The Yacoubian Building - Alaa Al Aswany

The Yacoubian Building stands in downtown Cairo, a handsome Art Deco building, housing offices and some old time residents. The author, a dentist by occupation opened his first clinic here.

A building bearing the same name and perhaps modeled on the original, is the setting for the novel. 

Originally written in Arabic, it traces the lives of the various building residents. They pursue different professions, profess differing allegiances, swing different ways, but they are all united in their subjection to the Egyptian condition. That is how the book started to appear after I had gotten through a third of it—initially I thought it was a pretty, slice-of-life narrative that would affirm some fuzzy-warm, feel-good aspect of humanity. I expected an Egyptian R.K. Narayan as I took in the various characters and their back-stories, but at some point I got rather startled by the sheer carnality of the book.  I wondered among other things, about the author's attitude towards homosexuality. He implies a character turned homosexual after being abused as a child, and seems a little too fixated on the actual act. No R.K. Narayan this. It is almost as if the sexual exploitation of the poor young by the established wrinkled is the thread that binds the stories, with a few accounts of lust making in happier circumstances standing out. Tad depressing. However, the writer has a mesmeric voice and despite the all- too aggressive male gaze that informs his observations, he tells his stories with a touch of understanding and compassion. It is just enough to keep the book from becoming either a political rant or a piece for the prurient. Also, Al Aswany manages to sew up a lot of Egyptian history, politics and culture in his novel, giving one a snapshot picture of modern Cairo society. 

The book made me understand how the latest revolution had come about. Clearly even the middle classes—the ones willing to work hard and keep their head down, if only they had some prospects—had become disaffected in Egypt. In India, which is not exactly behind in the exploitation and corruption parameters, there has been some trickle down to the middle layer. Does one attribute that to democracy or press freedom or both?

 The book reads very well and the translation is superb. I love the Arabic cadence and the switch to present tense for descriptions – a West and South Asian conceit that I am much partial to.  It is important to me that the book was a runaway bestseller in the Arab world. It reminded me too much of Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, and the resonance suggests that truth is reflected in the stories of the Yacoubian Building. I can only hope the author, in his zeal had not given thought to the fact that so many shocking but perfectly conceivable stories cannot take place at once. It is a bit like ‘A Fine Balance’- almost everything bad that can happen in India happens to the four likeable protagonists of Rohington Mistry’s novel.

Yet unlike Mistry’s book, the Yacoubian building does not end in despair. It shows people acting out their wants, and at some level reconciling to their situation. They do not get a great resolution, but it could be worse.

Definitely go for the book. It speaks the truth, is racy but not a rag. And great if you want an introduction to contemporary Arab literature.

Disgrace by JM Coetzee

In order to truly discuss a book, one has to presume prior knowledge on the part of the reader. Disgrace is such a book. I could not begin to give you the infinite twists and turns in the plot of a Satanic Verses or a Master and Margarita, but Disgrace has a straightforward narrative. To discuss the book may mean letting the story out of the bag.

JM Coetzee

Disgrace won JM Coetzee his second Booker. His Nobel thereafter, catapulted him to iconic status. The power packed economy of his writing is valuable in this busy world of low attention spans, where people want to get a million things done and contemplate the life, the universe and everything. Disgrace allows you to do just that – read a thought provoking, deep and complex novel, in the course of a short haul flight. To the plot then, and for people avoiding spoilers, they are in italics. I mean the spoilers are in italics. Mostly.

The opening:

“For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.”

‘He’ is David Lurie, a white man in post apartheid South Africa, a scholar and Professor, paid to teach communication when he would rather be discussing poetry. His ‘solution’ is Soraya from an escort agency. His Sorayan trysts end one day, owing to circumstances of his own making. He then starts a relationship with a young student, who nearly comes undone by the affair. An inquiry follows - Lurie refuses to apologize and is forced to resign. Footloose and fancy free, he serves up at his daughter’s small-holding where horror awaits. They are attacked in their house, his daughter Lucy is gang-raped. They do not expect justice, but it appears Lucy must make peace with her attackers, actually submit to them in a manner of speaking, if she wishes to keep her land and be safe in the new South Africa. Lurie is unable to help an increasingly remote Lucy. At the same time he begins to be drawn to the voiceless and the helpless. He helps out at an animal shelter, working hard to dispose of slaughtered stray dogs in a manner that dignifies them, he shifts the focus of his work from Byron, to Byron’s long forgotten, perhaps ridiculed mistress. He persists thus, despite a suspicion that his efforts are almost ludicrous in the context of the injustices of this world. The book comes to an end.

You would not want to read such a depressing book, but it is a real page-turner. The settings are perfectly etched, the characters credible even if their actions are at odds with one’s reasoning. We are swiftly sucked into the story and from there we ponder the themes and characters of the book-

The Problem of Sex: As a married woman maybe I have little right to judge the plight of a single man, but I come from a land where child widows had to go about with shaven heads lest they tempted someone to tempt them, if that makes sense. The western analogue-  the spinster stereotype, old, virginal, unattractive, was no less pathetic. I have felt a residue of sadness for Jane Austen and my late physically handicapped uncle who never married, but I can’t bring myself to sympathise with Lurie’s predicament. Why is he unable to take himself in hand, why does lack of ‘action’ make him go to pieces, spur him to act increasingly audaciously? Lurie’s excuse is that it is his nature, that one cannot fight one’s nature. Is that the fault of the South African experiment, to ascribe immutable natures to different people? Apartheid society failed to civilise a man like David Lurie, post-apartheid society is failing in the same way. Is that Coetzee’s point?

The book makes me think of the legitimacy of 'nature' as an argument. Are men's needs more legitimate? I wonder at the ad clip for the ethical porn site come4.org. A defiant voice-over, a rush of erotic images, mostly women, the camera finally zooming to the speaker, a wheelchair bound MAN. The site claims to support a pluralistic sexuality and is against subjugating our sexuality to marketing standards. I doubt the ad clip can reel in the women gritting their teeth on abstinence. Not, I think, with the male-centric ad, the too hip project team. If they could, they would be laughing their way to the bank – ask E.L.James.

Is David Lurie reprehensible? I did not mind David Lurie so much. First off I have the protagonist syndrome, thanks to Coetzee’s third person Lurie POV narrative. Lurie is a reliable narrator, and I am susceptible to a sensible and sensitive perspective, however flawed. That probably makes me a loser in the power stakes (it’s all about establishing one’s perspective over others, and presumption is a pre-requisite, is it not?)

No, but I get the code David Lurie lives by - the exercise of free will. If he gets carried away, it is owing to his passions, and please bear with my definition of passion: His passion makes him follow Soraya, unwanted, unasked, into her home-ground, it is his passion that makes him lose his head over Melanie. But then, his high strung nature acts as a check. I do not see him enjoying the exercise of brute force, or profiting by manipulating others. Just as his attractiveness (up until now), and the predominance of his race (up until now, which no doubt, added to his attraction-up until now), did not teach him to deal with sexual rejection, so is he incapable of going against the societal framework that has served him so well all these years. As I see it, his main fault is his ignorance of powerlessness.

My mother wonders at Soraya, a family woman leading a double life. What if she were frightened, or neurotic or otherwise stressed when Lurie calls her? He was coming close to unravelling someone’s life, playing with the life of her children. My rejoinder is that he does leave her alone in the end. More importantly he is sensitive to every subtle shift in his relationship with Soraya; and that is less aggressive and more lover-like.

David Lurie reminds me of Tony Webster, the protagonist of Julian Barnes’s Sense of an Ending – both men have the same smug air of self-sufficiency. There is a further parallel in their having to face up to their past deeds, although Coetzee is harsher with Lurie than Barnes is with Webster. Lurie gets everything back a thousand fold. If he is predatory in his relationships, his daughter gets raped, if he blames his nature, his daughter is raped by Pollux who can’t help his mental deficiency! But Lurie shows character in adversity. His apology to Melanie’s family is a counterpoint to his refusal to abase himself before the inquiry committee. By the way, I admire his attitude with the committee. I prefer arrogance to hypocrisy.

And yes he finds Melanie’s sister attractive and he disapproves of unattractive women, but come on, I will not find fault with what people think inside their heads. We can allow their nature that much! He is not a Humbert Humbert either, Melanie is much older than Lolita. And remember Lurie’s ex-wife is a friend. In fact, my heart goes out to Lurie, singing for Byron’s forgotten mistress, to a three-legged dog. I wish I could tell him it is not comic, the tinny banjo strain. There is a key line in the book, a part of Lurie’s inner monologue – he (Lurie) can, if he concentrates, if he loses himself, be there, be the men, inhabit them, fill the men with the ghost of himself. The question is does he have it in him to be the woman? My verdict is that Coetzee can be the aggressor through Lurie, only up to a point. To the women then.  

Melanie’s inexplicable behaviour: Melanie comes from a provincial family, she is inexperienced and possibly in awe of her professor, maybe she even crushed on Lurie- he first finds her dawdling in his path, she has spoken of him to her family. While her father speaks in stock phrases (we put our children in your hands, nest of vipers, so help me God, how the mighty have fallen, break bread with us), Lurie’s terse apology, contains one exquisite line, the confession that ‘he lacked the lyrical. (Of course he continues to lack the lyrical, to intrude, disturb, explain, demand indulgence. The lyrical would require him to be silent.) But Lurie's  sophistication and sensitivity must be attractive to Melanie. His lifestyle, his books, his erudition, his experience of the world must be glamorous, even heady. The rub is that she finds him physically unattractive. 

But does she like his company? Does she end up accepting that the cost of his company, this introduction to a rarefied life, or let us take a different scenario, the cost of obtaining refuge from her own complicated or banal life, is to agree to have sex with him? And does that capitulation undo her? And him too? For lacking the lyrical?

I left IIT after two months because I lacked the vocabulary to tell my father I was really happy at the Institute, that I thought that if I worked hard I could get into the coveted engineering program. I felt no legitimacy in my arguments, it seemed spoilt of me to refuse a seat in the medical college. Moreover I was worried about the Electrical Circuits Test. Why was that? Because when my father arrived at my hostel to take me back to Chennai where the medical college awaited me, I wasted five minutes bursting into tears. Then I remembered that my professor had threatened to mark us as absent if we were more than five minutes late, so I missed the entire class, which I decided would surely set me back in the coming test, which meant I had even less of a leg to stand on if my plan was to get a branch change. So I advanced no sensible arguments, only threw a super tantrum, hoping my father would say Amrish-Puri-like , “Ja Simran ja, yeh KGP jaise koi tere ko khush nai rakh saktha, ja, apni zindagi jee”. (Go Simran, go. No one can keep you happy like KGP does. Go live your life) My nod to that silly movie DDLJ. In the movie it is  Raj not KGP. Check out the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0Zc5m0w6gA

My father did nothing of that sort, instead he kept asking me what I wanted!

Sorry for that autobiographical dose, but the point is that those five minutes became a missed test, which made me believe that my career in IIT was finished and that I had to go elsewhere. We make decisions for the vaguest of reasons in our youth and our folly. Maybe Melanie wanted to get away from her boyfriend, maybe she felt let down by Lurie, maybe the missed test became a big deal, to the point where she became confused within and buffeted by all without. Melanie Isaacs is out of her depth from the beginning, but it is Lurie’s fault in not grasping that her problems could become his problem. 

Melanie is probably 'Coloured'. I don’t know much of South African society but if Lurie, a poor professor, represents a certain world, then the hard working petit bourgeois Isaacs household with their pickles and cumin flavoured chicken stew must come from somewhere else. And not just that, the overt religiosity, the bombast that reflects a limited vocabulary, Desiree’s  now-now, the Chinese features of both the sisters, Isaacs’s hairless skin, the dark hair, the dark eyes, Ryan the boyfriend’s warning to Lurie – stay with your own kind - I am sure of it. I will not even go into the play on Melanie’s name.

Disgrace was made into a movie starring John Malkovich as David Lurie. Good Casting!

Lucy’s inexplicable behaviour: It is clear that both Lucy and Melanie are unhappy with the sexual advantage that has been taken of them, yet they acquiesce to it in a most troubling way. I think Coetzee has inhabited Melanie very well- how about Lucy? Why is she willing to abase herself? Why is Bev complicit in Lucy’s harebrained decisions? Has Lucy’s sexual orientation made her differently attuned to life? Is it PSTD? I cannot answer these questions. But clearly Holland is not her idea of a safe haven like Lurie and the reader think it is. On the other hand she had found happiness working the land in South Africa and thinks she can give it a go, with the help of Petrus. Her father cannot help, he is increasingly irrelevant, jobless himself, his house in town burgled. Yet…how is she so placid when Pollux is found peeping into her bathroom, so irritated with her father for interfering? How does she end up pregnant? Is it a bid to tie the land to herself, produce a child of the soil? Will she be successful? Is she bending to the wind or has she been broken? Will she rise again?

Lastly, the character of Petrus: – I did not like him. It is all right to say my people, your people and propose all kinds of arrangements, but Petrus knows what he is about, and if he cannot  see it, he is no better than Pollux, the jackal boy. I am not a white or black man, I am a brown woman and Coetzee can show me all the parallels between Lurie and Petrus, I will not be lured by that kind of sophistry. Maybe Petrus and Isaacs are projections of Lurie, but if so, Lurie has done a good job of convincing me.

So?

But where is the story going? Where is the disgrace in the transfer of power? I have to agree with TS from the book group that perhaps it is the story of South Africa. It is an indictment of South Africa, of the apartheid system that allowed men like Lurie advantages, of the current law and order situation that has reduced Lucy, a good woman to such abject straits. Like all of Coetzee’s works, it is a protest and a cry on behalf of the voiceless- Lucy and the dogs, Byron’s Teresa and men like Lurie who are unable to age gracefully.  Advocacy at its finest.

And I like that semi colons have been dispensed with, that commas are the way to go. Oh, and I love the creative process as Coetzee describes it, apropos ‘Byron’s Italy,’ the opera that consumes Lurie as the book draws to a close.  I could go on. I could transcribe the book.

Read the book every five years. 

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

When I read a book, my head swims with ideas and questions and a multiple other troubling matters. The more a book worries me, the less am I willing to ‘like’ it. (Like how I am uable to let go after my reread of Disgrace. I will have to either read ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’ or ‘Gone Girl’ before I am fit for society.) And that is exactly what has happened with American Pastoral, Philip Roth’s 1997 offering and part of his great American trilogy (with The Human Stain, and ‘I married a Communist’). I was hooked from Chapter 1, then set adrift, leaving me flailing for concrete ground. Hmmm, let me quit the high-flown semantics, quickly get to the meat of the story. We can analyze and argue later.

American Pastoral is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, fictional writer, and Roth’s alter ego. Zuckerman is in his seventies here, a survivor of prostate surgery that has left him impotent and weak of bladder, a solitary pathetic figure nourished we presume, only by his writer’s curiosity and the satisfaction of regularly realizing his creative potential. Nathan runs into a man from his past, Seymour ‘The Swede’ Levov, who their entire Newark neighborhood once idolized, apparently because he was blonde, blue eyed, steep jawed and fantastic in sports. Believable enough; it is pointed out anyway that in those high school days of the forties, when Zuckerman’s ilk of second generation Jewish immigrants had just stepped onto the first rung in the ladder to assimilation, Swede Levov appeared to have arrived there already, showing them that it could be done. (One also infers that Levov’s lack of swagger imbued him with an aura: of the established one, of, should I say it, the well meaning, reticent Anglo Saxon at the top of the food chain!)

But on meeting him after all these years the star-struck Nathan is disappointed to find a bland, self-satisfied man, insisting on rubbing the lonely Zuckerman nose in cozy photographs and triumphant tales of family achievement. Zuckerman responds by consigning Levov to the boring platitude spouting multitude, one beneath the eagle eye of the author-narrator. However, a co-incidental meeting a few years later, makes Zuckerman realize how utterly wrong he has been in his reading, for the Swede, despite his obvious success in the diverse fields of sport and business and love, had been laid low by his beloved daughter’s destiny. Perhaps she had brought her fate upon herself, but it is no less horrifying to a parent for all that. That piques Zuckerman’s interest and he sets about dreaming up a ‘plausible’ version of what could have happened, a version that forms the substance of the book.

Philip Roth

How plausible Roth is, is borne out by the reception his book has received, for it cannot all be attributed to virtuosity, however much one likes the author’s gorgeous rants, or finds evocative the human interaction portrayed, or thinks interesting the descriptions of human endeavor – cattle farming, plastic surgery, glove making, feeding cake, take your pick. The American Pastoral has remained one of the most widely read and critically acclaimed American novels to date, and this will have to be because Roth writes the truth. But why am I not satisfied? Is it because in the best traditions of contemporary novelists he refuses to make one point (you already know I am thinking Disgrace here), but starts up a story abounding in any number of points, if only you picked them up? Is this the fate of the novel in the post analytic world where even evil has been teased into nothingness, where the author inevitably loses his direction? Yes, I have digressed here.

Back to the book. Just like the framing device of the novel is handled by Nathan Zuckerman, the body proper of American Pastoral is told from the bewildered perspective of Swede Levov, who while dealing with the aftermath of his daughter Meredith-Merry’s violent revolt, tries to understand what went wrong. In doing so he gives us nuggets to sift through the filter of our own experience, knowing as we do, the ultimate dénouement, (a brief history of Swede Levov’s life is contained in the “prologue”). Swede Levov goes back and forth in time, reveling in fond memories of an uncomplicated past, speculating on the reasons for his daughter’s breakdown - whether it was the lack of a religious foundation, or her being an only child, or her stuttering disability and perhaps their less than perfect parenting response to it, (but then again, who could claim perfect parenting strategies), or a very inappropriate kiss between Swede and a growing Merry (now this one is more worrisome). We get sucked into the game, as he anguishes. Is the Swede too smug, too unwilling to see a problem until it hits him on the head? Does he mirror the American experience? The Swede is constantly surprised by people around him – he does not worry that an intelligent, stuttering child of clearly glamorous parents could be miserable, thinking it enough that he finds her wonderful, he has no idea how important lack of appearance (of looks, class, and intellectual achievement) is to him and to his wife, he is not riled by the nasty remarks of the incorrigible Marcia Umanoff, most importantly he is not goaded by the violence coursing around him, so apparent in the bizarre events of the dinner he hosts towards the end of the book. 

We also wonder if the Swede’s moving away from his tribe (a Jewish identity), in the name of an assimilation that has not really happened, creates a vacuum in his child’s life that she tries to fill with her own individually created belief systems? Or is it only a case of crisis paralysis, for as the book progresses, Swede Levov seems unable to take any coherent action vis-à-vis his daughter. I could not help taking my musings further- so much land and so few people - you either farm the land or you squire it, or you move beyond the suburban. Is America creating little family islands brooding in provincial isolation, tinderboxes ready to explode anyway? It is amazing that one can get so carried away about the imaginary doings of imaginary characters. 

But still. Kuch khatakta hai. Ennomo neruderethey! And the more I think, the more I feel that it is the character of the Swede that does not sit right for me. He sounds wonderfully good childy in his John Appleseed fantasy, right up to when his daughter reaches adolescence. But is it possible that such a man would achieve all his dreams? In my limited experience, our gifts and talents give us a start in life, but what one makes of a business or a marriage requires character, and while self-delusion helps, it is never enough. The Swede could not have been such a babe in the woods, such an innocent if he came this far. And I do get it; there is an underside to him, steely or weak you decide, the side that does not see alternative scenarios, that walks away from a broken engagement, a broken marriage, the faith. I suppose he finds it more difficult to walk away from a broken child, but would such a character anguish like that? Who knows? I had to ask others. 

Tarun was like – Swede Levov realizes that he cannot accommodate his daughter in the life he has made for himself, and that is his tragedy. Alright. I went to the book discussion. 

Madelyn felt the book was pitch perfect in its portrayal of America. Having grown up in a New York neighborhood next door to many Jewish families, she could identify with the setting and that in itself, was exhilarating. Madelyn also found the development of the novel symptomatic of what she felt was happening in America, ‘the descent of the collective dream of the American Pastoral into the individual American berserk’. She appreciated also, how American history had been swept into the scope of this novel –World War II, the race riots, the Vietnam war, the weathermen, Angela Davis, the sexual revolution, the Watergate scandal. If Madelyn had to pick one inexplicable wrong move – by Levov/ Zuckerman/ Roth, it would be the kiss. She could not see how such deviance could so normally be woven into the story. My take is that the Swede gives himself away in more ways than one, through that incestuous kiss – in effect it is an admission that Merry’s stuttering is a terrible affliction that needs drastic recompense. I have to admit however, that the episode came across rather self consciously clever in a post Freudian way.  In the tradition of Woody Allen and Portnoy… 

I saw also in Roth’s writing, a delineation of the Jewish identity, how it explained many things to me, and how uncomfortable that made me. I did not need these sociological inputs about a people after the history lesson of Master and Margarita. Does reading great fiction make one an armchair ethnologist? Mamta asked how this story would have panned out in an Indian context- she felt an Indian middle class household would have never moved beyond Meredith, her story would have become theirs. Shivalik felt that the novel was really about America, the story of a nation that discovers itself veering off a blameless course to a happy ideal, as it gets blindsided by events. Possible. The sweep of the novel is American; why should there not be an allegorical significance?

 

Of course everyone wondered about Merry’s breakdown and the causes for that- the mother, the lax upbringing, an isolated life. It was interesting that I had read ‘Some Girls’ by Jillian Lauren just a week before starting American Pastoral.

 

'Some girls' is the memoir of a suburban New Jersey girl who rebelled against her Jewish middle class parents and ended up in the sex trade, ultimately landing in the harem of a Brunei prince. As airport reads go, it is superbly written, but what I took away, was that a kid from a perfectly boring-normal western background, brought up by well meaning reasonable parents could end up as the pet of a bored sultan. There are similarities between Merry and Jillian. Both of them felt disconnected at home perhaps, (Merry because of her insecurities, Jillian because she was adopted), both grew up in very well off Jewish households but in cosmopolitan neighborhoods; they probably felt alienated from their suburban peers. But more interesting was the difference between the real and fictional stories of a girl gone wrong. There was real violence in Jillian’s home. That key ingredient for someone to become unhinged - Roth hints at sexual abuse, but he is half hearted about it, would it have made sense instead, to have hinted at violence in the home?

I cannot end the review without registering a protest against the portrayal of a religion so moderate in its outlook as a kooky violent group, even from the warped perspective of a demented Meredith. Jains are vegetarians but scrupulously clean, but more importantly a basic tenet of their faith is ‘anekantavada’. Anekāntavāda encourages its adherents to consider the views and beliefs of their rivals and opposing parties. Proponents of anekāntavāda apply this principle to religion and philosophy, reminding themselves that any religion or philosophy—even Jainism—that clings too dogmatically to its own tenets, is committing an error based on its limited point of view. Roth could have surely picked another religion to project as fanatic. Maybe he was being ironical.

But the book makes you think. It is important and readable. Pick it up. 

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

I love Russian books. My introduction to adult literature was through a collection of short-stories by Gorky, a book I received as a prize in Middle School. I may not have understood all of it but I appreciated it.

I was also very much the product of the Cold War era. Non-aligned India leaned left, the Indian Air Force flew MiG-21s, my father spoke Russian, our family possessed Soviet memorabilia from his only trip abroad. And books from Russia were cheap. I grew up reading ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’.  As I read more I grew to love Lara and Aksinya and Levin and Ivan and Mitya and Grushenka. I loved the honest and fierce sensibility of the Russian writers, their brilliance that gave full play to drama but controlled it, in page after page devoted to the terrible search for an elusive truth and happiness.

And then I took up The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov’s offering that has upended all my notions of Russian Literature. This is not a book that systematically plumbs the depths of human experience. Instead, it calls to mind flying fish leaping to evade the predators lurking below. If you will, dolphins coming up for air. If there is a tinge of hysteria in this experiment in magical realism, that, I suppose accounts for the realism. 

Mikhail Bulgakov

This book was written in secret, in Russia between 1929 and 1940, at the time of the Great Purge, when repression, deportations and sudden disappearances were the order of the day, when writers kept packed suitcases in the hallway, preparing for the proverbial midnight knock on the door. Bulgakov came from a family of priests and had served in the White Army; moreover he was a playwright who in the best Russian tradition wished to portray reality as he understood it, his understanding often at odds with that of a totalitarian regime. He was a prime candidate for the lethal moniker ‘Enemy of the state’. Writing a subversive novel like the Master and Margarita was a risk, but it might have also been its author’s redemption. Indeed Mikhail Bulgakov had no immediate hopes of its publication as he raced to finish this masterpiece before he died.

'The Master and Margarita' opens one hot spring evening in Moscow, with the arrival of supernatural forces in the form of a Professor Woland and his assistants. Professor Woland strikes up conversation with two men – a literary critic and a poet. To elucidate his point, he goes on to narrate a fascinating account of the events surrounding the Crucifixion. He also predicts precisely the gruesome death of the critic listening to his story. What follows is mayhem, a series of inexplicable and magical events that rock Moscow. The poet who has witnessed the death of his friend and the supernatural abilities of this Professor (of Black Magic) finds himself in a lunatic asylum. There he meets the Master, a man who has suffered a nervous breakdown following the rejection of his life’s work, an account of the life of Pontius Pilate. The Master talks of  Margarita, the love of his life. Meanwhile Margarita, in order to rehabilitate the Master makes a Faustian bargain with the devil, Professor Woland that is, for he has been identified as such by common agreement. 

By the end of the book, the Master and Margarita achieve a semblance of closure as have the various Muscovites traumatised by the antics of the Devil’s coterie. So have Pontius Pilate, and significantly, a pathetic sinner, suffering for eternity for having suffocated her child.

Personally I found the Moscow narrative tedious (alright, it was painful in the extreme; it reminded me that there is a certain repetitive quality to Russian writing, and while it achieves closure for the writer, is seldom enjoyed by the reader. A case in point is Gorky’s story, character study really, of his ‘Travelling Companion’). However, I believe ‘The Master and Margarita’ makes an instant connection with people of that time and place, sending a jolt of pleasurable recognition of the travails they experienced. Bulgakov’s flights of fantasy - the witch’s Sabbath and Lucifer’s ball to give two examples, were too over the top for me. But I was in thrall to his story of Pontius Pilate, of a man who knew where justice lay but did not see it done, and suffered for it. With a few strokes of the pen – the overpowering scent of rose oil, the scorching sun, a splitting headache, a wrinkled olive tree, Bulgakov recreates first century Judea. It is a literary tour de force and a testament to Bulgakov’s genius. After I finished the book, I immediately reread the Pilate chapters, and it was every bit as enjoyable the second time around. I think I also began to understand the appeal of Christianity in Europe.

I have always wondered about the hold of an essentially pacifist religion over a basically  forceful race. It could be that people choose the religion that they need, just as the undoubtedly aggressive Mongols of Chengezed heritage gravitated to a religion that means Submission. But I wonder now, if European Christendom did not identify with Pilate. Any religion founded on martyrdom must give rise to a protective and assertive-aggressive outlook in its followers. So it should be with Sikhism and so it is with Shia-Islam. Come to think of it, modern day Zionism. A sense of ‘never again’, perhaps.

The dog and Yudhishthira ascending to heaven (ignore Bhima)

So, I called my mother with my little epiphany. She surprisingly heard me out, and then surprised me further by asserting that Bulgakov must have been exposed to Hinduism! The basis for her assertion is in his play White Guard. A character, Zhilin, asks God why he welcomes Bolsheviks into heaven, when they do not even believe in him. God replies that it is all the same to him whether the soldiers believe in him or not. He says, “Zhilin…you have to understand, that for me you are all identical – killed in the field of battle.” This is too similar to the story of King Yudhishtira of the Hindu epic Mahabharata, who dismayed to see his mortal enemies, the ‘unrighteous’ Kauravas in heaven, asks Zhilin’s question. He too is told that the Kauravas have died in battle and have a right to heaven.

Then there is the imagery of Pilate’s dreams. In his dreams Pontius Pilate argues happily with Christ  as they ascend a sort of moonlit celestial stairway, followed by Pilate’s faithful dog (all men are bad says Pilate, no they are good says Christ, but they agree that cowardice is the worst of all human failings). This picture too, recalls Yudhishtira who refused to ascend to the heavens without his faithful dog.

 Rushdie: Bulgakov was an influence

Mamta felt that all characters were various aspects of the writer. Shivalik found it impossible to pigeonhole the book, although Rushdie’s books, in particular the Satanic Verses are comparable. In some sense all characters are reflections of its author, but to my mind, the Master and Margarita represent Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master, the impractical artist who wishes only to live through his work and is crushed by criticism and intimidation, is as much Bulgakov as is Margarita, the ambitious pragmatist, compassionate and vengeful and weighed down by the bargain she has struck with the forces of ‘evil’ to rescue the Master. (Bulgakov owed his survival to the patronage of Stalin, who had liked a play of his, and responded to an open letter with a personal telephone call- leading some to surmise that Professor Woland could even represent Stalin).

The Master offers blessed release to his hero, Pontius Pilate whose courage failed him once. The parallels between the Master, Pilate and Bulgakov are striking. Margarita similarly redeems a woman condemned to be reminded eternally of her act of suffocating her child, again an arresting analogy for the pain suffered by an artist who smothers her own creation. Does suffering and redemption lie within the same person?

If there was something that bothered me it was the strain of revenge seeking, as a balm for one’s torments. Pilate executes Judas in the book and vows eternal enmity with the Jewish Sanhedrin, Margarita trashes the apartment of the literary critic who ruined the Master. There is the unmistakable odour of anti-Semitism, although Bulgakov is objective and precise in his depictions. I have to remind myself that he died before the atrocities of the Jewish Holocaust came to light.

The book is a cry from the soul of an artist forced to acknowledge his powerlessness. A true artist cannot be a pragmatist but when he is beset by forces from without, his art has to twist and swerve into different modes of expression if it is to remain true. So it is with The Master and Margarita. A tough read, beautiful in parts, and guaranteed to leave you thinking for days.

The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa

(Translated from the Italian Orioginal by Archibald Colquhoun)

The narrative starts in 1861 when great changes are underway. For the first time after the fall of the Roman Empire, Italy is to be unified into a single regime.  Garibaldi has sailed his ships for the southern coasts, the Bourbon King of the Two Sicilies looks nervously on and the landed aristocracy of the south watches as power slips decisively out of its hands.

The protagonist Prince Don Fabrizio of Salina is of the old order, a splendid man presiding over a handsome family and magnificent estates in Sicily. He has the patrician spirit and bearing of his ancestors and a clear-sighted intelligence tempered however, by a passion for astronomy and a tendency to intellectualise his troubles. He navigates political upheaval with pragmatism and dignity but it is hard. It is always hard. The book is a meditation on the prince’s inner life as he reconciles himself to the decline of his class and his family, and the fact that he has joined the misunderstood and apathetic majority of a land he profoundly loves and knows.   

The story takes place between the villas and palazzos of Palermo, the urban seats of the prince, and his palace deep in the Sicilian countryside at "Donnafugata." It covers a swathe of fifty years- although the action takes place mostly in the first two years, and the account of the remaining years serves as a sort of denouement to the action. The narrative is in the style of a deeply intelligent rumination interspersed with sumptuous descriptions of the decaying grandeur of an old aristocracy. The sense of contained foreboding in the beginning leads to muted resignation matched by a similarly controlled grief at the end of the narrative. Even Tancredi the favoured nephew of the prince, the nimblest and most successful of their lot is unable to avoid the bittersweet memory of a partiality and the consciousness that it was not explored and taken to its logical end. Even the fiercely idealistic and uncompromising Concetta, the Prince’s daughter has to come to terms with her misjudgements. Concetta is an interesting counterpoint to Tancredi. Together they are the Prince’s legacy. And this is what they contend with at the end of their lives.

Shatranj Ke Khiladi, the Chess-Players

Aasman Mahal

The Leopard  evoked for me, “Shatranj Ke Khilari,” a Satyajit Ray film, based on a short story by Munshi Premchand. It describes two Lucknowi Nawabs who play chess amidst political mayhem. The movie is satirical, mocking the incredible detachment of our lordly chess players, as India comes under British dominion. SKK informed my view of the nineteenth century ruling class of India. The Leopard shows me the flip side of that coin, telling me a story from the Nawab’s perspective. Another old movie- Aasman Mahal- comes to mind too. In it Prithviraj Kapoor plays the part of the old patriarch, a less successful version of Don Fabrizio who clings to the glory of bygone days.

The Leopard also evokes the tormented empathy of the privileged for the poor unfortunate of their land, a helpless fellow-feeling that cannot hope for moral approval but may get a nod in literary fiction. Like perhaps Tolstoy who feels for his people through Levin’s tortured heart, devoting pages and pages of Anna Karenina to the Russian muzhik, so too is Don Fabrizio one with his people when he describes the Sicilian voter as “either stunned with overwork or starved by unemployment.” His rant to the Piedmontese official who visits him is wonderful to read and will be understood by any self-styled “have” from a land of “have nots”. The insights offered by Father Pironne speak to me too- “they all (nobles) despise one another, except the peasants who despise themselves.” Brilliant!

The book transcends geographical boundaries and becomes relevant to me, even in its descriptions of the countryside, where “(sometimes) the sun is not so strong as to leach (the sky) of colour”. I like the Prince best when he is in his element, in Donnafugata. I like his flawed self-pride in adhering to traditions that elevate him, his self-absorption and his refinement. I cannot condone his emotional distance from his wife and children despite his ready understanding of what is in their minds and hearts, and this I feel is his downfall.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

The prose is exquisite, loaded with the result of many hours of thought, and improves with rereading. Apparently the character of Don Fabrizio was based on the author’s grandfather, indeed Giuseppe di Lampedusa could refer to diaries from the period; this and the fact that he was in his fifties when he wrote the book imbues it with a certain maturity and authenticity. By way of criticism, there is an interrupted, staccato nature to the work, as if Lampedusa worked on different bits that took his fancy and then tried to splice them all into a coherent narrative. All the parts of the book are beautiful, and so is the book, but the joints are not smooth. 

Still from the Visconti Classic - Il Gattopardo

A movie would probably edit out many parts of the novel, focusing instead on the handsome prince, the lovely Angelica, the delicious Tancredi and the heartbreakingly solemn Concetta in an opulent Sicilian setting. Or maybe not. It would still be a visual treat and one of these days I will catch the Burt Lancaster starrer, a classic I believe. It is incredible that every actor in the movie with the exception of Claudia Cardinale (who plays Angelica Sedara) looks exactly like I would have imagined them.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Llosa Vargas (Translated by Helen Lane from the Spanish original “La tia Julia y el escribidor”)

 A mad romp of a novel that explores Peruvian middle class dynamics, the spirit of youth, and forbidden love. A book that contains a series of supposed soap opera plots, one more outrageous than the other, giving us thereby a preposterous but entertaining introduction to many Latin American stereotypes. Es estupendo!

Years ago, I was left untouched when I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Call it youthful absorption in my own love life or lack of it, but the promise of love requited at seventy did not offer comfort. Also, the names in the book had the slant, throwing quality of the foreign arrayed in the familiar, not unlike… Malay food to an Indian palate? Having grown up in newly decolonized India I got Anglo-Saxon names, and the influx of Russian translations during the cold war era made Vanya and Nikolai, Masha and Aksinya, familiar. But I found it difficult to engage when a Maria befriended a Pilar, or when a can-get-my-head-around-it Florentino cavorted with a hitherto unknown Fermina.

In fact I do not remember a word of the book, except that I was very impressed by how it ended. Marquez was one of the first Nobel laureates I read leaving aside Tagore, so maybe I willed myself to simply ‘finish’ the book – that was my mantra those days. You could put down my lack of response to my youth and lack of literary inclination (my staples were Georgette Heyer and Agatha Christie). But then I picked up ‘Memory of my melancholy whores,’ last week, and found myself reacting against the graphic depiction of older men having sex with emotionally untouched, subordinate women. These things do not stop me from going on with a book, but I do not necessarily have to endorse them. Give me Nabokov’s extravagant lyricism or Coetzee’s economy and precision, if we need to deal with the politics of sex from a certain angle, but please do not subject me to explicit illustrations of unsavoury sex in fantastical settings. I do not like it. (Case in point: the Pedro Aldomovar film I watched recently, with an execrable, horrible premise. The only reason I watched it to the end was to see the demented wicked die. ‘In Your skin’ or something. Do not watch it.)

But reading Marquez boosted my sense of well-being. I was whale-shit at the bottom of the ocean that was the trading room, but the other fish were single young men, many of them groovy and gagging for it. Also, if 2008 marked the end of big bonuses, 1994 definitely marked their beginning in India, and reading authors from South Africa and Colombia was my way of adding the suhaaga to the sona. (Old Punjabi saying – sone pe suhaagaa – probably means ‘the clinching good thing on top of a good thing’. Kapish? Never mind.) Overall, I was happier swinging from Bombay locals to work than I could have reasonably been expected to be, and I owe some of it to my reading Marquez when I got a seat. Except the day I rushed into the Malad 8:08, unobservant of reeling women rushing out. I called out to my friend- what incredible luck, I had two window seats facing each other- we could now converse as I dipped into the book a la Jolie-Depp in The Tourist, except that instead of the gorgeous European countryside rushing by, we would catch lines of men squatting down to do their business by the tracks (maybe the women took the first shift, but eight in the morning?), except we did not know Angelina Jolie those days but where was I? I am brought down to earth by the soft squish of the very large pile of yellow shit I had stepped onto. It was spongy and yielded at once; the smell stayed with me for days. I had to be miles away in time and space and read Katherine Boo’s ‘Beyond the Beautiful Forevers’ before I could see that it need not have been a malevolent prank. One could tire of jostling to crap.

Oh yes, so I have always felt guilty about not really reading Marquez, who was selected in the first place on account of his renown and his coming from somewhere far off. When Leena suggested tia Julia by Mario Llosa Vargas, the other Nobel laureate from Sudamerica, I jumped at the chance to read it for our day group. I am glad I did.

I am addicted to Roman a clefs. For those who do not wish to Wikipedia that, a roman a clef literally means (in French at least) a novel with a key. It refers to real events/characters, settings etc. presented as fiction. The relationship between the real and the fictionalized elements is the key of the novel. All autobiographical novels would be roman a clefs – Naipaul’s ‘A House for Mr. Biswas’, R.K. Narayan’s trilogy, Roy’s ‘God of Small Things’ are all roman a clefs as they have strong autobiographical elements. But there are other variations too, like “The Green Carnation” which was loosely based on Oscar Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a Roman a clef, as it follows the life of Mario Vargas himself. It tells the story of young Marito or Varguitas, a law student who works part time at a radio station and dreams of becoming a writer. The ups and downs of his love affair with an older woman are one part of the book. The other part details happenings in the radio station, focusing in particular on a manic Bolivian scriptwriter- Pedro Camacho- who churns out soap operas non-stop. Interspersed are plots for the serials attributed to Camacho, as also Marito’s own more sober productions – fiction within fiction, all of it interesting and amusing. Vargas approaches his protagonist-alter ego’s budding creative life with a light and sympathetic touch, brimming with humour. He is less restrained when describing his family or for that matter his ladylove. But it is his treatment of Camacho that tends to take a turn for the surreal, funny and tragic and extreme, and I cannot wonder if Vargas has not moved from realism to caricature here. But I do not know the life of artists; maybe this is the gritty realism that I wish to ignore.

We had a very interesting discussion. Everybody enjoyed the book. Aparna found the soap opera plots confusing; she says she turned with relief to the love story, the ‘real’ story that she enjoyed very much. She could identify in many ways with the whole notion of the extended family that Mario is part of, the comings and goings between the houses, the easy conviviality. It resonated with her own experience in Benares, where she studied for a year. She was in the lap of the extended family, while her parents like Marito’s were in the United States. Verena sensed a slight obsession with Europe, which made her wonder about cultural hegemony. Shivalik was reading it for the second time and commented that ‘Aunt Julia…’ was a departure from Vargas’s previous books, which were darker, and it was possible that he went overboard. Leena was disappointed in how little one got to know of the food of the place, in a sense she felt the book possessed very little of the immediate physical flavour. She however, agreed that the book gave us a very good sense of how life could be in Lima.

I felt bad for Camacho, but then it was pointed out (Verena? Leena?), that maybe Pedro Camacho the scriptwriter and Mario the protagonist represent between them the arc of a writer’s career. One is at the acme of his profession, poised to fail while the other is starting out. One is a sociopath, egotistical and passionate to the point of madness, a prolific ascetic whose neuroses bring about his downfall. The other is young and vulnerable and full of the joy of life – ambitious, afraid and in love. The one who appears to have tasted the bitter dregs of life sells fantasy, while the sheltered and sensitive young man would plumb for realism. And just as these are both different avatars of the creative persona, so the trajectories of their lives diverge.

The serials by Camacho in the book feature a fifty-year old man, distinguished with silvering temples, a broad forehead and an aquiline nose, a handsome and upright man, in the prime of his life, as the main lead. Maria Vargas Llosa was forty-two when the book came out. Vargas in his later years bears an uncanny resemblance to Camacho’s hero. I am sure this is not co-incidental - just read that description and look at this picture - 

Vargas: Camacho's hero?

I cannot help puzzling over its significance. Is this implied narcissism, or is Vargas laughing at himself? And how about the depiction of Camacho? Vargas has mentioned a Raul Salmon as the inspiration for Camacho. But Raul Salmon appears to have done much better in life - he owns a radio station in Bolivia and is apparently more personable than Camacho. He claims never to have met Vargas (it is entirely plausible that a struggling young boy reporter went unnoticed by the star writer of the station). Refer www.pateplumaradio.com/south/bolivia/tiajulia.html. In his outrage at being linked to an outsize caricature, Salmon accuses Vargas of a deep-rooted anti Bolivian bias, much like Camacho’s seemingly inexplicable (at first,) prejudice against Argentineans, a theme in the book. Is Salmon taking an angry pot-shot or is this Vargas laughing at himself again?

But I keep coming back to a certain gleeful viciousness in Vargas’s treatment of Camacho- is this a catharsis for the writer, does he needs to witness the devastation of his forerunner, an artist he reverences in order to step out of his shadow? And is it again a co-incidence that the book came out a year after Vargas famously punched his fellow writer and friend, the first giant of South American literature - Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Did Camacho start out as Salmon and become a stand in for Marquez? We can only guess and wait for the memoirs.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez with black eye after being punched by Mario Vargas Llosa

Both Vargas and Marquez have been tight-lipped about their altercation though speculation abounds that the incident involved Vargas’s second wife, Patty. Vargas had at some point become enamoured of a Swedish airhostess and moved out of his house. A distraught Patty went to Marquez, Vargas’s great friend at that time. Marquez apparently counselled her to leave Vargas and ‘consoled’ her. In any case, Vargas came back to his wife, she filled him in on Marquez’s reactions and actions and the next thing we know is that Marquez has gone up to Vargas at a film event, arms outstretched crying ‘Marito’, and gotten a beautiful black eye in return. Marquez took care to memorialize the resplendent eye the next morning through some photographs, but there has been nothing more from either writer.

In one case however, we have got something to review the book by. Vargas’s former wife, the eponymous Julia to whom the book is dedicated, did write her own version of events in ‘Lo que Varguitas no dijo’ or ‘What little Vargas did not say.’ Vargas made her seven years younger in the book, but she objects to his portrayal of her as a designing woman with zero literary pretensions, and the implicit denial of any contribution she may have made to his literary career.

Julia Urquidi

Vargas describes a seriousness of purpose in ‘Marito’ after he commits himself to his love- a growing up that he chooses to show rather than explain, and could loosely be ascribed to  ‘coming of age’. I feel it should be attributed to an inspiration that allows you to throw off the weight of convention and expectation, and spurs you to follow your dreams.  To Aunt Julia then!