And

who be the Samuel Johnson?

Wishlist

The First Edition

Bibiliothèque

booked here.

Stain on the Snow

Absolutely brilliant; Simenon is a combination of Dostoevsky, Herzog with shades of Joyce. It makes you feel so good to pause reading a book in between and mull over the psyche of the character. Hadnt happened for a while. Now I gotto finish up all his eighty four novels. Allotted time twenty four months, so lad organise, organise.



PS- If things go well, in India for a week or so in June.

Ricochets 2.0

Been awfully busy the whole week, which made me lust after the Sunday. Not only the day but also its concept. Spent the whole day staying in, lazing around and catching up on some reading. The glorious summer day that it was, refreshed my memories of being totally devoted to sloth and anomie during my youth.

Speaking of reading, have finished the Quirke series by Benjamin Black aka John Banville. Quite alright. Lately I am noticing a lot of reviewers make a mountain of a molehill of a book review. Being the Muhammad that I am, allow me to break the mountains into molehills.

Christine Falls is a wonderful piece of work in noir-crime. Very few books written on this side of the cold war have been as masterly both in its narration and its plot as this one. I particularly liked the protagonist Quirke - a desolate, brooding, alcoholic, a hapless intense widower who simply can't help not pursuing trouble. Though the plot lacks in any great surprise or suspense it makes up in the complex layers of its characters - each of them. They all seem so unbearably, painfully realistic for a crime novel. In the case of Quirke, starting from very trivial - like no one knowing his second name to the very central - his extremely complex way of relating to others esp. with his layered family, it is all quite rare in popular literature. There is no sense of grand heroism or an undercurrent of righteousness; It just is the story of a few dysfunctional people living around a crime.

The follow-up The Silver Swan is comme ci comme ca. I found it less delicate and more linear than Christine Falls, as if Banville had penned it down forcefully under a spell of obligation. Somehow it felt terribly incomplete. I paid £16.99 for the book and thought wasn't definitely worth a penny more than £ 3.99. [ L and K, If you folks are in no hurry to get to it, I can lend it to you ]

The only new thing I learnt from the story was that the household refrigeration was in use in 1950s when I earlier believed it was introduced only in the 60s.

However, regardless of all that I suggest you read both the books:

1. If you are a fan of beautifully constructed English sentence ( though it is too sophisticated for a crime novel)
2. If you love Dear Dirty Dublin. (In which both the books are set)


Prompted by Banville, who reportedly was inspired to become Benjamin Black by reading Georges Simenon I took up Stain on the Snow which I am presently enjoying reading. Stripped off all the unnecessary decorations of pretentious language, typical of a shallow writing mind the narration makes me feel quite at home. I gather Simenon was a kick-writer who churned out a novel in an average time of ten days. That's amazing. Also I went through his biography , which makes me envy him. His experience and insight of life is first hand, as evident in that interview in Paris Review.

The other current read is the hilarious riot by John O' Farrell - An Utterly Impartial History of Britain or 2000 years of Upper Class Idiots In Charge. The title is self- explanatory. It is quite an entertaining read.

Here are few picks from the book in the timeline of Great Moments in British History:

60 AD Boudicaa burns down Colchester, St Albans, London. Roman Governor regrets asking her if it's her 'funny week'.
1191 AD Richard I joins Third crusade, convinced Saladin has weapons of mass destruction
1944 AD D-Day Only time in history the Brits get to the beach before the Germans.

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This is rather embarrassing. Had wished mom on Mother's day a couple of months back when she thanked me and called me a couple of days later and gently told me it was only Women's day and NOT Mother's day and it was the thought that mattered. Blimey! That's four ands in a sentence.
At that time I made a point to look up the Mother's day and put it on the reminder list but to add to further shame had called a day later than the actual Mother's day. Well what can I say, some days are just not your days. Mother's days especially.Interesting content of the further conversation with Mom was the acceptable difference of age between the groom and the bride. She kept on insisting that anything lesser than five years was appropriate whilst I said the rule of the thumb was to half the man's age and add seven. Concluded in amicable disagreement. Not that either of us believe in what we argued for.

+++

Ah yes, more on the Apprentice: readers might remember sometime time back I had written about benevolent geeks. Here is another wonderful example. A feller named wahwah has most graciously uploaded all the episodes of the first two seasons of the UK Apprentice, along with the ongoing season four on YouTube. Further He has also promised to upload season three. God Bless his soul. Acts like these reaffirms your faith in humanity. The moral of the story is that there are many ways to reach both heaven and the handsome target of seventy two virgins without the need to blow yourself to pieces.

Anyway, virgin-suicides apart (quite a shit movie that was), check out all the videos at leisure. Yes I Know, it is a reality show, but it reflects a fair deal of ethos and rationale of UK Business structure. Also gives you a flavour of variety of personalities in the world. Which I think is lot more useful than many other things, say, for instance watching Indiana Jones and the arcane tribe of golden testes or whatever the recent one is called.

Speaking of business and infrastructure, it's gladdening to see that cricket has been finally given the much deserved league shape and form. I haven't been able to watch any match yet, and unfortunately not likely to catch any this season but I reckon it is going to be a huge success, especially in the next couple of years when there would be, hopefully more international players representing the teams a la football. Already the competition is being well covered in the media in different parts of the world. Also, if backed with a sound strategy by the dormant ICC this version might help to push the game to the heart of America and who knows may be even China? so that in around ten years time we can satisfy ourselves on a Sunday evening by watching the Chinese Cricket Team comprehensively smash a motley team of vegetarian, overweight, so called spinners, asians.

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Shameless feral woman, aka greenmamba aka atonement butter naaan.

This year's Cannes shall go down for offering one of the most cringing moments in history. If you haven't known yet, day before this anonymous feral woman who looked like having jumped out of a Russian circus in an ancient Tarkovsky movie,
was noticed to be walking around confusedly by the Cannes red carpet. It is yet to be confirmed if she was actually begging. But seriously. Just because you once upon a time acted in a movie called Munni or Guddi or whatever the right nickname was, it doesn't mean you actually ought to turn up dressed like THAT. Did no one- her husband, son, daughter in law tell her before she left the hotel? All the bleeding four of those waste-of-oxygen Bacchans should be banned from Cannes for the rest of their lives. Such a absolute disgrace.

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Photography is a domain which I am yet to make peace with as an art form. I have shared some thoughts on this before. Thinking further, the main drawback with Photography I suppose is the lack of active and dynamic role of the imagination in the creative process. Often it is overridden by aesthetics of the subject or the technical aspect of the camera or at times a complex interaction between the two. Because of these reasons the degree of control of imagination is rendered minimal - reducing the process to no more than a skill. People might disagree about this but those who do often lack a reasonable explanation why it can be regarded as art.


Schels' sample

That regardless, I still find the whole idea and the process of photography quite an interesting exercise. All said, the minimum amount of imagination accessible in the procedure can be used to expand the possibilities beyond the technical and the aesthetic significance. Two wonderful examples of such an endeavour that I have come across are Walter Schels and Cindy Sherman bus riders. Schels explores the meaning of death through the eyes of time and Sherman examines individual identity in society. The former is a series of photographs of faces of terminally ill patients before and after their death while latter is a series of photographs of people posing in postures whilst they are travelling in a bus.

Sherman's Bus riders

Watched Days of Heaven after I have come to acquaint myself with the works of Edward hopper. Mallick meditates on the Americana so tantalisingly captured in hopper’s paintings. See below one of Hopperian painting House by a Rail Road and the Mugshot of Days of heaven.

This reminds me of this Edward Hirsh poem

House by the Railroad

Out here in the exact middle of the day,
This strange, gawky house has the expression
Of someone being stared at, someone holding
His breath underwater, hushed and expectant;

This house is ashamed of itself, ashamed
Of its fantastic mansard rooftop
And its pseudo-Gothic porch, ashamed
of its shoulders and large, awkward hands.

But the man behind the easel is relentless.
He is as brutal as sunlight, and believes
The house must have done something horrible
To the people who once lived here

Because now it is so desperately empty,
It must have done something to the sky
Because the sky, too, is utterly vacant
And devoid of meaning. There are no

Trees or shrubs anywhere--the house
Must have done something against the earth.
All that is present is a single pair of tracks
Straightening into the distance. No trains pass.

Now the stranger returns to this place daily
Until the house begins to suspect
That the man, too, is desolate, desolate
And even ashamed. Soon the house starts

To stare frankly at the man. And somehow
The empty white canvas slowly takes on
The expression of someone who is unnerved,
Someone holding his breath underwater.

And then one day the man simply disappears.
He is a last afternoon shadow moving
Across the tracks, making its way
Through the vast, darkening fields.

This man will paint other abandoned mansions,
And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly lettered
Storefronts on the edges of small towns.
Always they will have this same expression,

The utterly naked look of someone
Being stared at, someone American and gawky.
Someone who is about to be left alone
Again, and can no longer stand it.


~Edward Hirsh

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Have to go now, anyway, bear in mind these useful things:

Culture is no substitute for sex though people wish to tell you so.

And

If you want to shoot, shoot the message. Don't laugh. But make sure you fuck the messenger. Always.

Haunting Book Covers

Some book covers haunt you like anything. A few months back when Finny put up Lempicka’s The Telephone, I was left with that so very familiar feeling of I’ve seen it somewhere before. I even subconsciously associated the soft cubist painting style with The Great Gatsby. I was almost sure I had seen it on the cover of one its editions. But even after a quick 10 minute search-affair with google going through various covers of the Gatsby book I wasn’t much lucky. I eventually gave up. But almost unexpectedly today I came across the original painting that was haunting me. Google kindly pointed out that the mentally elusive Young Girl in Green was indeed the cover of The Great Gatsby of the Oxford world Classics Edition. Green after all. So there. Sorted.

But my favourite Gatsby cover is the Divers (below) , photographed by George Hoyningen-Huene for the Swimwear by Izod of London ( 1930). I think it captures both complex relationship with Jay and Daisy from a quite hypontic distance.

May be the covers of Ulysses sometime?

On Sir Vidia, some thoughts

Usually I manage to resist reading a review before I read any book. But when it is reviewed as the main article at the London Review of Books, it becomes incredibly hard to ignore. And impossible, either due to the reaction to it or because of my admiration for the writer, if it is a Naipaul book. So, through such travails of reading the book after having read about it, and, amidst reverberating echoes of such canon-shots booming between the pages, I finished Naipaul's latest book Writer’s people -Ways of looking and Feeling, last week.






It deals with one of the expansive and original subjects one can read about in the post-modern world. Naipaul typically, with no allegiance to anyone and no belongingness anywhere writes about writing and the writers - whom he had read or come across in his lifetime; and how, with their ways of looking and seeing, they helped to shape his own way of seeing.

Admittedly, the book is quite airily written and lacks the eye for detail that one usually associates with Naipaul. Given the vastness of the domain chosen for the book, it is at best a selective summary. It is fragmented, flaky and even in the best of its pieces surprisingly incomplete. Also, I must add, for anyone who has keenly followed Naipaul’s works, it would not be a subject entirely unfamiliar. At least I wasn't when I read the book.

Though there are liberal transplants of sentiments from his earlier books ( we all know about the influence of Huxley’s Jesting Pilate and Vidia's positive takes on Gandhi and RK Narayan), still The Writer's People doesn’t fail to give you a clearer understanding of his perspective. Yet, somewhere while translating the cynicism into criticism, in a passage here and there, one finds his shameless malice unmasking itself . Many pages on Anthony Powell have little relevance and are presumably prompted by his personal differences that existed between them. ( Naipaul briefly alludes to how Powell stopped seeing him before his death even while he continued to see others). The chapter was, as Naipaul claims himself at the very beginning - difficult to write - making the reader who has read it wonder, what exactly was the need to go through such hardship? More so, at a premise when it is least pertinent? Difficulty or malice, whatever it is, the sentiment has been given the treatment it deserves by many a critics. However, that shouldn’t make us overlook other segments of the book: there are wonderful observations and assertive judgements on others which, as hard as they are to digest, cannot be reasonably refuted: The takes on Vinoba Bhave and Flaubert for instance. I haven’t read any Salvon so I cant make a valid personal judgement. And the well-known Walcott-Naipaul bitching duel that's been running on for a while also finds it's share in the book. Pity really.


In all, personally the book was a welcome, coming during the hackneys and baloneys I have been letting myself read over the last few months. From a larger view, it wasn't an incredibly outstanding book but neither was it a dull put-aside. Which other writer would research to tell you that an Indian Bullock-cart did 24 miles a day in 1890s? And going back to the reviews, after having read the book was - sort of irony of relevance – because the book is all about ways of looking.


It’s always amazing to see how reviews on Naipaul often aid to propagate their own perception of him; the most commonest transference that goes into his reviews are that he is an arrogant, provocative prude who defines himself by criticism. But readers, who are able not to let themselves carried away by their own prejudices and loyalties often, if not eventually, bring themselves to admire his work - fiction and otherwise. But, for almost repeating his own old material and the apparent offence he has wrapped it in, I am not sure if that would happen with this book.


That regardless, a larger audience, as often as it is seen, continue to draw a great consolation by running a Naipaul work down the drain of their perspective ignorance. Here is one such insalubrious effort related to the book in question.


Half-way through the review, I had to go back to check who was able to write with so much self pity. Must admit though, if I was asked a year back about Dalrymple I could have convinced you that it’s a rare Belgian dish. It was only during my last visit to India I found he was a Scot writing about Delhi's history while living in Delhi! ( God save him). The only bit I have read of anything by Mr Dalrymple is a small essay while glancing through one of his book in a library; it was about the protests against the Miss-World competition that was to be held in Bangalore sometime last decade.

It was a typical western-modern eye looking down confusedly - about the Indian fundamentalists threatened by the erosion of their value, culture etc. To cut the long trauma short, nothing was placed in perspective-- Whys were blatantly ignored for the Hows and the Whats? The running sentiment was of sympathy and hopelessness for people who were opposing a beauty pageant; There was no effort made to really understand the underbelly of the emotions involved, no history was palpable; as if it was all read in readily available books: Kali, Kamasutra, Khajuraho? The impression was as much shallow as the oremise it was made from. After reading that piece, naturally, even the strongest recommendation of his work went into my fourth waiting list. The unread City of Djinns, sitting somewhere in my attic, must be as old and as sarsenic brown as a Delhi Minaret. May be someday when they cleanup Delhi, perhaps?


It is a similar sentiment he entertains here in the review: For the first five paragraphs in his review Mr Darlymple takes upon himself to introduce to the Sunday Times reader, Mr Naipaul, a Nobel laureate. The biased account of a perceived deterioration is so well articulated it conveniently ignores his Booker in 1971 and The Nobel in 2001. Perhaps the only thing the summary lacks is his obituary. Further, in the latter part Mr.Dalrymple contests equally in malice with Naipaul and completes the travesty of the review by making a grocery list of all the negative adjectives in the book. Not surprisingly there is no perspective, not even judgement of why Naipaul is or may be wrong. The defense is based on the irrefutable reputations of the people, Naipaul seemed to have challenged in the book. It might as well have been called a gospel and the writers apostles. The Naipaul dynamic, that so often has become to define his work and the response to it is thus complete. It is no wonder Mr Dalrymple writes about courtesans and Moghul jewellery - things that cant even beseech a judgement by a post-modern reader.


In areas where he reluctantly does offer some judgement ie Gandhi, he comes across as in grave need of reason. Kathryn Tidricks’s Biography of Gandhi is available on Google; anyone can make out it is far from the bounds of brilliance forget relevance, in fact is a curriculum vitae of Gandhi a la carte. What Mr Darymple terms as dull and superficial of Naipaul's judgement of Gandhi is perhaps one of Naipaul’s brilliant insights in retrospect ( not for the first time though) of Gandhi’s battle with reverse-culture-shock, a phenomenon now not unfamiliar to the Indian Diaspora and undoubtedly beyond the realms of Mr Dalrymple’s imagination.

Naipaul’s statement on the lack of autonomous intelligentsia in India is a fact; any average Indian blog has it written all over its template. Mr Dalrymple’s Indian universities - buzzing with the same vibrancy of commerce - is either at its best a rush to be recruited for a plum post in the farthest MNC or at its worst, the bass of some local wannabe ( invariably somehow they would never be) rock-band covering the ancient 80s Guns and Roses number. If that is autonomous, India might as well claim Rudyard Kipling as her literary masthead.

As I have said, its often hilarious to see why people who don’t know a penny about what Naipaul writes about, have an urge to put him down. This isn’t first time people have found it hard to figure him. A chunk of the criticisms railed against him is a confused literary babbling of a response obligated to say something mean, often about him rather than something valid against his work.

Part of the confusion I have always supposed, arises from people’s lack of understanding his place. Whenever I think of his position I am reminded of Archimedes saying that if given him an appropriate place to stand out and a suitable lever, he would move the earth. Naipaul, not belonging anywhere and no influences from his background, holds that enviable position which makes it possible for him to see the cultures and civilizations as crystal as sunrise : what he himself described as..' looking through multiplicity of impressions to central human narrative'.

His Area of Darkness is a mirror representation, a testimonial of the so called socialist state that was India. His judgement on half-formed African societies are as true today as much as they were when it was said. And it took twenty years for the world to understand what Naipaul had written - on his own, without any influence or motive - about Islam, what Edward Said had dismissed as 'Intellectual catastrophe' and what Mr Darlymple still calls in his review: persistent negative assessment of Islam is turning out to be a prophecy of sorts. But thankfully, it took less than a month after 9/11 for the Nobel committee to endorse Naipaul's views. This ability to see things - as they are, were and going to be - was more loftily put by the Nobel committee as : having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.

I remember in his Nobel acceptance speech Naipaul had said - He is the sum of his books. I dont think many of us can actually comprehend the meaning of the phrase. It is an accurate self-judgment, a rubric which in my opinion can only be accorded to two other writers of the twentieth century: Joyce and Kafka. This unique position is also reflected in Naipaul’s unwillingness to have any children as they would come between him and his work. For what is incomprehensible for many a writers or critics, that is just a symbol of how unique his position is and the possible layers it conceals.

I always believe, a reviewer who is reflecting on a writer; who cant stand in where the writer has stood should take special care to separate the works from the person. Unfortunately in Naipaul’s case, either by his own doing or as a package of consequence beyond him, people carry around his negative image wanting to fit him into it somehow. As said before, there is almost a palpable negative precept and a compulsion to offer an opinion on him, rather than his writing.

Here is one, dare I say Indian version that I found while scouring the Indian blogosphere. Admittedly the chap hasn’t read Naipaul recently, and in the event mentioned in the post, found him uninteresting and thought he looked liked a constipated Walrus. Further, much to his disappointment, he found Naipaul deaf (wow) and ERGO Naipaul is everything that he was told about. Well, there goes your autonomous intelligence. If you are not nice enough to me, you are bad or wrong. Or boring! You simply must be. The absurdity, is unbearable even for any humour. The only acknowledged interesting writer of the last fifty years, (apart from the oulipo) being dismissed as uninteresting. If people want to read beautiful, tender sentiments why dont they just go and read Neruda? It reminds me of what Naipaul had written about long back - The absurdity of India can be total, it appears to ridicule analysis. It takes the onlooker from anger beyond despair to neutrality.

Perhaps it was this neutrality that made him ask to repeat the question again. It’s not all that hard to imagine - someone getting up and asking in his or her best haryanvinglish in one go, “Sirrrviddiyyaa, whatdoyouthink of the Hindunaaationalist move-menntt?” (Just like on Ibnlive)

Of course, you are bound not to hear and not understand the question. It's just courteous to ask to repeat again. I couldn’t tell in the Delhi airport if the PAS was in English or Welsh or Urdu. Thankfully, Naipaul is deaf only in Delhi; when he was elsewhere he was just as fine as a fiddler - as Finny told me once when Naipaul was asked by another nincompoop - What do you think of Indian Roads? He had answered " Well, You deserve it." I bet it cant get any more interesting than that.

If you look at it in toto, it is a very interesting dynamic: Given his incorrigible inclination, Naipaul can see only cultures and societies as accurate as numbers. These in turn, just like the reviewers above, would just go on to validate what he had said. The thing speaks for itself, as it has been for the last fifty years. Well, what can one say? While Naipaul would want us to believe that he is the kind of writer that people think other people are reading, the world, with all its blemishes and glories, is what it is. Men who are nothing, men who allow themselves to become nothing have no place in it. Men who want to tell other people what other people are not reading and still want to find a place in the world for that.

Banville meri John

I would like to live forever . I find the prospect of leaving this exquisite world, I find it devastating. I find it infuriating.

I keep thinking what kind of day would I like to die on? Would it be as beautiful, would it be one of those beautiful pearl grey , slightly mauve days in June? Would it be one of those days in September, one of those puissant skies? Would it be depths of winter, you know, those bleak mid-winter days?

None of them suits me. I don’t want to go on any day. I want to stay forever.

Who else thinks that's almost like Doestovesky's words spoken by Brando in The Last Tango in Paris ?

888

Anyone up for this?

PS - Thanks J.

Why Banville is Word God?

A few days back in an online group, a debate was opened about the personal significance of John Banville's writing. Here is a Fellow-Banville-Lover writing why he is important to her: He articulates a feeling that you thought couldnt be articulated. The following is an extract from The Newton Letter, why I agree with her- fond memory of a feeling, when I was young and discovering United Kingdom jaunting all across on trains. He captures the very pulse of the moment, and it is why I have to return to Banville again and again.

I WAS BORN DOWN THERE, in the south, you knew that. The memories I have of the place are of departures from it.I am thinking of Christmas trips to Dublin when I was a child, boarding the train in the dark and watching through the mist of my breath on the window the frost-bound landscape assembling as the dawn came up. At a certain spot every time, I can see it still, day would at last achieve itself. The place was a river bend, where the train slowed down to cross a red metal bridge. Beyond the river a flat field ran to the edge of a wooded hill, and at foot of the hill there was a house, not very big, solitary and square, with a steep roof. I would gaze at that silent house and wonder, in a hunger of curiosity, what lives were lived there. Who stacked that firewood, hung that holly wreath, left those tracks in the hoarfrost on the hill? I can't express the odd aching pleasure of that moment. I knew, of course, that those hidden lives wouldn’t be much different from my own. But that was the point. It wasn't the exotic I was after, but the ordinary, that strangest and most elusive of enigmas.

Omega Minor

R, Eventually managed to get the hot copy; expect yours soon.

Starters...

Moolaadé

Moments of Reprieve

In search of...

~ All for 24 quid.

The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado .... and The Dead

The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two has been released today; had reserved it and expecting it soon. Having been a member of wordsmith I can say for sure that a story a day from the book would make the day more interesting. Evening teas would be tastier than ever.

Speaking of books, it is very annoying to see every Tom Dick and Harry who is a chef or telly presenter or beautician or wrestler or one of those who had carved a career out of their cleavage taking up space and time for their book-signing sessions at the book stores. I had to put up with all the drama in many a bookshops across many a cities lately. In fact countries. The pain entails putting up with hordes of pop-ulations who cant maintain any decorum and generally make a Leicester square at the ground floor. Moreover they drift off here and there with their cameras cramping up space, getting in way of the regulars demanding to be trampled. It would be immense relief to all the parties if a bus is parked in one of the adjacent side alleys with the writer or their ghost-writer inside ready with a pen and make all the admirers walk into the bus with their book copies and cameras. As a bonus they would all get a cctv footage with the author. It would be still more wonderful if the bus drives away with all of them and their idol aboard. They can claim for rest of their lives that they had been on a bus with so and so . Eejits.
If not for the pleasure of slowly wading through racks and racks of books, Amazon would have done the job.


Amongst other things, this article made me recollect my thoughts on the short story. With all my conviction I believe that short story is the real tangible unit of writing as against a novel where the content might easily overrule the craft of writing. Also, a novel as an art form is less restrictive and has more room for one ’s self expression thereby limiting the art per se. By this I mean, with some direction and commitment, one can search a material in one’s experience and convert it into decent novel. A short story on the other hand is more demanding on the imagination as well on the technicalities of writing.

Coming to the list , I haven’t read three in there, but I see it’s a decent list. Still there are gross overlookings- No Borges, No Dahl, No Calvino No Nabokov et al
But to be fair it’s a personal list -- but It would have felt better if The Dead had moved up to the top. Nose is a brilliant satire but like any satire, is limited in its depth. Just like a good animation. But The Dead is multi layered and deeply universal. It is my personal favourite; the ending is agreeably the most tender that literature has known. I remember reading it for the first time in a public library when I was young - a dogeared Dubliners in a bit of a state; no cover and no healthy spine.
I still recall the feeling; it is very hard to put into words. I didn’t know the author and the book at that time and moreover was devouring relentlessly everything so gradually I forgot about it. But the second time , a few years later , as I started reading it I instantly knew I had read it. It all came back in one instant. As I said before, tender. See even after all these years and after so many readings that's all I can bring myself to say.
The latter half of the story is a reflection of the delicate sharpness of Joyce’s mind. In the last paragraphs, if you can, you can find, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Stendhal and even Henry James.

Pure Bliss!!

PS- Sometimes I wonder how it would feel to pen such great prose ?

But we know the answer for that dont we? It would simply feel like writing the greatest prose starting somewhat stately and ending in a yes.

Bookbites

The Ten great books:

It was elle who told me about it first. Subsequently, a lot of discussion has been generated around the choices and reading habits following the release of this book last week. Had a quick peek through and its amazing how you and your favourite authors almost have related taste in books if not matching.

Although I am not into quantifying , I am definitely into lists. So spent a few minutes of considered thinking to choose my deci-list. And the cream is almost the same of that Irish wag John Banville. And, ain’t I pleased about it?



So here’s Banville's:

Ill Seen, Ill Said
Notes from the underground
Ulysses
Doctor Faustus
Moby-Dick
Lolita
Austerlitz
Dirty Snow
Gulliver's Travels
Vanity Fair

And here’s mine:

Ulysses
Notes from the underground
Moby Dick
Invisible Cities
Lolita
Great Gatsby
The Trial
Magic Mountain
On the road
And I always find it hard to pick between English Patient and Catch 22.


If you have nothing better to do for now, go make yours.