Ka. By Roberto Calasso

Ka

Roberto Calasso

Translated from the Italian by Tim Parks

Published 1999 by Vantage

As given on the back cover, quoting the Independent, this is 'an ... compendium of classical Indian myths and legends'. The narration is however not straightforward - not just translation, but commentary, interpretation and possibly reinterpretation, i.e. somebody else's interpretation, reinterpreted by the author. There are 15 chapters and each apparently addresses one quasi-coherent story (or myth or purana - it's difficult to know what name to give). But the stuff in each chapter obviously does not contain material from just one ancient text. The bibliography refers to more than a hundred different sources, mostly ancient Sanskrit texts, including the Vedas, many of the Brahmanas, the Upanishads, the Puranas, and the Mahabharata, as well as some modern texts such as Proust. The exclusive focus is on brahminical Hinduism, with an attempt in the penultimate chapter to include Buddhism in the same lineage. There is some sort of time line, with the first chapter dealing with the origin myths - before the earth, before the sun, before the Gods, before consciousness, before time. The next few chapters are clearly the Vedas, with  all the sex and violence. One chapter devoted to an elaborate description of the asvamedha yagna. Then there are the battles between the gods, the rishis, and some of asuras. There is a chapter describing Krishna leela, and another long one on the Mahabharata. (Strangely the Ramayana is not even mentioned anywhere in the book!). The 14th chapter is about the Buddha, called the 9th avatar of Visnu - Krishna is the 8th. And in a nice formulation, the author says that history began between the 8th and the 9th avatars. Which of course is the literal truth. Archaeological evidence exists for the Buddha, but not for the other avatars. 


Some of the stories are new to me, but most are familiar. The writing is part narrative, part interpretation, part philosophical discourse, often boring, but mostly nice to read. I skipped fairly large portions of it, especially in the beginning chapters. The creation and origin myths are convoluted and Calasso has probably added large doses of his own ideas here. In any case, what is stated here is only one version of these myths in Hinduism, even in the brahminical variety (or the BJP variety, though I guess the BJP may like to make this book another example of the anti-Hindu nature of liberal society). 


Anyway, here are some quotes.


In one chapter all the great rishis are described as having a kind of conference. Gotama says:'For many people things began with a series of Kings [e.g. for the Chinese - see a previous blog - NG]. For the Greeks it was a series of women. For the Aryas, a series of seers, of rishis. The kings conquered, the women united themselves with a god. And the seers? Motionless they vibrate with the brahman.' The anachronism here is obvious. But the idea is good.


'There is no story as complicated as the Mahabharata. And not just because of its length... Why did Vyasa choose this of all ways to tell the tale of a war fought between cousins in a plain of north-west India?...Even a tenth of the stories would be enough to generate the same impression. And the rest? Whatever happens in the island of Jambu, there's always a residue, an excess, something that overflows, goes beyond. Never the sharp profile, carved in the air, but long friezes, strips of stone bursting with action...Going back in time to what came before it, or forward a little, after it ended, we encounter a net that brushes against us on every side - and immediately we are struck by the conviction that we will never see the edges of that net, because there are no edges... the end and the beginning, terms that the mind is ever toying with, don't, in themselves, exist at all.'


'In the immensity of its structure, the Mahabharata can be seen as an overwhelming demonstration of the futility of conflict. Of every conflict. Was Dharma really renewed when the Pandavas, at last, and at a cost of countless dead, succeeded in defeating the Kauravas? Hardly. Peace was a half-life, still oppressed by memory. Dharma did reign again, but as it were for a fleeting interval.'


'Kasyapa said: Whether the existing world be made of mind or fire or some aggregate called matter is, in the end, hardly important. It only exists is if consciousness perceives it as existing. And if consciousness perceives it, within that consciousness there must be another consciousness that perceives the consciousness that perceives.'

...and so on ad infinitum, I guess! The author, here and at several other places in the book, tells the parable that recurs in the texts, of the two birds on opposite branches of a tree - one eating a fruit and the other observing the first bird.


'It is time that cooks each creature in its pot', said Yudishthira.
       

The Shape Shifter. By Tony Hillerman

The Shape Shifter

Tony Hillerman

Published 2006 by Harper Collins

Another nice crime/detective/police novel by Hillerman. (I read a few before, but this is the first one I am writing about here). The setting is the same as in most of his books - the Navajo lands in New Mexico/Colorado in USA. The detectives are chiefly from the Navajo Tribal Police, and though the crime and its detection is not directly connected with the Navajo culture, it plays out with that in the background. So we get a lot of information about native Indian customs, all of it sympathetic, with occasional direct attacks on the white 'European' culture that destroyed a lot of it. This is usual for Hillerman. In this book he also introduces Tommy Vang, a Hmong, who has been 'imported' from Laos/Vietnam to serve one of the characters in the book. There is long section in which the protagonist, retired Lt. Joe Leaphorn, formerly of the Navajo Tribal Police, has a conversation with Vang. They compare their respective cultures and find similarities in the way they kept getting pushed out of their native homelands to satisfy the greed of their 'conquerors' for land or natural resources. This particular awful treatment of the native Indians by the whites has been earlier described (harshly and sarcastically) by Joseph Heller in Catch 22. The Hmong were badly treated by not only the Chinese and the Vietnamese, but also the Americans during the Vietnam war.

The crime story moves a bit slowly, and not till the last few chapters does it get really interesting. The climactic pages are excellent, though rather too brief. All in all, a good read.

Rates of Exchange. By Malcolm Bradbury

Rates of Exchange

Malcolm Bradbury

Penguin Books. First published 1983.

This book was shortlisted for the 1983 Booker Prize. Experience tells that that does not necessarily make for a good read, but this book is one. It relates the academic trip of a British linguistics professor to the (imaginary) east European  country of 'Slaka', under a totalitarian communist regime. The protagonist Prof. Petworth is a colourless man, but meets a variety of men and women in his brief tour of Slaka, the capital city, and a couple of its provincial towns. The descriptions of the geography are like what one reads about an East European or Balkan country with medieval castles and baroque operas. The people of the country are an unsurprising mix of friendly, dull, sexy, uptight, etc., etc. One  encounter is with a low level British diplomat and his near-nymphomaniac wife. The diplomat has a speech defect and this leads to many jokes as he constantly repeats the rude-sounding first syllable of many ordinary words. The politics of the country is the standard cold war fare, reminiscent of Le Carre, Greene, Deighton, et al. Some of scenes remind me of Myanmar, and some, indeed, of socialist India! There are also descriptions of airports and lectures  that sync with some of my own experiences. One the best things about of the book is the language and how Bradbury captures the speech patterns of East Europeans speaking English. Wikipedia calls Bradbury 'a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern novel' and that probably underlies the focus on language and linguistics. There is a lot of humour in the writing as well as in the situations, and not all of them are aimed at socialism. There is no real tale, and the novel does not go anywhere except as a kind of intimate travelogue. There is no final denouement, though for a short space of time it appears as if there would be one. 

A couple of quotations:

'The business of a lecturer is, of course, to lecture... That is why planes have flown to bring him here, hotel rooms have been booked, food set before him  on plates; that is why he has left his house home and country, brought his briefcase, made his way to this point. His head may ache...his wrist may hurt, his split lip blur his talk a little; his heart may be be troubled, his spirit energyless, poor, lacking the will to be, let alone the will to become...but he has a story to tell, and now he is telling it. And telling it, he becomes himself an order, a sentence that grows into a paragraph and then a page, a page and then a plot, a direction incorporating a due beginning, a middle and end. His text before him, he becomes that text;... Petworth for this moment exists.' 

' "So many books", says Petworth..."Yes, every day I read them and become some more a person," says Princip.'

Drop Dead, My Lovely. By Ellis Weiner

Drop Dead, My Lovely

Ellis Weiner

Published by New American Library, 2004

A reverent spoof of the hard-boiled American detective novels (Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett, Ross MacDonald, Mickey Spillane...). Set in 2004, its hero, Pete Ingalls is a employee in a bookshop when a box full of detective novels falls on his head, and rearranges his brain. He comes out of a coma having forgotten everything that happened before, and thinking himself a detective. He gets the costume (fedora, greatcoat), the habits (drinking, smoking, wise-cracking), a seedy office, the language, and a receptionist, who's temping while she auditions for the stage. He gets a couple of cases which he simultaneously follows (sometimes making it difficult for the reader to keep track of what's happening, but it doesn't matter). He 'solves' one of the cases, thanks mainly to the actual detective work done by his assistant. The novel is written in the first person, like all the originals are, and Weiner works hard to project a crazy guy making like a cynical, world-weary flatfoot, and succeeds rather. There are several  references to the originals throughout the novel, coming mainly from the other characters who are chiefly amused by Ingalls' actions and dialogue. The novel however is on the whole not a great read, but mildly readable if you have read and are fan of the originals (as I am). 

The Panda's Thumb. By Stephen Jay Gould

The Panda's Thumb

Stephen Jay Gould

Penguin Books. First published 1980.

A set of 31 essays on paleobiology and evolutionary biology by a master. I have read and enjoyed (and learnt much from) Gould's books before, and this one is no exception. Except that they are all about the above two topics, the essays are only loosely connected. In the first few pieces, Gould tells something, but not much, about his theory of punctuated equilibrium as an alternative to the (then?) commonly held theory of slow steady evolution by random variation and natural selection. As 'evidence' he talks about repeated sudden extinctions. He does not say anything about Kimura's theory of neutral drift which I find an attractive way of explaining biological diversity. This is not to discount natural selection as the prime agent of evolution, only that it does not operate to always make organisms 'better and better'. Gould also talks about the Piltdown fraud; the evolution of how Mickey Mouse is drawn to make 'him' look more and more childish, and therefore more attractive; about politically and racially motivated biological and evolutionary theories about such features as the size and weight of brains of women and black people; about how to define species; about cladism; about the intelligence of dinosaurs; and about whether birds are descended from dinosaurs (they are) or whether they are a product of convergent evolution that produced feathers in two separate events - archaeopteryx and birds (no, they are not). Some of the essays are, well, not outdated, but dated, since surely much evidence has accumulated in the last 30 years that would have settled some of questions raised in them. For example, Gould speculates that the evolutionary relationship between ciliates and acoeles (whatever they are) will be settled by analyses of DNA sequences, of which very little were available at the time Gould wrote his essays. With the enormous amount of sequence information now available, that question must have been settled. 


I record one final piece of information - magnetotactic bacteria carry nanocrystals (Gould calls them 'single domain crystals' - the 'nano' terminology was not known then) of magnetite (i.e. one of the iron oxides) to help them orient themselves to magnetic fields. But not, in general, North/South but Up/Down, using the force of Dip or the vertical component of the earth's magnetic field. The nano size (~ 500 Angstroms) is apparently just right - smaller and they would be paramagnetic, any larger and they would have too many domains to act as a proper magnetic sensing device. 

One Hundred Years of Solitude. By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (of course!)

Penguin Books. Published 1996. First published in 1967.

While reading the first few chapters of the book I felt it was overrated and over-hyped. It seemed (and yet seems, when I think of it sometimes) a standard 'stream of consciousness' book in the style of some of books of Kazuo Ishiguro or Salman Rushdie, or even Orhan Pamuk. Maybe they all have the same style. And maybe it's a great and important style. But I find it difficult to understand. Or enjoy. Or derive any great satisfaction from it. I think to be really able to understand books such as these, one must be either a serious student of literature and philosophy, or have someone explain the whole book in detail, or be aware of every possible historical and political context of every sentence in the book (if there are, in fact, any) or most of them, anyway. Or maybe it's simply that 'the Emperor has no clothes', or well, very little. Certainly I don't understand why Salman Rushdie (or anyone) should call it 'the greatest novel in any language in the last fifty years', almost like there was a rating system for books, like cricket or tennis ratings. Likewise the New York Times' opinion that the book 'should be required reading for the entire human race' seems far too overblown. Of course these statements, which appear on the cover pages of the book, may be the publisher's attempt to overawe a potential buyer into completing the purchase. Maybe the context in which the comments were originally made nuanced them a lot more. But does the book deserve the Nobel prize? A question more to the point is, does the author deserve the Nobel prize? Who am I to say? I do know that most of my attempts to read Nobel prize winning authors have ended in confusion and boredom, except for a few instances - Steinbeck, Tagore, and one or two books by Pamuk and Gao Xingjian. But let me not digress too much. Let me get back to the 100 lonely years.

The book is a tale (or history) of one Colombian family over six generations, narrated in the 'magic realism' style. This means that there are a lot of strange happenings scattered through the book, such as flocks of yellow butterflies always announcing the presence of one of the characters, or the sudden ascent to heaven of another character, the most beautiful female in the book. These events probably represent something else, but I don't understand them. Sometimes they are humorous, sometimes sad, sometimes horrible, but only  rarely clearly related to what the author is trying to convey. The tale begins with the founding of the village of Macondo by the patriarch of the family Jose Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula. Beundia becomes demented after about 50 years and has to be kept tied to a tree until he dies, but his wife survives to see the birth of the sixth generation, and for the first few generations acts like a Michael Corleone, remaining 'strong for the family'. Among the other notable characters in the family is General Aureliano Beundia, son of Jose, who fights some kind of revolutionary war off and on, fighting first in favour of the 'liberals' against the 'conservatives' and then against the 'liberals'. There are other characters almost equally notable - Pilar Ternara, whore/mistress to more than one member of the family, and mother to one; Remedios the beauty who likes to walk around naked and finally ascends up into the sky; Melquiades, the gypsy, who comes to Macondo every year, each time bringing strange devices, like magnets, or flying carpets; and Mr Brown of the banana company who is the typical American (US) executive, only interested in the profits of his company, who oversees the slaughter (and then the cover-up of the slaughter) of '3000' people striking along with the company workers for better conditions. There is love, hatred, sacrifice, adultery, incest, birth and death, and generally high and low points in the struggles of the family, until it decays away to almost nothing. There are several memorable scenes, and no doubt I will come across situations in life where they will be recalled. The family story is set against the background of the typical (probably) history of a South or Central American country. It starts with the founding of Macondo in the wilds, its development, the internal wars, the politics, the dictatorships, the hyper-capitalist US company, the coming of the railway and the changes this 'modernity' brings, until finally decay sets in and the once prosperous and thriving town fades away, before being utterly destroyed (off stage, after the end of the book) by a storm. (This may be blasphemy, but some of these aspects, especially the ones featuring General Aureliano, are reminiscent of the book 'The Adventurers' by Harold Robbins! I kept thinking of that book while reading this.)

After the first few chapters, which as I said, I had to push myself to read, I enjoyed reading the rest of it. Once you get some sort of handle on the writing style and the innumerable Arcadios and Aurelianos, it is enjoyable, and frequently strikes a personal chord. Something or the other in my life is often like something described in the book. Apart from the loose structure I described above, the book does not have a real plot. Almost every third or fourth page of the book takes up a different thread and follows it for a short while. Sometimes, it reverts to a thread that was dropped earlier on, and takes it a little further. But on the whole the novel was probably written down like a poem, rather than like the novels that PG Wodehouse painstaking constructed (as described in his 'Performing Flea'). It does have a denouement at the end. This has to do with some mysterious manuscripts that Melquiades the gypsy has entrusted to the care of the first Jose Arcadio Beundia. The last Aureliano, after six generations, finally finds it is written in Sanskrit, learns that language, finds that it is actually coded in many different codes and then translated into Sanskrit, deciphers the codes, and understands that the manuscript is the history of the Buendia family written in a form compressed in space and time, or in other words, the novel we have just finished!

Some quotations - sentences that struck me as I read the book.

'The best friend a person has is one who has just died'

'She began to make mistakes, trying to see with her eyes the things that intuition allowed her to see with greater clarity'

'...he was the only one who had enough lucidity to realize that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave eternalized fragments in a room.' 

'It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people...'    

'...the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.'

Of course the original in Spanish may be different, almost certainly better. What I have written above are my 'raw' reactions. I will probably read the book again, after I read reviews and essays on Marquez, and perhaps understand why the book is considered so great. Not that I don't like the book now, I like it a lot. But 'greatest'? I don't know. Perhaps it's just that I don't see all of its merit.

The Chosen. By Chaim Potok

The Chosen

Chaim Potok

First published 1967 by The Random House Publishing Group

Maybe I have read another book by Chaim Potok. It was in 1990, I was temporarily in the guest house at the Department of Botany, I think, of the Louis Pasteur University, Strasbourg, waiting for more permanent accommodation. One of the earlier guests had left behind a book about hasidic Jews in New York. I only vaguely remember it, but the description of their habits and traditions now seems to me like what I just read in 'The Chosen'. One thing I do remember clearly from that long forgotten book is how the hasidim discuss whether turning on the electric switch on Sabbath constitutes a violation of the religious law, which requires a hasid to do no work at all on that day, but only study the Talmud. 'The Chosen' was Potok's first novel, and the title seems somewhat ironical, but maybe I've just layered my own feelings on it. For, the book takes itself seriously enough, describing an encounter between an extreme view of Judaism and a slightly less extreme one, but representing the two as diametrically opposite. The hasidic family is represented by a Rabbi and his brilliant son Danny, who is being trained in a harsh and unforgiving manner to take over from his father as the next Rabbi. The slightly less extreme tradition, Zionist, is represented by a teacher of the Talmud at a Yeshiva (Jewish seminary) and his son Reuven, also brilliant, also being instructed by his father in the Talmud, but less harshly. The training, in both cases consists of endless scholasticism regarding the Talmud and its interpretation. The story takes place in New York at about the time World War II was coming to an end, and Israel was being created. The book is well written, good to read, and opens a few mental windows, but is very insular. The messages and attitudes it conveys cannot really translate into the world outside the Jewish culture. I dislike the way the author assumes that it was right to displace an entire population (the Arabs) simply because, after Hitler and all the centuries of persecution, the European Jews desperately needed a homeland of their own. Wouldn't it have made more sense to carve out such a homeland in Europe itself, or, failing that, in the vast underpopulated regions of the New World (America and/or Australia). The British (and now, the Americans) did what they did (and continue to do it) because they can - not because it is right. I remember the argument (actually shouting match) I had with Osnat Herzberg on this topic when she was in Bangalore for a conference. I think I was stupid then, not for what I said, but how I said it. Anyway, these politics forms a vague background to the story, which is really about how to bring up your children, in particular contrasting a very traditional and harsh way with a more liberal (but only slightly more so) method.