Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

Until recently, I’ve only ever thought of Truman Capote as the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Frankly, even Breakfast at Tiffany’s seems to belong less to him and more to Audrey Hepburn who immortalised Holly Golightly on screen. Even when you are reading the book, it’s impossible to keep her persona out of it. However, Other Voices, Other Rooms belongs entirely to Capote.

This semi-autobiographical novel has its roots in Capote’s childhood spent in Alabama. Capote recreates his thirteen year old self as Joel Knox, the protagonist of this story.  Joel lost his mother and was being taken care of by his aunt and her family until one day, a letter arrives from his father, whom he has never seen or heard of before. The letter invites Joel to Skully’s Landing, where his father now lives with his second wife. Joel arrives at Skully’s Landing, a crumbling and isolated, old mansion which is nothing like he imagined it would be. He meets his stepmother Amy, a morose and whining woman and Cousin Randolph, a tragic and dramatic figure.  But no one will tell him anything about his father who is supposedly ill.

While the spotlight stays firmly on Joel at all times, there are other interesting characters that inhabit this strange world he now finds himself in. There’s Jesus Fever, a centenarian, mule driver and his granddaughter Zoo who has a strange obsession with snow. There’s also Idabel, a sullen and tomboyish girl and Joel’s only friend. Capote based the character of Idabel on his childhood friend Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee modelled the character of Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird on Truman Capote).

Other Voices, Other Rooms raked in a lot of controversy for this photograph of Capote on the book’s back cover. It was termed suggestive and debauched although on the face of it there isn’t anything remotely sexual. This is the mood that runs through the whole book. There aren’t really any sex scenes, foul language or violence but there is always something unsettling and suggestive, though it’s never articulated. Capote’s real triumph as a story teller is in the atmospherics he is able to create with so few, well chosen words. One really senses the decay of the Landing and the eeriness of its surroundings.

Capote’s debut effort is a coming-of-age story like no other. It’s also about desolation and loneliness. Every character in the book is isolated, cut off from all the others and fighting to be heard. Other Voices, Other Rooms is brooding and haunting, quite an experience. Definitely read it.

The Bronte Story by Margaret Lane

     

    

     When Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her famous book The Life of Charlotte Brontë, she had to tread very carefully because a lot of the people who played a part in the story were still living and their feelings and reputations had to be protected. Mrs Gaskell, apart from being Charlotte Bronte’s biographer was also her friend and champion so the biography is hardly an unbiased account. This is what Margaret Lane tries to  correct and improve upon with her retelling of Charlotte Bronte’s biography The Bronte Story.

      I must say the title misled me. I assumed the book was about all the Brontes, particularly Emily, Anne and Charlotte. We are given a brief sketch of each Bronte but the attention paid to them is cursory. The spotlight stays firmly on Charlotte. Mrs Gaskell herself is an important character in this story. As Margaret Lane says in the introduction, “This book is offered as a sort of footnote to Mrs Gaskell, bringing the reader back at every point to her incomparable text, and at the same time putting him in possession of everything that has come to light in the century since she wrote.”

    There are a few chapters to Charlotte Bronte’s life which were intentionally suppressed by Mrs Gaskell. The most controversial of these being Charlotte’s unrequited love for Constantin Heger, a married man and her teacher. Margaret Lane tells the whole story, quoting from Charlotte’s own letter to Heger. The letters are pretty tragic and lovelorn and I can see why Mrs Gaskell did not want their contents to be public. Lane also touches on Charlotte’s relationship with her husband which was placid at best. The stormy passion of Jane Eyre seems even more intense in contrast to the lukewarm love life of its author. Where did she dredge up all that intensity when she had never experienced it herself? A triumph of imagination over reality.

     

     I wish the author had focused on telling the Bronte story as she saw it, in her own voice. The book seems to have two and sometimes three narrative threads which can get confusing. There are letters from Charlotte, the writings of Mrs Gaskell and Lane’s own surmises all making a bit of a hodgepodge. In fact Lane quotes Mrs Gaskell’s book so extensively that almost half of it seems to be reproduced here. The Bronte Story is not an easy book to read. The writing seems unnecessarily complex and in some parts it is so dry that it reads more like a research paper.

      

     Overall I don’t think the book does justice to its subject. The story really comes alive only when it is directly quoting Charlotte Bronte. Her letters are the most interesting and touching part of this book.  I loved the letter she writes to her friend after the death of Anne, the last of her siblings. In it she talks of her writing as her solace, “The faculty of imagination lifted me when I was sinking, three months ago; its active exercise has kept my head above water since; its results cheer me now.”  All those of us who have sought refuge in books can relate to this.

       It wouldn’t take much skill or effort to tell a fascinating story of the Bronte sisters. Their lives were filled with so much tragedy and creativity, the book would practically write itself. Unfortunately Margaret Lane gives us facts and opinions but entirely leaves out the soul. I would only recommend this to die-hard fans of Charlotte Bronte. If you haven’t already Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Bronte, read that instead.

Miss Marple’s Final Cases by Agatha Christie.

      The short story Tuesday Night Club introduced the world to Miss Jane Marple in1926. An elderly spinster, prim and fragile looking, Miss Marple was supposedly Agatha Christie’s favourite creation.  The last novel featuring Miss Marple is Sleeping Murder which was published after Christie’s death. Miss Marple’s Final Cases is a collection of nine short stories, seven of which feature Miss Marple.  The name of this book is a bit misleading, firstly because these cases actually occur somewhere in the middle of Marple’s detective career and secondly because two of the short stories in the book do not feature Miss Marple at all.

      I’m a staunch fan of Miss Marple and all things Christie, but I must confess that the stories in this collection are not my favourites. Not that they’re bad, but some of them do seem a little rushed. In fact, I find this to be the case with all Marple short stories that I’ve read so far. There is something about the character that seems to warrant the more leisurely pace of a novel. Having said that, I did quite like Greenshaw’s Folly and The Case of The Caretaker. The later is faintly reminiscent of Endless Night, Christie’s suspense novel that did not feature any of her detectives.

        As I mentioned, there are two stories in this collection that don’t feature Miss Marple. In fact, they are not detective/crime stories at all. I suppose they could be called supernatural stories. Robert Barnard, a crime writer and critic, said”... Christie did not have the stylistic resources to bring off [the supernatural stories] successfully." I disagree. Granted the outcome of the stories were somewhat predictable but Christie does create tension and foreboding in her own unique style.

       If you’ve never read a Miss Marple before, I wouldn’t recommend starting with this book. It really doesn’t introduce the lady detective and her methods well enough. If however, you are a Miss Marple/Agatha Christie fan like me, definitely read Final Cases. It’s not Christie’s best work, but it’s still pretty darn good.

Nine Stories by J.D.Salinger

      

     I read Catcher in The Rye (nice review of it here) when I was a nineteen year old, full of angst and acne. I was almost convinced that this story was written especially for me. I loved it deeply and kept going back to it for months. Considering all of this, it’s surprising to me that I hadn’t read any of Salinger’s other works. Until now that is.

    Nine Stories, as the title suggests is a compilation of nine short stories by Salinger. The short story is apparently his medium of choice, Catcher in the Rye being the only complete novel he wrote. I can see why, Salinger’s succinct prose and less-is-more style is ideally suited to the short story. He uses back stories sparingly and never analyses his characters (he leaves that to you).

     Many of the stories in this book feature members of the fictional Glass family.  The Glass family is a bunch of troubled and gifted people created by Salinger who appear in most of his short stories and novella’s. If you’ve read Franny and Zooey or Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction you would be familiar with them but it doesn’t matter really. In fact, the Glass name only ever crops up in A Perfect Day for Bananafish, it’s the back story that Salinger doesn’t bore you with. You can read more about it here.

    The stories explore isolation, growing pains, spirituality and death.  Death especially is almost a literary device here, appearing in the first and last story, differently but with the same smack-you-in-the-face abruptness.  De Daumier Smith’s Blue Period is Salinger at his humorous best.  The best known story in this book is For Esme- with Love and Squalor.  My favourite however is Down at the Dinghy. It’s a powerful and intimate story and I think it really is an excellent example of Salinger’s narrative skill and the symbolisms he weaves into the most mundane scenes.

     What I loved most about this book is that it doesn’t overindulge the reader. It leaves you to take from it what you will without crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s for you.  Filled with equal parts hope and despair, Nine Stories is a book that you can re-read and you can read it differently each time.  

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

        Last week we had a discussion on the Literary Blog Hop about socio-political agenda in books. I think most of us agreed that as long as the agenda did not take us away from the story it was acceptable and sometimes even desirable.  In Half of a Yellow Sun the politics is the story.  Adichie doesn’t shy away from taking sides (The title refers to the emblem on the Biafran flag) but she still somehow manages to keep prejudice away.

         Half of a Yellow Sun is narrated from four different perspectives. First there is Ugwu, an adolescent houseboy   with no political views whatsoever. Then there is Olanna, a beautiful and educated woman from a privileged background that she leaves behind. There is also Richard, a British expatriate in Nigeria who is desperate to belong. The fourth perspective is actually a book within the book, hauntingly titled The World Was Silent When We Died.

       The story begins on an endearing note with an innocent Ugwu arriving from a tiny village to the university town of Nsukka to work as a houseboy. He is awed and amazed at everything he sees, especially his Master. The Master (Odenigbo) is in love with Olanna who moves in with him to the chagrin of her wealthy and self absorbed parents. Richard is an aspiring writer who falls in love with Olanna’s twin Kainene.  There is hurt and betrayal, loyalty and immense love. And then the Biafran war rips their lives apart.

War forces these people out of their homes and throws them into a world that gets more hellish by the day.  All concepts of good and bad, strength and weakness are turned on their head. Adichie does not turn this into a war commentary or a history lesson. She never resorts to the rhetoric that most war novels are burdened with. The story stays focused on these characters while their lives, ideologies and personalities change and sometimes come unstuck.

        This was not an easy book to read.  The mellow start does not prepare you for the unrelenting brutality that follows. Parts of the book are absolutely harrowing and you wonder why you’re doing this to yourself.  But you care for these people, you mourn for them and you can feel their helplessness, their terror, their shame and their rage.

“Were you silent when we died?”

Did you see photos in sixty eight

Of children with their hair becoming rust:

Sickly patches nestled on those small heads

Then falling off, like rotten leaves on dust?

Imagine children with arms like toothpicks,

With footballs for bellies and skin stretched thin.

It was Kwashiorkor- difficult word.

A word that was not quite ugly enough, a sin.

You needn’t imagine. There were photos

Displayed in gloss-filled pages of your Life.

Did you see? Did you feel sorry briefly,

Then turn around to hold your lover or wife?

Candide by Voltaire

“What is Optimism?” asked Cacambo – “Alas!” said Candide, “it is the mania for insisting that all is well when all is by no means well”.

        It’s difficult to say what Candide is about. It is the most bizarre book I’ve read lately. But, I mean that in the best possible way.  Perhaps the closest I can come to slotting it is to call it a farce.  Voltaire is supposed to have written this book as a rebuttal of the philosophy of enforced optimism. He believed that the “all’s for the best” theorists tried only to make people endure and accept their misfortunes without complaint. Obviously, optimism is not Voltaire’s strong point.

     Candide is the illegitimate son of a baron in Westphalia. His great hero is his tutor Pangloss who believes that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Unfortunately, Candide’s education is cut short when he is booted out of the Baron’s household for kissing the baron’s daughter Cunégonde. Thus begins an adventure that takes Candide all over the world, to real and mythical lands. He gets flogged, recovers, gets flogged again, finds Cunégonde, loses her, commits murder, escapes, murders some more, finds Cunégonde again, loses her again, finds wealth, loses it, finds it and once more loses it, finds Cunégonde but unfortunately isn't able to lose her this time. And all this in less than 130 pages.

       

         Candide’s world is filled with characters unlike any you will ever encounter. Almost everyone who is brutally murdered seems to crop up again, alive and well. Kings, pirates, holy men and large red sheep all weave in and out of Candide’s life. Realism is not the name of the game here. Neither is subtlety.  Voltaire’s pen is vitriolic and he uses it to settle personal scores and take pot-shots at everyone from the Pope to his fellow writers.

        Reading Candide is like being on an absurd roller coaster ride that never slackens from the first page to the last. Sometimes irreverent, sometimes gory and sometimes downright obscene. Candide is a fun ride, though it will leave you somewhat breathless.

Image http://www.uhseport.net

Talk to the Hand by Lynne Truss

            

        I was on vacation en famille and waiting for my husband to finish check in procedures at the airport when a woman coming from the opposite direction, mobile phone firmly stuck to her ear, rammed her luggage trolley into me.  By the time I had gotten by breath back, she was long gone, without the slightest gesture of apology.  When I made my way to the airport bookstore sometime later, I was still fuming. So it seemed like serendipity when I saw Lynne Truss’ book on rudeness Talk to the Hand.

      I had loved her previous book Eats, Shoots and Leaves and assumed that anyone who could make punctuation engaging and funny would probably do even better with rudeness. After all, the subject does lend itself so easily to satire. I expected to be thoroughly entertained. I wasn’t.

       It starts out promisingly. The world is getting ruder. You nod along.  No one feels the need to use the magic words anymore. Quite true, you think.  But then Truss goes into crotchety old geezer mode, going on and on about “kids these days” and “parents these days”.  Her voice gets shriller and what started out as a tongue-in-cheek poke at declining manners becomes a sermon about the whole of civilization going to the dogs.

      To give the devil her due, she does make some valid points. Like an absence of personal accountability being one of the causes for increasing rudeness.  She also points out that politeness, even for those who intend it, is becoming increasingly dicey in a world obsessed with political correctness. If you are a gentleman and give up your seat on the bus for a lady, are you gallant or are you a chauvinist? What about helping a person with disabilities? Is that condescension?

        Talk to the Hand is chock full of anecdotes and quotes on the subject. I liked the one about a woman writing to Tommy Steele to complain that he wasn’t to be seen when she rode the bus past his house and that as a celebrity he had a duty to be visible to the fans who made him what he is. Also mildly funny is the guy who sent sheet metal back to junk mailers in their post paid envelopes. Most of the other funny stories in the book though, are just not funny.

       I felt that very often her complaints against people amounted to nothing more than pointless nitpicking. I certainly wouldn’t consider a friendly waiter impolite just because he/she said “there you go” while serving me my order and I am not offended by anyone responding to my “thank you” with a “no problem”. 

       I didn’t really enjoy this book. With no new insight into the matter and rather forced humour, this feels like one, long, unrelenting rant.

Beastly Tales by Vikram Seth

Years ago, in ye olde pre-baby days, hubby and I did the rounds of a theatre festival whose theme was “Art with a Social Conscience”. Among several heavy duty plays was a dramatic reading of a poem by Naseeruddin Shah. The poem was a satire on environmental insensitivity in general and Big Dams in particular. It was called The Elephant and the Tragopan, written by Vikram Seth. I’d known Vikram Seth only for his novels, mainly the suitable boy, I’d never heard of his poems.  Last year, on a trip to Kolkata, I found a ratty copy of Beastly Tales at a roadside stall and was thrilled to find this poem in it. Along with nine other, equally delightful poems.

I had initially thought that this might be a fun book to read to my son, but it might be a long while before he is ready for this one. It isn’t really aimed at kids and some of the poems are a bit too gory (The Eagle and the Beetle). The Monkey and the Crocodile is an exception and my boy adores it. The author states that these stories in verse are gathered from India, China, Greece, Ukraine and the lastly The Land of Gup, that magical country in Seth’s imagination where ambitious frogs, wise elephants and other such creatures live.  

My favourite poems from this collection are the The Hare and the Tortoise, The Rat and the Ox and of course, the one that started it all The Elephant and the Tragopan. The Hare and the Tortoise is a retelling of the classic parable in the age of reality TV and media created celebrities. So now the hare is a vain society swan who is ‘famous for being famous’ and the tortoise is a cautious accountant. Despite losing, the hare grabs all the headlines and book/movie deals while the tortoise is deemed too boring to make good copy.

“Thus the Hare was pampered rotten

And the tortoise was forgotten”

The Rat and the Ox is a Chinese tale, wittily retold in verse. It tells of the Rat who outsmarts the Ox to earn the top slot on the Chinese Zodiac.

This book would be worth its very meagre price for its Illustrations alone. Each one precedes a poem and beautifully captures its quirky characters. Although these characters are elephants and cats and wolves and mice, their souls are unmistakably human. Seth uses these timeless fables to bare our darkest side to us. There isn’t always a happy ending here and almost never a ‘moral-of-the-story’, yet there is always an amazing insight into the most bewildering of all creatures. Humans.

“I speak to you as one whose clan

Has served and therefore studied man.

He is a creature mild and vicious,

Practical minded and capricious,

Loving and Brutal, Sane and Mad,

The Good as puzzling as the Bad”

                                         ---The Elephant in The Elephant and the Tragopan

And Thereby Hangs a Tale – Jeffrey Archer

“While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.”

So says Jeffrey Archer in his introduction to this book and he should know. Though he has written more bestselling novels than I care to count, I love him best for his short stories. A Twist in the Tale is my favorite collection, followed closely by A Quiver Full of Arrows. I finally got down to reading his newest book of short stories, And Thereby Hangs a Tale. Fifteen shorts make up this collection and more than half of them are true stories, or so we’re told. I think it’s better to treat this book entirely as a work of fiction. It’s more enjoyable that way.

 The first story in the book ‘Stuck on You’ immediately takes you in. This is classic Jeffrey Archer. The gentle start, the slow build up of tension, the nail biting suspense and finally his trademark, why-didn’t-I-see-that-coming ending.  I actually liked this story the best, but others like, ‘Where There's a Will’ and ‘Double-cross’ were great too. However, some of the stories seemed very contrived and the writing laboured. I didn’t think much of the last story and I could have sworn that I’d heard or read "Better the Devil You Know" somewhere else. It has the quality of a parable that’s been told and retold several times, in several different ways.

           And Thereby Hangs a Tale is definitely not Archer’s best work.  It has neither the sharpness of A Twist in the Tale nor the intensely engaging quality of his novels. Yet, it is very readable and the bits that are good are really good. Not a classic that stayed with me, but a good way to pass a lazy afternoon.

Mother by Maxim Gorky

                   Mother’s day seems a good time to revisit an old favourite, Maxim Gorky’s Mother. Gorky intended the Mother and her story to be a symbol of the working classes and their journey from oppression to awakening and finally to emancipation.  However, just for today, leave aside all symbolisms and see this simply as the story of a mother and you will find an immensely textured and poignant character.  

                    When we are first introduced to the mother (Pelagea Nilovna) she is recently widowed, but hardly grieving. Her husband was a drunken, wife-beating, factory worker who had terrorized her for their entire married life.  She has mutely accepted every injustice done to her, asking no questions, seeking no explanations.  All her hopes now rest on her only son Pavel.

         Pavel dealt with the brutality of his father by retreating into a shell, closing out his mother too in the process. With his father gone he seems to notice her again and yet, there seems to be discord within him. He studies books that are forbidden and talks of the suffering of the working class. His mother cannot understand most of what he says. His compassion and intelligence make her proud but she is afraid for him too because he alone seems to struggle against a life that everyone else, including her, has accepted. Soon Pavel’s comrades too start to come over and his house turns into an unofficial headquarters for their group. Soon she becomes Mother to them all. She cooks for them, knits for them, cries for them and prays for them.

        In time, almost without her realising it, their cause becomes her own. She stands up to the people who rebuke her son and his friends. When Pavel is arrested, she takes forbidden leaflets to the factory disguised as a peddler. Eventually he is exiled to Siberia and the mother carries on her son’s work. “If our children, the dearest parts of our hearts, can give their lives and their freedom, dying without a thought for themselves, what ought I to do, a mother?”

Whatever your political beliefs may be, Mother will strike a chord because it is the story of mothers everywhere. I know my own mother has often been bewildered by the choices I made, yet she’s struggled to be supportive. I, like all mothers must come to terms with the fact that we cannot protect our children from the world. This is our story too. “Our children will be our judges” says mother in the book. May we all be judged kindly.

To my mother and to mothers everywhere, A Happy Mother’s Day. 

On Writing by Stephen King

In the second foreword to Stephen King’s On Writing, he says,” This is a short book because books on writing are filled with bullshit... I figured, the shorter the book, the less the bullshit.” Perhaps the most significant reason to like this book over other writing guides is that it has very less bullshit. How indicative this is of his usual writing style, I cannot say.  My husband is the great Stephen King fan, not me.  I haven’t read any of his other works; horror just isn’t a genre I’m fond of. However, there’s no denying that Stephen King is a most formidable raconteur. On writing is his homage to his craft.

           The book starts with a brief biography of his childhood and early years as a writer upto the publication of Carrie, his first bestseller. While he does write of a difficult childhood and his struggling days, he doesn’t dwell on the pathos unduly and at no point does this turn into a tearjerker.

 The second part of the book is all about the art and craft of writing. King introduces his concept of a writer’s toolbox and then deals with each of the tools in detail. There is no esoteric mumbo jumbo here. He deals with absolutely identifiable issues that any writer would be up against like the use of adverbs (“The road to hell is paved with adverbs”) or the need for restraint in writing descriptions. Obviously, there can never be any hard and fast rules to writing, but King offers up his technique as a rough guide to help you along. Although this is primarily aimed at writers of fiction, anyone with the intention of yielding a pen would benefit from this master class.

The last and smallest part of the book talks of his near fatal accident, his long, slow recovery and his return to writing. Again, there isn’t any melodrama here, just the facts and his belief that writing was a crucial part of his recovery process. He also includes a reading list of books which he feels are well written.

This book is a must read for all aspiring writers. Even if you don’t agree with all his dos and donts, you will still take away some fresh perspective on how to approach writing. I must also stress that this book is by no means for writers only. Even those who have no intention of writing anything will enjoy this peep inside the writers mind.

Write about what you know is a recurring mantra in this book and Stephen King proves the rule by writing about what he knows best, writing itself.