Who's reading what,when & the experience

wonderwomanusa

I used the first volume of HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES as a sleep inducer for years -- I don't think I ever got through the first chapter. Ten minutes and I was yawning, 12 minutes and the book would fall out of my hands as I fell asleep.

Aishah

Any book is a sleep-inducer for me, if it's late and I want a short read. I read nightly and when I realize I haven't a clue what the last paragraph was saying I switch off the light! I should imagine that Churchill's history would be a pretty weighty tome in all senses and a very good sleep inducer!!! BTW it is not a reflection on the book of the moment the fact that I fall asleep- it maybe incredibly gripping but my eyes are just too heavy.

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global_yatri

try "stillness speaks" by the same guy who wrote "the power of now" (i forget his name)... really makes me sit up and re-read each page and i have to put it down after about three pages just to digest what i've read - in an exciting profound way.

speaking of sleep inducing though - what is up with arundhati roy's god of small things - ugh! maybe it's just the style, but i couldn't get through it

Aishah

I know what you mean about God of Small Things. I quite liked it but sometimes it 'got on my nerves'. Didn't mind the writing style -I thought the subject matter for an 'Indian' novel was unique,profound and disturbing . When I finished the book thought it wasn't a novel I would re-read.

capt_mahajan

I didn't like 'small things'.

I found it contrived, and a good example of the kind of book I find irritating.. written primarily for a foreign audience and a 'look at us exotic Indians who can write cleverly ..in English, too. Wow!'

And the lady can get equally irritating in her activist persona too.

My wife liked 'The God of...' , though. No accounting for taste

Now re-reading 'The Moor's Last Sigh'. I think Rushdie's best was Midnight's Children.

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batistuta

Eckhart Tolle. Agree with you on those books being Profound. His latest book ' The New Earth' is a quite good. too.

Arundhati Roy is a Psedo-activist .( If such a term exists)

kidsan

but have you read Shalimar Capt? I thought this a close second to MC...be interesting to hear an indian perspective on it??

Nick-H

The God of Small Things seems to really divide people into lovers or haters!

I enjoyed it. And read it twice.

I don't find Arundhati Roy's non-fiction (eg newspaper articles) stuff at all easy to read.

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capt_mahajan

Yes, and didn't think too much of it.. thought it was a well written book but factually (or by implication) haywire.

He got Kashmir almost completely wrong... which is usually the Westerners simplistic view on Kashmir.

Come to think of it, he is a westerner too

kidsan

oh dear, i feared you would say this

I loved it as a book and felt that i had learned a lot about the horrors of kashmir through reading it, so am sad to hear that i may have been misinformed.
What did he get wrong in your opinion?

capt_mahajan

Don't want to sidetrack this thread, but in a nutshell, what people often get wrong is the history of Kashmir and the circumstances in 1947, when Kashmir opted for India, and under what conditions. They also are not fully aware of the status given to Kashmir under the Indian Constitution.

What they do is, treat Kashmir like it was an occupied land, with people being oppressed since Indpendence, and think it is akin to, say, East Timor. Not true, though earlier Central governments have much to answer for as far as rigging elections etc are concerned.

Stories are often mixed with conjecture... and it becomes a litany of who did what to whom without any understanding of the problem or the history, or terrorism which has been around there for close to two decades, planned, funded, manned and everything else by our neighbour. The 'terrorist' in the book is a romantic caricature.

A whole book is needed to explain Kashmir. Rushdie did a poignant 'paradise destroyed' act as an aside to a story, and tried to imply that just because his grandparents came from kashmir, he is an expert.

To my knowledge, he was never even there, but 2500 miles away in Mumbai in his childhood, then abroad, so where does he expertise come from? CNN and BBC?


He writes well, but, like Naipaul usually does, he got this wrong.

kidsan

Hmm...i suspect we could go way off topic here
and i think that a seperate thread on kashmir is probably also asking for trouble so maybe i'll just go read a bit more about the subject.

machadinha

Thanks for asking, Aishah. And sorry for slow reply -- some technical glitches kept me offline for a while. Hey, gave me some to read! And (so) warning -- lengthy Mach musings ahead (perhaps befitting of my return ):

Cremer's poetry I've been taking in piecemeal, like poetry should I think. The small collection covers his lifespan (ca. 1950s till now), so it's hard to put them under one umbrella. Sometimes what I guess you'd call hermetic, sometimes more vulnerable and romantic, with women playing a big role, often idealized and/but still from a macho standpoint, yet offering some depth to the latter. I don't know, I don't know the man (or the author, rather) so well, but it offers an interesting and perhaps unsuspected dimension to him. He was born in the eastern Netherlands during or shortly before WWII, and having been a kid or not this is another dimension that permeates his work, something I can relate to due to personal family history. I guess subconsciously at least that generation was highly affected, coupled with social developments in the 1950s-70s. The (early) American section btw consists of mere observations copied straight from the papers or early TV it seems on what I presume was a journey of his there; short notes with neither a plot nor a judgement, just reflections on outlandish murders and crimes (and a good reminder that all that lamenting how this is worse and "on the increase" in our time should be taken with a pitcher of salt).

I changed my original description of Arendt's book a little now that I've read it. It strikes me as a lucid and straightforward critique of Zionism, which she had originally been passionate about, however I know too little of the subject to really judge it in any depth. Inasmuch as it consists of a polemic addressing the various strands of Zionism, one can see what she's getting at though.

Her theoretical arguments strike me as sound (interestingly, much of it was written on the eve of the creation of the state of Israel, one of the essays just two days before the event); when it comes to factual political and historical prognosis, much of it just hasn't come true, or not in the way she expects. Another thing that gave me food for thought is her high esteem for the Kibbutz movement, something that likewise doesn't seem to me to have found the international resonance she seems to read into it at that time. Mind you, this is no critique as such, I guess any prognosis must always fall by the wayside in the end, one of the trickiest fields there are, and better steered the hell away from by any sensible writer.

Anyway, I'll leave it at that before we run into a discussion on the pros and cons of Israel and yadida.

I'm currently working my way through the Nihilism and Culture book. In the first part, and like other authors, he tries to outline the various symptoms of nihilism as expressed in Western culture over say the past 2-3 centuries, rather than offering a definition, which he reckons cannot exist, as pure nihilism can't. In the second part, he similarly tries to outline the development of the Western notion of "culture"; to arrive at what he calls a "culturological" analysis, or working theory, of both in the final part.

I don't know, one thing I like about it is although it's tough, it's highly accessible and lucid at the same time, with a clear head and tail to the argument, unlike some more modern philosophical musings. It's probably romantic but it's a quality I find in many (of the better) thinkers of the time and that preceding it, who really sat down to describe a concept from A to Z. Maybe it's because I was born in that era and so my personal subconscious roots lie there; in any case to me it beats a lot of (post-) modern rambling about nothing in particular, with the clue often missing (out of wilful "irony" or mere cluelessness, one presumes) & the reader often being left to wonder do you get paid to write, or do you write to get paid. Whatever, I find it hard to put my finger on it, but maybe you'll catch my drift.

On a more personal level and probably veering off into romanticism and orientalism indeed (then again, as a befriended author once noted, perhaps even our romanticism isn't necessarily wrong and may serve as a cultural carrier, or as a means to re-infuse a culture with something that is underhighlighted or has gone missing -- a call to re-introduce some magic or mysticism into one's self-perception at both ends of the spectrum, I guess), the book seems to hook up with Camus's writings, which greatly influenced me as a young man (his essays rather than his novels, notably his The Myth of Sisyphus and its follow-up in a way, The Rebel). Like Goudsblom, Albert Camus describes what he calls man's state or awareness of absurdity as (so far) a symptom, not an active stance as such. And he goes on to describe several of the manifestations of this symptom in art and literature and so on, to pinpoint where the people who have stumbled on this condition have found their ways to evade it, rather than to live it and confront it, if you will -- finding their way out of the dilemma. (In the one essay, exemplified by the question of whether to commit suicide or not -- in the other, by that of why any revolutionary movement always tends to relapse into the next authoritarian system.)

Instead, Camus (implicitly or explicitly) suggests finding a way to maintain oneself in what he describes as this "desert of the mind," beyond either hope (and therefore beyond despair) or regret. Now, my feeling has always been this is, and must be, the end result of Western thinking -- to end up precisely at zero, if you will ("a great feat, but a depressing one," to quote Hakim Bey again). I'm not at all sure if and where we will go from there, and so far it doesn't seem to be happening. It seems to me however that in certain oriental ways of thinking, we can find this point of nihilism, this zero point, at the outset rather than as a conclusion -- to go on one's jolly and frivolous way from there, to precisely "populate" that desert with varying "baroque" outings of the mind and spirit, as again Camus faintly asked for. I believe we can find this in certain strands of Sufism, (Zen) Buddhism, Taoism, perhaps even at the very core of Hinduism. Not to over-romanticize, I'm aware of the discrepancy between some of these movements' theoretical radicalisms or esotericisms & their actual and historical or contemporary manifestations, however a certain impetus seems to be there. And conversely, one doesn't need to look to the East for this impulse -- however to turn to, say, a Christian monastery of this or that sect today in the hope of some autonomist enlightenment would seem to be an exercise in absurdity indeed (as turning to the average Buddhist monastery or Sufic sect probably would be). I feel a certain tradition has been lost here (in the West, more so than in the East perhaps, although I don't really hold my hopes up for any "living" [let alone relevant] tradition in the latter case either), and is unlikely to be revived any time soon, neo-pagans and so on notwithstanding.

[As a sidenote, Goudsblom notes somewhere that he cannot find the origins of that classic nihilist phrase, "Nothing is true -- everything is permitted" (or "permissible"), famous in the Western tradition I believe as uttered by one of Dostoevsky's characters. He interestingly misses -- probably for a personal lack of orientalism, although his favorite Nietzsche among others certainly looked that way -- that one of his earlier quoted thinkers himself relates it to Hasan i-Sabbah, the fabled Old Man of the Mountains of the fortress of Alamut, stronghold of the heretical Islamic sect of the Assassins (today lingering on as the Ismailis, quite big in India, incidentally) in Persia around the first millennium AD. Little is known of their teachings as their city and library were eventually sacked by the Mongols, however the notion that the idea arose here seems to be persistent. I should still read Rashid al-Din, a remotely contemporary historian who to my knowledge may be the only historical source on the matter. In any case, legend has it that the sect was entirely devoted to the utmost esoteric teachings of Islam, finally leading to the realization that "there is no authority but oneself" so to speak and no excuse to hide this under hierarchisms (both my interpretation), and leading Hasan to, in the middle of the Ramadan, proclaim the arrival of the Day of Resurrection, and that "the chains of the Law have been broken -- Nothing is true, everything is permitted" -- upon which he and his followers burst out into an endless round of feasting in celebration. He died just a few years after; assassinated, some say, by established parties in Alamut who had no interest in this communal sharing of the utmost liberation. The idea of the Resurrection (or Qiyamat) was laboriously brought back to precisely an allegory, not something to be immediately and factually enjoyed.

It's hard to say how much of this is apocryphal, however the phrase as such is persistently related back to this sect, perhaps all due to some 18th-century Western romantic nihilist thinker though, who's to say.]

In any case, have I made a point here? Probably not. It's just more food for thought, that's all.

To round up, the gypsy tales I've only flicked through so far. It's just from a commercial mass consumption series, so sadly lacks any detailed info on the origins of the stories, other than the editor's intro. They claim many of the stories dwell on local themes, yet are imbued with typical gypsy ones. Funny enough, literally all of them start with "Once upon a time..." As you may know, no one seems to know for sure, but the general consensus seems to be the gypsies originated in what is today Rajasthan. As a music lover, and one of both Indian music and flamenco (but a layman at both), I can't say I've ever found any obvious links between the latter and Rajasthani folk tunes, which might be understandable though given some 1000 years of wandering. Interestingly, observing flamenco dance's hand moves and bodily postures it's not hard to imagine how these might have originated in Indian dance traditions, although their acute meaning seems to have been largely lost, other than in the Indian case.

Well, blah blah. I told you it would be lengthy No pedantic proof of erudition btw (or I should hope not), just a fun exercise in offering a reader's experience. And by no means to step over the excellent literature discussions and recommendations here; I'm not much of a fiction reader as it is anyway, although more so than I once was, and it largely depends what comes my way.

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Aishah

Thanks Machadinha for your reviews! You lost me totally in the middle of Nihilism and Culture but i have saved your reviews and will read once i am back in Jaisalmer with more time.A combination of presently in a room in Jodhpur having done the wheel alignment and film on back window of car in heat of 40'c, a noisy desert cooler reverberating beside me, and concentrating on your brilliant erudition!! is bringing on drowsiness.
Interesting comments re gypsies - having done belly dancing a while ago, learning mainly Middle Eastern styles, you can see the movements both hand and body definitely coming from here. Also Spanish hand movements as you suggested, but music? Distinctly different rhythms, hand clapping patterns etc, and timing - most Rajasthani music is in 3, 4 or 8 beat timings and fairly repetitive,Flamenco is far more sophisticated technically. For my own interest, checked out Wikipedia on Flamenco and when you see the number of other influences coming into the gypsy music as it moved across into Spain, including Jewish, can understand why so different.

batistuta

The Book thief, Markus Zuzak.

With Death as it's narrator, It chronicles the life of a 10 year-old girl and her love for books, set in Nazi Germany during Hitler's rise to power, it potrays the events that unfold and the last 50 pages or so are very touching . A very good read.


Aishah, as Kidsan has posted, this is an excellent read and Better than A thousand splendid suns, Imho.