Or the Day Seizes You: a review

There's a passage in Or the Day Seizes You, Rajorshi Chakraborti's compelling debut novel, where the narrator visits an "exclusive men's club" in London along with a couple of friends. This is effectively an amusement park of sex, housed in a sprawling seven-floor building: they pay at the desk, are given cards with their numbers and asked to wait for their turn. In the meantime, they have the run of the place – access to unlimited drink, the right to wander anywhere they please in the building, even watch what's going on in various bedrooms; the place looks neat, well-managed, efficient. But the night wears on and it becomes obvious that things aren't as perfect as they seem: at 3 in the morning they're still 15 numbers away from their turn.

Exploring the upper floors, the narrator realises with a start that what he thought were a long line of doors are mere paintings – clearly a ruse to make the place appear grander than it really is. An angry Nigerian joins their group and delivers a long monologue about how they're all being cheated: "Look at what they offer you. You sit around for hours waiting for them to keep their promise, and they tease your eyes and ears so you won't leave, but that's the way it will be all night..." This extraordinary scene ends with the three men being forced to leave at 7am, weary and perplexed, never having achieved what they came to the club for.

People being repeatedly frustrated in their attempts to finish something, or even to focus on the task at hand...this is a theme rooted in the surrealist tradition. Luis Bunuel's film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is built on the constantly interrupted efforts of a group of six people to sit down to dinner. In an earlier Bunuel picture, The Exterminating Angel, guests at a dinner party succeed in eating all right, but then find they cannot leave the house (no reason is specified). In Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, a famous pianist is kept from his central task (though we never learn what that is) by a number of irritating distractions.. (Like the characters in The Discreet Charm..., he never gets to finish a meal either – which paves the way for the powerful ending involving a seemingly limitless feast spread out at the back of a tram-car.)

Or the Day Seizes You has other elements in common with these works: a continuing sense of dislocation, of time being stretched out to the point where it doesn’t mean anything, uncertainty about where dream-life ends and waking-life begins. Some of this is reflected in the book's cover design, which is one of the more interesting I've seen lately. Two famous Salvador Dali paintings occupy the background: "Le Sommeil" ("The Sleep"), which depicts a giant sleeping head precariously tethered to the ground, and the hypnotic "The Persistence of Memory" with its landscape of eerily folded “melting” clocks. The book contains no reference to Dali or to surrealism, and I don't know about how much collaboration there was between author and designer, but it's a strikingly appropriate design.


It's difficult to write a straight review of a book like this. It doesn't have a conventional beginning, middle and end, and it feels almost irrelevant to summarise the contents. But here goes anyway:

Niladri Dasgupta, a man in his mid 30s, gets a complaint about his seven-year-old daughter's inappropriate behaviour at her school, and this in turn leads to the discovery that his wife has been unfaithful. After a brief visit to a hill-station with his daughter, he leaves the country and goes to London by himself. Five years later, he returns to attend the funeral of an uncle who was murdered during an altercation at a traffic jam. He learns unpleasant truths about the reasons for the estrangement between his father and the deceased uncle, discovers that a vital part of his life – involving his family's cruelty towards a neighbour – was founded on a falsehood. He visits his ex-wife, marvels at how completely she has settled into a new life without him: "I found her absolutely undepleted and her magic circle was as large as ever, only I wasn't inside any more."

Interspersed with all this are vignettes from his life in London – including the sex-club incident and a trip to Normandy that ends in a nightmarish car chase. Near the end of the story Niladri is fleeing once again – this time as the result of his father's foolishness in taking on a powerful local ganglord. At a point where one would think the book could easily have gone on for another 100 pages, it simply ends.

This plot isn't remarkable in itself, but what's notable is the ease with which Chakraborti creates the sense of a life that’s perpetually adrift. In its refusal to draw obvious connections between the various episodes in Niladri’s life, the book is, paradoxically, more effective than a conventional narrative would have been. This is a story (if you can call it that) about missed connections, about the vast spaces that can exist between people in close relationships – and appropriately, at the centre of it is a passive narrator; Niladri is like a blank slate, content to be scribbled on. ("Forgive me if I narrate nothing in order and have omitted so much that must have occurred around me," he says, "I probably represent it as if I were alone with my feelings in some underwater womb surrounded by silence.")

As a whole, Or the Day Seizes You can be a bit mystifying, but chapter by chapter (fragment by fragment?) it's one of the most engrossing books I've read in a while. It's full of dream-like sequences, some of which foreshadow others: the very prologue, with the 11-year-old Nilu being forced to go to school despite heavy rain and finding himself practically alone in the building, has no obvious connection to anything that follows – but it prepares the ground for the book's tone of agoraphobia and general paranoia. In fact, the abstract elements in the book are so striking that I found it difficult to process the more straightforward presentation of ideas: a long rant, for instance, about corruption in high places, about the hegemony exercised by the powerful over the weak, about how the world's rich are part of a perpetual conspiracy to keep the poor in their place. (This occurs in two speeches made by different characters in different contexts.)

Or the Day Seizes You is a thought-provoking first novel that hasn't yet received the attention it merits. Even if you're not into surrealism, do give a try. And though I've revealed more here than I usually do about the plot and specific scenes, flipping through it again I realised there's much I haven't touched on: the book manages to pack a lot into its 200 pages.

Headless photoshopped baby

Don't know how to respond when proud parents send you baby photos? Young Falstaff has some excellent suggestions here. Please do read.

Quick notes on Crash

It’s been a couple of years since I stopped reviewing films professionally, and in that time I haven’t watched too many movies on their initial release. (Actually, not having got into the DVD-rental habit, I haven’t watched many of them at all.) But around this time of year (pre-Oscars), Delhi’s multiplexes show films of a marginally higher quality than usual, and I’m looking forward to next week: Brokeback Mountain, Munich and especially the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line.

Watched Crash yesterday, Paul Haggis’s debut feature about a couple of days in the racial conflict-ridden life of Los Angeles. Enjoyed it on the whole, though parts were simplistic. Overall I was more impressed by the film’s structure, the attention given to nuances of character, the editing and the performances than by its pat handling of the racial-discrimination theme. (If a movie’s deepest insight into the subject is that the best of us carry the potential for racism within us, and that conversely even the most bigoted people have good sides to them, well, that isn’t an earthshaking revelation where I’m concerned.)

There are quite a few powerful scenes. My favourite is the only genuine gun-shooting that takes place in the film (though it threatens them all the time). It’s based on a split-second decision that goes tragically wrong (the flip side of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink) and what makes it so effective is that it’s done by the character you’d least expect it from – it’s the movie’s strongest demonstration of how our hidden prejudices can come to the surface in high-stress situations.

One of the unfavourable reviews I read recently (it was from either Salon.com or NYT) remarked that the film’s chosen method of showing how complex people are is to show exactly two sides to each of its characters: the Very Bad and the Very Good. I don’t think that’s quite fair – at least 3-4 of the protagonists (notably the rich black man played by Terrence Howard, and the two thieves who double up as commentators on the city’s race politics) were more complexly depicted, with the script at the very least providing pointers to still other sides of their personalities. Perhaps the problem is that there just wasn’t enough time to do justice to all the characters. Most successful ensemble films that cut between many different groups of people (think Robert Altman, or Magnolia, or The Thin Red Line, hell, even How the West Was Won) are around three hours along, but this one is just a little over half that length. I couldn’t make much emotional investment in a couple of the characters (like the DA’s wife, played by Sandra Bullock) and if the film had to be this length, they could have been left out of the script and the time gained distributed among the others.

But highly recommended and all that, especially if you don’t walk into the hall thinking “this is a best picture Oscar nominee, so it has to be a Great Movie”.

P.S. One of the advantages of not watching movies as soon as they are released is that I don’t have to beat myself over the head about the factual errors made by our esteemed newspaper “reviewers”. In her Crash review the TOI Grande Dame writes “The district attorney thinks it would be good politics if he gave the award to an Iraqi named Saddam.” That’s completely wrong, as anyone with a little common sense would know. And over at the HT, Vinayak Chakraborty describes a film where “the director’s accompanying voiceover gives us nuances into the filmmaking process”. No such thing occurs anywhere in the movie. He watched a “Making of” documentary by mistake, yes?

Update: for a full-length review, read this one by Samanth Subramanian.

A virtual tomb for a billion posts

Blogging is "the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence", says Trevor Butterworth in this provocative piece, published in the Financial Times Weekend supplement.

"The spectre haunting the blogosphere [is] tedium. If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium."

Yes I know there’s plenty of verbiage in that sentence too, but don't let that put you off the rest of the story, which makes some interesting points. In deference to the spirit of the medium, the FT has also set up a blog where readers can interact with Butterworth about the article. (It’s been closed now but check out some of the comments.)

Full piece here.

Slow brain turning

I have Zee Cinema to thank for renewed acquaintance with many cherished classics from my misspent childhood – such as The Burning Train, which used to be my favourite non-Amitabh film as a seven-year-old (in fact it’s still my favourite non-Amitabh film as a seven-year-old).

Dharam paaji and Vinod Khanna are childhood buddies who serenade Hema Malini and Parveen Babi by cycling after them and singing one of the most instantly forgettable songs of the 1980s (I forget what it was called). This comes on the heels of an elaborate gag where each one pretends to eve-tease the other guy’s girl so that each of them gets to play hero in turn; these shenanigans will provide useful practice for the scenes much later in the film when they have to clamber about the side of the train dressed in smart silver-foil outfits (fuzzy pic below), fighting Danny Denzongpa.

After much coquettish wiggling of noses by the ladies, the two couples settle into happy domesticity and produce a brood of younglings, played by intolerable child actors who make horrible ululating sounds whenever they have to cry (making the viewer want to smack them on the head so they might do some impromptu Method acting instead). The plot of this movie, set a few years after the cycle-serenade episode, ensures there will be plenty for them to cry about.

The best thing about The Burning Train is that the title isn’t an obscure metaphor-ish thingie, as in those movies made by Bresson and suchlike – the film really is about a burning train, or more accurately, a train that is burning. There’s plenty of (intended) metaphor in the story though, with the imperiled chook-chook and its disparate passengers representing the Many Colours of India. Clad in elegant white (a terrifying portent of things to come on satellite television 20 years later) is Simi Garewal as a Catholic schoolteacher escorting a tribe of wailing little monsters. There’s a Hindu priest and a Muslim maulvi who initially squabble but later, faced with certain Death, smile sadly at each other and agree that when you’re being roasted alive in an unstoppable moving oven, religion suddenly doesn’t seem so hot. A loud-voiced but genial Sardarji rounds off this touching panorama. (He will volunteer to unravel his turban later for the Greater Good, just as a lady passenger will remove her sari.) There’s even a pregnant woman, though surprisingly her presence doesn’t lead to any of the “kindly give berth” variety of jokes that I would certainly have incorporated into the script.

Best of all there’s Jeetendra, who shows up halfway through the movie and, without prelude, performs an elaborate dance with Neetu Singh, for once dressed in something other than her favourite fisherwoman outfit (regardless of what she’s playing). When the train starts to burn, Jeetu teams up with Dharam and Veenu and they all change into those silver-foil costumes that people in sci-fi films wear to prevent alien beings from sucking out their mojo.

Jeetu’s white shoes go very well with the foil outfit, and Dharam and Veenu are envious – but they put these differences aside to save the train by doing a series of complicated things (which even they don’t fully understand) in the boiler room, and by kicking Danny off the roof. There is much cheering as Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims embrace: the crisis has united them and never again will there be riots or race-killings. Hema looks appreciatively at Dharam’s silver-foil suit as he gets off the train. “This film is dedicated to the courage of the people, and the soul of India which has remained uncorrupted” says a closing credit. Audiences were courageous enough to stay away from theatres in droves, and The Burning Train was an uncorrupted flop.

[P.S. This film really does have an enormous cast – including Paintal and Keshto Mukherjee, both credited as “Passenger in toilet” on the IMDB page. I must’ve missed that bit.]

The Manjunath Trust

If you feel strongly about the Manjunath Shanmugam case (the IOC sales manager was killed a few months ago when he tried to fight corruption and petrol-adulteration), please do visit the official trust website for information on donations and other ways in which you can help. For details about the trust, also read this post by Gaurav Sabnis.

Thomas Harris, monster-maker

(An extended version of something I wrote for my Writer's Block column last week in Business Standard)

"In the Green Machine there is no mercy. We make mercy, manufacture it in the parts that have overgrown our basic reptile brain." - Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

Genre writers aren't usually held up to very high literary standards: when was the last time you saw leading critics getting sullen about, say, Stephen King or John Grisham writing their latest novel (perhaps their second of the year) with one eye on a subsequent movie adaptation? Which is why it's noteworthy that so many critics and fans have protested the Hollywoodisation of Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter books. [The Lecter franchise created by big studios to cash in on the popularity of Anthony Hopkins's performance in Silence of the Lambs reached its nadir with the bloated film version of Red Dragon, which diluted the powerful story by reworking the script to give Lecter a larger part. It wasn't a movie completely devoid of interest, but it felt like such a waste given that Michael Mann had made a solid film, Manhunter, out of that book 15 years earlier – with a great performance by William Petersen as the haunted Will Graham. Edward Norton seemed insipid by comparison.]

But then Thomas Harris tends to evoke strong reactions; he isn't seen as the archetypal popular writer. Oh, he operates within the broad format of genre fiction alright (the genre in his case being the dark psychological thriller) - you'll find all the staples of pacy bestseller writing, the accent on moving the story along, in his work. But he also takes the reader to places where the usual popular novel won't go. His attention to detail, the intensity of his narratives and his talent for plumbing the depths of the soul [editor's note: always wanted to use that phrase!] - these are things that skirt, dare we suggest it, Literary territory. Consequently, while his sales don't quite match those of the King/Grisham/Archer brigade, he has a cult following that runs deeper, and which includes even heavyweights like Martin Amis.

Harris was in his 30s when he began his writing career, after having worked as a crime reporter for a few years. Black Sunday (1975), his first novel, was a political thriller about a terrorist plot to bomb the heavily attended Super Bowl final - possibly killing 100,000 people at one go. Michael Lander, a deranged Vietnam veteran and dirigible expert, becomes the terrorists' instrument for "delivering death from the sky". Instrument is apt: Lander is more machine than man himself, past traumas having entirely cauterized his human feelings. He is also Thomas Harris's first monster, an amoral sociopath who would prepare the ground for more famous protagonists to come. Black Sunday feels a little dated today, but it has many of the concerns that would become associated with Harris's writing: notably the theme that nature is cruel and unsparing; that primitive, atavistic impulses are forever boiling just beneath our civilised exteriors, and that it takes very little for them to come to the surface.

Of course, these aren't particularly original ideas - Harris himself often references William Blake, among other writers, who have dealt with them before – but his treatment of them within the thriller format is startlingly effective, and never more so than in his second and best novel, Red Dragon (1981). This is the story of Will Graham, an investigative agent who reluctantly comes out of retirement to help trace a psychopath who has murdered two families. Graham has a talent for getting into a killer's mind, thinking the way he does, and thereby anticipating his moves. This is not, of course, an unequivocally enviable gift, and what gives the book its emotional drive is Graham’s private conundrum, one that was famously voiced by Nietzsche: "Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster." This is set against the compelling parallel story of Francis Dolarhyde, the "Red Dragon".

For help in capturing Dolarhyde, Graham turns to another killer he caught years ago - and thus the Hannibal Lecter legend is born. Harris gave Hannibal the Cannibal a leading part in his next, most famous book, The Silence of the Lambs (1988), which became an equally popular film. And in the florid, over the top Hannibal (1999), Harris handed the stage almost entirely over to his gentleman monster.

Hannibal is overdone in parts, and disconcertingly different in tone from anything Harris wrote before it, but much of the criticism it received was misdirected. The ending, in which Clarice Starling - epitome of youthful idealism in Silence of the Lambs - becomes the Monster's Bride, was roundly vilified; Jodie Foster even refused to play Starling in the movie version of Hannibal because she felt this went against everything the character stood for. But in fact, Harris did a fine job of establishing the circumstances that bring about the change in Clarice's worldview between Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, and the change itself is consistent with something that runs through his work: that people with the strongest commitment to idealism are also poised most precariously at the edge of insanity.

"We don't invent our natures, Will," Lecter says to Graham in Red Dragon, "they're issued to us along with our lungs, our pancreas and everything else." Monsters walk amidst us, says Harris, and there can be no explanation for why they are what they are. Much of his work is founded on this idea, and this was partly why his fans felt so let down by a flashback to Lecter's childhood in Hannibal, which seems to "explain" his actions. But a closer reading of the book shows that this isn't the case – Lecter is just as enigmatic, as unknowable, as ever.

But whether that will remain the case in the next book seems doubtful. Behind the Mask, about the young Lecter, is due out this year, and predictably a film version is simultaneously underway. Harris aficionados (I'm among them) will be hoping the author succeeds in maintaining at least some of his integrity. Hollywood's Green Machine can be merciless too.

Review: The Patiala Quartet

(Did this for the Indian Express. I’ve found that I don’t enjoy writing unfavourable reviews as much as I once used to. In my more wanton days I would relish the opportunity to be sarcastic and over-clever about a book/film I didn’t like. But now, with time always at a premium, the thrill of writing a smart-assed, cocky review isn’t adequate compensation for having wasted so much of one’s time on reading something mediocre in the first place.

Another factor is that as one gets drawn into the literary circuit and sees what a struggle the writing process is, one sympathizes much more with writers, even the bad ones: it’s depressing to realise how much sweat and toil can go into putting together even five pages of mediocre prose; how much work writers put into their first and second and third drafts, and at the end of it all produce something that still doesn’t hold together. I’ve experienced this firsthand – I poured everything I had into my first attempt at fiction, a short story; agonised for days over it; and when it was done I could immediately see how dreary and unexceptional it was.

Of course, all this doesn’t mean that the reading public must not be warned not to waste their time/money on something that isn’t worth it – but it does greatly diminish the fun of trashing a book.)

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Wading through the drabness of The Patiala Quartet, the question that comes to mind is: why would a leading publisher print this? It isn't exactly a bad book – there's an acceptable story in there somewhere and the writing is okay, a little ponderous at worst – but it's so trite and unremarkable, it's hard to believe it can possibly be any better than dozens of manuscripts that are routinely rejected every month.

Maybe it has something to do with the recent trend involving fiction set in smaller cities, and attempting to capture specific milieus – like in Patna Roughcut, The Sari Shop (Amritsar) and Sikandar Chowk Park (Allahabad) among others. But apart from a few scattered passages, The Patiala Quartet fails to create an involving portrait of a particular place in a particular time – something it sets out to do before it even begins (with the author profile purposefully stating that Neel Kamal Puri "grew up in the erstwhile princely state of Patiala amidst remnants of grandeur and a generation of idle rich still clinging to the past").

The story, such as it is, centres on two sets of siblings - Monty and Minnie, and their first cousins Karuna and Michael - growing up in the Patiala of the early 1980s. We get personality sketches, capsules of information on them and on various members of their families. Contrast is the key: Monty has a penchant for mathematics and for thinking too hard about things, but Michael is "a man of action" and spends most of his time riding around on his bicycle; Karuna is timorous and silent, while Minnie is prepared to face the world and learns that "the best way to confound an opponent is to confront him".

The problem is, rarely does this information flow naturally from the plot; instead, it's presented to us academically. An author can of course establish certain things about key characters when introducing them, but once that's done they have to be defined by their actions within the narrative framework. Here, however, well into the story we continue to get tedious observations like this one (in the context of Michael's love for obstacle-racing): "No wonder Michael felt at home here; from going around in circles on his cycle as a child to doing the same on the bike as an adult offered him a kind of comforting continuity." (The sentence is in parentheses, no less, performing the function of a ready-at-hand footnote.) The narrator pedantically points things out to the reader, the way a teacher might draw a student's attention to what's written on the blackboard.

The story plods on – key elements include the meek Karuna providing the family its first scandal, and Monty being traumatised by a terrorist encounter – but the characters never really come into their own, and it's difficult to maintain interest. The numerous stilted sentences ("All these and more were memories the echoes had nurtured for a while, bouncing them around and keeping them in play till the walls began to peel") don't do much to help.

In fairness, The Patiala Quartet occasionally succeeds in evoking the old-world charm of a setting where young women are chaperoned on their way home from college and young men cycle surreptitiously behind them. There's a funny passage detailing the complications of a "wedding in reverse", and an unexpectedly poignant ending. But these bits are few and far between and you have to get through a lot of dross to find them. It isn't much of an endorsement when the best thing you can say about a book is that it's only 170 pages long.

Blurbs that burble

When you combine some of the stuff reviewers write with the extracts that publishers choose to display on book covers, you get intriguing results - some of which defeat their own purpose by driving screaming customers away from bookstores instead of encouraging them to part with their money within. Here are some of my favourite book-jacket blurbs (or How Not to Promote a Book):

The analogical
"Don Delillo’s new novel is a remarkable feat of engineering ... he chisels and carves until he has made a cathedral of prose...a towering structure...the view at the top is sensational" - Allison Pearson, on Underworld
(The reviewer is now senior editor, Architectural Digest)

"Eggers’ frisbee sentences sail, spin, hover, circle and come back to the reader like gifts of gravity and grace" - The New York Times on Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity
(Uh...boomerangs come back. Frisbees just crash-land clumsily)

The wide-eyed
"The terror just mounts and mounts" - Stephen King on Peter Straub’s Ghost Story
(A comedy of terrors from King, who shoots his own cause - popular and genre literature - in the foot here by chasing potential readers away from a modern horror classic)

The rhetorical
"Philip Pullman. Is he the best storyteller ever?" - The Observer, on The Amber Spyglass
(Turn page upside down for answer)

The knowledgeable
"It is, in fact, ONE OF THE TWO MOST TERRIFYING POPULAR NOVELS OF OUR TIME, the other being The Exorcist..." - Stephen King on Hannibal
(Mr King again, still scared, and using all-caps to show it this time. Blurbs like this one indicate that apart from having written more than any other living writer, King - in his time off from getting mowed down by trucks - also apparently reads everything ever published)

The much-too-specific
"I have marked 25 passages to come back to, which I will do again and again" - Rosie Boycott, on Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh

The pithy
"Good stories abound" - The New Statesman on David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon

The cautionary
"You may find yourself gripping this so tightly your hands hurt" - Miami Herald on Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled

The alliterative
"The master of metaphor, the sultan of simile" - San Antonio Current on Tom Robbins’ Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
(The Agha of Alliteration?)

The exclamation-marked!
"Astonishing futures and unique societies!" - New Encyclopedia of Science on Bruce Sterling’s Globalhead
(would you read a book recommended by the New Encyclopedia of Science?)

"Brainy stuff!" - Entertainment Weekly on The Da Vinci Code
(the reviewing publication specialises in the "taut and terrific page-turner" variety of review capsules)

Inspired by the book’s subject matter
"Artfully weaves psychology, politics, medicine and music theory into a polyphonic composition" - Newsday, on Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner

Sounds deep, means nothing
"A charmingly unique sort of minor masterpiece, a tour de force of the transcendence of the tour de force" - John Hollander on Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate

One word to blurb them all
"Wonderful" - The Spectator
"Magnificent" - The Observer
"Sumptuous" - New Yorker
"Unforgettable" - The Guardian
(All from the book jacket of Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red)

[These one-word blurbs remind me of how a review sentence like "this pathetic travesty was purportedly inspired by the superb French movie..." can make its way onto a film poster in this form: "....superb...."]

The wordy
"A dizzyingly capacious novel ... vast, jokey, impassioned, angry, ironic, philosophical, linguistic carnival, which tracks the tectonic plates of characters and cultures as they collide and reshape themselves in startlingly unforeseen ways" - Catherine Lockerbie on Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet
(a dizzyingly capacious blurb, also partly inspired by subject matter - the ‘tectonic plates’ reference the book’s earthquake imagery)

Should’ve carried a spoiler warning
"The moment the Titanic bursts to the surface is quite breathtaking..." - International Herald Tribune on Clive Cussler’s Raise the Titanic

The irreverent
"By contrast with the White Death, Moby Dick was a pussycat" - Washington Post on Peter Benchley’s Jaws

From the Acid House
"Tom Wolfe is a groove and a gas. Everyone should send him money and other fine things. Hats off to Tom Wolfe!" - Terry Southern on Wolfe’s psychedelic classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
(Who’s been puffing the magic dragon then?)

Of course there are millions more - perhaps even one for each book ever published. But this is all I have time for right now. Also see this.

From an insomniac’s diary

Picturing the fence is the easy part and the first few sheep are relatively obliging too. Of course, it’s never as smooth as in the comic strips – they don’t leap lithely over the fence, they clamber over it awkwardly, sometimes emitting Maria Sharapova grunts, and it’s always disturbing when the underside of their bellies scrapes the top of the partition. But at least they do what they're supposed to; they make it to the other side and then disappear from view at the left of the screen. The trouble begins with the next lot, which plain refuse to jump or climb. One of them makes a half-hearted attempt, falls back on the side whence it came, and gives up immediately and fatalistically. This becomes the cue for the rest to give up as well, and then they just linger about looking stupid, like sheep will. It upsets my sense of equilibrium to see so many sheep on one side of the fence (and because more keep entering the frame, they eventually pile up one on top of the other) and none at all on the other.

Because the fence-jumping is clearly not working out, I home in on the sheep in the crowded part of the picture and study their individual features. Naturally most of them are versions of the sheep I have personally known or known of. The solicitous matron sheep in Babe. The dumb things I saw up close at a sheepdog-training demonstration in Scotland a couple of years ago. A neighbour’s pet ewe, which she kept in her garden, and which appeared on that TV show hosted by Maneka Gandhi. Sheep are not creatures with great personality, you can dwell on their faces only so long, and so my thoughts soon drift to include other manifestations like sikandari raan at Karim’s and those delicious haggis balls you get in Edinburgh.

Somewhere in my mind is the dim awareness that dwelling this hard on the sheep defeats the purpose; that the correct way to lull myself to sleep is to think abstract-sheep thoughts, not specific-sheep thoughts. But by now I’m too far gone. Other references, fragments of sentences crowd my mind. The lambs were screaming, intones a hollow-voiced Clarice Starling. Meek and obedient you follow the leader/down well-trodden corridors into the valley of steel, sings David Gilmour. Who fleeced Mary’s little lamb? One morning I awoke and the sheep was gone, blubbers the Sheep Professor in Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase. It was then that I understood what it means to be ‘sheepless’. The sheep goes away leaving only an idea.

And next thing I know it’s 3 AM, and it’s like Chandler says in that Friends episode, “I can’t sleep because I’m thinking there are only four hours left before I have to get up. And then I can’t sleep because I’m thinking there are only three hours left. And then…”

Does the sheep-counting technique work for anyone else? Or am I trying too hard? If there are better ways (apart from drinking yourself silly every night), please do let me know.

Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Weight Loss: a personal take

I believe reviews are essentially personal things and the best ones will tell you as much about the reviewer as about the thing being reviewed (never understood the “be objective” shtick dished out by editors with Buddha-like smiles). And usually I’m quite comfortable writing what I feel about a book or film, irrespective of what others have said about it. But ever so often a difficult case comes along where I have to wonder whether it might be better to take a coolly academic approach; to tiptoe around my own (undoubtedly warped) ideas about a work and try instead to imagine how it might have affected most other readers/viewers. This usually happens when a book or film leaves a strong impression on me but I still can’t really argue with the negative things others are saying about it.

Does that make any sense? The latest instance is Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Weight Loss, which I started nearly a month ago and have only now brought myself to finish. I’ve been ambivalent about it all the way through: the first 70-80 pages were very promising, and funnier than anything I had read by an Indian author in at least 3-4 years (this could be the Indian Portnoy’s Complaint, I was thinking excitedly at that stage). But then it started to drift and get tedious. Around the halfway mark I put it away, got terribly busy and didn’t read anything for a couple of weeks apart from Jaipur tourism brochures, which were also funny. Then I returned to it yesterday and to my own surprise finished the remaining 200 pages quite easily.

I know at least 5 people who disliked this book intensely, and at least one (someone whose judgement I have very high regard for) who thought it was middling at best. Plus I’ve read three scathing reviews that made some very good points. And yet I can’t shake the feeling that for all its unevenness there’s much in it that’s good – and that in particular it hasn’t received enough credit for its subversive humour and for the way it brings a degree of believability, even poignancy, to the actions of a protagonist no reader would otherwise be able to identify with (and no mother would be able to love).

Weight Loss is about the strange life (from age 11 to age 37) of a sexual deviant named Bhola, whose attitude to most of the people around him depends on their lustworthiness. Bhola’s tastes are not, to put it mildly, conventional. Sex is a form of depravity for him and he fetishizes everyone from teachers to roadside sadhus to servants; he progresses from fantasizing about the portly family cook Gopinath to falling “madly in love” with a vegetable-vendor and her husband. This last obsession spans the length of the book and most of Bhola’s life – he even ends up studying at a college in an obscure hill-station hundreds of miles from his home because he wants to be near the couple. At various other stages in his life he get expelled from school for defecating in a teacher’s office, participates in an inexpertly carried out circumcision (one of the book’s many manifestations of the “weight loss” motif) and engages in sundry forms of debauchery. Agastya Sen would have barfed at some of this. Portnoy would at the very least have blushed.

And many readers will understandably be disgusted. As you might have guessed, this isn’t a particularly accessible book. From the first, it sets out to make things very difficult for the reader. The subject matter is unpleasant and gratuitous in places, and it’s easy to be put off. (I don’t have delicate sensibilities myself but I was still disturbed by some passages, and this was one reason for the two-week break in reading it.)

And yet, much as I was personally repulsed by Bhola’s twisted obsessions, I thought him convincing on his own terms: given how the author sets up and defines the character for us, I found it completely believable that he would behave the way he does; that he would, for instance, make a crucial life-altering choice on the basis of a single twisted obsession. If one of the chief purposes of fiction is to provide us a window into another way of living or thinking, Weight Loss does succeed in doing that to an extent.

The more pertinent question then is, what can we possibly gain from following the misadventures of such a grossly unbalanced character, and there’s no easy answer to that one. I don’t want to go out on a limb defending this book, but I have to point out here that it’s futile to take Weight Loss at face value. The entire premise is so extreme that the best way to approach it is to think of it as a deliberate distortion – the exaggeration of characters and situations to draw attention to the pathologies of our own lives. To this end, Chatterjee’s humour is an incredibly effective device. He’s better than almost any contemporary Indian writer at being irreverent about our sacred cows and showing us what comical little creatures we are at precisely those times when we are taking ourselves most seriously. The humour, admittedly over the top at times, also serves as a buffer, shielding the reader from some of the depressing things he has to say.

One criticism of the prose is that it’s laborious and overdone. But this very quality often helps him achieve a very specific comic effect founded on the gradual building up of hysteria. When he uses a long string of words machine gun-style to describe something, it’s done very deliberately – the effect is very different from, say, a florid writing style where adjectives are indiscriminately over-used. For instance, early in the book, when Bhola is caned by his physical education teacher, we are told that “one of his classmates, Anantaraman, a pale, sensitive, shy, nervous and complex boy, passed out”. You might argue that the simultaneous use of “pale”, “sensitive”, “shy” and “nervous” amounts to overkill but I think it gives the sentence a hysterical effect that fits very well with the overall mood of the passage. And it nicely leads up to the knockout blow provided by the last adjective, “complex” – a relatively unspecific word but a wickedly funny one in this context, and one that perfectly fits the character of the distressed Anantaraman.

Another example – after Bhola asks his wife to do something with a vaguely sexual connotation: “Embarrassed, terribly shy, faintly excited, almost happy, uncertain, she complied.” (But I’m going to stop dissecting humour now, it’s no fun.)

P.S. After all that pontificating, let me stress that I’m not giving Weight Loss my highest endorsement – only suggesting that it’s a more interesting book than it first appears to be, and worth reexamining. And no, I still have no idea what I’m going to write in that blasted official review I have to do now.

For the record

Things I’ve read in the past week:

Jaipur City Guide – Vasundhara Publications

Jaipur by Rajasthan Tourism

Pink City: A Shopping cum City Guide

Jaipur Vision: the Complete Tourist Guide

Shopping Map for the Crafts of Jaipur

Rajasthan Small Scale Cottage Industries – brochure

Menu cards of 27 restaurants in Jaipur

Assorted literature* on Jai Mahal Palace, Rambagh Palace, Rajputana Sheraton, Raj Mahal Palace, Amer Fort, City Palace, Jantar Mantar

*Brochures/press releases

Number of words on Jaipur written/compiled from brochures so far: 2,500

Total number of words to be written/compiled by Monday (including listings of bus-stand numbers, railway station enquiry numbers and suchlike): 6,000

Other pending deadlines: 6 (incl. 2 expired)

You can start feeling sorry for me now.

Wax and vain

Very funny piece from the Guardian’s Culture Vulture blog about the new issue of Vanity Fair, which has Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley posing naked, sorry "nude", on the cover. Tom Ford, the magazine’s artistic director, is also in the picture, though no one can be sure why:

"Ford... is apparently engaged in sniffing the inside of Knightley's ear. This is oddly fitting. He looks like some degenerate tourist who has been caught humping a waxwork in Madame Tussaud's."

Don’t miss the comments.

Even funnier though is the reference to the Vanity Fair cover on the world page of today’s Hindustan Times. "All you men, get ready to drool" it says sternly, and there’s something very "or else!" about the whole thing. Aye, captain!

Amer Fort photos

One pic is worth a thousand words blah blah blah (even when it’s taken with a creaky old regular camera) – so here are a few from Amber/Amer, which was the capital of the old city of Jaipur. If you’re visiting Jaipur for the first time and have only a few hours to spare, do prioritise a sightseeing excursion to the Amer Fort - it’s well worth it.

(Click pics to enlarge - though I'm not sure the facility is working; Blogger has been acting up.)

A section of the fort seen from across the lake. Wish I had a wide-angle lens for this one, the view was spectacular beyond anything that can be conveyed here.

Worm's-eye view of the Diwan-e-Aam, which blends Hindu and Mughal styles of architecture. Note the elephant-head carvings at the top of the pillars.


Self in fort. The only pic where I don't look like a cantankerous, sleep-deprived, reluctant tourist – though the relatively animated expression is only because the guide taking the photo nearly dropped the camera a couple of seconds earlier.


Sheesh Mahal: part of a wall and ceiling.




A wider view.




Palace gardens by the lake.

Oliphaunt. Tourists being taken up to the fort on elephant-back. After an accident a few months ago resulted in the death of a mahout, the length of the ride was reduced.

A relief on one of the Sheesh Mahal pillars. The flower on top was carved to incorporate the features of six or seven different animals/insects – you have to cover various parts of the carving with your hands to make out the features more clearly. There's a lion's tail in there, a fish's body, a cobra's head and even a scorpion, a butterfly and an ant.

More later.

Off again

Going to Jaipur for the second time in a fortnight – this time for some travel writing. Should be fun but I’ll probably also be tense about a number of pending deadlines: the coming week is going to be frighteningly busy.
Back on Thursday.

P.S. This boy has enabled comments on his site, so do rush thither and spam that controversial Rang de Basanti review. He has all the time in the world and promises to construct long replies to each individual comment (which I couldn’t when I was handling his correspondence).

Obligatory Oscar pontificating

I had an interesting email discussion recently with Anup Kurian, director of Manasarovar, who’d mailed me some of his thoughts on the Oscars. One of the points Anup made was that while the awards in general are whimsical, the winners in the foreign-language category tend to be deserving. In this context, he said that in the year Lagaan was nominated, No Man’s Land (which won the award) was a better film, and so was the Brazilian movie Central Station.

I disagree with some of the specifics of Anup’s mail. For instance, I don't think either Central Station or No Man's Land is a demonstrably better film than Lagaan. More to the point, in my opinion the three movies come from such different cultural backdrops/filmmaking schools that comparing them is a pointless, even impossible, task. And this is one of the problems with the foreign-language film category: it pretends that there is one common critical yardstick by which movies from around the world can be judged. That’s a ridiculous notion, and an insult to the great variety in the medium. Why should US-centric or Euro-centric benchmarks for Good Cinema be applied to mainstream Hindi films, for instance? Sticking with just India and the US (only two among the hundreds of countries and moviemaking schools in the world), we have countless examples of top-of-the-line Indian films being dismissed or completely misunderstood by critics in the US. Check this link via Alok’s blog, about an American film critic who refers to the Jai-Veeru male-bonding relationship in Sholay as "pure camp". As Alok observes, some things just do not translate across cultures.

[Conversely, of course, there are movies recognised as trash in India but extolled by Hollywood because they go so far over the top that they can at least be categorised as masterpieces of kitsch: like Bhansali’s Devdas, which Time magazine’s Richard Corliss lovingly placed in his year-end top 10 because (among other reasons) “the flouncing frocks worn by Madhuri and Aishwarya were so pretty”.]

Having said all this though, one can’t ignore the fact that the foreign-language film category does exist, and that winning the award can be immensely beneficial to the movie and even to the film industry of the country it represents. So instead of making some kind of judgement on what is actually “the best Indian movie of the year” (another futile task anyway, for there are so many different filmmaking schools within the country), the practical requirement is to pick and submit something that has a chance of winning. In his mail, Anup made some valid points about the idiocy shown by the Indian Producers’ Association when selecting India’s submissions for the Oscars. “The ‘racism’ lies more in our own selection process,” he wrote, “than with Americans or the Motion Picture Academy. There are excellent films happening in regional languages. But there is a collective myopia and now Indian cinema is internationally recognised only as Bollywood musicals - this gross misrepresentation is tragic.”

(Incidentally Patrix makes related observations here.)

Moving beyond the foreign-language film category to the Oscars in general: I’ve had a love-hate relationship with that show (and it is a show more than anything else) for over 15 years now. As a movie buff I've always enjoyed watching it, right from the pre-nomination buildup. I’ve speculated on possible nominees and winners, drawn up detailed lists of the permutations and combinations, exulted each time there’s been an upset. But very early on I also realised that there isn’t much sense in holding the Oscars up as indicators of the “best” in any category. (This is of course true of all competitive awards, even the most professionally organised ones, like the Booker Prize.) The whole thing is too much of a lottery – as anyone familiar with Oscar’s history will know, even with the best intentions, there are too many factors apart from merit that go into determining the winners. And even merit is subjective anyway.

Besides, once you have five of the best contenders in any category (and to be fair to the Oscars, their nominee lists are usually quite strong), it’s an incredibly silly exercise to pick out one from those five and anoint it the “best of the best”. (As Henry Fonda once said, "take the finest performances of Laurence Olivier, James Stewart, Jack Lemmon, Dustin Hoffman and Woody Allen, and tell me how you can possibly pick the best among them?") Personally I’d have a lot more respect for the Oscars if they just ended the show at the five-nominees stage. But of course a commercial awards show can’t work that way.

What the show definitely is, is immense fun, as well as a halfway decent pointer to some of the better American and British films of the preceding year. And I’m sure I’ll be sitting with my notepad in hand, waiting for the nominees announcement, even 40 years from now. But take it seriously? Nah. (Unless I’m senile then, in which case I will.)

P.S.Just checked and found that Central Station wasn’t made the same year as Lagaan and No Man’s Land. But that doesn’t affect the points made in this post, so I’m not editing.

[Cross-posted, in a slightly different form, on Desicritics.]

Quick note to say...

...the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival begins in Mumbai today; it's on till February 12. If you can't be at the event, do visit the official blog, the Kala Ghoda Gazette, where journos, columnists and freelance writers are pooling their blogging skills together to bring you the best of the festival. All the best to Peter and the rest of the team!

Dario Argento and Suspiria

The motif of innocent protagonists on the run from threatening authority figures, which features in much of Alfred Hitchcock's work, is often traced back to an awful childhood experience: the five-year-old Alfred was sent to a local police station by his father and confined in a prison cell for a few minutes, as punishment for some minor naughtiness. This is the kind of thing that can, of course, be dismissed as overanalysing – as retrospectively attaching too much significance to an incident in the early life of a famous person. Can an entire artistic career really be fueled by a single childhood episode? It seems pat and unlikely, but then who can really know?

Italian director Dario Argento has a childhood memory of his own to relate in an interview in the documentary "Dario Argento's World of Horror", which is one of the special features on my DVD of his film Suspiria. "We lived in a big house," he says, "and every night, after saying goodnight to my parents, I would have to walk alone down a long dark corridor to my room. Each half-open door on either side of that corridor seemed like a threat, harbouring the unknown. My hair would be on end, night after night." The director believes his obsession with scaring people stems from that time.

Suspiria, filmed in 1976, is one of the most distinctive horror films ever made, a visually enchanting work that gives us at least three grisly murders filmed with such grace and imagination that you won't be able to tear your eyes away from the screen (exactly the opposite of what a good horror film is supposed to do) – but which equally achieves its effect from what is not shown, only hinted at. There is a paradox here, and in Argento's oeuvre in general, which I find intriguing. Most horror-film directors specialise in doing one of two things: 1) creating suspense through atmosphere alone, with minimal depiction of actual horrors, or 2) going to the other extreme with an orgy of blood and gore that tests the tolerance of the strongest-willed viewer. But Argento is expert at both, and equally interested in both. On the one hand, he is obsessed with blood, with viscerally violent scenes that often seem gratuitous, even sadistic and cruel. (In many of the knife murders he films, for instance, the killer continues to stab away at the victim even after the purpose has been accomplished.) But on the other hand, some of his most effective work has been in the realm of the unseen. The two elements balance wonderfully in Suspiria, though in the final reckoning I have to cast my vote for the film's quieter moments.

As the credits roll, a solemn voiceover informs us that Suzy Banyon, a young American student, has come to Germany to join a famous dance academy. The film opens with Suzy (played by the gaminish Jessica Harper) walking to the airport exit, and a sense of menace is created almost immediately by the most quotidian elements: the automatic doors through which she walks, the howling of the wind, water flowing into sewers, the cab driver who takes her to her destination. This early scene is reminiscent of Marion Crane's car drive in Psycho - a journey to the netherworld, with rain and lightning heralding the way. It ends with a similar image too: a menacing building (the Bates Motel in Psycho, the dance school here) coming into clear focus through the rain-soaked night. Welcome to Hades.

Contributing immeasurably to the mood in this scene, and in the rest of the film, is the pounding soundtrack – very new-age, very punkish – by the rock band Goblin, with whom Argento frequently collaborated. Whispers of "witch!" punctuate the music score at intervals; Suspiria is not especially subtle or discreet about the mysteries of its plot, or about what Suzy will find at the dance school. You don't have to be a student of the genre to figure out early enough that the secret involves a witch coven.

What this means is that, superficially speaking, this film's structure isn't too different from that of a standard slasher. The ending in particular is overwrought. But Suspiria's great setpieces are the scenes that hint at something so strange and unknowable that it can't even be depicted on film. The barest hint of witchcraft, for instance, in the great shot where a chambermaid momentarily blinds (and weakens) Suzy with the light reflected from a piece of silverware. Or the magnificent (and magnificently show-offish) scene in a deserted public square where a blind piano teacher and his seeing-dog sense something evil around them but don't know exactly what it is (the viewer is given the privilege of a blink-and-miss shot of shadows flitting past a building – witches? On broomsticks?). And then there's the aerial view in a swimming-pool scene, which reminded me of Jacques Tourneur's creepy 1942 film Cat People.

Few directors can match Argento's talent for evoking unease without ever providing the viewer with a convincing explanation (even when there is an obligatory narrative justification). Brian DePalma is superb at it, as is David Lynch. (Hitchcock too of course, but he worked for the most part within the narrative structures defined by Classical Hollywood, and didn't experiment with avant-garde storytelling techniques as these guys did.) Suspiria is a strange, beautiful movie that makes the pretence of disclosing its secrets early on, but which remains fundamentally enigmatic even after you've watched it several times. When the supernatural is explicitly presented to us towards the end of the film, it's almost anti-climactic. But what continues to haunt the senses for days after you've seen the film are the shadows on the wall and on the swimming pool, and the strange behaviour of the seeing-dog.

(Warning: Suspiria doesn't contain anything that's inordinately gruesome, apart from a brief shot of a still-beating human heart being punctured through a chest cavity. But in general, Argento's work, balletic though it is, isn't for the faint-hearted.)

Some links: a Senses of Cinema profile, a classic Argento site Dark Dreams, and an excellent sub-section on Italian Gothic Cinema from Images Journal. And this on the Italian Giallo genre, which often provided the structure for Argento's plots.