A Horse Walks into a Bar
Israeli author David Grossman’s funny as well as unsettling
novel wholly set in an underground Israeli club and unfurls around a 57 year
old stand-up comedian named Dovaleh Greenstein’s performance. David Grossman is
one of prominent Israeli peace advocate who had repeatedly condemned daily
brutalities of the Palestinian occupation. A Horse Walks into a Bar is his 11th
novel, which starts off as a distractingly funny story, but ends up being a
courageous parable on the inhumanity and complicity of those who cower in front
of injustice.
Little Fires Everywhere
Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere (published September
2017) literally begins with fire blazing. An elegant house in an opulent suburb
is set in flames. The Richardson family, owners of the house witness the scene
with a dazed and detached expression, just as the firemen reports ‘Not an
accident’. Who set the fire and Why? There’s not much mystery on ‘who’, because
the Richardson couples and their three teenage children are certain that
14-year-old Isabel Richardson aka Izzy, the youngest member of the family, is
behind this arson. And, as if to confirm their suspicion, Izzy is conspicuously
missing. To know the ‘why’, the story is re-winded back to the months, when a
Bohemian mother and her teenage daughter shifted to affluent planned community
of Shaker Heights, in Cleveland, Ohio.
Author Ng explores the layered emotions of motherhood and censures the
allegedly liberal (mostly-white) suburban communities, whom despite their
parade of ideals remain blind or unsympathetic to race and class issues.
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee’s sprawling inter-generational family saga tells
the story of Korean immigrants living in Japan between 1910 and 1989. Through
the disparate set of well-realized characters, the author gracefully blends in
national histories with personal suffering.
Like any immigrant story, Pachinko deals with themes of in-between
identities, ostracism, female empowerment, and generational discord, while also
examining the effects of poverty, war on civilian society. Despite the coincidental twists and few melodramatic notions, Min Jin Lee brings her large
ensemble of characters alive (she spent nearly two decades in conceiving, and
writing the novel). Altogether, it’s a
epic exploration of the immigrant experience.
Satantango
What if existence is a recurring, empty dance directed by
Satan and staged in hell? A brooding question skillfully put forth by Hungarian
writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai in his first novel ‘Satantango’ (aka Satan’s Tango,
written in 1985 but translated to English in 2012). Krasznahorkai’s literary
world is persistently riddled with desolate mundanity and existential angst. It
is set in a collective farm (the estate); the one which has been formally
closed, yet its semi-crazed inhabitants live off their savings and by ‘rounding
up the cattle’. The novel was published
four years before the fall of communist dictatorship in the East European
nations. A lot of parallels could be drawn from the story’s destitute backdrop
to incompetent, creaking system. Moreover, by avoiding paragraph breaks and usage
of long sentences, the writer delightfully traps us inside the characters’
perturbed existence.
Station Eleven
Canadian novelist Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven
(published in 2014) is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where 99 percent of
human population is wiped out by an unforeseen pandemic disease. Despite the increasingly
familiar post-apocalypse sub-genre and getting pigeon-holed as sci-fi, Station
Eleven is much more distinct and understated than the usual survivalist
exercise. Emily Mandel herself believes her novel doesn’t belong to any
particular genre. Unlike many apocalypse novels, the narration here is deeply
introspective, wallowing less on the dystopian horror elements and rather hopefully
focuses on the fresh culture that emerges once past the climate of mayhem. On
the whole, it’s a superior literary work, which takes a trendy genre setting to
get at the fundamental truth of art and human condition.
The Changeling
Sometimes myths and supernatural forces can adequately
address the reality of our globalized societies. It’s what Victor Lavalle’s
recent novel The Changeling best does. It’s a dark fairy tale, rooted in
ages-old folklore and myth, which actually takes a subtly profound look at
racism, fatherhood, paternal anxieties, marriage, and most importantly the dark
crevices of internet universe. The book’s veneer of magic plunges us into the
chaos as well as the beauty of life. At its best, writer LaValle’s prose is as
simple, raw and powerful as the works of Haruki Murakami and Neil Gaiman.
The Devil in the White City
The 1889 Paris World Fair (‘The Exposition Universelle’)
shrewdly captured the attention of the Western nations. A one thousand feet
high phallic iron structure (Eiffel Tower) that was erected at the center of
Paris Exposition thought to be the symbol asserting the supremacy of French
architecture and culture. Deeply perturbed by the European showcase, American
architects, engineers, artists, and politicians, designed the 1893 World’s
Columbian Exposition (to commemorate 400th anniversary of
Christopher Columbus’ landing on the American mainland). This fair which
exhibited many prodigious material achievements of humans was spearheaded by the
super-talented architect Daniel Hudson Burnham. Nevertheless the fair gained
its notoriety in the later decades due to the charming serial-killer H.H.
Holmes. Erik Larsson’s spectacular 2003 non-fiction book tells the history of
Chicago Fair and the story of these two polarizing individuals. Larson was best
known for presenting non-fiction material in a very engaging novelistic style.
He beautifully turns history into a vast canvas for portraying myriad of human
stories.
The Southern Reach Trilogy
American author and literary critic Jeff VanderMeer’s new
weird fiction (an eclectic mix of dark fantasy, scientific speculation, pulp
fiction, and surrealism) The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority,
and Acceptance) is about broken systems, transitioning environment, and limits
of human reasoning and moral imperatives. The story revolves around the mystery
of Area X -- a forgotten coastal area transformed into a ‘pristine wilderness’
by an unknown transformative event 3 decades ago and spawns weird organisms.
The book one is narrated by an introverted biologist, who is one of the four
members of 12th expedition, investigating Area X. The 1st
book is being adapted into a movie by British author and film-maker Alex
Garland with Natalie Portman playing the biologist role.
The Tsar of Love and Techno
American writer Anthony Marra’s The Tsar of Love and Techno
uses fictional characters and set-ups to explore the past and present realities
with utmost clarity. The book consists of nine tightly interwoven vignettes
which read more like a novel than short stories. The intricately linked web of
stories are set in Siberia, St. Petersburg (Leningrad), and Chechnya between
1937 and 2014. The structure of The Tsar of Love and Techno resembles that of a mix-tape with eight stories divided into Side A and Side B, and an intermission
story in the middle (which is the longest). The stories are full of little
lived-in details which authenticates the characters’ desolate world.
The Underground Railroad
Using the speculative premise of a literal Underground
Railroad, Colson Whitehead exposes the United States’ perpetual crimes against
the black body and conscience. The Underground Railroad actually represents
different covert methods, secret routes, and secret signals employed to help
escape African-American slaves into Canada and northern free American states. The
‘railroad’ operated between early and mid 19th century (terminated
with American civil war in 1861), and rough estimates state that more than
100,000 slaves had escaped via the unorganized network. Through the eyes of
determined heroine Cora, the novel takes us across America’s grotesque display
of slavery sins.
Books I re-read this year: Solaris (by Stanislaw Lem), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K Dick), The Atrocity Exhibition (J.G. Ballard), Catch 22 (Joseph Heller), and Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad).
