Tittering on the edge : Thoughts on 'It's your move, Wordfreak!"

Wordfreak aka Aryan and Worddiva aka Alisha hit it off as opponents in an online Scrabble game. Several steamy chat sessions later, they decide to meet and find – oh happy fates! – that neither is a fat, hairy, psycho/ serial killer/ rapist.  Even better, they are both impossibly gorgeous, breath-takingly tall,  super rich, conveniently single  and utterly besotted with each  other .    And I haven’t even mentioned their socially useful careers yet - Alisha helps  women escape abusive marriages, while  Aryan builds green homes by day, swings with Mumbai’s swish set by night and sweet talks them into financing his rural projects.  

One gaudy Punjabi wedding  straight out of a Karan Johar film- and several  bouts of  coyly described sex – later,  Aryan and Alisha seem all set for the happily ever after. Except that Scrabble is promptly replaced by Squabble.  Alisha is attacked by a client’s disgruntled ex, and Aryan chooses the opportunity to unleash his inner caveman. He yells. She weeps. He disappears.  What is a smart , independent no-nonsense girl with a successful career , to do?

Drop everything and follow in his manly and troubled footsteps, according to Kothari. For despite Aryan revealing himself to be a chauvinist, alarmingly violent and contemptuous of the law (all in the name of love, cries Kothari), Alisha packs her bags and hares off to London with his Nani , where  she helps her true love confront his troubled past, patch up with his estranged father and half-siblings,  and realize just how badly the plot needs another gaudy Punjabi  wedding  - sorry, how much he loves her.  KJo  would approve.  I don’t.

Wordfreak is a book that tries to be a lot of things, in a half hearted sort of way. The first half swings from ‘hot (well, tepid actually) Mills and Boon choli-ripper’ one second, to ‘ sensitive look at a modern day relationship’ the next; the second aims for  full blown Bollywood melodrama.  It also  offers up randomly scattered observations about everything from gender equality and  India’s spiraling divorce rate, to green design  and differing skin tone ( “the quintessential difference between them – he was a North Indian Aryan, and she was a South Indian Dravidian.”) .  The book does have some interesting characters – Diya, Uncle Sam, Alisha herself – but they soon disappear in this unreal  world  where everyone is thin, beautiful and  loaded, and loyally served by a retinue of smiling servants. Also slaves to filmi stereotype - The North Indians are perennially overdressed ,  swinging at weddings or travelling abroad; South Indian Alisha  seems to eat nothing at home  besides idlis and dosas . 

Wordfreak  managed to annoy me with repeated references to Alisha’s “chocolate eyes”, as well as her various pet names – “Lee-sha” and “Sunshine”.  There is also  plenty of unintended humour, thanks to the prissy –or downright careless-  wording in all those sex scenes. Sample – “He groaned, loving what she did to him..How was he supposed to moderate this?”  Where are you, dude, at a high school debate?  Or, “He aroused them… until they tittered (sic) ..on the edge of annihilation.” I tittered too. 

And what is one to make of all the misplaced snippets of information throughout the plot? Why, in the midst of an emotional moment, do we need to know the details of Aryan’s post graduate studies? And why, after a deluge of ‘kuttis’ and ‘sahodarans’ – not to mention all those idlis – are we helpfully informed that Alisha speaks  Malayalam, exactly  two pages from the ending? 

Your move, editor?

This review is a part of the http://blog.blogadda.com/2011/05/04/indian-bloggers-book-reviews" target="_blank">Book Reviews Program at "http://www.blogadda.com">BlogAdda.com

Wounds already there

In Kevin Brockmeier’s new book, as stunning as it is disturbing, the Illumination refers to an inexplicable phenomenon that overtakes the world, where physical pain begins manifesting itself as a brilliant light emanating from the wounds on everyone’s bodies. Overnight, the world is awash in the dreadful beauty of lambent tumours and corroding tissue, luminous ulcers and glimmering schoolyard scrapes.

"The world had changed in the wake of the Illumination", Brockmeier writes. "No one could disguise his pain anymore. You could hardly step out in public without noticing the white blaze of someone’s impacted heel showing through her slingbacks; and over there, hailing a taxi, a woman with shimmering pressure marks where her pants cut into her gut; and behind her, beneath the awning of the flower shop, a man lit all over in the glory of leukemia.”

How would a world like this adapt to its newfound incandescence? Some turn voyeurs, rushing to capture the art, the unmistakable beauty in suffering. Hospitals evolve new triage rules; photography gains momentum like never before. For others, like the teenaged ‘cutters’ , self mutilation becomes an expression of angst, the inspiration for a whole new sub culture . “We’re not creating wounds”, a character says after a particularly grisly photo opp. “We’re uncovering the wounds that are already there.” Some see variety in the light around them, and in some, it inspires empathy. But for the most part, people just learn to look away. “You would think “, a character observes, “that taking the pain of very human being and making it so starkly visible – every drunken headache and frayed cuticle, every punctured lung and bowel pocked with cancer – would inspire waves of fellow feeling all over the world, at least ripples of pity…”.

Brockmeier gives us a world ripe with potential, a scenario that surely demands examination. Yet he prefers to breeze by this aspect of his tale, choosing instead to focus on individual stories. So we follow the trajectory of a journal through the lives of six unconnected people as they struggle to cope with their pain. The journal is a compilation of love notes written by a man to his wife. I love watching you sit at your desk, it reads. I love your gray coat with the circles like cloud covered suns. I love how easily you cry when you are happy. I love your many doomed attempts to give up caffeine. I love the way you shake your head when you yawn. I love the way chocolate makes your eyes light up.

It is a litany of endearments made all the more poignant by her untimely death, and it touches each of these six lives in different ways. For data analyst Carol Ann, whose life “seemed like one long litany of wounds”, it is the salve that helps her move on from a painful marriage and divorce. For Jason Williford, author of those notes, it is his one connection to the love he has lost, until his pain becomes his diversion and, ultimately, his salvation. Ten year old Chuck Carter, victim of bullying at home and in school, can see the pain in inanimate objects as well, and the journal’s radiant pages spur him to become its protector. For writer Nina Poggione, literally wounded by her words as she endures oral ulcers through successive book readings, the journal inspires a parable that leads her toward love and healing, however fleeting. And for used book peddler Morse Strawbridge, “..fascinated, yet vexed by the book”, the journal is a comforting presence, his sole companion in a momentary respite from his impoverished life. “Between each sentence, it seemed, there was a gap, a chasm, a whitening away of meaning. He did not understand how something so sweet, so earnest and candid, could also be so wayward and enigmatic. He kept expecting to return to the book and discover that it had pondered all his questions while he was gone and then fortified itself with the answers.”

In a world lit up by suffering, evangelist Ryan Shifrin is an anomaly – a man untouched by the Illumination, seemingly immune to disease and disaster. Bound to his vocation not by faith but the burden of obligation, his life is spent questioning God’s intent. Is the Illumination a sign of His love , in which case, he himself has been left bereft? Or is it a sign that His love is decorative, a particularly arduous test of faith? The journal resonates with a simple love he can never hope to feel, that he has, in fact, deprived himself of, and that he can only yearn for in “..a Heaven of starting over, a Heaven of trying again” .

‘The Illumination’ traverses terrain familiar to readers of Brockmeier’s earlier work – alienation, silent heartbreak, grief. This is also a book about the fleeting connections we make , or miss, the ephemeral encounters that leave one’s life forever changed. It is one of those books that you will either love or hate unconditionally, the kind that will work its way under your skin and into a stubborn corner of your head and stay there. There are times when Brockmeier’s chronicle of suffering feels like a dark reflection of Jason’s words, an unrelenting chronicle of damage and disfigurement – severed thumbs, mouth ulcers, the aurora of a million ruined hearts, livers and kidneys. His characters are offered little respite and certainly no redemption. The section on Jason Williford is especially hard to read, as we watch him apprentice himself to a teenaged cutter, learning how to release his grief in the incandescence of his pain.

And yet, for all its bleakness, it is hard to remain unmoved by this book’s raw and tragic beauty or Brockmeier’s considerable skills as a storyteller.

Race, rage, redemption - and pirates

Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

Pantheon Books

“You a lie!” someone yells in the opening chapters of this powerful book about family ties, the notion of home and one woman’s search for redemption . And in many ways, Fantine Antoine, successful travel writer and narrator of this book, does feel like one. Secretive about her origins, camouflaged by a skin tone that confuses most people about her racial lineage, she makes her home among strangers, distancing herself from her roots with education and a lifestyle her family can neither comprehend nor appreciate.


For Fantine's family is bound by ties far stronger than blood – they are brought together by the shared trauma of rape, decades of racial prejudice and violence, and the insularity that comes from being unable to trust anyone outside of their tribe. But though to outward glance she has walked away from it all, she still wears the scars of her heritage close, in her inability to commit to relationships, in the distance she must necessarily keep even from those closest to her.


All this changes, however, when her godson, the academically gifted Victor – and the one family member who seems to be following in her footsteps - becomes involved in a random act of gang violence. As she races against time to reach him and save him from the dark future that claims so many young black men of his generation, Fantine finds herself reconnecting with her estranged family and confronting, at last, the memories and dark secrets she has tried to leave behind. After years of being ‘invisible’ in her neutral complexion, carefully chosen clothes and the privileges her job offers, Fantine discovers, as she drives across America with her father, the reality of being black , when even an act as innocent as driving at night comes fraught with danger. “You just a nigger,”, her father says, a man who has survived great violence and meted out his version of it. “You not a writer. You with me.You tite souri (mouse). For them.” And sure enough, despite her laptop and vocabulary, she is mistaken for a prostitute (“a low-rent Halle Berry”) by a passing white couple and duly propositioned.

As a writer Straight is known for her extraordinary ear for dialogue, and ‘Take One Candle..’ moves effortlessly between patois , street jargon and Fantine’s articulate, writerly voice. ( ‘You made me fall in love,’ a professor tells her, after reading her work. ) Through the anguished inner voice of her protagonist, and the stories of the resilient men and women who came before her, Straight does even more. In an essay I read a while ago,about Haitians who dared raise their voice against political oppression, writer Edwidge Danticat defines ‘ guapa’ - the ‘courageous beauty’ she sees in the actions of these artists, writers and activists. With ‘Take One Candle..’ Straight gives us a glimpse of hers, returning to issues she has so eloquently examined in her earlier books – race; prejudice; the burden of painful cultural memory and its crippling effects across generations; the weight of love, often as damaging as it is redemptive.


At the heart of this book is the relationship Fantine shares with Victor - complex, fraught with tension, laced as much with a frail resentment as it is affection. In many ways, it springs to life only when she realizes she may lose him. Until the moment this happens, you can sense a diffidence on her part to bridge the gap she keeps between them, and his own pained , but silent acceptance of it. She brings him gifts, expensive mementos from the places she visits, yet is unable to offer him shelter the one night he needs it the most. For, much as he is like her, Victor is still a painful reminder of the past for Fantine – his doomed mother was once her best friend, the secrets of his parents’ death her unshed burden. Growing up, Victor has survived abuse and severe deprivation, scraping by only because of the largesse of the clan. Fantine, black sheep of this family, has rarely stepped in to help him; yet, she notes, as much with pride as regret, she seems to be the person he wants most to emulate. “People like us were not meant to measure success in the same way our families did,” Fantine observes. "We were failures to them.. And now Victor wanted… to be me.” But what they do have in common is a love of words, and it is this love that forges the tenuous bond that keeps Fantine on Victor’s tracks as he hurtles across America towards his doom, with little more than his cellphone in hand.


Fantine does eventually catch up with Victor, only to lose him again when he inexplicably starts behaving like the boys he has been trying to escape till now, and sets out on a hair brained treasure hunt of his own. Given how gripping the story has been till this point, and how drawn I was into Fantine's world, Victor's volte face made no sense whatsoever to me. It also alters the trajectory of the plot , taut and grounded until now, to embrace, in one great swoop, pirate yarns, flood waters (dame Katrina herself) death defying rescues, romance, ghosts , even the odd miracle.

Yet stick with Fantine - and Straight - as they negotiate this strange terrain , for a finale as satisfying as it is cinematic.

The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing

This book, first published in 1962, is considered one of the most influential books of the last century, as well as a landmark in feminist writing. The author, Doris Lessing, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007. The Golden Notebook has been the focus of a tremendous amount of scholarly discourse, that this review has absolutely no pretensions of adding to.

As a decidedly unscholarly person, I found this book to be one of the most difficult I've ever read. I chose to read it merely as a novel, however, overlooking everything else, which is probably how the author intended it in any case. Indeed, her preface to the edition I read states as much - the story was never written as a feminist text, or even as a book purely for women.On the contrary, her intention was to demonstrate a new structure to the novel, developing this story as a small novel, interspersed with writings from the journals of one of the characters. The reader alternates, therefore, between the protagonist's voice and the author's. The characters were based on the women she saw around her, the conditions of their lives in the Britain of the 50s and 60s, and their largely antagonistic relationships with men.



Anna Wulf, the central character of this book, is a writer and single mother who begins a series of notebooks that record her life. Even as she battles writer's block, she is so consumed by the fear of going mad that she decides to seperate this record into distinct narratives detailing singular aspects of her life. So there is a black notebook (her writing), a yellow notebook (her emotional life), a red notebook (her experiences as a member of the Communist party ) and a blue notebook (her everyday experiences).


Anna is complex, and hovers on the brink of a nervous breakdown as she faces disillusionment and rejection of various kinds - her association with communism grows increasingly strained, her relationships invariably leave her feeling used and betrayed. Finally, she meets Saul, a man who is practically her doppelganger and, in the course of an extremely unsettling relationship with him, she eventually faces her demons and resolves some of her issues. This exchange is chronicled in a fifth notebook- the Golden Notebook of the title.


I loved the robust language of the book, and the throb of nervous energy that runs through the notebooks, as Anna flits between her memories and plots for stories that are thinly veiled accounts of her own life. The journey through her feverish, wordy interior world was a challenge and, despite never really liking the character of Anna, I found myself wanting to know how her various crises would be resolved. At the same time, the book can easily feel dated. Womens' lives, at least in the urban context, have progressed since the time of this book, as has stylistic innovation in literature and, indeed, the feminist movement itself. Thus, this view of the relationship between men and women being essentially confrontational feels hostile and even objectionable today, but was perhaps the dominant view in the 60s. The flow of the novel, innovative for its time, didn't feel smooth either - bracketed explanations frequently crop up to explain sections and how to view them, leaving little to the reader's imagination. Sometimes the dialogues ascribed to some characters are strange, especially the Americans, who frequently sound and behave like characters from daytime sitcoms ("No, doll. No, baby").


A big problem for me with the book was the complete absence of any sound, morally coherent male characters - indeed the book reminded me of the early seasons of Desperate Housewives where the male characters seem like parodies of their own worst avatars. And yet, these are the men Anna unerringly returns to, and going by her journals, these are the men who shape her view of the world and herself. While she blames them for their cruelty, she cannot live without them either. At the same time, Anna seems incapable of building healthy relationships with other women. Her friendship with her best friend Molly is not without issues, and her opinions of all the other women in the book are largely derisive. And considering that she is a mother, her relationship with her daughter, Janet, occupies her ruminations the least. Janet remains a shadowy peripheral figure, until she finally breaks away for the safe 'normalcy' of boarding school. And yet, towards the end of the book, Anna suddenly realizes that
" ..Janet's mother being sane and responsible was far more important than the necessity of understanding the world". But why - I didn't understand where that epiphany came from, given how obsessively focused Anna has been on understanding the world upto that point.

Crucial to her recovery is the fifth notebook, the Golden Notebook, where all four strands of her narrative finally come together.But what dominates its narrative is yet another man, even if he is eerily siimilar to Anna. I even wondered if he was perhaps a figment of her imagination, crucial to her 'cracking up'and eventually resolving her conflicts with men. But no, the plot leads elsewhere. Nevertheless, at this point, as he alternately rages and then embraces her, she gifts him the golden notebook. The key to her identity, her recovery from all the turmoil holding her back - casually given away. Why?



And considering the interminable length of time the reader has spent inside Anna's head, the end feels sudden and almost flippant. Is irony intended here? Anna has ceased to be a communist. Now she announces she will no longer write, but join the Labour party and be (good lord!) a marriage counsellor. But when you have effectively chronicled the death of your belief in any kind of ideology, why begin endorsing another? And her turning away from writing felt like she was rejecting her creativity, which is what set her apart in the first place. And since the writing of those journals is what helped her recover, why is abandoning the words themselves necessary to heal? Essentially, Anna will be negating every aspect of her life and seeking the sanity of more conventional behaviour. Why?



As for it being a feminist bible....

I'm a feminist because I believe in equality and tolerance, not just because I'm a woman. To that effect, I would hesitate to call this book feminist or a positive influence on women struggling for empowerment. It is at its heart bleak, pessimistic and violent. Also homophobic. If its male characters seem like caricatures, the female characters finally feel the same, with their incessant internal conflicts, their almost parasitic need for male company, their weak hankering after men who clearly despise them.


A bible, indeed any book I consider influential must necessarily be affirming of life, of the power of the self and belief. And while I am no romantic, something that affirms life would in turn affirm love and tolerance. This book does nothing of the sort. It concludes with the suggestion that Anna will somehow fall in line with the life she has been bravely resisting for the last 500 pages. She will curb her creativity, be 'sane and responsible' for her daughter's sake, exchange one political ideology for another even after concluding that these will inevitably fail, and earn her living by "integrating with British life at its roots". Her relationship with men will continue to remain adversarial - that somehow, seems a given here.

Finally,I felt disappointed by this rather sad conclusion to a story about a woman so unique, despite her flaws - it felt like a cop out. Powerful yes, but ultimately not uplifting.