack of punctuation and capitalization makes it difficult to read, although I believe this was done to provide some originality to her text but then....
Either I just don't get poetry or I'm too old-fashioned for this.
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is one of the most interesting novels I've ever read, mostly due to its structure. The book is written in seven parts, each part comprising of a story written from multiple perspectives. Some of the central themes of each story are derived from semi-autobiographical accounts of Kundera's days as a political exile. Each story is vaguely connected to each other like small threads that pull at each other. Kundera explores in detail the themes of memory politics, social amnesia and damnatio memoriae.
The picture of Vladimír Clementis standing next to Klement Gottwald, before and after he was edited out of the picture. The picture is one of the first mentions of memory politics made in the book.
The book shares various fictional and non-fictional accounts of people's lives during the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. it is only ironic that the nation that Kundera writes about no longer exists as he knew it. And it makes this novel even more relevant.
"Dearest Father, You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning."
In November 1919, Franz Kafka wrote a letter to his father, where Kafka tries to open up about his father's emotional abuse and hypocritical behavior and the effect it had on him. It was around this time that father and son had reached a low-point, over Kafka's recent engagement and their disagreement on it. Kafka had given the letter to his mother to be forwarded to his father. His mother never delivered the letter, fearing that things were beyond the possibility of making amends in between father and son, and returned it back to Kafka.
In the letter, Kafka calls out his father on his demanding and authoritarian nature, and his hypocrisy. The words are full of raw emotion and anguish.
A personal note: I began reading the letter around the time when I was sleepless for 48 hours after my father had been taken into intensive care. It was quite a surreal experience.
Spring Moon is a collection of 43 English haiku written by Bangladeshi poet Quamrul Hassan and illustrated by Rudaba Mohsin. The cover was done by Khademul Jahan. The number 43 was chosen by Hassan as it was his batch number at Faujdarhat Cadet College. Quamrul Hassan is a former student of Dhaka University's English department. The book is introduced by the author's teacher Kaiser Haq, also a noted poet, who talks about both Quamrul's lack of seriousness in studies and his passion for poetry.
The beautiful haiku in this collection deal with everyday stories in the lives of the average Bengali. The haiku deal with urban and suburban culture: stories of love, loss, anguish and blissful musings.
The stories come alive with beautiful watercolor illustrations by Rudaba Mohsin.
Quamrul Hassan has done something really special here. He has captured part of the essence of Bengali life in this little collection. Short, and easy to read, these little poems are like a small sentimental tribute to Bangladesh.
A note of gratitude to Tisha apu and Tukunjil Nayeera apu for introducing me to this wonderful book.
I took a long look at my reflection in the window. My eyes were a bit hollow with fever. I could live with that. And my jaw was dark with five o’clock (five thirty, actually) shadow. I could live with that too. The problem was that the face I saw wasn’t my face at all. It was the face of the twenty-four-year-old guy you sometimes sit across from on the train. My face and my soul were lifeless shells, of no significance to anyone. My soul passes someone else’s on the street. Hey, it says. Hey, the other responds. Nothing more. Neither waves. Neither looks back.
Another one of Murakami's earlier works, Pinball is just his second novel. Here, the narrator from Hear the Wind Sing describes his brief obsession with pinball. The book contains some of the elements that we eventually relate to as part of the Murakami aesthetic. The metaphor of the switch-board, the twins that mysteriously appeared, a girl who kills herself and some details about his friend Rat make up most of the novel.
