Three Shadows by Cyril Pedrosa

Three Shadows is a graphic novel by French comics writer and animator, Cyril Pedrosa who’s worked on Disney films like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Hercules. The book is an attempt by Pedrosa to come to terms with the death of a very young child of a friend. The back states that Pedrosa’s graphic storytelling is influenced by Borges, Garcia Marquez and Tolkein. There’s a definitely a strong element of Marquez in the storytelling. Joachim lives with his parents in an idyllic but isolated rural setting. Their idyll is snapped by the presence of three shadowy horsemen who Joachim’s parents believe have come for their son. Through magical realism and tousled art, Pedrosa presents us to how Joachim’s parents attempt to escape the inevitability of their child's death. Strangely dark and disorienting, the artwork reminds me a lot of the sketches that precede the final work in animated films. You can read an excerpt from Three Shadows here.  

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

I find zombies tolerable, particularly in comparison to that sappy breed of vampires we are currently subjected to. I think part of the reason is the lack of pretence and verbal skills on the part of the zombie. Their singular goal of consuming flesh without seducing, pontificating, manipulating, fighting or engaging their victims in any mindfully mindless way makes them modest and even endearing. On the other hand, I’m not terribly fond of gimmicky books even one where the gimmick is chiefly constructed through the presence of the undead. Consequently, I trudged through Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with some apprehension.  

The book is principally composed of the original and only deviates through the injection of zombies into the plot. All the characters we know, love and despise, the Bennets, Mr.Darcy, the Bingleys, Mr. Collins, Wickham and Lady Catherine appear in somewhat modified avatars. England is in the throes of a strange plague which causes the dead to rise and seek the living to satiate their hunger for brains. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains” we are told. The Bennet sisters have been trained in the deadly arts at the Shaolin temple in China and are entrusted by the king to keep Hertfordshire safe of the stricken. After the slaughter of the family resident at Netherfield Park, the estate is acquired by Mr.Bingley whose move to the county leads to events described in the original Pride and Prejudice. In Grahame-Smith’s version, Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy are among the best zombie-killing warriors in England and in each other, they find an antagonistic match. In response to Darcy’s proposal for marriage at the Collins’ cottage, Elizabeth pushes his face into the mantel and a protracted martial arts scene ensues. The strangest scene though is the showdown between Lady Catherine with her cohort of ninjas and Elizabeth at the Bennets’ dojo (yes, apparently they were all the rage in Regency England).  

Contrived and silly as it sounds, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies turned out to be a fairly refreshing way to reconnect to Austen’s work. I read P&P in my early teens and since then my only connections to the novel have been the BBC miniseries with Colin Firth and the fairly recent film with Keira Knightley. Sadly, I wouldn’t have tolerated another reading were it not for the undead. I think it’s also a nifty way getting people who’d ordinarily find P&P dorky, to read a book which whilst being a ‘culturally apt’ parody, also exposes one to Austen’s writing, well for the most part.  

The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry

I don’t like audio books which is a pity given the 3 odd hours I spend in Bombay traffic each day. Working in training, the learner styles test is a perennial and unavoidable exercise which pops up unexpectedly and consistently delivers the same inferences about my VAK styles, ergo I am strongly visual, moderately kinaesthetic and pathetic with my audio.  

So, I have never really been able to listen to an audio book for more than ten minutes, save the erudite, mellifluous and pleasing voice of Stephen Fry. Last year, I listened to Fry’s first autobiographical work – Moab is My Washpot, an aural engagement that I enjoyed thoroughly. So thoroughly that I tried to unsuccessfully replicate it with others. Alas, it would seem that my aural cavities are closed to all but Fry.  

Where Moab is My Washpot dealt with his childhood right up to his late teens when he was sent to prison for credit card theft; The Fry Chronicles picks up the thread of his life through his years at Cambridge and his twenties. Fry is wonderfully funny, candid and scholarly. It’s his honesty that’s so endearing. You get the sense of a writer who really cares for his readers. Fry gives you profound insight into not only his thoughts, beliefs and the events that have shaped his life but also the inner workings of theatre, television, film, script writing, comedy and the list is endless. And all this rendered in his beautiful posh voice (albeit with some bizarre public school pronunciation) makes it a true reading (and by reading I mean listening) pleasure.  

Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk

Carl Streator is a journalist investigating cases of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) when he discovers that many of these deaths are linked by a poem from a children’s book which when read to the unsuspecting victim, puts him or her to sleep forever. When Streator finds a copy of this culling song that euthanises babies, he inadvertently becomes a serial killer, putting to death his editors and other random strangers who annoy him. To explore the ‘what and how’ of the culling song, he teams up with Helen Hoover Boyle (who for some strange reason Palahniuk refers to by her full name throughout the book). Boyle is a realtor specialising in haunted homes, earning large commissions from the frequent turnover in her petrified client base. Boyle like Streator has been purposefully using the culling song ever since she involuntarily killed her son and her husband. Their mission now with a little help from Boyle’s wannabe wicca assistant Mona, and her unstable vegetarian boyfriend, Oyster, is to find and destroy all the other copies of the book that contain the culling song as well as locating the ‘grimoire’, a textbook of magic which they theorise as the origin for the culling song.  

This was my first Palahniuk novel. I haven’t yet read his famous Fight Club. Palahniuk specialises in a genre called transgressive fiction. In Lullaby, he turns conventions on their head in plot, theme and style. And it works. His sardonic perspective turns every turn into something dark and deviant. From post-mortem sexual intercourse (i.e. sex with a corpse) to the eerie reflection of a typical American family on a road trip – you can’t accuse Palahniuk of lacking originality. At times, I did feel that the story wasn’t as tight as it could have been. The characters are sketchy at best but I think this is done with a purpose and Lullaby isn’t as much about the people who populate it as it is about situations and contexts. Apparently, Palahniuk wrote Lullaby as some sort of therapeutic outlet to come to terms with the murder of his father and the woman he was dating at the time and his subsequent decision to support the death penalty for the killer. You can read the background to this incident here.  

The Masque of Africa by V.S. Naipaul

Naipaul journeys across several African countries including Uganda, Ghana, Gabon, Nigeria, Cote D’Ivoire and South Africa to explore indigenous belief systems which predate Islam and Christianity on the continent. Along the way, he meets many Africans; priests, kings, chiefs, villagers and university graduates from whom he gleans knowledge of the interplay of old and new belief systems and the strange syncretism of superstition and technology in which modern Africans live with magic and other things from their past.

I know I am in the minority of people who actually like Naipaul. But, I did find The Masque of Africa somewhat dreary. The book lacks the incisiveness of some of his more celebrated non-fictional work. Maybe age is catching up with him. Perhaps it’s this fatigue that also makes him more patient and more accepting; traits that are seldom found in the Naipaulian world. His age is also perhaps entrenching his idiosyncrasies as he repeatedly makes asides on the state of cats and kittens in the towns he visits. He is most appalled to find that in most of Africa, cats are looked on with a mixture of revulsion and hunger and that in Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire, they kill them by beating them in a tied-up bag or dropping them into boiling water before cooking and eating them. Naipaul, it would seem, is fond of cats.

The accounts of most of the countries are entirely forgettable. But I found Gabon and its denizens’ relationship with the forest interesting. But, for the most part, The Masque of Africa misses its ostensible mark.

Turtle Nest by Chandani Lokugé

Aruni, a Sri Lankan who grows up in Australia returns to her homeland to search for her roots and the fishermen family from whom she’s been adopted. In a touristy beach town on the southern coast of the island, Simon, an old friend of her birth mother is sympathetic to her quest but her uncle Priya doesn’t want to talk to her at all. Gradually, she discovers the poverty of her original family and the tragedy of her mother, Mala.

Lokugé is a Sri Lankan born Australian writer and this is her second novel. On the whole, the novel comes off as trying too hard. The ‘in search of lost roots’ theme is tired and made even duller because Lokugé stays within the touristy comfort zone of beach resort and beach. The story seems deliberately written to wrench hearts and the ending, (perhaps intended to be a moment of great pathos) was slapdash and appalling. Methinks that this is a book written for the multicultural shelf of civic libraries across regional Australia.

Around this time last year, I read Sri Lankan writer Ru Freeman's A Disobedient Girl which deals with similar themes of poverty and separation from family in a similar setting.  But, that was a far superior work.  You can read my review of A Disobedient Girl here.  

The Unwaba Prophecies by Samit Basu

I finished reading The Unwaba Prophecies, the last book in Samit Basu's Gameworld Trilogy early last week. But I've been really hassled (or harrowed as people like to say in Bombay) with work and completely bummed out on Gandhiji's birthday long weekend (long for me because I don't normally have Saturdays off). The consequence of all this is that I can only vaguely remember the contents of the novel, echoing the words of a post I wrote not too long ago.

It was forgettably fun. And after finishing it I was filled with a terrible sense of regret about seemingly 'time-pass' books I seem to be reading these days which led me to order Confessions of an Indian Eater from the library, a pretentious and precious piece of work whose reading experience was augmented greatly by the numerous long strands of hair left pressed between its pages by an earlier reader. Better a time-pass book than one that's far up its own arse.