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This week at Strand Book Stall...
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All the Pope's Men
John L. Allen, Jr.
Doubleday, $24.95
THE SHOUT line for this book says that it is the "Inside Story of How the Vatican Really Thinks" but don't be fooled, it's a white washed, cleaned up, justified version. The book does a readable job with information on the Vatican — the structures of power within the Vatican, the Pope, the Vatican's physical assets etc. — with amusing anecdotes and examples.
John L. Allen Jr., an American Catholic, has for years been covering the Vatican on a daily basis, being the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and a Vatican analyst for CNN and National Public Radio, besides also writing the weekly Internet column called The Word From Rome.
Allen says that one of his aims in writing this book, apart form wanting to show readers the mind of the Vatican, is also the hope of putting "... English-speaking Catholicism and the Holy See in conversation with one another."
This doesn't seem like a book to be taken seriously, because it has a way of skirting issues of culpability of the Vatican in dividing blame equally-amongst-all-parties kind of way that doesn't hold water because the book is about the Vatican, not about all and sundry.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Mark Haddon
Definitions, Rs. 225
AN INTELLIGENT children's book, without the habitual cute characters, who go on cute adventures, following cute clues and employing cute methods, this tale of 15-year-old Christopher, with the photographic memory, who finds the neighbour's dog dead on the lawn and decides to track down the killer and write a murder mystery, is full of surprises.
It is illustrated; the pictures are like a sophisticated version of the Little Prince illustrations, though they have a similar quality of being completely accessible. It's not surprising that The Curious Incident won several prizes for teenage fiction, including the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. I would recommend this book to any parent whose children are intelligent and have a sense of humour.
Inside the Kingdom
Carmen Bin Ladin
Warner Books, Rs. 300
ANOTHER AMERICAN book, this one, significantly, published by Warner Brothers, is the story of Osama Bin Laden's brother's wife, Carmen, and her three daughters. Carmen Bin Ladin is so full of American hype and positivism that it turns the stomach to read more than a couple of pages at a time. But, of course, the book is already a best seller across the world.
The self-indulgent record of Carmen's marriage and break-up with Yeslam, brother of Osama is boring and tiresome, not least because Carmen always feels the politically correct sentiment and appears always as the very epitome of humanness. I don't know if its possible for anyone to read the book with satisfaction, because Carmen is either gushing about herself or telling us how dreadful it is to be a woman in Saudi and never saying anything significant about Osama Bin Laden. In fact he doesn't even appear and she probably almost never met him. It seems less easy to believe that a westerner like Carmen could have had no idea that life in Saudi would be the way it was, than it is to believe that her husband's wealth did not tilt the scale in her decision to marry him. These western women's "terrible oppressions" in the East are far too many and far too simplistic.
Selected Poems of Jorge Luis Borges
Ed. Alexander Coleman
Viking, $10.00
BORGES, WHO we know primarily as the writer of all those stories — in which mirrors, mazes, and swords strike out the division between real and unreal, making reality nothing more than a matter of perspective — always considered himself first and foremost a poet. His poetry was first published a whole decade before he had started writing stories and he later wrote that in these poems he foreshadows all that he would write later. He wrote in later years of the difference between the two phases: "At that time, I was seeking out late afternoons, drab outskirts and unhappiness; now I seek mornings, the center of town, peace."
Like all Spanish poetry, Borges' too has the magnificent sweep that unfolds across the bewitched page, as if from a magician's cloak, endless streams of passion, love, blood, hate, rage, beauty, death, dark skies, stormy seas, untiringly romantic men and women whose passion is never domesticated. To read Spanish poetry, even in translation as most of us do, is to be completely taken over, smelted and to glow with the secret knowledge that at least in poetry one can love and rage and be passionate without being edited.
There is only one word to describe this book — magnificent. Not only the words contained within the covers, but also the beautiful book with a cover of earthly simplicity and uncut pages. Buy it. And buy one for a friend
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
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