When I find that a book is poorly written, I can be somewhat caustic when I review it. But, on the whole I am not intrinsically evil. Sometimes after I post a review, I feel a little guilty about attacking a writer or a book like poor Kankana Basu and her ridiculous novel Cappuccino Dusk about whom and which I wrote some pretty nasty stuff. A week later, I regretted what I wrote. I recalled the words of Amy Tan “mature writers know that mean spiritedness is wearying and limited in its one dimensional point of view.” So, I amended my post... slightly. But, here I am trying to be Bodhisattva-like in dispensing compassion and along comes an opportunity for raw castigation that I just can’t pass up on. Return to Almora is – I apologise for my crassness but no other word can covey my sentiment more effectively – fucking pathetic.
Pachauri, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for his work on climate change in 2007 has apparently written many books but this is his first work of fiction and what a work it is. Evidently, Pachauri (who turns 70 next week) is one horny old man. I could still persevere through the terribly stilted writing but oh man I didn’t have the willpower to make it through the sex scenes, surely drawn from the author’s personal repertoire of fantasies like kissing someone with a mouth full of the sweet taste of jalebis. The story is so dull that I can summarise it in just a sentence – a sexual cum spiritual (no pun intended) journey of an Indian returning to his roots in Uttarakhand.
Pachauri has obviously written this piece of drivel for his friends in the west because he stops the narrative midway to explain who Shiva and Parvati are and highlights native words in italics since the book brims with the pseudo-spiritual. You half expect to come across commentary that tells readers how the organ of the Indian male waxes and wanes with the moon and is at its most potent during purnima, which is what the full moon is known as, when the member is washed in saffron water and holy basil. I read about a hundred pages before I started skimming. On page 179, I said to myself, “must go on, must finish this crap” but I just couldn’t do it. I am very pleased to report that I prematurely, well let me report it in Pachauri’s own words “He removed his clothes and began to feel Sajni’s body, caressing her voluptuous breasts. He felt very excited, but wanted to enjoy exploring her body, before he attempted to enter her. But, suddenly, it was all over. The excitement got the better of him, even before he could get started.”
No prizes for guessing that Return to Almora gets a thumbs-up from that most despicable Indian institution, the media. The Times of India’s Anjali Joseph notes “Pachauri is engagingly candid about his protagonist's urges; Sanjay is always noticing breasts and masturbating (once into a red silk hanky purloined from a train co-passenger.” But, that doesn’t stop Ms. Joseph from concluding that the novel is in fact a spiritual pot boiler (She also remarks that “the subplot of Sanjay's sexual life, at first solitary, then involving other people, provides rich and frequent diversion”). I wonder how much Pachauri’s publisher paid The Times to get this ambiguously glowing review.
There’s one thing Mr. Pachauri can be sure of though, his scenes of the carnal aren’t about to melt any glaciers.
You can read the mindless review from The Times of India here.
No comments:
Post a Comment