Book Review: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Title: The Sense of an Ending
Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Jonathan Cape, Random House UK
Genre: Literary Fiction
Pages: 144 pages
Source: Personal Copy
Rating: 5/5

We are what we remember. But imagine, suddenly, that you were confronted with incontrovertible evidence that what you remember is wrong. That, in fact, you behaved in a very different way than you remember at a key point in your past. Would it change your sense of identity, or alter your understanding of the world? This is the central theme in The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, more of a novella than a novel at around 150 pages, which was recently short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

The protagonist of The Sense of an Ending is Tony Webster, now retired and divorced, living a quiet, satisfactory, largely uneventful life and reasonably content with his lot. Out of the blue he receives a surprising bequest from the recently deceased mother of an ex-girlfriend from his student days, someone he has not seen for many years. As he puzzles over why he has been remembered, he recalls events and friendships from his student days. But it soon becomes apparent that others have very different memories of those times and their consequences than he does, and there is hard evidence to suggest that Tony’s recollections are wrong. Gradually in the course of the book the layers of the past are peeled away to reveal a truth which shakes Tony’s belief in himself.

It’s a book about history and how we recall events. Tony has his memories but without evidence or corroboration, how sure can he be? Do the lessons learnt in the History classroom apply to the individual? What starts off in the manner of Alan Bennett’s “History Boys” soon turns into a darker mystery as Tony is forced to face up to the actions of his younger self.

It’s a joy to read. Thought provoking, beautifully observed with just enough mystery to keep you turning the pages to find out what happened. Books that involve the narrator examining their own actions can get too easily bogged down, but by keeping it brief, this never happens with Barnes. There’s insight into the human condition and gentle philosophy without it becoming too introspective. It’s very readable literary fiction.

Julian Barnes is one of our leading novelists and The Sense of an Ending shows him working at a very high level. It is beautifully written and always interesting, while striving to address serious themes. At the core of this is the unease produced by the idea that Tony has lived an entire life built on a self-image relying on false memories. Is this because memory is inherently unreliable, or because some of us have the ability to reimagine events to be different than they really were, enabling us to live a different type of life than the one that our behaviour warrants? Barnes does not answer these questions, but makes the reader think about them.

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Book Review: The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

Title: The Pale King
Author: David Foster Wallace
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, Penguin
ISBN: 9780241145142
Genre: Literary Fiction, Satire
PP: 560 pages
Price: Rs. 599
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

Writing reviews on the late American author David Foster Wallace is an anxious and parlous process. There is first of all the saint like reverence in which is held in by his fans with Paul Morley on the Review Show proudly proclaiming himself as “Wallacistic” and in an almost Stalinist unthinking manner stating that within this new novel “every sentence and every word is tremendous” Then there is Wallace’s brutal suicide in 2008 at the age of 46 which left the Pale King unfinished after 10 years of work. It was eventually compiled by his editor, Michael Pietsch, who has pieced together the finished chapters and undertaken a degree of guess work to bring a kind of conclusion to a work in progress. Then there is the literary figure of Wallace himself coming on the back of 1996′s labyrinthine yet uber smart “Infinite Jest” a novel, which takes months to read, but which you can quote for years. This is followed by his tragic death as he stood on the steps of becoming one of the giants of American literature.

“The Pale King” is a novel assembled from a large collection of fragments left by the author after his untimely and tragic death in 2008. According to the editor’s note at the beginning of the book there was no synopsis or outline of the novel as a whole and months of work were needed to attempt to put together a novel that approached what may have been Foster Wallace’s intentions. There can be little doubt that a writer as meticulous as DFW would have been dismayed at the idea of an editor taking his unfinished work and publishing without his intervention; however, in the circumstances I think the decision was the right one. Unlike some posthumous works, this is not some early novel unfit for publication or the work of an author in decline: there is writing of the highest quality here.

My sense is that probably 70-80% of the novel was completed but there is clearly considerable uncertainty about the final structure and for this reason the novel is perhaps best approached initially as a series of short stories with a strong unifying theme: the activities of a group of employees of the US Internal Revenue Service in the mid 1980s when the organization was undergoing some radical reorganization.

The novel is at least to some extent autobiographical; Wallace apparently worked for the IRS for a year or so during the period when the novel is set. Chapter 9 is a strange `Authors Forward’ in which DFW addresses the reader directly and states that the `characters and events are fictitious’ disclaimer at the front of the book is completely misleading and that in fact everything is true. He then goes into a lengthy discourse about discussions with his publisher’s lawyers, the obtaining of legal releases from some of his former colleagues featured in the book (plus the refusal of one of his family members to give such a release) and the extent to which autobiography can be truly accurate when filtered through memory and the writer’s subjectivity etc. This all has the ring of truth but to what extent this is DFW throwing red herrings to his reader is hard to guess.

The book itself consists of 50 chapters of greatly varying length and no clear narrative structure connecting one chapter with the next; events do unfold through the novel however via the activities of the people in the group but the reader has to be very alert to the allusive character of the work.

DFW chose to set the novel largely at an IRS `Examination Centre’ where employees are tasked with sifting through hundreds of tax returns that have been flagged up by a primitive computer system as possibly containing discrepancies indicative of underpayment; the work is unremittingly tedious while at the same time requiring a continuous high level of concentration and alertness in order to do it well – a production line without the option of switching off one’s brain.

The main theme of the novel is around the people who have submitted themselves to this work regime, their individual characteristics and the way they approach the work and interact with each other. Many of the players have unusual personalities with several having strange and magical talents: Chris Fogle’s ability to track the exact number of words he has spoken at any point during a conversation; Sylvanshine’s unconscious acquisition of random facts about people in his vicinity (two colleagues unknowingly related `through a liaison five generations ago in Utrecht’) and Drinion, a high-functioning autistic, gradually levitating from his chair during a lengthy and intense conversation with Meredith Rand, the office beauty. All this leavens long passages describing in comprehensive detail the inner workings of the IRS bureaucracy in DFW’s meticulous and rather addictive prose (plus footnotes). Many chapters are in the first person where the speaker is not explicitly identified; the reader had to pick up clues and cross-correlate information from other chapters to fully work out what is going on.

This book will undoubtedly be compared with `Infinite Jest’; `Pale King’ has a similar convoluted structure but is much more circumscribed in its theme. It is also a darker work with none of the big set comic pieces which intersperse `Infinite Jest’ though not without a lot of black humour. Above all, DFW’s writing is a huge pleasure to read and the novel has a great degree of empathy with its characters. Not perhaps the best novel for newcomers to DFW but definitely recommended for fans.

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

Eating Animals in one tweet-sized chunk: Eating Animals is about the stories we tell about the food we eat. But also the gaps between the stories we tell and the stories as they actually are.

“Stories about food are stories about us – our history and our values.”

When I sat down to write this review I did so with 16 pages of notes and ambitions to compose a review that would change the eating habits of every person who read it. Only such lofty goals, I felt, could do justice to a book that casts the debate around the meat industry in a fresh light.

But what I soon realized as I considered how to achieve this gargantuan feat, was that the brilliance of Eating Animals is the extraordinary realism Foer injects into the debate. His master-stroke is to get away from the all-or-nothing vegetarian versus carnivore debate in favour of a third way, a way that promotes a reduction in our collective consumption of meat to a level that is conducive to stable and lasting farming practices. This is not a fundamentalist case for vegetarianism, or a moralistic case against eating meat per se, but an exploration of why the choices we make about what we eat matter – to ourselves, the animals we do or don’t eat, the planet, and the lives of all those who inhabit it.

Those who have enjoyed either of Foer’s sublime novels – Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – will find the same inventiveness is at play here, alongside a familiar appreciation that what matters most is not facts and figures but the stories that surround them. He lets a factory farmer speak for himself, devotes an entire chapter to a debate between a farmer, his vegetarian wife, and a vegan PETA activist. He has an inherent understanding that there is no such thing as unequivocal truth, merely lots of different stories that collectively make up a whole.

Eating Animals is about the stories we tell about the food we eat. It is about their importance to our communal experiences of eating, our cultural ways of life. But it is also about the gaps between the stories we tell ourselves and the stories as they actually are. And it is about the stories we want to tell about ourselves in the future.

These stories begin with Foer himself. Having spent the first twenty-six years of his life disliking animals and oscillating between vegetarian and omnivore, between feeling guilty about eating animals and savouring the taste and smell of meat, the prospect of becoming a father made him reconsider the person he wanted to be. Taking his cue from Michael Pollan’s assertion in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that “eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing,” and faced with the responsibility of deciding what to feed someone more important than himself, Foer set out to understand what sort of repercussions the decision to eat meat had. But what started as a curious bit of research soon grew into a mission to expose factory farming and the culture of cheap food that drives it. He joins an animal rights activist in breaking into a factory farm under cover of darkness, and what troubles him most is not the horrific living conditions of the birds, though they are bad enough, but the secrecy, the locked doors and hi-tech surveillance.

“In the three years I will spend immersed in animal agriculture, nothing will unsettle me more than the locked doors. Nothing will better capture the whole sad business of factory farming. And nothing will more strongly convince me to write this book.”

Above all else Eating Animals is a bid to burst open that secrecy and end the whole barbaric practice of factory farming once and for all. Part investigative journalism, part scientific study, and told through a variety of literary mediums, it is difficult not to be convinced by the passion and conviction of his arguments and the panache with which he conveys them. Of all the arguments in the book it is the assertion that what we chose to eat matters that reverberates longest. He recounts a powerful conversation with his grandmother about how she survived the holocaust:

“The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end and I didn’t know if I could make it another day. A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.”
“He saved your life.”
“I didn’t eat it.”
“You didn’t eat it?”
“It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why?”
“What, because it wasn’t kosher?”
“Of course.”
“But not even to save your life?”
“If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

One must make choices based on our own conscience, and Foer never deviates from this central assertion. However, that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t do everything in his power to shape our consciences. Much of Eating Animals makes uncomfortable reading. He tells of turkeys genetically modified to the point of being unable to reproduce sexually, to a state where there are virtually none left in America that could survive in the wild. “What we do to living turkeys,” he asserts, “is just about as bad as anything humans have ever done to any animal in the history of the world.”

He tells of the pigs slaughtered in stages, of cesspools filled with animal excrement, and the often-overlooked seafood industry’s mind-boggling war on the seas. He breaks down statistics into conceivable metaphors. At one point he asks the reader to imagine being served a plate of sushi that also holds all the animals that were killed for that one serving, concluding that “the plate might have to be five feet across.”

Another chapter begins with its title – `Influence / Speechlessness’ – repeated roughly 840 times over five pages. Why? Because “on average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime – one animal for every letter on the last five pages.”

Some consider this sort of approach glib and distracting, but it is this exuberance to communicate in a variety of ways that has always made Foer’s work so engaging, and it is as powerful here as ever it has been.

As a reviewer I am guilty of describing books as `must read’ far more often than is strictly true. Indeed, it is arguable whether any fiction is ever must-read. However, if there is ever a book that warrants the moniker then it is Eating Animals or another book on the ethical and practical questions raised by the food we eat. Aside sleep and death, there is nothing that can be said to unite the entire global population as eating does. What we eat, and the impact it has on the lives we live and the world around us, is a fundamental question of our existence.

Eating Animals ends with its author hosting a meat-free Thanksgiving for family and the acceptance that they will need to develop new stories for this new diet. But, he contends, that is a small price to pay for not living with the shame of supporting such a profoundly abhorrent meat production system. During the course of his journey he repeatedly returns to an emblematic story about Franz Kafka staring into a fish tank and, on seeing his own reflection mingling with the animals he once ate, saying “Now at least I can look at you in peace.”

Life is about recognizing the person you are and the person you want to be. It is about making decisions based on knowledge rather than routine. Without ever being overly preachy, Eating Animals asks us all to stare into a fish tank, to see ourselves reflected, and to decide what stories we wish to tell in the future.

Eating Animals; Foer, Jonathan Safran; Hachette Book Group; £6.49

Sunset Park by Paul Auster

Reading a Paul Auster novel is something like listening to a well-orchestrated, multi-layered musical composition where certain melodies and motifs recur with substantial elaboration and variation. He is one of our very best writers and his newest, Sunset Park, like many of his books, reflects back to us a great deal about how we live today. It is “up-to-the-moment” current, the protagonist, Miles Heller, being employed by a South Florida realty company (for part of the novel) as a “trash-out” worker who cleans out repossessed homes that are usually left in awful shape by their former inhabitants. Miles has a somewhat fetishistic compulsion to photograph the forgotten possessions, the abandoned things that have been left behind, and his large collection of digital photos of these objects comprise one of the many lists of contemporary artifacts that Auster constructs throughout the book. It includes pictures of “books, shoes, and oil paintings, pianos and toasters, dolls, tea sets and dirty socks, televisions and board games, party dresses and tennis racquets, sofas, silk lingerie, caulking guns, thumbtacks, plastic action figures, tubes of lipstick, rifles, discolored mattresses, knives and forks, poker chips, a stamp collection, and a dead canary lying at the bottom of its cage.”

Sunset Park is a different type of story, and in some ways it felt more like an intense character study. Its central character is Miles Heller, age 28, an intelligent, but directionless, Brown University dropout, who has been estranged from his family for a number of years. Miles has been harboring guilt over his part in an accident which took the life of his step-brother, Bobby, and which has torn his family apart. Miles father owns a struggling book publishing company in New York, his step-mother is an English professor, and his mother, an actress in the city. In Florida, Miles has been getting by odd jobs in Florida cleaning up foreclosed homes during the housing crisis, while trying to keep his relationship with Pilar, a quiet under-aged teenager.

Soon after tempers flare with the family of his girlfriend, Miles hears from his old friend, Bing Nathan in New York. Miles boards a bus and heads back to Brooklyn. Bing is a man who detests technology and runs a shop called “The Hospital of Broken Things”, where forgotten things of the past, like broken manual typewriters, old radios etc. get repaired. When Bing invites Miles to become a squatter in an empty apartment in the Sunset park section of Brooklyn, he joins him along with two women: Alice Bergstrom, who works part-time while working on her dissertation, and Ellen Brice, a unsuccessful real-estate agent, obsessed with the human body, who wants to be an artist.

Art and Literature bind Auster’s characters into a subset of Americana adrift and in search of moorings. As each character — mother, father, son, underage lover, coconspirator, childhood paramour — moves through dilemmas and confrontations — questions of self worth, gender, sexuality, ambition, procreation, death, global politics, and so on — to arrive at moments of clarity, compassion, self awareness and self liberation, armed for the good fight in the face of whatever the future might deliver next.

Auster loosely integrates these individual narratives into a fluid mythic context: Hollywood, in the form of William Wyler’s sentimental 1946 “The Best Years of Our Lives” which follows three World War II veterans return home to discover that they and their families (not to mention their nation 60 years later) have been irreparably changed. (Jung’s myth of the returning hero gone awry.) Auster’s contemporary characters engage the film and live out post-war angst, and post-cold war decline, into a state of lingering ennui at the end of empire today.

There’s a deeper mythology at work in Sunset Park, the exhausted spiritual state of existential reality as Samuel Beckett explored it, before the rest of us were even “born into it”. Auster’s lead character’s estranged mother, for example, is a successful aging film actress returned to the city to appear in the role of her career as Winnie in a new production of Beckett’s stark and challenging “Happy Days.” Sunset Park’s mythic context sifts through the last half century from the failed returning hero, into Beckett’s post-apocalyptic landscape of endless contemplation and anxiety, armed with nothing but logic, cunning, and language. Another contextual level is the everyday mythology of baseball heroes, discussed endlessly between generations, as well as food and popular celebrity which provide connective tissue to hold contemporary culture at least conversationally in place.

Like, “The Hospital for Broken Things”, the characters in Sunset Part are a collection of “broken souls” struggling to find a place in this world, haunted in some way by their damaged past. At times the story seemed conveniently, contrived, and the narrative without direction, yet the characters and their issues seemed very genuine. I thought the contemporary post-recession time frame was perfect as well. In the end, some things were left unresolved, leaving me with unanswered questions, and curious as to whether this was unintentional or whether Auster has a sequel in the works.

Sunset Park is a coming-of-age story. It shows young men and women struggling to cope with and grow up from the wounds of early life, to take a hint from one of the novel’s early passages. For though Miles is its main protagonist, the story revolves from one of the squat’s inhabitants to another and, skipping a difficult-to-bridge gap, to the generation above. But Auster’s latest novel also is about recession America. Waste and reclamation are everywhere present, from Miles’s job at the beginning of the story, to Bing’s store for repairing broken typewriters and record-players, to the house in Sunset Park itself. The constant need for money, the need to deal with bare essentials, are of course favourite Auster tricks to highlight, by contrast, his characters’ dilemmas.

But this novel is also the closest Auster has come to making a statement about America in the present, rather than in the abstract sense. Sunset Park is an American novel as well as the more typical metaphysical rumination. And this makes it something new to the Auster collection. Even if old themes such as homelessness (Moon Palace, City of Glass, The Music of Chance) remain present in Sunset Park, its cautious optimism, its preparedness to see light as well as dark, its greater realism make it something different. This is both a classic Auster novel and a new, intriguing departure.

Sunset Park; Auster, Paul; Henry Holt and Co; $25.00

The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk

I have always wondered while reading a novel, as to what goes on behind the scenes – the writer’s mind and his thoughts that provide the shape and form to the novel. How does he/she manage to produce such brilliant works time and time again, without any break or reluctance? How is the novel crafted? Is it art imitating life or vice-versa? And my answers were partially (I think) answered by Pamuk’s new non-fiction collection of Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, titled, “The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist”.

The title draws from the famous essay by Friedrich Schiller, “Uber naive and sentimentalische Dichtung”, conventionally translated as “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” – even though the principal connotation of “sentimentalisch” in German is different than “sentimental” in English. Schiller posited two types of poets and, following his example, Pamuk refers to two models of novelist and reader.

What the book really consists of are Pamuk’s meditations on the art of the novel, comprising “all the most important things I know and have learned about the novel.” Pamuk sets as his main goal “to explore the effects that novels have on their readers, how novelists work, and how novels are written.” Pamuk certainly is well qualified to speak on that subject (in addition to having won the Nobel, he teaches comparative literature and writing at Columbia). Further, his perspective is rather unusual, being a self-taught novelist from a Turkish culture with a fairly weak tradition of writing and reading books.

There is no coherent theory of the novel in the book. What it does have is the authors’ perspective on writing and reading and that is what makes the book so different and unique. It does not come with a reading list either. The chapter that stayed with me after I had finished reading the book was about The Center of the Novel and how as readers we read novels to search for that center. How as readers we feel that the novel is here to present us with “that something larger meaning” which may be the other art forms don’t live up to and I agree to a large extent with that. No one can take that away from readers or the novelist.

To sum up the book, I loved reading it. Pamuk presents his case engagingly and tautly, in a pleasant mix of autobiographical titbits, reading and writing experiences, and theory. It does not convince as presenting a ‘theory of the novel’, nor does it claim or attempt to. What it does instead is make the reader see things differently and apply them while reading a novel. It talks about how a reader and writer’s thoughts can and may be one day wil merge and the true center will then emerge.

Last Thought: I could not wait to read a novel after I was done with this book. Thank you, Mr. Pamuk.

Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, The; Pamuk, Orhan; Hamish Hamilton; Penguin India; Rs.450

Rescue by Anita Shreve

A born storyteller, Shreve does a beautiful job in her description of a family in distress, a relationship crippled by a tragedy waiting in the wings. When Vermont EMT Peter Webster first sees Sheila Arsenault, she requires emergency assistance at the scene of an accident. Her blood alcohol signals trouble, but what young man in love reads the signs of impending disaster? Without much thought, Webster and Sheila embark on a love affair, for Webster a wonderful and unexpected gift, for Sheila a time out in a chaotic life. Pregnancy leads to marriage, baby Rowan the center of the couple’s lives until the attrition of time and too many sacrifices causes Sheila once again to seek solace in a bottle. A near-tragedy and the course of a Webster’s future is altered. Eighteen years later, a happy, well-adjusted daughter becomes a moody, angry teenager, Webster unable to communicate with the daughter who has become a stranger.

Shreve explores the territory of single parenthood and the loss of what might have been with her usual deft touch, capturing the difficult choices of a man desperate to protect his daughter from her mother’s excesses, his work as an EMT contrasting the dangers in a quiet Vermont town with the previous serenity of his home life. The real villain of the piece is, of course, Sheila’s alcoholism, the reason for the domestic disharmony, the marital arguments and a daughter’s resentment of her mother. Since Webster never really understands Sheila’s drinking, he has no tolerance for Rowan’s experimentation, as though good intentions could keep such a nightmare at bay. Alcoholism is the elephant in the living room, the source of all Webster’s grief and the threat to his confused daughter.

Whether writing historically or of contemporary life, Shreve has a facile touch, her prose fluid and believable as her characters face the unpredictability of choices that deliver hope and pain in equal measure. The responsible Webster, the tragic Sheila and the dangerously rebellious Rowan are vividly portrayed and culturally relevant. No monsters here, only vulnerable humans who stray from the bright promise of youth into the ragged detours that leads to forgiveness.

Rescue; Shreve, Anita; Little, Brown and Company; $26.99

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

If the world as we know it were to spin uncontrollably into an Orwellian or Huxleyian orbit, where the consumption of animals sped down a slippery slope of barbaric proportions and power-hungry corporations manufactured pharmaceuticals to purposely make us sick and bio-engineered organisms to nurture our vanity, then reality would come very close to Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Year of the Flood. Some who cry conspiracy would say that that world has already come and its degradation upheld as evidenced in Atwood’s fiction. I, on the other hand, compare Atwood to those other great authors, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, as a voice to be heeded not for imitating life, but rather warning us of what life might one day become.

The world in The Year of the Flood has undergone an apocalyptic change, the “waterless flood”. Told from the viewpoint of a survivor who recounts her experiences from before the flood, the novel is a portrayal not so much of the characters, who indeed vividly jump from the page, but of the society over which this flood must wash.

With laser-like precision, the author’s unique lens skillfully leads the reader through a dissection and analysis of our human collective. As painful as this sounds, when she portrays our materialism and animal consumerism in the extreme dimensions existing prior to the flood, how can we not see a clear comparison between fiction and our present day world? The CorpSeCorps is our government in bed with Helthwyzer, the pharmaceutical company. Happicuppa, the coffee company that laces us with “gen-mod” might very well be our Starbucks.

In this world, life is perhaps how one might imagine man were he reach his lowest state, completely fallen into ultimate corruption through the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Technology and science has advanced to such a degree that we have full reign over biological creation and animals deserve no reverence. Humanity has reached the goal of supremacy over nature.

I think it’s safe to say that most humans wouldn’t enjoy life in this Atwoodian world. Not only are animals subordinate, but most people are as well, unless of course you belong to the privileged class of scientists working for Helthwyzer or the government officials of the CorpSeCorps. Humans are at the mercy of each other’s barbarianism. Your fellow man is most likely a rapist or thug and while atrocities may occasionally be apprehended, criminals are thrown into the “painball” wilderness where one is pitted against the other to the death for entertainment purposes, televised to the world.

In this fictional world, you can pretty much expect there is no sanctuary…with the one clear exception of “the Gardeners”. Though she has no religious leanings, the main character, Toby, finds herself living amongst this group and the main narrative is her telling of how she came to join them, her state of existence surviving through the waterless flood and her relationship to other characters in the story. Because Toby is very much like you or me she is the central viewing window through which we see the story.

The Gardeners lend this Atwoodian society its only remaining thread of human dignity and cause for salvation. When orphaned Toby joins the Gardeners, it is because she has been rescued by them from an abusive employer, and though they come across as what we may view as a religious cult by our own standards, their principles, as illustrated throughout the novel in the form of well-written hymns and the teachings of their leaders known as Adams and Eves, fall nothing short of the highest ideals that could indeed save our world today.

In preparation for the “waterless flood”, the Gardeners’ objective is to learn self-sustainability and harmony with nature. They teach horticulture and bee-keeping, survival skills, joyous life in the moment, sending “light” around those in need…all things that perhaps resonate with any reader who has ever thought that perhaps our world could use a little more of this.

When the flood comes Toby has been separated from her gardeners clan. This is actually the starting point of the book with the timeline reaching back and then bringing the reader forward at about the midway point of the book. The waterless flood heralds the disbandment of the CorpSeCorps, Helthwyser and a total disintegration of any world order. Toby must survive alone and so the story of her life, post-flood, is intermixed with the telling of her story up to his point, the point from which she must learn to survive and we the reader discover the landscape of this world.

Anyone who enjoys reading very rich, well-written thought-provoking literature will love The Year of the Flood. Margaret Atwood takes the human element of literary fiction to the brink of futuristic, urban sci-fi and creates a world deeply shadowed by the most despicable qualities of humanity, but manages to provide a glimpse of our potential for grace.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Year of the Flood because I took away from it a reinforcement of that belief I carry in the fortitude of human grace. The Year of the Flood drew a crystal clear world for me, and a distinctive emotional and philosophical reaction from me, two feats that are not always so easy to find in real life. I found it engrossing, entertaining, thought-provoking and inspiring…all the things I most love in books. Therefore I give it the highest rating possible: 5 out of 5!

Year of the Flood, The; Atwood, Margaret; Virago; Hachette Group; Rs. 395

The Autobiography of Henry VIII by Margaret George

I love British history, and in particular Henry VIII. Having read much of the scholarly works concerning the Tudors, I was hungry for something that would flesh out and balance the often spare dry prose of scholars. I found it in Margaret George’s Autobiography of King Henry VIII.

Ms. George uses the voice of Henry’s Fool-Will Somers, to add an additional and often fascinating look at this troubled but brilliant monarch. Will has a keen, dry, sardonic wit which he uses to great effect throughout the book. It is Will who allows us a glimpse of a very human fallible man, who often was ahead of his time in so many ways.

The greatest gift Ms. George brings to us through this book is to be able to visualize Henry from his early childhood forward. We are finally able to see the motivations for many of the future King’s actions. Here is an able and highly sensitive talented boy. Superior to his much loved elder brother Arthur in every way. Arthur, the future King of England, is his father’s pride and joy. King Henry VII sees the boy as England’s hope. Everything Henry does, by contrast, is constantly overshadowed by his princely brother.

Henry VIII began reading at 3 years of age. By the age of 7 he was already something of a genius, with a gift of languages, a talent for the arts and an absolutely fearless attitude towards life. Arthur, in contrast, was fearful, weak and indecisive. How that rankled the brilliant child, to see an inferior sibling chosen for the throne.

When Katherine of Aragon, the Spanish Princess is betrothed to Arthur, Henry is beside himself. For here is the shining symbol of all he has been deprived of. When Arthur dies of a fever shortly after his marriage, Henry is secretly thrilled. But his father, knowing the boy’s secret aspirations, rounds on him and torments him unmercifully.

Here Ms. George lays the foundation for all of Henry’s future actions. At his father’s knee, the child learns much of treachery, manipulation, and the misuse of power. Yet, the inner longing to be known as a fair just King overrides the negative imprints of his childhood.

Crowned King Henry VIII, he set about making the English court a haven for artists, writers and scientists. He alone created the great Renaissance in British history. His own contributions were enormous. From beautifully redesigned palaces, to boat building, music, and great written tracts on a variety of subjects. One which earned him the title “Defender of the Faith.”

He was the foremost jouster in the land, the fairest dancer and keenest hunter. He was known far and wide as the best King living, and England’s own Flower of Chivalry. Ms. George handles the long slow slide into paranoia and suffering so ably and does it in such a humane compassionate way, that at last, we can see a fully realized man beneath the myth.

Ms. George’s Henry is not just a bloated corpulent beast, but rather a troubled, hurt and mistrustful man. Not without cause, for everywhere he turns plots, cabals and intrigue abound. His failure to secure the throne through a son lay at the bottom of much of Henry’s difficulties. During this period of time, witches, demons and superstition walked abroad, hand in hand with a blossoming logic about the concrete nature of the world.

Much has been made of Henry’s fear of and accusations about witchcraft. Put in the context of those early years, it’s not extraordinary at all. So that when Henry first discovers his second wife Anne Boleyn might be using black magic, his blood ran cold. Given the testimony of highly credible witnesses, Henry had little choice but to believe his quixotic mercurial wife was guilty. Given that though rare, Henry himself could have been accused by association if he hadn’t complied with the verdict, then all the man’s actions become more understandable.

Ms. George has written a masterpiece of human psychology, spicing it up with exquisite depictions of court life during Henry VIII’s reign. She has gifted us with a rare but much needed honest look at this maligned monarch. For here we have a Henry we can understand. We can at times feel deeply for the lost hurt and jealous second son. We can share in his hunger for love and knowledge, knowing that these things don’t come easily to a sitting King.

Finally, we can feel his physical suffering, and glimpse the self hate as he becomes fatter and less regal. Most of all we can peer into his heart and begin to see the folly of his delusions about women and love.

This is a book begging to be put up on the silver screen. Where Ms. George’s work in all its beauty depth and fascinating complexity can truly shine. If you want a rare look at who the real King Henry VIII was, don’t miss this lively, lavish and fascinating book.

Autobiography of Henry VIII, The; George, Margaret; St. Martin’s Griffin; $17.99

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Had Neal Stephenson written “Snow Crash” as a dystopian love story, I’m not sure whether he could have equaled Gary Shteyngart’s latest, greatest, novel; a memorable exploration of romantic love set amidst a dystopian near future United States. “Super Sad True Love Story” crackles with much of the same high powered kinetic energy and swift pace of Stephenson’s groundbreaking cyberpunk novel – the very first to offer a memorable comedic strain of cyberpunk science fiction – but it is so much more, a brilliant satire of clashing American immigrant values and a well paced, well conceived, romantic love story between the most unlikely of protagonists; thirty nine year-old Russian-American Lenny Abramov , and his much younger lover, twenty four year-old Korean-American Eunice Park. Shteyngart excels in exploring the inevitable cultural clash between immigrant Korean and Russian cultures, as New York City and the rest of the United States heads relentlessly towards both economic and sociological implosion. Here he relies on crisp, fast-paced dialogue which may remind some readers of David Foster Wallace’s, often laced with pathos and sharp satirical wit.

The story is actually quite simple. It takes place in a dystopian America (outrageously imaginative but chillingly real), a fascist state ruled by the Defense Secretary, ARA (an “unbridled authority”), and a so-called Bipartisan Party, controlled by conglomerates (e.g., ColgatePalmoliveYum! BrandsViacomCredit), and steeped in rampant consumerism. Books have become “bound, printed, nonstreaming Media artifact” that “smell like wet socks”, and reading is frowned upon. Human communication is reduced to “verballing” each other in “textspeak” (short abbreviations to replace complete sentences) and “streaming” data through the “apparat” (a futuristic Smartphone) that “knows every stinking detail about the world.” The “apparati” are perpetually set to the “social” mode, where you rank each other with every imaginable criteria from hotness or sustainability (that is, $$), share your feelings and thoughts 24/7, and trace each other’s whereabouts globally. Without an apparat, you don’t even exist — you are a “non-person.” There is no privacy, because everything is readily available to the rest of world (your birthplace, family members, cholesterol level, purchasing behavior, credit score, personal preferences…). People only care about two things: spending and “sharing” (the extreme version of overexposure: one of the characters “spends about seven hours a day streaming about her weight” on her apparat, and the highest compliment is “You are so Media!”). It’s a “creative economy” — “credit for boys, retail for girls.” If you haven’t been living under the rock, the “future” described in this book will resonate strongly with you, cracking you up with its disturbing familiarity.

The narrator Lenny, like the wall of books in his apartment, is an anachronism in this age (“the last reader on earth”). He longed for the good old days when people “read to each other.” He doesn’t get the youthful textspeak and has a morbid fear of death (he is 39 in a youth-obsessed culture). He works for Post-Human Services, a conglomerate division that claims to extend lives indefinitely, for those that can afford it. In this organization people are obsessed with staying young and reversing aging (wine is just a source of “resveratrol” and one takes 231 daily “nutritionals”). Anyway, he falls in love with Eunice Park, a beautiful young woman who is completely out of his league. This is a “misery needs company” match from the beginning, because Eunice is an emotionally traumatized, directionless, lost young woman (and from a different generation — 15 years younger), the type that attracts Lenny, who wants to rescue her by loving her unconditionally. The majority of the book examines the relationship from his perspective (documented in his diary) and hers (via her emails to her family and friends), from meeting, to loving, to disintegrating.

Without question, Shteyngart’s new novel is science fiction, even if much of the science fictional aspects of the tale are often pushed aside, as the author gives his readers full, undivided, attention to the romantic twists and turns of Abramov and Park’s unlikely romance. Shteyngart’s depiction of a New York City in the full brunt of a dystopian collapse, echoes Rick Moody’s novella “The Albertine Notes” (from Moody’s novella collection, “The Omega Force: Three Novellas”) in rendering a similarly stark, quite bleak, urban landscape. But a more apt comparison is with Matt Ruff’s “Sewer Gas Electric: The Public Works Trilogy” for his humorous, often irreverent take, on New York City’s impending doom. Like Ruff’s mid 1990s cyberpunk classic, it is one of the best depictions of this city I’ve come across from within the literary realm of science fiction.

Why then is it such an irresistible novel? Because it is easy to identify with Lenny for all of his ridiculous efforts to succeed, find love, and survive with at least the illusion of dignity. Shteyngart directs most of his sights on us. Satires, unlike most other forms of humor, provide characters we can identify with, not laugh at. The approach to characterizations is logical, within the limits of the satiric conceit upon which they are based. We are given characters that could be us, if the circumstances allowed and as such they give us a chance to see ourselves in a new way, stripped of everything that we would like to believe about ourselves. Satires are medicinal, providing a needed reality check in a time when it seems that no one else is concerned about just how bizarre life has become.

Shteyngart delivers a precision strike on our current fixation with access and excess. The laughs come easy as the complicity we share in the slow march toward the future shown becomes clearer and clearer. If you have ever commented on your spouse’s status on Facebook, you will feel a pinch. If you have updated your profile or tweeted while walking down the street, you may feel a twinge. If you have coveted your neighbor’s shiny new 4G iPhone, this may sting a little. The real dig is in the unfolding proclamation of the total failure of social media to connect people with useful forces for change, as well as the total failure of technology to deliver on its promise of freedom from the mundane. These are just a couple of the laugh or cry choices the book offers. I caught myself wanting to do both.

This is also a book about language and virtuosity. Shteyngart’s brilliant verbal inventions are comically devastating. His ability to extrude new idioms out of internet chatter and thin air is magical. Like a fusion of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, Super Sad True Love Story is the story of a quest that is questionable and a future that is sadly foreseeable.

‘Super Sad True Love Story’ works best when it concentrates on the relationship between the two protagonists and uses it as a lens through which to examine the immigrant experience and the generation gap – two subjects with a long history in American fiction. Both themes generate comedy – although for me Shteyngart’s idea of comedy often felt effortful – but as the title foreshadows, the story ultimately pursues a tragic arc. Whether the reader feels that Shteyngart earns his culmination is likely to depend on how far he or she has identified with Lenny and Eunice’s struggle to make a refuge for themselves in the midst of social collapse.

“Super Sad True Love Story” seems destined to become one of this year’s critical and popular literary successes. It is certainly one of the best – If not the best – novels of this year. Shteyngart’s reputation as our foremost living American satirist is secured with this novel’s publication. His latest novel is a much more revealing look at human relationships than his earlier “Absurdistan”, and one that is much livelier in its depiction of romantic love and satire. However, I do hope his future work exhibits much of the same literary range exhibited by the lesser known Matt Ruff; “Super Sad True Love Story” represents a major first step in such a direction.

Super Sad True Love Story; Shteyngart, Gary; Random House; $ 26.00

The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt

I whooped with joy when I received an Advanced Review Copy of “The Summer without Men”. There was nothing better I wanted to do at that time than just stretch myself on my bed and read the book. To devour it, to read it word by word and not miss out on anything. I loved “What I Loved” and was waiting to read something else by Ms. Hustvedt right after and yes I read this one.

What happens when out of the blue, your husband of thirty years asks you for a pause in your marriage? Yes literally calling it that – a pause. What do you do? How do you react? Mia Fredricksen, renowned poet and writer gets asked that by her husband and cracks up to begin with, and then decides to take the summer off and hibernate to the prairie town of her childhood. She rages, she fumes, she bemoans, she suffers silently to begin with and slowly and steadily she gets roped into the lives around her. From her aged mother and her friends to the young neighbor with her disastrous husband and kids to the puberty-hit girls in her poetry class.

Mia then begins to see things differently (Surprise! Surprise!) and while doing that she comes across problems bigger than her own. She learns to see people differently and also corresponds online with the anonymous and sometimes abusive Mr. Nobody. Though initially trapped in a cerebral solitude Mia opens up and in doing so, she lets in some much needed air in her life.

This is not a chick-lit book. This is pure writing and thankfully it does not take pages to describe what the characters are going through. I loved The Summer without Men because it is not pretentious nor does it claim to be a feminist-central book. The prose is crisp and hits home all the time while you are reading it. Chuckle! Laugh! Grin! Read this book and all these emotions will for sure come alive.

Summer without Men, The; Hustvedt, Siri; Picador; $14.00 – Releasing in March 2011