shorshewitch's reviews
281 reviews

This book was chosen as Karuna's Kitab Club's August book. I have not read the author's Leila so I got into the book completely neutral. 

Two protagonist POVs form the story. Mayank Tyagi, who works for a YouTube channel run by a right wing conservative Kashyap and Nisha Bisht, who has come to Delhi from a small town to fulfil her ambitions. You might assume it's a love story but fortunately for me Prayaag Akbar steers clear of that cliche as an immediate premise. 

The book takes a look at contemporary India with its digitization, fake news apparatus, jingoism, migrant issues, religious animosity, violence, drug and alcohol problems, journalistic ethics, climate change, poverty and rampant corruption. In that the book attempts to navigate a lot of issues for its size. By the middle of the book I was wondering how would the author tie all the threads in such few pages. Incredibly, the author manages to take care of a lot of them, except a few, and I really hope the author writes a sequel to this. Not just the love story, but also the development of the protagonists' arcs seems incomplete for now. I'd also want a few of the characters in the book suffer consequences for their choices. 

Writing-wise, Prayaag uses lucid, well constructed sentence structures. A couple places feel slightly rambly but that could be on me because I was invested in the plot and couldn't wait for things to move on. Like Karuna said on the group, it does feel because the book is short, we might have skimmed over a couple significant things. It's on me now to re-read a few pages again. 

That said, I truly think a sequel is warranted. And going by this book, I might just pick up Leila now.

This is a very difficult book. Extremely heavy in what it wants to tackle. And yet I finished it in a day. Sometimes when I read such books, I think we read them despite our personal triggers because we owe it to those who are no more. The book is a song for all women who have experienced violence at the hands of patriarchy and misogyny, racism, capitalism and war. Patricia Melo hasn't minced any words. The book wavers between magical realism and actual cases of murder and investigation of women in Acre, Brazil. The translation is fluid, even though I suspect it might have been tough considering the variable format of the book. 

There is a point on page 101  if you are reading the Kindle copy (chapter L) at which I laughed and cried and laughed more and cried more because in all the ugliness the catharsis of that moment was electrifying. DM me if you feel that moment too. 

A horrifying page turner that ended up making me numb. Some sets are pushed a bit far, 

The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth by Veeraporn Nitiprapha, translated from Thai by Kong Rithdee

I came across a recommendation for this book when on my fav #translatedgemsbookclub someone spoke about crip time theory and queer temporality. The title fascinated me. So obviously I went and got the book. 

The writing is captivatingly lyrical. Metaphors abound. The book largely revolves around sisters Chareeya and Chalika, and their friend Pran. All three are orphaned at very young ages and try to find their footing in a world desperately trying to throw them off any love or affection. Plenty of characters come and go in their lives each with their own complexities. The author seems to have made a personal decision that time would not mean anything in the story. Various worlds collide to bring out a tragically beautiful story of human intricacies. Generous descriptions of Thai culture, food and if you love gardens, then the book is a gorgeous treat. 

Here is something from the translator, Kong Rithdee's note, that sums up the writing. 

//She disassembles words and clauses and then reconstructs them – a near-inimitable trick in the English language – and she deploys a range of devices from irony to digression, symbolism to fabulism, rhapsodic dramatisation to cinematic scene-sketching.//

It has been years since I declared my intent to never become a mother, but some of my relatives and friends still haven’t fathomed my choice of not wanting to bear kids. Time and again I get to hear how fulfilling it is, how I will regret at a later age, what will I do when I get old, etc. But I know who I am. There are days I fear myself. I have not had a very frolicking childhood. I have battled madness very closely. But that is not the only reason I don’t want to bring kids in this world. There are layers and layers of thoughts that have gone into the decision.

“Mothers Don’t”, as the name suggests, is about mothers. The book is a translation from the original Basque. The premise is based on a story of a mother who drowns her twins in a tub of bath water and does not feel remorse. Elsewhere, another to-be-mother, who is also a writer, gets this news and recollects that she knows this woman. She feels the need to write about this and embarks on a journey to research and understand more about the child murderer she had once known as a young woman with promise. In that this book is also about the process of writing a book.

Understandably, the book does not offer any answers for the many critical questions it raises. The author accepts that in her closing paragraph - 

//Because I have to talk about that muddy territory. It is neither a moral obligation nor a social accusation. It is something much more basic. The muddy land is there, as Everest is there, irresistible. Especially for those of us who are like me.

Defective. We are defective.//

What the book does offer, is a meticulous commentary on mental illnesses in women, the misdiagnosis, the loneliness, boredom and exhaustion of mothers, societal pressures, medical procedures, laws, history, literature, patriarchy and neoliberalism, and implores us to look at mothers as flesh and blood people. It’s a grim book, fast-paced in its narrative, satire is used as a device to assuage the intensity in some places. I am reading another book parallelly that is translated from Thai with a protagonist who was resented by her mother all her life - a fact that continues to define and underline all her future relationships. Mothers are not just capable of great injustice, but also great apathy, just like any of us are. Cultures across the world need to start to either provide structural and systemic support needed to rear children, or stop glorifying non-existent selflessness of mothers, that is often the cause of intense disgruntlement and confusion, not just for them, but also for their offspring. We need to truly keep it real. 

Sigh! There is plenty to write, but I need time to process the book.

For now, I am going to give a shoutout to @3timesrebel for being who they are. I hope you all keep doing what you are doing and folks like me get to access books from languages we had never known before. Thank you to Dan from #translatedgemsbookclub for bringing the book to my notice.