Bachelor of Arts by R. K. Narayan

Bachelor of Arts by R. K. Narayan (1937, 78 pages)

Coming of Age in India in the 1930s

The Reading Life R. K. Narayan Project

India Literature on The Reading Life

In the last two months I have read and posted on thirty one short stories and two novels by the great Indian writer R. K. Narayan, Swami and Friends and The Man Eater of Malgudi.    The more I read Narayan (1906 to 2001-India-there is background information in my prior posts on Narayan) the more I like his work.    Narayan was the first author from India writing in English to have a large international audience.   Most of his works are set in an imaginary city he created, Malgudi, India.   I have been happy to notice that my posts on Narayan have consistently been and stayed the most viewed posts on my blog from day one of  my first posting on him(out of 650 or so posts) so I know there is a lot of interest in him among readers of my blog.   

Bachelor of Arts is the second of Narayan's novels.   It is like almost all his work, set in Malguidi.    The central character, Chandran, a young man from an upper middle class family, is enrolled in college when we meet him.  This is really a fun novel.   The characters are well done and I liked all the main characters in the novel.   Narayan is pretty much on a par with almost anybody in making people come to life in just a few sentences.   Chandran's mother is just perfectly done.    We see she is strong and can be abrasive but she loves and totally looks out for her family.  There is one scene that takes a reader from 2011 a bit of getting used to.   Chandran has fallen in love (or infatuation) with a girl he has seen but never spoken too.   He tells his parents about her and the father knows she comes from a good family in the same caste they are in (very important) so he goes to the father of the girl and talks marriage.   Everything including the dowry is all worked out until the bride's father takes the horocscope of Chandran to an astrologer and the astrologer says it is not a match.   As much as he tries, the father cannot get the other father to allow the marriage.   The mother of Chandran  says she is glad as she did not want  her son humiliating himself by marrying a girl of the very advanced age of fifteen.   The negotiations were so much fun to sit in on and I felt crushed for Chandran when they fell through.



I was shocked when I saw that Chandran was so upset by this he decided to become a Sanhus, a wandering holy man who has renounced materialism.   But his parents were a whole lot more shocked.  This is a horrifying thing to his parents.   He wanders for several months, his parents know what he is doing but not where he is or if he is OK.   Sandus have a high religious status but it is hardly the career his parents sent him to college to prepare for.   In a few months he decided to return home.   His father lectures him, his mother yells at him and his younger brother tells him he is an idiot and his lady has married someone else but he is soon  more or less back to normal.

Once back in Malgudi he needs a job.   He ends up getting a pretty decent job with a good potential income promoting subscriptions to a newspaper.   He throws himself into the work and is very successful at it.   The more subscriptions he sells the more he makes.   I was really happy to see how well he did and how his self esteem was built up.   You can see his father and mother are very proud of his success.   The father locates another wife for him.   At first he says no as he feels he will never love another girl besides the one he lost so he refuses the match.   Then his poet friend (he is a recurring character) tells him he might as well marry the girl once he verifies for himself she is attractive.  The poet is a great character!.

The ending is fun and keeps us wanting more.   I will be reading near term three more novels by Narayan, The English Teacher, The Financial Expert, and Waiting for the  Mahatma.    Narayan wrote, I think, fifteen novels and I hope to read all of them.   Reading these works also seems to me a great way to learn about life in colonial India.


Please feel free to share your experience reading Narayan with us.

Mel u

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo (1831, 528 pages)

Paris in the 15th Century

 Victor Hugo (1802-1885-France-you can read more about him here) created in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, characters known by millions world wide who have never heard of his novel.   

Quasimodo has rung the bells of Norte-Dame Cathedral millions of times in Saturday morning cartoons and old movies on TV.    The Gypsy girl he loves, Esmeralda, is a stock Disney character now.  His work has influenced countless novelists from Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky on down.     He is buried in the Pantheon in Paris in a crypt shared by Emile Zola and Alexander Dumas.    Two million people lined the streets of Paris for his funeral possession.    He is among the towering giants of world literature.

Esmerelda

The Hunch Back of Notre-Dame probably violates many rules taught in creative writing classes around the world today.    Hugo loves to  stop the flow of the narrative and talk about something that he thinks his readers should know about.     He is very much given to the use of the "Dear reader" device to move the plot along.     His characters seem a little one dimensional (with one or two exceptions) and he does more or less force the reader into sentimental emotional attitudes by telling us what to feel.    All that being said, it is a great novel loved by millions, including me now.    

I do not feel a lot of need to retell the plot.   I will just try to explain why I like it and why I think it has endured as a classic when other works have been forgotten.

Part of the power of this novel is in the great descriptive power of Hugo.   He made Paris in 1482 come very much to life for me.    Hugo covers the full spectrum of society, from the king to the ragged poor and the criminals.  I first fell in love with this novel when Quasimodo was crowned the Pope of Fools at a street ceremony.   There is nothing like the mob scenes in this book in any English novel of the period (that I can think of anyway).   I thought one of the very best parts of the book came when  the struggling poet (stock romantic figure) Pierre Gringoire accidentally wandered into "The Court of Miracles" where the Gypsies and Thieves of Paris are conducting a meeting.    Gringoire has to be accepted as husband by one of the women or he will be executed in order to keep the groups meeting secret from the authorities.    I thought this scene was so great with lots of details to make sure we could visualize it.  It was completely real for me  (If you are a fan of the TV show Star Trek:   The Next Generation maybe this scene will remind you episode where Q puts the crew of the Enterprise on trial for crimes against the peoples of the universe and the jury is a wild collections of criminals from throughout the galaxy.)   The beautiful Gypsy girl Esmeralda accepts him as her husband, but in name only and he is saved.     

Quasimodo

I liked an awfully lot the historical tangents, the lists of items found through the book, the descriptions of the Cathedral, and the historical detail of Paris in the late 15th century.   I pretty much knew what was going to happen but I still found the telling of it very exciting.    I concede it maybe a bit melodramatic and the use of the Gypsy girl is possibly xenophobic or worse (I do not think this usage was meant in a mean spirited way.)    Also Hugo's insistence on the beauty of Esmeralda seems to carry the idea that an ugly woman is not worthy of concern and certainly not worth writing about.   

The evil characters in this novel do seem to have the most depth to them, just like in some of the novels  of Charles Dickens.     Sometimes it does seem like the interludes between plot action are pretty long (even though I would not advise skipping them).   There is a lot in this novel to love if you just let its magic take you over and forget that you saw the plot on the Disney Channel when you were ten!.   There are cliches in this novel and Hugo wanted it to be a big success (which it was).   

Sometimes it feels like Hugo said to himself "OK I am a genius so why should I deprive the world of my works by cutting anything short".    

The novel is very political and the King of France makes an important appearance. Hugo makes a very powerful and bold statement when he shows the way the King panders to the mob while being motivated only by his bloated ego.   There is a lot of good treatment of the differences between social classes and  we really learn a lot about the cathedral as we read.   We also learn a lot about alchemy and other occult sciences.     I thought something was missing in the treatment of  the relationship of Quasimodo to the church leader who adopted him when he was a foundling (I was waiting to find out Quasimodo was his son!) and I thought the emergence of Esmeralda's mother at the end a bit overly melodramatic.

I am so glad I have at last read this classic  novel.    (I read this at Dailylit.com-226 episodes-no translator credit given-I read it over about ten days).    I hope now to be ready to read his giant work (600 plus episodes on Dailylit) Les Miserables later in the year.    Anyone interested in French literature or the 19th century novel for sure needs to read this novel.  

Mel u

Pride and Prejudice: Hidden Lusts-An Erotic Retelling by Mitzi Szereto

Pride and Prejudice:   Hidden Lust by Mitzi Szereto (2011, 267 pages)

An Erotic Take on Pride and Prejudice

Behind Closed Doors at Pemberley Place

Pride and Prejudice:   Hidden Lusts  by Mitzi Szereto is a very entertaining highly erotic retake of the events in Jane Austin's classic novel, Pride and Prejudice (1813).



This is the first of the numerous rewrites of classic novels that I have read.    I know there are a lot of books that expand on the Jane Austin type novel and that they are very popular among some of the book blogs I follow.   I was never until I was offered the change to review Pride and Prejudice:   Hidden Lusts  by Mitzi Szereto really motivated to try one of these books.    I am glad now I did and had a very good time reading this book.   (I was provided an E-Book by the author).

Mitzi Szereto

I found this to be a great escape read.     The novel is perfectly written and as I began the book it did almost feel like something written in the 1813.   We are introduced to the people of Pride and Prejudice, Mr and Mrs Bentley, their daughters, Mr Darcy, Charles Bingley and his sister Caroline, George Wickham and a few new people.   After just a few pages I knew I was no longer in the cloistered world of Jane Austin.

The servant girls at Pemberley place are happy to provide extra services for male guests.    The young women in the story pride themselves on their ability to bring a large measure of satisfaction to their male suitors through beating them in the English school boy fashion with branches from birch trees.   Much of the sex in this world seems aimed at preserving the technical virginity of the Bentley daughters while still offering all parties a very erotic experience.  

Mr Bentley is preoccupied with pornographic drawings he buys from a special dealer in such items.    Mrs Bentley is the total "unrole model" for her daughters, taking up with young "red coats" as  they pass through town.   In fact the arrival of a regiment of soldiers sets off a near sexual frenzy at Pemberley Place.   One of the "Ladies"  likes to take on three men at one time.  

There is an erotic encounter about every ten pages or so.  Most of the encounters seem to be from the point of view of women who want to use sex to keep a hold of men without, in many of the cases, actually having sex with them.

If a full movie were made of this book, it would be x-rated.

I liked this book.   I am glad I read it and I would read another such book by the author.   It was a very fast read for me and very much a change of pace.

The author has published more than a dozen books, including the highly acclaimed

Erotic Fairy Tales, A Romp Through the Classics.

I think I will have as my closing words on this book, "Thanks Mitzi, I needed that".

There is a lot of information on the book (including how to buy it) at the author's

web page 

Mel u

"Befriending the Wild Elephant" by Sarmaresh Basu সমরেশ বসু

"Befriending the Wild Elephant" by Sarmaresh Basu সমরেশ বসু (1962, 5 pages)

An Enjoyable Story from a Leading

Author from Bangladesh

The Reading Life South Asian Short Stories Project


Posts on the Literature of Bangladesh

Before the 1947 partition of India and the subsequent 1971 War for The Independence of Bangladesh there was no such thing as Bangladeshi literature.   Works written in Dhaka were part of the venerable Bengali literary tradition.    The terrible events of history have helped to create a separate cultural tradition for writers from Bangladesh to draw on and at same time to help create by their work.

Saramash Basu (924 to 1988-Dhaka, Bangladesh) wrote over 200 novels and is credited with 100 longer works of fiction.    Prior to becoming a  full time writer in  1950 he worked for several years in an arms factory and also sold eggs as a street hawker.   In 1 949 he was placed in jail for a year as a member of the communist party, illegal at the time.     He was fascinated since youth by folk tales.   Unlike most of the other South Asian authors I have posted on, he was not born into a life of privilege.

"Befriending the Wild Elephant" centers on a young boy, maybe 15 or so, whose father wants to take him into a jungle preserve area that will allow them the opportunity to observe lots of wild animals, including if they are lucky, wild elephants.   I have learned recently that stories like this were very appealing to the very urbanized readers of South Asia longing for simpler days.    

As the story opens the father and son pass on a bus through places hurt badly by war and see lots of soldiers.    They see elephants tied up in the military camps where they are used kind of like living bulldozers!    They were on their way to a resort in the Darjeeling region, known for its great natural beauty and vast tea plantations.   In an interesting note, the boy's name is "Gogol".    The story is short and easy to read.   It really gets to be fun when the boy meets and becomes friends with a wild elephant (that speaks to him).    There is an exciting moment when  a wild elephant with the boy on his back charges a group of tame elephants.

"Befriending the Wild Elephant" by Sarmaresh Basu (translated by Atreyee Gusta) is a simple, well done half parable story that is sort of typical as a nostalgia for the past of South Asia story.    

You can read it HERE.    It is a fun story worth your time.

Mel u

The Caine Prize 2011 Short List-Story Five

"The Mistress's Dog" by David Medalie (2010, 10 pages)

The Short Listed Stories

Five of Five Stories

The Reading Life Caine Prize Project

The Caine Prize for African Writing will be awarded on July 11 at an award dinner in Oxford.    The Caine Prize is one of the world's top literary awards.    It is given to the author of a short story from a country in Africa.   (There is additional background information on the award in my prior post and on the Caine Prize Web Site.)    This month I am doing a series of posts on the five short stories that are short listed for the 2011 Caine Prize.

So far I have posted on "Hitting Budapest" by NoViolet Bulawayo,  "What Molly Knew" by Tim Keegan ,  "Butterfly Dreams by Beatrice Lamwaka and "In The Spirit of McPhineas Leta" by Laura Kubuisite.   I have enjoyed reading each  of these stories and am glad to have had the opportunity to post on them.    All four stories are very much worth reading.    

When I saw the title of the last story "The Mistress's Dog" by David Medalie I thought it sounded like the title for a story Anton Chekhov might have written.   "The Mistress's Dog" is The Reading Life pick for the 2011 Caine Prize.    

There is only one living person in "The Mistress's Dog", the wife, Nola, of a powerful business man, now deceased.    We do not know her exact age but it seems to be at least in her sixties.    She was married for many years to man we know only as "a powerful business man".    Her husband had the same secretary for thirty years.    For at least fifteen of those years she was the husband's mistress.   

As the story opens Nola is home alone but for the dog of the mistress who is sitting in her lap.   Nola thinks "I have always preferred cats".     This story is really tightly and beautifully written.   There are a couple of word choices that seem a bit awkward but other than that it is really a superb short story.    It is very interesting to see the mistress through the eyes of the wife.   We also can sense  the changing nature of their relationship over the years.    It is as if the wife almost feels sympathy for the mistress as she senses the powerful business man losing his ardor for the mistress just as he had done for the wife.    

This is such a well ploted and characterized story that I do not want to spoil it at all. 

It can be read on line at Caine Prize web page.

I think part of the high quality of this story originates in Medalie's obvious respect for the intelligence of his readers.    Medalie is a Professor of English at Pretoria University in South Africa.   He is the author of a novel, The Shadow Followers, that was short listed for a Commonwealth Literary award and a collection of short stories.   

As I said, this is my pick and guess for the winner of the 2011 Caine Prize.    My second choice is a tougher question.   I will pick "Butterfly Dreams" as it has multiple layers of meaning.

I will be reading the 12 Caine Work Shop stories in July and will post on each of them, maybe in groups maybe as  individual posts, depending on my reaction to them.

I think To See The Mountain and other stories which has 17 short stories should be a part of every school and public library collection.   I think it would sell well in bookstores and would be a good text for class room instruction in the short story.   

There is more information on the book at the publisher's web page.

Last year I think I was the only one to blog on the Caine Prize Short Stories.    This year I am very happy there are a number of very insightful posts on these stories.    An easy way to follow the posts would be to do a search on twitter for "Caine Prize".

I have not forgotten the notion of "Poverty Porn" or the element of  Orientalism (as defined by Edward Said) that can be seen in some of the stories.    Once I have read the 12 stories from the Caine Work Shop I will probably post a bit on these issues.

The awards dinner for the Caine Pize is July 11, to be held at Oxford.    If  you are interested in attending the details are on the Caine Web Page.   It sounds like a great event.     

Mel u

Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry- Is Alfred Jarry Camp?

"Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry (1896, 47 pages, translated by Patrick Whittaker, 2007)
"Notes on Camp"  by Susan Sontag  (1964, 26 pages)

The Start of French Surrealism

Was Susan Sontag Right about  Alfred Jarry?

When I saw that Amateur Reading of Wuthering Expectations and Nicole of Bibliographing  were going to jointly host a reading event centered on Alfred Jarry my first thought was "Yes, I will join in" and  my second thought was "Who is Alfred Jarry?"     There is some very good background information on Jarry on the challenge web pages.   Basically he was one of the founders or pre-founders of Surrealism in the French Theater.    About the time I was preparing to read the very first of the "Ubu" plays, Ubu Roi   (King Ubu or Ubu the King) I happened to reread Susan Sontag's very famous and influential essay about sensibilities, "Notes on Camp"    In this essay she famously said there were three major sensibilities.    The first was that of "high culture" meaning:


"The Iliad, Aristophanes' plays, The Art of the Fugue, Middlemarch, the paintings of Rembrandt, Chartres, the poetry of Donne,The Divine Comedy, Beethoven's quartets, and - among people - Socrates, Jesus, St. Francis, Napoleon, Savonarola. In short, the pantheon of high culture: truth, beauty, and seriousness."


The another sensibility (which she is more or less defining in her series of remarks) is that of Camp in which objects and things are valued for their aesthetic qualities.   There is a lot in her essay about the nature of Camp:


"The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers....

26. Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is "too much." Titus Andronicus and Strange Interlude are almost Camp, or could be played as Camp. The public manner and rhetoric of de Gaulle, often, are pure Camp.

27. A work can come close to Camp, but not make it, because it succeeds. Eisenstein's films are seldom Camp because, despite all exaggeration, they do succeed (dramatically) without surplus. If they were a little more "off," they could be great Camp - particularly Ivan the Terrible I & II. The same for Blake's drawings and paintings, weird and mannered as they are. They aren't Camp; though Art Nouveau, influenced by Blake, is."

Hmm before we say  Ubu Roi might be Camp Sontag says no it is not. Although  one could certainly see a woman in a dress made of three millions feathers poughassing on stage in Ubu Roi, the work of Jarry seems to take itself seriously (not real sure of this but it was taken very seriously when it was first preformed).  


The meaning of "Camp" as used by Sontag is very carefully explained and exampled.    I think perhaps Jarry does not fit because Camp is not meant or does not have the potential to "hurt", it is somehow meant to be light.   This does not mean it cannot be great super- refined art of the highest quality.  Ubu Roi cannot also be described as in any way capable of inducing feelings of rapture over its beauty.      It is also not in anyway over refined and maybe it does intend to offend and is like a large semi-private joke.   Or maybe it is sort of a "bright school boy joke" directed at  daddy and the headmaster?     

Sontag says in addition to Camp and High Art there is a third category there is a third sensibility in which  the work of Jarry falls:

"For instance, there is the kind of seriousness whose trademark is anguish, cruelty, derangement. . Think of Bosch, Sade, Rimbaud, Jarry, Kafka, Artaud, think of most of the important works of art of the 20th century, that is, art whose goal is not that of creating harmonies but of overstraining the medium and introducing more and more violent, and unresolvable, subject-matter. . . . Clearly, different standards apply here than to traditional high culture. Something is good not because it is achieved, but because another kind of truth about the human situation, another experience of what it is to be human - in short, another valid sensibility -- is being revealed."

As I began to read Ubu Roi I had some idea of what to expect from Jarry(1873 to 1907-France-there is a good background article on him HERE).  In the first few acts we meet Mama and Papa Roi, who seems to be European power figures (royalty) of some sort.    They conduct themselves in the most barbaric fashion.   I admit it took a few scenes for Ubu Roi to draw me in.   I loved it when Papa Roi began throwing lots of  court and government figures into the "debraining" machine.    He also seems to either invade or control Poland and gets into a war with the Russians also.   Hmm could this be a recounting of the wars of Napoleon?    Is Papa Roi Napoleon or is he any authority figure?   Is Jarry telling us that authority, government power, kingship, and the rule of laws are really just things imposed on us under the cover of propriety, religion or natural law by who ever the most powerful mad man of the moment might be?    Why does Papa Roi think the people he rules love him?    I think it is because he knows they hate the functionaries below the king much more than the king and they love the arbitrary cruelty he brings into the lives of these people, they accept their own misery because they can enjoy seeing their betters destroyed by King Roi.     Is Ubu Roi a Mad Magazine remake of a Theban play?   Is Ubu Roi Cronus (Kronus)?    Here it is I thought trying to recall some lines from W. B. Yeats:



The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 


I think the horrified people in the theaters when Ubu Roi was first performed thought he was the "rough beast".    I think the sensibility exemplified by Jarry in Sontag's essay as that whose  "trademark is anguish, cruelty, derangement" is at least as old as that of high culture.    Is Jarry showing us that High Culture needs the permission of this other sensibility to exist?   Or is it just a skirmish in a very old battle?


Ubu Roi was a lot of fun to read.   For sure I can see he is a big influence on Bolano and much of contemporary Japanese literature.    Maybe there had to be a Jarry in order for there to be a Beckett.   


I thank Amateur Reader and Nicole for allowing me to discover another wonderful totally new to me author.     One thing I have learned about the reading life is the more you think you have learned the greater your feeling of ignorance should be.   This might be one of the themes of Jarry also.   I will, I hope, read more of his work.   


"Notes on Camp" by Susan Sontag can be read HERE.    I am not aware of anywhere online where the full text of Ubu Roi can be read in English. 


Mel u

"Patriotism" by Yukio Mishima

"Patriotism" by Yukio Mishima (1966, 17 pages, translated by Geoffrey Sargent)



The Reading Life Japanese Literature Project

"Patriotism" is a horrifying deeply disturbing work.   It adds a coda to the famous lines from Keats

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,- that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

The greatest beauty lies in a pure death.      Some might see the laughter of the  Gods in this story,   I see no laughing, not even Pan's, in the vision behind this story.  
   
"Patriotism" is an erotically charged death driven story that either glorifies or shames horribly a very old revered way of life, that of the samurai.    Or perhaps it does both at the same time, which is where its true power arises.


I have posted on several of Mishima's novels and five of his plays.    (You will find background information on Mishima -1925 to 1970-Japan in my five prior posts on him),     Mishima is firmly on my read everything that is translated list.     Mishima's work has a great deal to teach us about Japanese culture, for better and worse.     In my opinion the samurai culture that helped lead Japan into WWII is a under all the beauty and ritual a slave's religion.     Of course, I take the additional step that this is overall a  horrible flaw in the belief structure, whereas a believer feels that it is mandated by God that all obey God's overlord on earth, the Emperor.    From duty to the Emperor an entire superstructure of obedience follows.   It does not matter whether we like it or not.   A true God  Emperor does not require the affection of his subjects, only their obedience.


The story takes place in 1936 in the home of a 31 year old military officer deeply into the Bushido code of the Samurai and his 23 year old wife.    They are recently married and feel great passion and love for one another.    Mishima's depiction of their feeling for each other is very erotic and moving.   I felt the heat and you will too, I think.    The story opens with a caption on a commemorative photograph which tells us that a young army officer  has been deeply shamed because some of his colleagues in the army have been involved in a mutiny against their commanders.   He took no part in this episode but because other officers in his regiment did so it is now mandated that he commit ritual suicide.     It is further mandated that his wife must also accept her death.    Normally the husband will kill his wife before killing himself in order to insure she will in fact die.   In this case the husband shows great trust and love for his wife by allowing her to witness the beauty of his own self disembowelment (very graphically described) and then kill herself with a special dagger used for female suicides.    As I read this, I wondered what is the fate of children in cases like this (this couple is newly married and childless).   I am assuming it is the duty of the father to kill his children before his own death  but I am open to correction on this.


The story lets us see the real love the couple have for each other.   I felt no cruelty in the motivation of the husband to have his wife die with him, only a very powerful love, carnal as well as deeply spiritual.

There is an unblinking account of what it feels like and the personal and physical power it takes to kill yourself by disemboweling.   We are made to feel the knife slice through his entrails, we see the blood everywhere.   In a very powerful scene both man and wife ritually bathe themselves before committing suicide.     In a very very sad scene, we see the young wife putting on her makeup so she will have a proper appearance in the after world.    You can feel the love as the wife thrusts the knife into her neck (it is not proper for a Samurai wife to die by self disembowelment -to put it delicately, it can be a very messy way to die.)   She is concerned over the terrible mess others will have to clean up when their bodies are found.

There are no "punches pulled" in this story.     It is a glorification of ritual suicide.

It is the things we love most that will  ultimately destroy us.   The only escape from this is a life without passion or love.

"Patriotism" is a deep intense very serious short story.    "Patriotism" is, to me, a great work of art.

Mel u