On Brown, White, and Rushdie

Sometime back, Venkat (better known as VGR), one of the early day Sulekhaites, wrote a blog at Sulekha, discussing the problem Indian writers (writing) in English have to face. The blog: Writing English While Brown was an interesting read, even though I disagreed with much of its central thesis and opinions.

Consistently, and quite apart from my own skills or lack thereof, I find that one of the hardest things about writing is being Indian. Like black Americans have their little joke about ‘Driving While Black’, Indians, given our peculiar relationship to the English language, might well say, ‘Writing English While Brown.’

No matter what you write – you with your very Indian names, that is – your Indianness will be part of the piece, he insists, in introduction.

The problem is this. How do you write a piece in such a way that when it is read, with your Indian name attached, it leads
to a coherent aesthetic experience for the reader?

The lack of coherence could come, I presume, from the expectations that an Indian name creates about the writing, and what the writing actually is. I don’t think Venkat would disagree with my presumption though. It’s mostly what he’s said all through in the blog.

Anyways, the two ends of the spectrum of responses, according to Venkat, are:

Some combine an incredible naivete with a lack of self-awareness and cheerfully write pastiches of their favorite English authors (say Muthuswamy Chandrasekharan writing a Ludlumish thriller with a hero named Jack Bauer, with no sensitivity to the fact that his name changes the reading of the story). Others are painfully oversensitive and self-conscious to the point that they invest all their creative effort into countering the Writing English While Brown effect, to the point where it ruins the actual intent of the piece.

And then he insists:

Somewhere in between is a happy medium where you can Write English While Brown and be aesthetically successful with respect to your intent (not necessarily commercially). We just haven’t discovered it yet.

Hmmmm. Then he goes on to exhaustively (almost) list the range of responses. I ended up commenting to the blog, which you can read here, if you’re terribly interested (which I assume you aren’t and hence I’m not embedding the comment here).

I forgot all that for a while. Then couple of weeks back, I picked up Vikram Seth’s Equal Music. And right away, I remembered that blog again! Vikram Seth has created all Caucasian characters, living in England, making Western classical music, with totally British problems, if one can call it that. Yes, remind me to put up my (yet unwritten) review, as I would anyways, but that’s not the point. In Venkat’s list this probably No. 9 response: Global Warriorization — something which he doesn’t think Fiction writers (IWEs) have tried (with any success, that is). Did it bother me? Vikram Seth, with clearly Indian name writing about characters who’re do not share a trace of Indian ancestry? Clearly, it did not. If I hadn’t read Venkat’s blog, I’d have not even thought about it. Would it have bothered the Brits? The Americans, for whom Briton is probably as alien as India, the French, the Germans (if select few of the latter two can read English at all)?

Then today, I came across this old little interview of Salman Rushdie from Salon.

When asked if he, “ever worr[ies] that using so many culturally specific references will leave many readers unable to understand what [he is] trying to say?”, Rushdie answers in his characteristic style:

No. I use them as flavoring. I mean, I can read books from America and I don’t always get the slang. American writers always assume that the whole world speaks American, but actually the whole world does not speak American. And American Jewish writers put lots of Yiddish in their books and sometimes I don’t know what they’re saying. I’ve read books by writers like Philip Roth with people getting hit in the kishkes and I think, “What?!”

That’s what I love about Rushdie (and probably that’s exactly what I hate about him, too), his spunk.

It’s fun to read things when you don’t know all the words. Even children love it. One of the things any great children’s writer will tell you is that children like it if in books designed for their age group there is a vocabulary just slightly bigger than theirs. So they come up against weird words, and the weird words excite them. If you describe a small girl in a story as “loquacious,” it works so much better than “talkative.” And then some little girl will read the book and her sister will be shooting her mouth off and she will say to her sister, “Don’t be so loquacious.” It is a whole new weapon in her arsenal.

Too bad Venkat dismisses Rushdie, who dared to write in an English that was anathema to the brown writers (more than it would have been to the whites, even) as escapist: write about anything other than the real world, or about the real world mired in so much of the fantastic that only a literature PhD can figure it out. But then, he’s entitled to his opinion.

I guess Rushdie will just sigh, after all he had taken bull by the horns, long back, in Midnight’s Children. And called the bull a bull.

Meme (not me me) once more

I’ve been blogging, on and off, for almost seven four years now that I think about it. I guess, when nothing else counts, years count; because sometime back Mahendra called me a veteran blogger somewhere. In reality, though, he looks much more of a veteran (it’s just been half a year, and he’s already blogging like a pro). Anyways, the same Mahendra has tagged me. The meme is: strengths of a writer. Now I see multiple takes on it by others who have been tagged: “my strengths as a writer”, “strengths I’d like to have as/in a writer”, “what are admirable strengths of/in a writer” and so on.

Being a compulsive egomaniac, I’d have picked “my strengths as a writer” theme, but that would be too much of a problem! I’m trained in finding weaknesses and faults (ask anyone, if you can’t take my word for it). Trained by myself, of course. Suddenly finding strengths, and that too, in my own writing, which has been the most unorganized hash of whimsical outpour that I’ve ever seen (yes I know I rock), is a job that I don’t have a heart for (sue me for ending a sentence with a preposition, but I won’t stop doing that, ever). Besides, I’d be kidding myself, if I actually listed my (alleged) strengths. My writing is, kind of, in the closet. It hasn’t gone through the grind of publishing industry, crowd’s acceptance/lack of it, and so on. So what use, is a so called strength, that hasn’t really been tested in the real world, so to speak of (there, again!)? So what I will do, is discuss what I find as strengths in writers, the real writers — writers I admire for one reason or the other.

Goes without saying, that those are precisely the strengths that I’d like to have in my writing. How I wish.

1. Personality: I have always enjoyed authors who tend to make their presence felt through their writing. Like Umberto Eco, Marquez, Kundera, even Rushdie. You can feel the author smiling that condescending smile here, that chuckle there, that raised eyebrow somewhere… It’s intimate. That’s what makes reading them fun, even when the content itself gets depressing at times.

2. Sense of humor: While I’ve enjoyed, once in a while, someone like John Steinbeck, I rather prefer authors who have a natural sense of humor, a sense of irrelevance/irreverence even. Of being able to laugh at the world at large. Of course, there has to be more than that, in a book, for me. Still, this is bare-minimum. A controlled sarcasm would be ideal (more so, because I don’t know how to control it: sarcasm is the easiest thing in writing, it’s the control which is the hardest). One book wonders like J. D. Salinger (OK, he’s rumored to have written another, even better, book but that’s for literary historians, looks like), or his present day American counterpart DBC Pierre, also fit in the shoe.

3. Poise: It’s hard to describe poise, but then we all know it, don’t we? If you don’t, read Hermann Hesse’s Peter Camenzind, or James Jyoce’s Portrait of Artist… or Pamuk’s My Name is Red, or Vijayan’s Legends of Khasak/Infinity of Grace, or Ghosh’s Shadow Lines… It’s when the author seems sleepwalking, sure of (him/her)self. There is a sense of calm that emanates from that self-assuredness. It rubs on you. It even rubs on your writing in that period, is what I’ve observed. I guess it cannot be manufactured. It’s one of those “states” that comes to you, or it doesn’t. That’s one strength, or quality, that I’d die for.

4. Perseverance: Damn, it’s the other one. We’ve heard it so many times, that it’s become a cliche. But not all cliches are outdated. This one will never be. Pamuk writes about it beautifully, in his Nobel acceptance speech (a strong recommendation):

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.The writer’s secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind.

5. Erudition: I guess we all love what we don’t have. I love Eco because of the expanse of his medieval scholarship, if one can call it that. Same with Arthur Koestler — not medieval, for sure, but his ability to summon references at will. And it’s not Encyclopedias that they’re writing. They create their own meaning out of it all. That’s what erudition is, to me: the ability to seamlessly weave a thread of meaning from jumble of facts. Pamuk also, again, does that so well with the history of a neglected world, so does Ghosh, in his own way, making connections.

The five are randomly chosen, more or less. Yesterday I might have chosen a few others. Tomorrow, I’m sure I will choose a few different ones. But however random they might be, I’d feel I’ve surpassed myself, if I manage to have these strengths. It’s a long haul, sigh!

And now: time to pass on the meme:

Gaizabonts : feel free to duck this one, too; no obligations, as always.
Anumita : I don’t think you remember me, for I rarely leave comments on your blog, but you make writing look effortless.
Red : Ditto (about the effortless part, I guess you would remember me, or should I have said hope?).
Rajesh : It might look like I’ve forgotten you, but this just might convince you I haven’t.

And then, anyone who wants to pick up the meme, you’re all invited. Just leave a ping/trackback/link to my blog, and increase the traffic here, lol.

The Hungry Tide: A Review

Well, it’s a Amitav Ghosh book, and I’m an unabashed fan, so I’ll drop the pretenses of objectivity. Granted it’s not in the same league as The Shadow Lines (but then that’s once in a lifetime work for an author, even Ghosh). Ghosh seems to have moved away from (almost) pure literature after Shadow Lines, and it might be a loss for pure literature, but its a gain for history-telling genre.

The Hungry Tide, set in Sundarbans islands, or the tide country, tells the story of Piya Roy, an American cetologist of Indian origin, who’s come to the Sundarbans in search of the Irrawady dolphins. On the train, she meets Kanai Dutt — a Delhi based businessman, quite successful at that, who manages a firm which provides professional translation services — who happens to be visiting his Aunt in a (fictional) island of Sundarbans: the Lusibari. They meet again, when Piya takes up his invitation to visit him at his Aunt’s place, after a chance encounter puts Piya on Fokir’s boat. Fokir, an uneducated local fisherman, who knows the ever-changing riverbeds of Sundarbans better than most, takes Piya first to the Dolphins, after Piya shows him the sketches that are the only real mode of communication between the two: Piya knows no Bengali. Fokir knows no English. Piya sees in Fokir, what neither the city bred Kanai, nor Fokir’s village bred wife, who’s fighting against all odds, to become a nurse. He becomes her guide in her subsequent trip to the deep interiors of the Sundarbans, where she is to observe the behavior patterns of the Dolphins. Kanai joins them on impulse, and so does the river.

In his characteristic style, Ghosh weaves an intricately plotted story that touches upon myth, legends, history, science/ecology, and human issues. Ghosh’s USP has always been his painstaking research into the history of the locale where his story is formed. In contrast to “The Glass Palace”, where the story spans across multiple locations, though, Hungry Tide is set in just one area, and consequently, it’s much tighter. Glass Palace, on the other hand, was tremendous in scope, but ended up dragging, especially in its second half. The Hungry Tide, is almost a too easy read, moving at a brisk pace.

Another virtue (for me, at least) of Ghosh, is that he rarely preaches. He rarely takes sides, even. His characters do, of course, but then there is always another character, as central in the story, pitching for the other side. And so, in the spirit of postmodernism, he lays down ideas, and counter-ideas; perceptions and counter-perceptions; pitting myth against science, belief against scepticism, progress/survival against environmentalism, the rustic against the refined, and so on. There are numerous sub-themes, developed just enough to make them meaningful, and aborted just in time (OK, not all the time!) to not let them take away the focus, and all contributing to the intricate structure, which looks almost simple in the end. But if one ponders, even for a minute, its obvious what genius it takes to narrate like that!

The backdrop of Sundarbans, where survival is an everyday matter, where one is confronted by the unknown the every other step, also gives the work the depth that its characters lack, probably. It gives Ghosh an infinite freedom to maneuver. And he has used it, without really abusing it. At times it reminded me of both Calcutta Chromosomes, his very early work, where myths reaffirm themselves, and Circle of Reason, where men are driven by singular passions. Only the passions here are very earthly. But it clearly surpasses both of them, in its poise, its plotting, its focus, its flow. In the past, if Ghosh could really be blamed for anything, it’s his almost missionary zeal to find connections. Although it can be argued, that that’s his unique gift, too. That’s precisely why Hungry Tide is one of his best books. He doesn’t get carried away, in a backdrop, where it well could have been excused. I am waiting for his next book more eagerly now. Clearly, Ghosh is in a great form.

Review: Love in the time of Cholera

“In reality the duty of a writer — the revolutionary duty, if you like — is that of writing well.”

- Gabriel García Márquez (Some interview)

Marquez needs no introduction. What he needs, if anything, is a de-literary-classicization. For years I stayed away from Marquez, because I wasn’t sure I’d get him. I first read Hundred Years of Solitude, and it completely floored me. Marquez the master storyteller is amazing, and what’s more he’s amazingly ordinary, if you throw away the bits and pieces of magical-realism and all the lit-crit concepts — and I mean that ordinary as a compliment. Marquez is the grandfather who tells stories. And boy does he tell them well.

If Hundred Years … was an epic, Love in the time of Cholera is nothing less of an encyclopedia. Only no one writes encyclopedias that way. Marquez, in this extraordinary book, has dissected love without really destroying it; demystified love, without deromanticising it … Nothing is taboo to Marquez, and nothing is sacred, and in a curious way everything is. Love in the time of Cholera makes me want to stop writing any fiction about love. It just feels superfluous now, after the man has flirted with every aspect of love. I guess a lot has been written about it, and a lot will be, so even writing a review of Love in the time … is probably superfluous. I mean, either everyone has read it, or they probably aren’t going to, those who haven’t.

All I would say is, if you’re staying away from Marquez due to the big aura about him, his almost cultish status in the lit crowd, and so on, don’t let that affect you. Marquez writes such a human literature that all the classification, even idolization of it becomes irrelevant. Read it to believe it. I’d say Love in the time of Cholera is a right starting point to Marquez (at least compared to his other celebrated work — Hundred years … ).

My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk

I picked this book on my Karnataka tour and soon cursed myself. This isn’t a book to be carried on a tour, to be read on a train, and the likes. This book is best served with a lot of coffee/ginger-tea and a long vacation. But then I wasn’t so lucky.

My Name Is Red is an intricately woven and beautifully told story that among other things revolves around the debate on the nature of art. Set in the late 16th century Istanbul, the book uses the history of Islamic art, and through it touches the very fundamental questions to the nature of art, including style, as one of the protagonists (or one of the twenty odd narrators — more on this later) says:

“But I have no style whatsoever. Having a style would be worse than being a murderer”

At first the shifting POVs were confusing for me, but then I got used to them, so much so that it seemed very natural way of storytelling, and especially for a book like this which discusses such open ended fundamental questions, having more POVs literally means having more perspectives. Something which makes the book very special.

Pamuk is a master story-teller: his characters recount stories after stories, for illustrating their point or even making one. It’s strange that many of these characters are themselves miniaturists – the artists who are supposed to compliment the stories with illustration – but in the novel they compliment their thoughts/feelings with stories! We’ve come a complete circle.

And all these stories, myths, about famous artists, poets, sultans and patrons of arts, are tightly woven into a plot which reads like a typical mystery novel, or a romance novel, whichever way you look at it. This book is the Foucault’s Pendulum of the world of art. I’ll recommend it for anyone who likes off-beat books.

For those who must have a glimpse of the plot, the Sultan wants a book to be made with illustrations, to gift to the Venetian Doge (go google) to impress them with the Ottoman power. Master illustrator Enishte Effendi is in charge of this project and wants to use the methods of the “Franks” which are against Islamic art. One of the miniaturist is murdered; Black, who is supposed to be writing the text is in love with Enishte’s beautiful daughter, whose husband is missing for years, and is rumoured to have died in a battle; and one of the three remaining miniaturists on the project is suspected to be behind the murder. When the Enishte Effendi is also found murdered in his home, the Sultan has to know what is happening. And the only clues are in pictures that are drawn for the Sultan’s book. And if I failed to interest you, blame me, not Pamuk. Give it a try, anyways.

I work in empty spaces

Last week I wrote about Umberto Eco. I wanted to follow it up with this interesting interview that Hindu published. Some interesting snippets…

And then I have a secret. Did you know what will happen if you eliminate the empty spaces from the universe, eliminate the empty spaces in all the atoms? The universe will become as big as my fist.Similarly, we have a lot of empty spaces in our lives. I call them interstices. Say you are coming over to my place. You are in an elevator and while you are coming up, I am waiting for you. This is an interstice, an empty space. I work in empty spaces. While waiting for your elevator to come up from the first to the third floor, I have already written an article! (Laughs).

I guess most people more or less use those empty spaces, but punctual people typically end up getting larger empty spaces, at least in India. How many times it has happened to me that I reached some appointment on time just to find out that the other party obviously doesn’t have the same concern for my time as I have (for their or mine). But in a way, the moment I waste that time waiting and getting upset over it, I value my time less too. Not surprising that I don’t have a thing to show, even leaving aside the proverbial creativity business…

Yes. A film cannot select all the layers. It has to make do with jambon or cheese… I didn’t react like authors who, immediately after the film is made, say it is not at all like my book. But after that experience, I asked my publisher not to sell the rights of the novel to cinema. I did this because I discovered that 80 per cent of readers read the book after the movie. And that is very painful for a novelist.

Shyam Benegal wrote a interesting piece in last Sunday’s TOI on the same subject. Worth reading…

Eco on the other hand dismisses the issue with a characteristic style:

The only enviable position is that of Homer’s who had the film made more than 2000 years after the book

The man wouldn’t stop fascinating me, would he?

Eco, Translations and The French Connection

Umberto Eco fascinated me with his Foucault’s Pendulum. So much, that I haven’t dared to read any of his other books. Sounds crazy, but when you start with something like Foucault’s Pendulum, you fear if the other books are going to live up to it.

Anyways. I was surprised that I didn’t know Umberto Eco was recently in India, something that I got to know from Element’s of Eco-logy, Antara Dev Sen in The Week. The article was more relevant for me, as it talks about travails of translation:

The context is important, he said while chatting with us later. “If you say ‘my nipote’ in Italian, I know that it cannot be your grandchild—you are too young!” he said, which reassured me. “So it must be my niece or nephew,” said I breezily, trying to pass off as a native Italian. “You have read Mouse or Rat!” said he, reassured in turn. Indeed my knowledge that nipote means any of the above was based solely on this book, where Eco lucidly explains the concept of translation as negotiation.

Speaking of translations, TOI has an interesting article (surprise surprise!) that has a title that’s abused left and right these days: Lost In Translation, which incidentally also mentions Eco’s India visit.

The organization that brought Eco to India, Transcultura, has been campaigning for alternative anthropology and “is constructed on the principles of reciprocal knowledge, respect and mutual enrichment, it develops methodologies of transcultural analysis applicable to different situations and intercultural contexts”

The French Connection is the context, of course, but then what I liked about the article is that it exemplifies how anthropology can affect perceptions and can cause havoc. In India, we ignore it almost as a irrelevant discipline and let others define us in any way they please, not realizing that the images that float in air come back to haunt us.

Coming back to the original article, let me end on a lighter note, with Eco again. Lighter, not frivolous, mind you:

Similar situations may seem completely baffling in different languages. “If I say I went into a bar, ordered a coffee, gulped it down in an instant and left,” said Eco, “it is perfectly understandable to an Italian audience. But in America, where coffee is served too hot, and in large mugs, it is confusing. Similarly, if I say, I ordered a coffee and sipped it for half an hour thinking of my beloved, it is okay in America, but in Italy they would not know how I could take half an hour over a coffee served at room temperature in a cup barely an inch tall!” The translator needs to negotiate such difficult terrain when rendering a work into another language.

Smell, A Review

Smell By Radhika Jha

As a rule, if I put down a book I rarely pick it up again, if it can’t hold my attention in ten pages. When a book by Indian female writer starts with stereotypical portrayals of first generation immigrants, and the book is set outside India, I would typically not break that rule. Still, I am glad I curbed my instincts, when it came to Smell for I had not one but two strong recos from people who are probably more dismissive of bad writing than I.

Smell is a refreshingly original book by Radhika Jha, for one it’s anything but Indian (not that I’ve anything against a book being Indian, but it’s refreshing to see an Indian not being bound by that identity while writing, especially fiction). Yes, she uses the angst of a refugee – doubly so, for her protagonist has to leave her native country Kenya, and has never seen her ancestral country and yet the identity is kinda stamped on her — but that’s just a minor detail.

The novel itself is an adult version of Alice In Wonderland, only a dark one. When Leela, the protagonist is sent to her uncle’s place in Paris, after her father’s death, she doesn’t know that she’s almost abandoned by her mother to her faith. The new home is also closed on her, in unusual circumstances, and she’s left to fend for herself in an alien country.

What transpires is a series of experiences and relationships, as she tries to find a meaning, in all the chaos. With only her strong sense of smell to guide her, she steps in an out of different worlds. There is an element of unbelievable in the story, but it’s just plausibility which is a question. When a writer flirts with implausibility, it’s absolutely forgivable if the story is fascinating, and not trying to ram something dull down your throats, and Radhika has left nothing to complain in that department. You become a part, and not just a spectator, of Leela’s sensual journey, as she struggles to rediscovers her soul. The breadth of experiences and the stories and sub-stories keep you guessing where will you be led next. Smell is more than worth a read.

Five Points Anyone?

Book Review: Five Points Someone

The book starts with a tagline “What not to do at IIT” and in all fairness sticks to it. For FPS is NOT a book about IITs anymore than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is about, well motorcycle maintenance. For one, it could have been set absolutely anywhere and would still have been as enjoyable as a well made teen movie.

Yes that’s a compliment, for FPS — whatever else it doesn’t have — has all the makings a bollywood love story, including its obsession with the lame and the banal.

Like, the protagonist is hit by (sic!) a charming girl who ends up being (yeah you guessed it right) the prof’s daughter. The prof (yeah right again) is the HOD of the institute…

Or, the young prof back from US is the only prof who looks beyond grades…

Or, the topper has oily hair and is a hopeless mugger…

Or, the coolest guy is the last in the class in GPA

Or ….

But that’s just a minor crib. The thing that I felt barely twenty pages into the book was a creepy feeling — the kind you get when you see the author talking in stereotypes and you know that the subtleties is the last thing you can expect, and that he’s going to screw up badly. Way before the end, I was vindicated. Bhagat hit onto something interesting and ended up spoiling it big time.

I asked myself, if I had read this book before going to the IIT, would I have ever wanted to go to a place like that and my answer was (using the IIT lingo) “scope hota hai!” (not a chance). The very idea of fun in the book is so beaten — grass, vodka and Floyd. I mean, I understand the profs being stereotyped but why do even the I want to break free students have to be cardboard characters? I was just a matka student (as the real IITians — the btechs would call the post grads), and still in less than half the time I had more fun in IIT, and met more interesting people than any in the book can ever come close to.

Bhagat’s story on the other hand goes on creating the carefree five-pointers having fun and the nerdy mugger nine pointers missing on life stereotype that’s so disappointing coming from an ex-IITian. But my worse disappointment is that the book completely misses the excitement, the sheer intoxicating excitement, that life on IIT campus is — despite the backbreaking workloads and the monstrous relative grading system. Where are freshie nites, the socials, the PAFs, the Mood Indigos (or its counterparts), the wing-treats, the film-shows (and the pondy shows), the various clubs, the intra-hostel sporting events and spats, the late night carrom sessions, the doom competitions in labs … the list is practically endless. Surely not all of this can happen with people mugging up all the time?

But then, of course, Bhagat was not writing a book about IIT, he was writing a book that would be easy to read, fun and easy to market (successful on all counts). The IIT in the name is just to increase that marketability. Plus when you do it, you create a minor controversy — a sure recipe for success (any review is good review, right?).

To be fair, the book is not totally worthless. It has its moments of fun, and is a nice traveling companion, or just a relaxing read. If you’re looking for anything more, you’d be disappointed. It’s the Indian Da Vinci Code. All masaala no meat.

Peter Camenzind

Sometimes not having any expectations from a book helps. I picked up Herman Hesse’s Peter Camenzind, on a recommendations from a friend, mainly because it was thin. I was anticipating busy weeks ahead and didn’t want to chew on a large book. I’m glad that I didn’t know, till I was well past the half-way mark, that Hesse was a Nobel winner, further freeing me from the expectations syndrome.

The size, however, proved pretty deceptive, for Hesse (and in all fairness the translator, although I’ve no way of judging the competence of the translation) writes with a simplicity that’s as deceptive.

Peter Camenzind is one of those stories of growing up, only the growing up has a slightly different dimension. But what struck me wasn’t the story itself — for there is hardly a story to tell here — rather the way it is told. And there are very few stories which have managed to strike such a harmonious chord with me. The narration is almost poetic, and yet there is no ostentatious ornamentation.

The novel is a first person account of the eponymous character, who struggles through his youth struggling to find his identity as an artist, and at another level trying to come to terms with his other identity — as a human being who loves nature. This almost universal struggle takes him to different places, and his life is interwoven with different people — falling in and out of love, finding and losing cherished friendships …

The stories of his unrequited loves also keep on changing the shades, another dimension of growth — not at all disjoint from his holistic growth. It’s this evolution of the psychology of the central character that really sets this book apart for me – although I’m sure there are many others that fall in league (The Portrait of Artist …, obviously comes to the mind — although I’ve not read it yet). It lends the simple story, and even simpler narration a depth that’s comparable to the very best of this genre. It’s one of those books that when it ends, has altered you in fundamental ways, and yet it’s hard to tell anyone what exactly is it about — the same problem that this review had to contend with. I regret that I cannot do justice to something as subtle…