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Cenacle - In hidden crypts and dark vaults, cenacles of secret religion meet to keep their flame alive.

Picture Courtesy: Famous Poets and Poems

Edith Wharton is usually compared with Henry James and usually judged to be his inferior. I find her to be a much greater artist. In her best works, she can play on your emotions like a surgeon carelessly cutting open a heart. The House of Mirth is easily the most agonising novel I have ever read. Nothing happens in it but somehow the plight of Lily Bart put me under some heavy torture of shame and anger.

The House of Mirth is my favorite but I also like The Age of Innocence and The Reef well and Summer, Madame de Treymes and The Touchstone are satisfactory reads too. I began but couldn't finish The Custom of the Country but what I'd read I liked immensely.

So it was with eager anticipation that I picked her novel The Children. It's not usually available in bookstores or on the net but it's been reissued by Virago Modern classics in 1985.

The Children has a delightful plot which promises much. It tells the story of a man in his forties, Martin Boynewho is on a cruise ship between Algiers and Venice. He is going to meet an old acquaintance in the hope that this encounter might turn more romantic. On the train he meets a bunch of unruly children manned by the eldest, the fifteen year old Judith. The children belong to his old friends. the Wheaters, who lead a very Bohmeian lifstyle and Martin is drawn into this gypsy like wonderland.

Wharton usually projected her own fear of sex onto her main protagonists(male or female) and the conflict of her novels is usually between the sexual innocence and the consequential powerlessness of the protogonists and the rapacious power used and enjoyed by those who have knowledge of sex, whether it's the other characters or the broader society. Martin, in this sense, is a standard Wharton hero: virginal, aged and not into that and he is educated by the contact of a fifteen year old who seems to know more about sex and life than him.

This would have been delightful if it had the same limbre, supple touch that marks the prose of The Reef or The Age of Innocence but Wharton was trying out the Jamesian technique of avoiding the important moments and trying to imply things through overwrougt descriptions of the secondary and the inconsequential minutiae. It never worked for James and it doesn't work for her. Consequently, all her characters suffer. She has a gaggle of children to cuten up the proceedings but she can't make any of them stick in memory (unlike say an Ann Tyler would). Her heroine, Judith is more of an intention than a fully realised character.

I knew that as she aged, Edith had become more and more bitter and her writing suffered for it and in The Children, you can feel some heavyhanded bitterness color the portrayal of the Wheater family. Sadly, it is not far off from some caricature you will find in the European media about the American tourists.

The Children should have been a handsome cap to an important career but it only showcases the declining powers of Edith Wharton.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: American Fiction

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Atlas is Fifty

October 7th 2007 03:50

It's 50 years since Atlas Shrugged was first published, one of the greatest books ever written in history.

I had already read The Fountainhead and I was fourteen. The next book to buy was of course, Atlas Shrugged. And for a fourteen year old child, that book came as a fairy godmother one never finds in real life. It bewitched pumpkins into twinkling carriages and took me on an intellectual journey which has never stopped since.

Of course, I have read it millions of times and of course I love it.

Have it outgrown it? many people claim that they loved it at one point of time but eventually grow out of it. Well, in a sense, I have. Too many people think that to love Rand is to be circumscribed by her. Many allege that this was a tendency perpetuated by Rand herself.

I did find new things to love, new boundaries so to speak, new pastures to graze. I may have come far from my intellectual hometown but is that straying too far? However far, I may have come, I have scrupulously followed one Randian dictum: THINK.

So, on the fiftieth birthday of Atlas, here's to my intellectual father (I am sure Ayn would approve of that term). FIFTY MORE YEARS.

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Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

January 30th 2007 07:12

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Gilead is Marilynne Robinson's second novel published some 24 years after her first Housekeeping. Robinson is a bonafide literray genius working today and her seocnd novel was promptly awarded a Pulitzer prize. Some secualr liberals hav reacted tendentiously toward the novel simply because it includes Christianity in it; I found their ractions every bit as silly as the "Christianists" objecting to Harry Potter simply because there were spirits involved.

Gilead is a town in Iowa and the novel is a long letter by Ames who is seventy seven years old and has been told he has angina pectoris. Not having much to leave his wife and child, he is writing a letter to his son to serve hima s his "begats." The long letter however meanders through a 100 years and tell the the tale of fathers and sons of four generations. It is also a tale of war which starts with the Civil war and ends on the cusp of Vietnam. It is also the tale of America, as it winds through barren landscape and fallen towns and through the minds of people who are conditioned by living in such a big country.

Robinson writes a sublime prose in that quintessential American voice that rings in Hawthorne and Dickinson. It is one of the few books that you'd feel privileged and blessed after having the chance to read them.

It is a book that renews your faith in literature. I had wanted to write a longish review of this novel and so kep it on the bakcburner for a long time. This small notice will have to until I read it again and come up with the review.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: American Fiction

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The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger

October 1st 2006 05:28

The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger

I saw The Devil Wears Prada last night. Did I like it? Well, it’s not boring. Most reviewers are in ecstasies over Meryl Streep. She does well. However, it is Anne Hathaway who takes the movie in her hands and turns it into a good entertainer. She is quite impressive and so eye-poppingly good looking. But if you have a co-star like Meryl Streep, you have little chance of getting notice even if you deserve it.

The movie however takes only the germ of the concept from the book it is supposed to be based on. That probably is its salvation. Lauren Wiesberger’s novel is one long whining shriek about this horrible boss, I mean, how horrible the boss is and basically the horriblity of the boss.

The movie turns the cardboard character of Miranda Priestly into a tough boss, a tough businesswoman who has survived in the world of sharks, who may be severe but has her human side too. There is a scene where we see Miranda without makeup, her face wrinkled with lines of grief and we feel a shiver of shock because we had seen her so immaculately turned up in the whole movie. Andy is a stock character and it is Anne’s interpretation that teased out some integrity in the portrayal.

Anne hathway and Mery Streep in The Devil Wears Prada

What about the book though? One reviewer called it bilious, which is an exact word to describe this work. The author was supposed to have worked as an intern to Anna Wintour on whom the book is based and it is unfunny, boring and basically a hatchet job. We all like to stab our bosses in their backs but the book does not even provide that kind of diverting escape. This is one of those rare cases where the movie turns out to be better than the book.

I walked into the theatre yesterday and I was a bit intimidated seeing all the women there. Yeah, I knew it was a chick-flick and not for the guys, but hey, if you want to check out some nice girls there is no better place than watching a chick flick. And yes, the eye candy on the screen does help too.

But what about reading chick lit? Before this novel, I had read only one other novel which can be properly called chick lit and that was Bridget Jones’s Diary which I found quite funny and moving. After reading The Devil wears Prada however, I am not going back to chick lit anytime soon.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: American Fiction

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The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

September 16th 2006 03:36

The Time Travler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

It has a nice idea to get going though not entirely original. We have seen time warp romances before where a person travels back or front in time and falls in love with somebody from different era, haven’t we? (Think Kate and Leopold). Except that in this one, the time travelling gig is the routine not the exception.

Henry DeTamble is chrono-impaired which means he pops into past and future without control every few days. This is a bit convenient; when Henry is five and has done the time-travel for the first time, he has an older Henry to guide him through the confusion and when Henry is getting married and time travels at the nick of the moment under pressure, well, some other Henry is there just to make sure. Though I have never understood how these older Henrys could pop back to the time and date they want but the story has to go on.

On one of his journeys into the past, Henry meets a six-year old girl, Claire Abshire, his own future wife. They keep meeting now and then and he keeps tutoring her in French and maths and she won’t have sex with anyone else. They meet in real time when Claire is 20 and he is 28 and he does not know who Claire is but she knows who he is. They meet, date and marry and the first part ends. In the second part, the novel becomes more and more like Forget Paris, the diary of a expectant wife and a busy husband. They even have baby problems. One day, Henry comes back with a heavy brow and you know he has known of his own mortality from somewhere in time and the novel races to its unusually sappy conclusion.

I don’t know why this novel went on to become such a big hit. I know, its not one of those ordinary romances but a literate romance. By that they mean, I suppose, references to Carmina Burana and playing, not Monopoly but Modern Capitalist Mind-Fuck. I suppose normal romances do not come with such perks and therefore, they have to be neutered in search of these literate romances. Even if it happens to packs way more schmaltz than a normal romance can ever dare to do.

Strictly for those who have thought themselves out of reading romances but not the need for romance.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: American Fiction

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The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler

September 5th 2006 07:10

The fifth anniversary of 9/11 is coming up and so I will write about 9/11 literature, literature touched by those events, as much as I can in the next few days.

Anne Tyler has always had plenty of admirers and is routinely called one of the best writers writing in America today. At first glance, her novel The Amateur Marriage is no different from the rest of her novels. It is set in Baltimore as the rest of her novels are and traverses the same territory that her readers are familiar with. It starts with a heart-hammering flourish but slowly gets bogged down. Tyler’s novels regularly fall into two camps: some like The Accidental Tourist read like the wake of a bullet train and some like Morgan’s Passing stop in the tracks without moving forward. You fear that this is what is happening. But once Tyler has her characters visit San Francisco, an exotic move, considering that most of her novels never move out of Baltimore, the pace of the book falls into place.

Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage

The novel is about a young man and woman who marry in the heat of the Second World War but bravely try to keep their marriage and family together afterward. Their marriage comes under strain when their eldest daughter turns into a drug-crazed hippie and runs away from home (an angle explored in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral). Years later, they are forced to take care of their grandson they didn’t know they had. Eventually, they separate. He marries another woman. She doesn’t. And the novels runs along showing different aspects of their lives at different times till one of them dies. Vintage Anne Tyler territory.

But, it also happens to be her first novel to appear after the events of September 11. Even if they did not explicitly deal with it, many of American writers’ first novels after those events were touched but them as if they had gone through a spasm. The Amateur Marriage does explicitly reference 9/11 though what it has to say about the terrorist attacks seems bland, even banal. Then, you realise that this novel has run from Second World War to the present and in its small spaced-out vignettes of a small, suburban family has drawn on almost all the major aspects of American History in the last fifty years and told you what it was to live through all those long, hard years. It doesn’t come to an easy conclusion, most of her novels never do. It is a strange, domesticised but necessary recapitulation of what America was when it seemed for a few seconds that America itself went down and disappeared in the fog of smoke.

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Posted By: nagster - Category: American Fiction

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War Trash by Ha Jin

August 26th 2006 03:27

The narrator of Ha Jin's War Trash remarks at the very beginning of the novel that he is going to tell his story "in a documentary manner so as to preserve historical accuracy." That's an astonishing claim to make at the beginning of what is supposed to be a novel. Isn't documentary manner the hallmark of non-fiction rather than the fiction that we have in front of us? But Ha Jin clearly sticks to his claim and avoids any narrative flourishes, dramatic touches or moralistic overtones, divulging fact after fact with more ruthless clarity than any documentaries might possess. The result is brilliant fiction that opens our eyes to reality that often goes unnoticed in the shrillness of newspaper headlines.

Yo Yuan is a 73 years old Chinese guy visiting his son and grandchildren in America. On his stomach, below the navel is etched a long tattoo which reads "FUCK….U…..S…." Yuan is afraid that this will bar his entry to the US but he is not stopped at the airport. So, once he has met his grandchildren he proceeds to tell the story behind that tattoo and the gaps in it.

The novel then switches to the Korea War and Communist China has sent hundreds of its young men, including Yuan, to halt the advance of American imperialism. The optimism is short-lived as the army is quickly routed by the Americans and hundreds are taken prisoner. The rest of the novel deals with what happened in the prison camp as they wait to be released to an uncertain future: they can either migrate to Taiwan and lose their families or go back to mainland China and be treated as criminals. The mechanics of prisoner exchanges. The politics of war.

The book with its stark title arrived when the heat of Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay had not yet died down. But instead of stoking the flame further, it put the events in context and strangely provided a balm. You hear a lot about Geneva Conventions being tossed aside these days. And yet they were signed in the same period as this book is set in and it will show you exactly what kind of effect those conventions had then and by inference, now. It is not quite the same thing that you would expect. That is why I liked this book though it was a little hard to get used to its style.

After writing this notice, I went and read the review New York Times had given it. Though we are in agreement with its style, the reviewer and I seem to have read the books from opposite directions. It's a wonder how people can arrive at exactly opposite conclusions from reading the same material.

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