The Hobbit

I read The Hobbit a long long time after I had watched Lord of the Rings, even though I had wanted to read it for quite a long time.

This book is a classic. First and foremost a classic of children literature. Then a classic of fantasy literature. And a classic of world literature. And all the three genres are going to remember it for a long time.

It was from this novel, that the great leap from fantasy to high fantasy was taken, at least technically if not in reality (as The Silmarillion was born in Tolkien‘s mind much before it). It is from here, that the present day notions of all the creatures of fantastic realm came, from fair, wise and immortal elves to hirsute, greedy dwarves to mountain-dwelling goblins.  This book is the starting point of all images and concepts we have in our mind regarding fantasy.

Okay, enough with the paeans. Maybe I went a bit too far hehe. Anyways, the story, from the outside, seems quite simple enough. A team goes on an adventure. And adventure they get in ample amounts. All the usual stuff (it has been usual since medieval folklore of Teutons and Anglo-Saxons) is there, fighting the bad guys, bravery and courage in war, loyalty towards friends, amiable friends, larger-than-life foes with ridiculous Achilles Heel.

But as we go to look deeper into the motifs of the novel, then we begin to see subtleties which make it different from a normal children fantasy tale, or even from legends of Beowulf and Sinbad.

The protagonist isn’t your usual hunky, big-muscled man with flowing golden locks and charming eyes. Rather he’s a middle aged midget with a weakness for good food and comfortable living.  How this adventure makes a hero out of him is one of the greatest things of this novel. Unlike usual heroes, he’s not born with courage. Rather he’s an out-of place accomplice with a company of dwarves, on whose poor shoulders such epithets are heaped which he hasn’t done a single thing to deserve .

Another thing worth noting is the calm, methodical pace with which Tolkien keeps introducing new characters, or rather, new kinds of creatures. Starting with hobbits, then dwarves, he goes on to trolls, elves, goblins, wolves, eagles, men and lastly dragons. And with each race, comes a new adventure. A nice trick. It’s like he were rolling down the complete documentation for us to refer to during further explorations (read: LOTR).

Though, it’s a children’s tale, its depiction often delves deep inside the obvious and begins to deal with adult themes, grey characters, greed and avarice, cunning, personal rediscovery through external adventures, widening of horizon of the perspective of a hole-dwelling hobbit. Even the main protagonist, after performing countless feats of valor and brushing with death too often to save his friends, is not immune to cheating those friends in the face of immense attraction of Arkenstone. And neither are those very same friends immune from forsaking their savior under the influence of their lost and thereby regained riches. These motifs, though very strong, are dealt only with secondary emphasis in the novel. The primary emphasis remains on the adventures, as befits a children’s tale. In places, it almost feels like Tolkien must have had to curb his urge to write an adult novel (an urge he quite readily yielded to when writing Lord of the Rings, to the immense benefit of the literary world) and keep concentrating on the adventures.

After The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings came and everything was changed forever. C. S. Lewis published his Chronicles of Narnia at around the same time. The high-fantasy has arrived

The Hobbit is considered one of the rarest gems of children’s literature . Secondly, in fantasy genre, this was the starting of the Tolkien revolution which would soon rewrite all the rules of high fantasy. Without it, Harry Potter and Inheritance cycle would not have been possible (I wish i could say the same for Twilight saga, sigh….). He first depicted fantasy as they were to remain, 60 years and still going high . Tolkien is the godfather of fantasy. Third and last aspect of the book is its theme and underlying serious motifs which made it more than just a classic of children literature. Much more than that. They made it a classic of world literature.

Related articles

• ‘The Hobbit’: Peter Jackson offers the first close-up look at three of his dwarves (insidemovies.ew.com)
• Post-Antaragni Hobbit-hoppings (notesbymohit.wordpress.com)
• The Hobbit (jdhhomeschool.wordpress.com)
• Sept. 21, 1937: The Hobbit Opens Up a Brave New World (wired.com)
• The Hobbit as Tolkien Saw It (wired.com)

End of the bad times-A post a week

It’s been a very slow start for Phaedrus Within.

I made it in the end of February of this year, specifically for music and literature reviews. For a full month I didn’t write the first post. After hours of intense torture, the first post came out, which was a satisfactory experience though .

But the pace always remained as slow as ever. It’s a sad thing to realize that though the first-born, it has always been a severely neglected child in comparison to my other blogs, Prairie Wind and Gorky Cafe.

Anyways, the good thing is I didn’t abandon this blog, and even though extremely infrequently, kept writing reviews of literature I read.

Now I think the troubled times for this blog (the torturous me! ) are going to end. From this week onwards, I’ve took up the personal challenge to write a post a week. Also from now on, the madman will only rave about his literary wanderings, and not the musical ones (sparse as they are, hehe). I guess this will make this my most coherent blog up to now .

End of the bad times for Phaedrus Within

Notes from Underground

Chilling. Dark. Menacing. And True.

These are the four words to describe this feat of philosophy and literature by Dostoyevsky.

The story is told by a man from the underground or a ‘hole’. Right from the start the narrator makes no compunctions about his thoughts on humanity and on himself. He denounces the society for its falseness on the outside beneath which there is a putrid core of rotten morality, ethical values and twisted ideas of collectivism and social welfare.

It starts by a classic description the narrator gives of himself, as an irritable, hostile and utterly despicable man who has been living in a ‘hole’ for the past two decades. He has been thinking about the society a lot during these 20 years and finally he’s noting down all those contemplations. And he doesn’t give a damn whether you take his thoughts in the right spirit or not. Because they are not in the right spirit in actuality. You can get appalled by them or you can laughingly toss them in the dustbin for all he cares.

He exposes the shallowness of the society he lives in, and goes on in a lengthy exposition about what people expect from a society and what they give to it and to what extent society marks its influence in the everyday life and thought-process of a common man. Moving on to the concept of ‘selfless ideal’ and ‘selfish evil’ he exposes the fallacy of this concept and denounces the collective amorphous faceless crowd that determines the fate of an individual man with a face.

Notes from Underground was one of the most vituperative and most revolutionary texts of the 19th century. It created a furor in the intellectual circles of 19th century Europe when it was published. The views over it in Russia was divided in two extremes, in the wake of the liberation of the serfs.

This book was the first novel to expound upon the idea of individuality which would later become the cornerstone of the edifice of Existentialism created by Sartre and others. Fyodor Dostoyevsky at his all-time peak as a philosopher. He presupposes the dawn of individual as a philosophical entity who would stand tall in the coming 20th century.

Literary Seasons

It’s the most awesome of summers. You are completely engrossed in a book. I mean it has you by the throat. You don’t know much about what is going on around you and in the solar system, except from what goes in the book. It IS the solar system. Perfect settings.

But it isn’t in those awesomest of summers that you miss that book. In those summers, you’ve been a fierce lover to that book, your intense focus merging the two of you into a single entity, a single conscious. You are the Henry Miller, the book being your Anais Nin. No, you don’t miss a book in an awesome summer.

You miss it in the waning autumn, the senescence of hitherto youthful year. The time when love seems to wane, giving way to picturesque silences in the evening, sad leaves leaving their home evicted by the ruthless winds. Age seems to be catching up with the year, slowing it down, making it more sombre and gloomy.

It’s 6:37 in the evening, the last of the lights lingering undecided on the horizon. Even the trees seems lethargic with sadness. Sure, there’s a buzz around, which is usual for a college campus teeming with more than thousand students. But in the autumn the buzz is a droning sound that further augments the loneliness of your soul. And that’s when you remember it. That’s when you miss it. The passionate summer afternoons spent in exhaustive reading. And when you come back to your room, a horrifying vacuum awaits you, ready to suck you in the infinite homogeneity of internet, or infinite tedium of pointless study.

That’s when you know it is time to pick up a new book. And start reading.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Aaah….The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The book, the gem.

As I have already mentioned in my blogpost on Gorky Cafe, this is one of the two most important books I read this summer. I want to extend it even further, at the time of reading this novel this was the best BOOK I’d read since Illusions, some two years back. I said at that time, because Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance came after it.

The book is a remarkable piece of art. It was like a clarion call rising from the Central Europe which looked quite drab otherwise in it multitudinous and infinitely divisible motifs of ethnicity, ideology and number of nation-states. It was like a blob of several intermixed colors suddenly emerging in a mass of continuing grey, black and white.

When you look at it, the profile of the author is quite unique too, Czech nationality, emigre living in Paris, born and raised

Milan Kundera

in the most tumultuous of times, when Czech Republic and a good number of other Central European states were raided and locked away behind the Iron Curtain, learned the most free of thinking in Paris, YET chose not to be an freedom-rights activist in support of his country, which most of the intellectual emigrants were inclined to become at that time, stationed almost invariably in Paris. He chose to direct his energies in the thing he loved, an exploration of philosophy, society’s morality and the psychological things that color normal people’s everyday lives. And this should by no means be construed as his apathy towards the fate of his country. He was passionate for his country and this showed in every one of his works. Milan Kundera is a highly inspiring personality.

The book explores the lives of four individuals’ inter-connected personal lives, through the close lenses of love, sex, insecurity, obsession, and the wide lenses of politics, ideology, idea of belonging to a country, time, ageless love, and true companionship. Actually to be more precise, four individuals and one dog. Tomas, a doctor in Prague, his wife Tereza, his mistress Sabina, who is a photographer, and Sabina’s later lover Franz who is a professor. Milan explore the various nuances of character of each of these individuals with a surgeon-like precision. Tomas is an intellectual, who is also a womanizer, and consider sex and love as two separate entities. While loving only his wife, he engages in numerous sexual

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

encounters. Yet, his life and the most important of its decisions are affected by his wife, Tereza who is a woman trapped in her own inner demons of insecurity for her love towards Tomas, and an impotent rage and inferiority towards Sabina, who is a free-thinker photographer and who shares Tomas’ sentiments regarding the dichotomy of sex and love, yet there are many subconscious layers to this thinking of hers, reaching back to her childhood, which leads her to always run towards an unattainable ideal in life, leaving behind everything constantly, not allowing oneself to settle. Later we see that she has found a glitter of permanence in life with Franz, but could not make herself come to terms with this new permanence, gives in to the inner demons and leaves him too. This marks an important change in the life of Franz, an idealist who is left deeply changed by thoughts of Sabina. Towards the end of the book we come back to the now old couple of Tomas and Tereza and the change time has effected on both of them, and there we encounter Karenin, the bitch who has now become an indispensable part of their lives. The end of the book is very very good. And quite heartbreaking too.

The title, and the philosophy of the book is inspired by the two opposite concepts of Heaviness and Lightness, of life, prescribed in different ages of time, by different philosophers. Parmenides, the Greek philosopher propounded the ephemeral nature of life, the ‘lightness’ of the consequences of every action we do here in our life. While in the 19th century, Nietzsche propounded the concept of ‘eternal recurrence’, the idea that everything is bound to occur again and again, and therefore every single of our actions is magnified thousandfold in it’s importance, the weight, it holds, and the sheer burden of everything repeating ad infinitum is unbearable. The author scrutinizes the lives of these four individuals alternately under the specs of lightness and heaviness.

This book is one of the best to come out of 20th century literature, and certainly one of the best I’ve read in my life. You will not be able to complete the book with a calm mind, let alone being happy or sad. Up until then, the emotional and philosophical storm going inside will have half-wrecked your mind.

 

The Big Read

Top 100 books chosen by viewers (re-edited and remastered from the BBC site) The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Copy this , Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt.

 

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen 
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible  (Some of it)
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials –  Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare  (Some of it)
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
24. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
25. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
26. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
27. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
28. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
29. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
30. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
31. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
32. Emma -Jane Austen
33. Persuasion – Jane Austen
34. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis (Btw this should  be in the Chronicles of Narnia)
35. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
36. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
37. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
38. Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
39. Animal Farm - George Orwell
40. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
41. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
42. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
43. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
44. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
45. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
46. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
47. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
48. Atonement – Ian McEwan
49. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
50. Dune – Frank Herbert
51. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
52. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
53. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
54. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
55.  A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
56. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
57. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
58. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
59. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
60. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
61. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
62. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
63. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
64. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
65. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
66. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
67. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
68. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
69. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
70. Dracula – Bram Stoker
71. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
72. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
73. Ulysses – James Joyce
74. The Inferno – Dante
75. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
76. Germinal – Emile Zola
77. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
78. Possession – AS Byatt
79. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
80. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
81. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
82. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
83. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
84. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
85. Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
86. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
87. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
88. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
89. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
90. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (English)
91. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
92. Watership Down – Richard Adams
93. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
94. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
95. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas (Unabridged and all three volumes)
96. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

The Stranger

These days I am getting a bit too lucky. Reading one masterpiece after another. After reading nerve-chillingly dark Notes from the Underground, I came across another secret passageway, which was a little less dark, but much much more melancholy (for me) and as nerve-wrenching and equally lofty- The Outsider/The Stranger.

The Outsider or The Stranger is a novella by Albert Camus. The masthead of his ‘absurdism’, this novel concerns the life a young man who is executed in public because of his ‘unfeeling’ nature and his complete absence of emotion for human beings and mankind in general.

Camus’ novel delves very deep into the basic philosophical question regarding society: Are we bound, living in a society, to a certain set of emotions and that too to a certain intensity only, to be accepted fully and work normally in that society? Is a man, who refuses to regulate his thoughts and emotions according to the convenience and smooth functioning of society, to be in harmony with those close to him, who refuses to be mutually bound by others’ thoughts and emotions, condemnable? Is there no place in society for a man who refuses to relinquish his intellectual and emotional freedom, the true freedom, for the sake of maintaining the masquerade of lies, and false and over-sized emotions, the masquerade which society so cautiously guards against any form of honest and brutal uncovering?

The protagonist is a very ordinary French-Algerian guy, living modestly. When his mother dies, who lives in an old-age home because he cannot afford to keep her, he has to go for teh funeral. That’s when his own free life and independence and ‘cold-heartedness’ starts getting on the nerves of the people.

Divided in two parts, first part shows the life of Meursault (the protagonist), his attendance at his mother’s funeral, neighbour Salamano, friend Raymond and his girlfriend Marie. Among his benefactors we find Meursault very safe and he appears to outer society a very ordinary citizen. But everything changes when he accidentally kills an Arab. It’s then, when the small details of his private life and philosophy are brought to public eye, that this no longer remains just a ordinary case of manslaughter. It becomes society’s battle to preserve its own masquerade, to punish the unfeeling ‘AntiChrist’.

The second part, the courtroom scenes, and Meursault’s recounting of prison life are unparalleled in economy of words and excellence. Camus’ rips apart the masquerade of religion, love, need and faith that humans wear and their addictive dependence of it for making them ‘humans’. He shows the stark contrast in which Meursault stands against the whole of humanity. The last pages, when Meursault rebuffs the chaplain’s offer to repent for his sins and the explosion of anger in which he delivers the phenomenal speech which embodies the core of the novel, of human existence itself, are Absolute Reason itself.

Besides all the greatness I loved this book personally very much. It’s like a sun in the dark, one of those very far and few in this world, which illuminate others from its own light, and not from the light reflected and sifted from throughout the centuries. It creates its own light.

Related articles

• A little of Camus (sophierosalind.wordpress.com)
• Turns out I don’t like it either! (littlefellandus.wordpress.com)
• Book talk: The Outsider and victimisation in the press (melissahogenboom.wordpress.com)
• The Destruction of Non-conformists (socyberty.com)
• “Invincible Summer” (ilmaha.wordpress.com)