Thursday, August 31, 2017

Neutral Zone


Reading to me  is  compulsive and obsessive though my selection and picks may be random.
Whenever I have to make a trip to Kuala Lumpur, the  motivation for me is Kinokuniya Bookstore. Since I still have plenty of  books awaiting to be devoured,I have to restrain myself from going on a binge and end up carting  loads of books back. During my recent visit to the bookshop, I had bought three non-fictions : In Other Worlds by Margaret Atwood,  Writing Voice, The Complete Guide to creating a presence on the page and engaging Readers  and Scratch on writers, money and the art of making a living.  While I was at Kinokuniya, I came across books that centred around themes like why read or why write, something I had contemplated about. When I arrived at the airport a tad too early, I ended up browsing around WHSmith and bought four fictions. One of them is The Pier Falls, a short stories collection by Mark Maddon. I enjoy Mark Maddon’s writing style that comes across effortless and effective. When I returned home, I purchased another non- fiction from Kinokuniya through their web store.Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright was one of the books that was recommended by delanceyplace.com.

On my  return trip from Kuala Lumpur this Monday, I worked out that I could spare an hour before heading to the airport so I dropped by BookXcess Bookshop at Starling Mall. I picked up The Last Word,  a fiction by Hanif  Kureishi  and The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simson. I have read fictions by both these writers and I like their wits. I have read first few pages of every book I have purchased in August and I will settle on some of them as I normally do read a few books at the same time.

A friend has lent me her copy of Stephen King’s memoir on writing and I am half way through it. It is definitely worth a read. 

There are books lying in my car so that I will always have something to read while waiting for a friend to turn up for coffee ( in all likelihood I am the one running late because I am stuck on reading or writing). I read when I wait for my turn to have my eyes checked by the ophthamologist but I dislike it when he applies eye drop to get the pupils dilated as I will have to keep both my eyes closed then. I read when and where I can.

I compartmentalise my reading in that I will read different books at various intervals during the week. Some books are best read in one sitting. One such novel is In the Café of Lost Youth written by Patrick Modiano, translated from the French by Euan Cameron. 

The story is about Jacqueline Delanque, a young girl growing up in poverty in Montmartre. She is on a restless quest to an unknowable destination. She frequents the Café Condé where young students, aspiring writers and world-weary academics go.  They are the lost youth who wander in and they are all in search of the same elusive something. There are also older customers who never make reference of their past.

At Le Condé, Jacqueline was different from the others. They named her “Louki” .

 'Those who frequented Le Condé would often be carrying a book, its cover stained with wine, which they would lay casually on the table. Les Chants de Maldoror, Les Illuminations, Les Barricades mystérieuses. But she, to begin with, was always empty-handed. Then, she probably wanted to be like the others, and one day, at Le Condé, I caught her one her own, reading. From then on, her book never left her.’

She used to go to Mattel, a stationer’s and bookseller’s shop on boulevard de Clichy that stays open until one o’clock in the morning.
In Jacqueline's narrative,
“ Yes, this bookshop was not merely a refuge but also a stage in my life. I often stayed there until closing time.”
“ I wasn’t truly myself except at the moment I was running away. My only good memories are memories of flight or escape. But life always got the upper hand.”

Sometimes life will somehow get you and you imagine or wish you could just run away but you know you just have to let go of whatever that affects you. I find joy in reading to prevent myself from becoming too overwhelmed by the life that I know. I read because I like to read.


To get its rhythm, In the Café of Lost Youth has to be read without interruptions from start to finish. The story is told from different perspectives by four narrators, a young student who goes to the Café Condé, Roland, Louki and Pierre Caisley, a private investigator engaged by Louki’s husband. The mood is melancholic and affecting as the different narrations construct a picture of Jacqueline and what happened to her. Patrick Modiano is crafty at capturing the scenes of  old streets in Paris and  the nostalgic feel that evokes memories of the indefinable past and lost youth.  click



Friday, August 18, 2017

Change

I thought I was running late for court. The Judge normally starts at 9 sharp. I ran as fast as my heels allowed me, when I walked in, the court was filled with lawyers and public members.
A smartly dressed lady said to me, ‘There is a reference.’
“ What reference ?” I was obviously in a daze.
The woman looked puzzled and she could not figure out if I had not known the meaning of holding a reference or that there was a reference going on.
“You know reference for departed members of the Bar?” I felt really awkward that I had not bothered to read all the circulars that had been sent  to me.

A couple  of these lawyers who have passed on had acted for my clients’ opponents and they had fought hard for their clients. I cannot help thinking about  how mortal we are. I know it is such a cliché to think so and it makes me think of the lyrics in Bob Dylan’s song, “ Blowing in the Wind” .It also makes me want to run to the music CD shop where the shop manager was supposed to have placed an order for one of Bob Dylan’s albums to replace  a French CD that I had bought as a going away present for an ex- staff who was attached to an association I volunteer in. The staff did not want to accept any gifts from the organisation as a token of appreciation. She was consumed with so much resentment and anger that her only way to let bygone be bygone was to leave no trace in her recent memory. She was certainly thinking about her future.  

Change is what we constantly have to deal with in life. Every individual evolves and adapts to the changes in and around them in order to continue living. What if your country is undergoing  a revolution that will bring about changes so huge that everything that you think you stand for and pursue will be unacceptable and you are forced to cast aside your aspirations and the only way to stay alive is to hide your dreams  and  give up your talent  so that you could protect yourself and your family? I could only imagine that life would be unbearable.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing written by Madeleine Thien is a fiction set during the Cultural Revolution in China. Life was brutal and oppressive for those who were intellectual, artistic and creative. Those citizens whose pursuits were not in conformist with the regime had to undergo re-education. The story is about Marie’s ongoing struggle to understand her father’s tragic life, unrequited dreams and attempt to understand the turbulent past of China. Marie remembers her dad, Jiang Kai as a kind but melancholy man. He was a renowned concert pianist in China and he gave her her Chinese name, Jiang Li-ling. When he died at age 39, she was only a child. Marie is a Mathematics professor in Simon Fraser University in Canada. When she was still a teenager in Vancouver, her mother received a letter from Shanghai asking for a favour. There was a request to take care of Ai Ming, a 19-year-old who had got into trouble in Beijing during the Tiananmen demonstrations.

In  Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Ai Ming said to the protagonist, Marie,
        
You understand, don’t you ?” she said. “The things we never say aloud and so they end up here, in diaries and notebooks, in private places. By the time we discover them, it’s too late.

Ai-ming was holding a notebook tightly. Marie recognised it at once: it was tall but thin, the shape of a miniature door, with a loose binding of cotton thread. The Book of Records.

Teacher Sparrow, a great composer, was Ai Ming’s father and he had to hide his true calling. He witnessed how young music students became red guards and ridiculed, tormented their professor and President of Shanghai Conservatory as their traitor and counter-revolutionary. Sparrow was Jiang Kai’s composition teacher and they were close.

When life gets tough, it is music, beauty and art that make it bearable. Imagine the horrors that befell classical musicians when the music they loved was forbidden. Their instruments were destroyed and they were accused of vanity and regarded as national threat thus dispatched to work in the farms and factories of the hinterlands. The movement began during the Great Leap Forward in 1958, the people had to become only what the ruling party proclaimed them to be, they existed to be forged and re-forged by the Party.

Zhuli, a talented young musician was taken away to live with Sparrow’s mother who was her aunt when her parents were sent away for re-education. Her aunt was known as Big Mother Knife who was Ai Ming’s grandmother. and Sparrow’s mother.
When her mother returned home after six years in the desert camp, Zhuli wondered what words she could possibly say to her. There were no words adequate to the feeling between them.’
 Zhuli felt that it had been her fault that her parents had been persecuted. Zhuli had discovered the underground library and she went down almost every day. 
‘It was just below ground, as if a very large and well-made wooden box, a shipping container, had been buried with a living room inside it, like an afterlife for Old West. There was  a cushioned chair large enough for six Zhulis, an imported kerosene lamp and a full case of oil, stacks and stacks of books, and a soft, woven mat on the floor.

A boy saw her emerge from the soil and that very day, the container was dug up and all the objects carted off and the books, the soft carpets and the cushioned chair were confiscated and neighbours plastered off the mud brick house with hastily written denunciations.

The novel contains a web of tales and it takes concentration to read it. Music serves as a figure for many things in the novel: Kai’s troubled relationship to his past and homeland, his love for teacher Sparrow and a repressive regime. When Kai met up with Sparrow again, the latter was a changed man for his hands had learned another language entirely after being sent to work in a factory and he had gone from building wooden crates to making radios. He could no longer compose music. When the country was opening up again, the possibilities broke his heart as he was no longer the same person. He had become the Bird of Quiet.
I used to be humbled before music, he thought. I loved music so much it blinded me to the world. What right do I have, do any of us have, to go back? Repetition was an illusion. The idea of return, of beginning over again. of creating a new country, had always been a deception, a beautiful dream from which they had woken. Perhaps they had loved one another, but now Sparrow had his parents to care for. They relied on him, and his life was not his own, it belonged to his wife and to Ai -ming as well. And it was true, factory work had brought a peace he had never known before. The routine had freed him.

Madeleine Thien writes,
IN A SINGLE  YEAR, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life.’

The opening line is haunting and captivating. The prose is descriptive and well written. A definitely good read. 

I often turn to my reading and writing for solace and they are the air that I must breathe thus  I cannot imagine a world where you are allowed to chant and read only certain writings. But then so often as I read , I wonder if we are truly thinking as freely as we like to think we are. Are thoughts really our own?