Book Review: Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Title: Jerusalem: The Biography
Author: Simon Sebag Montefiore
Publisher: Weidenfeld And Nicholson, Orion Books, Hachette Book Group
ISBN: 978-0297866923
Genre: Non-Fiction
Pages: 696
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

Jerusalem: The Biography is one of the great reads of the year for me and you should not miss out on reading this one. I have always loved reading anything by Simon Sebag Montefiore. He writes with honesty and passion that is hard to miss. Whether it is about Stalin as a boy and adolescent to Monsters and Heroes, Montefiore does a remarkable job of it.

Jerusalem is a true masterpiece – a biography of a city and yet so much more. It is not easy to write about a city – and also considering that the city is so old and ravaged by the brutalities of time. The thing about the book is that the reader feels as though he is stepping back in time and experiencing the history of Jerusalem first hand.
Jerusalem the book has been written in a very colourful manner – full of anecdotes, how the city came to be what it is today, the rulers, the ones who squandered and looted its riches, the ones who hold it in high regard – its Kings and its Prophets. Montefiore does not leave any stone unturned.

Having said that, there were times I would tend to disagree with the author and yet could not put the book down. There is not much in terms of guidance or analysis by the writer, and yet the book shines. What got me started was the role Jerusalem plays in the apocalyptic vision of fundamentalist Christians and Muslims, and how that has been brought to light in this book. The other aspect that got me going was the deep-rooted connection between Christians and Muslims is made so evident and clear throughout the book and the way it is done is marvellous.

Sparkling and profound, the book is written keeping in mind the most terrible things that have happened behind her walls and also the richness of its land. The book does not take sides. It is an unbiased book and at the same time lays the facts as they are which should be the case while writing about a city. My favourite chapter in the book is, “Sunset of the Byzantines” which truly captures the essence of the book – its timeline and charisma in drawing historical references.

To review a book of Jerusalem’s stature would definitely require a research paper. It is that intense and deep. What I can say is that this is not one of your airport reads. It requires the time and attention that a book of this kind deserves. It however makes you turn the page and wonder at the scale and scope of Jerusalem’s place in history.

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Book Review: The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht

Title: The Tiger’s Wife
Author: Tea Obreht
Publisher: Hachette
ISBN: 978-1780220796
Genre: Literary Fiction
PP: 352 pages
Price: Rs. 325
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

In my earliest memory my grandfather is as bald as stone and he takes me to see the tigers. He puts on his hat, his big-buttoned raincoat, and I wear my lacquered shoes and velvet dress. It is autumn, and I am four years old. The certainty of this process: my grandfather’s hand, the bright hiss of the trolley, the dampness of the morning, the crowded walk up the hill to the citadel park. Always in my grandfather’s breast pocket: The Jungle Book, with its gold leaf cover and old yellow pages. I am not allowed to hold it, but it will stay open on his knee all afternoon while he recites the passages to me. Even though my grandfather is not wearing his stethoscope or white coat, the lady at the ticket counter in the entrance shed calls him “Doctor.”

Sometimes it takes a while to get into a book, to find yourself hooked and unable to put the book aside for long lest you find your thoughts returning to it. At other times, a book might snatch up your interest from the very beginning and drag you forward without mercy. The Tiger’s Wife is the latter sort. It hooked me with the opening paragraph and I struggled to avoid sitting there for hours, consumed by the book until the last page was turned.

Obreht’s style is the culprit, encouraging you to read just a little more before putting the book down and taking a break or sleeping. The prose is immensely readable without feeling underwhelming and lends to a swift pacing. The book flies by, which is never a bad thing unless you want to take it slow and savor the read. Unfortunately for me, that is just what I wanted to do.

At the tender, sensitive heart of Tea Obreht’s stunning debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife: A Novel, is a moving story of love between a granddaughter and her grandfather. The grandfather is a physician and a man of science. He is also a storyteller who uses the power of storytelling to guide and instruct his granddaughter. “…and my grandfather might say, `I once knew a girl who loved tigers so much she almost became one herself.’ Because I am little, and my love of tigers comes directly from him, I believe he is talking about me, offering me a fairy tale in which I can imagine myself—and will, for years and years.”

The granddaughter is the narrator, Natalia Stefanovi, a young doctor following in her grandfather’s footsteps as a physician in an unnamed Balkan country, a country torn brutally apart after its most recent war. When the story opens Natalia is en route to a medical mission of mercy at an orphanage in a remote seaside village. The mission is to administer to the medical needs of the orphans there as well as to inoculate the children against measles, mumps, rubella and other diseases they were subjected to during the war. It is a tense time just following the latest round of wars in the Balkans and while crossing a new border which now redefines her country (most likely the former Yugoslavia), Natalia learns of the death of her beloved grandfather.

“Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man.” These stories are dominant in Natalia’s mind as she tries to understand what happened to her grandfather and how he came to die alone in the village of his birth, a village where his two fantastical stories also have their origin.

Natalia must go to the village to collect her grandfather’s belongings and in doing so she must not only come to terms with the end of her beloved grandfather’s life, but with the end of her country as well. The journey back to the village of her grandfather’s birth and death provides a grim perspective of life in the war-torn Balkans. It also gives more substance to the stories of the deathless man and the tiger’s wife, reaching beyond reality to draw on the energy of folklore to maintain strong personal and social relevance – personal relevance for Natalia and social for Eastern Europe.

Mostly, we learn about war. It runs in the background, a perpetual nightmare that inspires a range of reactions from the surreal to the horrific. People sit in cafes, sipping coffee and chatting as the war drops bombs around them. Everything breaks down as people stop caring–why do this or that when there is a war on? A village is whipped into paranoid superstition, the tiger lurking in the hills as dreadful as the war lurking on the horizon. The tiger is present though, something real and tangible that they can focus on if only to forget about the war coming for their out of the way mountain home. The Tiger’s Wife is tinged with war that has seeped into the lands, villages, and cities that the characters and stories inhabit. In the midst of the horror that it brings, we see the bits of wonder–the strange behavior that comes to the forefront and the strange little events that become the stories that we keep to ourselves.

To say that Natalia is the main character of this story would be false. She is our narrator and we learn about her life in some small fashion, but the story only involves her, it is not about her. The same might be said of her grandfather, whom the book revolves around. He is almost always there, in frame and a part of the events happening, but there is one other thing that sits in frame, hiding at times and coming into the foreground at others. There is no main character to this tale, at least no living, breathing being as a character tends to be. As I said before, we learn mostly about war. The characters, these living breathing beings that we have a habit of getting attached to, are unimportant. They are parts of the story, but the story is not about them… it is about the war and about the unnamed Balkan country that it seems to have perpetually settled upon, occasionally going dormant for a cease fire or short bout of peace.

This highly involved novel shifts back and forth, chapter by chapter, between the past and the present; between superstition and science; between folklore and realism; between the fantastical and Natalia`s present predicament . The Tiger’s Wife: A Novel does not have a linear structure with typical plot advancement and this might be off-putting for some readers but I found it engaging.

The Tiger’s Wife: A Novel is a complex but rewarding reading experience which brings together historical and contemporary themes with haunting images and rich symbolism. It seems to me that Obreht was striving for a heightened awareness of life`s hidden meanings and I think she succeeded brilliantly.

The Tiger’s Wife is a fantastic read that lures you in, traps you, and proves hard to escape from. Tea Obreht is a talented young author, who has crafted a brilliant story of stories and wrapped it up in a beautiful style that I could not help but fall in love with. The book is one of the best I have read this year and certainly one of the best debuts, possibly the best, that I have ever had cracked into. I cannot recommend The Tiger’s Wife highly enough and cannot wait to get my hands on more of Obreht’s work. You need to read this.

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Book Review: The Passage by Justin Cronin

Title: The Passage
Author: Justin Cronin
Publisher: Orion Books, Hachette Book Group
ISBN: 978-0752897844
PP: 784 pages
Genre: Horror, Fantasy Fiction
Price: Rs. 450
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

In this staggering book of speculative fiction, Cronin has proven that he can transcend genre and, with his power of language, create a distant world that feels close and credible. This is not your typical zombie or vampire novel; it isn’t cheesy or reductive. It shares some characteristics with its progenitor, The Stand, and fans of King’s work will be arguably riveted by this (more updated) novel. But there are as many differences as there are similarities, and Cronin’s ambitions are ultimately more complex and expansive. Cronin covers a longer period of time and delves more densely and philosophically into the dark and grey areas of the human psyche. Also, his poetic and luminous language and metaphysical subtext eclipses, in my opinion, King’s earlier work.

The story is teased out gradually, moving back and forth from places as far and deep as a Bolivian jungle, to the deserts and mountains of the west and southwest, to the concrete jungle of Houston, Texas, and many stops throughout. The disparate narrative threads converge to a point after the first 250 pages, and then we are thrust into a new world order at a place called The Colony. Some readers feel that this middle section is rather slow, but it is actually where Cronin shines. He introduces new characters that are likely to stay the course of the trilogy, and he is more meditative and succulent in his prose. The final 250 pages illuminate ambiguities that may still be humming and create a climax that heads toward a continuation.

There is a lot more than good and evil at play here, although the moral heft is evident, as human forces must combat malevolent viral creatures. But the incipience, growth, and psychology of these viral entities is not so simple. The relationship between the survivors and the creatures is more like a Venn diagram than a dualistic paradigm. Moreover, the human condition is explored in different states of wakefulness and sleep, in a myriad of conscious states, and connects all beings, whether viral or human. It also raises the question of, “who are the monsters?”

Divided into eleven sections, (with numerous chapters), the novel covers approximately one hundred years, starting circa 2014. However, there are three time periods that are pertinent to the story, two that are covered in detail. Each new section is headed by a short verse of Shakespeare from a play or sonnet, or else a poem by Shelley or other poet that has a poignant significance to the narrative. For instance, this verse by Henry Vaughan, from “The World:”

I saw eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright,
And round beneath it time in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres,
Like a vast shadow moved in which the world
And all her train were hurled.

Cronin’s sense of place; of time; of timelessness; and his magnificent explorations of memories; of memories folded and unfolded and twisted in time; and of the self and the Shadow self, are examples of his bridges from genre to literature. He balances intellectual and action narrative with enough gusto to keep all audiences satisfied. The plot and story have a solid pace, although he takes his time to develop his characters and illuminate the back-stories. Additionally, as in his superb novel, The Summer Guest, Cronin’s prose glitters with moving beauty. “…while you sank into the dreamy softness of your seat and sipped ginger ale from a can and watched the world float in magical silence past your window, the tallest buildings of the city in the crisp autumn light and then the backs of the houses with laundry flapping and a crossing with gates where a boy was waving from his bicycle, and then the woods and fields and a single cow eating grass.”

There are, occasionally, some minor snags in the construction. A few devices are employed at intervals, and there are times when a character is improbably saved from the clutches of disaster. Yet, the author does it with panache, in dramatic scenes portrayed with a soulful and melancholy elegance. He avoids melodrama. He gets inside the head of his characters, and they are made of flesh and bone, not straw. It is also satisfying to see that this is a very diverse cast of multi-ethnicities. The landscape of people is naturally rendered, not making a statement but rather reflecting a realistic ethnic pool of combinations.

THE PASSAGE is the first of an ambitious trilogy. The journeys on foot or by hoof, by machine or by dream, are full of serrated adventure. And it immerses you in all strains of love–sibling, maternal, paternal, friendship, romantic, and a crushing one of cross-purposes. And it has stars, the moon, bones, and blades, guns and garrisons, trees and cliffs. And did I say stars? Five of them, though
it ends with a jarring cliffhanger.

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Book Review: Never Look Away by Linwood Barclay

Title: Never Look Away
Author: Linwood Barclay
Publisher: Orion Books, HBG
ISBN: 978-1-4091-2091-9
Genre: Thriller
PP: 513 pages
Price: Rs. 295
Source: Publisher
Rating: 4/5

Don’t read this book! Not unless you’re prepared to give up sleeping until you finish it. And maybe for a while afterwards. Yep, it’s that good.

Davis Harwood is an ordinary guy, with an ordinary family, living in an ordinary small town. But he has a problem: his wife is depressed and seems to be edging towards suicide. When she buys tickets so they can go to an amusement park for the day, David thinks maybe she’s getting better. But shortly after they get there, their son disappears. David finds him, but now his wife has disappeared. Suddenly, David’s life turns into a waking nightmare where things just keep getting worse.

Lincoln Barclay grabs your throat in the first chapter and never lets go. Unlike a lot of entries in the genre, none of these characters have the unbelievable deductive powers, superhuman strength, or friends conveniently working in key positions. The good guys do their best, make mistakes, then regroup and try again. The bad guys are not possessed by some sort of demonic evil, they’re in it for the money but just don’t care who gets hurt along the way. And good luck figuring out who is really good, who is really bad, and who is sliding along in the middle somewhere.

The characters are so well fleshed-out, and so believable, you could swear you’ve met some of them before. Everything makes sense in context, so you never shake your head and wonder, “why would he ever do something so stupid?” The plot moves briskly; so briskly you won’t have time to anticipate the twists and turns and shocks. You travel right along with David and can’t shake the eerie, uncomfortable feeling that it could all have very well happened to you.

I don’t want to reveal any more of the plot for fear of giving away too much. I’ll just say that this is one of the twistiest of the twisty suspense novels I’ve read, that some intriguing questions of identity arise, and that there are multiple story lines, with the point of view alternating between David’s compelling, first-person narration and the viewpoints of various other characters in the third person. David is a likable, intelligent, ordinary man caught up in perilously extraordinary circumstances, and young Ethan and David’s parents are other sympathetic characters the reader will care about.

This book has major motion picture written all over it. But don’t wait for the movie, buy the book and read it now. It gets my highest recommendation!

Book Review: The Wise Man’s Fear (Kingkiller Chronicles, Day 2) by Patrick Rothfuss

Title: The Wise Man’s Fear: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day 2
Author: Patrick Rothfuss
Publisher: Orion Books
ISBN: 9780575081420
PP: 994 Pages
Genre: Fantasy Fiction
Source: Publisher
Price: Rs. 850
Rating: 4/5

Several reviews have focused on the oddly-shaped plot, in that our title character, after 1000 pages, is geographically right back where he started, and developmentally not a whole heck of a lot further away than that.

This is true but incidental to the question of whether or not this is a good book. Perhaps the expectation is that, by the end of book two in a trilogy, Our Hero ought to have vanquished at least one evil arch-villain, and certainly he ought to have fought in the Battle of Helm’s Deep. Instead, our hero learns some languages, hangs out with cultures alien to him, makes (and loses) some friends, and discovers he is both very good and also completely clueless when it comes to the opposite sex. The largest battle in the book — if you could call it that — has thirty people, most of whom don’t do anything. Wise Man’s Fear acquits itself well as a self-contained novel, avoiding the middle child trap: enough is resolved to satisfy the reader while the long-term plot threads are developed just enough to hold our attention for a couple of years until the trilogy is finished.

A lot of fantasy authors hit you over the head with their Epic scale. They’ve put so much research and effort into developing their creation that they want you to ‘get it,’ and so inundate you with the various languages, cultures, and histories that comprise their universe. Forced narratives deliver a mountain of exposition to show off how detailed their fantasy universe is. And it may well be that Rothfuss’ world is not appreciably more epic or more detailed than, say, Sanderson or Tolkien, but Rothfuss knows how saturated the entire genre has become and isn’t trying to sell us his story because the plot is any better, or even really any different, than every other fantasy series. It’s not the story: it’s the storytelling.

Rothfuss lets us in on this notion with Kvothe’s own Edema Ruh, the nomadic band of troupers in which the main character spends his early years. To paraphrase Kvothe’s own explanation, most troupers and bards know the same stories, just as most everyone has heard the best stories and songs before. What makes Wise Man’s Fear and Name of the Wind compelling is that they are told so artfully. The characters and the world itself are not narrated in a top-down fashion; rather, we learn about them just as Kvothe does: as a teenager discovering everything for the first time. The ‘Chronicler’ is writing down Kvothe’s story as he tells it, and no doubt has some experience with Amazon.com reviews, as he even complains on a couple occasions that Kvothe is glossing over something that is surely of interest, and Kvothe shrugs it off; he’s telling his story his way, and he gets to decide what’s important.

Rothfuss has been compared to George R. R. Martin, and while both are easily among the finest living fantasy authors around today, they are otherwise nearly incomparable. Martin is weaving a gigantic, elaborate web of relationships and betrayals, and one imagines that the gears started turning over at HBO as soon as the first book of ‘Song of Ice and Fire’ was finished. Rothfuss is less ambitious and more focused, in part because his story, like so many of Kvothe’s own stories, has more in common with an oral tradition than it does with era-spanning gargantuans: it is the proverbial old man by the fireplace to Martin’s HBO spectacular. To some, this is a shortcoming, but it’s what makes Rothfuss unique. It is probably impossible, or at least inadvisable, to translate The Kingkiller Chronicle to the screen. Its strength is not in a meticulously crafted machine of moving parts, like Martin’s Westeros; this story relies entirely upon the sheer force of personality behind both its protagonist, Kvothe, and Rothfuss himself.

In other words: this is possibly the only story out of the modern fantasy genre that I would ever want to read aloud. The plot isn’t always consistent, and maybe some of the architectural beams creak under the weight of it at times, but one imagines that Rothfuss is as unconcerned with that as he’d like us to be: he’s traveling around with his trouper’s wagons and he wants us to believe that the delivery matters as much as the content. There’s nobody else like Rothfuss out there right now, and even if Kvothe isn’t sufficiently ‘epic’ for some readers, he and many of the other characters have a lot more to say about the simple and confounding business of being human than anything else you’ll find in the fantasy section.

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