Killers of the Flower Moon - The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

Rating: 4 Stars

History books don’t cover all that we ought to know. So thank god for nonfiction literature and for investigative journalists like David Grann. In his stellar hit, Killers of the Flower Moon, he reconstructs an almost forgotten story of criminal conspiracy and racial injustice that should be required reading for anyone interested in the history of the United States.

In 1921, an Osage woman is reported missing and is soon found dead. She isn’t the only one. Within the space of a couple of years, 24 people, mostly Osage, are murdered; some with brutal violence while others were suspected to have died of slow poisoning. Frustrated with their local law enforcement, the terrorized Native American community demands federal intervention. Enter the fledgling Bureau of Investigation, later known as the FBI. What is uncovered is a ruthless plot where the high and low of society are involved in the criminal exploitation of the Osage. If discovering the perpetrators was a Herculean endeavor, obtaining justice for the dead proves to be an even more challenging task.

KotFM is mesmerizing narrative nonfiction that has the pulse and pace of the best crime fiction. I would have liked a little more suspense, but the author telegraphs the key suspects from the onset. Perhaps that’s because this is historical and was widely reported in its day.

Grann covers the story from three main perspectives. One is of the FBI. Blasé as we have now become with the wonders of modern forensic science, this period recalls an age where crime scene investigation was still in its nascency. Adding to that, the wild, wild, west was a place that was fundamentally hostile to federal law enforcement. But the Osage Reign of Terror highlights the nation’s desperate need for agents of the law who were unswayed by local political interests.

This is also the case that brought J. Edgar Hoover to the limelight. While we certainly learn quite a bit about the man who became synonymous with the Agency he directed for several decades, it is an agent called Tom White who represents the human face of the Bureau in its investigation into the Osage murders. In a story of mind-boggling greed and malevolence, White’s integrity and decency shows that the flawed America of that day (and this day) is a multi-faceted place where good and evil exist side by side.

Ultimately, however, it is the story of the Osage that holds center-stage. A people who have been hounded and persecuted for centuries face yet another round of callousness and depraved indifference at the hands of their tormentors. Though the crime might have been solved, justice is not served; not really. When one group of people habitually preyed on another, and habitually faced little to no consequence, there can be no legal redress. We can only hope that somewhere along the way we are learning something from history, as our species wearily inches its way forward.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Rating: 4 Stars

2017 Booker Prize

When I first heard of this book it vaguely struck me as something unsavory, and I felt a stab of indignation on behalf of the 16^th President. Hadn’t the poor man done enough; hadn’t he suffered enough? I calmed down after realizing my brain-fumble – not Lincoln in the Bordello; it was ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’. Duh.

In Tibetan Buddhism, bardo is the intermediate stage between life and death. The author conceived the idea for this novel when he learned that President Lincoln had paid several visits to a crypt in Georgetown, to hold the body of his recently deceased son. The story revolves around the untimely demise of twelve year old Willy Lincoln and the transitional phase of the boy’s bewildered spirit – uncertain as to whether he should stay behind with his father or move on to whatever realm of being awaits him.

The book is a quirky amalgam of actual historical documents, ingenious creative elements, and, word-crafting. While some of his literary experiments seem a little labored, others work very successfully. The writer deals gently with the grieving president in anguish over the loss of his child. The Lincoln we see here is the Lincoln vindicated by history and immortalized in popular culture – a very human man under extraordinary circumstances, shouldering an immense burden to the best of his abilities.

Considering that the subject is both moving and macabre, there is a surprising amount of humor here. The levity comes from the host of wraiths who are malingering in the cemetery, believing that this denial of the obvious shows their strength of character. These shades are a boisterous, bawdy, and, talkative bunch. They have a lot to get off their chest, and they think they have many reasons to hang tough. Three in particular befriend the little Lincoln and try to help him migrate to the next plane of existence because the bardo is a dangerous place for the young ones.

“…to be a child and to love one’s life enough to desire to stay here is, in this place, a terrible sin, worthy of the most severe punishment.”

The reasons for this are never made clear. Actually, the author does not give much detail, depth, or, clarity to the Great Beyond. He shies away from anything approaching actual religion, spirituality, mysticism, or, the occult. That doesn’t affect the book negatively, because oddly enough this story is more about life than death.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

Rating: 4 & ½ Stars

2014 Booker Prize

If I had done my usual due diligence before picking up this book, I would have discovered that this was yet another book about World War II. Not just about the Second World War, but a story about Japanese POWs. Then I would have avoided it; because reading ‘Unbroken’ was traumatizing enough, and why would I go through something like that again? But that would have been my loss.

Flanagan’s TNRTTDN is in equal parts ravishing and heart-breaking. The crux of the larger narrative is the building of the Burma Railway in 1943 – a construction feat engineered by the Empire of Japan, on the backs of forced labor and under the most savage conditions. The human cost of the Death Railway, as it was otherwise known, was horrific: an estimated 102,000 people – 90,000 civilian laborers and 12,000 Allied prisoners perished in the effort. The deaths were due partly to tropical illnesses; but overwhelmingly, the ultimate reason was the barbarous indifference of Japan to human life and suffering.

On a more intimate scale, the story is about the Australian POWs – those who succumb to the Death Railway, as well as its survivors. Flanagan, whose own father was one of the Australian survivors, has invested the historical narrative with depth of research and poignant humanity. The toll of building the railway is explored through the perspective of different POWs; as well as through the eyes of their embattled Japanese tormentors – men who were tasked with performing the impossible and who would give no quarter because they belonged to a time and culture where clemency was equated with weakness.

But TNRTTDN is also a love story. The novel’s protagonist is Dorrigo Evans – a senior medical officer at the Burma Railway who later becomes a renowned surgeon. Evans seems to have a charmed life in many respects. As an officer, he was not subject to the same privations as the other prisoners at the labor camp, and afterward he’s, quite rightly, hailed as a hero. But the public éclat that’s lavished upon him, and the good fortune of having family and friends leave no impression upon Dorrigo, obsessed as he is with the woman who got away, the love of his life – Amy Mulvaney.

One of the motifs of this book is the vastness of human history – the bewildering force of circumstances beyond our control that shape the destinies of nations and individuals. The other is the inexorable sweep of time in erasing all events, men, and man-made things. What may remain is memory. Remembrance is important – hence the seemingly endless stream of books that exhume old wars and past injustices. We remember our history so that we do not repeat its mistakes. But cling too desperately to the past, and we lose our happiness in the present. Few books I’ve read have expounded this as eloquently as ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’.

Hillbilly Elegy by J.D.Vance

Stars: 4 Stars

I did not grow up in the U.S.A. So, my first introduction to Hillbillies was through those lovable fictional transplants to California. I refer to the TV show – The Beverly Hillbillies. I never thought about hillbillies after that, till coming to America. Then it slowly began to sink in, that for whatever reason, hillbillies were not held in fond esteem by the rest of the country, and I couldn’t see why. One of the things about being an immigrant is that there are some cultural nuances that we just won’t get. For example, when it is generally agreed that stereotyping is harmful, why then is it not considered offensive to label some poor people as ‘white trash’. I have heard that term casually tossed around in pop-culture, while another word is delicately expressed as the ‘n-word’. There seems to be a double standard there that I don’t understand.

In his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance explores the complexity of his family roots; and in the process, gives us an insider’s scoop into the hillbilly culture – the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of it.

“Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology, and community and culture and faith.”

Though Vance proudly identifies as a hillbilly, in his case, it is more an identity of culture and ethos. His hillbilly grandparents had eloped as teenagers from the hills of eastern Kentucky to start their life together in a suburb of Ohio. His beloved grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, briefly enjoyed their share of the American dream, reaping the windfall of the industrial boom of the Fifties. However, they and their kin also exemplify self-destructive behaviors and attitudes that blight their chances of happiness and prosperity. As we see in Vance’s book, some of his family grow in awareness; and make conscious decisions to exercise better judgment, make better choices; simply, to live better. Because they’ve seen first-hand the alternative to that – living as their own worst enemy; no outsider can do to them what they do to themselves.

Despite his interest in sociology and his research, Vance does not write like an academic. I say that as a point in his favor. The statistics he cites, and the writers he references serve to anchor his personal narrative more securely. Because ultimately, it is his story that held my interest – the family lore; the grandparents who try to amend the mistakes of their youth by being the rock of their grandchildren’s life; the poignancy of a childhood held hostage by an unstable parent; and most importantly, the resolution that neither the odds stacked against him nor any possible inherited genetic traits would doom his destiny. I found that self-assertive optimism made this a remarkably ‘American’ book in every sense.

Ulysses by James Joyce

Rating: 4 Stars

“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.”

You’ve got to hand it to Joyce; that breath-taking confidence that he’s written something that will be read for centuries bespeaks a considerable chutzpah. Not quite sure that I would agree with him about that. This amateur reviewer’s unapologetic opinion is that - never have so many words been strung together to make so much nonsense, and for so little purpose.

Perhaps future generations will question the literary merit of ‘Ulysses’ and concur that it’s an imposter that does not deserve to be on every ‘100 Must-Read Books’ list. But as of now, this book remains the unchallenged flagship of novelistic excellence. Having got that off my chest, let’s move on to take a closer look at Joyce’s opus, keeping in mind that there’s really no possibility of one mere blog post doing adequate justice to a work so vast and ambitious in its scope.

A preliminary introduction to how the book originated: the title, structure and theme were inspired by James Joyce’s fascination with Homer’s Odyssey, and in particular, the hero of that epic narrative - Odysseus/Ulysses. It was initially serialized in parts in an American journal and later published as a book in 1922. The entirety of the story unfolds in Dublin on June 16, 1904; a day now celebrated by Joyce aficionados as ‘Bloomsday’ after the novel’s protagonist (and Ulysses stand-in), Leopold Bloom. It’s structured in three parts and eighteen episodes, with each episode named after a character or incident from the Odyssey.

Part One begins with an introduction to Stephen Dedalus, a young writer and school-teacher and the novel’s ersatz Telemachus, son of Odysseus in Homer’s original. Part Two launches our day’s journey with Leopold Bloom. We first encounter him making breakfast for himself and his wife Molly; then setting out for an old friend’s funeral; and later, stopping by his office where he works as an advertising canvasser for the ‘Freeman’s Journal’. The rest of the day is spent in aimlessly wandering in and out of pubs, a church, a library, a maternity hospital, a brothel, with a brief stop at the shoreline. In Part Three, Bloom finally meanders back home with Stephen Dedalus in tow, whom he briefly entertains before heading up to bed. The book concludes with the episode titled ‘Penelope’ (Ulysses’ loyal wife in the Odyssey), but what is more commonly known as Molly Bloom’s Monologue.

The parallels Joyce draws between ‘Ulysses’ and the Odyssey are numerous and more often than not, ironic. After having engineered the victory over Troy, Ulysses voyages for ten years to return to Ithaca, his homeland. Awaiting his return are his aging father; his steadfast son; and, his devoted wife, Penelope, who, spurning her many suitors has remained faithful to their marriage (though Ulysses himself has not). Impeding his nostos (heroic return journey of an epic hero) are vindictive gods, malignant monsters, sorceresses, sirens, and a rebellious crew. Overcoming them all, return he does, thwarting his rivals and reclaiming his throne.

And Bloom? Well, he starts his day making a breakfast of ‘the inner organs of beasts and fowls’; followed by a visit to the outhouse to answer Nature’s call, a visit that is described with unsparing detail. His profession depends on ingratiating himself to would-be sponsors. He is forever an outsider in his hometown, a fiercely Catholic city that has no intention of letting him forget his Jewish lineage; regardless of Bloom’s baptism or general lack of religiosity. As he wanders around town, he runs into colleagues, acquaintances, an ex-lover, a young woman who flashes her underwear at him, barmaids, and wastrels. His thoughts turn often to his father who died of overdosing, and a son and heir whom he lost at infancy. In Stephen Dedalus, in whom he takes a paternal interest, he discovers a kindred intellect and a talent that he hopes to foster. On his return home, waiting for him is Molly Bloom; partnered with him in an adulterous marriage. Unlike Penelope, Mrs. Bloom has seen no reason to spurn her many suitors. They have enjoyed her favors and she theirs; and that is not something she intends to change anytime.

Homer gave us Ulysses’ wit, verve, and heroic adventures; Joyce serves up in ‘Ulysses’ the mundane, the sordid, and the flatly uninspiring. What can I say? I guess we don’t live in an epic age anymore.

Yet, there are similarities, too. Bloom, like Ulysses, is intelligent. He is a well-read man, whose thoughts certainly dwell on his family; and if not exactly a leader of men, he is still amiable and seems to get along with most people. Like the sea-faring voyager of the Odyssey, Bloom too watches the stars – he dabbles in astronomy. In a dull century, perhaps a stroll around town will have to take the place of a thrilling odyssey. While Bloom seems besotted with his wife whose voracious sexuality remains untamed by marriage, it can be said that Molly Bloom, herself, is at least not indifferent to her husband.

So much of ‘Ulysses’ is mind-numbingly boring: an endless stream of fillers and inanities; characters that have little or no bearing to the narrative are thrust upon us; we are pelted with strings of names that serve no consequence whatsoever. The language is needlessly dense and opaque, and the reader is assailed with Joyce’s sesquipedalian loquacity, his incontinent verbosity. Some chapters are not merely tortuous; they are downright torturous. The episode ‘Circe’, for example, is an unrelenting sewage of babble and obscenity.

So why bother to read ‘Ulysses’ at all? Are his erudite fans simply misinformed? No; there are veins of gold in the book, but you have to mine them assiduously. A certain grim sense of commitment is needed, not just to finish this book, but to appreciate the literary genius (okay, I admitted it, alright?) exemplified by the mighty intellect, eclectic multi-culturalism, inspired wordsmithing, dazzling vocabulary, and literary experimenting. I stuck with this book for one reason only. I finished my Masters in English Literature several years ago. This book served to remind me that I’m no Master; but that I am and always will be a student of Literature.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Rating: 4 Stars

“I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.” – Sal Paradise from ‘On the Road’

And yet Kerouac decided to go ahead anyway and write an entire novel regurgitating that state of mind.

If one has never tried recreational drugs, it’s not particularly pleasant being sucked into someone else’s psychedelic ravings. But hey, once there, why not make the most of the vicarious experience?

This work is considered the definitive work of the Beat Generation, and Jack Kerouac, its spokesman. In historical perspective, the counterculture movement that was the Beat Generation may scarcely register a blip on the radar. But no matter; this droll dubbing of each and every generation seems to be a particularly American trait, one that seeps and permeates its literature. Hence we have the ‘Lost Generation’, ‘the Beats’, ‘the Hippies’, ‘the Yuppies’; all the way up to ‘the Millennials’ - as if labeling a thing enables us to understand it any better.

In Kerouac’s estimate, the Beats were those who were tired of the superficialities of life. In a fairly obvious metaphor, the road is life. Life is to be experienced on a deeper level – “our one and noble function of the time, move.”

And move is what they do. The book traces the restless, fevered traversing of the United States by the narrator, Sal Paradise, and his friend, Dean Moriarty, between the years 1947 and 1950. Paradise is a stand-in for Kerouac and Dean Moriarty refers to his fellow Beatnik, Neal Cassady. Many of the multitudes of eccentric characters who make an appearance in this novel refer to Kerouac’s real-life acquaintances.

Paradise, who lives in New York with his aunt, meets Dean Moriarty a charismatic ex-con who initially latches onto Paradise for food and boarding; and over a period of two years the two, together, and sometimes with the company of others, crisscross the United States in a haze of motion, till Paradise finally wakes up to the sting of Moriarty’s exploitative nature.

The narrative has a staccato rhythm that effectively captures the manic pace of the Beat existence. The life Kerouac describes is one of fast cars, fast women, hot jazz and easy drugs. He does not waste too many words delving into character and motive. On the surface, there seems to be very little introspection. Yet the characters are strikingly outlined – Moriarty, erratic and incoherent even at the beginning of the novel, grows increasingly unstable towards the end; hurt, resentful women nevertheless make themselves easily available to men who have scant respect for them; men who aspire to beatific understanding mainly seem to spout meaningless drivel, all the more meaningless because more often than not, they are stoned out of their minds and all their elevated talk is in direct contrast to their treatment of others – in their careless mishandling of others’ property and feelings.

The Sal Paradise we see at the novel’s end is perhaps no less wearied of Beat existential philosophy; but he has grown disillusioned with Dean Moriarty.

To readers who may have never fallen under the spell of Moriarty, Paradise’s disenchantment may seem long overdue. There is no single path to achieving Grace. But it seems counter intuitive to believe that a life of common sense, common decency, and kindness to one another, is in any way less than the rapturous epiphanies of a febrile, drug-fueled mysticism.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

4 Stars

It seems a little unfair that all other Victorians novelists are thrown into the gigantic shade cast by Charles Dickens. To most readers, and even non-readers, his writing captures the zeitgeist of the Victorian era like none other.

It’s interesting to note that Dickens was one of the few to instantly suspect that ‘George Eliot’ was in all probability the pseudonym of a female writer. He said as much in a fan letter to her in 1858:

“…I should have been strongly disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address the said writer as a woman. I have observed what seems to me to be such womanly touches, in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me, even now…You will not suppose that I have any vulgar wish to fathom your secret. I mention the point as one of great interest to me – not of mere curiosity.”

George Eliot did come forward later to reveal herself as Mary Ann Evans. Her initial reticence could perhaps be ascribed to many factors: her desire to shield her private life (she was co-habiting with a married man); she was already working as a journalist and editor under her own name; and, also, because apparently she wished to be judged on her own merit, not to be compared with other female writers of the age.

‘Middlemarch’ is far from being a feminist diatribe, but in its depiction of the ‘lot’ of women, Eliot’s mature understanding of gender inequality certainly has no predecessors. The protagonist, Dorothea Brooke, is no social rebel; at least not by her standards. She doesn’t defy social restrictions. Rather, she seems to be oblivious of them; choosing to live a life guided by her conscience rather than convention.

The book has intersecting plot lines and a vast cast of characters, many of them relatively important to the progress of the narrative. The title of the book refers to a fictional manufacturing town. Eliot sets the novel in the early 1830s - forty years prior to the date of its publication. Choosing that time period for the plot enables her to delve into political issues such as the passage of the Reform Act, the onset of the British railways, the death of one king and the succession of another, and the medical practices of a bygone age. Whether the book is improved by the long-winded digressions into obsolete medical procedures and petty politics; or if it even qualifies as an actual historical novel, is a subject open for debate.

She is the quintessential Victorian writer – circuitous, verbose, unable to arrive at any point without expanding on several other topics, all of which she seems to consider germane to the central issue. And, she does seem to go over-board in her anxiety that no one in the story should be ill-judged:

“Pray think no ill of Miss Noble…”

“For my part, I have some fellow-feeling with Dr. Sprague…”

“Think no evil of her (Rosamond), pray…”

Perhaps readers should be extended the courtesy of making up their own minds.

But there’s a genuine kindness that makes one excuse her fussy empathy. And of course, Eliot has many kinds of humor in her quiver – gentle, observational, ironic.

Though she spared no effort to be taken seriously, the real strength of her writing, the enduring value of her books lies in her perceptive, and yes, very feminine understanding of human nature, or as Dickens called it, the ‘womanly touches’.

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

Eliot was perhaps much less ‘wadded with stupidity’ than the vast majority of people. Her sensitive psychological insight and compassion makes her characters - every one of them - intensely real, intensely relevant for all ages.

Discussion Questions for this book at:

http://noa-betweenthelines.blogspot.com/2015/07/george-eliots-middlemarch-discussion.html

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Rating: 4 Stars

It seems like the latest crop of fiction isn't discussed much on BTL in general and not at all this year. Chalk that down to wariness when it comes to trying anything new. When browsing through lists of ‘Best Books of 2014’, one title was ubiquitous – Anthony Doerr’s ‘All the Light We Cannot See’. Surely so many critics couldn't be wrong; turns out they weren’t. At the risk of recklessly slinging hyperbole – this book is a masterpiece.

With a plot spanning more than seventy years, the main action takes place around the epochal years of the Second World War. Though the narrative glides through many European scenes, the story is firmly anchored in the historic port city of St. Malo on the northwestern coast of France. Doerr’s description of St. Malo is cinematic in its detail. From its colorful past to its near annihilation during the liberation of France, the author vividly recreates a city that lingers in the imagination long after the last page has been turned.

Just as haunting are the characters that people the book: Marie-Laure LeBlanc, blind from early childhood; her devoted father – a skilled artisan and the principal locksmith at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris; her great-uncle Etienne a traumatized veteran of the First World War. Equally compelling are the German cast of characters – Werner Pfennig a young technical wizard forced to play a role that’s far distant from his childhood aspirations; his friend Frederick, gentle and honorable in a world that has no use for such qualities; his younger sister Jutta, who sees more than her years. All are pawns in the looming calamity that will engulf them.

Without the bizarreness of ‘magical realism’ – the plot of this historical novel is both magical and intensely real. A fabled and fatal gem that men lust to possess; treasures that must be safeguarded from the maw of war; innocence lost; strength discovered; heroism in unexpected places; and Time’s healing; the stuff of clichés…and classics.

It’s easy to rhapsodize over this novel; but it’s not easy reading though. The pace of the book is inexorably slow and a nihilistic sense of pessimism overhangs it.

“It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world – what pretensions humans have! Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them?”

Yet consider this:

“What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.”

If the book is slow, it’s the slowness of crescendo; and novels that discuss war, and omit despair and futility skirt the truth. This book is ultimately not about the pointlessness of human endeavor, but the resilience of the human spirit that seeks out invisible light.

The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovanni Guareschi

[Translated from the Italian by Una Vincenzo Troubridge]

Rating: 4 Stars

It was by sheer accident that I came across this lovely little book many years ago. I found it in the small library of the small town that I was living in at that time, sorted under a note that read, ‘Librarian’s Recommendation’. I fell in love with the book, and the writer’s style all at once.

Guareschi, a WW II veteran and plyer of multiple trades, was the author and illustrator of the Don Camillo books, of which there are six. ‘The Little World of Don Camillo’ initiates the series with our introduction to the feisty priest Don Camillo, and his rival, Mayor Peppone of the Communist Party.

Less of a novel and more a connecting suite of short stories, the plot draws on the various clashes between Camillo and Peppone – be it Camillo’s refusal to baptize Peppone’s infant son with a name like ‘Lenin’; or, their feuding soccer-match; or, the ensuing ruckus when the Bishop visits their village.

Though they may lock horns in their battles to win the heart and soul of their community, these two ideological stalwarts have more in common than they want to admit. Despite his tendency to give fiery orations against the Church and its appointees, Peppone is at heart as much an Italian Catholic as anyone else in the village. Devout Don Camillo, though a man of God, is as free with administering lessons with his fists and feet, as he is with his sermons. But if the circumstances call for it, they will work together for their excitable and boisterous flock/compatriots.

This underlying conviction, that men of good intentions can, and will, put aside their differences for the greater good is the essence of the book – one of the reasons for its charm, that, and the benevolent take on humanity as evinced by Camillo’s confidante, the receptor of all his musings – the conversational Christ, who looks on with an equally tolerant eye on Camillo and Peppone alike.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Rating: 4 Stars

2000 Booker Prize

This isn’t a feel good book. Never mind; it has other things going for it.

For starters there is its technical virtuosity. Atwood has taken an outmoded literary device – the epistolary novel - and imbued it with a savage new life. While the novel is certainly open to feminist interpretations, the author’s approach is iconoclastic in its demolition of fondly-held notions of family, religion, and marriage. That makes for a prickly, uncomfortable read; but artistes’ integrity lies is in staying true to their vision, not in pandering to the fickle caprices of the audience.

The plot is like a matryoshka doll, apparently nesting several stories within the main frame. The narrative opens in the 1940s, ‘ten days after the war ended’. Iris Chase hears of the tragic death of her younger sister, Laura, in a car accident. We learn over the course of the novel that Laura has achieved posthumous fame with the publication of the scandalous (for its time) book, ‘The Blind Assassin’. Iris, several years later, though physically frail, is indomitable and clear-minded in her old age as she never was in her youth. Part of the story is her recollection of her life as she writes it down for an estranged grandchild.

Part of it are also excerpts from ‘The Blind Assassin’ - a story of a young society woman involved with a man on the wrong side of the law, though his crime is never made explicit. The couple meet in various different locations each having their own reasons for being very careful. The word ‘love’ is not mentioned in their trysts, and they are often cruel or callous; yet, their need for one another, even if not always tender, is genuine and palpable.

The third story is the science-fiction tale with which the young man entertains his lover – a fantasy world of oppressive social stratification, sexual deviancy, and a perverted religion based on sacrificial rituals. Even under these unconducive circumstances, there are two unlikely people who fall in love seeking a redemption from the sordid reality of their lives.

Each story is engrossing enough on its own. Atwood’s ingenuity lies in her one-woman enactment of the triple Moirai in spinning the narrative; keeping the skeins from unraveling; and, swiftly and ruthlessly tying the threads together for a truly brilliant yarn.

“…All she has left is the picture. Also the story of it.

The picture is of happiness, the story not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

Rating: 4 Stars

1928 Pulitzer Prize Winner

“…soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

On July 20, 1714, an ancient bridge collapses, and five travelers plunge to their doom. The tragedy is witnessed by a Franciscan missionary who is so profoundly moved by the incident that he sets out to seek meaning behind the victims’ sudden deaths.

Starting from this premise, the novel opens with the inquiry into the lives of three of the main characters. Whether it’s a sad woman frantically nurturing her relationship with the daughter who spurns her; or, a brother in anguish over his irreparable loss; or, a caring mentor attempting to help his stricken protégée - the common thread in their lives is love, flawed, yet still sublime.

Thornton Wilder’s classic novel is based loosely on real life characters, and the titular bridge was inspired by a famed Peruvian bridge that spanned the Apurímac River. Wilder’s technique was greatly influenced by his study of classic French literature. The lucid style though emotionally detached is nevertheless deeply compassionate, and his character portraits are indelible. A passage that lingers in the memory is the description of the Archbishop of Lima:

“Between the rolls of flesh that surrounded them looked out two black eyes speaking discomfort, kindliness and wit. A curious and eager soul was imprisoned in all this lard…the distress of remorse was less poignant than the distress of fasting and he was presently found deliberating over the secret messages that a certain roast sends to the certain salad that will follow it. And to punish himself he led an exemplary life in every other respect.”

Though Wilder did not visit Peru until 1941 he is able to evoke the sensibility that we associate with Latin American authors. Like them he too mines the heart for its mysteries. Though Father Juniper attempts to tabulate human virtue and thus make sense of tragedy, the author is graceful in highlighting the impenetrability of cosmic design. 

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

Rating: 4 Stars

‘The Godfather’ is one of those books that leave me awash in memories – how the first time I read it, I finished it in one breathless sitting; how my friends and I discussed character and motive with a passion that better students would have reserved for Shakespeare; and more recently the recurrent allusions to the book and movie versions that echo in other icons of popular culture – be it ‘Seinfeld’, ‘The Simpsons’, or the various movies that are unself-conscious in referencing this work. The chance to read it again was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

The book begins with the wedding of Vito Corleone’s daughter. While FBI agents parked outside the house take note of the guests, the Don accepts the homage of underworld vassals and hears the entreaties of supplicants. The Godfather, Don Corleone, the head of the most powerful of New York’s five mafia Families dispenses justice like an ancient god, either smiting mightily or granting favors according to his discretion. But even gods fade out of fashion, and neither the Don’s legendary sagacity nor his sons’ fierce loyalty can withstand the changes surging upon the fortunes of the Corleone family.

One reason for this book’s visceral appeal is the effortless ease with which it taps into our fascination with power - power untrammeled by feeble notions of legality, or the greater good, for in the Don’s mind, he is the greater good. Yet, a closer glance reveals that Puzo is not an unsophisticated writer waxing eloquent about the glories of violent aggrandizement. In this world everyone pays the price; every victory comes at a cost.

‘The Godfather’ is a rare example of a book whose understanding would be incomplete without its movie version, and it needs to be said that while the book may be an engrossing read it’s the movies that are true works of art. Partly the credit for the movies too belongs to the author because Mario Puzo co-wrote the screenplays for The Godfather and The Godfather II, in both instances sharing the Oscar award for Adapted Screenplay with Francis Ford Coppola, the director. Whereas in the book the consequences of the ruthless pursuit of ambition were merely hinted at, with the cinematic adaptation the author is able to complete the narrative arc he had started.

While Puzo freely admitted that his motive behind writing ‘The Godfather’ was to make money, yet he shows flashes of brilliance in limning human nature, and in his plot construction. There is an operatic crescendo to the waxing and waning of the Corleone family’s power from the onset to the brilliant climax. If Vito Corleone is portrayed as a Machiavellian Robin Hood, the concept of original sin colors the depiction of all the characters in the novel, both major and minor. The teetotaler family man who supports many dependents and carefully plans his children’s education happens to be a corrupt cop; the battered wife is a shrill, self-serving harridan; kind-hearted Sonny, who is incapable of lifting a finger against the truly defenseless is also a savagely brutal mobster – these richly swirling complexities give hue and depth to the novel that redefined Family and family business.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Rating: 4 Stars

It had me at the first page, and kept me hooked till the last. So many ‘suspense’ novels telegraph their grand climax well before the reader is half-way through that, we nearly forget the enjoyable sensation of being kept on tenterhooks. It’s nice to get an occasional reminder once in a while.

Nick Dunne, on the day of his fifth anniversary returns home to find his wife, Amy, missing. He calls in the police, and the search begins in the small town of Carthage, Missouri. The evidence points all too damningly to the usual suspect in such cases. While there may be more than one side to any story, Nick’s perspective on his tottery marriage and his spouse does not win him much sympathy. The scariest place to be is inside someone’s head, and Flynn leads us into the darkest nooks and crannies of her protagonists’. The distinction between being a self-absorbed jerk and a narcissistic psychopath may be merely a difference of degrees.

Predictably the hunt for Amy soon turns into the usual media circus; with ratings-hungry talk-show hosts quivering with self-righteous outrage, slick attorneys, and casual acquaintances avid for their fifteen minutes in the spotlight.

Gone Girl scores an enviable double whammy. It’s a thriller that beckons with a promise of sexy, wicked fun, and before we know it, has us by the throat with its ferocious intelligence and startlingly acute insight.

There are some questionable angles, but it’s easy to overlook those when the author has gratified in so many other respects. One of the charms of this book is the way it slyly upends clichés – the lawyer who is the go-to guy for uxoricide suspects is apparently happily married; romance’s cherished ideal of a knight in shining armor is not every girl’s idea of the perfect man; incorrigible love-birds are annoying to the rest of us, as Nick nastily remarks on his grieving in-laws "cherishing each other" every chance they get. And while hope may be ‘the thing with feathers’, love can and does sport scales, fangs, and claws.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Rating: 4 Stars

William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983

Some books are a rite of passage. We trudge through them cursing the educators who deemed that they should be ‘required reading’; that our academic experience would somehow be incomplete without them. Under this duress, the book inspires fear and loathing, rather than instilling a love of the best there is in literature. It’s with great relief that we turn the final page, submit that last essay, and vow to never pick up that wretched thing ever again. Yet years later, the book continues to haunt, etched forever in our memory. Lord of the Flies is beautiful, ugly, and deeply disturbing; or as my thirteen-year old opined, “There was something seriously wrong with this guy.”

In the aftermath of a nuclear war, a plane transporting an unnamed number of English school-boys crashes on an uninhabited island in the Pacific. The boys range in ages from adolescents to kindergartners. They make tentative plans for their immediate survival while awaiting a rescue. Their ill-formed attempts at establishing a functioning society crumbles in the tug of war between the conflicting impulses of civilization versus savagery.

One reading makes clear why this book is beloved of English teachers everywhere – the abundance of themes, the simple yet sophisticated language, and characters that are universal archetypes. It’s a book that tantalizes with symbolism, and tempts the reader to assay imaginative interpretations.

However, I confess that this book appeals to me at its most basic level – as a riveting tale that has the blood pounding in your veins, and your nails chewed to shreds as you try to guess what’s coming next. As a story-teller, Golding ranks with the best. Where one may find room for argument is perhaps, in his seemingly dark take on human nature. As one of the book’s characters is prone to exclaim, “What’s grown-ups going to say?” The more painful question is, what would adults do that would be any different?

This is the crux of the intertwining themes. Golding was a school-master with a visceral understanding of the school-boys’ mentality. Though the clinical detachment of his tone is chilling, it is not so much misanthropy, as a potent warning of mankind’s proclivity for degeneracy. As he said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech,

“…We need more humanity, more care, more love. There are those who expect a political system to produce that; and others who expect the love to produce the system. My own faith is that the truth of the future lies between the two and we shall behave humanly and a bit humanely, stumbling along, haphazardly generous and gallant, foolishly and meanly wise until the rape of our planet is seen to be the preposterous folly that it is.”

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Rating: 4 Stars

Wilkie Collins is considered by many to be the first author of detective fiction. Trained in the law, the sleuthing techniques used in his work paved the way for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Collins’s 1859 novel, ‘The Woman in White’ is written in the epistolary style reflecting multiple viewpoints, with some portions seeming like outright witness statements.

Walter Hartright, a young art teacher is employed at Limmeridge House by Mr. Fairlie to restore his art-work and to teach his niece Laura Fairlie, and her half-sister Marian Halcombe. In no time at all, Walter falls in love with Laura, but takes the honorable recourse of removing his impecunious self from the scene, so that she may marry her titled fiancé. Alas, much tragedy lies in wait for Laura, a young woman exasperatingly incapable of taking any decisions on her own behalf. She leaves that to the intrepid Marian.

Danger hems in the sisters from all sides, and the key to the mystery lies with an eerie young woman whom Walter had met by chance. Damsels in distress; a noble-minded hero guided by the highest principles; unscrupulous villains; and, a plot with many twists and turns - the book is a true Victorian pot-boiler.

It is not free of the maudlin sentimentality that hounds even the best works of this period, and at times betrays an overwrought imagination that could have been dispensed with. But to the question does it work – the answer is yes. Collins keeps the threads of the narrative firmly in his possession, and the work has a contemporary charm in its sudden quirks of humor, and astute characterization, except in the case of Laura Fairlie who is presumably the Victorian ideal of a delicate-minded lady. It has the watermark of the successful mystery – it keeps you engrossed till the last page.