Blindness is tragic, deafness is comic. That is the premise Deaf Sentence, the latest by the British author David Lodge, begins with. The first few chapters explores this perspective through Desmond, a likable character, spending his early retirement as professor of linguistics from the English department, but still in academic setting and company continuing with his research (or purporting so). He has accepted his deaf state and its mostly comic and tragicomic flailing in stride, without indulging in self-pity (David Lodge acknowledges his growing deafness for the authenticity of the portrayal of the protagonist). Through him we learn of the (non) workings of hearing aids, what is Lombard reflex and how deafness saves one from that, why TV is a good companion (close captioned) for the deaf than the movie halls, of ‘quiet coaches’ in England trains, of Beethoven’s despair and how his reclusive character is a put-on to cover-up his growing deafness (as he explains in his letters), how Francis Goya’s deafness could have enhanced his concentration to do better paintings in his later years and several such interesting deaf stuff. These sections are peppered with word play and dead-pan humour

One of the strongest curses in English language is ‘Damn your eyes!’ (much stronger than ‘Fuck you!’ and definitely more satisfying) […] “Damn your ears!” doesn’t cut it. Or imagine if the poet had written, ‘Drink to me only with thine ear…; It’s actually no more illogical than saying drink with thine eyes […] Nor would ‘Smoke gets in your ears’ be a very catchy refrain for a song […] ‘There’s more in this than meets the ear’ is something Inspector Clouseau might say, not Poirot.

The novel moves on from that relatively light premise to a ‘deafness is tragic’ premise for few chapters and ends with chapters that conclude ‘deafness is not tragic, only death is’. The plight of a geriatric parent, living separately in London, and refusing to move ‘up North’ near to his son (Desmond) and daughter-in-law, and the doting deaf son’s inadequacy in convincing either his dad or his wife for a ‘move in’ solution is only familiar to most of us in such a state in our lives. A less familiar track, perhaps to readers who are not ‘academics’, is the episodes between Desmond and Alex Loom, an attractive but unhinged PhD student who is only too aware of her charms and doubly eager to use them for getting her research and laundry done by someone else capable. The despair felt by a bright professor (not Desmond) beguiled by Alex, the dread he and Desmond feel when a suicide was threatened by her, the associated academic quibbles, jealousies and integrity, are all portions of the novel I could lap with sympathetic unease. In the end Desmond gets lucky — not with Alex, but with his integrity.

Apart from Desmond, his ageing dad is given enough coverage and care in character depth (again, David Lodge acknowledges his personal life for this). Next comes his asserting and business savvy wife Winfred. The character of Alex Loom is also given some flesh and detail. The rest don’t have a major role of impact in the novel. This perhaps is deliberate as the novel unfolds from the perspective of Desmond and the rest of the characters are discussed and detailed only to the extent he knows of them. The novel has several anecdotes that are original and amusing if not LOL-type funny, while engaging in wry observations about familiar human relationships.

Given the scope the deafness tempts, thankfully, the novel is not bitter, kept mostly upbeat, if not cheerful. The writing as one expects from David Lodge, is elegant and taut. The narration moves between first and third person, an exercise Desmond is fond of giving to his students. That and long paragraphs often spanning two pages, with long sentences that use the language and written form to its potential (with parenthetic contrary observations appearing in the middle of the already long sentences, a style that I have observed to annoy several non-British English language readers, particularly non-native-English speakers), a writing style that demands undivided attention from the reader in return for the assured enjoyment.

*

Book: Deaf Sentence

Author: David Lodge

Year of Publication: 2007

Buy at Amazon | Flipkart (India)

London based publishers Prion have sometime now been re-publishing most of the classics from around fifty to hundred years back, from the stiff-upper-lip-Brit humour (notice the ‘u’) to the more unabashed slap-the-back American ones. Authors include (complete list) E. F. Benson, Saki, Jerome K. Jerome, Max Beerbohm to Anita Loos, James Thurber, Mark Twain, S. J. Perelman across the pond to the relatively obscure E. M. Delafield (Diary of a Provincial Lady). I picked a relative unknown for me, How to Travel Incognito written by Ludwig Bemelmans.

Ludwig Bemelmans, born in Austrian Tyrol in 1898 and a colorful personality in his times, was raised by his uncle who was a successful hotelier. The book has a nice introduction by Robert Warnick on Bemelman’s real-life adventures — shot a staff in his Uncle’s hotel and ran off to America by 16 with two pistols to “fend off hostile Indians”. Bemelmans is not exactly obscure, for he is a popular author for children and has written more than fifty books, most of them light-hearted and humorous. How to… is also written in similar style. It is a collection of easy adventures by the protagonist, semi-autobiographical, set in 1950s France.

Monsieur Le Comte de St. Cucuface is an aristocrat fallen on hard times, with his head and appetite held high, living on parties. He convinces our protagonist, Ludwig, to travel ‘incognito’ with him, as the Prince of Bavaria and join the fun. And so the adventures begin in post-war France, gallivanting from one hotel to another buffet through bar-rooms, gobbling gastronomic delights to gaffes, from one castle to another party via train journey that gets misdirected. Each sojourn is spruced with a story of local color, some interesting others plainly boring. And in the end, all misadventures along with the adventurers come to a happy tepid ending.

Here is a sample from the whacky prose to prick your interest:

“The painter Dali once told me that turtles are very useful. They make excellent ashtrays,” said St. Cucuface. “The way to do it is simple: you take a turtle of medium size, a young one, preferably between fifty and seventy-five years of age, and you have a jeweller attach a metal rod to its shell. On the top of that an ashtray is put, a detachable ashtray that you may take off in order to have it cleaned. The advantage is that since the turtle always tries to get under something, it will always be next to a couch or an easy chair where you want the ashtray.”

“Very practical,” said the Princess.

“And besides,” added St. Cucuface, “when you leave, you can say to the housekeeper - ‘Good-by, and don’t forget to feed the ashtray.”

Such passages and a re-working of Sleeping Beauty into a really wacky story, slipped in as part of an adventure, are the high-points. The book entirely is not that way, interspersed with several un-interesting passages that tested my resolve not to skip, saved only by occasional one-liners that promised more and the contextual line-drawings by the author. I am reminded of an observation on the music of Richard Wagner that goes something like: His music has beautiful moments and awful quarter-hours. But then, I would always complete reading such honest books than feeling lost and guilty over certain literary-tomes.

*

Book: How to Travel Incognito (Prion Humour Classics)

Author: Ludwig Bemelmans

Year of (Re-)Publication: 2003

Buy at Amazon | Flipkart (India)

Blood Music is a SF that starts off fairly simple - a self-absorbed scientist injects himself with genetically engineered cells, which over the course of the book, develop intelligence and collective consciousness. As the story proceeds, it gets not only horrific - where an entire continent, including almost all of its living beings, is transformed into all encompassing, hyper-intelligent protoplasmic goo, capable of even diffusing nuclear bombs hurled at it, but also complicated, as the cells, briefly interact with the vector, the human vehicle who eventually dissolves and integrates into the goo, becoming part of the collective consciousness himself. The end is ambiguous (at least to me) - not satisfied or being incompatible with the macro world, the cells enter quantum dimensions (I am not sure if I got this right) go into space-time continuum (fuzzy about this too), and collapse the physical rules of the world as we know them.  Is this the end of the world?  If so, where do the survivors go?  Inside themselves into that quantum space? Or to outer space? Or are they the same?

The book raised in me the basic question of what really IS consciousness.  Is it a chemical phenomenon distinct from the physical world, or is it part of it?  As human beings, we are an ensemble of various types of cells, but the concept of “I” transcends the components to signify something else.  Or is thought itself merely a collection of individual chemical reactions that happen in each of the billions of tiny components that somehow come together as a single entity? Does the “Me” exist after the components are worm food?  Or not?

A different kind of sci-fi that builds up slowly into a live wire, leaving you high and dry in the end with a feeling of what-the-heck-just-happened?  I suppose that in itself is a mark of success.

*

Book:Blood Music

Author: Greg Bear

Year of Publication: 1985

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Last year has been, as every year is, very volatile w.r.t. reading.  There were brief occasions of maniacal reading followed by extended non-reading periods, driven by work, laziness and hormones.  This is not a comprehensive read list because I read a few not worth remembering.  The links on the books take you to reviews I wrote here and elsewhere about them.

My best book read of last year was “The Old Man and Mr. Smith” by Peter Ustinov, a fantasy of God and Devil coming down to Earth to assess progress of creation.  A funny and thought-provoking must-read.

The worst read of the year was “The Amateurs” by John Niven about a loser guy who becomes a raging success thanks to his Kluver Boosey syndrome that gives him a perfect swing in golf.  I hated this book so much that it is, unfortunately, indelibly branded in my memory.

Sacre Bleu (dude’s review here) by Christopher Moore was an engaging read.  Part fantasy, part history, part mystery.  A certain blue color used by master painters in their master works has a sinister story.  This blue keeps alive the mysterious “colorman” but kills the painter through the Goddess of blue – Bleu. How Bleu breaks free of the  colorman with the help of baker-painter Lucien Lessard forms the climax of the story.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson was a science fiction I read after ages. It talks of the year 2312 when most of the solar system has been colonized and the earth itself faces the aftermirth of global warming and much of it is under water. The protagonist Swan is caught in a political plot that she must uncover and diffuse to save the worlds.  An interesting read, if a bit sagging in the middle.

“Instructions for living someone else’s life” by Mil Milington was an unexpectedly interesting book I picked up at the library.  A bloke goes to bed drunk and wakes up next morning 18 years into the future, beside a wife he does not know.  How the 25-year old, now caught in a middle aged body come to terms with his lost years forms a fascinating story.

Remember the extended non-reading periods I mentioned earlier?  They are strictly not “non-reading” but more of “brain-dead” reading – mostly re-re-re-re-re reads of various Agatha Christies, JeffertyArchers, Erma Bombecks Dave Barrys etc. (Harry Potter is soon joining the list of to-be-re-re-re-re-read during times of brain death) . While in the middle of an Agatha Christie Poirot mystery (who remembers the titles anymore?), I stumbled upon “The Floating Admiral“, co-written by, in addition to Agatha Christie, a football field full of mystery writers such as Arthur Conaon Doyle,  Dorothy Sayers, G.K. Chesterton, Canon Victor L. Whiechurch, Henry Wade, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, Ronald Knox, Freeman Crofts, Edger Jepson, Clemence Dane and Anthony Berkeley. The book started promising, but soon was lost in the complications of plot.  I prodded along until the end, to a very unsatisfactory solution.  The individual authors are excellent, but together, their work turns up like, as Crazy Mohan once said, excuse the grossness, “a beggar’s vomit”.

Sometime in 2011, dude and I decided to read “award winners”.  That resolution was rudely terminated after Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. Of course Case Histories was the culmination of a series of really really depressing award winning reads.  A Humphrey Bogart-ish detective attempts to solve the problem of a child that went missing 30 years earlier, another of a young woman, murdered by person or persons unknown, a decade before,  and the third of a woman who apparently slaughtered her husband in a fit of post-natal rage two decades back.  Actually, I am not sure the detective does much other than mope around with his failed marriage; that’s where the Bogart panache fades.  Things just fall into place on their own, and the guy miraculously inherits millions from a client.

Missing Mom by Joyce Carol Oates started off very drab, but picked up somewhere in the middle, and ended being a good read after all.  A rather intense story of a woman who comes to terms with her own adulthood after her mom’s unexpected and rather gory death.

Julian Barnes was another interesting author I was introduced to by the dude last year.  Love etc. is a story of three people, about incidents that happened to them, from each of their viewpoints. I usually don’t like open endings, but the one in Love etc. was tolerable to me, even intriguing.

Having read Love, etc. by Julian barnes and having loved it, I read “The sense of an Ending” in one sitting.  I don’t think I really got it (borrowing the narrator’s ex-girlfriend’s last words to him!). Of course, I did get the story of the novella – the past of a man, as remembered by him, sometimes erroneously, sometimes correctly in his own sunset years, and the facing of his own past actions and its consequences.This book was, however, less impressive than Love etc. to me because perhaps of heightened expectations.

The Leftovers by Tom Perrota was a 50/50 book.  It is a grim tale of the world facing a sudden inexplicable disappearance of millions of people. The consequences to the “left overs” are scary but the world moves on, coping as best as it can.

Wodehouse is irreplaceable and incomparable (“how is the existing state of what I might call “plus pig” to be converted into a state of “minus pig“?), but Allen comes close with his wacky humor that is full of nonsense and intelligence at the same time. “Without Feathers” is Woody Allen’s collection of 18 ROFL-type short stories that are an instant pick-me-up on a dark, despondent day.

“And Another Thing” by Jeremy Clarkson is a collection of brilliantly humorous essays. What hits you like a double shot espresso on a sweltering afternoon is the total irreverence, brutal honesty and political incorrectness of opinions.   Clarkson is not even remotely in the league of the supremely obnoxious Larry, the Cable Guy but merely communicates his strong ideas (often justifiable, even if unpalatable) on politically sensitive issues (e.g. homosexuality, Green peace movement etc.), and is not afraid to own his views.  There is a lot of self-deprecating humor a-la Dave Barry, but with more class.  Makes for good reading if you are not sensitive about issues such as the above.

While on the topic of humour, “May Contain Nuts“is a collection of American Humour writings, edited by Michael J. Rosen . Typical of American humor (against the stiff-upper-lip of the island) – the stories are mostly slap-stick and self-deprecating. I have not read the book fully because there is only so much slapstick you can take in a year.

Edmund Crispin’s Gervase Fen mysteries “Swan Song” and “Buried for Pleasure” are wonderful to read for the holidays where you don’t have a care in the world, and can just lie around in the couch with a bowl of coated peanuts, a mug of honey lemon tea and Ilayaraja playing in the background.  It is heartening to note that I did get a few of those days last year, that allowed me to savor Crispin in peace.

The tales in “Stone Garden and Other Stories” by Alan Spence are not spectacular in any way, but quietly interesting – meaning, you don’t really feel like reading it all in one shot, but you don’t feel like not reading them at all either.

“The Franchise Affair” by Josephine Tey is a story set in post-war England of two women denying charges of  kidnapping, and torturing a teenage girl, despite all evidence against them – a very simple plot sans corpses, and an engaging read.

“The little Black Book of Stories” by A.S. Byatt is a collection of vaguely disturbing short stories.  It is disturbing by its macabre than depravity.   The stories are scholarly, as is the flow of language.  Each story has many layers to it, the superficial, apparently fantastic, fairy-tale (albeit grim) to the more profound truths the tales symbolise. My resolution at the end of this book to read more Byatt did not materialize.

On the non-fiction side, I read “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking ” by Susan Cain, about introverts and how stuff works with them, which I found fascinating because it said nice things about me.

2013, despite having started with excruciating work deadlines, has been promising so far, with “Practical Demonkeeping” by Christopher Moore, “Lamb”, also by CM (an amazing book) and “Holy Disorders” by Edmund Crispin already under the “read” (past tense) folder in the kindle. Wodehouse’s “Uncle Fred in the Springtime” is currently holding me in splits for the gazillionth time.  Ofcourse the wave would go up and down.  But if I can read at least as many books this year as last year, I would consider the year well-spent.

The Humorist, P. G. Wodehouse has written over a hundred books, most of which have remained popular crossing three generations, even today. It is surprising that one of the verbose Tamil critics I read found PGW less appealing, after ‘going through’ two of his books. Wrong books coupled with a lack of appreciation for excellent English, I should say in my kinder moods, instead of wondering in prose on the misfortune of creators having to cast pearls among pigs. If one wonders where to begin to bask in the sunlit prose of those cataloged hundreds and laugh oneself to tears, Leave it to Psmith is a recommended place. You may then move on to The Code of the Woosters or Right Ho Jeeves, available for download at the gutenberg.

Indignant and harmless, effacing and enlightening, light-hearted and lilting, complex sentences of creative elegance, careening the plot into chaos, only to be unraveled like a quipu with no loose ends, the story revolves around a happy-go-lucky chap Psmith (p silent), endeavoring to purloin the necklace of Lady Constance Keeble, at the behest of her nephew Freddie, only to redouble his efforts for benefiting his friend Mike and his wife Phyllis, who is the step daughter of the Lady with the necklace. And re-triple his efforts in the guise of Ralston McTodd — the poet who originally got invited to Blandings Castle by the Lady’s brother the Lord Emsworth, but absconded — having realized that Eve Halliday, a friend of Phyllis and on whom he got love-struck the first sight, is also going to Blandings Castle as a cataloger. The plot is more complex than I have described, but the eliciting prose is of supreme clarity I wish I could write a few sentences that way in English, in my lifetime.

Here are two samples to get you going:

Are you really broke?

As broke as the Ten Commandments.

and the next

Planting his foot firmly on a golf-ball which the Hon. Freddie Threepwood, who had been practicing putting in the corridor before retiring to bed, had left in his casual fashion just where the steps began, he took the entire staircase in one majestic, volplaning sweep. There were eleven starirs in all separating his landing from the landing below, and the only ones he hit were the third and tenth. He came to rest with a squattering thud on the lower landing, and for a moment or two the fever of the chase left him.

*

Book: Leave it to Psmith

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Year of Publication: 1923 (reprint 2008)

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I like essays. Even the entirely fictional ones. I like the most, essays that blur the difference between fiction and non-fiction. They are the creative ones that shape your thought through the unease they suffuse through their fine mix of facts and fantasy. Finding such essays, leave alone finding such essayists, is hard. It is an endeavor. In Tamil, several essays/short-stories by Nanjil Nadan repeatedly define this standard with ease. Recent collections titled “kAvalan kAvAn enin” and “sUdiya pU sUdarka” (that won him the sAhithya akAdemy award) are treasures that demand your thinking and action. Discussing these books is for another note.

While on a recent splurge at a local bookstore for such essay collections in English, along with the relative heavy-weights like “The Collected Essays” of A. K. Ramanujan, “Patriots and Partisans” by Ramachandra Guha, “Selected Essays” of G. K. Chesterton, “Readings” by Michael Dirda, “Inventing the Enemy” by Umberto Eco, “Some Remarks” by Neal Stephenson, I also picked “My Husband and Other Animals” by Janaki Lenin with a prompting from my dame and on a lark, Never Push When It Says Pull by a guy named Guy Browning, a relative unknown to me. But that is one reason we read books, don’t we — to meet over a course of their printed discourse made available for a price, strangers whom you could become life-long friends with.

Never Push When It Says Pull is a collection of 800 word long (short?) essays with titles beginning with a “How to…” discussing everyday topics. The essays are segregated under ten categories ranging from “Out and About” to “Reading and Writing” to “Shopping and Spending” to “Lying and Swearing”. Intended as humorous asides peppered with unintended profundities, on several occasions they fall between sarcastic observations and ignorant hyperbole. The prose with distinctly understated British humor reminds one of those “How to Be…” books by George Mikes, popular from several decades back. But then, George Mikes was an emigrant (Hungarian) who ‘became’ a Brit.

Several of the first sentences of these essays are deadly. Sample these: You don’t realize how important your dignity is until you suddenly lose it (How to…embarrass yourself); The golden rule of healthy living is to make sure you keep your total units of alcohol below your total number of cigarettes (How to…live cleanly); Singing is what you do when you want to make a noise but haven’t got anything much to say (How to…sing); Things are very like people in that at any given moment one tenth of them are poorly (How to…fix things); Having too many choices leads to moral obesity (How to…choose); tourists are people who spend their life savings travelling many thousands of miles in order to stand directly in front of you when you are trying to get somewhere in a hurry (How to…be a tourist). One does feel some of the essays in this collection shouldn’t have been written beyond such first sentences.  

Science is the religion for people who can’t cope with religion. That is the first sentence of “How to…be scientific”. If the humorous intent is kept aside, that first sentence only exposes the ignorance of the writer about science. In fact, many of the observations on science in this essay, if not taken as humorous observations, are either confused or wrong or both. But then, in the next essay on art, he observes:

Impressionism was the world seen through a couple of glasses of vin rouge. Expressionism was impressionism after the whole bottle. Vorticism was when the room started spinning and modern conceptual art is the throwing-up stage

Humorous and barbarous, respectively, for those who don’t know and know about art/paintings.

Like any short story or essay collection or even the omnibus of an author, this is a book not to be read in one go. It should be visited periodically, if not often, like  chatting with our beer-buddy or meeting the town wise-counsel. Else the humor would begin to appear cynical, the reflections would appear judgmental and before long, the wry would turn dry. That is when the prose of such essays would settle into boring fiction or bland facts.  

*

Book: Never Push When It Says Pull

Author: Guy Browning

Year of publication: 2005 (paperback, 2010)

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Ruskin Bond is one of the Indian authors who writes in English; well. His English is not strained and doesn’t read ‘translated’ from a native Indian tongue — especially when writing the thoughts and emotions of Indians. Another writer with such language ease is R. K. Narayan (I wouldn’t put a Salman Rushdie in this league, not because he lacks skills in English — far from it — but his would often read pompous and ‘high-browed’). Ruskin Bond lives as a bachelor, away from the cities and on the hills, not mingling with the ‘literary crowd’ and their intellectual cocktail parties (“The cocktails usually run away with the intellect”). But he has prevailed and been prolific with an impressive profile, decked with the Sahithya Akademi to Padmashree honors. Penguin India is re-releasing some of his earlier titles and I bought a bunch.

When Darkness Falls and Other Stories is a collection of stories written by him around 2001. The book is less than hundred pages and takes an hour to complete. Most of the stories are set in and around his hometown Dehra Dun, at a time when he was young and forming. The first story, which lends the name to the book title, is also the best. It describes the life of Markham, the man with a scary face — result of an army-term accident — who no one wants to engage or endure. Put up by his longtime friend, Markham dwells in a forgotten corner of the dilapidated Empire hotel in his hometown, rotting along with the furniture through the changing times. A lifetime of resigned acceptance and dormant frustrations manifest one day (rather, night) unexpectedly, irrevocably, and an era passes in an inferno. I liked this story because it didn’t pretend to be a story; just events and experience and the rest is upto the reader.

There are other lighthearted stories like The Writer’s Bar (supposedly visited by great writers like Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham… to boost the sales) or the Monkey Trouble (Ruskin’s younger self describing the enjoyable childhood phase with a grandfather who loves to keep pets, much to the chagrin of the grandmother). The ‘ghost stories’ are the driest in content and charm, predictable and bland. But then, as one of the character says, “People can’t live without stories”. These are stories from a corner of India, events and experience told with a personal touch, in simple language. When Darkness Falls… is not the best by Ruskin Bond, but his regular is a better read than the self-professed nine-point someones in the market.

*

Book:When Darkness Falls and Other Stories

Author: Ruskin Bond

Year of Publication: 2001

Buy at Amazon | Flipkart

Back in college, I read Ayn Rand because it seemed to be the “cool” thing to do.  I use the word “read” rather loosely because I prodded along doggedly - partly not understanding what it spoke about, but mostly feeling miserably foolish for not being able to rave about it like my intellectual friends.  I knew I had some opinion on that book, but couldn’t find suitable words to describe the opinion. A decade or so later, I read a post by John Scalzi, who described Atlas Shrugged as “nerd revenge porn”.  That was the light bulb moment for me.  I believed it was a once-a-lifetime thing, and there would be no further nerd revenge porns in my life again.

Until I read a Tamil novel called “Vishnupuram” recently.

Vishnupuram is a fairly large period novel; the first part of the novel is set at period t, the second at t minus a few centuries and the third, t plus a few centuries - in the now re-popular non-linear story telling format.  The central theme of the novel as far as I can see (which is not much, to be honest) is that everything in this world is cyclic, more so, the quest of man to understand the truth of being. The story (?!) by itself is smartly set, the first and last chapters brilliantly portraying the repetitiveness of events and human emotions but what comes between the two is migraine inducing, with the words  “pretentious drivel” repeatedly blinking inside your head.

To be fair, the author has worked really hard with history and facts and extended known facts commendably to fiction. He has also done his homework well in trying to understand the various philosophies that have reigned at different eras - Vedic, Sankyam, Buddhist, Jain and all in between. The downside of it is that most of the book (especially the second “t-centuries” section) comes out as the author’s brag of “see how much I know”.  The book gets lost in the fuzzy area between fiction and non-fiction, where you wonder if the fiction has been painstakingly fabricated to carry the philosophical pondering or vice versa. What could have been said in one sentence of “in a debate among the various philosophers, the Buddhist monk won” the chapter rambles on and on about the various philosophies to the point of being childish - remember the time when in your Geography paper, you wrote up everything you knew irrespective of whether it was relevant to the question or not because your teacher (Mrs. Eipe) rarely read your answers and graded you according to the number of pages in your answer sheet ? Most of the second section seemed like an attempt at bragging, not very subtly either, at how much the author knows about the various philosophies, which is all very well except that it served the additional purpose of filling pages and making the novel an apparent “magnum opus” of modern Tamil literature, as it is considered by the cult following.  Just like Atlas Shrugged.

The language of the book is elegant and chaste enough to bring out the period effect.  The use of the colour imagery is also creative - the red river to symbolise the emotional unrest of the townspeople, the green stone to symbolise lust and so on. However, the descriptions, especially of nature, become very repetitive after a point. The third section that describes the pre-deluge and deluge makes you skip passages because of the monotony of the narrative.

All the characters in the book (and there are plenty of them) are emotionally high strung and it seems that everyone is obsessing about truth and enlightenment (and gratuitous sex) all the time.  Agreed that you cannot write an interesting story with mundane characters who wake up every morning deciding what to make for breakfast like normal people do, but having a town full of jumpy people constantly agonizing about the nature of truth makes you wonder how many heart attacks and strokes the town must see.  Won’t there be a single sensible person in that town who tells people to snap out of it and get on with life? The worst part is that this obsession with “truth” (“Gnyana thedal”) is not confined to an era alone, which is ok because that’s the premise of the book - what goes around comes around - but with so much torment, it is a wonder people didn’t kill themselves and put an end to the human race. As if it is not enough that people talk philosophy all the time, even an elephant ponders about the nature of its existence. As Calvin (of Bill Watterson) would say  - there’s just too much atmosphere !

Of course, as with any book aiming to become popular with the mass, there is a lot of Brahmin bashing.  Some of it justified, some, clearly racist.  There is also the general theory that all apparently “great” philosophers are  imbeciles and became gurus because people around them saw mileage in advancing them.  The book vacillates between fantasy and reality- for example, in the first section the deification of a prostitute is clearly explained as an act of human conspiracy, while in the debate hall, the lamps lighting by themselves etc. is in the fuzzy area of “miracle” with no evidence of any trick and only a half-hearted suspicion.

As I have always maintained with “literature”, there is every form of human depravity and misery described in detail.  In fact the book gets so depressing by the end of the second section that the last section that describes deluge and destruction is positively chirpy in comparison. By the time I was in page 600 of the 847 page book, I was snapping at everyone around and the only reason I completed the book was the masochistic thought that the remaining 247 pages can’t get any more annoying than the first six hundred pages.

I don’t care if I am too dumb to understand the nature of truth and such like.  To me, now is the only truth and if I cannot smile or laugh at this moment,nothing else matters.  As I publish this post, I shall seek out the people who will put that smile back on my face - Wodehouse, Bombeck, Devan.  That will be the only cure for the intense acidity that has developed in the past three days.

Post script: The author has a strong internet presence and cult following and I have no doubts that I will get trolls here.  I shall not approve hate comments to this post.

*

Book:  Vishnupuram (Tamil)

Author: Jeyamohan

Year: 1996

Another book on how to write; this time, a lot. How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing by Paul J. Silvia is short, light-heart-ed throughout and good. It primarily attends to academic writing in the field of psychology but also contains essential advice that holds true for any science writer in academia.

By ‘writing’, Paul means not only the act of putting words onto a medium but includes any and all tasks related to generating those words. Thinking, analyzing data, drawing graphs, reading related literature, making notes, editing and re-writing, revising a manuscript, writing rebuttals… activities that makes you progress in a particular project involving writing. However, it doesn’t include doing peer reviews of other’s research, chatting up with colleagues even on a research problem, discussing research with your students, teaching, committee meetings and so on…you may be already doing “a lot” in any or all of these, but these are not writing activities. Not surprisingly, ‘blogging’ doesn’t feature at all — neither in the ‘writing’ nor in the ‘not writing’ group of activities. Perhaps, one should neither schedule nor feel distracted about pastimes.

The first two chapters — if not the rest — are worth the price of the book. The second chapter on Specious Barriers to Writing a Lot hits the mark with humor. It correctly identifies some of the ‘lies’ we tell repeatedly until such time we start believing them as ‘reasons’ for not writing more. Complaining about ‘not finding time’ is one such. One should not ‘find’ time to write; one should make time to write.

Here is another sample from that chapter:

When unproductive writers complain that they don’t have fast Internet access at home, I congratulate them on their sound judgment. A close look at Figure 2.1 (where Paul shows a picture of his writing desk with an old laptop and few other rudimentary stuff) shows that there’s no Internet cable plugged into the computer. My wife has fast Internet access in her home office, but I don’t have anything. It’s a distraction. Writing time is for writing, not for checking e-mail, reading the news, or browsing the latest issues of journals. Sometimes I think it would be nice to download articles while writing, but I can do that at the office. The best kind of self-control is to avoid situations that require self-control.

“In order to write,” wrote William Saroyan (1952), “all a man needs is paper and a pencil” (p. 42). Equipment will never help you write a lot; only making a schedule and sticking to it will make you a productive writer.

A not so different sentiment is discussed some years back in Disconnecting Distractions essay by Paul Graham. He uses two computers, one with the internet and the other where the real work gets done, without it. I could immediately relate to the above advice. I write papers in a laptop, internet unplugged.

At the end of the second chapter Paul Silvia provides the remedy for thwarting such ‘writing barriers’: Schedule your writing and stick to it. That is the only way one could write a lot; at least in academia (non-fiction). Sounds too simple? Scheduling a task means hermetically sealing oneself from the rest of the tasks and thoughts that life’s juggernaut generates at any instant and doing only that task, come what may. From my limited and humble experience, I would agree with him.

The rest of the book, in my opinion, is an overstatement of this idea. If you can take my ‘blogger’ words for granted, close this book at the end of the second or perhaps third chapter (Motivational Tools). And make a schedule for your writing and stick to it. OTOH, go ahead and read the book and schedule your writing; the results should convince you that you should have taken my word. 

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Book:  How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

Author: Paul J. Silvia

Year: 2007

Buy at Amazon.com

How to go about prolific publishing in academia? If prolific writing can be learnt through profligate reading, here is a book on the topic: Write to the Top!: How to Become a Prolific Academic by W. Brad Johnson and Carol A. Mullen. As the book title suggests, it provides tips, advice and suggestions on how to become a prolific writer in academia; to write better non-fiction like research publications, books and book chapters on technical topics, grant proposals. Non-fiction is our intent in such writing, not necessarily their final content.

In all sincerity, there are sixty four elaborate tips segregated into relevant chapters, on how to become prolific. Beginning with how to establish a well honed writing habit, the book discusses pertinent issues like systematic writing from start to finish, when to collaborate and when to cut losses, tackling thoughts and emotions that block productivity and so on up to cautionary remarks on how not to lose perspective about our life in our pursuit for being prolific; You are the writer, writing is not you.

Although most of the academic publishing aspects mentioned in the book (how to fumble with, write, edit, edit and edit a research paper, how to submit, peer review polemics, dealing with rejection and success etc.) were apprenticed from an excellent adviser, I did enjoy reading this book. It provides a comprehensive, and at times  inspiring, reminder about academic writing, its purpose and prominent-but-not-pervading place in a balanced academic life. The book is not set in a lighter tone, if you are looking for such sugar to make you read the medicine, but meets its goal, which is fine with me.

From one of the tip, here are some “scholarly irrationality” in academic writing

• I must be successful in getting all of my work accepted for publication.
• I ought to be an outstanding scholar, clearly better than other writers and professors in my department, university, or discipline.
• I have to be greatly respected and loved by colleagues and editors.
• If a reviewer or editor caustically denigrates my work or rejects me, he or she is obviously worthless and should be removed from the position of power.
• If a reviewer or editor caustically denigrates my work or rejects me, it just proves that I am worthless and will always fail.
• I should find writing easy and enjoyable like other scholars in my college and field.
• If the audience at a professional conference should react negatively to my paper, it would be catastrophic — so awful I would probably vomit, faint, and be barred from ever attending the conference again.

There is no such thing as good luck in research publication. Painstaking work, coupled with careful risk taking, is required for success. Success, mind it. Not necessarily — as the above “scholarly irrationality” warn us — significance. According to the authors, if you are in academia and cannot relate to any of the above then you perhaps are either unproductive or too far on the wrong side of tenure.

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Book: Write to the Top!: How to Become a Prolific Academic

Author(s): W. Brad Johnson and Carol A. Mullen

Year: 2007

Buy at Amazon