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This fortnight at Strand Book Stall
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In the Shadow of the Wind
By Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Weidenfed & Nicolson,
Rs.500
Don't pass this one up, it's definitely worth buying and keeping: a magical, enchanting, thrilling book, about the magic of reading, writing and the enchantment of stories. I haven't read a book this good in ages.
The incredibly lyrical prose is wrapped around a literary thriller of sorts, how a book and its characters haunt and change a young boy's life and the lives of those around him, his search for the book's author and the secrets contained in the book's making are so charged with enchantment that you will find yourself swearing by the magic of words if you had ever stopped doing so.
Again, a lovely, magical, thrilling, absolutely terrific book. Buy it.
Bisi Busy Banglore
By Ananth Shankar
Graphics by Kaushik Das
Rs. 300
Done by two people who have come to love Bangalore in the last seven years, Ananth Shankar and Kaushik Das, NIFT graduates, see the city through the eyes of its four legged inhabitants, who seems often more human than humans!
The lines of text and graphic are unambitious and rarely suggests more than they say. As I said earlier, an unambitious but enjoyable little book about a city that is fast losing its "fun" in a lot of fizz.
The Palace Thief
By Ethan Canin
Picador, Rs.175
The four stories in this collection "capture people at crucial moments, as they struggle to understand the strange, surprising turns their lives have taken."
The stories are titled Accountant; Batorsag and Szerelem; City of Broken Hearts and The Palace Thief, and each story is about a very ordinary person whose life is rendered unusual only because they kind of stop and look at what is happening to them and they do this in a language that is evocative though prosaic and the reader sees that the events themselves take on layers of meaning that did not possess when they were not discussed. So in a way the stories are about words and what words can do.
Not a bad read, sometimes a bit wordy for comfort, but largely the words flow well and lightly over the pebbles of plot and narrative.
The Alchemy of Desire
By Tarun Tejpal
Harper Collins, Rs. 500
Tarun Tejpal's first novel, with V.S. Naipaul's shout line "At last — a new and brilliantly original novel form India", actually turns out much better than the awful beginning indicates.
The Sufi bug seems to have bitten a lot of writers (quite a variety from Pico Iyer to Tarun Tejpal) into this "desire", "longing" thing that their characters get into. Iyer did it with some finesse but Tejpal trips himself, his characters and his readers up: the first section of the book is false, stilted and very Delhiite — cerebral, over detailed, self indulgent.
The idea is interesting: a young couple, one of them a writer, unearth a cache of diaries while renovating an old house up in the hills and find the diaries not only intruding into their life but also undoing it. The two stories run parallel and are meant to merge and run together at some point but though the author stretches the two stories they don't hold together. The story told by the diaries is much better narrated than the one in the present and some of the erotic prose is quite evocative.
Not a book to spend money buying, but definitely one to read, even if only for Tehelka.
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
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