Eat,Pray,Love

I know you must be wondering why have I chosen to review this book even though the second book 'Committed' by the author is already out  in the stores and is a sequel to the book I review today.I thought this review could help the person who hasn't read the first book get an idea of what the book is all about!


Let me start by saying that this book has been a bestseller, loved and adored by millions of women worldwide.A movie is also in the making based on this book by Elizabeth Gilbert.


The book has been translated into over thirty languages, with over 7 million copies sold worldwide.The book became so popular that, in 2008, Time Magazine named Elizabeth as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.


Unfortunately the book did not work for me...rather didn't enjoy reading it too much.(I am very certain I would be among a very few handful women out there who didn't enjoy the book!) 


The book is in Elizabeth's words One woman's search for everything .This book is her story and how after going through a tough time after a divorce she plans to take a break from work and go on a journey of self-discovery. The journey takes her through Italy,India and finally Indonesia.The entire journey helps her in putting her past to rest and moving on... to finally managing to find love.


Her journey begins from Rome,Italy.After her divorce from David she takes up Italian classes to learn the language and after a few months lands up quitting her job,her house and takes off to Rome where her only agenda is to learn to speak Italian fluently and of course EAT!So starts her stay in Italy where she meets interesting people like Luca Spaghetti,Giovanni who is her tandem exchange partner and his twin Dario.What Italy helps her do is gain weight while also helping her learn to speak the language more fluently!In her words 'I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here'...She discovers quaint eating places which serve the best pizzas and pastas.She manages to cover Bologna,Florence,Venice,Sicily,Sardinia,Naples and Calbria.Phew!The  stay in Italy is her first step in healing though not totally out of her depression and loneliness after the divorce!This journey she call her pursuit of pleasure.I wish I could also do something like this take a break and go on an exotic Italy trip ,meet Italian mamma's boys ...but more importantly not to lose  perspective here... eating food!! Dreams!Sigh!


Her next journey is to India and her step two in the healing process i.e. PRAY.She comes to India to spend time at her spiritual guru's ashram which is located in Maharashtra.Everyone in the ashram is given work to do and Elizabeth's first work assignment is to scrub the floors of the temple!The usual day starts at 3 am and could last up to 9 pm regularly.Hours are spent in meditation and contemplation so its not just rigorous physically but also psychologically.Initially she finds it very difficult to concentrate while meditating but with the help of Corella her room partner she trains her mind to concentrate on  the mantra she is chanting.Slowly and steadily she manages to succeed.Her stay in India she calls as her pursuit of devotion.This is also the part from which I stopped enjoying the book as I felt it became a bit too preachy for my liking.


After India she heads to Bali in Indonesia where she finds LOVE again.Her trip to Indonesia is to meet a man called Ketut who is a ninth generation medicine man,she had met him  on a prior work related trip to Indonesia.Ketut had on that trip asked her to return to Indonesia to teach him English and he in turn would teach her everything he knows...hence choice of Bali as her final destination 


During her stay in Bali she becomes friends with Wayan who is a Balinese healer and how she helps Wayan buy a house for herself and her daughter Tutti.She also meets Felipe ,a Brazilian man who loves and adores her with "such single minded concentration".The book ends on a very positive note that you cant help but feel a part of Elizabeth's happiness.There are no strings attached in their love story but she promises to keep in touch with Felipe before leaving for New York....
Again in this part too I felt a bit let down because it just tends to drag into her personal issues,problems and delves a bit too much into Wayan's story. 


I hear that in the sequel she ends up marrying Felipe...So I am pretty certain the book would have a lots of apprehensions,plots, indecisiveness.Not too sure if I'd want to read it!  

The Electric Feather

The Electric Feather
The Tranquebar Collection of Erotic Short Stories
Edited by Ruchir Joshi

At the outset, a collection of Erotic Short stories from the subcontinent had me interested and not just because of the erotic part of the subtitle. The short story format is one that interests me, the idea of narrating an entire event, creating characters that the reader can identify with and feel for within the limited perimeter of a short story is an art which few writers are able to achieve with any success. O Henry being one of the exalted few who have. And W Somerset Maugham. And another of my personal favourites, and paradoxically radically different from the genteel writing of the previous two authors mentioned, Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn. And of course, my personal God, Pelham G Wodehouse, who had a mastery over the short story and the intricate maneouvres of a detailed novel level plot which is unparalleled.
Which meant I had high standards in my head for this compilation. Which also naturally meant I would have to face a let down. Starting with the very first story. The phrase Erotic to me is delicate, nuanced writing which is not sexually explicit but sexually charged. It might mean something different for another. To me, sexual explicitness degenerates into porn. Erotica is tantalising, not all revealing. For the Bad Sex in Literature award this compilation has more than enough contenders. But let me focus on the saving graces within the book. The story that was truly superlative in the entire compilation was Kamila Shamsie's Love's Sunset, the seduction of the primal woman by the Sun. Sheba Karim's gentle story of a girl down on vacation, and infatuated by her aunt was subtly nuanced and written with the kind of restraint that makes writing superlative. Niven Govindan's story about a pair of gay lovers in Amsterdam, who are bound to each by a painful bond of hurting and pleasure makes for fascinating reading. Sonia Jabbar's The Advocate is perhaps the only story that stays closest to the premise of the short story with a definite narrative, and written with empathy and where the sex in the story does not seem gratuitiously chucked in to make it to the mandatory requirement of the compilation. Tishani Doshi and Meenakshi Madhavan Reddy are the other new writers who have contributed to this compilation, as has Rana Dasgupta and Abeer Haque. Sadly though, for a compilation of short stories from a land which has given us the Kamasutra and the love poems of Geet Govinda, The Electric Feather does seem like a good intention that lost its way, and doesnt quite make it to the Brindavan of the preface.

By Kiran Manral

The Museum of Innocence

The Museum of Innocence
By Orhan Pamuk

Reading Orhan Pamuk is always an experience one gets down to with the slightest frisson of anticipation and The Museum of Innocence was no different. Having just got my head around his previous work My Name Is Red, I wondered if this book too, would be as difficult to assimilate with multiple narrators and a complicated plot. I need not have worried. The book was delicate, nuanced and for me, unputdownable.
In his  previous novel, Snow, Pamuk took the headscarves, symbolic of religious morality and looked at them as indicative of a country ready to assimilate into the Western world. In My Name Is Red, his focus was on the Ottoman miniaturists back in the 16th century who were proscribed from depicting anything apart from what is acceptable by religion, and the formula, in an era where the European masters were breaking free to find their own individual styles, from an individual's perspective rather than what is accepted as the norm.
Instanbul is the protagonist of The Museum of Innocence. The story is rather wistful, rather like the Indian equivalent masterpiece Devdas, albeit with different characters caught in similar circumstances of longing and long unfulfilled. The story is intimate. A love story that tells the reader of the doomed love of kemal, a rich young resident of Instanbul who gets into an affair with a distant cousin Fusun, who is wholly unsuitable to be married to, because of her inferior social standing. In the interim, Kemal gets engaged to Sibel, who is a 'suitable girl' and Fusun distances himself from Kemal.
Like Devdas is unable to stand up for his love to his father and sinks into ruin and despair because of that one moment of spinelessness, similarly Kemal is unable to tell his family that he would rather marry Fusun than the more socially acceptable Sibel. In fact one gets the impression that Kemal assumes he would be able to give up Fusun once he is married to Sibel, only to find that with Fusun out of his life, nothing matters anymore except getting her back.
Kemal is supposedly running his father's export company but gradually slips into a dangerous obsession to woo Fusun back. He gathers together mementoes from their days together at the family's second apartment creating a Museum of Innocence. Everyday items like —"a porcelain saltshaker, a tape measure in the form of a dog, a can opener that looked like an instrument of torture, a bottle of the Batanay sunflower oil that the Keskin kitchen never lacked"—are hallowed and venerated because he associates them with Fusun and their short doomed relationship. The novel goes on to describe how Kemal collects the 4,213 cigarette butts smoked and stubbed out by Fusun, how he visits her family for dinner over 2,864 days, the obsession borders on Humpbert Humpbert's obsession with Lolita and is as raw and naked in its yearning. Shades of Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera peek through, in the scale of the monumental love that overtakes all the protagonist's sensibilities.
Through Kemal's disintegration as a man with promise into a middle aged drunk obsessed with Fusun and having given up his entire career in the hopes that he would woo back Fusun, one feels a repulsion mixed with curiousity and empathy for the way a man loses himself in a love which is plainly, not to be. The end of the love story comes as no surprise, when Fusun finally agrees to marry Kemal, and then drives herself and Kemal into a horrific crash, one realises with a sinking feeling that the love not fulfilled is always more all pervasive than the love story that succeeds despite all odds.
Running parallel to the story is the evolution of Turkey as a society on the fringes of the Western world, and still moored deeply to tradition. Set in the late 1950s through the 1960s, the narrative is a fond reminscensing of a city that was divided almost schizophrenically into those mired in the headscarves and religion, and those who adopted the ways and manners of the more liberal Westernised world.
It is a long journey for Kemal to where he wants to be. Breaking his engagement to Sibel. Courting a naturally suspicious Fusun, convincing his mother that he would marry Fusun, and finally their coming together after nine years, only to have her die in a horrific crash the very next morning. His wooing of Fusun over nine years of daily dinners in her modest home, his filching of everyday objects from her home, like a fetishist, is what adds the pathos to the novel. Symbolically, Fusun, who is a bleached blonde in the first half of the book, returns to her natural black hair colour in the second half, the half that has Kemal turn his back on the ways of the Europeanised strata of Instanbul society and checks into a seedy hotel in the impoverished sector of Instanbul.
The protagonist meets the author in his quest to set up a museum dedicated to the memory of Fusun, and Pamuk very kindly talks to the protagonist about his memories of Fusun, having entered the narrative as a character during Kemal's doomed engagement party to Sibel, in a Hitchcockian device that he often uses in his novels.
The Museum of Innocence is a book that stayed with me for days after I had completed it, overwhelming me with a sense of loss and despair that had nothing to do with the loss of the possibility of a life together that the lead characters suffered. Instead, it haunted me with its implied message that obsession in love can obliterate an individual completely. And ironically, we are never quite rid of the niggling feeling, that despite the altar that Kemal puts Fusun up on, she is possibly just an ordinary shopgirl.
Reviewed by Kiran Manral

My review :Karl aaj aur Kal

Author of this book is one of India's best known MTV VJ Cyrus Broacha.Cyrus B and MTV Bakra were synonymous and a huge hit on Indian Television.He now hosts a show for CNN IBN called 'The Week That Wasn't' .It's a surprise that not many people are aware of his debut novel.I must say the book is immensely hilarious and very funny from the word go.The man can surely make you laugh.

The story is about Karl Marshall and his friend Kunal (draws inspiration from the real life pals Cyrus and Kunal)who are best buddies and are the average regular Mumbai boys, its their journey from school through college and beyond.Its narrated in a very tongue-in-cheek manner.

You see them through school,their college years at Xavier's College after which they decide to pursue an acting course in NYC and that too from Lee Strasburg Acting Studio! While studying there they are auditioned for a Hindi movie and get selected.On their return to Mumbai they become friends with the lead actor of the movie Yusuf Khan. The trio become instant friends and thereafter start a movie production house that keeps starring the three of them in a Munshi brothers franchise.

After becoming a super success and a Superstar Karl steps into the next obvious choice for any film actor which is POLITICS he becomes a South Mumbai candidate for ...hold your breath guys ....PYJAMA PARTY!!He manages to win the elections as well!

A good read though it dragged a bit at the end.It did become a bit tough to read till the very end. That can be easily forgiven as Cyrus manages to keep us laughing throughout the first half of the book.

Books I have read and shall put up reviews soon!

The Curious Incident of the dog in the night-time -Mark Haddom
Karl,Aaj aur Kal-Cyrus Broacha
The Great Indian Novel- Shashi Tharoor
The memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards
The Diary of a Wimpy Kid - Greg Heffley

Shall update soon!

Have you read any of these books and if yes would you want to share your views/opinions please send them to me will put it up on the blog!

Until then!

I am not alone!

Hey all really been a lousy and lazy blogger.Sorry for being AWOL but work,home,kids seemed to have jointly conspired to keep me on my toes and away from blogging.But the good news is that I am back and I am not alone!

Kiran,a dear friend and a champion blogger took pity on my blog going wasted like that, has kindly agreed to post some of her book reviews on my blog.It's an honour to have her contribute to this blog.Thanks Kiran.

She has also suggested that I make this blog more interactive and get authors to share their book writing experiences with the readers.So will try and implement that shortly.I have also created a google group (http://groups.google.co.in/group/thebooklovers?hl=en) and a facebook group http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=298122441114

Do join these groups and do keep reading the reviews and discussions on the blog!Suggestions,feedback also welcome!

Terrified of this symmetry

Book: Her Fearful Symmetry

Author: Audrey Niffeneger

It has taken the author six long years to get this book out. Coming as it does, after the phenomenally successful The Time Traveler's Wife, the book had a tough act to live upto. And add to this the author takes a William Blake poem and twists it a bit for the title, makes this book one of those who pick up with the urge to read through it in a single night.
The book starts off promisingly. Gothic in its eerieness, it opens with death. Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer and leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina. The interesting twist is that these nieces had no clue that their mother was a twin too, and that they had an English aunt. And this is the first of the many twists that the narrative will lead us to. The twins, Julia and Valentina are almost regular American teenagers, but strangely purposeless. A chance to live a year in London is something they leap at. They happily uproot themselves from their Chicago suburban home and move to London, to live in Elspeth's musty home with rare books and chintzy furniture. What they dont know however is that they are not alone. Elspeth, in her spectral form, is constantly with them. Appropriately enough, Elspeth's flat, which borders Highgate Cemetery in London is where her lover Martin does volunteer tours for tourists. The entire macabre atmosphere is accentuated by Martin, an OCD sufferer who never ever steps out of his home and must manically clean, but is also a brilliant and charming crossword puzzle setter. His wife, Marjike, has left him to go live in Amsterdam, unable to cope with his illness. In fact, for me, the triumph of the story was Martin's effort to overcome his illness and go to Marijke in Amsterdam. Living below the twins is Robert, Elspeth's lover, a scholar of the cemetery, who then gets involved with one of the girls. And the twists in the tale begin.
The twins are mirror images of each other, fearfully symmetrised, as the title goes, with reversed bodies. They sense Elspeth's presence in the house and even begin communicating with her. From this point on is where the plot, nice and taut, starts unwinding. The two twists at the end, the truth about Elspeth and Edie, and the final twist about body snatching was a let down, a debate with no resolution and one in which one cannot fathom whether Elspeth's ghost gets her come uppance at the end for trying to play God with everyone's lives. Did I enjoy it? I did. But to be honest, I had higher expectations from the writer of The Time Traveller's Wife.

(Posted by Kiran Manral)