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The Japanese Wife
Kunal Basu
Harpercollins
Rs. 395
Yes, it is this “The Japanese Wife” that the Aparna Sen film is based on. In Ms. Sen’s words “It’s an improbable and hauntingly beautiful love story, almost surreal in its innocence. And I immediately knew that this was
the film I had to make”.
I was disappointed with the collection of stories here, perhaps because “The Japanese Wife”, also the first story in the collection set the tone. It’s a story that’s strangely flat. A Bengali school teacher begins a pen friendship with a Japanese woman, which flows along without too many ripples, till his aunt suggests he marries a girl that she shows him. This, he reports it to his Japanese friend which makes her suggest that they marry instead. So there is a marriage through letters and the marriage goes on and on, with exchanges of gifts and both of them staying in their own homes. Finally, something happens and she comes to see him.
I suppose if you are a Kunal Basu fan, this sort of story might appeal, I found myself increasingly impatient with the predictability of the story. And that stayed in the reading and I dropped the book after one or two more stories.
The Dante Club
Matthew Pearl
Ballantine Books
$ 5.50
Matthew Pearl’ debut novel is part real and part fiction. The Dante Club is a real club whose members at one or other time included Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell, as well as Longfellow. Set in the late 1800s, it begins with Lon
gfellow, Lowell and Holmes working on a translation of Dante; soon murders being to happen in the manner of deaths in the Inferno and the members of the Dante Club are natural suspects. These men take on the business of solving the crimes themselves in order to establish their innocence, and soon we are off on an exciting journey where it’s difficult to separate “real” events from fictional, or one kind of writing from another.
A must buy for anyone interested in mystery, detection and reading,
The Poe Shadow
Matthew Pearl
Vintage Books
3.50 pounds
Absorbing reading, this crime story “on the cusp of mystery, literature, and historical fiction” starts with the death of Edgar Allen Poe, in circumstances that are identical to those of his “real” death. Quentin Clarke, a law
yer and Poe admirer, who happens to witness Poe’s burial, sets about to uncover the mystery of the writer’s death. In the process, he seeks the help of the man on who Poe’s famous creations Auguste Dupin was based. The story moves between facts and fiction with the same uncanny ease that we saw in “The Dante Club” and effortlessly uses several genres of writing to unravel its plot.
The book is a tribute not only to Poe, Dupin, detective fiction and the whole business of detection, but also to reading, for it appears to be written from a vantage point that privileges the reader at every turn.
Exciting, intelligent, entertaining and suspense-filled to the end, this is a book worth owning.
The Book Thief
Markus Zusak
Alfred A. Knopf
Rs. 595
This is a terribly overrated book; the long, dreary tale, set in World War II Germany, narrated by Death, it trudges on and on and doesn’t really go anywhere. The story begins with the childhood of Liesel, the little girl who steals books and ends with her death as an old woman; Liesel, isn’t particularly endearing or interesting; perhaps the book is too long and might have done well as a short story. The one line that stays in the mind is this one by Death “I am haunted by humans”.
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
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