Possession and The Sea

A.S. Byatt, made infamous for some by her poisonous criticism of adults that read Harry Potter books, is a serious author. She is the anti-J.K. Rowling and the anti-Dan Brown. Her arrogant attack on J.K. Rowling was unjustified and didn't endear her to the public, but the reason she is important is her fiction, and her fiction is difficult to fault.



Possession, her most successful novel, is set in academia. The plot centres on scholars of literature who discover new evidence of a romantic affair between two (fictionalised) historic poets whose remaining writings - poetry, love letters, journals - make up a large part of the book. Especially the poetry is masterfully interwoven with clues of the mysterious love affair and thus of critical importance to the scholars trying to fill in the gaps in the poets biographies. It is a clever plot in an ingeniously crafted work.

While many readers have admitted to quickly skimming through, or even entirely skipping, some of the longer passages of poetry, the book was a big commercial success and was even made into a film.



The Sea too is a serious book; John Banville, the author, calls it a work of art. It is written in the first person and the narrator, Max Morden, is a character surely similar to John Banville: his sometimes pompous tone comes partly from his sense of having fought his way up from the bottom (as Max Morden admits: "I was always ashamed of my origins"). That the author in his interviews comes across as arrogant is however completely irrelevant to the book; on the other hand, the pompous tone of the narrative fits the fictional character perfectly.

The book is art. It's full of rich imagery, of clear insight of human emotions and razor sharp wit ("I do not entertain the possibility of an afterlife, or any deity capable of offering it. Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him").

It's also has the crowd-pleasing elements of story-telling: the plot builds up to a tumultuous climax and takes a twist at the end. The only conceivable barrier is the very frequent use of words that are not in the large majority of people's vocabulary (amusingly, the narrator does make a reference to Roget's Thesaurus - no doubt a well worn copy was lying open on Banville's writing desk at the time).

I loved reading and was greatly moved by both Possession and The Sea; they are carefully crafted by skilled artists and stand out as contemporary examples of fine literary fiction. I see no reason why anyone else shouldn't be moved by such books - we are all human and suffer under and are moved by the same set of emotions - and I'm convinced they should be valued by more people (and should sell more copies) than works by less talented authors of so-called popular fiction. Clearly, not everyone agrees with me.

For Whom the Bell Tolls and New Year

Last year I listed my New Year's resolutions on this blog. I didn't do anything for my physical fitness and I didn't go to any music concerts, but the other things turned out fairly well. This year I'll carry the list forward and add one new point: I need to add adventure to my life.

The world doesn't need me to tell it that For Whom the Bell Tolls is a great book; the only thing I can add is to say what effect it had on me: I admire Hemingway's style, so I enjoyed the reading process, and I was of course moved by the tragic events he described, but apart from that the book gave rise to ideas in me that I can't shake off (or don't want to shake off) about living an adventure. I have always wanted to take action and shape my life the way I want it instead of just following the path of least resistance, but maybe my ideas or my actions haven't been bold enough. It's been several weeks since I finished For Whom the Bell Tolls and still I feel the need to join a guerilla war in some faraway foreign place. I feel like blowing up bridges (I don't really, but you'd understand that if you'd read the book). And I feel like drinking lots of wine.

I'll probably only get the drinking lots of wine part right, but 2008 could, depending on what opportunities come my way, still get pretty interesting. I'll have some big decisions to make. I hope that I can be bold about them and that my boldness leads to exciting times.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has something of a cult following. I read it for the first time now, and although I can understand people getting excited about it, I remain largely unimpressed. Still, it was an interesting read, and it did get me thinking, just not in the way the author intended.



I contend that the book can be split into three separate parts: first, a story of a man with a history of mental illness on a motorbike trip across America with his son; second, insightful guidance on embracing life and applying all of your rational and emotional mind to tackle problems; third, an unveiling of what the author thinks is his grand unifying theory of metaphysics.

The motorbike trip narrative is good. It's a novel. The characters learn and develop. The story is interesting. It believe this is the part of the book that appealed most to people that read it, even if they don't admit to it.

The practical self-help side of the book is also fairly good. It uses the example of motorbike maintenance to make a point about people's approach to problems, to illustrate the advantages of wholeheartedness. I think there is much to learn here. If people claim that this booked helped them, I believe they are really referring to this part of the book.

The third part, the metaphysics of quality, is nonsense. Metaphysics is a very shaky branch of philosophy as it is, and Pirsig's mystical theory is mostly waffle. Unfortunately, he takes it very seriously, and in his later work focussed on this instead of just continuing to be a good writer.

The fact is, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance reveals to me Pirsig's disillusionment with himself and his sense of failure. He states near the beginning that he has an IQ of 170 - if his argument were sound, such a statement would be superfluous and boastful, but he desperately needs respect. His blames his failure to get through his first attempt at university on his early recognition that Science was unworkable due to the unlimited number of hypotheses that could explain any given phenomenon. And his failure to complete PhD studies at the University of Chicago was, of course, the failure of the academic establishment to recognise his genius. He speaks of himself in the same context as Kant and Einstein, finding the secrets that eluded them.

Amusingly, near the end of his metaphysical ramblings, he calls himself a Sophist. He may have meant it in the classical sense of the word, but it's the truest thing he says in the entire book.

Pirsig has many interesting things to tell, and the talent to tell them well. It is a pity he chose to ignore this and rather become obsessed with the esoteric fringes of philosophy.

Midnight's Children

Ironically, considering he is an atheist who landed himself in huge, huge trouble with the Islamic world, Salman Rushdie himself deserves to be worshipped like a god. Very few writers can match his extreme talent with language and style; even fewer writers come close to his insightful understanding of the interplay of politics and religion that has made up our sometimes awful history.

In Midnight's Children, first published in 1981, Rushdie describes the birth of post-colonial India in the form of a fantastical autobiography narrated by Saleem Sinai, a man born at the moment of India's independence whose fate is (tragically) linked to his country's.


Rushdie makes heavy use of magical realism, something surprisingly (to me) used in many of my favourite books - One Hundred Years of Solitude, Der Steppenwolf - although I usually steer clear of anything remotely fantasy-like. So what is it that draws me to these books of nasal telepathy, magic theatres and babies being carried away by swarms of ants? I think much of the reason is the writing itself - the masterful use of language that demonstrates the genius of Rushdie and co, genius that we should be grateful to have the opportunity of sampling.

The Road

Cormac McCarthy's The Road decribes the journey of a father and son through the wasteland of a post-apocalyptic world. The language is as bleak as the situation the characters are in as they push on southwards for no discernable reason, desparately hanging on to their hopeless lives without any sort of goal or encouragement.


An interesting aspect of the book is the complete lack of positive groups forming in society - all people are reduced to complete savagery and cannibalism. I would hope that people would band together to help each other in such a situation, but McCarthy seems to think otherwise.

Anyhow, I find the destruction of the world extremely difficult for me to imagine and relate to. My world is overflowing with beauty, diverse emotions, opportunities in quantities too great to explore and experience fully. And so I'd rather read about my world than about a broken and devastatingly hopeless one.

Henderson the Rain King

This is a strange book. What is it about? Saul Bellow himself (the author, in case you were wondering) warned people against over-analysing what is essentially a book about a man's adventures in a fantastical tribal Africa. So I'll just have to ignore his warning.

For me, the book is about two conflicting types of people or philosophies to life: people that want, and people that are.

Henderson, the main character, wants. He feels he has a spiritual void that needs filling. He is driven all the way to Africa by his wanting, by his search for more, by his search for meaning in life.

Eventually he meets King Dahfu. King Dahfu is a character who is. He lives in contentment, spending his time reclining in a hammock and being served by his numerous mistresses. He is inspired by the lazy, contented behaviour of lions - a behaviour that can change to agile reaction when the need arises, but is otherwise accepting of life's lulls.

King Dahfu tries, by introducing Henderson to his lioness pet, to teach him to be more accepting of life, more content, a person who wants less and is more.

A good thing to learn, I think.

Narziß und Goldmund

One of the students in my German class last week gave an excellent presentation on early 20th century art in Munich. With arms waving passionately, knocking things around him over, searching for the German words he needed to express his excitement, he told us of Der Blaue Reiter, of Kandinsky and Marc, of Lenbachhaus. It was as though he had discovered beauty in the world, was thrilled at this discovery, and wanted to share it with us, get us as excited as he was.

Turm der blauen Pferde, Franz Marc, 1913

How is this relevant to Hermann Hesse's Narziß und Goldmund?

The two characters, Narziß and Goldmund (once again, I've no idea what they're called in the English version of the book) are supposedly opposites: Narziß thinks, Goldmund lives; Narziß is a monk and a scholar, Goldmund an artist; Narziß deprives himself of pleasures, Goldmund drinks them in; Narziß is dark and solemn, Goldmund sunny.


Goldmund leaves the monestery where he was schooled to wander around medieval Germany. He embraces life and a huge number of women who are drawn to his innocent boyishness. He marvels at the beauty of nature and people, and wishing to immortalise this beauty, the fleeting moments that he can't take hold of, he becomes an artist - fixes emotion and meaning in sculpture.

Goldmund ends up sacrificing himself to his passionate life, and Narziß, through his love and admiration for Goldmund, reveals his longing for a more sensual, "motherly" existance himself.

And the relevance to a presentation on Der Blaue Reiter? It has to do with passion.

The Inheritance of Loss

Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss is set in the 1980's in the Indian town of Kalimpong in the Eastern Himalayas, the time and place of a Gurkha uprising. It follows a number of characters making up a cross section of Kalimpong society.


None of the characters have any feeling of belonging or connectedness with people or place: a bitter retired judge, educated in Cambridge, felt marginalised in England due to his Indianness, and is now even more marginalised in India because of his Englishness. His orphaned granddaughter, who lives with him but with whom he hardly communicates, has nobody of her own age around her, except her young tutor, who ends his romance with her to join the Gurkha independence movement. Their cook is too poor and uneducated to connect with the judge or the granddaughter, and he is Bengali and thus despised by the local Gurkas. The cook's son, who emmigrated illegally to New York, lives a miserable and desperate existance sleeping on the kitchens of resturants where he works for slave wages. All are disconnected from each other by circumstance and by phychology; all struggle on in loneliness, wishing they could break out, find a place more suitable to exist in.

It's a morbid book. I've read a number of other books with similar themes of Indians' relationships with each other and the rest of the world (by Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie and even EM Forster), but none are quite as despressing and hopeless; none portray as much gloom, decay and despair as The Inheritance of Loss. And this makes it less convincing to me, or at least less relevant to my feelings. I know what the battle for connectedness in hard times, in unfamiliar places and among different people can be like. Sure, I am priviledged compared to many other people, but the utter lack of anything even remotely positive in the book I find unrealistic, the gloom exaggerated.