“You want freedom and they give you chicken korma”
Mohammed Hanif, currently the head of the BBC's Urdu service, shares his insight as a graduate of the Pakistan Air Force by creating a satirical account and explanation of the assassination of President Zia ul-Huq. On Aug, 17 1988 President ul-Huq was killed in a mysterious plane crash along with several of his top generals and the then United States Ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Lewis Raphel. Since then no official explanation came out regarding this incident. Therefore several conspiracy theories are running amok. Borrowing from all those theories and adding his own twist Hanif creates a witty account of the assassination. And according to his version it is a crate of mangoes on the board of the PakOne that was responsible.

The story starts with the moment before the crash and then flashback from the point of view of Ali Shigri, Pakistan Air Force pilot and Silent Drill Commander of Fury Squadron, son of Colonel Shigri, “one of the ten men standing between the Free World and the Red Army”:

“The runaway is in the middle of the Bahawalpur desert, six hundred miles away from the Arabian Sea. There is nothing between the sun's white fury and the endless expanse of shimmering sand except a dozen men in khaki uniforms walking towards the plane.”

The story then quickly moves into the day Ali Shigri's roommate “Baby O" Obaid's mysterious disappearance and the subsequent detention of Ali Shigi, the involvement of the intelligent service, and Code Red security alert for President Zia ul-Huq. In between we meet interesting characters such as the laundryman Uncle Starchy, blind Zainab, secretary general of the all Pakistan sweepers union and my favorite the First Lady:

The First Lady stayed away from newspapers. There were too many words she couldn't make sense of and too many pictures of her husband. She herself rarely appeared in the papers, and if she did, she was usually attending a children's festival or the Quran recitation competitions for women that General Zia dispatched her to so she could represent the government and hand out prizes. The information minister sent her the clippings of these pictures and she usually hid them from General Zia because he always found fault with her appearance. If she wore makeup, he accused her of aping high-society Westernized women. If she were no makeup, he said she looked like death, very unlike a First Lady. He constantly lectured her that as the First Lady of an Islamic state, she should be role model for other women. “Look at what Mrs. Ceausescu has done for her country.”

The bulk of the story is the account of Ali Shigri in first person and his flashback leading up to his arrest where he was accused of plotting to kill the president:

The soldier doesn't blindfold me. He walks me into a room that is trying very hard to look like a torture chamber. A barber's chair with rubber straps on its armrests is connected to amateurish-looking electrical devices. An assortment of canes, leather whips, and scythes are arranged on the table, along with a grass jar of chili powder. Nylon ropes hang from a hook on a wall and a pair of old tyres is connected to the ceiling with metal chains, probably to hand the prisoners upside down. The only new item is a while Phillips iron, unplugged. A torture chamber that doubles as a laundry room? I wonder.

Whether Hanif talks about the busy streets, the secret dungeon created by the Mughals or the spiritual crisis of President Zia while reading the story of Jonah, he brings a witty sense of humor and depth to the story telling. In a recent interview he was asked, if he had received any threats from Zia’s family, the Army or the Intelligence Services. “No,” said Hanif. “I don’t think they are into reading books.”

Saudi writer Yousef Al-Mohiameed Wolves of the Crescent Moon (Fikhakh al-rai'ha) is a provocative and sometime disturbing tale set in contemporary Riyadh. It is short, quick paced story that brings together three men that are living in the periphery of the Saudi society. There's the middle-aged Bedouin, Turad, who has come in from the desert in search of work. Nasir, an orphan, and Amm Tawfiq, an old ex-slave brought from the Sudan decades ago as a youth. The allegorical style of the book poses some of the thorny questions the Saudi society is facing. The book is banned in the Kingdom, the author had to publish is from Beirut.

The story unfolds in a bus station with Turad, who lost his left ear during a failed robbery in the desert. This deformity haunts him everyday and later we find the other two also has similar deformity: Tawfiq who lost his testicles and Nasir, lost an eye when he was an infant. Al-Mohiameed is at his best in describing these incidents with gruesome detail, as a result some other parts of the story feels flat. However, overall the structure works out nicely with different points of view, sometime even in the same page. He brings together these three deformed men with flashbacks and dreams and connecting their pasts during one night in Riyadh and ends when the city is "like a young woman wiping the sleep from her eyes".

Al-Mohiameed uses some nice poetic touch while describing the brutality of slavery and Bedouin life. As Turad sits in the bus station trying decide where to go, we get a glimpse of the these people eariler lifes with the crescent moon looming behind:

On one occasion, at the beginning of the night with the crescent moon just over the horizon like the slender sculpted eyebrow of a sleeping woman, the scent of camels came upon them, like a herd in the desert. It invaded Turad's nose and he mentioned to his companion to be silent. They lay motionless in the sand like two rocks. They had tied bands of cloth around their waists to keep up their tattered thobes for ease of movement. They had their sharp knives ready, for it was their intention to sneak up past the guards and slip into the middle.

Or later we hear Amm Tawfiq's account on how he was transported from Sudan

I was sad. The sun was drawing its golden mantle across the shoulders of the houses in the quarter of al-Mazlum. They had just pushed me into the back of a Ford truck with a pile of furniture and household items: rugs and blankets, and pillows with colorful linen covers. I took one and placed it under my head as we drove along the darkness. It was stuffed with feathers, and the sharp quills scratched my face. Ah, if only I could put the feathers along my arms and fly. Slowly, I would ascend, little by little, until I was a bird in the open sky.

Although overwhelming few times, it was a good quick read. A good translation from Arabic by Anthony Calderbank.

Marcel Proust apparently saw death disguised as a fat woman dressed in black. But José Saramago's death (with small 'd') in the novel Death At Intervals (As Intermitências da Morte), is a “skeleton wrapped in a sheet” and “she lives in a chilly room accompanied by a rusty old scythe that never replies to questions”. Yes, death, a morte, is feminine in gender in Portuguese and she is whimsical, funny, and often times cold as death should be. However, as the story progresses, Saramago, defying every single rule that is taught in creative writing classes, brings forth a more nuanced death that talks to her scythe and certain times feels sorry for the human beings that she is destined to snatch away.

Saramago with his unique narrative style creates a world that makes us question what it means to be human. The story starts like this. All hell breaks loose, if that is indeed an apt expression in this context, when in an unnamed country, death stops her usual duties: “The following day, no one died”. Then a series of events occurs.. Newspapers across the nation prints ominous headlines -- “What Will Become Of Us Now?”. The government is at a loss while some citizens are ecstatic with the vision of immortal life:

Although the crisis is clearly not the most appropriate one to describe these extraordinary events, for it would be absurd, incongruous and an affront to the most basic logic to speak of a crisis in an existential situation that has been privileged by the absence of death, one can understand why some citizens, zealous of their right to know the truth, are asking themselves, and each other, what the hell is going on with the government, who have so far given not the slightest sign of life. When asked in passing during a brief interval between two meetings, the minister of health, had, it is true, explained to journalists that, bearing in mind that they lacked sufficient information to form a judgment, any official statement would, inevitable, be premature,

Saramago loves to poke fun at the dismay of bureaucrats and at the hysteria of the government as he did in another novel (Seeing), where all the citizens turned in a blank ballot. Not only the government is at a loss, with the absence of death the insurance and funeral industry are in a quagmire. So is the church where death is crucial concept tied with religion and god:

if there was no death, there could be no resurrection, and if there was no resurrection, then there would be no point in having a church. Now, since this was clearly the only agricultural implement god possessed with which to plough the roads that would lead to his kingdom, the obvious, irrefutable conclusion is that the entire holy story ends, inevitably, in a cul-de-sac.

The story moves on as Saramago details the confusion that seeps through the country. Then death, with the small 'd', returns. She comes back after seven months of hiatus with a violet-colored envelop that announces or proclaims, if you fancy such lofty words:

“ Dear Madam, I regret to inform you that in a week your life will end, irrevocably and irremissibly. Please make the best use you can of the time remaining to your, yours faithfully, death.”

In the country where no one dies, death returns as an empress from her “freezing subterranean room, as if she had been buried alive, but on top of the highest mountain presiding over the fates of the world, gazing benevolently down on the human herd, watching them as they rush hither and thither, unaware that they're heading in the same direction, that one step forward will take them just as close to death as one step back,”

I will leave further details for the brave readers as the story of death turns into a story of love. Saramago once again created a world that at the same time defies logic and commonsense but also pours a mist of philosophical quandary that questions our basic human understanding about life, death and love.

As of today, this hasn't been published in the USA.

Death at Intervals
by José Saramago, another brilliant translation by Margaret Jull Costa.
Harvill Secker £12.99, pp208

How do you differentiate between a pessimist and an optimist? I don't differentiate between optimism and pessimism and am quite at a loss as to which of the two characterizes me. When I awake each morning I thank the Lord he did not take my soul during the night. If harm befalls me during the day, I thank Him that it was no worse. So which am I, a pessimist or a an optimist?

This is how Saeed, the comic hero of the Arab Israeli journalist Emile Habiby's novel The Secret Life of Saeed, The Pessoptimist (1974) defines his dilemma. This is a novel about the struggle of Palestine, conceptualized by Habiby which makes the reader question what is comic and what is tragic as Saeed questions his outlook on life.

The book starts Saeed's encounter with men from the outer space where he finds his 'exile', after he explains his family history, the origin of the Pessoptimists:

For this word combines two qualities, pessimist and optimism, that have been blended perfectly in the characters of the members of our family since our first divorced mother, the Cypriot. It is said that the first to so name was Tamerlane, following the second massacre of Baghdad. This was when it was reported to him that my first ancestor, Abjar son of Abjar, mounted on his horse outside the ciy walls, had stared back at the tongues of the flame and shouted, "After me, the deluge!"

The language of the novel is simple, but Habiby's succinct style does not cloud the sufferings of the Palestinians with comedy, rather he brings a fresh new look and finds a balance between the "denounced aggression" and "glorified resistance" (p. xv, Introduction by Salma K. Jayyusi).

We also find Saeed as the informer for the Zionist state. But his stupidity and incompetence makes him an object of ridicule by both sides and thus creates his confusing identity as the Pessoptimist:

I lived in the outside world -- outside the tunnels, that is -- for twenty years, unable to breath no matter how I tried, like a man who is drowning. But I did not die. I wanted to get free but could not; I was a prisoner unable to escape. But I did remain unchained.
How often I yelled at those about me, "Please, everyone! I groan at the burden of the great secret I bear on my shoulders! Please help me!" But all that came from beneath my moustache was a meowing sound, like that of cat.

A nice translation by Salma K. Jayyusi and Trevor LeGassick. This is a short novel, with 2-3 page long chapters and covers several themes that could have been developed further. Yet, in such short scope, Habiby creates a believable picture of our world with the use farce and tragedy.

Garden of Secrets Juan Goytisolo
Blindness José Saramago
Seeing by José Saramago
The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa
The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami
Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño
Story of the Cannibal Woman Maryse Condé
If on winter's night a traveler Italo Calvino
Fascination of Evil by Florian Zeller
The Path to the Spiders' Nests by Italo Calvino
Zoli by Colum McCann
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam
My Name is red by Orhan Pamuk
All the Names by José Saramago
Double by José Saramago
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
By Night In Chile by Roberto Bolaño
The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt by Wilhelm Genazin
Falling Man by Don Delillo
Anxious Pleasures: A novel after Kafka
Delirium by Laura Restrepo
How I Became a Nun Cesar Aira
The Assistant by Robert Walser
Drown Junot Diaz
I sailed with Magellan Stuart Dybek
Savage Detective Roberto Bolaño
Memories of My Melancholy Whores Gabriel García Márquez
The Journals of Sarab Affan Jabra Ibrahim Jabra
Anarchist banker and other Portuguese stories edited by Eugenio Lisboa
Collected Stories Leonard Michaels
Dona Flor & Her Two Husbands Jorge Amado
Ali and Nino: Kurban Said

I forgot where I read it -- at certain point in their life everyone wants to be a poet. Poetry, one of oldest forms of art, common in all traditions, cultures, still haunts, annoys, and confuses us. Roberto Bolaño is one such poet that takes us through a journey in his phenomenal novel The Savage Detectives where poetry is everything and at the same time poetry is nothing.

I took me few months to finish this 577 page book, translated by Nathasa Wimmer (who also translated Maria Vargas Llosa and Laura Restrepo). The structure of the novel is not conventional, there is a plot, but it does not follow the usual route. There might be some moments of disappointment at the end. However, the pleasure is finding how Bolaño structured this novel with multiple narrators that are ultimate mixture of poet and vagabonds, Kurt Cobain meets Che Guevera. He portrays this avant-garde, outlaw like, romantic image of the writer: waking up late, having breakfast, then writing, then wondering around in the evening in the city, going to then bar, then reading late in the night, then writing again and again, no ties, no hopes, just sex and drugs, but all ends up in utter failure and frustration.

The novel starts with Juan García Madero. I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realist. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way. The visceral realist movement is founded by Arturo Belano (supposedly Bolaño's alter ego) and Ulises Lima -- the marxist response to the Latin American literary mainstream. A certain political agenda permeates Bolaño's works. Even though he does not really talk about any political movements directly, through poetry and writers, his frustration and aspirations are evident. Bolaño also founded a similar movement called infrarealistas -- "French Surrealism fused with Dadaism, Mexican style". This movement was was called the "the terror of the literary world" by a mainstream Mexican author. (Bolaño is from Chile, but spent a lot of time in Mexico City.)

The book never explains what this visceral realism is, there is a certain air of mystery, like the founders of this movement. But we know that there in the search for Cesárea Tinajero, another avant-garde poet from the 1920s when she started a group with the same name. Belano and Lima thinks that she is still alive even though no one can find any of her works. But the detail of the search comes back after 400 pages in the book. The bulk of the novel is basically four dozen narratives that account the wanderings of Belano and Lima. The last part ends with the account of the search for Tinajero, equally confusing and perplexing like rest of the novel. My favorite narrator is Octavio Paz's secretary. Both the visceral realist and infrarealistas were not that fond of Don Octavio.

I am not a big fan of 500+ page novel, there were certain parts in the book, mainly some of the narrations in the middle felt repetitious. But overall, it was an enjoyable experience, specially the way it talks about writers and readers:

Do you what the worst thing about literature is? said Don Pancracio. I knew, but I pretended I didn't. What? I said. The you end up being friends with writers. And friendship, treasure though it may be, destroys your critical sense. Once, said, Don Pancracio, Monteforte Toledo dropped this riddle in my lap: a poet is lost in the city on the verge of collapse, with no money, no friends, or anyone to turn to. And of course, he neither wants nor plans to turn to anyone. For several days he roams in the city and country, eating nothing or eating scraps. He's even stopped writing. Or he writes in his head: in other words he hallucinates. All sign point to an imminent death. His drastic disappearance, foreshadows it. And yet the poet doesn't die. (p. 318)

According to NY Times.

The IMPAC (largest and most international prize of its kind for a single work of fiction published in English) long list has been announced. Here's my short list, unfortunately, I only read three of these:


1. José Eduardo Agualusa - The Book of Chameleons
2. Vassilis Alexakis - Foreign Words
3. Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games
4. Upamanyu Chatterjee - Weight Loss
5. Neil Griffiths - Saving Caravaggio
6. Sara Gruen - Water for Elephants
7. Marie-Elena John - Unburnable
8. Verlyn Klinkenborg - Timothy, or, notes of an Abject Reptile
9. Colum McCann - Zoli
10. Naeem Murr - The Perfect Man
11. Peter Nadas - Own Death
12. Gary Shteyngart - Absurdistan
13. Alan Warner - The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven
14. Geling Yan - The Uninvited

Quick mention of two nice short story collections by two talented writers. First, Stuart Dybek and his home Chicago. He recently been awarded MacArthur fellowship. I sailed with Magellan is a nicely composed insight of Chicago, through the minds of deftly created characters of Little Village.

The second city in New Jersey in the eyes of Junot Diaz and Dominican immigrants. His short story collection Drown came out in 1996. With ten stories that move from the barrios of the Dominican Republic to the struggling urban communities of New Jersey, Junot Diaz makes his remarkable debut. In "Ysrael", two brothers hunt a disfigured boy who hides behind a mask; in "No Face", the mirror is flipped and perspective belongs to the tormented. In "Fiesta, 1980", a spirited family gathering plays against the noiseless hum of a father's infidelities. In "Boyfriend", a young man eavesdrops on the woman next door and colors in the life overheard with the drama born of intense longing. And always, it seems there is the throb of waiting: in "Aguantando", for the fulfillment of a promise; in "Negocios", for rescue; in "Aurora", for respite; in "Drown", for resolution.. His new book is also getting some good reviews.

I discovered Robert Walser(1878-1956) several months ago through a blog. The Assistant was not out then but fortunately the library had a copy of the The Robber and Selected Stories. I was intrigued by the opening of the Robber, but gave up after few pages: Edith loves him. More on this later. Perhaps she should have initiated relations with this good-for-nothing who has no money.

The Assistant written in 1907 in a six-week sprint has recently been translated in English and published by the good folks of New Directions. This is a more approachable and readable work than The Robber, yet in the middle it felt little monotonous. But I picked it up again after couple weeks and finished it. Maybe I wasn't attentive enough but I thoroughly enjoyed the later half of the book. I might give Robber another try soon.

Written in 1907 and based closely on Walser's own experiences, The Assistant tells the story of Jospeh Marti. The employment bureau sends Joseph to a position as the assistant of an inventor named, Carl Tobler. The book opens, not as unconventionally as The Robber, when Joseph arrives at the Tobler household:

One morning at eight o'clock a young man stood at the door of a solitary and, it appeared, attractive house. It was raining, "It almost surprises me," the one standing there thought, "that I'm carrying an umbrella." In earlier years he never possessed such a thing. The hand extending down at his side held a brown suitcase, one of the very cheapest. Before the eyes of this man who, it seemed, had just come from a journey, was an enamel sign on which could be read: C. Tobler, Technical Office.

The story moves on as Joseph settles in "the dazzling-gauzy-white outlines of the Alps appeared like notes of music fading into the distance." and discovers the sad state of Tobler's finances. Tobler's inventions didn't create much noise, -- the Invalid's Chair, the Deep Hole Drilling Machine, the Marksman's Vending Machine and the Advertising Clock --, instead those created more debts and unhappiness for Mr. Tobler and as a consequence no salary for Joseph. Tobler said he will be paid only if the inventions are successful. But Joseph was happy, as he was enjoying the landscape, once a in a while a nice trip to the city and of course regular meals and good supply of cigars.

The book is full of soliloquies and digressions. One of Walser's trademark is vivid description of the landscape. This excerpt is towards the end of the book, one of Joseph's trip to the city. Walser does not reveal which city it is but experts claim it is Zurich, even though Walser was in Berlin when he wrote the book:

About this time there came a Sunday on which Joseph
decided for a change to take a train to the capital to amuse himself once more. In the city, he discovered fog in the streets, wet leaves upon ground, benches in the parks on which one was no longer able or eager to sit, and in the winding little alleyways he found noise, and in the evening, raucous drunkards before the numerous bars (p. 200).
...
In the cold night, he sat down on a bench in one of the little parks to let the harsh, imperious weather blow the intoxication from his head and limbs. A proper storm wind was howling and shaking the branches of the park's trees. This however, appeared a matter of complete indifference to a second person who seemed likewise to be taking a rest here at this nocturnal hour; for he
had made himself at home on a bench across from Joseph. What sort of person might this be, and what had caused him to sit down in this exposed, inconsiderate stormy night like Joseph? Was such a thing done? The assistant, sensing some misfortune or pain, walked over to the resting, dark figure -- and saw it was Wirsich (p. 201).

(Wirsich was Tobler's last assistant, he got fired.)

The book was full of prose concerning Joseph's day to day undertakings, again digressions here and there. This is one my favorite paragraphs:

Down in the office. The first thing was to pace back and forth a little, after all that was standard procedure, that's how a person always begins when he's resolved to get to work. Was Joseph one of those individuals who always begin some piece of work by first taking a breather and only afterward, when they have finished work, that is, half-finished it, do they begin to display some energy, which suggests perhaps that the impetus behind this energy is merely the wish to indulge in some cheap amusements? In a leisurely fashion, he lit one of the familiar cheroots, which always sweetened the thought of getting down to work, and soon he was puffing away like a member of a smoking club.

One of the interesting aspects of Joseph Marti that was intentionally left by Walser is the detail of his romantic interests. Walser's women are mysterious and perplexing so is the relationship involving them. For instance, in this case, Joseph's attitude towards Frau Tobler, her employer's wife. He has a certain affection for her, yet it is not fully exposed. When Frau Tobler was ill to
Joseph she looked more beautiful, younger, certain times a completely different person.

But Frau Tobler was little by little becoming the old Frau Tobler once more. The more she recovered, the more resembled herself. Well, it would have been exceedingly peculiar, wouldn't it, if she had become another person instead! No, a living human creature is not so quick to leap
out its own nature. Provisions are in place to ensure that a thing like that will never come to pass. If the woman made a gentler impression, it was only because she was still feeling weak.

A beautiful translation by Susan Bernofsky, keeping the essence of Walser's style. She also translated extremely
difficult Robber, which was written during the 'pencil' phase of Walser when he was not in a sane state:

Since Walser never prepared a fair copy of the The Robber, the novel comes down to us in Microscript form. The microscript, now housed in the Robert Walser-Archi in Zurich, were tiny, densely pencil-jointed manuscripts in which Walser composed the rough drafts
of his texts starting as early as 1917. (Introduction, The Robber)

Also, check out a nice long article in New Yorker and a blog dedicated to this ignored genius. I would highly recommend to start with the Selected Stories then Assistant. He is more known the short pieces.

Argentine writer César Aira's How I Became a Nun can be best described as a eccentrically charming piece of work. It is about a little boy named César Aira in Argentina who thinks that he is a little girl. It is not a coming of age story, it is not about becoming a nun, it is just a surreal book with a very twisted ending, hard to categorize. Well, the ice cream is big part of the book. So you can say it is about ice cream -- strawberry ice cream to be precise.

I really enjoyed his writing style, the way he captures the mind of a unreliable six year old narrator is justbrilliant:

Anyway, one day, in the middle of a lesson, I asked the teacher for permission to go to the bathroom, I was always doing this; we all were. I asked without needing to go or having carefully chosen my moment (I guess it was the same for the others). I did it on impulse. It's the only unalloyed triumph I can remember from my childhood. As soon as the teacher saw the little hand go up, she could briefly consider what the pupil was going to miss (it was always something trivial like when to write b and when to write v) and then shout: All right! But this is the last time! And the kid who had been visited by the brilliant idea of asking at precisely that moment, which had turned out to the last, ran out of the classroom, deliriously happy, under the hateful, bitter gaze of all others. who felt they missed their last chance...

There are so many excerpts I can quote, but I need to go back to my social theory reading for tomorrow's class. This was one of the best things I have read this summer. A great translation by Chris Andrews who also translated Roberto Bolaño's work. Highly recommended, this is a short one, 117 pages.

As the summer coming to an end, I was coping with my binge reading, slowing it down, picking up some non fictions, getting ready for classes, the Phd program. First mistake I did, after getting off the wagon, is to take a stroll to the new book section at the Public Library. There wasn't anything that exciting but the cover of Delirium caught my eyes. I never heard of this prize winning Colombian author. Then I made my second mistake, I flipped to the back and there it was, raving reviews by two of my favorite authors and one of them is Colombian. Saramago says, "Delirium is one of the finest novels written in recent memory." And then Marquez, "...save her novels from any temptation toward pathos or melodrama, and infuse them with unmistakable reading pleasures." I was sold.

It was splendid, not in the scale of Saramago, even though it was apparent she was influenced by him. (In an interview she also mentions Kazantzakis as her influence, recently I got Zorba The Greek as a gift, haven't read it yet.) I really liked her narratives, somewhat poetic, somewhat ramblings, yet it flows together nicely. The book opens with Aguilar, an old school marxist, a former professor that now working for Purina. After returning from a trip he finds his wife, Agustina, in the brink of madness.:

I knew something irreparable had happened the moment a man opened the door to that hotel room and I saw my wife sitting at the far end of the room, looking out the window in the strangest way.

Even though there were bouts of strangeness in her behavior before, he was puzzled. In his attempt to trace this mysterious madness, he gradually discovers more about her young wife, her past, her parents, brothers, her old boyfriend, Midas McAlister, who was my favorite narrator. Restrepo combines several different narratives like patches -- "all stories are like a big cake, with everybody's eyes on the piece they're eating, and the only one who sees the whole thing is the baker." However, she was obsessed with eccentricity, madness. Each character comes out with some oddities. I think the beautiful prose could have been more alive, if she just limited the madness to the one or two characters.

This is a excerpt from the diary of Agustina's grandmother. It wasn't clear who was reading the diary, she switches between the point of view, confusing few times, but nicely done:

Blanca suspects that behind Nicholas's apparent calm terrible thoughts are seething and her eyes grow huge and intense to prevent him from escaping, her gaze begging him please, by all he holds dear, to speak words that are sensible and prudent, as God intended, to renounce the too-many words and those words with a thousand meanings instead of one. Speak to me about things, not ghosts, Blanca begs her husband, not understanding that he's wandering amid ruins where things and ghosts are one and the same. Do you love me, sweet Blanca of mine? Portulinus asks her, and she assures him that she does, I already told you I do, I love you so much that it hurts, she promises him over and over again, not understanding that it's a different question that troubling him. He wants, needs, to ask her to distance herself: Go away, woman, let me dream alone, don't talk to me about this tree here and the sun that's warming us now, don't trap me, I beg of you from the other side, where my soul has already fled.

Highly recommended. There are more exciting writings besides magical realism from Latin American Literature. And a nice translation by Natasha Wimmner.

The company that sponsors Man Brooker prize is inaugurating one just for Asia.

The prize aims to "recognize the best of new Asian literature and to bring it to the attention of the world literary community," the organization said in a press release. Twenty-three works were chosen out of 243 for the long list. The shortlist will be announced in October, with the award presentation on Nov. 10 in Hong Kong.

I haven't heard of any of these writers :(.

Tulsi Badrinath, The Living God
Sanjay Bahadur, The Sound Of Water
Kankana Basu, Cappuccino Dusk
Sanjiv Bhatla, Injustice
Shahbano Bilgrami, Without Dreams
Saikat Chakraborty, The Amnesiac
Jose Dalisay Jr., Soledad's Sister
Reeti Gadekar, Families at Home
Xiaolu Guo, 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth
Ameena Hussein, The Moon in the Water
Nu Nu Yi Inwa, Smile As They Bow
Jiang Rong, Wolf Totem
Hitomi Kanehara, Autofiction
N S Madhavan, Litanies of Dutch Battery
Laxmi Narayan Mishra, The Little God
Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
Nalini Rajan, The Pangolin's Tale
Chiew-Siah Tei, Little Hut of Leaping Fishes
Shreekumar Varma, Maria's Room
Anuradha Vijayakrishnan, Seeing The Girl
Sujatha Vijayaraghavan, Pichaikuppan
Xu Xi, Habit of a Foreign Sky
Egoyan Zheng, Fleeting Light

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.

This first line in English more famously known as: As Gregor Samsa awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin (Translated by Donna Freed).

Translators and scholars came up with number of different variations of this first line. This implies the complexity of translating such work. An equal complex task would be to take this work and "rewrite", "reinvent" it. Lance Olsen accomplishes this in his ambitious new novel Anxious Pleasures: A novel after Kafka.

Years ago when I first read The Metamorphosis, I didn't had an epiphany like Marquez. Instead, I was appalled by the reaction of the Samsas. Even the sister, Grete, who is the only one that took care of him, felt selfish and cruel. So it was interesting to read her emotions in Olsen's work where he takes Kafka's writings and rediscovers it using the "others" -- Grete and her suitor, his parents, the chief clerk, the servant girl, the cook, the chambermaid, a cashier, the neighbor downstairs, three lodgers and Margaret, who is reading The Metamorphosis for the first time.

Paying close attention to Kafkaesque style Olsen brings his own distinctive narrative prose and finds a balance between retelling and reinventing. For me the most satisfying aspect was the genuineness of the story. It didn't feel like Kafka but yet it was close enough to induce similar emotions. Grete dominates this story. We get to know her in other context beside the Accident, with her suitor, Herrmann:

I listen to the rhythm of our heels clicking below us, the distant clock cawing the hour, the tenor of his bassoon voice. Shutting my eyes, I slant into the presence of his arm, the pinprick flakes of cold tapping my face and vanishing, and begin to imagine myself suspended in the center of the gigantic piece of marzipan. It is white and soft and grainy with almond paste and sugar. Behind the immediate scents lingers an understated vanilla that makes me forget all the French verbs I have been trying to learn.

We see another Grete, through the eyes of the servant girl when she sees sister and mater are moving all the furniture from Gregor's room.

-- Gregor doesn't need all the furniture in there, Grete is saying. It just takes up room. He doesn't even use most of it. I'm thinking perhaps we could make a little extra something selling of a few pieces. The chest of drawers. The writing desk. It would help with our payments. Lend me a hand? We could have them on the landing and fetch the furniture salesman round by the time Papa gets home.
...
Slowly the chest of drawers emerges through the door. Grete is pushing. Behind her, the missus supervises. She looks pasty and uncomfortable. Grete halts, examining the fruits of her labor. She goes back to into Gregor's room to tackle the writing desk.

Olsen organizes these voices in small chapters without delineating too much. Once in a while he experiments with forms and punctuations but limits it so it does not get flashy or pretentious. He borrowed ideas and theme from other works, as mentioned in the Acknowledgment at the end. His academic background and literary knowledge shine through the pages. The title probably comes from some aesthetic, psychoanalytic aspect of literary studies but again he finds the balance and does not make this work too pedantic and experimental.

A really enjoyable and inspiring work, highly recommended. I also recommend his fiction writing guide Rebel Yell.

Don Delillo's new book Falling Man is about the aftermath of 9/11, however, in a way it is not. It starts with: "It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night." A timely novel, but Delillo is more interested in the psyche than the time, space and events that followed after the planes -- "The second plane, by the time the second plane appears," he said, "we're all a little older and wiser."

Delillo follows Keith Neudecker after he escapes the smoke and ash of the collapsing World Trate Center and goes to the apartment of his ex-wife, Lianne who is confused by his return, doesn't fully understand it. While describing all the confusion, we find more twists. Florence who loses her briefcase while fleeing one of the towers finds it back through Keith and they have a brief affair. And then there is Hammad, one of the hijackers on the planes. At one point, frequent mention of beards, Islam and Koran was becoming rather boring, but I can forgive Delillo after reading the powerful last two chapters, just marvelous, nicely paced. I didn't care much for the dialogs, in fact, I don't think he is good at writing dialogs. But other than that, it was a delightful read, really enjoyed his writing style:

Pictures snapped anonymously, images rendered by machine. There was something in the premeditation of these photographs, the bureaucratic intent, the straightforward poses that brought her paradoxically into the lives of the subjects. Maybe what she saw was human ordeal set against the rigor of the state. She saw people fleeing, there to here, with darkest hardship pressing the edges of the frame. Thumbprints, emblems with tilted crosses, man with handlebar mustache, girl in braids. She thought she was probably inventing a context. She didn't know anything about the people in the photographs. She only knew the photographs. This is where she found innocence and vulnerability, in the nature of old passports, in the deep texture of the past itself, people on long journeys, people now dead. Such beauty is faded lives, she thought, in images, words, languages, signatures, stamped advisories (page 142).

The unnamed narrator of the book is a shoe tester -- a man employed by a shoe company to try their new product. He walks around the streets of Frankfurt and submits a review to the manufacturer for two hundred Marks (soon we find out that the pay is decreased to 50 Marks). Even though this seems to be an unique profession, but the brilliance of the novel is not in the feet, but in the mind of the shoe tester who is having an existential crisis. As he walks around, he gets to ramble and reflect on life, he runs into old girl friends, he manages to have a fling with a hairdresser. After the pay cut, he survives by selling the shoes at a flea market. The stream of thought comes with witty, humorous account. For instance, when the shoe tester notices a woman drop a piece of gum from her backpack:

The woman is engrossed by a jeweler's window display, she didn't notice her loss. Shall I go to her and tell her: You've dropped a stick of gum? Maybe it would be enough to say: I think something fell out of your backpack. Or simply: You dropped something. To clarify things (and because I don't like saying the words chewing gum), I could point my index finger at the object on the ground. Except for the fact that pointing my index finger would (does) embarrass me. It's awful.

Or while selling shoes at the flea market, we find a more philosophical shoe seller:

I keep asking myself which feeling is stronger: futility or pointlessness. It's a question
I can't answer. So I quickly skip to the next question: which will come for me first, insanity or death? The mere mention of the word death intimidates me, and I drop that question right away. But what else should I think about? I sense that my attempt to be a dealer in luxury shoes may be my last chance to find a so-called normal life. I observe the people passing by and tell myself that I'm like they are. I list what I have in common with them. That goes pretty well, for a while. But then I realize that I can make whatever list I want and the details won't all add up.

What I loved about the novel, specially the first part, is the ramblings as he watches the streets. Full of witty commentary, he walks around but he does nothing. His inaction comes through with a nice a sophistication,. However, for me, the novel looses its brilliance at the end when he finds out what to do. At a cocktail party, the shoe tester jokingly mentions about an imaginary Institute for the Art of Memory and Experience, envisioning a radical new treatment that will help people rediscover experiences beyond TV, vacations, highways and supermarkets. It is good, we get to see another side of the narrator, but I would have preferred more rumination.

Wilhelm Genazino is an award winning writer. This is a nice short book, with no plot. The writer, without going into too much details, accomplishes a lot, like his narrator, by doing nothing, just rambling and walking.

I don't exactly recall how I first discovered Roberto Bolaño, deceased Chilean poet and novelist, the Kurt Cobain of the literary world. Maybe I sought him or perhaps it was some random blog post that I landed on. Either way, few months ago I read his short story collection Last Evenings On Earth. I wasn't blown away or anything but his unique style definitely struck a chord. So I picked up By Night In Chile, probably his best work. This is how is starts:

"I am dying now, but I still have many things to say. I used to be at peace with myself. Quiet and at peace. But it all blew up unexpectedly. That wizened youth is to blame. I was at peace. I am no longer at peace. There are a couple of points that have to be cleared up. So, propped up on one elbow, I will lift my noble, trembling head, and rummage through my memories to turn up the deeds that shall vindicate me and belie the slanderous rumours the wizened youth spread in a single storm-lit night to sully my name. Or so he intended. One has to be responsible, as I have always said. One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one's actions, and that includes one's words and silences, yes, one's silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one's silences. I am responsible in every way. My silences are immaculate. Let me make that clear. Clear to God above all. The rest I can forego. But not God. I don't know how I got on to this. Sometimes I find myself propped up on one elbow, rambling on and dreaming and trying to make peace with myself."

I like his "self-aware" characters, the narratives that brings a certain "psychoanalytic" mood. By Night in Chile is narrated by one such character, Father Urrutia, a dying priest and literary critic. Urrutia is also a member of Opus Dei and supporter of the Pinochet regime. The book is not about religion or priesthood, even though if one seeks one can trace a religious undertone, it is at the end about Chilean politics and literature. During his deathbed confession Father Urrutia never talks about the clergy. He is more interested in Pablo Neruda than God. The priest raves on pages after pages -- talking about Allende's Chile, Pinochet's Chile:

Bolaño's By Night in Chile is not only a devastating attack on the spinelessness of the certain literati in face of capitalist brutality, it is also a literary achievement that breaks new ground in a Latin American fiction that has lately shown a tendency toward magical realist formulae or slavish imitation of European postmodernism(Swans, Louis Proyect).

If you are like me: up all night reading, you just want to finish the chapter or reach the end of the paragraph before going to bed -- well, this book is going to be tough. Because the priest just rambles on, in one big paragraph that goes on for 130 pages, full of long run on sentences. So rather than finding the end of the chapter, I waited for a period after a long flowing sentence before I went to bed.

There are Jews and there are Yids.

This is probably the funniest book I have read so far this year, but it struggles a bit in the middle. Other than that it was a riot.

Gary Shteyngart who has been compared to Nabokov brings us a modern day Oblomov in his latest book Absurdistan. Misha Vainberg, son of Russia's 1,238th richest man is a Bronx's brown beauty loving, 325-pound Russian bear. He is not wholly Russian. He's a Jew and majored in "Multicultural Studies" at the Midwestern Accidental College. In his college days, besides busting his nutz with Rouenna Sales, his Bronx girlie girl, he also becomes a aficionado of rap music and a client of a Lacanian psychoanalyst.

The book was still funny, when Mishka had to move back to St. Petersburg. INS won't let him in the States, even though he wrote a love letter to them. His beloved papa, Boris Vainberg, killed a man in Oklahoma, that resembles Roger Daltry. All Misha wants now is to go back to Rouenna. He is fat, he is rich. He has a manservant, he can get anything he lusts after -- food, women. But due to his father's misdeed, the elusive American visa is out his big hands.

To fix this and get rid of his Russian passport, he ends up in a country near Caspian sea, Absurdsvanï, or Absurdistan. Here a crooked counselor officer will sell him a Belgian passport. The republic of Absurdsvanï is modern day ethnic nightmare, much like Bosnia, maybe like Iraq. Infused with ethnic tensions between the indistinguishable Svani and Sevo, the nation, and our hero Misha, find themselves in the middle of a civil war. Finally, American troops, in search of Caspian oil, in the disguise of Kellogg, Brown and Root (KRB is a subsidiary of Halliburton. "Golly Burton" is how the natives pronounce it.) arrive in Absurdistan.

The satire was brilliantly funny. Shteyngart has enough political insight to bring all the complexity of war and ethnic strife in to the picture. But his ethnic jokes gets little old after few chapters. The obese hero's day to day struggle gets boring. In short, the middle part, I had to skim through. But I really enjoyed the way he picked on the identity politics. Here's an excerpt from New York Times review that said this better:

It's self-consciousness that defines our species, though, and Shteyngart is hilariously aware that the selves we invent in order to be conscious of them can be based on almost any difference. Ours is the species that insists it's not one. How else could we justify warring for common resources? Absurdsvanï, for example, is divided between two ancient Christian traditions. The schismatic distinction is the tiny line that the sects draw through the bottoms of their crosses. One party's line slants up from left to right, the other's is angled in reverse. Sometimes the Absurdis laugh off the split, sometimes they fight about it. Almost always, though, some ambitious profiteer or maniac is plotting new ways to use it to his advantage.

Overall, a nice read, I recommend it, despite few shortcomings.

Another stunning novel, beautifully done. It was a roller coaster ride. Certain point in the book, I was mildly disappointed. The main character of the The Double (2003), Afonso, was becoming more or else like Senhor José of the All the Names(1997) with his obsession and thinking pattern. But Saramago is far from disappointment as he takes the story into unexpected places and lands it with dexterity and poise.

The premise of the book is nothing new, slightly similar to Dostoevsky's Double but the originality is in the mastery of the storytelling. A history teacher while watching a video stumbles upon a supporting actor who proves to be identical to him in every way. We never find out the reason of this mistake of nature, but we witness the consequences. The gloomy, divorced teacher always liked his solitary life. But the sudden appearance of his double changes everything: "One of us is a mistake"..."never before in the history of humanity have two identical people existed in the same place and time". He finds himself wondering what it would be like to find and meet this double and eventually he does.

Saramago takes the obsession of the teacher to it's ultimate height. We also meet the double, the struggling supporting actor, as obsessed as Afonso. We also meet their respective women, as perplexed as the reader. There is violence, romance, unexpected twist, even death! The intrusive narrator along the way reminds the reader about the absurdity and irony of life and yet how we remain logical about it -- our human existence:

The human soul is a box out of which a clown is always ready to spring, making faces and striking out his tongue, but there are times when that same clown merely peers at us over the edege of the box, and if he sees that, by chance, we are behaving in a just and honest fashion, he merely nods approvingly and disappears, thinking that we are not yet entirely a lost cause.

Another Saramago off my list.

Every time I finish a book by José Saramago, a certain emotive emptiness captures me. Pardon my word choices, but after I finish reading, I have to sit for few minutes to clear my thoughts. This time I had to go out and get a frozen yogurt.

It has been a while that I read something by him, so I picked up All The Names (Todos os nomes). Saramago uncanny lyrical style is just unbelievable. He can take the most inane, mundane situation and make it exciting, lovable or even hateful. All The Names involves such an uninteresting yet perplexing setting. The main character is Senhor José, a low-level clerk in the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths. In his past time, he collects news clippings of famous people. One day he realizes that having their birth certificates would complete the files, as he lives adjacent to the registry, he has easy access to it. One night while collecting cards of the famous people he stumbles across the records of an ordinary, unknown woman. He becomes obsessed with this woman and devotes his whole life finding her.

There are people like you everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps they can not bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary; everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.

Saramago's detached narrative style is at its best here. He makes simple quibbles into a metaphysical diatribe. This is Mr. José's conversation with his ceiling, as the ceiling claims that he is in love with that unknown woman

....These are imaginings of a ceiling, They're your imaginings, a man's imaginings, not mine. You're so arrogant, you think you know everything about me, I don't know everything, but I must have learned a thing or two after all these years of living together, I bet you've never considered that you and I live together, the great difference between us is that you only notice me when you need advice and cast your eyes upwards, while I spend all my time looking at you, The Eye of God, You can take my metaphor seriously if you like, don't repeat them as if they were yours. After this, the ceiling decided to remain silent, it had realised that Senhor José's thoughts were already turned to the visit he was going to make to the unknown woman's parent, the last step before bumping his nose against the wall, an equally metaphorical expression which means, You've reached the end.

(He despises period; He uses no quotation marks to separate dialog.)

Another great translation by Margaret Jull Costa. Some day, I will learn Portuguese to read the original. Some day.....