Reading Again

I have finally started reading on a regular basis now. So, I can justify all those trips to Blossom and all the money spent there. And now I won't feel guilty spending more time and money.

In the last week-ten days, I have read When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro, Kari (a short graphic novel) by Amruta Patil and The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood.

After having read three Ishiguro books by now, I believe this is going to be a perpetual thing in his novels - the story starting off very very raw, the characters appearing two-dimensional, the attempt at making the conversations appear typical of the land and time being very transparent, and then all of it gradually falling together and you getting into the flow of things, forgetting the awkwardness of the language, and the story.

In any case, this book wasn't as much fun as I had while reading The Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go. When We Were Orphans, very often, seemed to deviate into pointlessness, and I still think there were pages upon pages that could have been condensed into a quarter of their total text, with absolutely no loss to the story. I moved on only because I had encountered similar feelings in the earlier books I had read by him, though to a lesser extent, and had some faith in his ability to provide a payoff. Which did come. I liked the way it ended.

There's something indescribable about such endings, which aren't exactly happy, and where the goal is reached, but not the way it was meant to, where you feel cheated, not by the author, for he has done his job well, but by fate, as maybe the protagonist would have felt. You discover, at the same time as the protagonist, the lie he has lived all his life. You feel, at the same time as the 'hero', pained by the realization that he had no say in the choices that had such profound effects on his life.

Kari is an average book, which I found filled with cliches, but still worth a mention in the growth of the graphic novel culture in India. I find such stories very irritating though, which talk about a 'different' person, someone who finds herself difficult to adhere to the cliches of the society, but the different-ness of that person actually adheres to all the cliches of different-ness propounded by our literature or media.

I had read The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood a few years back. It was one of those phases in under-grad when I was devouring e-versions of novels, one every day. Among the many books I read during that phase, and most of which I forgot, this one stood out. I wonder why I did not read another Atwood after that. The Edible Woman is one of her first published novels, written way back in 1969, and it still did not feel dated. One of the best things about her novels, though I have experience of just two from a collection of around 13, is that, unless you have cheated and read the blurbs, there is no way you can predict the way the story would move. In case of The Edible Woman, I knew from the first few pages what Marian, the central character, would do in relation to her 'boy-friend' Peter, and she did do that, but how Atwood went about making her do that, and the collection of interesting characters she made me meet on the way, is what separates the women from the girls. One of these characters, Duncan, is particularly interesting.

And this is the first woman-writer I have seen who could give the best of men a run for their money in terms of coming up with curious descriptions of ordinary things and clever turn of words. Highly recommended.

Also, my previous post, which, if it comes as news to you, was completely fictional, was inspired from a similar instance in the novel.

Am reading Rant by Chuck Palahniuk, The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood and Woody Allen's Collected Prose these days, which I keep altering depending on my mood.