Review: Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee

First published:-1980

Star rating:-

It is impossible to read this and not be reminded of an almost genetically programmed inferiority complex, the burden of history only the descendants of the colonized have to bear. Despite those smug pronouncements of the 21st century being an era of a fair and equitable world and the hard battles won in favor of interracial harmony, there's the fact of your friend barely suppressing a squawk of alarm when you express your admiration for Idris Elba - no female I am acquainted with in real life has learned to wean herself away from the fixation with a white complexion. Scrub your skin raw till it bleeds but never fall behind in the race to make it whiter because that's the color the world approves of. You can fawn over Simon Baker's blonde, light-eyed glory but not over Elba's hulking, ruggedly handsome perfection; heaven forbid you prefer the latter over the former. The 21st century is yet to cast its magic spell over the standards of physical beauty. 

So if I, a citizen of a purportedly newer and better social order, can still feel the rippling aftershocks of the catastrophe called Imperialism from across the barrier of decades and centuries, what would a man like Coetzee have experienced, stranded in the middle of the suffocating sociopolitical stasis of Apartheid? Moral anguish? A bitter impotence? A premonitory sense of doom? Anger? 

Fiction, I believe, must have been his preferred method of exorcizing these demons. And purge these emotions he did through the composition of this slim little novel which can be aptly described as a most heart-wrenching lament on the condition of the world of his times. 

It may be true that the world as it stands is no illusion, no evil dream of a night. It may be that we wake up to it ineluctably, that we can neither forget it nor dispense with it. But I find it as hard as ever to believe that the end is near.

An anonymous magistrate stationed at a farthest corner of an unspecified Empire witnesses the death throes of its reign while recovering his own humanity at the loss of his position of power and influence. In the beginning he is convinced of his righteousness as a dutiful servant of the Empire who oversees the welfare his subjects with moderation but with the arrival of a bluntly tyrannical figure of authority whose methods differ vastly from his, he begins to question his own collusion in the maintenance of an unnatural order. Unable to stand as a mute witness to the horrendous abuse inflicted on innocent 'natives' on the false suspicion of their complicity with 'barbarians' or armed rebels who threaten the stability of the Empire, he clashes with the aforementioned administrator who undoubtedly represents the true face of any oppressor when divested of its sheen of sophistication. And thus begins his fall from grace culminating in a kind of metaphorical rebirth through extreme physical abasement. 

I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow. Two sides of imperial rule, no more, no less.

In the fashion of Coetzee's signature didacticism the novel is rife with allegorical implications but as much as these can be deeply thought-provoking, sometimes they also resemble conveniently inserted contrivances. Like the pseudo-erotic entanglement that develops between the ageing magistrate and a young 'barbarian' girl who is left maimed and partially blinded after a violent bout of interrogation is amply demonstrative of a colonizer-colonized arrangement - the one bereft of power to drive the relationship in a desired direction becomes dependent on the volatile benevolence of the other party. Or the mounting paranoia about the anticipated attack of the 'barbarians' who, much like Godot, fail to appear and remain a myth till the end although emerging as the key factor hastening the impending demise of Empire. All the layers of meaning and symbolism could send a dedicated literature student into paroxysms of pleasure no doubt.

With the buck before me suspended in immobility, there seems to be time for all things, time even to turn my gaze inward and see what it is that has robbed the hunt of its savour: the sense that this has become no longer a morning's hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to death on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim; that for the duration of its frozen moment the stars are locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things.

Wary as I am of Coetzee's often stilted world-building, my 5-star rating was an inevitability given my obsession with narratives containing a discernible vein of literary activism in harmony with notions of social justice. Here he also seems to have successfully reined in his pesky habit of turning his characters into sockpuppet-ish mouthpieces to tout his own passage-length worldviews. The narrator does occasionally morph into a pedagogue but his inner monologues never seem out of place given his unique circumstances. Besides it takes courage to acknowledge the fact of white man's guilt in a world which is yet to discard the rhetoric of 'white man's burden'.

 

Review: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

First published:-2004

Read in:- April, 2014

Star rating:-

There's the sound of a deeply contented sigh emanating from the lips of someone clutching this book to herself like a long-lost friend, a bead of tear perched precariously atop disorderly eyelashes. And there's the barely audible sound of her turning the pages ricocheting off the pliant walls of time and space, sculpting a minuscule dent on the surface of a collective fate and this perplexing cosmic interconnection. 

She cannot properly articulate her awe or even fathom her own bewilderment at being rendered so tearfully sentimental by another case of 'old wine in new bottle'. Now she longs to believe that any or all of her trivial actions will lift her out of her predestined prison and place her somewhere on the crisscrossing grid of timelines and geographical boundaries, enable others to hear the distinct echo of her shout into the void. She just by herself is insignificant, not even a mere drop in the pool of time and she fears this looming threat of obscurity above all. But then David Mitchell gently reminds her that mute resignation to the 'natural order of things' is cowardice and billions and billions of droplets like her coalesce to form the ocean itself. She can will herself to shape the world any way she can. 

American notary, Adam Ewing sails reluctantly across the Pacific aboard The Prophetess, unaware of the events that will set into motion a change of heart which will contribute toward the making of history. 

A disinherited, arrogant and musically gifted Robert Frobisher chronicles the making of his avant garde 'Cloud Atlas' sextet in a series of letters addressed to his dear friend from distant Zedelghem.

Dauntless Luisa Rey doggedly pursues the truth and exposes the nexus between the Nixon administration and corporate corruption, emerging victorious against the tide of adverse circumstances. 

Ageing, pedantic and self-important vanity publisher Timothy Cavendish endures a 'ghastly ordeal' partly as comeuppance for his lifelong selfishness but manages to emerge from his own predicament with a reformed worldview. 

Fabricant Sonmi~451 rises above the 'catechisms' of institutionalized servitude to 'corpocratic' masters in futuristic Korea to light the spark of revolution. 

In a post-apocalyptic Hawaii, valleysman Zachry witnesses mankind on the brink of a choice between complete annihilation and survival through self-reform. 

And master puppeteer David Mitchell pulls all their strings from the background.

As she delights in her newfound admiration for the sweeping scope of this masterpiece and Mitchell's ambitious foray into the Matryoshka-doll structured story-telling, she doesn't fail to notice the accusations of gimmickry and pretensions, of self-indulgent writing, of 'trying too hard', of 'contrivances' and acknowledges the legitimacy of these opinions. 
But then she remembers Robert Frobisher answering Mitchell's detractors on his behalf. 

"Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late..."

Do you blame her for chuckling at the man's foresight and wit?

Enthralled, she notices the parallels drawn between the rabid consumerism of our times and a 'predatory society' based on principles of the empowered devouring the disenfranchised and the voiceless, the invisibility of the aged in the eyes of the young and unwrinkled, carefully inserted allusions to virulent sexism, racism and xenophobia through the ages, the enthusiastic nod given to cross-cultural harmony and freedom of sexuality and she wonders if Mitchell has left any of the issues haunting mankind since times immemorial unexplored. 

Thus as Mitchell tips his hat to the likes of Melville and Calvino, to prose stylists like Joyce and Nabokov, to the traditions of intertextual witticisms and metafictional references, to all the disparate voices and genres that help enrich the body of literature today, she tips her hat to Mitchell's genius and the sheer audacity of his vision.

Unhappily she then takes cognizance of the fact that never again will she read 'Cloud Atlas' for the first time. 
But then again, she might.

 

Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

First published:- 2006

Star rating:-

Terror. Stark naked, clear as the day and indelible in its intensity. Terror that turns its unflinching gaze on you, commanding you to quake in your boots and disintegrate into pieces. This book is that kind of cold dread that seeps into your blood like insidious venom and drains away your strength in a steady, agonizing trickle as you read along. The horror of being stranded in a world, where the living live on either to become sustenance for other survivors or to hunt and feast on fellow brethren to survive, becomes as real as the morning sunlight pouring in to your room through the gauzy curtains.

The trouble with dystopian fiction (literary and otherwise) is that if you have read one book from the genre you have pretty much read them all. And the rather unabashed confession I have to make in this regard is that I have read quite a lot of them - this is the 'guilty pleasure' I am not really guilty of indulging in once in a while. But when the focus of the discussion on dystopias shifts to a universally read book like 'The Road' then opinions range from acerbically negative criticism, a patronizing, reluctant pat on the back to disappointed neutrality and effusive praise. Cormac McCarthy's prose has also garnered less than enthusiastic responses from quite a significant number of reviewers. I suppose some thought his metaphors to be too flowery for their taste. While the rest have found him to be repetitive and dull. 

Fair enough. But I did not.

To bring to life a world, where there's nothing left to do except scrounge around for nourishment, it is obvious the author will be hard pressed to elaborately detail the act of unscrewing a jar top and drinking from it. The monotone adopted while chronicling these trivial actions conveys the chilling truth of how much gravity is being accorded to affairs considered undeserving of even a passing mention in a former way of life.

Thus, I refuse to join in the chorus of complaints. The very visceral and undiluted reaction the narrative elicited from me as a reader, caused me to refrain from belittling McCarthy's gift for utilizing the same old genre tropes to offer such insightful commentary on the human condition. And despite its bleak and nihilistic leanings, 'The Road' surprised me with its deft handling of a subject as sensitive as a parent-child relationship, a theme that is often explored in many fictional narratives but with varying degrees of success. More than any tear-inducing gimmickry, the relationship depicted here bears a frighteningly close resemblance to how things are in reality. 

Our two unnamed vagrants, a listless father-son duo, who move down this seemingly endless road strewn with the debris of a world long gone and the echoes of a way of life no longer preserved, seemed to me to be representatives of a large majority of humans. The father acts as a kind of misery-sponge, enduring the brunt of all the vicissitudes of fate that await them on this cruel and unforgiving peregrination, while shielding the son from the same. And as the toil of this godforsaken journey wears the parent down to the point of no return, the child is familiarized with the brutalities of the world at large and gently shown the ways in which one can side-step all the unpleasantness and maintain an existence without challenging authority in any form. Isn't this what a majority of humans have been seeking to accomplish on an infinite loop? 'Survive and don't ask for trouble in any form.' is the motto etched onto the blank slate of our minds since childhood. 

All the horrors lying in ambush for this father-son pair, starting from chance encounters with roving bands of cannibals to combating the evident threat of starvation and the bitter cold which freezes them to the bone, can be taken to be allegories of all the challenges of living that individually all of us have to contend with. The metaphorical road is just another minefield where one can never foresee the kind of evils one wrong step may unleash. All the lawless laws, by which the world is governed once the formerly established edifice of order and organization has crumbled to dust, are deeply reminiscent of the relentless cycle of injustices institutionalized by our so-called 'civilization'. Just as the weak are preyed upon and devoured alive in this dystopia, the downtrodden and oppressed are victims of a sort of economic cannibalism enshrined in the 'laws' of our reality. 

The scales are tipped ever in the favor of those who wield power in some form; in this dystopia it is the possession of a weapon, in ours it is the ownership of wealth. 

"The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all."

It disturbs me how near invisible the line of separation between an imagined dystopia and a real one is.
 

Review: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

First published:-1985

Read in:- August, 2013

 Star rating:-

Consider this not a ground-breaking work of literature. Consider this not a piece of fiction boasting an avant-garde mode of narration. 
Consider it not a commentary on the concept of subjugation of the weak by the ones holding the reins. Consider it not a thinly veiled feminist diatribe either.

Instead, consider The Handmaid's Tale an almost physical experience. Consider Margaret Atwood a fearless deliverer of unpleasant news - a messenger unafraid of dishing out the bone-chilling, cruel, unaltered truth and nothing but the truth.

Move over Bram Stoker. Move over H.P. Lovecraft. Fade away into oblivion, Edgar Allan Poe. Disappear down the depths of obscurity, Stephen King. Your narratives are not nearly as coldly brutal, your premonitions not nearly as portentous. 
Because Ms Atwood, presents to us something so truly disturbing in the garb of speculative fiction that it reminds one of Soviet-era accounts of quotidian hardships in Gulag labour camps. 

Speculative is it?

Aren't the Offreds (Of Fred) , Ofglens (Of Glen), Of warrens (Of Warren) of Gilead equivalent to the Mrs So-and-So-s of the present, reduced to the identity of their male partners? Isn't the whittling down of a woman to the net worth of her reproductive organs and her outer appearance an accepted social more? Isn't blaming the rape victim, causing her to bear the burden of unwarranted shame and social stigma a familiar tactic employed by the defense attorney?
Hasn't the 21st century witnessed the fate of Savita Halappanavars who are led to their untimely deaths by inhumane laws of nations still unwilling to acknowledge the importance of the life of a mother over her yet unborn child?
Doesn't the 21st century have materially prosperous nations governed by absurd, archaic laws which prohibit a woman from driving a car?
Doesn't the world still take pleasure in terrorizing activists like Caroline Criado-Perez with threats of rape and murder only because they have the audacity to campaign for female literary icons (Jane Austen) to become the face of Britain's 10-pound note?
Do I not live in a country where female foeticide is as normal an occurrence as the rising and setting of the sun?

Are we still calling this speculative fiction?

Some may wish to labour under the delusion that the women belonging to this much vaunted modern civilization of ours are not experiencing the same nightmare as Offred and are at perfect liberty to do what they desire. But I will not.
Because when I look carefully, I notice shackles encircling my feet, my hands, my throat, my womb, my mind. Shackles whose presence I have become so used to since the dawn of time, that I no longer possess the ability to discern between willful submission and conditioned subservience.

But thankfully enough, I have Margaret Atwood to jolt me back into consciousness and to will me to believe that I am chained, bound and gagged. That I still need to break free. 
I thank her for making me shudder with indignation, revulsion and righteous anger. I thank her for causing bile to rise up my throat. 
And I thank her for forcing me to see that women of the present do live in a dystopia like Offred's United States of America. We just prefer to remain blissfully blind to this fact at times.

Disclaimer:- I mean no disrespect to the other writers mentioned in this review all of whom I have read and deeply admire.

 

Review: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Star Rating: 

The only thing about Ready Player One that I can even remotely appreciate is the nostalgia it might stir up in readers who grew up in 80s America. Cline, in his debut offering, uses his love and knowledge about yesteryear pop culture to cleverly mask its many technical shortcomings. He lays out a plot that guarantees fun - an elaborate 80s-themed treasure hunt in a futuristic virtual world. And judging by the high average rating on GR, he seems to have gotten away with it.

How "fun" this book is depends on how much you know, or want to know, about the movies and video-games and music of the 80s. Forget the west, I hardly know anything about Bollywood movies from that era. So reading this book was like being stuck in a fangirl/fanboy convention without a clue about what the gush-fest was for. My initial curiosity kept me entertained and Cline's long explanations made sure I could keep up but that lasted only for the first 30 percent. The onslaught of pop culture was so relentless that fun turned to exhaustion pretty quickly. My patience finally ran out around page 300 and I skipped straight to the rather-obvious end.

Let's keep the pop-culture aside and look at the rest.

Characters? Flatter than cardboard. One-dimensional. Painfully contrived.

Writing? I won't call it terrible, but it's not something worth appreciating either. Mediocre at best, annoyingly juvenile at worst. I've come across better sentence construction in fanfiction.

Plot? It is one long sequence of duex ex machinas. Crazy coincidences. Stumbling across lifesavers by chance. Inane plans that work out. Every. Single. Time.

World-building? If you're going to give me amazing virtual reality, you must first make me believe in a real world where such a thing can be thought of as feasible. But as detailed as the OASIS is, Cline's real world is just as vague. All I know is that it's 2044 and the Earth is ugly because there's climate change and energy crisis and starvation and all that. So everyone escapes by logging into the OASIS - something that requires a special console, haptic gloves and virtual-reality visors.
Yeah right.

What frustrates me most is the lost potential in the tale. We're talking about people who are so fully attuned to their virtual selves that they have no life outside the OASIS. There is so much to explore here - the psychology of these characters, the clash of identities, the perception versus reality debate. But Cline takes all that potential and throws it out the window. No wait, he mentions a lot of deep things and then leaves them be. Because how can thought-provoking and fun exist at the same time, no?

There is nothing wrong with fun. But there is also nothing spectacular about fun. Which is why I'm more than a little surprised with all the gushing reviews and high ratings. I expect this to be the most unpopular of all my unpopular opinions yet, but I believe Ready Player One is the most overrated book I've ever read.

1.5 rounded off

Review : World War Z by Max Brooks

Full title:- World War Z : An Oral History of the Zombie War  (yeah too long to write the whole thing on top at once)

(Originally review posted on Goodreads:- May 5, 2013)

Initially I had thought World War Z was going to be a book I would be surreptitiously adding to

my 'read' list on Goodreads, rating it and moving on to better reads quite unceremoniously.
I had considered not even the remotest possibility of reviewing it, because I assumed this was going to be one of those books one reads for sheer entertainment value and little else. 
But here I am writing one anyway, because I think the author definitely deserves some praise for his powers of imagination, if not for the copious amount of research he must have put in to write this.

If you are looking for your regular dosage of blood, guts and gore or a deliciously disturbing montage of decapitated torsos and severed limbs, I suggest you look elsewhere. Because World War Z is different from your mainstream zombie book.
Sure it contains the appropriate number of grotesque scenarios and morbid imagery, but these are not its highlights.
Here the zombie apocalypse serves merely as a backdrop against which the fragility of the world order is exposed - how an unforeseen human crisis of unimaginably catastrophic proportions can make the painstakingly put-together fabric of our civilization crumble like a house of cards.
Instead of recounting the story of the survival of one particular group of humans, making their way from one safe haven to another, Max Brooks gives us the bird's eye view of the nature of the calamity. 
The story of the human resistance against zombies unfolds from the perspective of not one but numerous survivors all over the world - military and navy men/women, war strategists, politicians, fraudulent businessmen, doctors, film directors, divers, ordinary civilians and so on. But the multiple points of view are compiled together in a single document, by an unnamed UN official to help create a clearer picture of the extent of the tragedy after the war has ended.
So what one finds in this book are minutiae regarding military equipment, weapons specially designed to fight off the living dead, strategies for quarantine and annihilation of infected people, psychological after-effects of surviving the disaster and living through it. Which makes it a lot more interesting and unconventional since the focus is shifted from the mindless violence perpetrated by a bunch of reanimated corpses and placed on human strengths and fallacies, instead. 

So then why did it leave me underwhelmed? 
Because the different accounts start to sound repetitive and the novelty of the mode of narration wears off after you get past the halfway mark. The frequency with which the author bombards the reader with descriptions of tactics employed by military and navy men tires one out after a while. And often, he goes overboard while trying to display his ample knowledge of the socio-political landscape of various nations. The way the book feels like a piece of non-fiction rather than a fictionalized account, also curtails one's enjoyment of the story somewhat.
I would have rated this 4 stars had the book helped me maintain the same level of interest throughout. 
That, however, does not mean it is unreadable. 
If you love your zombies yet cannot put up with mediocre writing and respect an author who cares to thoroughly research the topics he wishes to write on, World War Z is your next prospective read.

3 stars out of 5.

Review : The Stand by Stephen King

(Original review posted on Goodreads:- Feb 02, 2013)

One of the reasons why I would never club Stephen King together with any of the other best-selling writers of his generation (Grisham, Archer, Patterson, Sheldon and so on) is this :-
None of them match King's calibre as a story-teller.They don't even come close.

If somebody spins an intriguing tale, his characters get in the way of my enjoyment of it.
If somebody excels at characterization, his plotting is rather unconvincing.
If somebody plots a story well, then his writing turns out to be flat.
(And if you're unlucky enough, some of them mess everything up.)

But Stephen King, possesses that rare talent of getting everything right - the story, the unraveling of the plot, the imagery, the underlying implications, the characters, the backdrop, the world-building, the writing - down to the very last detail. 
He can grasp your attention at the onset, reel you in slowly but surely, give you nerve-wracking moments of pure anxiety, make you visualize a scene exactly the way he must have imagined it, feel for the characters in his story as if they were people of flesh and blood you were familiar with and, at some point, render you completely incapable of discerning between reality and the make-believe world of his imagination. And you're caught in the same nightmare as the characters of his book are plunging deeper into with every passing moment. 

The Stand is one such Stephen King creation. Arguably known as his best written work yet, The Stand, I'm happy to inform readers, deserves every bit of the praise and adulation it continues to receive worldwide till this day. 
Now don't get me wrong. The book is nothing new when you glance at the blurb. It is nothing you haven't already read or known about because it is the story your mom/dad/grandma must have read to you as a kid - while you listened moon-eyed with wonder and awe, overcome with emotions you couldn't quite fathom. 
It is the ever-fascinating and timeless tale of good triumphing over evil that you have come across enough times yet can never possibly get over. 
It is that same story, but with a distinct Stephen King-esque flavour.
Add a dystopian, post-apocalyptic, anarchic world in the grip of an epidemic that claimed most human lives to the eternal conflict between good and evil, and the summation result will lead to The Stand.
But it is so much more than this simple one-sentence summary. Every character, every plot device, every written scene has been constructed and put together so fastidiously in this book that at the end of it one feels that the reader is assigned with the task of collecting and preserving every piece of the gigantic puzzle to form this humbling, larger-than-life image the author had begotten.
Everything is done so ingeniously, that the mesmerized reader can only sit back and watch this spectacle of gargantuan proportions unfolding right in front of his/her mind's eyes. 
Horror, psychological ramifications of events, political intrigue, war, chaos in the absence of a centralized administration, a crumbling world order, basest of our human tendencies - King doesn't shy away from exploring the entire gamut of human actions and emotions in a world where nothing of the old establishments has survived.

This man can write. There's no doubt about it.

In terms of sheer volume, scale and narrative sweep, it is an epic. In a way it is The Ramayana, The Mahabharata, The Iliad and The Odyssey or a concoction of all the elements that transformed each one of these stories into epics the world will never cease to look upon with the utmost respect. 
It is the story that never becomes stale despite the number of years you insert between the time you read it first and read it for the umpteenth time in some other form. It is the story that transcends barriers of language, culture, religion and history and will always be told and retold in possible ways imaginable, for as long as humanity survives.
It is the story you are bound to be won over by even if you're snotty enough to swear by your copy of Ulysses and frown upon the Stephen Kings of the world of writing simply because they don't have much of a chance of ever winning the Man Booker or Pulitzer or *gasp* the Nobel Prize.
It is the story of good, evil and everything in between. It is the story of love and hatred, loyalty and betrayal, sin and redemption, fate and co-incidence, rationality and the inexplicable. Of unalterable mistakes and innocence lost. Of the goodness of the human heart and the face of the Devil.
At 1100+ pages, it was rather much too short. 
I almost wished for it to never end. 
But then again one can always re-read to start the cycle of awesomeness all over again.

5 awestruck stars out of 5.