Illusionist review, and thoughts on movie twists

“Nothing is what it seems” is the tired tagline for Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, which I saw on DVD recently. I should have been warned. This disappointingly static film is capped by a surprise ending which shows us that nothing, indeed, was as it seemed. In a story about illusions and the fine art of deception, this shouldn’t come as a big surprise at all – but it’s done in a way that shows up much of the movie as lazy gimmickry.

I’m wary of twists in a film’s tail. Too often this device works only at one level – creating a shiver of excitement in the first-time viewer – and at the expense of the internal logic created in the rest of the film. Classic example: Bryan Singer’s overrated The Usual Suspects, where the final revelation (conveyed through the responses of a character whose shock mirrors the viewer’s) became an end in itself – two minutes of cleverness making nonsense of the 90 minutes that preceded them. (Besides, watching the film again, you realise how vapid those 90 minutes were in the first place.)

One twist that worked for me was the one at the end of M Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable (which I’ve blogged about here) because it brought the film’s themes into clearer focus and helped the viewer appreciate things about the central characters that we hadn’t been able to see until that point. But such examples are rare, and the surprise at the end of The Illusionist doesn’t enrich the film in any way.

Burger's film, set in late 19th century Austria, is great to look at and begins promisingly. The driving force is an early scene where Eisenheim, a carpenter’s son, is hiding in a secret room with Sophie, a young duchess; they have become close friends and this is frowned upon in her social circles. “Make us disappear!” Sophie urges him as her wards closes in on the hiding place. Eisenheim is an amateur conjurer but this feat is quite beyond him, and the two of them are discovered and separated.

Fifteen years later Eisenheim returns to Vienna; he calls himself the Illusionist now, and he’s played by Edward Norton with a gaze that’s so fixed and so intense you’d think he was trying to keep from dissolving into peals of laughter. Meanwhile Sophie has grown into Jessica Biel, and worse things could happen to a young Duchess, but she isn’t very happy – she’s engaged to Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell), an unsmiling throne-hankerer with “a reputation for beating up his women”. Rounding off the main cast of characters is Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti), an intrigued witness to the mindgames that ensue as Eisenheim casts a spell over the city and renews his relationship with Sophie. His illusions begin with relatively pedestrian things like growing an orange tree out of a seed in a few moments (“the mysteries of time and space may be unlocked. Nature’s laws may be bent”) – but soon he starts invoking otherworldly spirits and raising questions about supernatural powers.

There’s enough here to suggest that The Illusionist could have been a really good film. The early scenes, especially the sepia-tinted flashbacks of Eisenheim’s childhood, are very striking; in fact the cinematography and art-direction are beautiful throughout. But the producers failed to pull a scriptwriter out of their hat. There’s plenty of solemn talk alright, and a few cryptic exchanges (especially between Eisenheim and Inspector Uhl) that sound like they might mean something, but none of it leads anywhere. Initially you think the dialogue is stilted because maybe this is just how these 19th century types talk to each other – but any such fancies disappear with scene after scene of posturing and clumsy humour.

Rarely does a bad script produce decent performances, however accomplished the actors, and Ed Norton never seems to get a grip on Eisenheim; his performance consists almost entirely of that intense gaze and the occasional raising of his hand to his head to simulate deep concentration. Jessica Biel apparently did this film to prove she could be a serious actress, but “serious” here is a synonym for “English-accented”. (Just by the by, why do we need to hear turn-of-the-century Austrians speaking in Oxford accents? Once it was decided that this would be an English-language film, the suspension of disbelief was already in place; so couldn’t Norton, Giamatti and Biel have been allowed to retain their American accents? Unless the idea was to make sure the actors earned their wages, given that their lines are so undemanding.)

I was also put off by the way the film copped out at key moments: there are early indications, for instance, that some of Eisenheim’s tricks will be explained, but all we get is a quick glimpse of a notebook with elaborate marked diagrams on it. And there are hints but no real exploration of the possibility that Eisenheim’s secrets might be connected with the “magic” of cinema’s early years (The Illusionist is set at a time when pioneers like Georges Méliès were astonishing audiences with their moving pictures, and when the line between science and the supernatural must have become very blurred).

Pity. With a more thoughtful, wittier screenplay and a better-developed exposition, this could have been a much more satisfying film.

P.S. Anthony Lane once said of the cardboard villains in Con Air that the more the film broadcast their wickedness, the more unbelievable and funny it became. It occurs to me that similar logic applies to movie twists. When you see a goggle-eyed character experience a moment of epiphany (whether it’s Bruce Willis staggering about in astonishment as he realises that he’s been dead for years, Chazz Palminterri coming to the chilling conclusion that Verbal Kint is Keyser Soze, or Paul Giamatti discovering an elaborate conspiracy in The Illusionist), the whole thing is just too earnest to be taken seriously. It’s as if the film is banging you over the head with a signboard that says “Payoff time! Here’s the Twist! Be Surprised!” And you’re too busy rolling in the aisles to notice.

Penguin nets Amitav Ghosh

Hear ye! Penguin Books India has acquired Amitav Ghosh’s new work, a trilogy of novels titled (for now) “The Ibis Trilogy”. The first book, Sea of Poppies, will be published in early 2008, with Hindi, Marathi and Malayalam translations to follow.

This is good news indeed – one of India’s top writers tying up with the publishing house that has the best resources at its disposal – and I’m looking forward to the books. But I was also amused by this bit in the press release:

“…this is a work of stunning sweep and destined to become a classic.”

Amit Chaudhuri was right - the old language of literature has been replaced by the language of the marketplace. Time has turned on its head.

Absolutely the last post on the Jaipur festival

Here’s the link to a fly-on-the-wall piece I wrote about the fest for Business Standard. Includes stuff I’ve already put up here and here (especially the “Session Snippets”) but I’ll still post the whole thing a little later – because the BS website, there’s no polite way to say this, is crap. Para breaks are random (because of a ridiculous notion some people have that no one will read a paragraph that’s more than 5 lines long), words that are supposed to be italicized/in bold aren’t, and the links keep changing. I was told more than a year ago that improvements are underway but it doesn’t ever look like happening (which, to be fair, is true for the world in general).

Update here's the piece, minus the Session Snippets:

“I get the impression,” poet Jeet Thayil deadpans, “that India has discovered the literary festival and is going to make up for the past with a vengeance.” Thayil is referring to the sudden preponderance of lit-events being organised in the country, but he might as well be talking about the blink-and-miss pace of activity at the one we are at — the Jaipur Literature Festival, held in the Diggi Palace between January 19-21. Inside the hall, a few feet from where we are standing, a reading-cum-discussion is underway, one of many scheduled for the day. We are by the lawn outside, near the little book-stall and coffee-stand, having decided (like many others) that it’s impractical to try and attend each session; it makes more sense to choose your events and spend the rest of the time soaking in the general atmosphere.

The Jaipur festival allows for such an approach, being relatively informal in its structure — the sessions are free-flowing, not centred around a specific theme, and the event descriptions usually not more elaborate than “So-and-so well-loved author reads from her work and speaks with so-and-so”.

Of course, informality does start to disappear as an event gets bigger in scale. At last year’s edition of the festival it was possible to meet someone like Hari Kunzru at the door as he left after his reading, and shepherd him to a deckchair for an impromptu five-minute interview. This year things aren’t so simple. With a larger audience and (more pertinently) larger media representation, authors tend to be chary and stick to their own comfort groups — though it’s ridiculous to suggest, as some news reports did before the event, that Salman Rushdie has a security contingent accompanying him around. The man is usually surrounded by a clique of friends, fellow authors and festival organisers, but it isn’t uncommon to see him blithely entering the hall all by himself and occupying the nearest available seat.

The quality of the actual events stays consistent most of the way through, though minor irritants do show up. Pramod Kumar, former director, Jaipur Virasat Foundation, is candid about the areas that need to be improved on. “We’ve had seating problems, especially for the highest-profile events,” he says, alluding to the Kiran Desai and Rushdie sessions where the audience spilled over onto the lawn; Desai’s conversation with Barkha Dutt was especially frustrating for those who didn’t get good seats because the TV set installed outside the hall played Twinkle Twinkle and the acoustics weren’t up to par. “I’m also disappointed by the lack of questions from the audience,” Kumar says, though this does also stem from the need to hurriedly wrap one session up so the next one can begin.

At any rate, you can be assured of strange and wondrous sights at a literary event spread over three days, especially if you’re uninitiated to cocktail book launches and the lit-party circuit. For starters, the image of the author as a reclusive beast cooped up in a room with pen and Muse goes rapidly out the window. There are games of one-upmanship between writer and writer, agent and agent, journalist and journalist, and various permutations of these. There is groupism, bitching, backstabbing, canoodling. Two heavyweights who might not be very happy to run into one another are steered away at key moments by the organisers. Wannabe writers pursue publishers and agents with large manuscripts in their hands. Caferati, the online forum for aspiring writers (http://www.caferati.com/), has its own stall set up in one corner, where there is much (good-natured) hard-selling of the group’s first book, the self-published Stories from the Coffee-Table.

At the other end of the lawn a schoolgirl talks excitedly on her cellphone: “Haan, uncle? Rushdieji mere peeche baithe the!” Other students take photographs inside the hall with flash-enabled cameras (despite a strict injunction not to) and whisper loudly to each other: “Damn, I clicked that guy’s picture instead of that guy’s! Which of them is the main guy for this session?”

And in the midst of all the fun and frivolity, there are even some provocative discussions about literature — authors reading from and talking about their work, sessions that cover legacies from the past (in the form of a moving homage to the late poets Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel and Arun Kolatkar) and possible directions for the future (Penguin India editor Ravi Singh cautions that all the talk about explosive growth in Indian publishing is “ridiculously overstated — the average print runs for mid-list books hasn’t changed in the last 10 years”, but Zubaan publisher Urvashi Butalia is more optimistic about the increase in the number of bookstores, genres and the growing importance of literature for young people).

One of my favourite moments came when authors Ira Pande and Namita Gokhale, cousins, began a session by chattering jovially amongst each other and then apologising to the audience: “Sorry about this, when Namita and I get together we turn into a Johar Mahmood show and forget all about the audience.” However, this didn’t stop the ladies from embarking on a thoughtful conversation about the work of Pande’s mother Shivani, the acclaimed Hindi writer. In the final reckoning, this balance between intimacy and serious discussion is what makes the Jaipur festival a success.

Of penumbras and KRAs

[Have spent the last few days putting together longish feature stories about the literary festival and such, so it was a nice break to do this lightweight “My Week” column in personal diary-form, for the Sunday Business Standard.]

Friday
A freelance writer is more likely to be going to bed at 3.30 AM than waking up at that time, but I have to be ready for the early-morning drive to Jaipur – I'm going with a group of friends (fellow bloggers and journalists) for the annual literary festival and have decided to take my car, having suffered motion sickness on the bus journey last year. Co-travelers offer to share the driving if I get tired, but my insides can stand a long road journey only if I’m behind the wheel myself. (This makes life very complicated. Midway through a journey from Shimla to Kalka once, I had to ask a startled cab-driver to stop and allow me to drive the rest of the way.)

Once on National Highway-8, I briefly regret my decision as we find ourselves in the middle of a bizarre (for this time of day) traffic pile-up just outside Gurgaon; I ruminate darkly on all the things I've heard about improved roads and infrastructure. Later, alarm bells ring when we see a long line of trucks heading back towards us on our side of the road, but the traffic clears and there are no further problems. Unfortunately we reach Jaipur only around 11.30, having missed a session I badly wanted to catch - the one featuring domestic worker-turned-author Baby Halder.

In the next three days we attend readings and discussions, laze in deckchairs on the Diggi Palace lawn, chat with writers and publishers and go out for non-literary dinners each night (note to anyone visiting Jaipur: try Cafe Kooba, it's excellent). While shopping in the Walled City, a prominent blogger friend who shall remain unnamed is miffed when a crafts store assistant asks him in polite English if he "would like to try a sari". (Immense emasculation proliferates.)

Saturday
At an otherwise excellent session featuring author Amit Chaudhuri in conversation with editor/critic Anita Roy, I hear the former use the phrase "the Penumbra of the Self". Having long believed that "penumbra" was either a gruesome inner body part or a six-headed mythical monster, I am stunned into reverential silence. These literary festivals really do expand one's mental horizons, even if the coffee is below par.

“I am truly mesmerised!” the short balding man in the audience says to the beautiful poet who has just finished a reading. “You seem obsessed by the human body. Can you tell me your worldview please?”

Sunday
Jade Goody, who said all those mean things about Shilpa Shetty, has been evicted from the celebrity house and India has once again chastened the rest of the world with its Moral Superiority. A newspaper quotes Shetty's family as saying "good has triumphed over evil, just like in Bollywood films". I shake my head so hard it falls off.

In the evening we are entertained by a stream of quotable quotes by Salman Rushdie as he holds forth on faith ("my mother developed religion in her old age – but it was like arthritis"), censorship ("you can't burn a thought"), the Indian Army in Kashmir, and many other topics.

Monday
I reach Delhi around 12 PM after another long morning drive, and with fever and a bad cough to show for my pains. The rest of the day is spent staring listlessly at the TV screen. Outstanding match between two of tennis's finest youngsters, Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray, and I wonder philosophically whether you get more brownie points in the afterlife for writing a dozen good books, winning a dozen Grand Slams or participating in a dozen reality shows.

The "We support Shilpa" messages on the tickers of news channels read: "My sentiments, and the sentiments of millions of We Indians, have been offended". Seeking comfort in numbers, what? I consider possible National Mottos to go with our national anthem and national song: "I am Indian and my sentiments are always hurt." Pleased with this small contribution to the national cause, I sleep, only to be tormented by nightmares about Amit Chaudhuri's penumbra chasing me through a cold and dark forest where the trees are all painted in the national tri-colour.

Also
The features department in office is abuzz with talk about a grand new concept called "Key Result Area" (KRA), conceived by the human resources team as a way of measuring employee performance. It sounds very promising, but a senior editor tells me the acronym makes much more sense when you add the letter "P" to it. Another sniffs, "How can you quantify a writer's work or reduce it to cold figures?" It feels like I'm back at the lit-fest.

Colour us saffron (and green, and white)

So here are some of the things The Times of India advises its readers to do to "show your love for India":

"Wear a tattoo with Indian colours. There is one with today's issue of The Times of India itself. Go on, wear it!"

[note they don't specify where]

"Get your face painted in the colours of the Indian flag"

"Wear the Indian flag on your lapel"

[while making sure the flagpole doesn't pierce your carotid artery]

"Sing patriotic songs while you are with friends and while you are traveling. Soon perfect strangers will join in too!"

[...and use the joyous occasion to molest your girlfriend]

"Make the national anthem your ringtone"

"Send people messages wishing them a Happy Republic Day"

And what about this quote from Mandira Bedi:

One should remember people who have got India independence. So, I will be spending time with my memories and wearing my love for the country proudly on my sleeve.

Not sure what this means: does she have personal memories of the freedom movement or is she under the impression that Navjot Singh Sidhu and Charu Sharma were freedom fighters? Also, what sleeve?

[It's probably just coincidence that this is my 666th post]

Jaipur fest session notes 2: Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri has this air of gravitas but he can be very funny in his understated way. When Anita Roy, moderating his session, cautiously said, “I hope you don’t take offence, but it seems you’re something of an oddity in the pantheon of Indian writers…”, Chaudhuri promptly retorted with a faux-offended “How dare you!” (Was it just my imagination at work or did it seem like a Naipaul send-up?)

Anyway, Anita’s point about Chaudhuri being an “oddity” was that he seems to belong to a different time-zone from the other major Indian writers of his generation – in terms of his influences and the nature of his writing. “On the one hand there’s been this prevailing notion that only big, sprawling books can capture the reality of this big, sprawling country,” she said, “but on the other hand your work is almost miniaturist.” (At this point Hurree leant across to remind me that Chaudhuri had once referred to a certain type of Big Book as “baggy monsters”.)

And yet, Anita continued, despite these differences, you are seen as a 36-point figure on the Indian literary scene rather than, say, a 24-point figure. (I enjoyed this cheeky way of expressing the difference between a heavyweight and an author of medium standing; also thought it was a nice comment on literary hierarchies.) Chaudhuri responded by discussing his discomfort with “the triumphalist nature of Indian writing” and by mentioning some of his early influences, including Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri: “this lineage is as important as the huge monuments of Rushdie and Midnight’s Children.” Here, he also touched on how his relationship with most of the books he read in the late 1970s has changed over the years. “I don’t feel the same way now about many of the books I enjoyed in 1976, and vice versa. Jejuri is one of the exceptions – I loved it then and I still love it.”

Shortly afterwards, he was asked what he thought of Suketu Mehta’s remark (made during an earlier session) that Indian writing in English is more interesting and dynamic than in other languages because Indians who are thinking/writing in English are seeing more rapid change. Chaudhuri looked around faux-surreptitiously. “Is Suketu here? No? Then it’s safe to disapprove?” He then proceeded to tackle the question in seriousness – he didn’t argue against Mehta’s position forcefully but with quiet effectiveness, by asking rhetorical questions: “Are good writers simply a product of rapid change? I’m not sure.” The classes of society that are not seeing very rapid change, he pointed out, still produce great writers (C S Lakshmi, for instance) because great writing can come out of a search for freedom – from feeling in the dark, and pushing the walls back.

“The old language of literature is being replaced by the language of the market,” he said later, alluding to the blurb culture. “There was a time when it took a while for a book to develop a reputation. Today we’re being told even before a book’s release that it’s a masterpiece. Time has turned around.”

P.S. Anita is a hugely entertaining moderator. She allows herself to be cheeky, gets sidetracked now and again and refuses to be didactic about the Big Issues – and paradoxical though it might sound, I think these qualities makes authors feel more comfortable when they’re talking to her. The format of a panel discussion at a literary festival is a bit stifling anyhow – it’s understood that serious issues are going to be discussed and meaningful things said, and some lightness and irreverence during the actual discussion always helps. Of course, what made this session such a success in the final reckoning was that Chaudhuri himself was responsive and articulate.

Jaipur fest: notes on sessions 1

Short notes on a few of the sessions I attended. Will draw on these for the stories I have to do:

Kiran Nagarkar in conversation with Shoma Choudhary
This session was a bit of a mess. The acoustics were poor and Nagarkar, who can be a very entertaining reader, seemed uninspired – it was immensely boring to sit through more than half an hour of readings from various sections of God’s Little Soldier (the sound was so bad that I’m not even sure whether he read three passages or four). The discussion that followed the reading was far too brief, largely inaudible and went off into odd tangents, such as who Nagarkar’s favourite Indian directors were (to my everlasting regret, he didn’t say Manmohan Desai – though I did hear a disembodied “Kurosawa” at one point, which probably means I missed a turn in the conversation).

(It’s a pity; I was looking forward to this session, especially since I missed his book launch in Delhi, where the conversation was also moderated by Choudhary and where Aamir Khan was in attendance.)

William Dalrymple in conversation with Mark Tully
I’m a big fan of Dalrymple’s zeal as a presenter, the way he brings 19th century Delhi to life in his writing and his talks, and the powerpoint slides that he uses to illuminate his talks on White Mughals and The Last Mughal – but after the first 50 times my enthusiasm starts to wane. The man is staggeringly good at repeating presentations word for word, inflexion by inflexion, and yet making it sound spontaneous each time.

Some of Dalrymple’s material here was an exact repeat of his presentation at the last edition of the Jaipur festival – such as the bit about Sir David Ochterlony who went for evening promenades around Delhi with his 13 Indian wives, each of whom had her own elephant. Major déjà vu also happened when I heard such sentences as “Already strange things are happening to his facial hair” – said during the slideshow of the gradual physical changes in William Fraser after he had spent a few years in India.

I’m sure this session was a delight for the first-time viewer, but for me personally there was very little new to hear or see; it didn’t help that I had attended two of his presentations around the time of the Last Mughal launch in Delhi.

Keki Daruwala, Jeet Thayil and Jane Bhandari remember the late Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel and Arun Kolatkar
Easily the highlight of Day 1, even though I don’t have much of a feel for poetry. This session was as free-flowing as it could get, with Daruwala, Thayil and Bhandari taking turns to read from the work of Moraes, Ezekiel and Kolatkar, and interspersing the readings with little anecdotes and asides. Thayil was outstanding – apart from his readings, I enjoyed the photographs he showed us, such as the one of Kolatkar sitting in the inn where he received his visitors (“his apartment was so tiny he couldn’t meet people there – sometimes he had to take them out to the balcony”). He also described the poet’s voice as that of “a stoned and benevolent God who believes in man even though man has ceased to believe in him”.

“You’re allowed to laugh. These are funny poems,” Jeet said to a too-solemn audience at one point. Enjoyed that.

Suketu Mehta in conversation with Dalrymple
Very entertaining session, though I found myself seated between a couple of schoolgirls (a whole contingent of students had come for some of the events) who were taking photographs with flash-enabled cameras and whispering loudly to each other. Stuff like “Oh shit, I clicked that guy’s [Dalrymple] picture instead of that guy’s [Mehta]! Which of them is the main guy for this session?”

Mehta read out some of the funnier bits from Maximum City, proferred his thoughts on non-fiction (“it requires many years of trudging in the dirt – and a big advance”) and related stories about meeting gangsters, bar girls and movie stars for his research. One of his stories, about meeting a hitman who had turned vegetarian because he needed to keep his mind cool (“if I ate meat, I would end up killing many more people”), was the same as the one I heard from Vikram Chandra when I interviewed him here. But let’s not go down the Suketu Mehta-Vikram Chandra road...

The audience was livelier than usual. One gent was the source of much mirth for the way he worded a question: “One of the most fascinating portions of your book was about meeting Satish and Mickey – remember?” Everyone roared in laughter, but I thought it was fair enough: do the authors of Big Books really remember everything they’ve written, even if it’s based on a real encounter?

In reference to Mehta’s story about discovering that the police staged “encounter killings”, someone else asked if he felt any conscience pangs as an Indian citizen. “Well, I’m not an Indian citizen,” Mehta quipped, before quickly adding “In any case what was I supposed to do, call the cops?” Who watches the watchmen...

Back

The advantage of attending an event with someone who’s even more addicted to blogging than you are is that it saves you a lot of work. Amit, whom I last saw looking bleary-eyed in our hotel room early this morning, has (no doubt in the short time he had between getting ready and making a dash for the railway station) put up a nice little post about the Jaipur Literature Festival. It’s specifically about the Salman Rushdie session and I have nothing to add, except for these sentences uttered by the great man (Rushdie, not Varma), which I present to you out of context:

“I ceased to believe in God thanks to neo-Gothic architecture.”

“I wondered to myself: what kind of God wouldn’t strike you down for eating a ham sandwich?”

“Karachi is a bloody big dump!”

“It wasn’t a very good ham sandwich but I loved it.”

“Some of my best friends are journalists. I was just kidding when I said those things about them earlier. (Pause) Maybe. (Another pause.) A little bit.”

I took notes throughout the fest but won’t be putting up detailed posts, at least not for now. Have to sort them out for official purposes first. More later.

Hutch Crossword shortlist

The Hutch Crossword Book Award shortlists have been announced, and I’m especially pleased to see the inclusion of Rajorshi Chakraborty’s Or the Day Seizes You in the fiction list – it was one of my favourite reads (and favourite discoveries) of the year gone by. As it happens, I’ve read all the titles on the fiction shortlist, and also written about all of them on this blog – so here, self-indulgently, are the links to the relevant posts:

Or the Day Seizes You (interview with author here)

Racists

Sacred Games (author interview here)

The Inheritance of Loss

Home

Londonstani

Bougainvillea House

On the non-fiction list I’ve read three of the six titles, but only reviewed one on this blog: Sanjay Suri’s Brideless in Wembley.

On that note, off to Jaipur. Ta.

Pages From Hell

Treat this as a graphic-novel equivalent of those “cherished extracts” I sometimes post. Here are two pages from one of my favourite passages in From Hell, from a chapter that contrasts the day-to-day lives of London’s privileged classes (represented here by Sir William Gull, the Queen’s physician) with those of the poor women of the East End (Jack the Ripper’s victims, the prostitutes of Whitechapel), living in the most squalid, unhygienic conditions.

Gull wakes and stretches languorously in his plush bedchamber, while the unfortunates of Whitechapel sleep in the cold, sitting up against a wall, with a rope stretched out in front of them to prevent them from falling forward. (In the morning, when it’s time for them to get up and go about their work, the rope is pulled away, rudely awakening them – as depicted in the third panel of the first page.)

(Click the images to enlarge)



Update: for more illustrations from the book (especially from the "symbols of London" section), artist notes and other work by Eddie Campbell, see his wonderful blog.

Immense gratitude and purplocity overflows...

...in the direction of that darling boy Amit Varma, who in his bountiful munificence has presented me with two DVDs packed with the full content of graphic novels such as Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan, Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Craig Thompson’s Blankets and Bill Willingham’s Fables, plus Sin City, Sandman and much else.

I can’t read for long stretches on the computer and the tactile experience of reading a book in its original form is very important to me – so I still intend to collect the hardcopy versions of these works over time. (Besides, navigating through pages can be difficult on the comp, especially when the files are very large.) But one great advantage of having these comics on DVD, as Amit pointed out, is that you can appreciate the artwork in a way that the hardcopy format simply doesn’t allow you to. Each page, blown up on the computer screen, becomes a treasure to be closely studied and marveled at.

I spent most of last night moving between the 580 pages of one of my very favourite books – no, make that (Ponderousness Alert) one of my very favourite Works of Art: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s magnificent From Hell, set in Victorian London at the time of the Jack the Ripper murders. I’m a big fan of Moore’s writing, and more to the point his conceptualizing and putting together of seemingly unrelated ideas; the Appendix of footnotes in From Hell is a book unto itself and testifies to the depth of his research and imagination. But this is one instance where he’s been overshadowed by his illustrator. Campbell’s atmospheric, sooty black-and-white drawings look stunning on the laptop screen.

Am not going to gush about From Hell here, except to say 1) please, no mention of that Johnny Depp-Heather Graham film of the same name, and 2) if you’re at all interested in the Jack the Ripper case and/or the social climate of late-19th century England and you haven’t heard of this book, you should kill yourself without delay. But here are two links before you do: the Wikipedia entry and this write-up on Salon.com. Enjoy.

Meanwhile, I’m moving on to Moore’s collaboration with Melinda Gebbie, the pornographic Lost Girls, which is one graphic novel that won’t be available in our bookstores anytime soon – though wouldn’t it be lovely if it were and an innocent shop assistant tossed it into the children’s section! Happens all the time with the others...

Earlier posts on graphic novels: Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries, Moore’s Watchmen, Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha.

The end of pretension in publishing?

Posted below is a feature I did for the latest issue of Man’s World magazine. It was meant to be about books that are commonly classified as “lad lit”, but a related story that I find much more interesting (and which I’ve incorporated here) is the number of writers who are targeting the mass market – reaching out to the kind of reader who might pick up a cheaply priced novel because of the easily relatable characters and settings in it. The attitudes of some of these writers are very revealing. There’s plenty of inverse snobbery, for instance: the assumption that “literary” must necessarily be synonymous with “pretentious”, and that the best reason (the only reason?) to write a book is to sell thousands of copies and become famous quickly. I couldn’t help thinking about my recent interviews with Vikram Chandra and Raj Kamal Jha: Chandra saying he would be pleased if his book found just one reader with the “same heart”, Jha saying he felt lucky if 4-5 people appreciated something he had written. The mass-market writers would probably snort at these statements.

Working on this story was another reminder that many of us who read/review for a living and move in lit-circles tend to lose sight of the possible directions IWE (Indian writing in English) might take in the next few years. I think there’s scope for more indepth features about the increasing democratisation of Indian publishing.

Here’s the story.

‘We can’t do very literary stuff’

“What we’re seeing,” says Neelesh Misra, “is the end of pretension for the publishing industry.” The journalist-cum-author is talking about a new movement in Indian writing in English: the growing number of writers who are reaching out to the “casual reader” – that is, someone who prefers easily recognizable stories and settings, and conversational prose, to the rigours of literary fiction. Misra’s own first novel, Once Upon a Timezone, is a case in point. Despite a low-profile launch, it had sold over 8,000 copies as of early December, a very impressive figure for the fiction market in India.

“People who didn’t read earlier are picking up books now,” says Misra, “and they want themes and characters they can relate to.” Many urban Indian youngsters should be able to relate to his fast-paced story about Neel Pandey, who dreams of going to the US but ends up working in a Delhi call centre and forming a long-distance relationship with an American journalist.

Misra is in his 30s, well-ensconced in his job as a senior editor with the Hindustan Times, and proclaims that he’s “primarily a journalist who also happens to write books” – but his views are shared by a much younger man who hasn’t even embarked on a career yet. Tushar Rahaja, 22, recently graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and the author of Anything for You, Ma’am – An IITian’s Love Story, says he and his friends can’t connect with a lot of contemporary fiction. “I know many people who don’t read simply because they find it very boring,” he says. When Raheja wrote his debut novel, he relied on his visual sense and a flair for recording casual conversations: “I knew I couldn’t do very literary stuff.”

This movement away from “literary stuff” is catching on. Traditionally, one of literature’s strong points was supposed to be that it could make you uncomfortable – by opening windows into new worlds, challenging the reader to (at least briefly) understand characters who live and think differently. Much of the new writing on the Indian literary horizon performs the opposite function: it’s about reinforcing what you already know of the world; seeking comfort in the fact that there are others who have experienced the same things you have (even if it’s something as basic as having an argument with a girlfriend at the Barista in Green Park market - you know, the one that's just around the corner from Evergreen?). And as it happens, much of this writing is currently in the form of stories about the lives of confused young men.

Dude lit: a facile classification

Many new books deal with the coming-of-age experiences of a male protagonist – the ups and downs in studies, friendships, romance and career. In recent months, apart from Once Upon a Timezone… and Anything for You, Ma’am, there’s been Abhijit Bhaduri’s Mediocre but Arrogant, about a youngster named Abbey who lives and learns in a Jamshedpur management institute in the early 1980s (don’t miss that the book title spells “MBA”) and Tuhin Sinha’s That Thing Called Love (TTCL), centred on the ad-sales manager of a matrimony website and his quest for true love.

This commonality has led these books to be classified as “lad lit” or “dude lit”, the Boy’s Own Club riposte to Chick Lit. But the authors themselves resist being slotted. “These are terms propounded by the media,” says Sinha, pointing out that his novel deals with the lives of a motley group of characters, not just one male protagonist. “In a broad sense, I suppose it can be called lad lit. But personally, while writing it, I was least concerned about what category it would fit into.” Besides, he says, the feedback he gets through his website and on email comes from both male and female readers.

Chetan Bhagat, whose bestselling Five Point Someone and One Night @ the Call Center have been vanguards for the genre, is more aggressive. “Chick lit refers to literature that is read primarily by women. But ‘lad-lit’ is read by men and women both, what is so laddish about it?” he asks. “Some journalists like to slot items into snappy sub-categories, and so do the marketing divisions of publishing companies – that’s how this compartmentalisation happens.”

Abhijit Bhaduri says Mediocre but Arrogant wasn’t written to fit a genre but flowed naturally out of his own experiences as a business-school student. “I wanted to write about the experience of growing up in India in the 1980s and I chose a business-school setting because I was familiar with it.” Similar sentiments are voiced by Sudeep Chakravarti, whose Tin Fish captured the ethos of Mayo School in the mid-1970s, a milieu the author had experienced firsthand. For all the recent media hype, “lad lit” is simply a jazzed-up term for the good old-fashioned Bildungsroman, which is the sort of book a first-time novelist – still struggling to find a comfort zone in fiction – often writes.

Reading is cool. So is writing. But 'serious’ equals ‘pseudo’

So while it’s interesting that stories are being told from the young male perspective, the more notable thing about these books is that they constitute a new approach to writing and publishing – one that’s opposed to the idea that reading has to be a solitary habit, confined to a select few. Through pricing strategies and through the accessibility of their writing, these authors are targeting a mass readership and they make no bones about it.

A couple of years ago, Rupa & Co’s gambit of pricing Bhagat’s Five Point Someone at Rs 95 famously paid off: in a market where a mere 5,000 sales are enough to classify a novel as a “bestseller”, Five Point Someone sold lakhs of copies. Youngsters who would otherwise never have listed “reading” among their hobbies were buying the book – not just from regular bookstores but even at railway stations and traffic crossings. This is a strategy that other publishers have picked up on. Srishti Publishers has marked Raheja and Sinha’s novels at Rs 100 (in fact they are marked down even further at some bookstores), while Once Upon a TimeZone (HarperCollins India) and Mediocre but Arrogant (Indialog Publications) are both priced at Rs 195 – which is still quite low given their higher production quality and better editing.

“I told my publishers I didn’t want my novel priced at more than Rs 100,” Raheja tells me. Reason? He can’t imagine why someone might want to spend Rs 500 or more on a book “when he can go out with his girlfriend a couple of times and enjoy himself with the same money”. The obvious jokes aside (people who read have time for girlfriends?), this indicates a thought process that’s very different from that of purveyors of literary fiction. It’s the thought process of someone who’s willing to see a book as a pop commodity, something that provides instant gratification the way a quick meal at McDonald’s would – rather than as a pathway to intellectual stimulation.

But then “intellectual” is a bad word in these circles anyway – it’s synonymous with “pretentious”, and invariably preceded by “pseudo”. There’s plenty of inverse snobbery on view: the eagerness to take potshots at “serious writers”, the simplistic and self-serving assumption that any writer who uses big words, long sentences and descriptive prose must necessarily be insincere or catering to the demands of the West. The writers who target a mass-readership can’t understand why anyone would be “self-important” enough to write an 800-page tome, or to spend six years working on one book. “My life has been so eventful that I’m sure I can already write 50 books based on my experiences,” says Raheja confidently.

Abhijit Bhaduri and Neelesh Misra are relatively measured in their attitude to literary distinctions. “I want to avoid talking down to readers or getting into fancy descriptions,” says Misra, “but I do think of my work as middlebrow at least. If I write something, it should meet a certain quality requirement.” Bhaduri, who counts Rohinton Mistry and Arundhati Roy among his favourites, says, “The casual, conversational style of writing appeals to a large mass of people, but literary fiction has its own place.”

Convergence

Significantly, many of these writers have a strong online presence, with personal websites and blogs that help in promoting their books. “My Ryze page helped spread awareness about TTCL,” says Tuhin Sinha, “When you don’t have a professional PR agency working for you, the Net is the best option.” This medium also helps the writers to bypass the critic (another bad word!) and interact directly with that more important beast – the reader. For as Raheja puts it, “Critics use words that are out of the public domain. They are distanced from what they write about – they don’t know how much effort one puts into writing a book or making a film.”

Another interesting thing about this new lot of novels is that many of them are practically ready to be transferred to the big screen. (As a boy tells his girlfriend in Anything for You, Ma’am, “When God is giving us such a good chance to live a movie, why should we despair? Right now it is a perfect script for a masala movie.”) This isn’t surprising, for on the whole these writers have closer ties with Bollywood films than with literature. Sinha, for instance, is a Mumbai-based scriptwriter whose work includes serials like Pyar Ki Kashti Mein. “The scriptwriting experience has helped,” he says. “I’ve been told my book is very visual.”

Similarly, Neelesh Misra has written songs for Hindi movies – notably “Jaadu hai nasha hai” from Jism and “Maine dil se kaha…” from Rog – as well as a couple of scripts. His book ends with a very movie-like coda about what eventually happens to the various characters (sample: “Meenal Sharma and Sonia Shah are now India’s first legally married lesbian couple”). And Raheja’s ultimate aim is to make a film and oversee most aspects of the production. “I hate collaboration in art. Ideally I would like to do everything myself.” He draws an imaginary marquee in the air with his hands: “It should say Written by, Directed by and Music by Tushar Raheja.” Chances are that film versions of most of these books will be underway soon – which in turn should open the market even further.

But as Bhaduri says, “Today it’s lad-lit, tomorrow we’ll have teen lit or even kid lit. Eventually it’s all about giving the reader something to identify with.” Purists and critics will continue to be sceptical about this new writing, but for good or for bad it seems to be working. The coming months should see the playing out of the conflict between mass-market writing and literary fiction, especially if the larger publishers start accepting more manuscripts with an eye on what appeals to the untrained reader.

(BOX WITH STORY)

Tempting as it is to put all these books in the same bracket, they do vary in quality. Once Upon a Timezone… and Mediocre but Arrogant are a cut above the others. The former is a good airport read, but it also makes interesting observations about the changing nature of relationships and communication in today’s world – especially in the way the protagonist and his US-based girlfriend become close long-distance despite lying to each other about important things. Bhaduri’s novel (soon to be followed by “MBA” sequels, starting with Married but Available) is well-plotted and benefits from the illustrations, done by the author himself, which are like the doodles you’d see in any college student’s notebook.

On a lower rung in terms of writing quality and production values are Anything for You, Ma’am and That Thing Called Love, both of which are earnest first-time efforts but cringingly awkward in places. When a young couple spends time getting to know each other over coffee in That Thing Called Love, the author notes, “They soon realised that their coffee had been over for sometime. They’d been instead sipping the magic of their interactions.” It’s the sort of amateurishly constructed sentence that one is immediately tempted to condescend on – but then, who is to say there isn’t a market for such writing? This manner of basic, school-level playing around with words is exactly what might appeal to a lovelorn young man who has never read a novel before and casually picks one up at a roadside stall for “timepass”.

However, even the most indulgent reader would have to squirm at a sex scene late in the book, when a boy “pulls off a girl’s bra to discover that her lofty boobs did indeed meet the idea he had of them”. (“Lofty” boobs? Really? Where was the editor? But I forget – assembly-line books don’t waste much time on the editorial process.)

Sai Paranjpe's Katha: tortoise therapy

Major nostalgia happened while I was watching a party scene in Sai Paranjpe’s marvelous 1982 comedy Katha yesterday: sitting delicately next to a beer glass in one shot was a bottle of Gold Spot, that wonderful orange drink from the Ancient Days. (Another scene had an antique television set that was kept under a cover “because it’s afternoon, there are no TV programmes at this time”. Nostalgia good. Early 80s gooodd.)

Paranjpe’s film, which I first saw more than 20 years ago on Doordarshan, is a beautifully scripted and acted story based loosely on the fable of the hare and the tortoise. After a cutesy title sequence (with an animated rendering of the tale), we meet our tortoise, Rajaram (Naseeruddin Shah), an honest, likable young man who works as a filing clerk at a shoe company. Rajaram stays in a Mumbai chawl that’s the picture of communal living; many families packed together in a small space, all on friendly terms, sharing food and gossip. He’s in love with his neighbour Sandhya (Deepti Naval), but true to tortoise form he keeps stumbling over himself and missing the opportunity to voice his feelings. Then his suave, opportunistic childhood friend Bashudev (“call me Bashu, it’s more stylish”), played by Farooque Shaikh, shows up unannounced and coolly moves in with him. Bashu secures free meals at posh restaurants, charms the other chawl-dwellers, smooth-talks his way into an administrative job in the company Rajaram works for…and eventually sets about wooing Sandhya and her parents. All the while, Rajaram continues plodding along in his own way, convinced that everything will come to he who waits.

Katha is mostly narrative-driven – it’s the sort of film where you get absorbed by the story and the characters without thinking much about the technicalities – but it’s also a very playful movie with some funny sight-gags: such as a scene where the sound is turned off and a large “Censored” splattered across the screen while a dirty joke is being told. And a couple of dream sequences that play like spoofs of the mainstream cinema of the time. In one, Rajaram is molested by a gang of cackling shrews (women from his office) and a jhaadu-wielding Sandhya comes to his rescue; in another, Bashu and the delightfully pixie-ish Jojo (played by Winnie Paranjpe, the director’s daughter) perform a disco-style variant on the song “Tum Sundar Ho” (which is used as the theme for the hare’s wooing of various women). Even Mithun-da might have blushed at the shiny vest worn by Farooque Shaikh in this scene; it’s fun to see these doyens of “parallel cinema” clowning about in this way, and Paranjpe keeps giving us entertaining asides that don’t have much to do with the main plot but which make the film very enjoyable.

Despite appearances, Katha isn’t a straightforward morality tale about the Good (read: slow and steady) guy winning in the long run. In the very first scene of the film an old lady, narrating stories to her grandchild, cautions him that in the real world you rarely have the tortoise winning the race, and the rest of the film expands on this idea. Balancing your personal ideals with the practical demands of living in an imperfect world…these are the real concerns of this story, which raise it above the romanticism of the fable it’s based on.

For instance, Paranjpe makes it a point to show us at the film’s end that both protagonists have achieved what they wanted. Even when Bashu is exposed as a cheat, he walks nonchalantly out of the office, twirling his key-pouch around his finger (“my sudarshan chakra,” he calls it), a thoughtful look in his eyes – he’s already planning his next strategy. The last time we see him it’s in a plane heading for the Gulf, presumably to continue conning and sweet-talking his way through life. A director whose primary concern was to provide a moral lesson would have ensured that the character got his comeuppance, but Paranjpe’s approach (much like Satyajit Ray’s) is more gentle – built on exploring shades of humanity in various characters rather than turning any of them into outright villains.

Of course this doesn’t mean that the viewer should condone some of the things Bashu does (especially his final act of seducing Sandhya and then leaving her on the wedding day), but he also serves as a medium for Rajaram to learn valuable lessons about pragmatism. What this film is really about is the development of the tortoise. Though he’s the good guy, on more than one occasion Rajaram comes across as plain silly in his idealism – at times you want to give him a good shaking or at least clip him across the ear. I’m thinking in particular of the scene at the bus-stop where he keeps up a steady, self-righteous rant about people who jump the queue, and the general insensitivity of the world. Here one gets the sense of a character who’s so bent on exposing others’ shortcomings that he fails to understand his own, and rarely makes a serious attempt to be pro-active.

At this level, it’s possible to look at the Bashu character beyond the function he plays in the narrative and see him as a guardian angel (albeit a smarmy, twisted guardian angel) who plays a cathartic role in Rajaram’s life. This comes across most clearly in a scene near the end. Rajaram has just discovered that his friend “borrowed” money from his unlocked cupboard without asking him. Bashu is unapologetic. “This is what happens when you don’t keep your belongings locked,” he says insouciantly. Rajaram responds with one of the funniest lines in the film (though he’s being very solemn indeed): “Main taala-sanskriti ke bilkul virudh hoon,” he says, “Jee karta hai duniya ke sabhi taalon ko tod daalun. Taalon ka matlab hai aadmi ka aadmi par avishvas.” (“I’m completely against the lock-culture. I wish I could break every lock in the world. Locks indicate lack of trust between people.”) Now Bashu, briefly turning into a sutradhaar, tells him “You have to be practical. People like me exist in this world, and we’re willing to take advantage of others. Stop being so idealistic.”

And Rajaram does learn his lessons. Our final indication that he’s grown as a person and learnt not to look at the world through rose-tinted glasses comes in the scene where he offers to marry Sandhya after Bashu’s disappearance. She tells him she’s no longer a virgin; he looks down, visibly upset, but then raises his head and tells her that it doesn’t matter to him. I don’t think the Rajaram we met at the beginning of the film, well-meaning though he was, would have been capable of such maturity. He would have been hampered by his unreasonable expectations of people and his firm views about how things should be. But by the film’s end the tortoise has emerged from his shell, and the hare is at least partly responsible for this.

The Jaipur Literature Festival 2007

Just a quick word about the second edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival, being held at the Diggi Palace between January 19-21 (though it really kicks off on the 18th evening with a kavi samelan featuring leading poets from six Rajasthani dialects). You can see the lip-smacking schedule of events here. The fest will be much larger in scale than last year’s charming, modestly attended affair (which I wrote about in these posts: 1, 2, 3, 4). Many high-profile writers will be in attendance this year, including Salman Rushdie, Kiran Nagarkar, Amit Chaudhuri and Kiran Desai, and the session moderators will include Mark Tully, Urvashi Butalia and Barkha Dutt. Which means much greater media coverage, TV cameras and so forth.

Personally I have mixed feelings about the idea of the event turning into an elaborate media circus, but the larger picture must be looked at I suppose. "The idea was always to make this a broad-based platform,” Mita Kapur, the fest director, tells me. “Last year was like the first step by a baby. This year we're moving forward, providing an opportunity for authors, publishers, literary agents and media to interact in a picturesque setting. Our dream is to make Jaipur a literary hub for the country.” With a number of suitable venues scattered over a relatively small area, and many opportunities for cultural sightseeing, the Pink City certainly is an attractive setting for such an event.

Blogger representation will be quite high, it seems. Amit, Chandrahas, Space Bar and I are driving down together, Hurree Babu will be there too, and so will many of the Caferati crowd. Anyone else who’s interested, do try to come down, at least for a day, but try to work out accommodation beforehand; this is peak season for most hotels in the city.

Some highlights (for full schedule, visit the website)

January 19
10-11 AM: Baby Haldar, whose autobiography Aalo Aandhari was published in English under the title A Life Less Ordinary last year, will be in conversation with writer/publisher Urvashi Butalia. The book, about Haldar's violent marriage and her experiences as a domestic worker in Delhi, was one of the most remarkable publishing events of the year. Kapur tells me that the fest organisers have mobilised NGOs to bring some victimized women (whose experiences have been similar to Haldar’s) along for the session.

5-6.30 PM: Keki Daruwalla, Jeet Thayil and Jane Bhandari will discuss the work of the late poets Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel and Arun Kolatkar.

January 20
10-11 AM: Hindi poet Ashok Vajpeyi will discuss his work with Urdu critic/poet Aman Nath.

12-1 PM: Jerry Pinto, author of Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, in conversation with Penguin India executive editor Ravi Singh.

January 21
12-1 PM: His Highness Maharaja Gajsinghji of Jodhpur will moderate a discussion with Sydney-based journalist John Zubrzycki, who wrote The Last Nizam: An Indian Prince in the Australian Outback.

4-5 PM: Rushdie in conversation with Barkha Dutt

6-8 PM: An Evening with Caferati, with a selection of writing by the forum’s members, and the launch of its first book, Stories at the Coffee Table.

Notes on Hannibal Rising

"War crimes do not end with the war, Hannibal." Popil paused to read the advertising on each facet of the ashtray. "Perhaps I understand your situation better than you think."

"What is my situation, Inspector?"

"You were orphaned in the war. You lived in an institution, living inside yourself, your family dead. And at last, at last your beautiful stepmother made up for all of it." Working for the bond, Popil put his hand on Hannibal's shoulder. "The very scent of her takes away the smell of the camp. And then the butcher spews filth at her. If you killed him, I could understand. Tell me. Together we could explain to a magistrate..."

Hannibal moved back in his chair, away from Popil's touch.

"The very scent of her takes away the smell of the camp. May I ask if you compose verse, Inspector?"

(from Thomas Harris's Hannibal Rising)

It's interesting that though Hannibal Lecter himself remains faintly amused by efforts to analyse and “explain” him, readers and critics continue to complain about the demystifying of this most famous of fictional cannibalistic doctors. The Lecter cult has become quite the albatross around the neck of his creator, Thomas Harris. Fans of Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs were so taken by the idea of Lecter as a monster whose actions "couldn't be explained" that they closed their minds to anything that might resemble a deconstruction. After all, wasn’t the character meant to exist in his own void, to tower imperiously above Harris’s more routine psychopaths such as Francis Dolarhyde and Jame Gumb?

Such thinking shaped some of the response to Harris's last book, the very ambitious (and very florid) Hannibal, which gave us short flashbacks to Lecter’s traumatic early life. It will probably also shape the response to his latest, the terribly titled Hannibal Rising (surely even Behind the Mask, which was the book's working title, would have been better?), a prequel that details Lecter’s childhood, adolescence and early youth.

Having just finished Hannibal Rising, I can't agree with the view that Harris is providing a summary explanation of his most famous character; a straightforward "this is why he became what he became". Little in the book suggests simplistic cause-and-effect. (Mild spoiler warning) Lecter's cannibalism, for instance, may be the direct result of soldiers killing and eating his baby sister Mischa; but the cannibalism is just a manifestation of an insanity that runs much deeper.

Despite all the exposition in the new book, the monster remains in some fundamental way just as unknowable as ever. When we first meet him he's eight years old, standing with Mischa near a castle moat, throwing bread to black swans, and there's something immediately unsettling about the scene. Long before he and his family are visited by horrors from the world outside, we already sense that he's a strange little boy, certainly a frighteningly precocious one. "Hannibal could always read, or it seemed that way," we're told: his nanny read to him when he was two, he lolled against her and looked at the words on the page, and soon after she found him reading aloud by himself. At the age of six, he discovered Euclid's Elements and started measuring the height of towers by the length of their shadows, "following instructions which he said came directly from Euclid himself". (If such a child isn't already primed for a career in psychopathy, who is?)

Some of Harris's methods for conveying Hannibal's precocity (the conversations between the boy and his tutor Mr Jakov, for instance) are trite, but this comes with the territory. Lecter's erudition is often at odds with the conventions of this genre, and throughout his writing career Harris has had to balance the many references to High Art (William Blake, Dante and such) with the demands of his pulp readership. Consequently, there are awkward passages in all his books – passages that would seem pretentious/obscure to the "casual reader" on the one hand, and ludicrous or simplistic to the more experienced reader on the other hand.

As a Harris loyalist, I managed to isolate the things I enjoyed about this book from its more tedious bits (much the same way Lecter moves between the rooms of his memory palace), but a warning to less tolerant readers: there is some seriously overwrought writing in here, including an exchange between Hannibal and his Japanese stepmother that has sentences like “I see you and the cricket sings in concert with my heart” and “My heart hops at the sight of you, who taught my heart to sing”. Oh yes. (Imagine Anthony Hopkins saying those things.) There's also a climactic scream that's just as cringe-inducing as Vader/Anakin's "NOOOO!" was in the final scene of Revenge of the Sith.

But despite the occasional heavyhandedness, I'm pleased that Harris still has it in him to produce the droll humour on view, for instance, in a scene where an eccentric village barber out walking his dog discovers a bodiless head:

"You should have performed your duty on the lawn of Felipe, where no one was looking," M. Rubin said. "Here you might incur a fine. You have no money. It would fall to me to pay."

In front of the post office was a postbox on a pole. The dog strained toward it against the leash and raised his leg.

Seeing a face above the mailbox, Rubin said, "Good evening, Monsieur," and to the dog, "Attend you do not befoul Monsieur!" The dog whined and Rubin noticed there were no legs beneath the mailbox on the other side.

Harris’s supplying of a back-story for Lecter is being seen as a cynical, money-motivated exercise encouraged by Hollywood (the film version of Hannibal Rising, which he worked on simultaneously, is ready for release – it's widely felt that the book is more a cold-blooded novelisation of a movie screenplay than a work of artistic integrity.). There may be some truth to this, and it's also true that Hannibal Rising doesn't approach the quality of his best work. But it still is very much a Thomas Harris book, written with the care and attention to detail one associates with the man; not a lazily thrown together hack project. Read on its own terms, without the Lecter baggage attached to each page, it's even a pretty good thriller – even if it contains some of the writing excesses that were on display in Hannibal.

Irrelevant P.S. This is the second book I’ve read in the last few days that has a “Rising” in the title, and now I’m having Aamir Khan-as-Mangal Pandey nightmares.

(Earlier post on Thomas Harris here.)

Shorts: Pavan Varma's Kama Sutra, Passarola Rising

Much to blog about on the books front – many reviewing commitments have been made recently and I’ve been reading quite a lot. Here are short notes on some of the books, might post longer reviews later.

First, Pavan K Varma’s Kama Sutra: The Art of Making Love to a Woman, a new adaptation of Vatsyayana’s legendary sex manual. Varma’s writing is very accessible; the text, divided into 12 short chapters, doesn’t take much more than an hour to get through. Using one of the basic tenets of the original work (that the fulfillment of women is at the heart of the sexual experience) as a guiding principle, he addresses such topics as “the right setting”, “the embrace”, “the kiss”, “the use of nails” and “the bite” – presenting, in very simple language, Vatsyayana’s views on how these combine to optimise sexual satisfaction.

The fun lies in Varma’s wry observations about the more fastidious or idiosyncratic aspects of the original text – as when he comments on Vatsyayana’s preoccupation with classifying men and women according to penis size and vagina depth: “We are within our rights to wonder how our master collected his data. What kind of fieldwork must this have entailed? How would he have so precisely observed the ‘elephant’, ‘mare’ and ‘deer’ women? Did he sally forth with a scale in his hands?” Even when he’s sticking to the letter of the original, there’s a distinct sense of humour on view. Discussing Vatsyayana’s thesis that a mild form of sadism/mutually agreed-on violence is permitted at the height of passion, he cautions men against overdoing it: “If the woman is moaning with pleasure, being driven to other audible sounds of obvious approval, then the force is within acceptable and pleasurable limits. If she is lying limp or screaming in pain, then she is either beyond help, or beyond pleasure, or both…”

And yes, there are pictures too, many of them, placed in separate sections between the chapters, and worth studying at length – though not as much for their erotic (or instructional) value as for the polite, genteel smiles on the faces of the copulating men (always turbaned) and women, the impossibly intricate positions, and paintings such as the one of a man in mid-intercourse shooting an arrow at a bird while his companion twists her head around to be able to appreciate the sport (the caption reads: “In ancient times, scenes of hunting and lovemaking were often depicted together”). This is exciting stuff on many levels, especially if you’re a Kamasutra-virgin and haven’t seen illustrations of this type before.

(Also see this feature by Kishore Singh about Varma’s book and the other new Kama Sutra, by Alka Pande)

From a very different genre, a novella that’s about levitation of another sort: Azhar Abidi’s elegant Passarola Rising, a historical fiction about the flying adventures of the brothers Bartolomeu and Alexandre Lourenco in 18th century Europe. In the Passarola, an airship built by Bartolomeu, they go on a series of exciting quests, including one to rescue King Stanislaus of Poland from the Russians, and a perilous scientific mission for King Louis XV that's aimed at discovering the exact shape of the earth in order to improve marine navigation.

Alexandre is the narrator and through his ruminations we learn about the differences in the brothers’ personalities. Bartolomeu has few worldly ties of any kind, and in fact seems to be using his airship to escape human narrow-mindedness, to cross frontiers; much to the horror of the Church, he dreams of discovering what lies beyond the atmosphere. Alexandre, though initially a willing participant in these adventures, eventually feels the need to be tethered to something; to “come home” and “settle down”. (It’s another matter that after turning his back on flying, the feeling of disquiet never leaves him.) And both brothers are idealists in very different ways. Bartolomeu dreams that air travel will help people “unseal their eyes” and better understand their fellow men in other parts of the world; but Alexandre, after witnessing the idyllic, unreserved lives of the inhabitants of Lapland, comes to believe that some things should remain a secret, “otherwise no part of the world would be safe from civilised man”.

Abidi’s writing is very economical, establishing a whole milieu and a variety of characters in a few pages (though the abundance of short sentences can occasionally get distracting) and also capturing the spirit of exploration at a time when traveling 200 miles in three days was an achievement to be gaped at. After being a pleasant picaresque story for the most part, his book moves to a different plane three-fourths of the way through, with a vivid description of Alexandre’s suffering during a particularly arduous flight – including a series of hallucinations that convince him that he can’t carry on with this life. And the final pages are very poignant. Without giving too much away, I was struck by the author’s ultimate refusal to romanticise Bartolomeu, to hold him up as a symbol for escape from the petty concerns of the world, drifting forever in time. Instead there is a very specific closure, perhaps even a suggestion that escape isn’t possible.

(More to follow)