The Old Man and the Sea

Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway

Paperback, 99 pages

First Published:  1952

Publisher:  Arrow Books

ISBN:  9780099908401

Blurb:  Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the story of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. In a perfectly crafted story, which won for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature, is a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements in which he lives.

 “I try not to borrow. First you borrow. Then you beg.”

Among the most iconic books written in 20th century, Ernest Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea” has a spot of its own. In case you have not been living in a cave since you were born, you’d have heard of its reference somewhere. Published in 1952, The Old Man and the Sea went on to win Pulitzer Prize. It was also cited as the contributing factor to Ernest Hemingway’s Nobel Prize in 1954.

 Santiago, an old veteran fisherman, embarks on a lonesome journey in his skiff to catch a big fish after not catching a single fish for past eighty four days. The book chronicles the struggle of the old man and the marlin in the Gulf Stream. Even with scarcity of basic amenities, Santiago does not let go of the marlin, at the risk of his own life. He does so because he believes in his skills no matter what the other fishermen think of him. The book is the depiction of struggle of man with the nature for his existence.

The writing style of Hemingway is poetic. The scenes are full of imagery. The book contains a lot of monologues, which are masterfully written by the Nobel Laureate. Hemingway is highly economical with his words without leaving any point of the characterization of the old man. Without even ever talking about it, the author depicts the desire of the Old Man to cement his place in the Cuban society and culture. The author also paints the picture of the relation between the young boy, Manolin, and the Old Man. The reader is presented with a vivid picture of their interdependence on each other, even though the young boy’s parents do not let him work with the Old Man.

Although it might take you only a single sitting to read the entire novella, the book will end up giving you enough food for thought that will take a long time digesting. The central theme of the book is man’s capability, strength, bravery and ethics at the time of adversity. Te recurring theme of manhood in Hemingway’s literature is also present in this book. The struggle in the Gulf Stream between the marlin and the old man can also be seen as a metaphor for the adulation, love and respect between two adversaries of equal footing. The turn of the events later on in the book tend to show the ethics of manhood, too.

The book can be summed up as a triumph of an individual. It is the moral code of a life laid bare, where a man has to fight for his even most essential needs.  In modern life we would hardly have to struggle for life’s basic needs against nature like Santiago, but still he teaches us how to accept failure in life, strive alone for our goals with dignity, believe in our capability, and when success comes accept it with humility.

I think every lover of literature should go through this small, yet magnanimous piece of literature. Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea is highly recommended!  

Reviewed by: Shadab Ahmed.

A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities

By Charles Dickens

Paperback, 382 pages

First Published in:  1854

Publisher:  Bantam Classics

ISBN:  9780553211764 

Blurb:  'Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; -- the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!' 

After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the ageing Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror, and they soon fall under the lethal shadow of La Guillotine.

A masterful pageant of idealism, love, and adventure -- in a Paris bursting with revolutionary frenzy, and a London alive with anxious anticipation -- A Tale of Two Cities is one of Dickens's most energetic and exciting works. 

Doctor Alexander Manette has been captured in the prison of Bastille, before the French Revolution, and has almost lost his senses in the eighteen years of exile from the world beyond his cell. When an old friend and banker, Jarvis Lorry, summons Dr Manette’s daughter, Lucie Manette, on the pretext of settling some issues of the property that her ‘dead’ father has left her, she agrees to meet him in Dover. After circumlocution, Mr Lorry eventually tells Lucie that they are to get her father back from St Antoine in Paris. After hearing the news, Lucie passes out. Soon after, they are on their way to St. Antoine, for the Resurrection of Dr Alexander Manette.

I wasn’t acquainted with Dickens’ writings before I picked up A Tale of Two Cities. Although, I had read David Copperfield as a child, I don’t remember any of it now. Except hating Uriah Heep.

 However, a lover of World history, I loved the way the conditions of both France and England have been portrayed with n number of metaphors. Apart from what I had read in high school, I knew nothing of the French Revolution. But Dickens does not show us just history. He shows us lives of people of the Guillotine. Or even that of people in England. Many say that Dickens relied on Carlyle’s The French Revolution for writing A Tale of Two Cities, which in itself wasn’t very correct in exploring the history of the event. While many say, that Dickens corrected over the facts before writing A Tale of Two Cities. Whatever it is, as Dickens tells me of these lives, I take them as gospel.

The second part of the book was quite a task. I couldn’t take much of Charles Darnay’s courting Lucie, Sydney Carton’s drinking bouts, Dr Mantette’s madness, the blabbering of Miss Pross, the messy hair of Jerry Cruncher, and his wife’s praying against his will. I drudged along as I read each paragraph of the Book Two. I was dreaming of the next book I would read after the torment Dickens was doing on me would be over. God! How I hated the second part of the book. I found it agonizing and tiresome with all the stupid and banal details. If I have forced myself to read a book to the verge of madness, it was A Tale of Two Cities’ Book Two. Had it not been in my literature course, I would have stopped right there and chucked it out of my window.

Had this been my first Dickens’ novel, I think I won’t have picked  him up again. But I read a little of A Christmas Carol, and it was damn hilarious. I don’t know if Dickens tried to show off too much with all the symbolism and metaphors deliberately in A Tale of Two Cities, just to prove something. I didn’t like it much.

The Third part of the book was finally where I picked, I mean, the book picked momentum again. I loved the third part of it. It was all business, and no bullshit; unlike book two. I so want to reveal the plot and say how much I loved every aspect of it. But I know, no spoilers.

However, I love Sydney Carton. Hell with Darnay! Carton is my real hero, and I think everybody who has read the book would fall in love with Sydney Carton. I cannot stop thinking about poor Carton since I finished reading ATOTC.

The Book Three is a heart wrencher. It makes the torment of the rest of the book worthwhile.

However, the recommendation would be that if you haven’t read Dickens before, DO NOT ATTEMPT to read A Tale of Two Cities for the first one of his series of books. I would have said that you shouldn’t read it at all, however, just for the sake of Sydney Carton, I say that you definitely should. 

Nude Before God

Nude Before God

By Shiv K. Kumar

Paperback, 184 pages

Published in:  1983

Publisher:  Random House India

ISBN:  9788184003833 

Blurb:  Sex and death meet in a story bursting with laughs and essential life lessons.

Ram Krishna is an artist who paints nudes. He is obsessed with death and with his wife’s possible infidelity. Despite his own conjugal insecurities, he engages in an adulterous liaison. Immediately, Karma strikes: he is murdered by his wife’s suspected lover. Unclad of corporal existence, he hovers above earth and discovers that—apart from his parents, dog, and a few friends—no one misses him. Dejected, he encounters Yama, the Lord of Death, and begins a long conversation that extinguishes Ram Krishna’s airs and affectations, and makes him see that he may have been wrong about life . . . And his wife. 

Armed with a wry sense of humour, Shiv K. Kumar lays bare the questions about humanity’s inescapable end, plying us with a story that gives us new reasons to live and laugh.

Nude Before God was my first encounter with Shiv K Kumar’s writing. A satire on afterlife, the book said. I was intrigued. It seemed like my kind of thing, and once I started it, there was no stopping.

Rama Krishna is a top-notch artist, known for his paintings of nudes. Married to a Christian, Mary, you cannot call him a faithful husband. As soon as he picks up the call one night after returning home, it is some Kenneth George asking for his wife. The seed of doubt sprouts in his heart. Has Mary been having a Christian lover? Before he can look for the evidences, he finds himself dead, and talking to Yama, the god of death.

This book is in the true sense a classic. I have never ever enjoyed and learnt of the bitterness of the world so good humouredly as it has been depicted in this book. Shiv K Kumar has shown us the world through the eyes of an artist. Who finds love, beauty and sometimes sex, everywhere. Who sees the whole world as a rhythm. I was mesmerised by this aspect of the book.

The best thing about the book was showing the thirteen days of afterlife, and the torture and torment and fun a soul has in the time. I could never have imagined anybody writing a satire on afterlife and making fun of it. Shiv K kumar has become my ideal.

Even apart from the death and its satire, he touches several sensitive topics with all his humour. The infidelity, the sex, the envy, the pain, the hypocrisy, he shows it all. A true mirror to the world you live in and would be considered dead in.

Shiv K Kumar is the man who thought out of the box back in 1983. And his straightforward attitude might still not be taken in by everyone. And that is what I loved him for the most.

A very short book, it can be finished right in one weekend. And that would be the best ever entertaining weekend you would have had in a long time. 

I would recommend the book to everybody who loves reading, especially to those who believe in having ideologies completely opposite to the contemporary. Even if they be superficial.

In the Body of the World

In the Body of the World : A Memoir

by Eve Ensler

 

Paperback, 220 pages

Published: April, 2013

Publisher:  Random House India

ISBN:  9780805095180

Blurb: From the bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues and one of Newsweek’s 150 Women Who Changed the World, a visionary memoir of separation and connection—to the body, the self, and the world

Playwright, author, and activist Eve Ensler has devoted her life to the female body—how to talk about it, how to protect and value it. Yet she spent much of her life disassociated from her own body—a disconnection brought on by her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s remoteness. “Because I did not, could not inhabit my body or the Earth,” she writes, “I could not feel or know their pain.”

But Ensler is shocked out of her distance. While working in the Congo, she is shattered to encounter the horrific rape and violence inflicted on the women there. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer, and through months of harrowing treatment, she is forced to become first and foremost a body—pricked, punctured, cut, scanned. It is then that all distance is erased. As she connects her own illness to the devastation of the earth, her life force to the resilience of humanity, she is finally, fully—and gratefully—joined to the body of the world.

Unflinching, generous, and inspiring, Ensler calls on us all to embody our connection to and responsibility for the world.

Lately, I have been in love with reading Memoirs. After reading some quite nice ones, when I got my hands on Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World, I couldn’t wait to get through it. As I read it, I realised I have become a sucker for memories. Be it mine, a friend’s, or an author’s. I love the idea of memories.

I had heard a lot about Eve Ensler before I got to read In the Body of the World. Her very acclaimed book, The Vagina Monologues had gathered all the praise it could. Being a burgeoning feminist myself, I instantly became a fan of Ensler for all that she has done for the women on the face of this earth.

Ensler’s memoir, In the Body of the World is primarily an account of her fight with her cancer. A uterine cancer that emptied her from within, quite literally.  This book is as much an account of the atrocities meted out to the women of Congo, and the making of their dream place, the City of Joy.

The first thing that intrigued me about the book was its index. She called it SCANS. I wondered what the SCANS was about. And just as you are through a few pages, she tells us why. And you are just awestruck at her capabilities and the uprightness that she shows towards life.  

The book, if to be described in a word, should be ‘heart-wrenching’. The images that Ensler shows us are vivid, and explicitly disturbing. Ensler doesn’t  hold back. She gives you the details of every damn disturbing thing in such a raw and graphic language that you would squint your eyes and say ‘Ew!’ Until now, of all the books I have read, In the Body of the World was the most disturbing one. And I loved it for that.

The women of Congo, the centre of attention for Eve even during her turbulent times of cancer, steal the show. So much that has been written about them, it made me feel more and more related and identifiable to them.

No wonder that the book is depressingly explicit in terms of the imagery, it is humorous. You would want to laugh in all the heart ache that Ensler gives you. This is the biggest thing that makes obvious the brilliance of Ensler as a writer. The way she marries laughter with tears, my hats off to her.

Eve’s language (Gosh, I am addressing her as Eve as if she were my childhood chum! But I felt closer and closer to her as I read the book. OMG! She is such an amazing writer) is like a conversation. You feel like she is talking to you; sitting in front of you sipping coffee and telling you everything that has gone by in her life lately. The book sounds like a diary. It is filled with casual but strong metaphors. And what took my heart away were the short chapters. Yes, I am a sucker for short chapters too.

She makes you feel ‘in her head’.

At last I would say, Eve Ensler makes you introspect. Whether you want it or not. She is a spiritual guide! I found it out right when she talked of the somnolence in all of us.  “The choice between being awake or half asleep,” she says.

You got to read the book to know it all. It is totally, totally worth your time.

Wedding Night

Wedding Night

by Sophie Kinsella

Paperback, Large Print, 400 pages

Published on:  April 25th 2013

Publisher:  Bantam Press 

ISBN: 9780593070154

Blurb:  Lottie just knows that her boyfriend is going to propose during lunch at one of London’s fanciest restaurants. But when his big question involves a trip abroad, not a trip down the aisle, she’s completely crushed. So when Ben, an old flame, calls her out of the blue and reminds Lottie of their pact to get married if they were both still single at thirty, she jumps at the chance. No formal dates—just a quick march to the altar and a honeymoon on Ikonos, the sun-drenched Greek island where they first met years ago.
 
Their family and friends are horrified. Fliss, Lottie’s older sister, knows that Lottie can be impulsive—but surely this is her worst decision yet. And Ben’s colleague Lorcan fears that this hasty marriage will ruin his friend’s career. To keep Lottie and Ben from making a terrible mistake, Fliss concocts an elaborate scheme to sabotage their wedding night. As she and Lorcan jet off to Ikonos in pursuit, Lottie and Ben are in for a honeymoon to remember, for better . . . or worse.

Sophie Kinsella being on the top of the list of my most favourite authors, I was more than dying to read her latest release, Wedding Night. I had been excitedly waiting for it since May last year when I heard that Kinsella was penning down yet another book called Wedding Night.

The book starts when one of our protags, Lottie is with her four year long boyfriend Richard in a restaurant anticipating a proposal that Richard is supposedly going to make. Sadly, it doesn’t turn out to be anything of the kind for Lottie and thus with the inevitable breakup of the couple, Lottie is shattered.

On the other hand, Lottie’s sister- Fliss, is in the middle of a bitter divorce with Daniel which is also making her seven year old son, Noah, suffer a great deal.

When the crestfallen Lottie suddenly has an encounter with her first love from fifteen years ago, and decides on the spur of the moment to get married to him asap, Fliss is alarmed. Fearing it to be one of Lottie’s Unfortunate Choices, and that  Lottie would end up in the same situation as hers, Fliss is hell bent on getting their ‘annulment’ done, by keeping Lottie and Ben from consummating their marriage at their honeymoon and of course keep them from having a Wedding Night.

The most wonderful thing about the book is the new idea of the three POVs that Kinsella has used for the first time in her writings. We are mainly told the story from both Lottie and Fliss’s POV, and at just a couple of times Arthur has his POV too. And the concept is amazing.

The troubles Fliss puts Ben and Lottie in on their honeymoon are hilarious, ludicrous and saddening at the same time. Kinsella has maintained her standards and has given us yet another fantastic read.

The thing about Kinsella is that she is real in her writing. There is hardly anything in her novels that you feel is unrealistic. The way she pulls the whole thing together is always worth kudos. And with all the belly laughs she gives you, she’d be gripping you to her book with all your emotions. And Wedding Night is no different.

But, there was a slight shift in her writing style this time in Wedding Night. There seemed to be a merger of her writing as Sophie Kinsella and Madeleine Wickham. This made me a little edgy at times. The book lags a little behind in humour compared to her predecessors. There weren’t many moments when I burst out laughing as I read through the text. Comparatively, I’ve Got Your Number was a step ahead in this regard and from the plot POV.

There isn’t much going on about in the book apart from Ben and Lottie being desperate to make out and Fliss trying to stop them from doing it. And then there’s another subplot of Fliss’s bitterness about her divorce, but that doesn’t have a great heat to it either.

It in no way means that Kinsella ha even a bit lost her creativity. She keeps on surprising you with a billion things, especially towards the second half of the book and you’d absolutely be on tenterhooks. She just keeps you guessing and guessing about the characters’ next move.

Lorcan, Ben’s best friend, was my most favourite character. And even though she was caring, Fliss was a Bitch.

The thing that disappointed me a little is that there were some loose ends to the end of the novel which should have been tied. I wanted to know what would happen of Lorcan and Fliss. About Lottie and Richard. About Nico’s special package at the honeymoon suite. Many things. But, we get to know nothing of them.

To sum it up, Wedding Night is quirky, humorous, breezy, emotional and an entertaining read. You will feel Lottie and Richard’s pain after the heartbreak, would worry as Fliss gets worried about her kin (and at times hate her for it), and will be as frustrated as Ben and Lottie when they don’t get to have their so-longed-for Wedding Night on their honeymoon. And reading between the lines, you will smile and giggle and laugh.

It is a must read for all the Kinsella fans, but they shouldn’t expect anything better than what they had in IGYN. And for people who haven’t read Kinsella yet, they should start their summer breaks with Wedding Night in their hands and getting introduced to the incredible writer on the coming weekends.