Twilight (The Graphic Novel) by Stephenie Meyer

I just wanted to know what all the fuss was about without reading the book or watching the movie. Now that I have read the 'graphic novel', I still don't know what the fuss is about.  Like, have all these fawning girls not heard of Anne Rice, the original (and quite enjoyable) queen of sensual vampirical fiction?!  If I set aside the story and look solely at the art - well it's nothing to write home about.  If you want to read a good graphic novel which has great atmosphere and is creepy and fun, pick up Coraline.  

Tokyo Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta

Thirteen strangers are stranded in Tokyo airport after their flight gets cancelled due to a freak snow storm. By the luggage carousel, each recounts a tale to pass the night. With only this thin thread tying the tales together, this is really just an anthology of stories. Dasgupta takes the sexual machinations and plot devices of the Canterbury Tales and The Decameron and adds some post-modern surrealism to create strange lives in places as far flung as Lagos, Anatolia and Frankfurt. The language is Dasgupta’s, other worldly and striking but the stories themselves aren’t very compelling. I have blogged before that I’m not a fan of magical realism particularly when it’s forced on the reader in seemingly contrived twists and turns. The House of the Frankfurt Mapmaker is a good example; it seems to have been inspired by a David Lynch film and surrealism for the sake of surrealism comes across as crude and ineffectual. There are however some engaging stories such as The Doll in which a Japanese entrepreneur falls in love with a life size doll of his own creation (mirrors a real life phenomenon in Japan, read about it here). The Rendezvous in Istanbul is a poignant tale of a Ukranian woman who follows a wingless bird to France to rescue her Bangladeshi lover from an impounded ship. The bird had been stuck in the lover’s throat for many years causing him to temporarily lose speech.  

An interesting read but incomparable to Dasgupta’s brilliant subsequent book Solo.  

The World According To Garp by John Irving

Jenny Fields is a somewhat unconventional individual living in the wrong half of the 20th century. She eschews the mores of her wealthy New England parents to become a nurse in Boston. Here, she resolves to get herself a baby sans the pesky interference of a man. She finds a potential sperm donor in the form of TS Garp who’s arrived partially brain dead from the war. When the hospital discovers her imminent unwed motherhood, they fire her (yes, it was those times). She has a son who she names TS Garp; the TS doesn’t stand for anything, she informs people who ask. Although, it is in fact the full title of her son’s late father, Technical Sergeant Garp.  

Jenny and Garp move to the grounds of the Sterling School where Jenny is the school nurse. When he turns 17, Garp decides to become a writer so off he goes (reluctantly acquiescing to his mum’s companionship) to Vienna. Garp struggles to find his first words but Jenny makes remarkable progress with her own work, writing about 600 pages of an autobiography. But, she’s not very pleased with it, not until she finds the sentence that sets the tone for her book; “In this dirty-minded world, you are either someone’s wife or someone’s whore or fast on the way to becoming one or the other.” She calls her work A Sexual Suspect and it’s an instant hit and Jenny, despite her dislike of labels transforms into a feminist icon. Meanwhile, Garp’s first work, a short story called The Pension Grillparzer fails to make any waves. Interestingly, some of the protagonist’s work including this story and chapters of his novels are embedded in the narrative of the book.  

Garp marries the daughter of his wrestling coach from school and they have a son and then another. His first two novels enjoy a very tepid success. It isn’t until the tragedy of an accident where his younger son loses his life and his older son, an eye and an arm, that Garp is spurred on to write his masterpiece, The World According to Bensenhaver, a violent tale of a father’s anxieties built around a ‘rape’ plot. In a classic example of the strange humour that pervades this book, Garp’s wife, Helen is partly complicit in the death of her son as she fellates her young lover in a stationary Buick whilst Garp unknowingly drives his two sons into the back of this car.  

The World According to Garp possesses a certain Forest Gumpish temperament which makes it simultaneously engaging and inane. Although I was initially hooked, I soon grew weary of both the story and its characters. I suppose when it was published in the seventies, the plot, the themes and tragicomedy must have been pretty innovative. But, now it seems dated. There’s a point in the book (mind you it’s a very long novel) where you cry out “When will it end?” As if the impending and predictable anti-climax of Garp’s death wasn’t irksome enough, Irving presents us with page after page of tying up loose ends, of following up on each character till their very last breath. It’s almost as if his intention was to write a book that would be made into a movie and sure enough, several years later, out pops a movie by the same name with Robin Williams playing the titular role. I found the World According to Garp both trying and tiring.  

The Curious Casebook of Inspector Hanshichi by Okamoto Kidō

Japanese writer, Kidō wrote a series of detective stories between 1917 -1937 which were published in a popular magazine. Inspector Hanshichi, Kidō’s protagonist, is a police detective in mid-nineteenth century Edo (Tokyo) before the Meiji Restoration, when the Shogun still held sway and the ways of old Japan were at play. Kidō was apparently influenced by Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. But, the similarity with the famous resident of Baker Street is slight and limited to that famous Holmesian omniscience. I found that the Hanshichi stories reminded me of a lot of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. These stories of nineteenth century Edo are nowhere near as tame as their counterparts set in Gaborone. Indeed, they feature everything from kidnapping and intrigues to manslaughter and matricide. Kidō like McCall Smith subtly bends space and time to give us an intimate glimpse into life in a different era. Kidō’s first love was writing Kabuki plays and the restrained tragedy the art permeates all of the stories, not to mention the countless allusions to famous Kabuki pieces.  

If you read Kidō expecting nifty tales of investigations, you’d be disappointed. The investigations themselves often come to a swift and abrupt end as the all knowing Hanshichi quickly confronts culprits who he reduces to tears and confessions with frankly whimsical and completely unintimidating posturing. The comeliness of Hanshichi’s tales is in the modest and off-hand observations of the mores and aesthetics of a different world. In the Stone Lantern (Ishi-Dōrō), Hanshichi investigates the strange disappearance and cryptic but brief reappearance of the daughter of a wealthy shopkeeper. His sleuthing leads him into the shopkeeper’s garden: 

To satisfy his suspicions, Hanshichi slipped on a pair of wooden clogs left at the edge of the veranda and made a thorough inspection of the small garden. A large stone lantern stood in its east corner. It looked to be of a considerable age, for its roof and base were covered entirely in a thick carpet of dark-green moss whose musty smell seemed to bespeak the long history of the Kikumuras’ shop.

“That’s a fine lantern. Has it been moved recently?’ Hanshichi asked casually.
“No, it’s been in that exact spot for as long as anyone can remember. The mistress was always very particular in warning us not to touch it, on account of its beautiful coat of moss.”
“Is that so?”

On the roof of this ancient stone lantern, which no one might touch, Hanshichi had chanced to notice the faintest suggestion of a human footprint. The only evidence that remained was a tiny indentation, possibly made by someone’s toe, in the plush green moss.

More than sleuthing, these stories simultaneously delve into a culture and signal its end. A culture where moss isn't culled out, but cultivated.  

My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekov to Munro edited by Jeffrey Eugenides

• Somewhere in a timeframe of the last 9 to 17 months, I have picked up this ghastly habit of reading not two, not three, not four but six or seven books simultaneously. And it’s not as if I were a multi-limbed spectacled Tibetan Goddess, each hand clutching a tome.
• 
  · I start reading, get a little bored, migrate to the next.
  · I start reading, spot a more appealing cover, move on.
  · I start reading, need to return a book, skedaddle.
  · I start reading, nice book but might be too much of a good thing, oh here’s an alternative.

And so on. The problem is that I don’t abandon books unless they really test my patience (like Rimi B. Chatterjee’s City of Love). Instead, I collect them like a hand of cards except there’s never a royal flush, or any kind of flush really.

If you’ve been observing the ‘I am currently reading’ counter on the right, you’d have noticed that My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead has been idling away in this quartet for months. It wasn’t a bad read; it was fairly decent although I don’t think I’d rate it as highly as Chandrahas Choudhury. Naturally, some stories were better than others but it was the way in which each was so sharply different from its neighbours that overwhelmed, made me want to seek a reprieve every time I concluded a tale. I haven’t ever read any of these writers before save Chekov so I wasn’t sure what to expect.

But, I found it difficult to move from a clichéd tale of necrophilia in William Faulkner’s A Rose For Emily to James Joyce’s The Dead, told in a startling, disorienting style from which I could neither fathom story nor sense. How uncouth am I to not have appreciated James Joyce. The Dead, we are told in the introduction, was recommended to Eugenides by none other than Miss Lahiri of Jhumpa fame.

Among my favourites was The Hitchhiking Game by Milan Kundera. What a wonderful voice, modish words where epiphanies creep on you when you least expect it. A young couple on holiday play an impromptu but familiar game of assuming the identities of a driver and a hitchhiker. Each eggs the other to carry forth the role play further and further into the unrecognisable and into places from which there is no return. Unable to tolerate the emotional distress of this waylaid game any longer, the woman begs her boyfriend to recognise her, “I’m me, I’m me. . . .” she pleads. “The young man was silent, he didn’t move, and he was aware of the sad emptiness of the girl’s assertion, in which the unknown was defined by the same unknown.”

Vladimir Nabokov’s Spring in Fialta was beautifully written but I found the story cold and aloof. Lorrie Moore’s How to Be the Other Woman was charming but gimmicky. Robert Musil’s Tonka was frustrating but strangely alluring. We Didn’t by Stuart Dybek was sardonic in the best possible way as the corpse of naked pregnant woman floats on to the beach next to young couple as they “slammed together still feeling for that perfect” (it was a maiden slamming for both of them).

If it weren’t for Miranda July’s Something that Needs Nothing, I would have probably written this anthology off as just about passable. One of my principal complaints is that Eugenides has chosen a very narrow interpretation of love although he praises himself for exactly the opposite in his introduction. The whimsical name of this collection is inspired by some ancient ‘love’ poems by Roman poet Catallus who had an affair with a married aristocrat named Lesbia. Lesbia had a pet sparrow.

Sparrow, my girl’s darling
Whom she plays with, whom she cuddles,
Whom she likes to tempt with finger-
Tip and teases to nip harder
When my own bright-eyed desire
Fancies some endearing fun
And a small solace for her pain,
I suppose, so heavy passion then rests:
Would I could play with you as she does
And lighten the spirit’s gloomy cares!

In a later poem, we find out that the sparrow dies.
“[P]asser mortuus est meae puellae,
passer, deliciae meae puellae,
quem plus illa oculis suis amabit,”

“My girl’s sparrow is dead,
Sparrow, my girl’s darling,
Whom she loved more than her eyes.”

Sparrows, like the love described in these stories, are prone to sudden death.