Selected Readings
Traveling alone means: times of frenzied activities when your orbit merges with the spins-spuns of other backpackers... and times of silent introspection (and by this I mean the increasing volume that silence brings inside your head until your brain devours itself).
In these times of silence I've read a lot of books. Here are some quick thoughts:
Pig, by Andrew Cowan: A coming-of-age story. Cowan weaves a vivid photo of teenage escapism, a hodgepodge of rebellions and sporadic revelations -- full of the be-speckled mud and splattered stains from the heart-rending English countryside. Full of goodbyes, and with those departures of mind and spirit and body, so climbs this tale, like the solitary flower among the darkening moor. Four stars.
Wicked, by Gregory Maguire: A take on the 'nature of evil', starring one of the most beguiling, reviled and misunderstood (according to the author) characters in the Oz saga. Maguire starts out the experiment well enough, with adequate mystification and originality to turn the page. The study bogs down in the middle and never regains traction, as the words rips free of its realism and punches through the trite world of the metaphysical. Maguire falls in love too much with the philosophical underpinnings of his ideas that he forgets to maintain the reins on maintaining a good story. Three stars.
Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides: A classic immigrant tale with a full hard-on for comic tragedy. The Greek drama swells more convincingly around the 4-generation immigrant tale of the Stephanides clan than the undercurrents of sexual-gender crisis. While Eugenides can't quite breach the gap between Calliope the adolescent girl and her eventual metamorphosis into the existential Cal, his cast of supporting characters provide a brilliant backdrop for all sorts of 'oh wow!' moments from the reader. Five stars.
The Hungry Tide, by Amitav Gnosh: Once again, Gnosh, the author of The Glass Palace, has woven a tale of fragile characters searching for the constancy of redemption among forces of change greater than the sums of their lives. Set in the Sundarbans, a tug-of-war region between land and water, the metaphoric story centers around Piya Roy, an American dolphin expert and Kani Dutt, a businessman from New Delhi -- the two outsiders in this ever shifting desolation. Gnosh has captured exquisitely the nexus between history and future, tradition and modernity, and constancy and change by gripping the reader with a melancholic tone while hinting at the cleared skies to come. Four stars.
A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby: A scathingly dark and funny story about the absurdity and wholly human-ess of wanting to kill yourself. Hornby laughs at his own jokes sometimes, but it's a perfect story for the beach: breezy with just the right dash of surprises. Once again, Hornby flexes his talent at getting the fever pitch of the modern self-pitying hero, and the result is a joy ride. Five stars.
The Honorary Consul, by Graham Greene: A treatise on how to get dialogue right. A story of lost and the emptiness of redemption set among a fictionalized Argentinian town, The Honorary Consul is a take on the ironic circumstances of life: how it throws lives together inexplicably, how it demands allegiance, and how it leaves behind a trail of tears. Green has an unequaled gift for bringing down all institutions of hypocrisy -- and here he takes on religion, bureaucracies, and the morality of immoral men. Five stars.
Against All Enemies, by Richard Clarke: If you haven't been convinced by the course in which US reality has plunged in the past six years, look no further than Clarke's angry and insightful look at the birth, growth and coming of al Quaeda and how horribly ill-equipped the US was to handle the hydra. The missteps of the Bush administration is glaring, and when measured against the daily news coming out of Iraq, Afghanistan and the White House – things are dire indeed. Four stars.
On Beauty, by Zadie Smith: A satirical look at academia, intellectualism, and the stuff that holds together families. Sorrow is beautiful, and so is delinquency and disloyalty. Secrets are known, then revealed, and then tested against the DNA of familial bonds. Smith has real talent for getting inside her characters, whether it is a self-obsessed professor or his wanna-be ghetto son or his big-hearted ad confused wife. Compared to White Teeth, Smith's third novel could use some better editing, and when she gets away from her characters and into the actual stuff of theses, the book falters. Three stars.
A Wild Sheep Chase, by Haruki Murakami: What is power? What is life? What is living? Murakami explores all those questions in a hauntingly beautiful and absurdist tale of an everyman on a hunt, then a quest, to find a curiously marked sheep with mysterious powers. Reveling in his mundane life, the protagonist and un-named author reflects the sterile modern life: our daily routines are but anesthesias against the encroaching dangers of a truly lived life. In his own words, the narrator searches for boredom instead of trying to escape it... until the sheep specter appears and begins to wreck his carefully constructed persona. This is a great leap down the rabbit hole and back – and upon coming back, affirmation for life will linger with you beyond the finished words. Five stars.