Friday, November 10, 2023

Island of Spice

 


ANSWERS

You wake up with the answer to the question that everyone asks. The answer is Yes, and the answer is Just Like Here But Worse. That’s all the insight you’ll ever get. So you might as well go back to sleep.

You were born without a heartbeat and kept alive in an incubator. And, even as a foetus out of water, you knew what the Buddha sat under trees to discover. It is better to not be reborn. Better to never bother. Should have followed your gut and croaked in the box you were born into. But you didn’t.’

The first two paragraphs of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sri Lanka’s author, Shehan Karunatilaka are captivating. This is the voice of Maali Almeida, thirty-four years of age, who is now dead and his dismembered body is sinking in the Beira Lake. He has no idea who killed him. He was working as war photojournalist and until recently he did work for the Associated Press, and various news agencies. He accepted gigs from government officials, human rights organisations, foreign journalists and possibly spies. He also worked as a fixer and he has taken photographs that nobody wants to see. His full name is Malinda Almeida Kabalana.

The story is set in 1990, Colombo. Maali Almeida is a closet gay and he is also a gambler. He shares a house with Jaki and her cousin Dilan Dharmendran (DD), a lawyer whose father is Minister Stanley Dharmendran. He has a sexual liaison with DD and the affair is hidden from Jaki and DD’s father. Together with DD and Jaki, Almeida’s mother reports to the police that Almeida is missing.

Maali is caught in the liminal space between life and the unknown that lies beyond. He has seven moons ( seven days and seven nights) to try to contact his housemates, DD and Yaki and lead them to the photos that will rock Sri Lanka. He has shot thousands of photos , including ‘photos of the government Minister who looked on while the savages of ’83 torched Tamil homes and slaughtered the occupants‘. He has taken portraits of disappeared journalist vanished activists and images of ‘killers of actor and heartthrob Vijaya and the wreckage of Upali’s plane on film‘.These photos are kept in a white shoe box hidden under his bed. Almeida wants his friends to develop the photos and show to the world the brutalities of the civil war in Sri Lanka.

In his afterlife, there are also counters and confusions just like the living world with all that bureaucratic process to go through. He meets Dr Ranee Sridharan who holds a ledger book telling him that he has seven moons to reach The Light and cautions him that the In Between is filled with ghouls and demons who draw power from your despair and he must not gift it to them. To reach The Light, Maali first has to have his ears checked and bathe in the River of Births to have his mind erased. He meets the Dead Atheist who has been stuck in the In Between for over a thousand moons and the latter advises him not to follow the thing with the hood that turns out to be Sena Pathirana who wants him to reject the promise of The Light and join him in seeking vengence on their murderers. Sena was JVP organiser for Gampaha district, now dead and still talking revolution. Maali wants to learn from Sena a In Between who can whisper to the living. He needs to tell Jaki to find the photos. Sena says to Maali,

Every soul is allowed seven moons to wander the In Between. To recall past lives. And then ,to forget. They want you to forget. Because , when you forget, nothing changes.’

The world will not correct itself. Revenge is your right. Do not listen to Bad Samaritans. Demand your justice. The system failed you. Karma failed you. God failed you. On earth as it is up here.’

The good doctor, Dr Ranee shouts that these are false words and says :

‘ Revenge is no justice. Revenge lessens you. Only karma grants what is yours. But you must be patient. It is the only thing you need to be.

He wants to know what The Light is.

Dr Ranee says ‘Whatever You Need It To Be‘. The good doctor is championing The Light because the In Between is congested. She says this to Maali,

I was obsessed with justice, with protecting the powerless,with my students, with the plight of Tamils. I didn’t see my daughters grow up. I squandered by my marriage. All for what?’

The narratives juxtapose between scenes from the imaginary realm of ghosts with Buddhist insights, Hindu mythology and scenes from the living world. The story is set against the volatile political climate in Sri Lanka in the 80s.

Shehan Karunatilaka‘s narration is witty and peppered with dark humour. Here are some excerpts :

‘ Lankans can’t queue. Unless you define a queue as an amorphous curve with multiple entry points. This appears to be a gathering point for those with questions about their death. There are multiple counters and irate customers clamour over grills to shout abuse at the few behind the bars. The afterlife is a tax office and everyone wants their rebate.’

All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair. Many get luck, and many get misery. Many are born to homes with books, many grow up in the swamps of war. In the end, all becomes dust. All stories conclude with a fade to black.

Dr Ranee Sridharan of Jaffna University famously mapped out the ecosystem of a Tigers terror cell and of a government of a Tigers terror cell and of a government death squad. Those with dirty hands are unconnected to those in power so those in power could blame whoever they chose. The good doctor used your photos in her book without permission. She was shot while cycling to a lecture. Probably more for speaking out against the Tigers than for stealing your snaps

When you fantasised about heaven, you thought you’d be greeted by Elvis or Oscar Wilde. Not by a dead professor with a ledger book. Or a murdered Marxist in a cloak.’

‘ They say the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. That may be true of Irish playwrights in jails but not of dead fixers in the East. The darkness falls and all you can hear is the din of your name being rolled on tongues and spat upon.’

You never wished to be famous. Despite the absent father and the indifferent mother,that adolescent fantasy never entertained you. You never sought popularity, though out in the war zone whenever you donned that red bandanna that is precisely what you got. You tried to be no one’s friend and ended up being everyone’s . You wonder if the news has travelled to the north and east and if you will be transported there, should anyone mention your name. Everything in the afterlife seems to come with a radius and a barricade.’

Don’t try and look for the good guys ’cause there ain’t none. Everyone is proud and greedy and no one can resolve things without money changing hands or fists being raised.

Things have escalated beyond what anyone imagined and they keep getting worse and worse. Stay safe, Andy. These wars aren’t worth dying over. None of them are.’

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is full of insightful observations about human condition, philosophy about living and the cruelty of wars. The conversation between Dr Ranee and Maali is candid when the latter confronts her about stealing his photos for her articles without his permission. Dr Ranee was killed in 1987.

Maali learns to harness wind and ‘if you catch the right wind, it can take you places. Though rarely to the doorstep of where you need to go‘. He never got along with his mother and he heard his mother telling Jaki and DD that he had blamed his mother for everything when his father left. He is surprised to see his estranged mother weep. At first he wishes that’ he could appear before herif only to embarrass her and tell her the odds of surviving a plane crash and the odds of surviving an STF abduction are exactly the same thirty-eight percent.’ Finally he decides to do the opposite. In his voice, ‘ You decide right then, better late than never , a few days after your sudden death, to let her be.’

Now will Maali find his killer? He has a week that is to say, seven nights, seven sunsets to find that out, to show his photos to the world and more importantly to reach The Light.

Shehan Karunatilaka has cleverly written a thriller that reminds us about the horrors of civil war and civic unrest. The Seven Moons of Maali Almelda was the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize.

Helga’s Folly in Kandy, Sri Lanka 25 December 2018

Tuesday, September 12, 2023

Winner takes all

 Where is the line between thinking that you are special and yet you are not that special? Who do you think you are? We do not want to become merely cogs in the system, so we create our own purposeful existence that is otherwise devoid of meaning. Trials and tribulations are part of life and they can either humble you, crush you or help you grow. When things go wrong, it is hard to believe that failures happen for the better. The  thing is we take for granted that things are right most of the time , and yet  whenever things go wrong, we feel overwhelmed and terrible. Things do not always go our way. We just have to  be thankful that things do go our way, we cannot win them all.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is img_4660.jpgIn Tracy Flick Can't Win, a fiction by  Tom Perrotta, there are two characters who  once thought they were more important than other people.

Vito Falcone was 'well-known and widely respected in some quarters, He'd played in the NFL for three seasons, - not a superstar, but he'd shown a lot of promise until a knee injury ended his career --- and he'd stuck with the game after his retirement, becoming one of the most  successful high school coaches in central Florida. He was an alpha dog, the guy who gave the orders and let you know when you fucked up. The world was like this : you apologized to Vito ; Vito didn't apologize to you. Nobody else in the church basement had any idea what that felt like, or how hard it was to surrender that kind of authority.

Vito Falcone is a recovering  alcoholic and he is presently attending his weekly sessions at the church basement. He is  ready to make amends to those people he had hurt before. He finally realises   that he is not that special and that he is quite messed up. As it happens, Green Meadow High School, his alma mater is setting up a Hall of Fame and he is going to be honoured and inducted into the Hall of Fame. He has hurt too many people, someone from school is planning a vengeful act. Things are not going to be pretty. 

Tracy Flick is smart, industrious and ambitious. She is the Assistant Principal of Green Meadow High School. She had dropped out of law school to take care of her ailing mother and she is feeling stuck in her forties. When  the school's long time Principal announces his retirement, she is elated by the opportunity to claim the top job. Will she get the board and the Superintendent to endorse her? She has been told by the newly elected President of the School Board that she is the overwhelming favourite and at the first round interview, she had made the case for a Flick administration. 

Tracy has a ten-year-old daughter who is 'greeted with fanfare of happy shrieks and joyful shimmies from the other girls' when she gets dropped off at school  for soccer camp. Tracy had 'never been like that as a child, a valued member  of the pack, showered with affection, protected by the safety of numbers'.  Unlike her daughter, Tracy had always been a party of one as a child, and she had possessed this conviction that she 'was destined for something bigger than they were, a future that mattered'.  Sadly, she no longer believes that anymore.

Tracy Flick muses, ' It had been an adventure, growing up like that, knowing in my  blood that something amazing was waiting for me in the distance, and that I just needed to keep moving forward in order to claim it.' 

Tracy was a high achiever in school.  

In Tracy Flick's voice, 

   ' Coming in second too many times is tough on anyone's self-esteem, but it was especially hard for me, because it brought back memories I'd prefer not to dwell on. Back when I was in high school, I lost an election for President of the Student Government Association because a teacher - our civics, instructor, if you can believe that - tampered with the votes.

It sounds crazy, but it's true.This crooked teacher - a man I'd liked and respected and learned a lot from - wanted my male opponent to win so badly, he tossed two ballots into the trash, turning me from a winner into a loser. That's how close it was - I won by a single vote -which was humiliating in and of itself, because I was so over qualified for the job it was ridiculous I 'd been preparing to run for President ever since middle school and probably even before that. I'd climbed my way methodically up the ladder of Student Government - Homeroom Representative as a freshman, Secretary the following year (highly unusual for a sophomore), and then Treasurer as a junior - putting in the time, doing the work, earning the trust of my fellow students. Or at least I thought so, until half of them stabbed me in the back by voting for my completely unqualified bu super-popular rival.' 

Tracy graduated Phil Beta Kappa from Georgetown, and worked as a congressional intern for one summer. She started law school at Georgetown as she saw herself as a budding prosecutor.  She likes rules and laws. She believes in order and justice. But she had to drop out of law school because her mother was diagnosed with MS and she had gotten very sick. Her neighbour the Del Vecchios had been helpful and one day they had to go and meet their new grandchildren so Tracy had to come home. She had to find temporary work to keep them afloat. She first worked as a market research associate  when she had to harass people at the mall asking them a few questions about athlete's foot.  She tried a few other jobs and finally landed with substitute teaching. She finally feels like her 'true self again, and not just an anonymous cog in a commercial transaction'. 

In her voice : ' School had always been my chosen arena, the place where I shined the brightest. I still remember my first day on the job, standing in front of an Algebra 2 class in Grover Township, writing Tracy Flick on the board like an autography. It felt like homecoming, like my exile was over.' 

Tracy is disappointed with herself. While she accepts that she did the best she could , she muses,

'But I desperately wanted to go back in time, to find the girl I used to be and tell her how sorry I was for letting her down, that fierce young woman who never had a chance, the one who got crushed.'

Tracy Flick Can't Win is a sequel to Election where Flick was portrayed as an overly ambitious  high school student. Election was made into a film in 1999 and Reese Witherspoon had rave reviews acting as Tracy Flick. 

Tom Perrotta's style of writing is straightforward and effective.  In Tracy Flick Can't Win, the narratives are in various characters' voices so you get to hear from the first person's voice about their personal views and what is going on in their lives. They are not particularly likeable characters but they feel real. 

Saturday, June 17, 2023

Remembering the past

 If there is a memory that haunts you, do you wish that it could be erased ? If we choose to delete memories that we cannot live with, what will become of us ? Given a chance to restore the deleted memory, would you want it ? Are we not the sum of all our experiences?

Our memories are the memories of what we remember from the past. When I remember some happenings from the past, I am aware that it is a memory of what I remember from the past. It may not be all that accurate but it is what I choose to remember. In order to move on, the optimist in me is inclined to let the bad experiences slide and not dwell on them and tell myself it is what it is, sometimes things happen and there are no answers. Over the years, I have learnt that bad moments pass just as the good ones. When we succeed in doing something, it merely reminds us that we can do it and nothing more. When we land ourselves in some situation that we think we could have avoided if we had thought it through , we do not have to beat ourselves about it. We must be kind to ourselves just as we must be kind to others, What is done cannot be undone, we cannot reverse the past hence we can only keep going. As I age, I know I am still not getting wiser but it is okay. As trite as it sounds, life is work in progress.

Tell me an Ending , a debut by Jo Harkin is a thought- provoking science fiction that is premised on the theme : What happens if something had happened and you could not possibly live with it? Imagine there were this clinic called ‘ Nepenthe where the doctors could administer a procedure that would erase the unwanted memory, would you sign up for it ?

Nepenthe has two types of clients: self-informed and self-confidential. The former knows that they had the deletion procedure but not the latter, that is to say, they choose to erase the act of memory deletion.

In Tell Me an Ending a debut by Jo Harkin, there are four characters who have had gone through such a procedure at Nepenthe .

At the clinic, Noor, a psychologist will assess the mental wellbeing of the client after the deletion procedure. However there is no assessment if you choose to delete the memory of the Nepenthe procedure.

Oscar Levy does not know who he is, he keeps running and he has loads of money to allow him to flee from destination to another but he has no idea what he is running from. He knows that someone is following him so he thinks that he must have done something bad in the past because he keeps having a scratch memory of him holding a gun. He runs from Budapest to Marrakech and finally he is brought back to Heathrow. A driver picks him up and sends him to the clinic.

Oscar turns out to be one of the clients whose removal procedure has been successful but there are adverse consequences. When he was twenty-one years old, he had volunteered himself for the clinical trial to remove part of his memory. The memory that he has erased is to do with his parents’ tragic road accident resulting in their deaths before his eyes when he was a young kid. After he has had his memory deletion, Oscar can’t remember anything at all before he was about sixteen, but he starts having traces of memories of being seventeen and hanging out at his friend’s house. He was at a boarding house for rich kids.



Sixteen-year-old Mei is experiencing traces of a memory. The first of Mei’s memory traces came to her a month ago when she was having scrambled egg on toast for breakfast and the second time was in the shower a week later. She is now with her dad in Kuala Lumpur. She has a trace of a place and she wonders where that is. The traces repeat but they do not develop into anything. Then one of her apps suggests that Katya, someone she has deleted, is a friend. Katya’s profile picutre shows her beside their other friend Sophia and a shoulder that Mei is sure is her own, with a sunny park in the background. She contacts Katya who cannot believe that Mei has no memory of their trip to Amsterdam.

William used to be a police officer. He is suffering from PTSD. He has traces of a memory of an accident involving a young person’s death. As a police officer he would not be allowed to get memory wipes of cases he had personally worked on. But the memory that has been deleted does not fall into any of those categories. William and Annetta has been seeing Marian Dunlop a therapist who talks to them about Nepenthe.

Marian Dunlop says to Annetta.

Nobody really remembers events accurately. Even in a wider sense : we tell a story of ourselves, and edit our memories so they fit that narrative. If the story we decide to tell changes, the memories change, We see memory as creating the self, but the self that’s created looks back and changes the memory.’

Finn is married to Mirande. Every now and then he has flashes to a memory about his wife and David who is a surgeon. and a friend of theirs. He thinks David is not just a friend to Mirande. He thinks Mirande has a memory erasure.

The story is narrated through the stories of these four characters and the psychologist, Dr Noor Ali.

After experiencing traces of a memory , some of the former clients of Nepenthe claiming to be self-confidential sue Nepenthe and the court has ordered that their clients must be offered the opportunity to restore deleted memories. Doctor Louise, who has full knowledge what these clients have deleted try to contact clients like William not to restore the memory that he has deleted. Louise is against restoration of a deleted memory.

Nepenthe has a regional clinic in Crowshill, outside London. The design of the facility looks sci-fi good. When Dr Louise interviews Dr Noor Ali why she wants to join Nepenthe, the latter says :

We’re all coded, we’re all running programs. The goal is simplicity, elegance, orderly cooperation, to produce an effective and bug-free whole. Obviously the human brain is more of a challenge. When you don’t know the operating rules, problems seem impossible to fix. But they aren’t. To understand the underlying system, the rules, like Nepenthe does, and then use them to fix a , a malfunction, in this case a PTSD response – that’s just a ….beautiful concept. Actually I don’t think there’s anything more beautiful than that.

You didn’t mention morality, Louise said.

Well, no, Noor said. Health ,function – those aren’t moral matters. It ‘s not a moral matter when a program isn’t working. It’s a practical one.’

Louise has told Noor that Do No Harm is an impossibility. Her ethos is Do Least Harm.

Before Noor started working at Nepenthe a decade ago , she looked up the meaning of Nepenthe, she discovered that the word came from Odyssey.

There was a magical potion called nepenthes pharmakon, a drug to quiet all pain and strife, and bring forgetfulness of every ill. Helen of Troy got hold of some of it. She used to spike the drinks of veterans of the Trojan War – which she technically started, so it made sense that she’d want people to forget about it. ‘

Tell Me an Ending is a meditation on what makes us humans.

It asks the question : What will we become of us if and when our experiences are taken away from us? How much our experiences define us?

Tell Me an Ending is 525 pages long and it had taken me a month to read it and it had been a busy month for me. Glad to have finished it. The premise of the cautionary tale is thought-provoking and it is an enquiry into what lies in our human mind and if our mind is what being human means. Our mind is fragile and I do not think our mind is all that reliable with all the thoughts that run through it. Its author Jo Harkin had done research when she was writing the book and found that the science referred in her book is real. She concludes that Memory isn’t written in stone: it’s more like a photocopy of a photocopy. In her article in Irish Times , Harkin writes that ‘memories are mutating all the time: merging with other memories, losing parts, gaining new elements, disappearing altogether‘.

I do believe that we do alter our memories to be able to live with them. Everything is a perception and our mind is too fluid to be reliable.



Sunday, February 26, 2023

Whatever will be will be

It seems that change is the only constant and yet nothing much has changed.

There are many quotes about change. Amongst them, the Greek proverb:

The only constant in life is change. – Heraclitus philosopher.

and the French proverb :

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr 

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

If we do not address our fears and understand our emotions, we will always be experiencing change and yet nothing changes in us. Life happens, it is what it is. Que sera sera, whatever will be will be.

Imagine a box arrives at your doorstep. It will tell you how many years you have before you die. Would you open the box?

In her debut ‘The Measure‘, Nikki Erlick has created a world where one day in the middle of spring, small wooden boxes with words ‘ The measure of your life lies within‘ inscribed on every box written in the native tongue of its recipient arrive for every person above twenty-one years old . From suburban doorsteps to desert tents, strange identical looking boxes materialize out of nowhere and inside each box lies a single string hidden by a silvery white piece of delicate fabric. The length of the string tells each recipient the number of years he or she will live. As data is collected, scientists declare the strings to be accurate in foretelling their recipients their lifespans. It sends the whole world into a frenzy. Some choose not to open the box while others throw them off the bridges.

‘ There was something both comforting and unsettling about the fact that every adult on earth suddenly seemed to be sharing the same surreal experience, the ubiquity of the boxes both a terror and a relief.’ – The MeasureNikki Erlick

During early weeks when the boxes first appear, short stringers are invited into the hospital to run a series of tests, but when the short-stringers appear with greater frequency, the hospital no longer performs these tests for the short-stringers who do not exhibit any symptoms. The emergency room is crowded and the legal team worries that doctors who release short- stringers with a clean bill of health might be flirting with a law suit.

Hank is an ER doctor at the hospital. He has witnessed short stringers turning up at the hospital desperately begging to speak with a doctor about their short strings. He decides to quit because he is tired of seeing people coming into the hospital crying, begging for answers that he does not have. He also feels that in his fifteen years of medical practice, he might have brought hundreds of people back from the edge of death, maybe he had merely saved those who weren’t going to die anyway. He has a short string and he cannot do anything about it.

Nina is an editor of a newspaper and she is blessed with a long string but she cannot celebrate the truth of her string without mourning for the truth of her girlfriend’s string. Maura has a short string. Her string ends in her late thirties. She has fewer than ten years remaining. Nina feels powerless watching Maura suffer, because nothing can be done.Nina’s sister, Amie does not want to look into the box as she has read enough novels to recognize that this is part of the story where nobody knows what is going on and where the characters make rash decisions, consequences of which will only be revealed chapters later. Amie teaches at the Connelly Academy where teachers have been given a directive not to ever talk to their students about the strings.

Nina and Maura debate whether to marry and have children. Amie finds an accidental pen pal when she responds to Ben, a short stringer drops his note under the chair in Amie’s classroom, Room 204. Short stringers have formed support groups and one of the groups meet in Room 204. As part of the therapy, the participants are told to write a letter. Ben’s letter is picked up by the janitor who hands it to Amie who teaches ten-year-olds.

Once the truth of the strings have been acknowledged, homes and possessions are sold, jobs are abandoned – ‘all in the pursuit of making the most of one’s time‘. Some travel, some live on the beach while others dive into a abyss of anger, envy and violence. A small number of short-stringers takes advantage of their remaining time to take revenge on those who have wronged them. In London, three computer scientists nearing the end of their strings hack into the accounts of a major bank and make away with ten million pounds.

Amid fear and confusion, Anthony Rollins, a blue-blooded congressman from Virginia campaigning for presidency in the US is using his long string to his advantage. He and his wife, Catherine have long strings. He sees the strings as a blessing from God and uses the threat of fear to get more votes. He spouts incendiary speeches and incites prejudices against short-stringers as their despair is seen as dangerous. Anthony makes hay from the long/short divide.

The President announces that all military positions would require a string disclosure, two new graduates Javier and Jack decide to swap their strings as their placements are dependent on their string length. The string has impacted the world and years later it will become a memory of the past just like how the pandemic has impacted us.

The Measure by Nikki Erlick is a fascinating and thought provoking story about family, friendship, hope and destiny that encourages us all to live life to the fullest. It is a commendable read.

Sunday, October 30, 2022

Life in transit



 In Soy Sauce for Beginners , the debut novel by Kirstin Chen, Gretchen Lin, aged thirty, leaves her floundering marriage in San Francisco to move back to her childhood home in Singapore. She finds herself face-to-face with her mother's drinking problem and her father's wish to have her succeed him in heading the family's artisanal soy sauce business. Lin's Soy Sauce was founded by her grandfather, Lin Ming Tek half a decade ago. Her Ahkong began his career at Yellow River, the Hong Kong soy sauce giant responsible for the mass-produced stuff that all of them Lins 'learned at a young age to abhor'. When Gretchen's grandpa became the head of the Singapore division, the president of Yellow River flew him to Hong Kong and treated him to a celebratory dinner at a fine restaurant where he 'had his first taste of real soy sauce, poured by a waistcoat- clad waiter into a porcelain dish small enough to sit in the palm of his hand. Shimmering and lively with a smooth, dry finish, this sauce was a sparkling stream to Yellow River's murky, stagnant, pond-water brew'. That was how Gretchen's grandpa had been inspired to open his own factory to produce naturally fermented soy sauce, made from the highest-quality ingredients. He made up his mind to master the ancient technique of naturally aging soybeans in century-old barrels, a production method that was was quickly becoming obsolete. He had then 'apprenticed with the Chiba Soy Sauce Factory, a premier artisanal soy sauce maker located on the island of Schodoshima, in Japan's Seto Inland Sea.' Gretchen's grandpa had quit his lucrative job in Singapore and his family for six months to pursue some obscure romantic dream. It was the fifties, barely less than a decade after the war but he was determined to learn the traditional process that 'yielded the delicate ,multifaceted golden broth that had long enhanced the flavours of Asian cuisine'. In spite of Gretchen's grandma's dismay and protest, her grandpa pursued his dream and left a legacy for his sons to carry on. Hence everything Gretchen knows about soy sauce she learned from her late grandfather, her father and uncle. They are a family who can talk endlessly about soybeans and their intricacies.

While she is back in her childhood home, she still thinks about heading back to San Francisco. Meanwhile, her college good friend, Frankie Shepherd whom she has known for years comes to work in Singapore . When Frankie arrives in Singapore , she has lost a fair bit of weight and she is no longer a bookish girl who hides 'the soft folds of her body beneath shapeless sweatshirts and baggy jeans.'

Frankie has left California to reinvent herself abroad while Gretchen is back in her home to get her act together. While Frankie is settling in and working hard at her new job at Lin's Soy Sauce, Gretchen is still mourning about her wavering marriage to Paul who has cheated on her with his computer science assistant. She has not told her parents about their separation and Paul's affair. Paul and her have been together for twelve years and married for five years.

Gretchen has obtained a master's degree in English and now she wants to pursue a master's degree in music education. Despite her privileged background and her academic accomplishments, she appears to have low self-esteem. Her mother does not understand why she has agreed to work at Lin's and thinks that she should remain in California. To her mother, after all she'd done to set her free, and here she is right back where she was .

In Gretchen's voice,

' My mother believed her best years were the ones she'd spent as a doctoral student at Cornell. From the very beginning, she was determined to prepare me for a life away from Singapore. She named me after her favourite Schubert lied even though she knew every one here would stumble over the name. She convinced my father to send me, their only child, halfway around the globe to boarding school in California. Later, when I was in college and my parents first met Paul, she counseled Ba not to immediately dismiss my ang mo boyfriend.'

Gretchen is torn between her parents' opposing desires, ultimately it is about what she personally wants. After being sent away at fifteen years old , she finds herself torn between two cultures. Amidst the narratives about the art and business of making the artisanal soya sauce and the need to rise above the food scandal and family feud , Kirstin Chen weaves together an insightful multifaceted tale about familiar love, loyalty, friendship and a woman's journey to find a place in the world. Soy sauce for Beginners is a commendable read.

Monday, October 3, 2022

Books speak


This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is img_1148.jpg

Ruth Ozeki's fifth novel begins in the 1990s. It tells the story of Benny Oh, a fourteen-year- old who begins hearing voices after the death of beloved father, Kenji Oh, a jazz musician, a clarinetist. The voices belong to the things in his house. He does not understand what these voices are saying but he can sense their emotional tone. As a response to bereavement, his mother, Annabelle develops a hoarding problem.

When Annabelle first met Kenji, she was doing a master's degree programme in Library Sciences as she had dreamed of becoming a librarian since young. But she had to give it up when Benny was born. She first worked at a national media-monitoring agency as a scissors lady who had to speed-read the stacks of local town and state newspapers, and then clipped articles to send to the clients on topics relevant to their interests.

Benny adored the father and he was the anchor for the family despite his drug problem. He died in an accident. One night as he was nearing his house, he fell and was too stoned to move. A chicken truck ran over him mistaking him as a sack of garbage lying on the ground.

After Kenji's tragic passing, chaos takes over the house. Annabelle is trying to keep her job because digital technology has changed the way news get disseminated and she is worried about getting laid off. In the meantime, not only she cannot get rid of the news archives that she had kept for her job, she acquires used things that they do not need and further clutter their home. Benny hears noises at home and everywhere he goes. He also hears voices in class. When a pair of scissors tells him to stab his teacher, he turns the blade on himself and he ends up being sent for psychiatric treatment. His doctor is Dr Melanie who is clueless and diagnoses “schizoaffective disorder,” and prescribes mind-curdling drugs. When his condition does not improve, he is sent to a psychiatric institution.

At the psychiatric unit, he meets, Alice, a young artist who calls herself the Aleph. She writes anonymous messages on scraps of paper. One of her little notes directs Benny to the old public library, where he can seek refuge in its silence and where objects know to behave and speak only in whispers. There he becomes acquainted with Slavoj a homeless Slovenian poet called the B-man described as the Bottleman, and at the same time he has a crush on the Aleph aka Alice.

Alice tells Benny that the hobo is not crazy.

“It’s not him that’s crazy,” she tells him. “It’s the … world we live in. It’s capitalism that’s crazy. It’s neoliberalism, and materialism, and our … consumer culture that’s crazy.” 

Alice makes globes and she thinks they are crap. Benny thinks they are beautiful and says to her,

" How can you be an artist if you don't make stuff?'

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Alice regards Slavoj as her mentor and quotes him and says that they should get out on the streets and disrupt the status quo and change the way people normally see things. She wants to focus more on unmaking.

The Book of Form and Emptiness is a Zen parable. Inside the novel, there is a book that talks to Benny. It claims to be Benny's own book. It narrates Benny's life and tells him to listen to the things that truly matter.

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THE BOOK

'Yes. of course. You had an important philosophical question to answer - What is real? - and were so preoccupied with the nature of your own reality, you were oblivious to know your mother might be experiencing hers. But that's okay. It's perfectly natural. Children have a limited ability to understand a parent's inner life, perceiving it through the lens of their own subjectivity and understanding only as much as impacts them. Children are remarkably obtuse that way, but not to worry,. This is not a criticism or a reprimand. You were younger then, and we are not a scolding kind of book. There's nothing worse than books that scold. Nobody wants to read them. We are simply pointing out a well-documented developmental fact. There are many books on the subject of child development, but we are not one of them. Let's move on.'

'Benny? Are you there? Are you still not talking?

  You can try to block us, but the memories are still  in you, and we know where to find them.

All right, fine. You leave us no choice. We’ll just have to continue without you.'

Is it odd to see a book within a book? It shouldn’t be .Books like each other. We understand each other. You could even say we are all related, enjoying a kinship that stretches like a rhizomatic network beneath human consciousness and knits the world of thought together. Think of us as a mycelium, a vast, subconscious fungal mat beneath a forest floor, and each book a fruiting body. Like mushrooms ,we are a collectivity. Our pronouns are we , our , us. Because we’re all connected , we communicate all the time -agreeing and disagreeing, gossiping about other books, name-dropping, and quoting each other – and we have our preferences and prejudices, too. Of course, we do ! Biases abound on library shelves. The scholarly tomes disparage the more commercial books. Literary novels look down on romance and pulp fiction, and there’s an almost universal disregard for certain genres, like self-help

After experiencing a great deal of physical and emotional pain, Benny finally embarks on his hero’s journey to reclaim his own story.

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Daunt Books Marylebone,London

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, film maker as well as a Zen Buddhist priest.The Book of Form and Emptiness has won the 2022 Women's Prize( formerly known as the Orange Prize). It is a beautiful tale about present-day living.

thereadingroom374231461.com/2022/09/11/books-glorious-books/click