Habibi: Craig Thompson

Image Credit: Amazon

I had a smashing birthday last month. I visited a new country and got beautiful gifts from wonderful friends. One of them was a graphic novel, Craig Thompson’s Habibi, which had been on my ‘must-buy’ list for some time. And what a treat it was! But first, a summary of the book –

Sprawling across an epic landscape of deserts, harems, and modern industrial clutter, HABIBI tells the tale of Dodola and Zam, refugee child slaves bound to each other by chance, by circumstance, and by the love that grows between them.

At once contemporary and timeless, HABIBI gives us a love story of astounding resonance: a parable about our relationship to the natural world, the cultural divide between the first and third worlds, the common heritage of Christianity and Islam, and, most potently, the magic of storytelling.

Habibi, which means beloved in Arabic, begins with a little girl married off to a man much older to her. She is frightened as is expected but the man treats her reasonably well and even teaches her the alphabet. Later, desert bandits storm the house, kill the man and kidnap her. They take her to a slave market from where she escapes, along with a little boy, the son of a black woman. They make a home for themselves in the carcass of a ship in the middle of the desert. This is the first half of the story which is told in a non-linear manner until it intersects at one point. The rest of the book is about how they get separated, the dynamics of their relationship and their quest to find one another.

Now, when I say graphic novel the first image is that of a medium sized book with roughly 200-300 pages. At nearly 700 pages, Habibi is a catacomb of pictures, stories and characters. Straddling the two worlds of fantasy and reality, Habibi is a mesmerizing read partly because of its illustrations and the setting. Although it is initially set in what looks like a traditional Middle Eastern country, it later changes to a modern one and the transformation is shown wonderfully through Thompson’s painstaking illustrations.

But what is even more wonderful is the fact that Thompson learnt Arabic, including its alphabet, which forms a very important part of the book. He tries to form a Middle Eastern milieu by devoting pages to Arabic designs and words.

Another notion that is connected to a graphic novel is that it’s going to be a light read full of pictures. Habibi breaks that concept. Interloping themes of religion, sex, violence, desire, identity and love, Habibi is not an easy read. It shows the evolution of relationships and how they can change over time. The overshadowing presence is that of religion, wherein Thompson tries to demonstrate that Islam and Christianity have the same origins. At the same time, he shows how the lives of Dodola and Zam run parallel through their experiences.
Habibi is a fascinating book, although a bit too abstract at times for me. There was also a lot of unnecessary sex in the novel, which perhaps could have been avoided. So, who says ‘comics’ are for children? There is a lot to be gleaned from pictures as Habibi will teach you.

Verdict: A deep yet fast read

Rating: 3.5/5

Fame by Daniel Kehlmann

Image Credit : Guardian

It's been a while since I finished reading a book over a weekend. Fame by Daniel Kehlmann isn't a magnum opus - it's rather what the publisher calls a 'novel in nine episodes.' Don't be misled by that. Novels don't happen in episodes - this is a set of nine interconnected short stories. No more. No less. They employ narrative techniques and deft literary devices, but they are short stories nonetheless. But as the Guardian notes in its review - short story collections don't sell. And it's true.

But there is a certain beauty to this collection. Daniel Kehlmann is what I wish I could be. His sarcasm and wit seamlessly blends in with his dark and acerbic humor. It's the sort of humor that doesn't hurt, that makes you smile, and yet the dark comedy in his lines make you cringe, because Kehlmann is pointing the finger not at his characters but the world we live in. A networked world that is falling apart because of technology, at the evident law of connection that the cosmos operates on, and the sheer absurdity in trying to milch sense out of it. Kehlmann strikes me as an intelligent author. (Actually, aren't all authors intelligent? How would they write books otherwise?). There is much to be explored beneath the seeming dry wit. Take for instance this quote:

At first I supervised five people, then seven, then nine, discovered to my amazement that people cannot work together without hating one another, and if you tell them who what to do they detest you, met Hannah, whom I loved more than she loved me, became head of a department, and then was moved to another town; it's called a career. 

Wow. A more powerful criticism of the modern day drudgery of work I haven't read in a while.

And this for us, the 'social' generation:

How strange that technology has brought us into a world where there are no fixed places anymore.  You speak out of nowhere [on cellphones and the internet], you can be anywhere, and because nothing can be checked, anything you choose to imagine is, at bottom, true.

There is more to this book than just dark humor. There are layers of meaning beneath each story. And interesting narrative twists as in the story of Rosalie, a terminally ill old woman, who begs the writer to save her life just before she commits to a Swiss institute to take her own life. And does the writer intervene? Most of all these stories echo one frightening thought : that there is no isolated action. That something happens somewhere that creates a ripple elsewhere. It's a thought that has always fascinated me. And repelled me. You would want to think that you are independent; that really the fact that you go jogging tomorrow morning is not going to affect anyone else in this universe except you. And then I start thinking - because I go jogging early in the morning, my Mom has to get up earlier. The shoes I wear are Nike - imagine the process it must have gone through to reach here, and because I am jogging, the sun has to rise. Haha.

Forgive this slightly crazed review. But I think it's a bit like what Fame is. It's craziness. Beautiful craziness.

Verdict : Very readable, especially if you want to take a break from the regular and mundane.

Rating : 3/5

Tiger Hills : Sarita Mandanna

Image Credit : Reading The Past

Much of the past week, I have spent ruminating over why vacations don't last, and work does. It's one of those puzzling conundrums that seem to be invented so that you can take some self-help philosophy from deep within you and console yourself that vacations don't last precisely so that you can experience the beauty of that short-lived joy otherwise. "You must fight for happiness," Devi, the Scarlett-like heroine of Tiger Hills tells us.

And it's true. Happiness seems to be worth fighting for. But why isn't it easy, I wonder? Not for me the cage fight of blood and tears - give me the smooth waves that comes easy. Why toil to be happy? Why struggle at happiness? I haven't found the answer to that, and I keep striving away, knowing well that happiness is an art, and that is something I haven't mastered. Something at least in life is easy - and that's reading. And it makes me happy to read. And happier when you discover there are such amazing writers who write amazing books even if the characters there have to keep fighting for happiness all the time. Tiger Hills is one such amazing debut - Sarita Mandanna has a beautiful gift - that of keeping the reader interested. No, correct that. Gripped. I am not easily swayed by a book as long-time readers of this blog may know (and where have they gone, these readers? :-(...).

The year is 1878. As the first girl to be born to the Nachimandas in over sixty years, beautiful, spirited Devi is adored by her entire family. She befriends Devanna, a gifted young boy whose mother has died in tragic circumstances. The two quickly become inseparable, 'like two eggs in a nest', as they grow up amidst the luscious jungles, rolling hills, and rich coffee plantations of Coorg in Southern India; cocooned by an extended family whose roots have been sunk in the land for hundreds of years.

Their futures seem inevitably linked, but everything changes when, one night, they attend a 'tiger wedding'. It is there that Devi gets her first glimpse of Machu, the celebrated tiger killer and a hunter of great repute. Although she is still a child and Machu is a man, Devi vows that one day she will marry him. It is this love that will gradually drive a wedge between Devi and Devanna, sowing the seed of a heartbreaking tragedy that will have consequences for the generations to come.

Yet, I was captivated by the lush landscape of this book. Coorg. It's not far from my hometown - I have been to these lush coffee bearing plantations. And Sarita is magical in weaving its textured history and luscious greenery. And Devi and Devanna - her two protagonists melt into this background. Coorg is one of the characters here - never does she let go through the story. Her pain, her history and her fierce pride all echoes itself in Devi, Devanna and Machu. There is a bit of Hardy-like despair at fate in this story - what if, you keep wondering all the time. What if Devanna wasn't so madly in love with Devi? What if he hadn't done what he did in a fit of concussed rage? And what of Devi herself? Does she carry her bitterness too far? Her idolization of Machu - her lover, never changes. Yet there is a spirit to Devi - the clarion call of the wild that reverberates through the book. In Devi, I feel that Sarita Mandanna has created the Indian Scarlett. Tempestuous and wild. And uncaring of the whims of society. It's precisely this wildness that kept me interested. You never quite know what Devi would do. Or wouldn't do.

There have been complaints about the ending by other reviewers, and I agree. It feels manipulated - almost as if the publishers felt this is too good a story to just let it go. Let's keep alive the possibility of a sequel. If there is such a sequel rest assured that I would be reading. This one is that good.

Verdict: Read for an interesting peek into a little known part of India. 


Rating : 5/5