On James Joyce

Whenever people ask me who my favourite writer is, I blurt, without even letting them complete the question, “Joyce, Joyce, it can’t be anyone else.” And the reactions I normally receive are mixtures of surprise and doubt.

A writer who have not read even one Austen or Bronte novel, says his favourite writer is Joyce. It surely would stir doubt about the honesty of the statement. Even it can reflect pompousness, pretentiousness or boastfulness of an aspiring writer who wants to let people know that he knows things.

I don’t want to defend myself, I don’t need to. And I am not bound to explain myself either, because I really don’t care.

This post is my dedication to the writer for whom I have the purest, the most childish love possible between a writer and a reader.

(Before starting, I confess: I have not read “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake” yet.)

 

I never knew I want to be a writer. I am good with mathematics and science has always been my easy choice. Still, when time or mood permitted, I picked a random book and read. My childhood books consisted of the Bengali translation of “Tintin” and Bengali comics like “Nonte-Fonte”, “Batul the Great”. I never needed to seek stories in English language. Feluda and Byomkesh gave me all the Sherlock Holmes I wanted to read and “Chader Pahar” (The Mountain of Moon) gave me all the adventures I aspired to have. When I needed some serious stuff, I had our good old Tagore.

During my college days, I didn’t regularly read books. My selection was so random that I read one book by Bhagat, then next by Robin Cook, then Hosseini or Ken Follett or Coelho. I never wrote much either. One or two scattered Bengali poems max.

James Joyce

So 19 years of my life had passed and I had read only some 20+ books. After graduating in engineering with rather good marks, I had too much free time. I watched all the movies I got from hostel and had all the boozing I could indulge myself in while staying in home.

I could do nothing but read books. I read “The Idiot” by “Dostoevsky” next. Strange, isn’t it? I just randomly picked it from my ebook collection I got from my hostel friends (reading or not you got to have collections to show off). It was long but I liked it. It was good time-pass for me. I read “1984”, “A Passage to India” after that, which I got from our town library. I attempted to read “Beloved” and “Midnight’s Children” back then but couldn’t understand it.

One day, I happened to come across a book titled, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” By then, I started to doubt whether I’d remain an engineer and go for research in control and automation.

The title and the content of the book had a kind of ironical justification to my mental condition back then.

There were few thoughts, emotions I used to have when I was child and I thought only I thought that, and they were my secrets, my very own little but extremely personal ones. No one knew it. But here was this book where I was seeing Stephen doing things, thinking things that shook me at the most vulnerable corners of my mind. For example when I read:

But he was not sick there. He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place. Fleming was very decent to ask him. He wanted to cry. He leaned his elbows on the table and shut and opened the flaps of his ears. Then he heard the noise of the refectory every time he opened the flaps of his ears. It made a roar like a train at night. And when he closed the flaps the roar was shut off like a train going into a tunnel. That night at Dalkey the train had roared like that and then, when it went into the tunnel, the roar stopped. He closed his eyes and the train went on, roaring and then stopping; roaring again, stopping. It was nice to hear it roar and stop and then roar out of the tunnel again and then stop.

I literally used to do that. During the boring lectures in the programs at my missionary school, I used to do that (opening and closing ear-flaps) and entertained myself. I thought I knew a trick that no one knew. It was mine. Mine. But this strange author came and took that away. For the first time, I realized what words could do to a person. I read that part again and again. After that, I came across this paragraph,

He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.

Stephen Dedalus

Class of Elements

Clongowes Wood College

Sallins

County Kildare

Ireland

Europe

The World

The Universe

I wrote that in my school copies. (Anirban Nanda, Class 4, Section A, Saradamoni Sisu Niketan, Haldia, West Bengal, India, Asia, World, Universe.) How the hell Joyce knew that?

Though winter is short in my country, I cherished those nights inside quilt as described below.

First came the vacation and then the next term and then vacation again and then again another term and then again the vacation. It was like a train going in and out of tunnels and that was like the noise of the boys eating in the refectory when you opened and closed the flaps of the ears. Term, vacation; tunnel, out; noise, stop. How far away it was! It was better to go to bed to sleep. Only prayers in the chapel and then bed. He shivered and yawned. It would be lovely in bed after the sheets got a bit hot. First they were so cold to get into. He shivered to think how cold they were first. But then they got hot and then he could sleep. It was lovely to be tired. He yawned again. Night prayers and then bed: he shivered and wanted to yawn. It would be lovely in a few minutes. He felt a warm glow creeping up from the cold shivering sheets, warmer and warmer till he felt warm all over, ever so warm and yet he shivered a little and still wanted to yawn.

In short, I felt Joyce wrote this book for me to read. It was meant for me. The struggle of Stephen to find his vocation in later chapters resonated with me. Though the prose was becoming denser with each chapter, I read the book line by line. Read each sentence again and again until I understood it. I read it three times in a row. I almost ruined the library copy.

There are many more deeper secrets that I share with this book and for this reason, whenever I feel down, I read it; whenever I feel a block, I read it.

I read Dubliners after that and with each story —I must emphasize on ‘each’— I learned unexplored sides of human emotions. So, yes, even if Joyce had never written (thank God he did) “Ulysses” or “Finnegans Wake”, I’d worship him all the same.

Joyce is not just another writer for me; he is my tuning point, my Literary Guru.

Advertisement

How to receive a review (both positive and negative)

A book can get both positive and negative criticism from a reviewer. This post is about how to handle such criticisms. Now, if you search in internet, there will be plenty of posts regarding handling a negative criticism, but no one tells you about the positive one. We shall try to discuss that too in this post.

Before reading any review, remember the following:

1. The reviewer has invested 6-10 hrs of his time on your work. He has the right to voice his say.
2. If he thinks his time is wasted by reading your work, he can say bad things about your work.
3. If you get offended by that (and yes, you have also the right to get offended), you should be okay with it. Tastes vary.
4. If a reviewer tells that “this part of this novel is crap, and should have been written in this or that way”, it doesn’t establish that the reviewer himself can write the way he has expected to read.

Read the last sentence again.

Now, let us divide our discussion in 2 parts.

1. Handling Positive Criticism: If you get positive views from someone about your work, then pat yourself, you deserve it. You should use this praise to boost your confidence and work harder to bring better work. But I have seen in many cases, the recipient gets so inflated that he refuses to work hard anymore. Remember, every work will require equal and preferably more effort than you have put in your previous work. So boost your confidence with positive criticism but don’t become overconfident. If you become overconfident, points in italic in following will happen.
2.  Handling Negative Criticism: If someone bashes your book showing valid reasons, analyze if those reasons are at all valid for you. In many cases, the reviewer may not get your intentions or visions. In those cases, as you are the creator and know more about what you are doing, you may (not must) ignore those points. 

   Source – Barron’s Cartoon – by Kaamran Hafeez.

   On the other hand, if a good reviewer gives negative review and justifies his points with enough reasons and examples, preserve the review and apply the lessons learned from it. Due to overconfidence, if you respond with hostility to the review and ignore everything he has said, two things will happen: people will get a pretty good idea about your nature and you lose the chance to learn from your mistakes which you will iterate in your next works.

So, that’s it about receiving a review. This is the last post about reviewing and receiving them. Coming up: few short-stories, few discussions on books, some amazing workshops/articles/interviews by various well-known authors and a serialized post about something (I’ll reveal later). 🙂

Happy New Year

2015 is arguably (if I can find anyone to argue! :p) the most eventful year of my life. The year started with me gluing my face over GATE preparation books with almost 8 hours of continuous study a day. Also, it was my final year of graduation; so it was a bit emotional. Frankly, I had no serious plan to write anything. I had only written two short leisurely stories in my 20 years of life. I had one friend in my college who was also writing stories and was doing quite good (Biswadeep 😉 ). So, while preparing for exams, I started peeking into different kind of books (till then, I never choose to read any book. Whatever came in my way, or whatever our library had, I read). Till February, I couldn’t write anything.

But after exams gone, I found myself free to do whatever I want. So, I wrote one or two stories and sent them to few anthologies (remember, I didn’t have much connections then and I had to follow Biswa and few of his friends’ profiles to find the contests.) It (my story) got selected and from then, I gained confidence and kept writing more.

After that, strange things happened. I got okay marks in GATE and decided to drop a year to prepare again, because I had high ambitions. I even started going to coaching classes and refused the job I got from campus placement. But then unexpectedly, one day I received an appointment letter for research post in a project at IIT Kharagpur. I came here and started working on interesting things.

Now I have six anthologies published, a blog with 3000 views, administration to a facebook page of 7k plus likes, attendance to a book launch of which I am a part of (with authors I admire and from whom I’ve learned many things). I’ve met wonderful people from both technology and writing background, few of whom have become very good friends from whom I can seek help at 2 A.M. I am starting 2016 with better visibility of what I want to do in future and a mix feeling of fear and confidence about what I am going to do.

Thank you for everything 2015 and a very happy new year to you all.

How it is possible to read more than one book at the same time.

As a voracious reader and an ambitious writer, I am member of many book-clubs where we share what we are reading and discuss it. So, when I say that I am reading 3 books at a time, people get surprised and ask how it is possible to do so and still not mix up themes and characters.

First of all, it’s not a matter of pride for reading more than one book at a time. People who read one book at a time normally plunge themselves in the book and become lost into it, which is a great thing and truly depicts how one should enjoy a book.

But as for me, like many others, who reads many books at a time gets a different experience, neither superior nor inferior to the previous case.

Let’s get to point about how someone does read a lot of books at a time, let me tell you from my own experiences. I am currently reading Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and Tess of the D’Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy; all of which are well respected. Each of these has separate plot, themes, styles and characters. As a writer who doesn’t say he earns his bread by writing, he has to go through separate realms of life-styles/thinking processes; for example: a writer who also works as an accountant has to be a good serviceman, good reader, good husband, friend etc etc. So many personalities where you are supposed to think separately and behave accordingly. Do they mix these up? This is the source for me to find the reason of my reading many books at a time. While I am reading the story of Caulfield I am thrown into different world and different tone and while I am reading Elizabeth Costello’s story which revolves around struggles of a writer at old age, I see a new style and premise and a lot more though provoking literature. But I do not mix them up because I do not read them as a reader, rather I read them to find the tricks the author is using in his writing. I do not get surprised/delighted to face a plot twist, I normally get drawn to a novel solely because of the writing style and set up and how the writer is building the whole plot. I do get lost into the stories but on some level, I’m also aware of the techniques the author is using.

That’s is most probably the case with me. I don’t know if I am able to make myself clear enough, but right now, this is all I can think of (and blogging because the thought is tormenting me).

Discussion: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Lately, though I have watched the movie, I picked up the book ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’ which, literary critics categorize by a fancy name bildungsroman; meaning books that concentrate on the vulnerability and transformation during teenage years of a person.

I am sitting to write this post entirely out of urge to discuss a book like this which specifically tries to decipher all the perks of becoming an adult from a teenager. So, this is not a review to be clear (and hence it contains spoilers).

So, we have an introvert, sensitive (very) boy who tries to adapt himself for high-school mindset. I didn’t like ‘Catcher In The Rye’ (don’t know why) but I seem to like this one very much. The major reason for that might be huge similarity between Charlie (that’s the boy) and I. Though I am more emotionally attached to Stephen in ‘A Portrait of the Artist As a Young man‘ by Joyce (I’ll come to that later sometime). Charlie really sucks at building relationship with opposite sex and he falls in love pretty soon after meeting Sam. Sam is a very realistic girl, much older and already in a relationship. She understands Charlie’s attraction to her, and she tries to make sense to him like this:

And I felt good that those were the first two words that I ever typed on my new old typewriter that Sam gave me. We just sat there quiet for a moment, and she smiled. And I moved to the typewriter again, and I wrote something.

“I love you, too.”

And Sam looked at the paper, and she looked at me.

“Charlie… have you ever kissed a girl?”

I shook my head no. It was so quiet.

“Not even when you were little?”

I shook my head no again. And she looked very sad.

She told me about the first time she was kissed. She told me that it was with one of her dad’s friends. She was seven. And she told nobody about it except for Mary Elizabeth and then Patrick a year ago. And she started to cry. And she said something that I won’t forget. Ever.

“I know that you know that I like Craig. And I know that I told you not to think of me that way. And I know that we can’t be together like that. But I want to forget all those things for a minute. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I want to make sure that the first person you kiss loves you. Okay?”

“Okay.” She was crying harder now. And I was, too, because when I hear something like that I just can’t help it.

“I just want to make sure of that. Okay?”

“Okay.”

And she kissed me. It was the kind of kiss that I could never tell my friends about out loud. It was the kind of kiss that made me know that I was never so happy in my whole life.

These is a very tender way of handling such situation and I love the way it’s executed.

It’s tender because from the beginning I’m telling Charlie is vulnerable, too vulnerable to grasp a situation like following:

After a few minutes, the boy pushed the girl’s head down, and she started to kiss his (). She was still crying. […] I had to stop watching at that point because I started to feel sick, but it kept going on, and they kept doing other things, and she kept saying “no.” Even when I covered my ears, I could still hear her say that.My sister came in eventually to bring me a bowl of potato chips, and when she found the boy and the girl, they stopped.

My sister was very embarrassed, but not as embarrassed as the girl. The boy looked kind of smug. He didn’t say much. After they left, my sister turned to me.

“Did they know you were in here?”

“Yes. They asked if they could use the room.”

“Why didn’t you stop them?”

“I didn’t know what they were doing.”

“You pervert,” was the last thing my sister said before she left the room, still carrying the bowl of potato chips.

[…]

“He raped her, didn’t he?”

She just nodded. I couldn’t tell if she was sad or just knew more things than me.

“We should tell someone, shouldn’t we?”

And I was disturbed to read this part, and was quite in doubt if the author did justice to a situation like this. But the way author let him grasp those things is admirable.

There are other situations, which I think, is impossible to come up out of imagination.

When I was done reading the poem, everyone was quiet. A very sad quiet. But the amazing thing was that it wasn’t a bad sad at all. It was just something that made everyone look around at each other and know that they were there. Sam and Patrick looked at me. And I looked at them. And I think they knew. Not anything specific really. They just knew. And I think that’s all you can ever ask from a friend.

Such things couldn’t be written unless the author himself went through them, and though I have not done the required research, I strongly believe Stephen Chbosky in some way, in some time, was involved with similar situations in his early life(it is further reassured by the fact that he has not written anything else since).

The foundation of the path of transformation of being prepared for the hard future of Charlie mostly laid by books and a teacher like Bill. Reading classics and cultivating ideas by writing essays on them is an effective way of developing character and moral basis of any teenager/person.

In later part of the novel, Charlie is forced to be involved in an one-sided relationship with Sam’s best friend and he, in an inappropriate moment chooses to kiss Sam instead of his existing girlfriend, and jeopardizes every relation between him and everyone. He finds himself dangling in between an un-achievable love and unwanted love; thus alienating himself from every friend of his, he goes through a nervous breakdown.

THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER Ph: John Bramley © 2011 Summit Entertainment, LLC. All rights reserved.

At the end he became friends with everyone again via few fortunate and/or critical moments.

But this teaches us an important lesson: everything heals with time. Also, there are few golden moments like when Patrick is being mocked and insulted by his homosexual partner for saving himself from public shame, Charlie interfere and saves Patrick from a disgraceful scene.

The above scene turns Charlie into Patrick’s closest friend at near end and Patrick tries to kiss him in an intimate situation to which, Charlie doesn’t protest. I like to quote what to be learned here:

“Charlie, you’re missing the point. The point is that I don’t think you would have acted different even if you did like Mary Elizabeth. It’s like you can come to Patrick’s rescue and hurt two guys that are trying to hurt him, but what about when Patrick’s hurting himself? Like when you guys went to that park? Or when he was kissing you? Did you want him to kiss you?”I shook my head no.“So, why did you let him?”

“I was just trying to be a friend,” I said.

“But you weren’t, Charlie. At those times, you weren’t being his friend at all. Because you weren’t honest with him.”

But at the same time, we can’t be just shoulders to cry on when we want something more. If we love someone, we should go and try to get it. It’s important to note that I said ‘try’; not persuade. Sometimes, we can’t get things because we never attempt to have them, out of generosity or assumption.

I said, “Well, I thought a lot of things. But mostly, I thought that your being sad was much more important to me than Craig not being your boyfriend anymore. And if it meant that I would never get to think of you that way, as long as you were happy, it was okay. That’s when I realized that I really loved you.”

She sat down on the floor with me. She spoke quiet.“Charlie, don’t you get it? I can’t feel that. It’s sweet and everything, but it’s like you’re not even there sometimes. It’s great that you can listen and be a shoulder to someone, but what about when someone doesn’t need a shoulder. What if they need the arms or something like that? You can’t just sit there and put everybody’s lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can’t. You have to do things.”

“Like what?” I asked. My mouth was dry.

“I don’t know. Like take their hands when the slow song comes up for a change. Or be the one who asks someone for a date. Or tell people what you need. Or what you want. Like on the dance floor, did you want to kiss me?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Then, why didn’t you?” she asked real serious.

“Because I didn’t think you wanted me to.”

“Why did you think that?”

“Because of what you said.”

“What I said nine months ago? When I told you not to think of me that way?”

Nearing the end, I can only say that, Charlie has already achieved maturity when he thinks:

The party at Craig’s was great. Craig and Peter bought champagne to congratulate all the people who were graduating. And we danced. And we talked. And I saw Mary Elizabeth kissing Peter and looking happy. And I saw Sam kissing Craig and looking happy. And I saw Patrick and Alice not even care that they weren’t kissing anybody because they were too excited talking about their futures.

By the way, it has left me dubious about existence of persons like Sam and Patrick.

Now, about the ‘A Portrait’ by Joyce:

You’ll get another article like this soon enough.

Thanks for reading. ❤

A Discussion on Midnight’s Children, A Fine Balance and Magical Realism

The origin of the post is the hours long thought process after reading A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (and the origin of the thought process is not being able to write anything for my blog for a long time).

Now comes the reason of this post and the reason of your wasting (Is it?) time on this fairly unpopular blog and its posts. The reason is this: according to me very few people have a good idea about what magicrealism means and what it is about and why the above mentioned books should not be called a hugely different books.

First of all, let me give a brief account about what the above books are about, which you can find in description section of corresponding Goodreads pages and of course we have wikipedia! And before proceeding any further, let me spell it out; if you have not read or if you have no idea or if you plan to read the above two books, then you can stop right now (and miss some arguably interesting observations).

So here are the short accounts of the books:

A Fine Balance: This is set in emergency situation in India during 1977 where we have a uncle and his nephew treading through different areas of India (both cities and villages) and experienced the awful things that people had suffered at that time.

Here, Rohinton (I’m calling him by first name because I love and respect him too much.) uses those two characters as a magnifying glass to let us see and feel what was happening at that time and how people’s mindset had been changing correspondingly. That’s all. (I now safely assure you that you have not missed much about the book if you are planning to read the same.)

Midnight’s Children: Here Salman (First name because he is admirable, funny and friendly) has apparently done something different. I’ll come to that in a moment, just hold on a bit.

Midnight’s Children is about India’s sociopolitical (mostly political) situations that shaped the nation as it is now. In this book too the central theme was the emergency situation and the happenings in that time (note: beautification, vasectomy etc you can find in the two books.) And a lot of awful events had happened with most of the characters in this book.

Now here I’ll spill the beans about magical realism and a comparison between the two books. In A Fine Balance, you’ll find a conventional, Dickentian style narrative, which is so finely (pun intended) done that it has almost universal appeal (note: just have a look at any random review of the book). It is raw, ripe and ruthless.

In Midnight’s Children, however, things gets a bit different. Here you’ll find people having flying, metamorphosizing, telepathizing and thus in total 1001 (Yes, it’s a fact.) such capabilities. Add to this happenings like dogs suddenly protecting a politician, mother visualizing all about her daughters’ dreams, monkey intentionally ruining a lifechanging deal, girl vanishing persons in her basket, a nation conspiring to make drastic changes in our main character’s life and thus affecting the fate of an entire nation. (Yes the main character is so godly and supernatural that anything happening in his life has reflected to the nation’s fate.) In short: it’s all very symbolic and extremely sarcastic. This is a new kind of writing process to hammer more boldly the same things in a new way.

Midnight’s Children could have been easily written like this: Saleem is boy born in a muslim rich family with no magical power whatsoever, and gradually with change in political situations of nation his life takes turns and he goes through an awful lot of sad things; he goes to places, always crying and invoking mercy in the reader, and can do nothing to prevent it etc etc(which actually happens in A Fine Balance).

Rather, Salman has chosen a hugely sarcastic and arrogant tone, making fun of the victims and readers and constantly referring to vast Indian mythological events. Without magical realism (A world where magic happens and none recognizes it as magic; a basic difference between fantasy and magical realism.), without assuming such outrageous and illogical facts in Rushdie’s book, could it be symbolized to depict history of a nation via merely life story of a character? Could the miseries of a nation be described in an utterly cruel and sarcastic tone by making fun of a character’s pain? It maybe possible, but it’ll be hugely boring and bigger and more difficult.

On a slightly out-of-the-track note: One Hundred Years of Solitude could never be written if there was no magical realism or perhaps, there would not be any Franz Kafka or Haruki Murakami.

The point is: Magical realism is NOT a GENRE of English literature, it is a literary TOOL, same like allegory or oxymoron. So don’t run away from a book because it is written in magical realism technique; it can be fun and it just tries to show a realistic world through a different magnifying glass so that you can recognize and understand the situation more vividly and tequilically (note: tequila is a strong alcohol).

P.S. My future endeavors in literature may cross a line or two with magical realism.

 

Steam by Anirban Nanda

Disclaimer:

*Provocative words are used with vivid implications.

*Do not read if you are easily offended by abusive words.

---

I am invincible, I am invisible, and I am everywhere. You can find me in morning while making tea, while taking tea and while fucking your secretary. It is a steam, a steam of prickly conscience. It accumulates on your face and that’s why it is moist when you fuck your secretary (and not to mention, you are moist the whole body, especially because of your thirsty shaft thrusting and drinking sexblood from the infinite pit). I’ll not take the whole credit of moistening your face; it was wet partly because of sweat. But your face is so hot that, the perspiration boils up and turns into steam, me; a prick in your mind, a constantly nagging presence of a thorn whose existence can only be felt in future. Funny it is though; recognising something’s presence in past. But actually, if you think that you can dry yourself in your fancy ac room after the sex, thinking that sweat will vanish and you will be same again like before the sex, then you are a miserable imbecile. Don’t you know I am invincible? While you are drying yourself in your ac room, I sneak past your body right into your soul. And you fool; you think I am gone just in a flick! You deceive yourself assuming that you’ve defeated me by sitting few minutes in your ac room and watching your naked secretary dressing herself, fully concentrated on the dressing procedure, without any expression. Each time you take her in, a small part of your soul will be replaced by me. From today, you won’t be having a sound sleep.

Above all, a fresh soul is my favourite dish. I roam from people to people in search of a palatable soul. Once I see someone doing a thing he shouldn’t do, I enter into his body and wait, I‘ll wait for that wrong step, that one slip from conscience and my dish will be ready. I take a piece and eat it ravishingly, munching the crunchy thing. You should actually thank me, because the part I eat will soon be rotten and that one rotten piece will soon contaminate the whole thing, your entire soul. I eat a part, depending how much your soul is wasted, and then replace it by steam, me. So basically I save your soul. You can call me SOS too. Ha ha ha. Just kidding. The steam is just a fake replacement. Because you know, you can’t touch or see me; I take an empty place, exactly similar to air. And I forget one thing to tell you that, as you are enjoying your secretary and then you’ll return home and again enjoy your wife, a part of me in your soul will ooze out and enter into hers too. No matter, how much precaution you take, with each day of deception, I’ll cloud your wife’s soul little by little.

Do you know I have a twin brother? We are so much connected that; we can exist in one form, in one body. Ever heard of Schrödinger’s cat? No? It is a theory where one can be dead and alive at the same time. My brother is just like that. Let’s play a game. I will give you clue and you’ll try to identify my brother. Will you play? Yeah? That’s the spirit. Yes spirit means soul you moron, I am not in mood to praise you. Okay, clue number one; we can be both present in one form. I mean, you will either able to detect me, or my bro, not both of us at the same time. Got it? Now guess. Anger? No you fool. Let me give you another clue, there is fine line between he and I, we can convert into one another within moment. Still, we have many differences; we are quite opposite. Can you guess? It’s becoming boring. Either you give me the answer or today is the last day you fuck your secretary. Cool down, cool down. Don’t panic. Think and give the answer. Fear? You are quite close buddy. But rules are rules. You are done. Actually it is suspicion. You thought that? Yes you asshole, I know you got it because I am in your soul. You’ve forced me to call you an asshole. Yes you are a big arsehole. You can’t believe it is suspicion, because you are overconfident. Now take that and go home and there you will find your wife, suspicious. Do you think you can find another family in this age, at fifty? You had a complete family; a loving wife, two adorable daughters. Now you have exchanged them for another young body. What? You want to give penance. Okay what penance? Money? Shove that in your arse you and we’ll meet in hell. Give it to me then, you smugfuck. Today the cloud acquired in your wife’s soul for so many days will be converted into suspicion. And you will lose your family. Best of luck! You are to spend rest of your days alone and nights in restless, sleepless wandering.

THE END

©Anirban Nanda

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko … Bittersweet [Book Experience]

Few day ago, I threw this book after reading 50 pages saying:

This book is very non-linear and full of avant-garde techniques which is pretty hard to grasp for a first time reader of a post-modern novel.

(Block quoting my own words felt good. :P)

In one word; I gave up. Then I couldn’t move to my next book leaving this book half eaten. So I have read it anyway and I am here writing this Book Experience.

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko is a post-modern, magic realistic and speculative fiction. It has taken 2 weeks for me to complete this book. Two weeks! And that too for 197 pages.

First of all, this is one of the most difficult books I have read, and the author has done it intentionally.

Shmoop has given it 8 out of 10 in terms of difficulty.

The reason would be that she wants the reader to feel confused and dizzy like her protagonist felt in the beginning. Tayo, our protagonist was a half breed (a cross between white American and native American) and he went to war. He had lost his brother at war and right from the war he felt post traumatic disorder by visualizing his uncle Josiah while killing a Japanese soldier. After returning from war, he felt terrible, he was dreaming always and vomiting all the time. His belly was one hell of a thing; every time something happened, his belly would react in some way or other.

He shivered because all the facts, all the reasons made no difference anymore; he could hear Rocky’s words, and he could follow the logic of what Rocky said, but he could not feel anything except a swelling in his belly, a great swollen grief that was pushing into his throat.

OR

“He didn’t want them to know how sick he had been, how all night he had leaned against the metal wall in the men’s room, feeling the layers of muscle in his belly growing thinner, until the heaving was finally a ripple and then a quiver.”

OR

“The smell of snow had a cold damp edge, and a clarity that summer rain never had. The scent touched him deep behind his belly, and he could feel the old anticipation stirring as it had when he was a child waiting for the first snowflakes to fall.”

You’ll find umpteen numbers of ‘tummy updates’ throughout the novel.

This book is mostly based on folklore and ancient unscientific ceremonies and their contextual impact on modern era. She’s written this book without any specific chapter divisions and jumped back and forth through time within passages. Also, she changes perspective without giving any warning. The whole book is written in flowery prose, poetry like. Even in between long pages of difficult prose, you’ll find poems and hymns. Sometimes a complete side story is told in form of poems.

Up North

around Reedleaf Town

there was this Ck’o’yo magician

they called Kaup’a’ta or the Gambler.

He was tall

and he had a handsome face

but he always wore spruce greens around his head, over his eyes.

He dressed in the finest white buckskins

his moccasins were perfectly sewn.

He had strings of sky blue turquoise

strings of red coral in his ears.

In all ways

the Gambler was very good to look at.

His house was high

in the peaks of the Zuni mountains

and he waited for people to wander

up to his place.

He kept the gambling sticks all stacked up

ready for them.

… and so on.

These are a delight to read and in some places she has used magic realism with such expertise that it never felt she was one of the preliminary magic realist of our time. Like when Night Swan killed her lover (he dies due to trampling of horses in his stable) by dancing in her apartment. And there is always a mysterious and obscure environment throughout the novel. Author tries to describe every minimum and negligible detail and cleverly hides important plot points in between them. That’s why I had to go back and find the phrases that I have missed. Unnecessary stress on minor details has ruined the fun while reading this book.

He continued north, looking to the yellows and the orange of the sandrock cliffs ahead, and to the narrow sandrock canyons that cut deep into the mesa, exposing the springs. He was wondering about the speckled cattle, whether they had pushed their way through the fence and were halfway to Mexico by now. They had been so difficult to control in the beginning; they had taken so much from Josiah.He left the road and took a trail that cut directly to the cliffs, winding up the chalky gray hill where the mesa plateau ended in crumbling shale above the red clay flats. The sun felt good; he could smell the juniper and piñon still damp from the rain. The wind carried a wild honey smell from meadows of beeweed. The trail dipped into a shallow wash. The sand was washed pale and smooth by rainwater and wind.

But in some places the beauty of the language is so good that I can’t help but admire the writer’s ability to create magic out of words.

They walked close together, arms around each other’s waist, pulling each other close. A mourning dove called from the tall grass along the wash, and below the cliffs the speckled cattle were grazing. Every step formed another word, thick like yellow pitch oozing from a broken piñon limb, words pressing inside his chest until it hurt: don’t leave me. But he sucked air through clenched teeth and breathed hard, trapping those words inside. She stopped by a juniper tree at the edge of the road and set her bundle on the ground.

OR

Before dawn, southeast of the village, the bells would announce their approach, the sound shimmering across the sand hills, followed by the clacking of turtle-shell rattles—all these sounds gathering with the dawn. Coming closer to the river, faintly at first, faint as the pale yellow light emerging across the southeast horizon, the sounds gathered intensity from the swelling colors of dawn. And at the moment the sun came over the edge of the horizon, they suddenly appeared on the riverbank, the Ka’t’sina approaching the river crossing.

The author, in most places, refers to something in such subtle way that it’ll be treat for you if you can figure out what she’s trying to say.

“I have a sister who lives way down that way. She’s married to a Navajo from Red Lake.” She pointed south, in the direction she was looking. “Another lives near Flagstaff. My brother’s in Jemez.” She stopped suddenly and laughed. “You know what they say about the Montaños.” The tone of her voice said that of course he knew what the people said about her family, but Tayo couldn’t remember hearing of that family.

“Up here, we don’t have to worry about those things.” She was right. They would leave the questions of lineage, clan, and family name to the people in the village, to someone like Auntie who had to know everything about anyone.

But in several places the dialogues are so vague that you can’t understand anything.

Tayo had been drowsing in the sun with his back against the cliff rock; he sat up stiffly and looked at her.

“In case of what?” His heartbeat was fast and unsteady. Her eyes had distance in them; when he looked at her he saw miles spreading into canyons and hills. She knelt down beside him, and he saw tears.

“Out there,” she whispered, “things are always moving, always shifting. I hear them sometimes at night.”

All I can say now is that, after finishing this book, I’ve felt relieved, not jubilant. I’ve felt that finally I have completed a difficult book which has every quality to become a masterpiece. I agree that it definitely is a masterpiece but I also admit that maybe I’ll not touch this book again. I just can’t go though the trauma it has induced in me again.

Read all my book experiences here.

“How to write a fiction and so on…” kind of posts are never actually helpful.

You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me that. You have asked others, before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you worry when certain editors turn your efforts down. Now (since you have allowed me to offer you advice) let me ask you to give up all that. You are looking to the outside, and that above all you should not be doing now. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write. This above all: ask yourself in your night’s quietest hour: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if it should be affirmative, if it is given to you to respond to this serious question with a loud and simple ‘I must’, then construct your life according to this necessity…

——-Letters to a Young Poet by R.M. Rilke

I have seen in many blogs that people are posting tips and tricks for writing a good fiction.

Well, to be honest and with no intention to sound offensive, those who try to read and follow those tips and all are in search of some short-cut or easy way to write a great book. In this computer age, to have such ideas are of no surprise.

To make my point clear, those posts are mostly written by published writer from their own experiences. They have worked hard to reach that goal and you have to pass that too. There is no short-cut ‘tips’ to write a novel. It’s not a mathematics problem or a rocket science theory that you need tutorials and techniques.

You are writing or planning to write because you have felt an urge to write something and you are passionate about it. More importantly, you believe in it. So to make it the best book you can write you too have to read thousands of books, spend hours doing research on your plot  and identify your narration style and genre.

If you are writing from your heart, and if you have read enough on the same genre, your writing bound to be thrilling and enchanting. In this process, you will develop your own strategy to write your own fiction which works only for you. Hence, pour all your heart on the paper and just submit it to your editor.

And when you will become successful, maybe someday, you too can post a similar post on ‘how to write a good novel et al.’ and increase page-views of your blog.

Significance of my blog name: ALPHABET SPEAKS

Okay, I intend to post this historical, one-of-a-kind post, maybe for the first time; where a blogger writes a blog post about meaning of his blog page name. It’s very funny if you come to think of it.

So name of my blog is : ALPHABET SPEAKS.

On paper, it’s a very ordinary name meaning a bunch of letters in English language are speaking. Very ordinary.

Look closer. Let me break the title in two parts:

1. ALPHABET
2. SPEAKS

ALPHABET:

It’s the set of letters in English language. We all know that. Right? Now, if I write ALPHABET like this:

ALPHABET ALPHABET ALPHABET… on and on in circle. What do you see?

ALPHABETALPHABET… on and on in circle.

Two phrases are coming out: ALPHA, BETA. We all know them. They are two Greek alphabets which we majorly use in science and calculation. We also use them on another case.

In any project or work we use them to denote version. Right? Alpha version means a very premature state, whereas Beta means a better much improved state, but not the final perfect state, mind that.

So the meaning of ALPHABET(A) SPEAKS is simply this:

It’s the cry of a writer who continuously moving from alpha to beta, alpha to beta in circle but never reaching that perfection, never.

SPEAKS:

Now comes the Speaks part. Grammatically speaking, ‘Speaks’ is normally used in case of 3rd person singular number. But as mentioned above, alpha and beta are separate states, so ‘speak’ would have been much appropriate. But here, ‘speaks’ is signifying a singular entity of different stages as a writer.

I think I am clear enough. It’s my tendency from the very beginning of writing a story is to insert minute, insignificant riddles, metaphors and symbolism. I know very well that, none will notice them and none will care for them. But I keep that anyway, in hope that someday a reader would find that or at least doubt a mere simple line for something else.

So moral of this post is this: though few things may look like shit (generally); there maybe a hidden meaning in that. Try to look for it.

Thank you for reading. ❤ 🙂