Old Friends

I am no wine-snob (Or oenophile, I hear, they are called), who raves about the wine from 1872 that is the best ever. But some old things just get better and better with age. Like some books that I go back to after years and still find them as relevant, or more, to me. Some of these....

- The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy
- The Handmaids Tale (Margaret Atwood)
- Heidi
- Sophie's Choice (William Styron)
- The Little Prince
- To kill a mockingbird
- All the Calvin & Hobbes series

Where I laughed before, I laugh harder now; And where I cried, well.. I always cry at the sad bits, so never mind!

The bookshop is going...

So I hear Trent has bought a majority stake in Landmark. What does this mean for the bookstore?

The first Landmark in Nungambakkam was, and still is a favourite haunt for me. Its a comfortable place to stand, browse, read, just walk around looking at all the new covers that are in etc etc. The new Landmark at Spencers somehow is just not a bookshop at all. The book section is quite small and all squashed together so that there is hardly any space at all to stand and check out anything.

The kids toys section, the furniture section, the hep cafe section, the assorted junk section, all these possibly occupy more space than the books. And if you stand in the aisle for just a fraction of a moment, make sure you have your lucky charm with you. Or else you will be prodded in the back by wandering elbows and shoved aside by sundry-teenager-hordes-with-nothing-else-to-do-on-a-sunday.

Now with Trent doing a takeover (practically, since their share is going to be aout 75%), and the bookstore getting fully 'corporatised' , maybe we can expect a chain of Landmarks, all outfitted alike, stocking every single thing on earth, including, did you say books?

Revelations

One of my earliest poems...Dont write poetry anymore these days though....This one I think uses a bit of cliche, but passable for a 16 year old I suppose :-)

Here lie two torn tickets for a concert
Where, listening to Tchaikovsky and Schubert,
I wanted to withdraw my love for you
And do it, oh-so-politely too.
I watched you, seemingly rapt,
Listening to the sad music – so apt
To this occasion; To be unkind
Was farthest from my mind.
I wanted to make it easy
For you – Just a final breezy
Goodbye. Felt the heavens drop on my head
When outside the theatre you just said,
“I don’t think we should meet again.”
I stood still in the pouring rain

Before the Word Came...

If you saw the movie, Ice Age, you will remember the scene where the animals walk into a cave to find their likenesses etched on the walls. Kind of cheesy sentimental moment, when the mammoth remembers his parents as he sees the signs of an animal hunt drawn on the cave walls.

Before the age of the wood tablets and stylus, much before the invention of ink and paper, early man found his own way of leaving behind a record of himself. This urge to say something, leave an tiny imprint on the gigantic face of time - looks like it has been there forever, from ice-age man to present-day blogger. (Ok, Ok, I admit that’s slightly ambitious for the blogger, but no harm in being optimistic). It was also probably a part of early human rites and rituals conducted to appease the elements.

I am not a history or paleontology student, so I just stumbled upon this site of the Chauvet cave artin Southern France by chance. It’s a lovely site, in terms of design as well as content…This is the account of how the cave was first ‘discovered’.

“They explored almost the entire network of chambers and galleries, and on the way back out, Éliette saw an amazing sight in the beam of her lamp: a small mammoth drawn with red ochre on a rocky spur hanging from the ceiling. "They were here!" she cried out, and from that instant they began searching all of the walls with great attention.”

I like the way they describe the moment of discovery, so exciting and yet almost in a matter-of-fact manner!

The ones that got away

So if you read that recent post on Kafka on the shore, you will know just how bad my finances have been. I discovered two new books out today by two authors I really like, and ofcourse was in no shape to buy either, each totting up at over 500 bucks.

The first one is The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco, that master writer of the Name of the Rose. Here is an interesting review in the Post-Gazette that explains how the novel subverts the theme of a man creating literature from his memories into one of a man trying to recreate his lost memory and therefore his self from the literature that he has read.

The second one is John Irving's new release, Until I find you. John Irving was once upon a time my absolute favourite. Now however I am a little more ambivalent about his writing. The World According to Garp remains one of my best novels, but he does tend to get a little repetitive in other books. This one has received fairly ambivalent reviews, with some critics slamming it for the excessive melancholy and length.

What did I pick up finally? A copy of Kafka's Metamorphosis, an author I have never read before despite the intellectual pretensions it bestows on the reader when seen with a copy. Besides, he was cheap at Rs. 125.

Love - Whats Columbus gotta do with it?

One of my favourite musicians, esp one whom I admire for her song-writing abilities, is Suzanne Vega. Her songs, even on that most over-used (and over-rated?) of subjects, L-O-V-E have a refreshing quality to them.

Here are the lyrics to one of my favourite songs,World before Columbus, which you may enjoy even if you havent heard the song before.

If your love were taken from me
Every color would be black and white
It would be as flat as the world before Columbus
That's the day that I lose half my sight

If your life were taken from me
All the trees would freeze in this cold ground
It would be as cruel as the world before Columbus
Sail to the edge and I'd be there looking down

Those men who lust for land
And for riches strange and new
Who love those trinkets of desire
Oh they never will have you

And they'll never know the gold
Or the copper in your hair
How could they weigh the worth
Of you so rare

If your love were taken from me
Every light that's bright would soon go dim
It would be as dark as the world before Columbus
Down the waterfall and I'd swim over the brim

Those men who lust for land
And for riches strange and new
Who love those trinkets of desire
Oh they will never have you

And they'll never know the gold
Or the copper in your hair
How could they weigh the worth
Of you so rare

Kafka on the Shore

Last week after realising that I was miserably broke as usual and telling myself that I couldn’t or shouldn’t spend 600 rupees on another book, I found myself walking in a sort of haze to one of the assistants at Landmark and asking for Murakami’s latest book, Kafka on the Shore. The book came out in Japanese in 2002, but it took about two years for the English version to hit the shelves. Settling down nicely over the weekend, with a minimum number of breaks for eating, sleeping and other necessary activities, I managed to finish the book today.

Not that it was a chore by any means. Murakami is one of the easiest authors to read that I know. No big words. Short sentences hardly ten words long. He is by far one of the easiest authors to just read through without understanding anything of what is going on.

Kafka on the Shore deals in symbols, metaphors and seemingly unconnected events in an even more bizarre manner than Sputnik Sweetheart and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, both of which have their share of eccentricities. The book has however one of the best, I should say, infact, superb characters Murakami has ever created – Mr. Nakata. Instantly lovable, he has the outward simplicity of most Murakami characters with the added attraction of a mysterious inner life which allows him to talk to cats and open the doors to a secret world.

This secret world is perhaps the core of the novel. I say, perhaps, because it will probably take me another reading to really figure out things, but as I understood it, the secret world is the world of the individual’s deepest desires, some of which live on forever as memories. The novel is about the confrontation of those desires and memories, in a way the confrontation of grief and loss, and the ability to move beyond the confrontation and go on living. The main “confronter” if I can use the word is the eponymous Kafka, a fifteen year old boy with an unusual past.

Though this Kafka is the main character (or one of them, the other being Mr.Nakata), I didn’t find it as easy to empathise with him as I usually do with Murakami heroes. For one thing, in many Murakami novels, the heroes are usually ordinary people to whom extraordinary things happen. But in this one, right from the start, one gets the feeling that Kafka is a special, maybe strange person, who is destined to go through strange happenings, so no surprises there. He is no boy next door. The supporting cast in the novel, Oshima the librarian who helps Kafka, Sakura, the girl he meets on the bus, Hoshino, Mr. Nakata’s fellow-traveller, all these actually turned out to be a little more interesting than Kafka himself.

In between all the strange happenings, coincidences and seemingly supernatural events, the part about this novel which touched me was still the very earthly stuff – themes of abandonment, love, the loss of love, the themes of memory, longing and identity, and the fundamental theme of all, the struggle between good and evil that wages through the real and the secret world. I like it, that in the middle of all the imaginative sequences, Murakami never forgets the essential things, which after all determine what our lives turn out to be!

Your poison comes wrapped in...

Paperback or Hardcover?

Paperback

Usually cheaper than hardcover edition. Convenient to carry around. Lighter to lift in the case of thousand page tomes.

The negatives –

Tend to get dog-eared.
Doesn’t come back when lent since everyone assumes it’s just a cheap copy.


Hardcover

More Expensive. Can be a weight-lifting exercise on occasion. Take up a lot of space on the shelf.

The positives –

Better display value.
Comes in handy as a blunt weapon when required (Overstaying guests, Intruders, In general irritating specimen).
Smell good – good as in that woodsy, dry, warm smell you get from the binding.
Useful as a weight to smooth out wrinkled objects.

Anymore, Anyone?