The Picture of Dorian Gray - An Excerpt

Starting a novel and not completing it has been my forte since long. There have been one-too-many a novels that I started with full enthusiasm and then could not continue with that due to lack of time or mostly lack of enthusiasm. The start of this year has been a good one to me in this regard and I have, unexpectedly, completed more than a few novels, some in Hindi and others in English. Now only time will tell what is in its store for Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'. Going by the recent trend, I, myself, am not quite sure about completion of this novel by me but whatever few pages that I have been through, it seems quite promising.

I must admit this fact, that my knowledge about English literature is too less to know about different authors and their style of writing. So, it always has been a problem for me to choose a particular novel at a book shop amongst thousands. I was going through Shashi Tharoor's 'Riot, A Novel' at that time when I saw this book by Wilde. Shashi Tharoor has quoted Oscar Wilde too many a times in his novel that I was fascinated by this name. Finding his novel in the book store at that time compelled me to buy this one and once again I would like to admit that I am not at all disappointed with whatever I have been through.
Here is an excerpt from this novel where Wilde writes about the contradiction of beauty and intelligence and a strong sarcasm on church and its people:

"But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delighful."

Riot, A Novel

The death of an american women, Priscilla Hart, serves the pretext of Shashi Tharoor's 2001 novel, "Riot, A Novel". Of the many things that is good about this novel, the first and the foremost is the fact that its written by Tharoor. A thoughtful, sociologically precise novel that not only brings with it a great flavour of Indian social stratification, the religionism, the conservativeness of a small Indian town, but also manages to present the very Indianness that lies at the heart of a middle class Indian society. Tharoor holds a grip over this very Indianness and continues to show his great understanding that he has on India,  its people and their mindset.
In September, 1989, a 24 yr old american, Priscilla Hart, working with an NGO, is stabbed to death in a riot that erupts in the town of Zalilgarh near New Delhi. Priscilla's divorced parents, Katherine and Rudyard Hart, then visit the town to find out what happened and in the course of their stay at the town meet all the people associated directly and indirectly to her. They meet and talk to everybody and try to learn the conditions in which their daughter was living in there and also the one in which she was murdered. A mystery in itself, the reason of the murder is not told till the end and leaves the reader with so many possibilities. A story that deals with love-hate, social norms, communal riot, political issues all at the same time gives everything of these one or more reasons for Priscilla's death.
Riot comes out as a novel knit with the threads of completely different contexts. The writing of the novel is unique in its own sense. So far, I have not read many novels but I am very sure that there will be, if any, very few novels written in that style. It starts with the newspaper cuttings of The NewYork Journal about Priscilla's death and the news of her parents visiting Zalilgarh a few weeks after. And then follows a mixture of too many accounts of all the characters involved in the story without much regard to the timeline. The story goes into flashback, comes back to real time, then again goes further back and keeps on jumping time all through. A total story of around a year being presented in a screenplay style was something different to me but without doubt interesting.
The last time that I was reading Tharoor was his first novel, The Great Indian Novel. Sadly, I could not finish the major part of it, still, whatever I did, I was too much involved in it and liked it. His understanding of the Indian culture and tradition was pretty much evident in that book and so came the anticipation of a similar understanding in this book also. I must admit the fact that this book managed to fulfill my anticipation and I am pretty much content by with this one too. All in all, if not a great book, it surely is a readable book at least.

The Truth of Truth

"You know, there's an old Hindu story about Truth. It seems a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. Her father, the king, thought he was a bit too cocksure and callow. He decreed that the warrior could only marry the princess after he had found Truth. So the warrior set out into the world on a quest for Truth. He went to temples and monasteries, to mountaintops where sages meditated, to remote forests where ascetics scourged themselves, but nowhere could he find Truth. Despairing one day and seeking shelter from a thunderstorm, he took refuge in a musty cave, There was an old crone there, a hag with matted hair and warts on her face, the skin hanging loose from her bony limbs, her teeth yellow and rotting, her breath malodorous. But as he spoke to her, with each question she answered, he realized he had come to the end of his journey: she was Truth. They spoke all night, and when the storm cleared, the warrior told her he had fulfilled his quest. 'Now that I have found Truth,' he said, 'what shall I tell them at the palace about you?' The wizened old creature smiled. 'Tell them,' she said, 'tell them that I am young and beautiful.'"

The above excerpt from Shashi Tharoor's Riot, a novel brings to us the very truth of Truth. Not that the writing in this very paragraph is splendid yet, it presents the philosophy of truth in most basic style. Yes, truth is not beautiful and yes, truth is not true itself all the time either.

Lately, I have been reading this book and so far, has been an endearing, to say the least, experience that has kept me bound to it. Tharoor's hold on India, its history, its religions, its stories, its people, their mindset and above all the very Indianness keeps you along with itself. Looking forward to writing about in much detail once I finish it...

Great Expectations!

The title of the post derives itself from a yet to be read by me novel by Charles Dickens. A copy of the novel has been under my custody for just under a decade now and I must admit, here, the fact that for all this long time, it has been there in my priority list of the things to do. The last decade has seen me making and then abandoning too many of such lists. All this time, there have been items from the English literature that have formed a constant part of such lists. Great Expectations is one of them. The another one, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, was there in that list till last year when I finally completed it. Its not my laziness that I have not been able to complete these novels in all this time, its only my lack of interest in literature that I have already referred to in my earlier posts on this blog. Things have come and gone from the priority list, most of them bypassing these novels in the process, but one thing is for sure that these novels have always managed to maintain their position there in the list. With time, their glamour decreased and so did my enthusiasm towards them. Still, a hope of completing these novels are present.
Anyways, the post is not, in any way, about Dickens' Great Expectations. It is about my own expectations from two books that I have recently bought. The last weekend saw me visiting Kolkata where an evening was planned for window shopping at a mall. The evening went as was planned except for the fact that I found a real rich book store there. Having already mentioned my lack of interest in literature, it was probably my first time to witness such a rich book store. Maybe, this was the first time when I actually showed some interests towards a book store and hence, such a book store that might seem mediocre to many others, looked rich to me. Finding too many of books at a place felt me with a fear and an enthusiasm at the same time; the fear of books that I have already described here and the enthusiasm of getting over this fear this time round. With a determination in my mind, encouragement by my companion there and suggestions from my brother, I finally managed to lay my hands upon two books, Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The House of the Dead.
Anybody can deduce from the name of the authors itself that I am a complete novice to this field of reading. Two different novels on two different themes by two completely different authors from two totally different era, was all what I could find there. Nothing, at all, common between them. Even for me, it was hard to discern my actual taste. Where Tharoor is a 21st century Indian politician, statesman, columnist, author, activist, Dostoyevsky is a 19th century Russian writer, essayist sometimes a nihilistic, sometimes a rebel, sometimes a cynic. The simultaneous selection of such two completely different authors must be bewildering to many (atleast, it is, to me).
My knowledge about the two authors is also not complete. Whatever I have mentioned about them above is acquired in recent times from various sources on the internet. For Tharoor, the way he and his tweets have managed to create a hype in recent times has let me to know about him more and more. Maybe, this was how, I knew about the book and hence, finding it compelled me to buy it. I won't deny that my love to Indian political history was also a considerable factor for my selection of this book. For Dostoyevsky, the selection was mostly due to the strong inescapable suggestion by my elder brother. Amongst his penned novels, the selection of this particular book was completely based on the volume of the book. This seemed the least voluminous in the lot and hence, came the selection. Having said all this, I must make it clear that I was not completely unknown of Dostoyevsky before buying this book. My first encounter with him was reading his short story, White Nights, a story of the dreamer that it most simply can be described was fairly well liked by me. Reading him once again never seemed a bad idea for me.
Now comes the expectation part. The first and the foremost expectation common to both the book is that I would be able to finish them. For Tharoor's novel, I have already started it and what I could make out of it is that it must be a satirical presentation of an epic that Mahabharata WAS, in relation to another epic that the Indian political game IS. For Dostoyevsky's novel, reading itself, the introduction on the back, fills me with a certain amount of depression, a doom. A character who dies and dies again in the search of real death is all that I can expect from this. Nihilism and pessimism is echoing from the book and giving me a feeling that I could end up being sad at the end. Yet, strangely, a feeling of optimism is what I am getting at present. Its strange but true, maybe this is the beauty of Dostoyevsky, maybe this is the beauty of literature that I have been away from, maybe this is what I am going to witness with it this time.
Will keep posting my updates on the books as I move on with them.