Phaedrus Within

Gunahon Ka Devta (Spoiler Alert)

My rating: 5/5

Gunahon ka Devta is the most popular work of Dharmvir Bharti. And it’s easy to see why it is so popular. It’s a love story. And one of the epic one, the shine of whose brilliance isn’t going to go for ages in Hindi Literature to come.

It’s the story of a boy and a girl, who grew up together since early childhood, and share a bond of trust, friendship, and pure and innocent love. The boy is a simple, hardworking and an honest person, who has intellectual ambitions. However he is ideal to a fault, adhering to a (pseudo)intellectual conception of love which rejects any physical fulfilment of that love as the negation of its spiritual loftiness.

The blind devotion of Sudha submits to Chander’s aggressively spiritual ideal of love, and they are separated. From this point onwards the real test of Chander’s spiritual ideal begins as he meets Pammi, the mature and materialistic girl, experiences the power of physical intimacy and it’s ability to distort the ethical and moral fabric, and suffer on account of his unfulfilled love for Sudha. Chander’s Dostoyevskian journey into the endless recesses of his mind’s darker sides, Sudha’s sacrificing herself on the altar of marriage, everything comes to a feverish climax when Sudha dies in childbirth. Too late, he realizes the defeat of his lofty spiritual ideal.

The book’s immense popularity, especially among the young generation of that era is entirely deserved. The subject matter is perennial favorite, the prose magical. The first half of the novel, which goes in more or less a positive vein, is exhilarating and refreshingly lyrical. It’s almost a perfect love story between the innocent, bubbly, full-of-life Sudha and simple, intellectual, honest, and serious-to-a-fault Chander. The story takes on a serious turn at about halfway with Chander’s creating an inevitable, irrevocable turning point in the lives of both of them.

The intensity of the book after that is too much to take. The psychological torture that Chander goes through, and makes you go through, compares to Raskolnikov or a Nietzsche. The downward spiral towards madness continues till the end when the death finally catches up with one of them, and hits Chander the hardest. Sudha dies in childbirth, her last hysterical moments a searing pain.

With this final thunder, the storm of Chander’s mind finally dies, leaving a charred landscape behind, and a life to keep living on.

Gunahon ka Devta and Suraj ka Saatvan Ghoda are two of Dharmvir Bharti’s most famous and acclaimed words. While Suraj ka Saatvan Ghoda, an experimental work, is favored by critics(not undeservedly so), Gunahon ka Devta is certainly the toast of the masses. And you won’t doubt it for a single minute after you read it. One of my all-time favorite works.

Shatranj Ke Khiladi

My rating: 3/5

Shatranj Ke Khiladi is one of the most famous stories by Premchand, or I should say, arguably the most famous story along with ‘Do bailon ki kahani’. And years ago, when I read a lot of short stories by Premchand from the Mansarovar series, including ‘Do Bailon ki Kahani’, I missed this story somehow. The hype surrounded it has been all the greater for the movie made on it by Satyajit Ray.

So when I sat down to read it, the first and biggest surprise was its size. It was a mere 17 pages. I expect some 30-40 at least. Maybe my bad. It didn’t take long to read the whole thing, about half an hour. The experience was anti-climactic.

I think the whole problem I have with the story is encapsulated in its short length. In my opinion, with the epic historical background of the story, two feudal lords playing the lordly game of chess, and losing their lands and subsequently the empire(which they were part of) and killing each other over the very game in a Macbeth-ian end, he could have made much more out of it. Premchand, the master storyteller, could have created an even more beautiful masterpiece if he had handled it more leisurely. It looked more like what I’d write, wasting a beautiful idea in a hurry to finish the piece.

It looked more like the synopsis than the story itself. In that sense, it was disappointing to see the story rush itself to finish before I could sit back and enjoy the evolution of the drama.

P.S. – The photo is the poster cover of the movie by Satyajit Ray based on the story.

South of the Border, West of the Sun

A short novel by Haruki Murakami. I had been planning not to read any Murakami for some time after completing the formidable and brain-frying ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’. But somehow, I ended up picking this book after uselessly going through my bookshelf.

This book has many similarities with other Murakami books. And since the main theme here is love, I connected the book to Norwegian Wood. This is Norwegian Wood’s inferior sister, not meaning the word ‘inferior’ in any particular derogatory sense, but stating a fact. The qualities(or lack of qualities) which I liked about South of the Border, West of the Sun, but which make it more ordinary and not-so-great, are the simplicity and directness of prose. True, rich natural symbolism is still here in places, but there is a clarity to the prose. A fog of mystery and greatness which enveloped Norwegian Wood’s prose is not here. It is a much simpler book, which I what I wanted in the ongoing condition. So, I am not complaining at all.

The story is about a man, and three women he encounters in his life at three different stages, how his relations with each of them develop(and end in two of the cases), depending on and affecting his evolution as a person. The novel, therefore, stays loyal to the central of almost all of Murakami’s works, the exploration of self and the meaning of life through the exploration of emotions, love, sex and death.

While I have no issues against the writing style in this novel, I love it as usual, the one thing, and it’s not a minor one, which makes this book ‘good-but-forgettable’ is the lack of a really really interesting plot. The plot is good, and apparently no better or worse than that of Norwegian Wood, but something is not very right about it, something is missing. I think the plot is not utilized properly. All the possibilities in the plot are not explored fully. Only the most important things are given centre-stage. So, in a way, the plot of South of the Border and that of Norwegian Wood are like two pictures, first one with low pixel quality and other one with high pixel quality. At one glance, you don’t spot the difference in sharpness between the two, but once you zoom in a bit(that is, read the book closely), you can see the first one getting all blurred while the second one retaining the sharpness. I think that would be an apt description of what I felt about this book.

Yet, all said and done, I enjoyed reading it thoroughly. There are some heartstrings which have waited for years to be touched by just the right choice of emotive, introspective prose, and Murakami touches those heartstrings just perfectly.

2012 in Retrospect

2012 was a good, but an ironic year in terms of books. It was my most prolific year up till now in terms of books read, it was a year when I was finally able to rein in my abrupt and erratic reading habits to a certain degree of regularity. But it was also the year, I wrote the least about books. Although it can also be said, that I blogged much less in 2012 than 2011 on the whole, but whatever amount of blogging I did, reviewing and writing about books consisted only a measly amount of that, that is to say, only first three months and half a dozen posts. So, while I ended the

year on a happy note, feeling good about the books I read, returning to the blog was a bit saddening as I haven’t touched it for more than 9 months. Anyways, I don’t intend to remain sad for a long time, as I have returned to the blog again and intend to write about books, at least much more than previous year, though I wouldn’t go so far as to make any presumptuous statements :D.

I read 32 books in 2012. First half of my year was quite dismal, and I was reading very poorly and distractedly. I was completely fallow for a period of 3 months, April-June, while precisely at that time another year ago, I was reading most intensely. The listlessness and indolence was so great, while I tried unsuccessfully to tackle War and Peace, that for some time I thought I had lost my reading habit and passion forever and from now on I would only drag myself onward forcibly. Thankfully, I could finally force myself to change all that after the first half of the year, and turn it into the best year I ever had with book 🙂 The number of classics(by ratio) I read this year was lower than 2011, when I was in a very purist mindset. This year, lagging behind miserably in terms of number of books and motivation, I resorted to reading many small books(I’m quite tempted to use the word, ‘filler’, which I guess would be appropriate for some of the books I read) instead of tackling heavyweights. This was also the reason, I wandered towards smaller, non-classical, and occasionally, non-fiction, personal-development styled books. Due to this, this years books had a very fair distribution from best to worst.

The most awesome books I read this year were:

STEPPENWOLF – I read this towards the end of October, during the winter vacation in one of my reading sprees, when completely alone in Kanpur. Instantly added to my classics, this book established the genius of Hermann Hesse to me. This book is a violent beauty, a perfection so shocking and animistic that you can’t appreciate the book without shuddering at its ominous, foreboding meaning. And if you shuddered, and stopped frequently to give your mind a breather from the violence on the pages, while reading the book in the dead of night, you’ve enjoyed the book 🙂

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE – The last book I read in the year, and the one book which definitely should have been the last. This book is a stroke of genius of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I will write more about it in a separate review which I’m thinking to write about it. This book has more layers to it than I understood while reading it, something which I’m getting to understand only now when I think intermittently about it. It’s magical realism at its best, but it’s also much more than that.

SKETCHES FROM A HUNTER’S ALBUM – This one transported me back the old Russia of 1850s, Russia of my childhood. Turgenev is different from both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, yet their equal in stature, a true master of prose. Sketches depict life of peasants and landlords in pre-1850(before serfdom was abolished)Russia, from the eyes of a nobleman hunter, always on the move, as he passes through all forms of life, observing with equanimity and keenness, all sorts of cruelty, wretchedness, and quirks and foibles of people around him.

His love of nature is equally obvious and as beautifully shown here as his trenchant observation (and occasional commentary) of the life of his times. Which also means the book might not be an easy read if you are not a nature-lover, as these are sketches, not a centralized story. Written in a poetic, unhurried and beautiful style. There are no all-encompassing moral/geographical canvases of Tolstoy, or violent psychological inquests of Dostoyevsky, only the hunter’s eyes, his gun and his dog, the people he meet, the lives he encounters, and nature. (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28458.Sketches_from_a_Hunter_s_Album)

And now for the worst. Now there were some sub-standard motivational and self-development celestine_prophecy books I read which irritated me a lot at many points, but there was only one book which could meet up to my stringent criteria of ‘worst’ – THE CELESTINE PROPHECY by James Redfield. This book is so stupid, so dumb, so childishly conceived and written that it’s a appalling mystery to me why some people swear by this book. One of the biggest disasters of the mystical/spiritual genre, which, despite being an atheist, I hold some interest in.

Riding on the crest of book-reading nowadays, I’m positive and ambitious towards reading more forcefully and regularly this year. Also, almost as importantly, I’ll try to review as many books as possible this year, and more than that, write about books in general, all my thoughts and feelings which keep coming up randomly in my mind, but never worked on enough to take the shape of words.

Wishing a happy reading year of 2013 to you all 🙂