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Chocolat by Joanne Harris

April 26th 2007 07:47

Chocolat by Joanne Harris

I first came to know about Chocolat only after the movie based on the novel was nominated for the Oscars. I read the plotline in some paper and for years I kept dreaming about it. It was such a wonderful idea ! I then saw the movie. While not a masterpiece, it was neveretheless good. One day while shopping, I chanced on the book. The blurb on the book said, "Is this the best book ever written?" and I was wholeheartedly willing to acquiesce. I gave in and bought the book.

I wish I hadn't. I wish I had not read it. I wish I had kept kept ruminating on the idea in my mind forvever. It was not to be and I came to ruin a very special feeling.

Joanne Harris's novel, Chocolat, is about a vagrant mother, Vianne Rocher and her daughter, who arrive in a new town where parochialism and religious sentiment both run high, where the local priest, Father Reynaud, has a commanding power over his flock and keeps them under strict religious lock and key Vianne has a gift for chocolate making and she opens a patisserie, a thing unheard of in the village. She also has a knack of telling who likes what and soon draws a circle of unhappy souls who like to hang around her cafe. She inspires a lot of tiny insurrrections and comes under the eye of the priest who thinks that chocolate is too tempting for his parishioners to resist and blames Vianne for spreading insubordination. Soon, it is a duel between the two where the priest imposes a stricter moral code on his village to counter Vianne's ever more exorbitant creations in chocolate. Time for a showdown.

Harris does not have a talent for converting idea into incident or for story-telling. The novel unfolds without any revelation and runs morosely. But her worst failing is that she is so constrained by an academic femininity that she is unable to look at the world, leave alone men, with any sort of meaningful vision. She can neither draw from the real world nor can give reality to her own imagination. In the end, even though she desperately tries to be a projected Vianne Rocher, she ends up being a Father Reynaud. What a waste of a brilliant idea!

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Imperium by Robert Harris

January 10th 2007 09:00

Imperium by Robert Harris

Imperium is Robert Harris's second novel after Pompeii set in Rome. Harris was a BBC reporter before turning to writing thrillers like Enigma which were supposed to rectify historical wrongs and credit the Brits their due in the glories of Second World War. He then turned to ancient Rome in Pompeii and has said that he fell in love with the era and so decided to revisit it in this novel.

It follows the mercurial rise of a young senator called Cicero in Roman politics. The novel is narrated by Tiro, Cicero's slave and now his invaluable amanuensis. Tiro had even invented shorthand to keep up with the senator's incessant flow of words. In history, there was an actual biography of Cicero written by Tyro which is now lost to us. Some of the conceit of this novel is to supply the re-imagined life of Cicero by Tyro.

In the beginning Cicero is a rookie senator who has worked hard to improve his oratory but his rigorous training makes the second best lawyer in Rome but does make him the political start he wanted to be. He is married to Terentia, an aristocratic woman who is conscious that he is married beneath her station but also fiercely protective of her home and hearth. He has a precious daughter called Tullia who is the apple of his eye.

This then is the world of Cicero until one day a man called Sthenius knocks his door. He is a vicitm of the corrupt exertion of a powerful governor called Verres. Verres has not only dispossessed Sthenius of his possessions but also has a orders his execution. Verres is politically well-connected and Cicero would be pleading the case of well an underdog. But as he realises the extent of Verres' depredations and comes to know that the first best lawyer in Rome is pleading on his behalf, Cicero takes the plunge. Thus starts one of the most interesting court cases in history of law.

As the case proceeds, inspite of some heavy challenges, Cicero also recognises the potential for his advancement: he can become an aedile or perhaps an praetorian based on the outcome of this case. And there is also that small matter of justice in his heart. The case won, Cicero is a big name and a huge star and now starts the second part of the novel with Cicero lunching with the bigwigs and being part of the conspiracies of the heavyweights.

When I first heard of the title, I immediately thought that this will be one more oblique references to the supposed current imperium. I was not wide off the mark. By the end of the period portrayed here, Rome turned from a republic into an empire, with Julius Caesar as its first emperor. This provides the all too familiar pop culture reference (remember Star Wars?) and since a Republican is in office these days, the reference is inescapable and not so oblique. Harris does not just stop at that of course, he also likens 9/11 attacks to pirate raids on Rome which started the power struggle that resulted the end of the republic. Translation. America's days as a republic are numbered. Boohoo.

As a reporter for BBC, Harris must have had the opportunity to observe the political life up close and Harris fills the novel with those little details that you'd find in a political gossip column. For all its glibness nevertheless, Imperium is a snappy, craftily engaged and mightily entertaining novel. Perhaps it's to do with Cicero who is drawn creditably by Harris. Perhaps it's to do with the ancient era called Rome whose magic is still potent. Whatever be the reason, I was charmed and so will you.

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The World of Wonders by Robertson Davies

November 26th 2006 06:30

World of Wonders by Robinson Davies

The World of Wonders is the last novel of the Deptford trilogy. In it, the BBC is making a movie on Houdini and has Magnus Eisengrim, who is a renowned magician himself, recreate Houdini's contraptions. Ramsay hangs out on the sets and by the by, is asked by the production team to keep the production historically accurate. One day they all sit down and ask Magnus about his past.

In several spaced conversations Magnus recounts his life. He was born a premature baby, when his mother is hit on her head with a snowball with a rock hidden in it. Life was hard in the small Canadian town with a mad mother. One day, he is kidnapped by a circus show freak and sexually abused by his kidnapper for the next few years. Magnus has no compunction in telling them that he had done everything to hasten the death of his kidnapper.

The scene next moves to London and Magnus describes he learnt the basics of show business and later, moves to Switzerland where Magnus learns intricacies of watch making. Both these arts help to make him a magician. In Switzerland, he meets also meets Liesl, his life long mistress and manager.

Dunstable keeps close to the conversation because he wants to know Magnus's own version of what happend on the night of Staunton's death. Magnus has more than one agenda and the novel provides for a very entertaining clash of egos.

This novel comes a close second to The Manticore and it has the most explicit statement of Davies' work. Quoting Spengler, Davies tells about a Magian world view, a weltanshauung where, " a sense of unfathomable wonder of the invisible existed side by side with a hard recognition of the roughness and cruelty of day-to-day demands of the tangible world."

Davies' lifelong attempt is to find a way to retain the old magic, fairytales, myths and miracles, that was banished by the advancement of science. His interesting protagonists of the three novels of this trilogy, Dunstable, David and Magnus, all battle with that Magian world view and each comes to accept it in his own way.

For Davies though, the Magian world view provides an alternative to his rejection of modernity. In the Deptford trilogy, this rejection does not descend into a monomania resembling hatred, as it does in the Cornish trilogy.

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The Manticore by Robertson Davies

November 25th 2006 06:06

The Manticore by Robertson Davies

The Manticore starts where Fifth Business left off. Staunton was found dead in his car, with a big stone in his mouth. Police and Dunstable Ramsay are less than happy with Magnus's explanation but they can do nothing about it. Nevertheless, a mild crisis is provoked when Staunton's son David shouts that Magnus is a murdererer during one of his performances.

David is the hero of the novel and he begins by telling us the comedy around Staunton's funeral. But, once he loses control in that auditorium, David realises that he needs therapy and goes to Switzerland, for a treatment of Jungian analysis.

David is told by his analyst to keep a diary and it is these long sessions with his beautiful therapist that form the crux of the novel. As David goes back and forth about his life, his tense relationship with his dad, his lifelong chastity come to the fore. This is also simultaneously cast in a Jungian mould and we see an interesting man wrestling with his own demons.After the treatment, David meets the menage a trois of Dunstable Ramsay, his old schoolteacher, Magnus Eisengreim, the suspected killer of his father and Liesl, their common mistress.

I think this is the best novel of the series and a very good novel generally. It is also the best case Davies has made of his world view. Just as in Jungian pscychology, we are told to make peace with our Shadow, the other self which we have repressed, Davies wants us to make peace with that old repressed self, the one which believed in magic and wonder, before we crushed it in favour of common rationality.

The man dying with a stone in his mouth is a practice described in Mahabharata, an ancient Indian epic. The Manticore is one of the Jungian symbols but it is also a medieval monster that has been imported into Christian myths and folklore from India. These were symbols incorporated into the Western thought in a post-Enlightement phase of heightened Orientalism. Like the predecessors ( Spengler, Jung) he admires so much, Davies too is waging a battle against what's left of Enlightenment in the West.

As I have said previously, Davies preserves his mask successfully and so he can argue for this viewpoint without producing a backlash from our rational self. In his other works, the mask slips off and Davies comes across as a man possesed with more invective and animus against science and modernity than is apparent in this novel.

The Manticore is probably his best-modulated and best-written work and that is why, it is a pleasure to read and recommend.

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Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

November 24th 2006 05:33

Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

Roberston Davies was nominated for Bookers prize exactly once in his long career and he did not win but he is routinely selected to the sundry "my favorite author or book" lists more than any other Booker winner. He has produced many novels and many volumes of criticism but his Deptford trilogy is supposed to be his best work.

I read the trilogy in reverse which meant that the first novel is what I read last. Inevitably, since I already knew what happened later, Fifth Business seemed kind of stale to me. But it is in this novel that the main conflict is set, which Davies re-visits again from different perspectives in the other two novels.

The main protagonists are Dunstable Ramsay, a school teacher who is the narrator of Fifth Business, Boy Staunton, his lifelong enemy and friend, Magnus Eisengriem, a charismatic magician and Liesl, the mistress they share in common.

When Dunstable is 10 years old, he and Staunton have a quarrel one day which ends up in Staunton thowing a snowball at him with a stone hidden in it. The snowball hits the head of Mary Dempster, a pregnant wife of a minister, causing her son Paul to be born prematurely. It is this event that provides the hook for all their lives.

Ramsay is filled with contrition at this event for Mary slowly descends into madness. He holds a soft spot for her lifelong and comes to think of her as a saint during his World War experience; something which leads him to study saints professionally. He becomes a schoolmaster and ends up teaching Staunton's own son. Staunton meanwhile has become a very rich man and most of the novel is a sort of Kane and Abel kind of showdown between them, though it is always told from Ramsay's perspective.

The mood darkens when a charismatic magician called Magnus enters the scene. It is not long before that Ramsay realises that Magnus is Paul Dempster, the lost son of his patron saint. But he is supicious that Magnus harbours some malevolent project and the novel ends with the suggestion of Boy Staunton's imminent murder. This strange murder underpins the later two novels; Ramsay is sure that Magnus has had a hand in it while Magnus is non-commital.

It is clear that Fifth Business is just an introductory preamble for the other two novels and this was especially clear to me because I had read the other two. And it didn't help that both The Manticore and World of Wonders had more rivetting action packed in them and more juicy detail too.

It is frequently said that you can read these three novels in any order but its better to read Fifth Business first, or else it would be spoiled for you, like it was for me.

The whole trilogy is filled with obscure but fascinating details of Bollandists and operattas of post-War England, made all the more enjoyable because Davies hits a pitch perfect narrative voice in this series; something he failed to repeat ever again.

For a work which is modelled on Jungian pscyhology, I must say that Davies manages to preserve the mask of a cultivated man of culture with a sophisticated sense of humour who just barely dissents with the mainstream thought quiet well in this trilogy. When it slips off as in his Cornish trilogy, the results are diagreeable.

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Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres

November 1st 2006 09:30

Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres

Louis de Bernieres' Captain Corelli's Mandolin had acquired such a strong following that when a movie was made based on the novel, the movie was trashed even before it saw the light of the day. That fact aroused my curiosity and I picked the novel a few years ago. My opinion? It is not too bad a novel. Readable and reasonably entertaining but I still fail to see any "iridiscent beauty" in it.

It is set on a remote Greek island of Cephallonia during the second world war, which is marooned with both the Italian and the German forces stationed on it. Yes, it deals with the love story of a soldier of a Fascist army. No, it doesn't demonise him. On the contrary, it humanises him and satirises Mussolini. What's not to love in it?

Nicholas Cage and Penelope Cruz

Well, the soldier is as you know Captain Antonio Corelli and he has a mandolin. That's sweet. He is stationed on the island with his platoon and he barges in politley but firmly into the household of a local doctor, Dr. Iannis, who fills his days by dreaming about writing a history of his island. He has a daughter called Pelagia, who is waiting for her bethrothed to come back from the war. it is not long before Corelli sings his way into Pelagia's heart.

The novel is dovetailed narrative of various elements: the history of Dr.Iannis, the confessions of a giant homosexual who is secretly in love with Corelli and the ravings of that mad cat Mussolini. The humour is standard and the romance reminds you of a Bollywood movie. In fact, it is remarkable that such a straight-laced, conventional romance should garner so much devotion. As I've said it is conveniently anti-fascist and all too pat and comes with appropriate asides on tolerance, gays and women. No wonder the Brotherhood went nuts over it.

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The Master by Colm Toibin

October 31st 2006 08:58

I went to this book with every kind of malevolence--Henry James is not somebody I admire and it was shortlisted for the Booker prize. Years ago, when I was a kid I persuaded a friend that buying Ben Okri’s The Famished Road would be a good thing because it won the Booker prize. I have never been able to live down the disgrace. So, when Colm Toibin came up with the obsequiously titled The Master, I was not enthused. It came in “a James season” along with Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, which eventually won the Man-Booker( probably for its satire on Lady Thatcher than for any of its literary merits). I did try reading The Line of Beauty and put it away after a few pages which did not help matters at all.

The Master by Colm Toibin

But now that I have read it, I am glad I did. It is clear that Toibin admires Henry James, but he is clearly not beholden to him. It tracks the moods of James after his play Guy Domville had become a resounding failure and shuttles in time to illuminate James's important creations as he struggles to spring back from the failure.

Toibin tries to emulate the same sensitivity that is the hallmark of James but without James’s predilection for dubious prose and excess of feeling. The narrative is smoothly controlled and the writing perpicacious.

In many ways, this novel is like The Master of Petersburg of J.M.Coetzee, which followed Dostoevysky as he is preparing to write The Possessed. That novel is one of my all time favourites and I found Coetzee’s Dostoevsyky bland, not the blazing prophet of The Possessed whom I cherished. I don’t know if the portrait is faithful to James because I do not care for him. Probably this helped. Probably that’s why I found the portrait of an author who battles inner demons to produce a work of art, engaging and interesting.

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The Crimson Petal and The White by Michael Faber

October 12th 2006 05:04

The Crimson Petal and The White By Michael Faber

Michael Faber is one of those guys(Jonathan Franzen and Philip Pullman are the others) who are regularly put up by the Brotherhood, zealously promoted and made into marquee stars even before you've registered their names. Faber is not quite there with Franzen or Pullman but he will be.

The blurb says that "is one of the most serious, and the funniest writers around." If The Guardian said that, it probably means that he is neither serious nor funny but is full of that juice which liberals are shot with through and through: bile. You can't call this novel bilious either. It's just plain boring.

The setting is turn-of-the-century Victorian England. Yeah, underneath all that prim stiff-necked, moral-spewing façade, there was a lot of dirt. I read somewhere that there were, hold your breath, at least 6000 prostitutes operating in London. Oh, dear! The hypocrisy of that don't-show-your-ankle age.

A certain section of intelligentsia has never stopped chest-beating even 100 years after the Dreadful Age has passed. The success of A French Lieutenant's Woman, another boring book turned into a classic attests to this fact. But, that novel arrived in the seventies. There is no justification for another rehash of the same thing to be promoted so aggressively nearly thirty years afterwards.

The Crimson Petal and The White is on the face of it a story dealing with the life of a young prostitute Sugar in the vile Victorian age. You are told she is spirited, sweet; OK, you have a ken for spirited sweet things, especially if they are prostitutes in Victorian England. But twenty pages into the novel, you wonder whether the author decided to read an entire shelf of Zola before sitting to write this one. This is not an original novel; it is an adaptation. Er, I mean, you take a nineteenth century open-your-eyes icon and do your own nineteenth century open-your-eyes take, substituing London for Paris. Seriously, no novel of Zola was this lengthy either.

After twenty-five pages, I am not feeling the rage against the system or the compassion for the victims I am supposed to feel, just boredom and wonder when this lengthy dreck of a book will finish. Or is that a too-bourgeoisie emotion to feel?

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The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

September 29th 2006 03:41

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

The novel starts with an assortment of newspaper cut outs tracking the deaths and fortunes of one family, interspersed with the beginnings of a novel within the novel called The Blind Assassin. The novel tells of the secret meetings of an adulterous pair and because she asks it, the man in the novel starts weaving a science fiction story about blind assassins for his lover. The novel may have been written by Laura Chase and had acquired notoriety on posthumous publication. Atwood uses blind assassins and other “science fiction” elements as a prop to raise interest in her drab material and the novel’s mystery revelation is that the Blind Assassin was actually written by Iris, Laura’s elder sister. What a breath-taking revelation!

Cut to the present and Iris is over eighty years old and quietly waiting to pass over. Except that, she has lifetime of quietly acquired malice stored within her and won’t go before she has vented out it on paper.

The Chase Girls, Iris and Laura were brought up in relative lavishness by an industrialist father and an adoring mother. It all changes when the father goes to war and comes back as a bitter cripple and the mother is dead. Their factory falls on rough times and the girls provide refuge to a radical called Alex , wanted by the police because he had stoked the strike in the factory and riots in the town.

The said factory is bought off by an American industrialist Richard who also marries Iris. He just happens to like young girls and arranges for Laura to stay with them and in time lays his hands on her. Iris meanwhile has spotted Alex again and is having an uproarious affair with him and doesn’t know what to make of Laura’s increasingly erratic behaviour. Laura bore everything because she was secretly in love with Alex and Richard blackmailed her about the fate of Alex. When she comes to know that Alex doesn’t love her and her own sister is having an affair with him, she commits suicide.

Margaret Atwood

After being nominated for three or four times, Atwood finally got the Booker Prize for this novel, which is not a very great recommendation. It was also hailed as the first great novel of this century. Is it?

Basically, it is a wet dream of a novel where an industrialist is a paedophile whose motives are not explained because the narrator has never “understood” him but the radical has the required “stamina” to take part in some knee-tremblers with the said industrialist’s wife. Not unlike when in The Robber Bride, Atwood made a toy boy of a war deserter. Calling Tutsis “cockroaches and vermin” allowed Hutus to massacre them, and calling bourgeoisie capitalists “child-lovers” had allowed many social revolutionaries to confiscate their properties and send them to labour farms. I think this insult was originated, though I am not sure, somewhere in 1930s. The novel is basically an attempt to give those pejorative insults a semblance of reality without the need of slightest self-consciousness of a manufactured insult.

As a literary method, Atwood’s style is said to be about stored hysteria. Well, to me it looks more like working too hard on your wet dream which then busts off in a limp climax.

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Friends, Lovers, Chocolate by Alexander Mccall Smith

September 10th 2006 04:36

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate by Alexander Mccall Smith

Alexander Mccall Smith came into prominence with Mma Ramotswe detective series set in Botswana, a hugely popular series. He lives in Edinburgh and there is a touch of old-fashioned chivalry about him, as if he is determined to preserve the genteel ways in a world fast moving into perdition of drabness. He even writes a novel that is serialised regularly in the The Scotsman.

His novel Friends, Lovers, Chocolate is a standalone romance set in Edinburgh. Its heroine Isabel Dalhousie is a philosopher with money. She edits an ethics journal for having something to do but is more than a bit contrite about the vast sums of money she has. Her niece runs a delicatessen and when she goes on a vacation asks her aunt to take over. Which is a dicey proposition because her niece’s ex-boyfriend, the handsome Jamie is more than a bit interested in her and that is making her a bit nervous. But there’s more adventure to come.

The novel had an inviting title and a promising romantic plot. I confess I am a huge sucker for romance. But once I started reading I was very much disappointed. Imagine chocolate made by amateur cooks and the light runny stuff that comes as a result. Well, it feels something like that. In the end, the novel has nothing to recommend except the geniality of its author and that’s not nearly enough.

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The Lady and The Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier

August 25th 2006 03:53

Tracy Chevalier’s The Lady and The Unicorn treads the same path as her Girl with a Pearl Earring. Both use an object of art as a canvas and breathe scandal into it. This time, instead of a Vermeer’s painting, she takes up fifteenth-century set of tapestries and they allow her to inject more sex and heartbreak into the story than the Vermeers.

Jean le Viste, a fifteenth century aristocrat takes upon himself to commission a huge set of tapestries to cover his Grand Salle to celebrate his presidency of the Cours des Aides. Nicholas des Innocents, a Parisian artist is to do the job. Nicolas is a rake and it does not take long for him to lust after Claude, le Viste’s beautiful young daughter who is carefully watched over by her cold and fanatical mother, Genevieve. A situation ripe for explosion in fifteenth-century Europe where class differences were rigid and an artisan could never hope for a nobleman’s daughter. It is Genevieve who comes up with the idea of lady and the unicorn for the tapestries; a lady offering food and other inducements to a stubborn unicorn which finally gives in and lays its head in her lap; each tapestry representing one sense and the final one where the lady tames the unicorn, representing man’s spirit conquering the senses.

Nicholas does not realise how revolutionary a design he has made until he goes to Brussels where the tapestries are actually to be weaved. Georges de la Chapelle, an industrious weaver accepts the commission against his better judgement. His wife Christine will never be allowed to weave herself due to guild rules even though it is her fondest dream. Their daughter Alienor is a blind but precocious daughter has a grim fate in store for her. All these women find their way into the tapestries and Nicolas touches them all in one way or the other.

Chevalier uses multiple narrators in her novel which races to its tragic conclusion. Many people who have read her previous novel were disappointed with this one. I wasn’t. Where Girl with a Pearl Earring is controlled, The Lady and The Unicorn is lavish. But it is not less an interesting read. Having read other novelists like Susan Vreeland and Sarah Dunant who have come up with similar novels, I can say that Tracy Chevalier beats them all. Go for it.

Image Source: tchevalier.com

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