Saturday, October 28, 2017

Just life


'The truth knocks on the door and you say," Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away.' -Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Every now and then  I do like a boost to my fading passion about the law. I enjoy watching lawyers in action on screen or read a fiction about lawyers. In all the movies and television drama scripts and novels where the protagonists are lawyers, all wrongs will be put right and the one who has been outrageously wronged will be vindicated simply because justice must prevail.

In The Whistle written by John Grisham, there  is a female lawyer who is trying to do things right and there is also a mob kingpin who does not care about what is right and what is wrong. What happens when he has a judge on his payroll? The hook itself is  intriguing.

Lacy Stoltz  is an  investigator for the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct. She is pretty and smart and not easily cowed. A previously disbarred lawyer is back in business and he claims to know of a Florida judge who is receiving cash bribes from a group of monsters, known as the Coast Mafia. Lacy and her colleague Hugo Hatch thus find themselves investigating into the Honorable Claudia McDover, “a Florida gal who just happens to be the most corrupt judge in the history of America.” and her connection with one Vonn Dubose ( not his real name)  who is powerful and greedy.

Lacy enjoys her solitary life while Hugo, her fellow investigator, struggles to make ends meet with a wife and four children. They live in Tallahassee. The previously disbarred lawyer point them to the Native American-operated casino that  takes in a half-billion dollars a year in cash . The casino development in question  is also in the Florida Panhandle and when some members of the tribe oppose the casino, they get killed and those  tribe leaders and their people who go along have jobs and share the profits As the story unfolds, there are more characters and the plot thickens. For Lacy, she finds her role as an investigator is treading on  dangerous terrain and the informant and the whistler blower have  to start running for the mobsters have ways to track them down.

“ We’re not cops with guns,” Lacy says. They are only lawyers with subpoenas. Eventually they have the attention of the FBI who initially shows no interest in the corrupt casino. 

John Grisham’s style of narration is very matter of fact. He writes,

‘On October 5, the first Wednesday of the month ,Judge McDover left her office an hour earlier than usual and drove the same condo at Rabbit Run, her second visit there since the filing of the complaint that accused her of receiving the unit in a bribery scheme. She parked her Lexus in the same spot, leaving room for another vehicle, and entered the condo. She gave no indication of being the least bit jumpy or nervous,never once looked over her shoulder or up and down the street.

Inside , she checked the patio door and all windows. She went to her vault and spent a few moments admiring her “assets”, goodies and she’d been collecting for so long that she now believed she deserved them. Cash and diamonds in small, portable, fireproof safes. Locked and cabinets filled with jewelery, rare coins, vintage silver goblets and cups and flatware, limited singed fist editions of famous novels, ancient crystal, and small paintings form contemporary artists. All of it had been acquired by casino cash, skillfully laundered through the systematic purchasing from dozens of dealers who never suspected that she and Phyllis Turban were violating those perky reporting laws. The genius of their scheme was patience. Buy fine and rare goods in small quantities and, with time, watch their collection grow.’


Reading John Grisham is akin to drinking an espresso that gives a quick lift as in a badly needed  shot to kick in  the  dose of optimism that justice will prevail. The inspiration booster is  much needed  even when you know in reality, legal battles are never open and shut and much more complicated. The truth is an elusive goal.  

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

As it happened...


In the month of August, I made a couple of  day trips to Kuala Lumpur. Each time I made my little detour to the BookXcess Bookshop at Starling Mall before heading to the airport. During one such trip,  I was cutting the time rather fine and ended up having to take an Uber car to the airport as  I did not want to be caught in downtown traffic and risk missing my return flight home. I had to prevent myself from thinking that if I had been more prudent and managed to catch the airport bus from the public transport hub, the cost of an Uber car ride would be equivalent to the price of one book or several that I could purchase, depending on which bookstore I go to. The Uber car driver was rather chatty. By the end of my one hour plus ride, I knew that he was  a father of four boys and he and his wife would long for a girl.  He also told me that he would like to move his family to Australia as he had dreams of having a farm and living there. Years ago, he had visited his aunt in Brisbane while she was there and he really liked it then. I hope he would make his dream a reality .
As it happened, when I arrived at the airport well before time and joined a throng of passengers who were seated at the boarding gate, I was told that  the flight would be delayed and we would not take off for at least another forty-five minutes. I had all these books that I had bought and I was too exhausted and famished to read any of them. What a bummer.

Some months ago, I lent a friend my daughter’s copy of  The Girl on the Train  click  and she returned the book just before she left for France. She had not quite finished reading the novel so l decided to get her a copy of the book by Paula Hawkins from the BookXcess webstore click. She told me, " I think I know whodunnit"  and she could not be more wrong. I could not tell her the ending as that would be a spoiler.  When I placed the order, I bought along with it  The Believers by Zoe Heller. The Believers is a novel about a dysfunctional family living in Greenwich Village in New York.

In 1962, eighteen year old Audrey Howard meets Joel Litvinoff, a prominent civil rights leftist lawyer from America at a party. He is attracted to her, asks her out  and then proposes to her. Despite an age gap of some thirteen to fourteen years between them, she takes him up on his offer as she feels that is her chance to break away from her mundane life as a typist in suburban London. 

Forty years on,  Audrey has to re-examines everything she thought she knew about her marriage to Joel when he suffers a stroke and ends up in comatose. Audrey and Joel have two daughters, Karla and Rosa. They also have an adopted son, Lenny who is into drugs. While Joel lies in the hospital, Audrey and children have to battle their own demons and with each other. Ultimately they each have to decide on what they truly believe in. Rosa, a disillusioned revolutionary, decides to get connected with her Jewish roots. As she grapples with Orthodox Judaism, her unhappily married sister, Karla  is falling for an unlikely suitor at the hospital where she works.

Audrey and Joel had always prided themselves in accepting mortality as facts of life. When the doctor advises Audrey that Joel's vegetative condition will not improve, she  refuses to agree to  terminating the life sustaining equipment.Once upon a time, Audrey's brash manner had been a mere posture but 'somewhere along the way, when she hadn't been paying attention, her temper had ceased to be a beguiling party act that could be switched on and off at will.'


Here are snippets from the novel. 

At the edges of her fury with the doctor, there was an embarrassed awkwardness of her own hypocrisy. She and Joel had never been sentimentalists about death. Over the years, their discussions about their own mortality had always been showily phlegmatic. ‘ When the day comes that I can’t take a piss on my own,” Joel had told her a few years back when he started having trouble with prostate, I want you to have me chopped up for horsemen,okay? How often had they shaken their heads ruefully at the dotty sanctity-of-life types who insisted on keeping their loved ones alive when they were no more sensate than parsnips?How often had they congratulated themselves on the fact that, as atheists, they were uniquely well-equipped to face the end of life with dignity? ‘We’ve got nothing to be scared about,’Joel always said. ‘We know there’s nothing else.’

      Yet now that the discussion had departed the comfortable realm of dinner- table posturing - now that  she was confronting the possibility of actually presiding over her husband’s death - she understood how cowardly their former bravado had been. All those jokes about not wasting public health resources and suffocating one another with plastic bags —— what had they really been but avoidance? Refused to confront the horror of extinction?’

On arriving home, Rosa went straight to her bedroom, knelt down before her dresser and began rummaging through the bottom drawer. At length, she unearthed an ancient pack of Marlboro Lights. She laid the cigarettes on the bed and considered them. The mere act of smoking, evil as it was, was not yet sufficiently evil for her purpose. She stood up and went down the hall to run a bath. Here was decadence : she would smoke in the tub.’

In The Believers, the dialogues created by Zoe Heller are animated and witty and the caricatures of the characters are wry, some not so likeable but they feel real. 

Zoe Heller is a brilliant novelist as she describes the different characters with acute and unsentimental observations and captures candidly the essence of human follies, hypocrisies, contradictions and insecurities. 

After having read The Believers by Zoe Heller, I cannot wait to read Everything You Know that I recently bought  from Kinokuniya webstore. It is a debut novel  by the same author.



Friday, October 13, 2017

Suburbia




We know things are never quite what they seem but more often than not, we are afraid to rock  the 'place' we are in and look closely and openly at where we are. 

Good writers have the innate ability to describe so aptly the psychic of the ordinary people and their relationships that you find their fictionalized characters real and the circumstances that they have landed themselves in are completely plausible.

Trust written by Mike Bullen explores suburbia, friendships and contemporary relationships. It is about two couples. Greg and Amanda have been together for thirteen years and have two young daughters while Dan and Sarah have been married for sixteen years and have one teenage son, Russell. 

Greg and Dan work in sales for the British division of the same multinational computer company and they both spend half their time on the road and go on sales conference every year. 

Greg tells Dan," What happens on tour, stays on tour, right? Our little secret.

The story is essentially about how one bad decision can turn a couple's seemingly happy life in disarray and help turn an unhappy couple around and back in love again. Mike Bullen's debut novel is fast moving and it feels like watching one of those feel good movies when I read it.  It is a fast and light read interjected with good humour and a touch of realism.

Saving Grace by Jane Green  is a women’s fiction about trust and relationships. It is more intense and definitely a page turner.  

Grace Chapman is married to bestselling author Ted and lives in a picture perfect farmhouse on the Hudson River in New York state. It was whirlwind romance, passion and  excitement. Then  life gets hard when she jumps as she sees the barn door open, Ted emerging, she wonders the kind of mood he is in.

When Ellen, their old assistant leaves, Beth becomes their new assistant. As Beth is not only organised, she is  also eager to learn and smart,is Beth too good to be true?

When Grace loses her interest in cooking and finds her life coming apart, she fears she is going crazy just like her mother. 

   ‘ There is nothing Grace loves more than being alone in her kitchen, surrounded by food, inspirational recipes scattered on the counter in front of her as she tries out new dishes. When she is working on a book, she will use assistants, but it is these moments , when it is just Grace, alone in her kitchen experimenting, that makes her happiest of all. ‘

In the beginning, when she first met Ted, it felt as if she had fallen into the kind of life that only happened to other people, and usually only in movies. It was a life she determined to enjoy while it lasted, convinced it wouldn’t last long, for Ted could have his pick. There were always women more exciting, more glamorous, more beautiful than she.’


She loved the house before Ted’s moods had the ability to discombobulate her in the way they do now.  In the early days of marriage,  she could  laugh it off but the years have taken their toll and she is no longer finding it easy to deal with his rage and mood swings.

'She used to fight back. She doesn't anymore. She withdraws into a well of pain and resentment, removing herself .....'

' This life had made her so happy, for so many years, she had never wanted anything or anyone else. She had never thought to question her role, to question her happiness. Most of the time she truly felt that  somewhere up high, perhaps to make up for the hell of her childhood, the gods, the angels, were smiling upon her.
      She had been charmed. She led a charmed life. At least if she didn't look too closely; at least if you pretended, as she did so well for so long, that if you put on a good enough act, it would make it so. But then the gods and angels had deserted her and she fell to the ground with a crash. And now? This is a decision of necessity ..........'

Jane Green writes proficiently. She has included some mouth watering recipes in  Saving Grace. 

In both Trust and Saving Grace, the women are compelled to confront demons that have been haunting them for years. Amanda in Trust and Grace in Saving Grace are afraid to become like their mothers. In Trust, Amanda’s mother repeatedly condoned her husband’s infidelity whereas Grace’s mother is manic depressive and bipolar. Her mother had mood swings so bad that Grace had lived in fear throughout her childhood. 

In a book of fiction or a film , there must always be a resolution and that is what we expect when we read fictions or watch a film. If only life were so straightforward.
San Sebastian