Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

Print Pick

This week at Fabmall.com

The Other Side of Me

Sidney Sheldon

HarperCollins, Rs.195

Yes, the title is meant to remind you of The Other Side of Midnight, which had achieved almost cult status in its time, becoming a movie too, if I remember right. But that's the only similarity; this has to be the most dreadfully boring, self-important, badly written book ever.

Slow Man

J.M. Coetzee

Secker & Warburg, £ 10.25

The critics are divided over this one; with reviews doing all kinds of readings, including a postcolonial one, in which the whole white Caucasian male being attended on by the Croatian nurse is lensed quite carefully. Is the slow man of the title really Coetzee himself some ask, while others opine that the author's voice is really the voice of Elizabeth Costello, who we met in Coetzee's previous book! Never mind all that. But the book is still slow, and the Coetzee bite is missing. Not in the same league as Disgrace or any of the old favourites.

The Prophet

Kahlil Gibran

Rupa, Rs.60

With Gibran's drawings, this classic never stales. I don't know if you noticed, but all over the world, there's been a tremendous revival of interest in the writings of Gibran, along with Rumi and Rilke. I often think that the three of them make a nice little bridge outwards from the cocoons of self-reliance and self-help that we seem doomed to weave around ourselves in the world as we know it today.

One should start with Gibran's easy mysticism, which is like a journey from oneself to an other mysticised and made lovely through love, then to Rumi, who shakes up all these little quiet certainties and sends us whirling madly, and finally to Rilke, whose mysticism and love are sited within longing for a world of such human milestones that you can feel how the pain of suffering your humanness is the mystical journey most near you, the most accessible. I for one am redoing my Gibran collection.

Memories of My Melancholy

Whores

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Jonathan Cape, £10

Even if we were still where readers were supposed to be, objective about the texts they were reading, this would have been a rotten read, which means that even if I were not a mother of teenaged daughters having to read about the remembered sexual exploits of a man who, on the eve of his 90th birthday, decides to give himself "a night of mad love with a virgin adolescent", (who, in the event turns out to be 14) I would still have found this book annoying and dull. A 115 pages of old vigour rehashed.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores makes it evident that if Marquez has not written in the last 10 years, it's because he can't write any more.

KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail