That thing called Love /Tuhin A Sinha.

Tuhin A Sinha's debut novel 'that thing called Love' has the magic of a Bollwood entertainer! The plot is gripping with lots of twists and turns to keep you completely engrossed in the flow of the story. The novel revolves around the lives of three friends, Mayank, Anil and Vishal, who work in a leading matrimony website. While Mayank is looking for a prospective bride for himself, the other two friends are married and have their own woes to deal with- Anil has a wife carrying the luggage of her past affair and Vishal gets a strange kick out of cheating on his wife. The complications grow when Mayank falls in love with a married, Revathi. The entangled relationships between different characters is what keeps one tied to the book. A vivid exploration of love, lust and marriage makes it a complicated study of the ever-changing urban psychology.

Besides, the skilful unjudgemental narration of the incidents and the responses of the characters to the different episodes in their lives, makes the novel, an interesting read. To add to the interest of the youthful souls, are abundant descriptions of passionate love scenes, though, I must say, they are an integral part of the plot. Sprinkled with lyrics from old Hindi songs and Urdu ghazals, the familiar TV serials and movies, the fictitious world almost comes alive before us. 

 One such quotation aptly adds to the relationship between Mayank and his love interest in the story-

"Taruf rog ho jaye to usko bhulna behtar,

Taluk bojh ban jaye to usko todana achcha

Woh afsana jise anjaam tak lana na ho mumkin,

Use ek khubsurat mod dekar chhodna achcha."

MiSTER PIP / LLOYD JONES.

The winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Prize, and short-listed for the Man Booker Prize (2007) Lloyd Jones's novel is set in a village on the Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville during a brutal civil war there in the 1990s. Jones covered it as a journalist, and this delicate fable never shies away from the realities of daily life shadowed by violence. As Matilda, the 13-year-old narrator, begins her story, a blockade has begun. Helicopters circle, the generators are empty and all the teachers have fled. Apart from the presence of pidgin Bibles, civilisation might never have touched the village.

One white man remains. Mr Watts has a home in the jungle, an abiding love for Dickens and faith in the power of literature. Assuming the responsibilities of teaching, he dreams of making the classroom "a place of light". Though the children hope the promised introduction to "Mr Dickens" will provide anti-malaria tablets, aspirins and kerosene, in Great Expectations they discover something just as vital as medicine and fuel: "a bigger piece of the world" that they can enter at will. In the fertile soil of Bougainville, Mr Watts's cultural seed has taken root and flourished.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this compelling story of a girl caught in the throes of war on the island of Bougainville. It is through the guidance of a most beloved mother and teacher that Matilda survives but more importantly, through her connection with Pip. A fictional creation from the mind of Charles Dickens himself, Pip helps Matilda maintain a desire to live, especially after her mother, the wise Mr. Watts, and her island cease to exist.

Though, in the beginning, there is an escapist pleasure of reading, the subversive nature of stories is highlighted as the war draws closer. Just as Great Expectations changes Matilda, instilling in her a moral code, so the environment in which it is read changes the book. Olivia Laing in The Guardian, Saturday 7 July 2007 writes- "In this dazzling story-within-a-story, Jones has created a microcosm of post-colonial literature, hybridising the narratives of black and white races to create a new and resonant fable. On an island split by war, it is a story that unites."

A fascinating read for all the lovers of Dickens and for those who would like to indulge in reading about how life would possibly be on a remote island sans civilization!

MISTRESS / ANITA NAIR

'Mistress' is one of the most beautiful books I have recently come across. The manner in which two stories unfold in the novel, show the masterful narrative technique of the novelist. The whole novel revolves around the four main characters. Radha and her husband Shyam, her lover, Chris, and her Uncle, Koman. The amount of intensive study that must have gone into the making of this novel is commendable. Within a perfect framework of the nine emotions that a heart can feel, the novel is divided into three books, each consisting of three emotions. Illuminating explanations from life, nature and dance go with the nine emotions - love, contempt, sorrow, fury, valour, fear, disgust, wonder and attachmentThe story then is entangled in between these emotions and it is an interesting study of how the kathakali dancer hides himself within a mask, and becomes a different personality altogether. Equally engaging is the lexicon of kathakali dance that we come across scattered throughout the novel. With his knowledge of kathakali, a dance form which is entirely based on the epics, Koman looks upon mankind with a wisdom drawn from the heroes, princes and villains of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. He recognizes every nuance of emotion as one he has experienced, as part of a vesham, or a role in kathakali.

The first is the story of Radha and Shyam, and travel writer, Chris, who comes to their riverside resort in Kerala, with a cello and a tape recorder, to maat Radha's Uncle, Koman, a famous kathakali dancer. While Koman and Radha both feel themselves compulsively drawn by the personality of Chris, Shyam becomes a helpless observer as Radha embraces Chris in a passion he cannot comprehend.Koman is both an observer and participant in this story, making no judgments, except those he reveals to the readers.

 The second story is that which Koman tells Radha and Chris, the story of his own convoluted past and his parents, a fascinating account by all standards. The tale takes us all over Kerala and Tamil Nadu, to the unique town of Arabipatnam, and to various other places. And it brings us to kathakali, with fascinating insights into the training and performance of this traditional dance form, which is drama as well as dance. The book is in the first person, but does not have a single narrator; as in a dance-drama, each of the players is allowed to speak for himself. Shyam voices his thoughts, and Radha voices hers, and we see them hurting each other, the misunderstandings deepening through the trickery of words. As Nair goes further into their past, we begin to understand the complexities of their relationship, to comprehend the injustice of it all.
A not-to-miss book as it is, I recommend it if you have taste for some serious thought to go with a smooth running fiction. You will enjoy the long descriptions, the passages that go to bring out the inner turmoil of different characters, and the layer-by-layer unfolding of the story, woven with complete mastery in words.

"Art is a tough mistress. Exacting. Unforgiving. But beautiful and tantalising, all the same. When applied to best-selling author Anita Nair's latest novel Mistress. these truths prove double-edged, yet true as steel..... those who have read it will mull over issues inherent between its covers. Set in Kerala, spanning 90 years, Nair's third novel explores the depths of relationships while, in a parallel strand, it unravels the skeins that weave together a life in art.... As the turbulent eddies of life surround the protagonists, we are plunged into a multi-pronged narrative ? where the navarasas dictate the mood of each segment, where the main characters offer first-person slants on the evolving plot,? where myths are vigorously retold with local colour, where the artist and his art tussle for an equitable balance.?It is a formula that seems bound for literary magic. To me, Nair's narrative powers and mastery of minutiae remain her forte... this novel proves she is conscious of the trivialisation of art, a mistress who accepts no compromises. "(The Hindu)

Happy Reading:)

That Long Silence/ Shashi Deshpande

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Shashi Deshpande is perhaps ideally suited to tread the labyrinthine tracts of human pysche and creditably represents it in her fiction. Her novels, particularly 'The Dark Holds No Terrors' and 'That Long Silence' - are an education in the psyche of people who lose their capacity for rational thought on being subjected to traumatic experiences.

The novel is about Jaya Kulkarni, an apparently satisfied housewife. Having married a responsible man, Mohan, and blessed with two children, Rahul and Rati, and a home and material comforts, she seems to have almost nothing to ask for in life. However, to achieve this stage of fulfilment, Jaya has systematically suppressed every aspect of her personality that refused to fit into her image as wife and mother. Two such most important aspects are : her writing career and her friendship with Kamat.

Deshpande has adopted the stream-of-consciousness technique which helps her to successfully bring out the inner workings of the mind of characters. A smooth lenear development of the narrative would not have facilitated the two and fro movement in time of Jaya's consciousness. The use of this technique reminds us of Dorothy Richardson's 'Pilgrimage' in that there is significant assertion of autbiographical undercurrents in the novel.

Thus, the novel is about how Jaya accepts her boundaries and then moves on to redefine her relation with the world. Her psychology is probed and we witness anxiety of how she would respond to the situation she finds herself in.

A book recommended for all..but do not expect it to be like a fiction or story...it is more like some aquaintance baring her heart and life before you.

A Fine Balance/ Rohinton Mistry

The novel is a complex, magnificient, hurting story told in the best tradition of 19th century realism, Rohinton Mistry continues to write about how little individual agency counts in a national emergency and how brutally personal initiative is suppressed by caste imperatives. In writing about the defeat of Ishwar and Omprakash, the chamar tanners turned caste-violating tailors; of Dina Dayal, the Parsi widow in search of economic autonomy; of Maneck Kohlah, the student from the hills hungry for existential answers; Mistry captures the overwhelming forces of history and caste, of politics and patriarchy, of coicidence and destiny that combine to break the human spirit in its quest for value, for betterment, for nobility.

Set in mid-1970s India, 'A Fine Balance' is a subtle and compelling narrative about four unlikely characters who come together in circumstances no one could have foreseen soon after the government declares a 'State of Internal Emergency'. It is a breathtaking achievement: panoramic yet humane, intensely political yet rich with local detail; and above all, compulsively readable.

Happy Reading:)

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE/ JANE AUSTEN.

Something of the full structural possibilities of the formal social occasion is revealed by 'Pride and Prejudice'. In this novel, Jane Austen creates a tripartite structure, each section of which is controlled by a different social ritual. The opening chapters are organized around four invitaions to dance which create a pattern of approach and rejection emblematic of Darcy's frustrating relationship with Elizabeth. Then in order to bring her heroine to an understanding of the aristocracy, Jane Austen takes Elizabeth to the diametrically opposed worlds of Rosings and Pemberley. Finally, the ritual of marriage takes control, and the unions of Wickham and Lydia, and Bingley and Jane prepare the way for Darcy's marriage to Elizabeth.

Courtship is relegated to the periphery of 'Sense and Sensibility', but it assumes a very central position in 'Pride and Prejudice'. At the centre of this web of courtships is that of Darcy and Elizabeth, for it is through the development of their relationship that the novel makes its main statement. The other love affairs are subordinate and their function is largely exhausted once they have fulfilled the role of expanding the issues raised between hero and heroine.

To add a feather to the novel, 'Pride and Prejudice' is much cleaner in its structural lines than either 'Northanger Abbey' or 'Sense and Sensibility'. In both of these novels, patterns have to be extricated from an often confusing plethora of formal social occasions. But 'Pride and Prejudice' readily divides into three secctions, each controlled by a different and thematically appropriate social ritual- dancing for the problems of courtship, the visiting for the broadening of social horizons and marriage for the resolution of conflicts. Thus, form and content are truly united in this master-piece of Jane Austen work.