Winkie

“Winkie is a remarkable character, made vibrant and utterly convincing flesh (plush?) under Chase’s masterful hand. This is a hauntingly beautiful, lovely and strange, funny and sly, surreptitiously moving book.” —David Rakoff, author of Don’t Get Too Comfortable.

“Winkie is a luminous achievement—a magical, eccentric novel about the subversive imagination, and about the power of anarchic play. I recommend this book with the utmost enthusiasm and joy.” —Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Jackie Under My Skin and Andy Warhol.

A book about a teddy bear. When was the last time I read something like that? Come to think of it, when have I ever read a book about a teddy bear? I collect stuffed toys - there are more than 30 cute animals from sheep to cows to pigs to yes one small bear, which adorn my room. But would I read about them? And come to think of it again, yes I would!

Winkie by Clifford Chase is a bizarre, comic, and hilarious novel that rises to absurd proportions but keeps a deft date with philosophy all the same. As Boris Kachka comments in the New York Times, "political satire is risky business." Winkie is an ordinary little teddy bear, lonely and neglected, handed down through generations, living his life on a dusty shelf. Winkie then realizes one day that deciding his fate is just a matter of taking charge of it. So he breaks the glass, escapes through the window, and walks his way through to a forest. There he gives birth to his Baby Winkie. Did I say that this book will order you to put all logic aside? But then as I was reading, I found that it was indeed easy to put logic aside - reading after all is meant to elevate the human imagination. A bizarre hermit, who mails bombs on the lines of the Unabomber, spies Baby Winkie, falls in love, and kidnaps her. And Winkie loses his Baby - who dies of a broken spirit. The FBI swoops in, and arrests Winkie - on some 9000 odd charges, one of which was terrorism, and a farcical trial ensues.

Throughout the book, Winkie is what captivated me. His thoughts radiate an innocence and purity that clashes with the absurdities of human existence. Winkie is no ordinary bear - he is the product of a society that succumbs to mass paranoia, and excessive mistrust. With his friend Francoise, a Muslim from Egypt, and the faltering lawyer, Unwin, Winkie withstands his 17-month long trial. The book is actually inspired by a real Winkie - a teddy bear handed down by the author's mother, now more than 80 years old, and needless to say more than a little mangy. As a social critique, Winkie is marvellous. As a personal treatise, Winkie is still marvellous. Endearing.

Excerpt from Google Books.

Verdict: Inventive.

Rating: 4/5

The Other Side of the Sky

Farah Ahmedi's memoir "The Other Side of the Sky" is intriguing as it unravels Farah's fight to belong in a new place. Born in Kabul at the height of the war between the mujahideen and the Russians, Farah sketches herself as a tenacious child who loves going to school. But everything changes for her the day her leg gets blown up in a land mine. After multifarious trials and tribulations she lands in the US which becomes her permanent home.

Ahmedi strikes us as a highly resourceful individual possessing far more intelligence than for her age at times. Her language is simple, almost as if she is talking to us one on one and her description of her childhood in Afghanistan is also a picture of a culture, landscape and people. Although the book is definitely touching in some places, Farah comes across as a slightly wilful character at times. When she returns from Germany she looks with scorn at her poorly dressed family who rushes to fulfil her every whim because they are just glad she is back. When she demands the red car, John and Alyce do their best to get it for her. But when they are unable to, she pouts and is not at all happy with an even better Mercedes. She explains saying that she failed to recognise the brand name and the value and admits that her reactions are at times like that of a small child because she didn't have the best of childhoods. Anyone else in her place would perhaps have been thankful that they have come this far, escaping with dear life from a wartorn country and now leading a life of relative peace and comfort. But then Farah is not anyone else. She is different.

Farah meets Laura Bush at the White House

The book is truly a memorable read in its evolution of Farah from a child to a literate woman who struggles to make an identity of her own in an unknown land. But although I sympathised I was not affected. Surprisingly, Alyce whom she describes as her closest friend only gets a passing mention in the list of dedications. After reading about Alyce's role in shaping up Farah's life and being the pillar of strength and support at all times, I feel Alyce deserved more than that. Atleast a couple of lines in expression of love or gratitude. But then these are my perceptions from the book and perhaps Farah has done so in other ways.

Verdict - Great story of survival and determination

Rating - 3/5

Eva's Cousin

"An intimate portrait of two women at the center of history and how innocence itself can be a crime against humanity. My book of the year." Linda Grant, Orange Prize-winning author of When I Lived in Modern Times.

"[A] strange, moving and disturbing book....In Anthea Bell's excellent translation, Eva's Cousin is a novel that feels like the truth." The New York Times.

"Sibylle Knauss's hallucinatory novel shows how people might sleepwalk into complicity in the worst crimes of the twentieth century. It extends the scope of human understanding in a deeply disturbing way. I was hugely impressed by it." Jill Paton Walsh, author of Knowledge of Angels.

Sibylle Knauss has written a truly beautiful book in Eva's Cousin. How bland yet how fulfilling a title for a book based on the real life experiences of a woman whose identity became enmeshed in her relation to Germany's supreme ruler of that time, Adolf Hitler. Set in Berchtesgaden, in Hitler's own home, with the towering Alps for a backdrop, and the despairing end of World War II, Eva's Cousin is a collage of memories, and time set against the superimposition of evil. There is a personal side to evil here - through all the chaos that Hitler unleashed, seen through the eyes of Marlene, the poor cousin of Eva Braun, the mistress of Hitler, it becomes a intense focus of a 20-year old struggling to come to terms with existence. Who was Eva Braun? It is a question that has been asked time and again. Sibylle Knauss attempts an answer to that question. Who is Gertrude Weisker? This forgotten figure from history who broke almost 50 years of silence to speak to Sibylle? Yes, we know she was the woman who spent the best part of the last year of Braun's life with her in the Berghof, Hitler's mountain retreat in Obersalzberg. And, who is Hitler? Of that last question, we know not the answer. This is a work of fiction based on facts - but the fiction is just strange as the facts. Especially, when the novel stretches the fact into imagination. Towards the latter half of the novel we are introduced to a strange novelish element - young Mikhail, who Marlene hides in Hitler's Tea House. Incredible. But to Sibylle's credit, the book is not history or a memoir but it is just a novel. And a well-written, almost movie-style ending, is just the stuff of novels, even if it is Eva's Cousin.

In the end, I was hugely impressed by Eva's Cousin. It was poetry in prose, in its meanings lay the capacity of the mind's imagination - that deep understanding that only the most beautiful of books can bring forth.

Verdict: Brilliant.

Rating: 4.5/5

Atonement

I don't know how to begin describing this book. I finished it and yet I was still with Briony, standing at the window, thinking of Robbie and Cecilia. Ian McEwan's novel "Atonement" is unsettling and moving in its tale of love and guilt. In Part One the language is languid and fluid. Time hangs heavy with expectation and the hot summer is palpable. And then the ripe sweetness explodes. Briony, the main 13 year old character in the novel, watches from the window as her sister Cecilia and Robbie, the char lady's son, tussle for a vase near the fountain. Suddenly, Cecilia strips to her underwear climbs into the water. Briony in an exaggerated shamefulness closes her eyes and when she opens them again they have disappeared. From then on there is a surprise at every turn and glance. One crisis follows another and there is a series of misinterpretations.

Readers familiar with critical literary fiction would find a combination of Woolf and Shakespeare among many others in McEwan's writing as he explores the turmoils of the mind through poetic stream of consciousness. He manipulates the language into exquisite prose, lush, intense and detailed, making the entire novel seem like a person, changing feelings and experiences. In the second part the language is hard and the sepia toned warmth that adorned the beginning has given way to the blue and grey landscape of war. It balances the stark realities of war where people die in needless bombings with the tender poignancy of Robbie and Cee's love mostly conveyed through imaginations and letters. In the third part the novel realises itself in Briony's atonement, taking on a regretful tone. The horrors of war are shown in all its brutality with nurse Briony having to treat badly wounded, misshapen patients. A self-flagellatory ambience imbues the pages as she immerses herself in treating the war-torn casualties and one gets the feeling that she is trying to heal and stitch up her broken conscience. Through her passage into realisation her solipsistic existence thus far is shattered as she learns what "everyone knew: that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended." Or as in the novel, beyond repair altogether.

McEwan inserts rhetorical criticism too. With echoes of Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, the novel writes an apparaisal of itself and gives a glimpse of what might have been, in certain instances. We feel then, that McEwan has just been a catalyst in the story, and that the events have all been created by other hands. But ultimately McEwan reaffirms his position of the author as God, with the perfectly imperfect ending. I closed the book, haunted by its shifting images, deeply moved by the passionate and poignant love between Robbie and Cee and by the unrest that has settled itself in the depths of Briony's soul.

Verdict - Absolutely can't miss.

Rating - 4.5/5

Red Strangers

When Richard Dawkins calls a book "illuminating," and names it as one among the top ten books he has read in his life, then it means that that book would enter your own "must-read" list. Red Strangers by Elspeth Huxley is indeed epic in its scale, spanning four generations of Kikuyu family from pre-colonization Africa to the advent of the Europeans. From Waseru to Matu to Muthengi to their sons, the saga is gripping, thought-provoking, and touching. A large part of the book is devoted to the customs and traditions of the Kikuyu life as it existed before the 'red strangers' came. For someone like me, whose knowledge of Africa is just on the surface, these early pages were indeed illuminating.

For such a powerful book, it is lamentable that it has been frequently out of print - a fact that frustrated Richard Dawkins into throwing an open challenge for any publisher to reprint this epic in an article in the Financial Times. Penguin took up the challenge, and includes Dawkins' article in the Financial Times as the foreword to this book. To me, what was perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the book is that the voice is always Kikuyu. We see every turn of the changing world through their eyes. As Dawkins says " it is Elspeth Huxley's extraordinary achievement in the first half of Red Strangers to immerse her readers so thoroughly in Kikuyu ways and thought that, when the British finally appear on the scene, everything about them seems to us alien, occasionally downright ridiculous, though usually to be viewed with indulgent tolerance."

Elspeth Huxley herself is considered something of an enigma - she was an advocate of colonialism but books like the Red Strangers and indeed, the Mottled Lizard do reveal a fair degree of sensitivity to the plight of the Africans. Book 1 in Red Strangers deals with Muthengi while Book 2 deals with Matu. The language is pristine, right from the beginning:

Muthengi was fourteen years old when he first saw a column of shining-skinned Kikuyu warriors swinging along the forest's edge towards the plains, like a ripple of wind across a field of ripening grain, on the way to war.

Ah, this book was reading heaven. Just heaven.

Verdict: Classic

Rating: 5/5

Tears of the Desert

Halima Bashir's Tears of the Desert is an absorbing memoir - for the first time, the horrors of Darfur, Sudan are written from a woman's perspective. Daoud Hari's The Translator was astounding in its depth, its portrayal of a stark and cruel world without sentiment. Tears of the Desert is much the same. The first hundred pages of the book are written with gentle nostalgia. In exquisite detail, Halima weaves her childhood, and life in pre-war Sudan. And then comes the Janjaweed. And the horror. The horror of it all, as Kurtz would no doubt have said.

Sudan is the heart of darkness. As the world comes to terms with the increasing hollowness of the Sudanese government, more authors will emerge, more books will be written about this 21st century genocide. Dave Eggers' masterpiece What is the What is one of the standout works in this category. Tears of the Desert, perhaps, may not rise to that stature. Halima's escape from Sudan to London is fairly non-dramatic. But what is heartfelt is her tale of gang-rape at the hands of Arab soldiers. The Sudanese government has repeatedly denied that it uses rape as a method of torture - but story after story by oppressed women have countered that fact. The Times seems to find certain sections of the memoir too incredulous to be true, and I have to say I agree when Stephen Robinson wonders how Halima could recount entire conversations from her childhood.

Yet, no matter the criticism, Halima's story is a poignant plea for help from a world that seems to have forgotten them. Written with the help of British journalist Daniel Lewis the book is a beautifully moving account of the heartache of an entire African nation. At the time of the book's publishing in Feb 2008, Halima is yet to find her family who were separated during the Janjaweed attack on their village. Only can only hope that she will. Someday.

Verdict: Moving

Rating: 3/5

Refusal

Subdued power. Those are the two words that come to my mind when I think of "Refusal" by Soazig Aaron. The underlying tension literally tears the silence that Klara brings into the life of Angelika, her sister-in-law and best friend. Klara is deported to Auschwitz and manages to return unscathed to all who sees her. But her eminent disquiet and harsh, sarcastic, pithy responses to questions reveals the horrendous scars beneath. Her experiences are not fully elaborated but the reader along with Angelika are given glimpses of a life too perverse to be described. The absence of revelation is the most weighty presence in the book. Towards the end we know one of the primary reasons why Klara refuses to take back her daughter, Victoire, and seeks a solitary life.

Aaron's writing is philosophical and sometimes poetic. There were instances when I read a sentence and nodded understandingly and paused for thought. Initially we feel frustrated with Klara, because we don't know the full extent of her experience, hence we don't know why she is behaving the way she does. Angelika exclaims, "I want her to go!" and I nearly agreed with her. But towards the end, there are scenes during Klara's narration, where she becomes extremely vulnerable and her exhaustion with life is palpable. Emotionally she has reached a wall and its too high for her to climb to reach the other side.

Verdict: Readable for its different look of a Holocaust survivor

Rating: 3.8/5

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers: A Novel

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers has to be one of the quirkiest novels I have read this year. I have read other books Xiaolu Guo, namely Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, and the Village of Stone, and enjoyed both immensely. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (phew, could not the publishers come up with a shorter title, please?!) is Zhuang's coming-of-age tale in England. Sent to London to study English for a year, the novel is written in an entirely pidgin English style.

“Now. Beijing time 12 clock midnight.
London time 5 clock afternoon.
But I at neither time zone. I on airplane."

I found it amusing. The style does not detract in any from readability but Guo's effort might appear a tad artificial, (how come there are no spelling errors, for instance?). So our Zhuang, or Z in the novel, comes to England, falls in love with a bisexual vegetarian with difficulty in communicating, and desiring solitude above all. Z is love lorn, dreams of babies, and farm houses. Well, difficulties are bound to arise, aren't they? The love story, to me, was just the background to the story - hidden in the book are little gems on differences between China and the West. Sample this, for instance, when Z is incredibly lonely:

“I think the loneliness in this country is something very solid, very heavy… We don’t have much the individuality concept in China. We are collective, and we believe in Collectivism… When I was in Middle school, we have to dance exactly the same pace and the same movement in the music. Maybe that’s why I never feel lonely in China."

Or this:

”Why privacy is so important? In China, every family live together... Privacy make people lonely, privacy make families falling apart.”

But Guo is at her best when she dissects feelings, never mind making cultural statements.

“I am sick of speaking English like this…I feel as if I am being tied up, as if I am living in a prison... I have become so small, so tiny, while the English culture surrounding me becomes enormous. It swallows me, and it rapes me. I am dominated by it… I wish I could just go back to my own language now.”

Some critics have torn apart the book with Carole Cadwalladr saying she just "didn't get it", and for Rosie Blau from The Financial Times "the book does not convince." I can't say I agree with them. I read the book in one sitting on Sunday. And those were hours well spent. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is quirky, humorous, and absorbing.

Verdict: Readable

Rating: 3/5

Prisoner of Teheran

Prisoner of Teheran by Marina Nemat is page-turning and taut with action. Set in Teheran at the time of the Iranian revolution - at a time when the world looked away even as men raged under the guise of Islamic fundamentalism. Imprisoned in the infamous Evin prison while still in her teens, Marina is seconds away from her death - by execution. Strange how sometimes life appears stranger than our imagination, almost as if the substance of our thoughts are no match for life's own creativity. Rescued by one of her interrogators, Ali, Marina's death sentence is commuted to a life sentence, and is forced to marry Ali under threat.

Beaten, tortured, and left for dead in a rapidly changing world, Marina's is an extraordinary story of survival - of grit that emerges when all the courage in us has disappeared. Interspersed with her childhood memories, the book is a precious vintage of life under the Shah in pre-revolution Iran. Yet, am I happy at the end of it? Perhaps not - I found sections of the book replete with cliches, especially where Marina aches under the pangs of teenage love. "I ached to reach out and touch his face?" And, some of the instances in the book sounded too far-fetched to be true, as some other bloggers have commented here. In fact, the discussion so became a rage that Marina Nemat herself is forced to comment on that blog. Interesting. But I have no doubt that Nemat suffered - and suffered immensely during her stay in Evin - and as long as our world turns a blind eye to this suffering, we are no worse than the hunters, or the captors themselves. I only wish the cliches had been left in Evin.

Verdict: Gripping

Rating: 3.5/5

Video: Interview with Marina Nemat

Is Bliss then, such Abyss

Is Bliss then, such Abyss,
I must not put my foot amiss
For fear I spoil my shoe?

I'd rather suit my foot
Than save my Boot --
For yet to buy another Pair
Is possible,
At any store --

But Bliss, is sold just once.
The Patent lost
None buy it any more --
Say, Foot, decide the point --
The Lady cross, or not?
Verdict for Boot!

- EMILY DICKINSON

Undoubtedly one of my favorite poets of all time, Emily Dickinson (1830- 1886) brings to her poems a refreshing insight, a clamor for detail, and mesmerizing lilting music. Her poems reveal a profound intuition, a complex understanding of the simple miracles of Life, Love and Death. Is Bliss then is from her series of poems titled "Life." Almost achingly true, the poem reminded me of all the times when I have suffered with a bruised heel only because bliss seemed exchangeable for the surfeit of style. Ah but then her thoughts need no more explanation - Emily was free, and knew Bliss. I still strive for it.

Miss Chopsticks

After having read Xinran Xue's three other books, including The Good Women of China, and the haunting Sky Burial, I didn't have to think twice when I saw her latest offering, Miss Chopsticks, in the bookshop. Xinran writes with a lyrical style - and Miss Chopsticks, a feel-good novel, is engrossing to the end. Translated by Esther Tyldesley, the book traces the journey of three peasant girls, Three, Five and Six - so named because in China, the value of the girl-child is negligible, just numerical abstractions that fill the human landscape. They are called "chopsticks" and boys are called "roof beams," the implication being that chopstick girls are disposable, while boys are the support of a family, the center beam upon which it revolves.

Xinran says that the novel is an imagined version of the lives of three peasants/migrants who she interviewed. Weaved together, they form the sisters, who leave their village for the big city of Nanjing. Struggling to cope in the frightening vastness of the city, they still manage to find work, love, and friendship amidst its harshness. Three works as in a quaintly-named restaurant called the Happy Fool, while Six, the more literate of the three, works in a teashop, that doubles up as a library. Five, the one I liked the best, considered by her father to be the "dumbest" so much so that she wasn't sent to school, finds work as an assistant in the Dragon Water-Culture Center. Often, the most evocative of the three, Five's character has more warmth, and achieves a level of tenderness that Three and Six fail to reach. Although well-received, Miss Chopsticks, is not below criticism - the uniform level of goodness that permeates the book sounds too unbelievable to be true. All of the sisters' employers are paragons of virtue - and seem to belie the 100s of stories that emerge from China everyday where migrant workers are underpaid, underfed, and cheated by ruthless bosses.

Miss Chopsticks ends on a positive, uplifting note - but I can safely say that I have read better from Xinran.

Xinran's next book: Voices from Last Generations, is scheduled for release later this year.

Verdict: Good if you are interested in changing China.

Rating: 3/5