A day after the death of former chief minister J.Jayalalithaa, a 39-year-old P.Selvendiran, apparently a DMK supporter, was arrested by the Ariyalur police and sent to judicial custody for a Facebook post disapproving Jayalalithaa and her party cadres. Selvendiran was booked under Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace), 507 (criminal intimidation by an anonymous communication), 294 (b) (singing, reciting or uttering any obscene song) besides  criminal intimidation read with section 67 of the Information Technology Act after a police complaint was lodged by an AIADMK functionary P.Shankar. 

According to a police officer, Selvendiran in his post described AIADMK supporters as slaves and reminded them that the leader who kept them enslaved is no longer alive. Further, he exhorted the AIADMK cadres to wake up at least now and work for the welfare of the people who voted the party to power.

In Tamil Nadu, one need not be surprised if more such arrests are reported in the coming days and in the near future as well.

Hardly a month before Jayalalithaa's hospitalisation, the Supreme Court had come down against her government for persisting in slapping criminal defamation cases against her critics and political opponents. In its own deposition before the court the AIADMK government informed that a total of 213 defamation cases have been filed between 2011 to 2016 against its critics. Prior to that on July 28, the court pulled up the government stating that the  penal provision on defamation (Section 499 and 500 of the IPC) should not be used to throttle dissent. The bench also observed that just because anyone calls a government corrupt or lacking in administrative ability cannot be slapped with defamation case and there has to be tolerance to criticism.

The sedition charge against folk singer and pro--prohibition activist Kovan last year for his protest songs slamming Jayalalithaa government's liquor policy is now history...

“Perhaps I didn’t live just in my self, perhaps I lived the lives of others.”

--Pablo Neruda

Hemingway, Marquez, Pablo Neruda...The writers who were close to Fidel Castro and overtly admired the Cuban leader.  Neruda’s Song of Protest contains a poem `To Fidel Castro’, which users  widely shared on social media after the death of the Cuban leader on Saturday. 

'To Fidel Castro' is from a poet who wrote about his works thus:  “My poetry rejected nothing it could carry along in its course; it accepted passion, unraveled mystery, and worked its way into the hearts of the people.” (P-170 Memoirs). 

 I understand that in the late 1950’s his work began to move away from the highly political stance it had taken during the 1930s.  Neruda died in 1973. But whether he would have written `To Fidel Castro’ or regretted writing it if he had lived several more years, has no relevance, because Neruda, who became a member of the Chile’s Communist party on July 15, 1945, admired the pattern of the typical South American dictator, who "at least were leaders who braved battles and bullets," in contrast to Gonzalez Videla (President of Chile from 1946 to 1952), who does not the fit the pattern and was the "product of smoke-filled back-room politics, an irresponsible and frivolous clown, a weakling who put on a tough front.” (Memoirs).

So even as one might  admire Neruda the poet it’s difficult to put up with a man who refused to publicly condemn the Soviet repression of dissident writers like Boris Pasternak and Joseph Brodsky and did not speak out against Juan Peron (President of Argentina from 1946 to 1955 and 1973 to 74) because, according to Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, he was "afraid to risk his reputation."

"During the late 1960s, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was asked for his opinion of Pablo Neruda. Borges stated, "I think of him as a very fine poet, a very fine poet. I don't admire him as a man, I think of him as a very mean man." He said that Neruda had not spoken out against Perón because he was afraid to risk his reputation, noting "I was an Argentine poet, he was a Chilean poet, he's on the side of the Communists, I'm against them. So I felt he was behaving very wisely in avoiding a meeting that would have been quite uncomfortable for both of us." (Wikipedia).

Patrick Modiano’s Pedigree. (Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti, Maclehose Press) is a memoir in 100-odd pages.

The writer was born in 1945 to a Jewish man and Flemish woman who meet in Paris under the Occupation. Modiano describes his mother, an actress, as a “pretty girl with an arid heart.” (“I can’t recall a single act of genuine warmth or protectiveness from her”) His father, a shady businessman, who never took his baccalaureate exam, was, as a teenager and young adult “left to his own devices.”

“He was searching for El Dorado, in vain.”

As for himself, Modiano writes: “I’m a dog who pretends to have a pedigree.”

Putting in few words the death of his brother, Modiano writes that apart from his brother Rudy’s death, he do not believe that anything he relates in the memoir (an autobiographical portrait of both post-war Paris and a tumultuous childhood) truly matters to him. 

“I am writing this pages the way one compile a report or a resume, as documentation and to have done with a life that was not my own…”

Brief and to the point, grim but intense, Pedigree is typical Modiano. Not for readers who look in books entertainment value.

M.Balamuralikrishna has rendered some remarkable songs in Tamil movies. For instance, "Chinna Kannan Azhaikkiran" in Kavikuyil (1977) for which music was scored by Ilayaraja. In M.S.Viswanathan's music, he sang "Mounathil Vilayadum" in K.Balachander's Nool Veli (1979). Before all, in 1965, came "Oru Naal Podhuma" (Thiruvilayadal) in K.V.Mahadevan's music. I read on a website that when K.Balachander was making Apoorva Raagangal in 1975, M.S.Viswanathan approached the classical Carnatic musician for a rare raga and the latter gave him, "Mahati' which was Balamuralikrishna's own creation. M.S.Viswanathan worked on the raga and came up with the evergreen hit "Athisaya Ragam" sung by K.J.Jesudass.

In Malayalam, notably, he has sung several songs in Lenin Rajendran directed Swathi Thirunal.

“But time…how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time…give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.”

 --Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending.

As the narrator, Tony Webster, in his sixties, recounts his past, there is love, break-ups, and reconciliations. Then a letter from a lawyer arrives informing that mother of his ex-lover has bequeathed him five hundred pounds and a couple of documents. We read on till the narrator makes a discovery towards the end of the novella.

There is a fineness to Julian Barnes’ writing which makes it endearing. Despite a disquieting plot, he pulls it off with elan. On this novella, the Independent manages to nail with the words: 'Mesmerising...the concluding scenes grips like a thriller -a whodunnit of memory and morality.' 

This work, (as well as Levels of Life) as The Guardian notes about his The Noise of Time, (a fictional biography of Dmitri Shostakovich) "gives us the breadth of a whole life within the pages of a slim book."

The Best of Bach

The more I listen to Bach the more it strikes me the extent to which the German composer has `inspired' 'Isaignani' Ilayaraja.  (No offense intended. I in fact like Ilayaraja's music). I think he succeeded in fusing delicately all his western classical inspirations in his music, particularly in songs which characterize Tamil provincial life.

‘My beloved people,’ the President said in a midnight broadcast,’ give me your freedoms, henceforth let them be hidden inside me, because it is to rob you of these that the insidious enemy has penetrated us.’ The people were grateful to be stripped thus, yet the sceptics’ whisper caught the unwary citizen now and again, settling with wasp’s feet on his ear for a brief while, before winging away to the next defenceless host. But the people easily overcame these feeble disturbances. No,they told themselves, not the President, the Supreme Commander of the Congregation of Persuaders; never would he imprison and torture his own subjects! The Palace brought out colourful stamps of the President squatting among heaps of carrot and lettuce, munching the vegetables, and defecating – a picture of deep and enduring peace which reinforced the people’s faith in their pacific Presidency…

--O.V.Vijayan, The Saga of Dharmapuri.

The Saga of Dharmapuri is a distinctly odd creation in O.V.Vijayan’s oeuvre. If all of Vijayan’s works brim with compassion, it’s anger that defines Saga. It was Vijayan’s answer to Indira Gandhi’s emergency.  But the timeless and sweeping quality of the work would compel us to discover in it a stinging critique of all despotic governments. No need to remind the pertinency of this novel in these times. One feels more respect to this writer seeing several contemporary writers pander to the government in power.

Dmitri Shostakovich - Into the Cold Dawn (Documentary, 2008)

"Everything that I am I owe my parents"

Let down by the Monsoon (one more farmer suicide has been reported, this time in Erode) and Narendra Modi government's policies, the hopes of the rural populace is already broken and senile resembling cracks in the drought-hit fields while in cities and small towns grievances of the people keep growing like long queues in front of ATMs, one week after the notification on demonetization was issued. The prime minister (who before the polls promised to put Rs 15 lakh within 100 days of his government coming to power in every Indian's pocket) has now sought 50 days time for the results of demonetization to show...

A police officer affirms that this is a good move and the result will start showing by January. One of the targets, according to him, is the illegal hawala dealers (Kuzhalpanam in Malayalam). Many such views and theories abound, many absurd, some good (no questions widely asked about Ambanis and Adanis) but no relief in sight for the masses.

"What Doust Thou Think? Thou Canst Do Any Goddamn Thing Thou Wantest? Who the Fuck Doust Though Imagine Thou Ist: Hugh Hefner? The Dalai Lama? Donald Trump?

-Salman Rushdie, Fury

Midway through Eduardo Berti's Agua, but thought it apt and timely to switch over to Salman Rushdie's Fury. This is said to be Rushdie's first American novel. Published in 2001, Fury is the story of Malik Solanka, historian of ideas and dollmaker extraordinaire, who abandons his family without a word of explanation and flees to New York where he encounters fury all around him. "Cab drivers spout invective. A serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete..."

So Donald Trump wins the U.S.presidential election. The last thing liberals across the world, why, perhaps even many in the anti-Hillary Clinton camp wanted. But then the trajectory taken by democracies in the last few years has been alarming. Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte...

Having said that the headline of Sean O' Grady's column in The Independent is dead on in reminding us that  "Donald Trump's victory is democracy at work -whether we like it or not." 

Whether we like it or not we have to live with Donald Trumps and Narendra Modis. There is no point in blaming the people for the failings of political parties--the congress party in India and the democratic party in the U.S- that have denied the voters a credible choice...

In the meantime, while the supporters of Trump celebrate his victory in the U.S and elsewhere, another farce, demonetization is played out in India, in a bid, as the BJP government claims, to get rid of black money. 

In fact, corruption happens to be the trump card for both the leaders.

Thomas Frank in his column in The Guardian points out that after all, there was a reason that tens of millions of good people voted for him (Trump) yesterday. He has pledged to "drain the swamp" of DC corruption.

"But let's not deceive ourselves. We aren't going to win anything. What happened 

on Tuesday is a disaster, both for liberalism and for the world," he goes on without sparing Hillary Clinton either.

Not only that we aren't going to win anything it looks like more troubles lie ahead.

Unfortunately, I don't share the unusual optimism of Slavoj Zizek (Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst)  who foresees in a Trump victory emergence of a "totally new political situation with chances for a more radical left -or, to quote Mao: 'Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.' " 

Mao? Again frightening!

From, Ismail Kadare's Paris Review Interview.

I could not understand how Sartre could defend the Soviet Union. During the Cultural Revolution in China he was told that thousands of writers, artists, and intellectuals were persecuted, tortured, killed. And he became a Maoist!  

I have great respect for Camus—he was exemplary...

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1105/the-art-of-fiction-no-153-ismail-kadare

“And generally speaking, the experience of individuality in modern culture is bound up with that of death: from Holderlin’s Empedocles to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and on to Freudian man, an obstinate relation to death prescribes to the universal its singular face, and lends to each individual the power of being heard forever; the individual owes to death a meaning that does not cease with him.”

--Michel Foucault in his Conclusion to The Birth of the Clinic, An Archaeology of Medical Perception.

He waited a little longer before replying and then announced: “I suffer from melancholia.” “Well, I never,” I said, unable to suppress a smile,”people who suffer from that are usually people who feel they’re over-privileged. But it’s such a very ancient illness, it can’t be that serious, nothing classical ever is, wouldn’t you agree?”

--Javier Marias, Everything Bad Comes Back (When Was I Mortal)

The article (link below) in the Aeon magazine sparks curiosity in Havi Carel's book Illness: The Cry of the Flesh. Havi Carel is the professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol.

“Sickness is not just the experience of pain and malaise, but also of acute vulnerability in a hostile world that refuses to accommodate itself to your struggles.”

https://aeon.co/essays/can-there-be-anything-good-in-the-experience-of-illness?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=a3f22605ec-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_11_08&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-a3f22605ec-69414093

The Sublime

It takes much experience of literature to respond to it properly. so says a Greek critic whose treatise On the Sublime shows radically different approach from either Plato's or Aristotle's.

"Judgment of literature is the final fruit of ripe experience," according to Longinus who is concerned to distinguish those elements of style and structure which contribute to the effect of sublimity.
The ultimate function of literature, and its ultimate justification, according to Longinus (whose identity is uncertain), is to be sublime and have on its readers the effect of ecstasy or transport that sublimity has.
The Greek word which it has become traditional to translate as sublime in English means literally height or elevation.
Coming to psychoanalytic criticism, sublimation (Freud, whose works depends on the notion of the unconscious) is whereby the repressed material is 'promoted' into something grander or is disguised as something 'noble.' "For instance, sexual urges may be given sublimated expression in the form of intense religious experiences or longings." Repression, which is the `forgetting' or ignoring of unresolved conflicts ,unadmitted desires, or traumatic past events and sublimation are linked with the unconscious.

(Ref: Critical Approaches to Literature by David Daiches & Peter Barry's Beginning Theory, An introduction to literary and cultural theory).

Javier Marias

It's quite some time since I've read Latin American literature. The book I'm reading presently is  When I Was Mortal, by the Spanish author Javier Marias. But the experience one has reading Javier Marias is similar to reading Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano, or so to say. Their writing, particularly Bolano's is mindblowing. I read in the Melville House website that of his Spanish contemporaries, Bolano was impressed by the literature of Enrique Vila-Matas and Javier Marias.

When I was Mortal is a collection of twelve stories. Most stories are comical and startling. Of them, eleven were commissioned. Now, Marias does not believe sentimental purists who say that "in order to sit down in front of the typewriter, you have to experience grandiose feelings such as a creative "need" or "impulse", which are always "spontaneous" or terribly intense". He argues, in the Author's Foreword, that majority of the sublime works of art produced over the centuries -especially in painting and music -were the result of commissions or of even more prosaic or servile stimuli.

It's worth pondering, writes Sam Sacks in his review of Thus Bad Begins in The Wall Street Journal., why Javier Marias has never received the acclaim in the U.S.that he enjoys in Europe. 

"Why isn't he as renowned as genre-benders like Salman Rushdie or Haruki Murakami?" 

Giorgio Bassani

Giorgio Bassani's Within the Walls.

`Within the Walls,' which is the Book 1 of the Romanzo di Ferrara (a collection of Georgio Bassani's works), has five stories, Lida Mantovani, The Stroll before Dinner, A Memorial Tablet in Via Mazzini, The Final Years of Clelia Trotti and A Night of '43 of which I found `Clelia Trotti' most alluring. The story happens in the aftermath of the war in the autumn of 1946. The remains of Clelia Trotti who has died in the prison during the German occupation is transferred from the Codigoro graveyard to the Communal Cemetery of Ferrara. As her oldest comrade in the Socialist struggle, Mauro Bottecchiari begins his commemorative speech when the very moment a Vespa with its silencer removed revs up explosively interrupting his speech. He sees a young girl riding along the portico arches of the cemetery. He reacts twisting his lips in a grimace of sadness: "Oh, it must be a very young girl, from a good family."

At the cemetery, Bruno Lattes recalls his relationship with Clelia. He takes a stroll down the memory lane. He wishes one day perhaps she will realize who he was. He had spent time with her from 1939 on before he escaped to the United States of America to save himself, unlike his parents who were taken away by the Germans.

With Bruno's mind trip the narrative swings from the present to the past and back.

Then, he spots a young couple about fifty meters ahead of them.The boy was sitting on his bike, and every now and then, to keep his balance, he encircled his companion's shoulders with his right arm. He watches them with an insatiable interest.' Who are they? What are their names?' he keeps muttering under his breath. 

"They seemed to him more than beautiful -marvelous, incomparable. There they were: the champions, the prototypes of their race! he said to himself with hatred and a desperate love, half-closing his eyes. Their blood was better than his, their souls were finer than his. If he wasn't mistaken, the girl's hair was tied at the back with a red ribbon. The little light that remained seemed to concentrate itself on the ribbon. Oh, to be them, to be one of them, despite everything!" he thinks...

It is a classic of a story which leaves one ruminating.

Lida Mantovani is the story of a 25-year-old woman abandoned by her lover, David, who was the son of well-to-do parents. She delivers a child. The circumstances force her to marry a 50-year-old bookbinder...

After many years she asks herself: "But David, who was he? What was he looking for, what did he really want?"

Bassani's style is solemn and subdued, unshowy, meditative and dreamlike...

Giorgio Bassani was born in 1916. He was involved in various anti--Fascist activities for which he was imprisoned in 1943. Ferrara, a city in northern Italy where he was born, is the location of his stories. 

Ismail Kadare's `The Concert'

One autumn afternoon in Tirana, Albania, a delivery man brings in a tub branches of a lemon tree at the house of diplomatic envoy Gjergj DIbre. His wife Silva asks the man to put the tree on the balcony. Gjergj, who is not home for their daughter Brikena's birthday, is traveling on the night plane from Paris to Peking with a letter in a briefcase. Silva is exhausted as she is expecting guests for the birthday celebration.
"A lemon tree is all I needed," she thinks.

In the final chapter of Ismail Kadare's `The Concert' (1988) Silva looks at the little plant tenderly as she thinks about the world which was full of political meetings, plots, commotions, and tragedies, while in its little corner of the balcony, careless of everything else, the lemon tree devoted itself to its own raison d'etre -bringing forth fruit. Compared with the tumult going on in the world as a whole, it seemed so frail, so lonely you couldn't help pitying it. She smiles thoughtfully."Perhaps the lemon tree, if it had been able to think, would have pitied the rest of the world."

"The political meetings, plots, commotions and tragedies" which play out under a totalitarian rule is what `The Concert' is all about. Through the meditations, musings and reveries of the characters, we transit through a time in Albania's history when its ties with China was deteriorating. It was the period of chairman Mao's death and arrest of his wife Jiang Qing along with some of her cronies...The story of Victor Hila (as mentioned in the previous blog) who gets into a mess after he steps on the foot of a Chinese diplomat is but a strand in the plot. The book is made of several such macabre strands. For instance, after Mao's death, Albanian students are sent back home for allegedly behaving improperly towards Chinese girls, not to mention whole sectors of activity coming to a grinding halt, like the steel complex as the Chinese men working there return home.

'The Concert' is a surreal and comical work which delves into the mystery that is China. I felt the flow petering out in the middle before picking up.

Kadare’s The General of the Dead Army was hailed as a masterpiece. But I chose The Concert ahead of the General  pulled by its satire and its similarity, which I felt, to Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say…It was said that he has been compared to Kafka and Orwell. Such comparison seems to me to be ill-advised which would amount to being unfair to both sides. Furthermore, Kafka belongs to a completely different class (and incomparable), while Orwell’s writing, I agree with some critics, is mixed up with pamphleteering, though today his relevance cannot be overlooked...


--------------
Albania Today: From one extreme to the other?

Albanian Church to celebrate martyrs' legacy on Nov 5.
https://cruxnow.com/global-church/2016/11/02/albanian-church-celebrate-martyrs-legacy-nov-5/

Albania: How St. Ignatius unites Christians and Muslims

http://www.lastampa.it/2016/11/02/vaticaninsider/eng/world-news/albania-how-st-ignatius-unites-christians-and-muslims-IAu9P5RSvhdcc2IVKM774N/pagina.html

Madeleine Thein’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing should help stimulate our memory and provide an understanding into what life is like under tyrannical regimes, past and present, in any part of the world.

It is a Book of Records. A piece of virtuosic music. Hidden within this fictional world are true names and true deeds. Sparrow and his cousin Zhuli (for whom Prokofiev, Bach, and Old Bei occupied the space that the Party, the nation, and Chairman Mao occupied for others), Swirl, Wen the Dreamer, Big Mother , Ba Lute..."They would live on, as dangerous as revolutionists but as intangible as ghosts."

The novel begins with Marie Jiang recalling her father Jiang Kai, a pianist, who commits suicide at Hong Kong in 1989 when he was only 39 years old. He defects from China in 1978. Alive when the demonstrations began in Tiananmen Square in April 1989, he disappears from his wife and daughter in Vancouver and on June 4 the military crushes protests in Tiananmen Square. In October the family comes to know about Jiang Kai’s death.

Ai Ming, a fugitive who seeks shelter in Marie Jiang’s house for a brief period, is the daughter of Sparrow, a great composer and musician and Jiang Kai’s teacher at the Shangai Conservatory of Music.

Music lovers, the two men love each other. Sparrow gives up his talent to protect his daughter and work in factories making wooden crates, then wire and then radios for 20 years... He dies during the Tiananmen massacre. The official record would, however, say he died of "A Stroke." "At Home."

The lives of this two families intertwine and forks as the novelist, through them, takes us through the history of the country--the 1949 civil war to the year 2016...

"Tiananmen Square, that place that Chinese architects once imagined as the zero point, the location that determines all others."

It's over the sweat and blood of ordinary people and poor jawans and the political spectacle played out over the dead- photo-ops and lies, authoritarian regimes sustain themselves. So it calls for conscientiousness from our part to `new dawns' which are otherwise prone to let us down.

From, Do Not Say We Have Nothing.

“Like thousands of other surviving counter-revolutionaries, she would be informed, after years of prison labor, that she had never been a criminal. Would she weep?Would she feel joy?...”

“The camp was the very end of the earth. I am no counter-revolutionary and neither were those exiled with me. In my heart, I believe that it is this age and our leaders who one day will have to account for their crimes.”

-----------------------

“My father stood in front of me, naked / in the hospital’s basement
He spoke to me / his voice muffled by cotton
Listen to me Claudia / listen to me
And all I could think of was to say / Cover yourself, Daddy / You’ll tell me all another time.”

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2015/09/poetry

Is it too much to expect of our so-called reviewers and critics to first comprehend (at least try to) a book for themselves before writing about it? This question arises because a couple of `reviews’ on J.M.Coetzee’s two works-The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, which I came across in some magazines recently was all about the reviewers’ flaunting of their ignorance and the consequent desperation than anything about the work.  If a work is incomprehensible why write at all about it in the first place? Perhaps to show-off, I have read the book but the author is at fault for not producing a work which is easily understandable or palatable to the reader?

Anyhow, it’s alright being not able to comprehend a work. Coetzee himself makes an admission in The Good Story (his discourses –exchanges being the precise word used in the book--with Arabella Kurtz) when the discussion comes to Sebald’s Austerlitz, he says that despite his admiration for the book, he have struggled with it in the past and still struggle with it. 

So coming back to the Jesus `reviews' or blathers, the problem seems to lie in approaching a work with the anticipation that it will be malleable; it would bend easily to a supine reader's whims...

Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel warns that like all of the culture, the novel is more and more in the hands of the mass media which “distribute throughout the world the same simplifications and stereotypes easily acceptable by the greatest number, by everyone, by all mankind.” 

The termites of reduction at work?

This Brain Pickings link on Jeanette Winterson's essay "Art Objects" (today's find on twitter) is of utmost relevance in this context.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/27/jeanette-winterson-art-objects/

Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel: "Every novel says to the reader: ”Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and lock it off.

“For Musil," Italo Calvino recalls in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, "knowledge is the awareness of the incompatibility of two opposite polarities. One of these he calls exactitude-or at other times mathematics, pure spirit, or even the military mentality –while the other he calls soul, or irrationality, humanity, chaos. Everything he knows or thinks he deposits in an encyclopedic book that he tries to keep in the form of a novel, but its structure continually changes; it comes to pieces in his hands…”

“the art of the novel relies on our ability to believe simultaneously in contradictory states,” says Orhan Pamuk in The Naïve And the Sentimental Novelist.

J.M.Coetzee makes a similar point as he concludes his exchanges with consultant clinical psychologist Arabella Kurtz (The Good Story, Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy). This is the second 'intellectual engagement' between them. The first titled ‘Nevertheless, my sympathies are with the Karamazov’s’ was published in the journal Salmagundi.

“As a genre," Coetzee says, "the novel seems to have a constitutional stake in the claim that things are not as they seem to be, that our seeming lives are not real lives. And psychoanalysis, I would say, has a comparable stake.”

Instead of following a ‘linear train of thought’ Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz-- starting with `a well-shaped story versus telling the true story,' poetic and pragmatic truths, memories (procedural and episodic), consciousness, remorse et al--  pursue lines of thinking without always knowing where they will lead in the hope that they may here and there ‘open a new or unusual perspective on the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and on the psychotherapeutic project in its wider social forms.'

Here's an illuminating observation Arabella Kurtz makes: “You write about an objective or a transcendent truth, a truth outside or above the realm of human understanding. I am working on the basis of a subjective and an intersubjective truth, a truth to experience, which is what I believe to be at issue when one is trying to help a patient who is suffering. People come for psychotherapy because they feel dreadful and are in subjective distress, not because they do not know if God exists or how to read the weather...”

This is one of the books I'm presently re-reading.

“My father had once said that music was full of silences…”

--Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing. 

The silences Madeleine Thien refers here is what, I feel, adds elegiac and ethereal qualities to the writings of O.V.Vijayan or the films of G.Aravindan...

The same shines through like a gauzy light in this terse Yehuda Amichai poem reproduced below.

Forgetting Someone

Forgetting someone is like forgetting to turn off the light
in the backyard so it stays lit all the day

But then it is the light that makes you remember.

“No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy- that is to say, has given so complete a picture of man’s life, both on its domestic and heroic side. No English novelist has explored man’s soul as deeply as Dostoyevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analyzed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust.”

--E.M.Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Salim Bachi. A fantasist from Albert Camus' land.

Being conscious of the insufficiency of my readings, the discovery lately of the Algeria-born Salim Bachi who writes in French reminds of the vast literary treasures, especially in foreign languages, (for various reasons imperceptible to English literary scene) which await to be unearthed and explored.
If it was the mention in Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed that I came to read Patrick Chamoiseau, I stumbled upon Salim Bachi while browsing at a bookshop in the city during a modest Sunday evening outing with family yesterday. (Besides Bachi I bought Eduardo Berti’s Agua. Berti is an Argentine writer and Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing).

Salim Bachi is the author of The Silence of Mohammed and Dog of Ulysses. But the novel of his that was available in the outlet was The New Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor (Translated by Sue Rose/ Pushkin Press). Halfway through the work, I'm convinced he's one of those authors not to be missed at any cost.
In Sinbad he resurrects Sinbad, the fictional sailor, to narrate the experience of waves of North African immigration into Europe.

Here're a couple of excerpts from the work:

”Our world illuminated by Nothing, was a Cave whose walls showed terrible images that had men mimicking actions they didn’t understand, while governed by urges they concealed under the guise of reason…”

“Had he fallen asleep yesterday after Ben M’Hidi (a prominent leader during the Algerian war of independence) had been arrested, or the day before yesterday after Emir Abdelkader (Algerian religious and military leader) had been captured?Had he gone into exile in Damascus to spend the rest of his days with the wise old man,amid prayers in Umayyad mosque (one of the largest and oldest mosque in the world)? Perhaps he had died in Bolivia, trapped in the jungle, abandoned on the revolutionary path? (Che Guevara?) Or, going back even earlier, was he washing Jugurtha’s (King of Numidia, Algeria) feet, kissing Jesus’s feet, accompanying the Prophet on his hegira? He might be Jewish, Roman or Berber; he might have walked with the Arabs alongside their caravans; crossed the Atlantic on a slave ship; perished in the silver mines of Mexico…One question, though, kept pestering him like a persistent mosquito: why had he woken up here? And where had the six other sleepers gone?”

Story and Plot

“ ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Or again: ‘The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.’ This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. ..If it is in a story we say:’And then?’ If it in a plot we ask: ‘Why?’ That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel. A plot cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave-men or to a tyrannical sultan or to their modern descendant the movie-public. They can only be kept awake by ‘And then-and then-‘ they can only supply curiosity. But a plot demands intelligence and memory also.”

--E.M.Forster, Aspects of the Novel.

“The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: ‘Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.”

--E.M.Forster, Aspects of the Novel.

John Stuart Mill who gave us the idea of the free and sovereign individual had, in the aftermath of a crisis of faith discovered in the poetry of Wordsworth and Goethe, and in the philosophy of Coleridge, Saint Simon and Comte, a fusion of thought and feeling, an appreciation of the ‘many- sidedness’ of human nature and society, that went far to fill the vacuum created by utilitarianism.

(In turn he lost the sense of community provided by the utilitarians,”the assurance of a common purpose shared with others of like mind.”)

Utilitarianism: Greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Mill’s crisis was caused by this fateful question:

‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’

The answer was an irrepressible ‘No!’ The end had ceased to charm! The feeling there is nothing left to live for.

Gertrude Himmelfarb in the introduction to On Liberty says that what depressed Mill even more than the sense of vocation was the absence in him of any natural and spontaneous feeling, any poetic and artistic sensibility. “He was convinced that the exclusive cultivation of the ‘habit of analysis’ had destroyed in him all capacity for emotion.”

Coming to his treatise Mill predicted the crises largest democracies will go through caused by the rise of popular governments, which he saw as the pre-condition of a new and more formidable despotism, for he comprehensively explains that ‘society is itself the tyrant.’  He hits the bull’s- eye when he says that the society imposes a new despotism of custom. “It dictates,”he says,” its will by means of public opinion; it presumes to tell men what to think and read, how to dress and behave; it sets itself up as the judge of right and wrong, propriety and impropriety; it discourages spontaneity and originality, personal impulses and desires, strong character and unconventional ideas; it is fatal, in short, to individuality. And all of this, Mill predicted, was bound to get worse as the public more and more felt its power and acted upon it.”

From Anthony Doerr’s About Grace.

“The human brain, he wrote, is seventy-five percent water. Our cells are little more than sacs in which to carry water. When we die it spills from us into the ground and air and into the stomachs of animals and is contained again in something else. The properties of liquid water are this: it holds its temperature longer than air; it is adhering and elastic; it is perpetually in moton. These are the tenets of hydrology; these are the things one should know if one is to know oneself.”

"Water was a wild, capricious substance: nothing solid, nothing permanent, nothing as it appeared."

"These were facts, bounded by inviolable laws: water was elastic and adhesive, it held its temperature longer than air, it was perpetually in motion."

“To live in the tropics is to always be reminded (I find a hornet in my rice, a minnow in my shaving water) of the impossibility of ownership. The street in front of me belongs more to whatever is tunneling up those hundred or so little mounds of red dirt than to any of us. The beams of this apartment belong to houseflies; the window corners to spiders; the ceiling to house geckos and roaches. We are all just tenants here. Even the one thing we believe is ours – the time we’re given on earth – does that belong to us?.”

What is personal (private realm) stays personal in Anthony Doerr's first novel About Grace, the story of an hydrologist and his perilous dreams... Later on in the novel he stops dreaming, even if he does, it is not the kind of frightening dreams relating to deaths particularly of his dear ones.

The writer as not only a witness of catastrophes; someone who grapples with the puzzle of human condition, but as someone who tries to reconstruct an image of the past so that it would allow us to imagine a future.

The contemporary author in the words of Carlos Fonseca Suarez must also, to some extent, "make whole what has been wrecked," unlike Walter Benjamin's "angel of history" contemplating how the past has been reduced to a giant pile of debris by the catastrophic passage of time.

"The twenty-first century author must reconstruct, out of the ruins of the twentieth century, an image of the past that would allow us to imagine a future." Fonseca sees in the self-exile of Alexander Grothendieck a new way of bearing witness. The only adequate testimonial way of  interacting with a century that had been marked by a constant repetition of man-made catastrophes.”

Carlos Fonseca Suarez/ Alexander Grothendieck/Chuck Close/  Mexican painter Dr. Atl

http://bombmagazine.org/article/5694106/carlos-fonseca

Alexander Grothendieck 

He burned many of his papers and retreated to the French Pyrenees, where for more than 20 years he lived the life of a recluse, rarely speaking to people, refusing to indulge visitors or mathematical tourists, and reportedly subject to periods of religious mania and apocalypticism.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/25/alexander-grothendieck

In a letter to Welsh mathematician Ronnie Brown, Mr. Grothendieck wrote about why mathematics was important: It allows people to do difficult things — and it creates the tools by which difficult things can be made simple.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/alexander-grothendieck-mathematical-genius-who-went-into-self-exile-dies-at-86/2014/11/15/1e65f69a-6cf2-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html

Alejandra Pizarnik:  A rare anthology of poems trying to figure out psychic wounds, predicaments and helplessness of the living…?

This Buenos Aires' bequest to literary world, one gathers, madly worked with elements from the inner shadows. Her works, like surreal puzzles penned out from pitch-black darkness?

“Redemption is a theme that concerns me. We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.”

--Stanley Kunitz in the Paris Review interview.

In the same interview he says Bob Dylan ( Robert Allen Zimmerman) couldn’t have existed if Dylan Thomas (Remember Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night?) hadn’t existed before him.
Do Not Go Gentle... was a call to the poet's father to fight death. It explores the personal experience of grief and death. Dylan Thomas, in the words of Robert Lowell, is a "dazzling obscure writer who can be enjoyed without understanding."

"Understanding," writes Knausgaard, "must not be confused with knowledge for I knew next to nothing- but should there be, for example, skirmishes in the borderlands of an ex-Soviet republic somewhere in Asia, whose towns I had never heard of, with inhabitants alien in everything from dress and language to everyday life and religion, and it turned out that this conflict had deep historical roots that went back to events that took place a thousand years ago, my total ignorance and lack of knowledge would not prevent me from understanding what happened, for the mind has the capacity to deal with the most alien of thoughts. This applied to everything..."

On reads Julian Barnes’Levels of Life, which comprise an essay on his personal grief over the loss of his wife Pat Kavanagh, and goes back to Joyce Carol Oates' A Widow’s Story.

(Levels of Life also contain brief biographies of three Balloonists)

Joyce Carol Oates says hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity.”  (this when her husband was in hospital).

A Widow’s Story deals with the death of Raymond J.Smith, author and editor and Joyce Carol Oates’ husband for 47 years. He died in 2008. Pat Kavanagh, a formidable literary agent, died in the same year. She and Barnes married in 1979 and were together till her death.

Switch over to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Death In The Family, My Struggle:1 (My Struggle is an autobiographical series of six novels).  The death of narrator's father.  Knausgaard and his brother Yngve are on their way to the chapel where the Dad was "lying on a bier with his eyes closed and features composed."

Having reached the chapel,  scrambling out of the car…the he reflects:

“Some birds circled high above us, under the sky, which was still a pale grey. The Dutch painter Ruisdael always painted birds high in his skies, to create depth, it was almost his signature, at any rate I had seen it in picture after picture in the book I had about him.”

Altitudes and Heartaches

Julian Barnes' Levels of Life soars to colossal heights and plumbs depths like all good works of art. The book is a slim volume of 117 pages. All the three essays, The Sin of Height, On the Level and The Loss of Depth are interspersed with philosophical reflections and metaphors. Lucidity and brevity are the mainstay of Levels of Life.

The first two essays offers a peek into the lives of balloonists; Colonel Fredrick Gustavus Burnaby, Nadar aka Gaspard- Felix Tournachon and the French stage and film actress Sarah Bernhardt, nicknamed The Divine Sarah.

The third essay deals with the loss of the author's wife and literary agent Pat Kavanagh. The book is in fact dedicated 'for Pat.'

Sarah Bernhardt: She is temperamentally drawn to ballooning because her dreamy nature would constantly transport her to the higher regions. She feels the balloon to be the 'emblem of uttermost freedom.'

Fred Burnaby believed that shape was the key: an aerostat in the form of a tube or cigar and propelled by machinery, was the way forward- as it eventually proved.

(Ballooning represented freedom-yet a freedom subservient to the powers of wind and weather).

Nadar: Journalist, caricaturist, photographer, balloonist, entrepreneur and inventor...a tireless self-publicist. His infidelities coexisted with uxoriousness. He wrote that the three supreme emblems of modernity were 'photogarphy, electricity and aeronautics.' 

(Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the Truth.' Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers:'How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness  drop away...and forgiveness descends)

The government in Thailand has stepped up scrutiny for material on social media deemed insulting the monarchy in the wake of King Bhumibol Adulyadej's death on Thursday. The broadcasting regulator, National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) had on Friday asked internet service providers to monitor content and block anything inappropriate besides asking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and messaging apps to block material deemed insulting to the monarchy, reports Reuters.

Thailand's Lese majeste (insulting the monarchy) laws are among the strictest in the world. 

Convictions have become more frequent, and punishments more severe, under the military government that seized power in 2014, the report points out. 

Article 112 of Thailand's criminal code says anyone who "defames, insults or threatens the king, queen, the heir apparent or the regent" will be punished up to 15 years in prison (BBC, June 10, 2016)

In Tamil Nadu, at least seven persons have been arrested so far for publishing and circulating rumours about chief minister's (who is undergoing treatment at a private hospital) health status. 

But what we should keep in mind is that unlike Thailand, India is  a `democracy.' 

http://bangkok.coconuts.co/2016/10/15/phuket-man-accused-lese-majeste-his-shop-mobbed-over-social-media-post

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37651953

From a "news journal of Catholic opinion"

The first explicit example of conscience is to be found in ancient Greece in Sophocles' female character, Antigone. When faced with the choice between obeying a royal command to leave her brother unburied, on the one hand, and flouting the king’s authority, on the other, Antigone does what she considers to be right after careful deliberation. 

Like Sophocles' Antigone whose personal morality turns a kingdom on its head, women who seek birth control or abortion services cannot be ignored, contends Daniel A.Dombrowski, a professor of philosophy at Seattle University in this article, The Heart of the Matter: A Very Brief History of Conscience. 

The author traces the origin of conscience (ancient Greece) and the trajectory it has taken with the help of Martin van Creveld's Conscience: A Biography, as compass.

One passage that is particularly noteworthy and relevant to the present times is on how civil disobedience differs from conscientious refusal. To put in a nutshell, in civil disobedience, one breaks some particular law out of respect for law in general. By way of partial contrast, in conscientious refusal it is the government that initiates a confrontation with a citizen by commanding her to do something that violates her deepest moral convictions.

http://consciencemag.org/2016/08/22/the-heart-of-the-matter-a-very-brief-history-of-conscience-2/

Here’s another remarkable Nobel Lecture.

This, of  Mario Vargas Llosa.

"Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal."

"My disillusion with statism and collectivism and my transition to the democrat and liberal that I am – that I try to be – was long and difficult and carried out slowly as a consequence of episodes like the conversion of the Cuban Revolution, about which I initially had been enthusiastic, to the authoritarian, vertical model of the Soviet Union; the testimony of dissidents who managed to slip past the barbed wire fences of the Gulag; the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the nations of the Warsaw Pact; and because of thinkers like Raymond Aron, Jean Francois Rével, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper, to whom I owe my reevaluation of democratic culture and open societies..."

"I despise every form of nationalism, a provincial ideology-or rather, religion-that is short -sighted, exclusive, that cuts off the intellectual horizon and hides in its bosom..."

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2010/vargas_llosa-lecture_en.html

While leafing through an old notebook of mine lately I stumbled upon this excerpt from a Joseph Brodsky poem which I had copied out from some websites. It is from Brodsky's I Sit By The Window. What shines through the all-pervading disenchantment with reality is the honesty. ..

I'm by now acquainted to the function of such unfeigned lines in revealing to us the vanity of things as much as it preserves us as we make our way through this farcical and fake world.

I reproduce here the lines.

A loyal subject of these second-rate years,

I proudly admit that my finest ideas

are second-rate, and may the future take them

as trophies of my struggle against suffocation.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out

which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

"Apropos of Rojas Gimenez, I'll say that madness, a certain kind of madness, often goes hand in hand with poetry. It would be very difficult for predominantly rational people to be poets, and perhaps it is just as difficult for poets to be rational. Yet reason gets the upper hand, and it is reason, the mainstay of justice, that must govern the world. Miguel de Unamuno, who loved Chile very much, once said: "The thing I don't like is that motto. What is it all about, through reason or force? Through reason and always through reason."

--Pablo Neruda, Memoirs.

“Oh, Christ!” she said upon hearing the news, adding, “I couldn’t care less.” Doris Lessing’s initial reaction when journalists informed her that she had won the Nobel prize for literature.

I like to think of Bob Dylan (one of my all-time favorites) quietly laughing at the whims of the Nobel committee...

Meanwhile link of Doris Lessing's thought provoking Nobel lecture: 

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/lessing-lecture_en.html

A copy of Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs which I own is a gift to me by friends in The New Indian Express, Chennai, years ago upon my transfer to Coimbatore.Scribbled on the front page of the copy is, “To gladwin All the best from Express reporting team Chennai.” I cherish the memories as much as I cherish the Memoirs and Neruda poetry. 

Béla Tarr: Celluloid wizard from Hungary

His Satantango is the film adaptation of Laszlo Krasznahorkai's dark but amazing novel by the same name. In the very first shot itself the director surprises you. On and on and on….Béla Tarr weaves, unveils, reveals magic in Satantango. Though a dark theme...

Béla Tarr’s cinemas portray people, deprived people mainly in rural Hungary and their struggles to lead a dignified life.

In an interview he says that he was interested in human emotions; the real humans and the whole stuff. He places himself in the "middle" of the two groups of the Budapest Movement-one which made documentary style movies and the other, the experimental group which set out to find a new film language.

Andrzej Wajda’s ‘Kanal’ (Canal): A company of Polish army; men and women trapped in the endless sewer of war. People who have so much to live for realizing they cannot go on. Kanal is about love, courage and cowardice. And above all war. This is a black and white movie made in 1956.

In Kanal even light is a booby train amid death and destruction, though of course we see light in the courageous Daisy.

Inside the sewer struggling to make their way to the other side, Jacek who is tired and sick suggests to her: "We'll never keep up shall we call to Michael"

"It doesn't matter I know the severs," comes the reply.

"We'll get there if we go slowly and steadily," she reassures him.

Jacek: "You're very strong as though you'd heaved sacks".

Daisy: "That I've never done."

Kanal may not have the technical brilliance of movies made today but it has poignant and moving moments which makes it memorable.

Andrzej Wajda’s ‘Kanal’ was the first film made out of the Warsaw uprising, an operation by the Polish army to liberate Warsaw from Nazi Germany.  It was the second of the War trilogy preceded by A Generation and followed by Ashes and Diamonds.

Movies like Kanal (although the Iranian masters and directors like Krzysztof Kieslowski are my favorites) would open our eyes to the fact that most present-day movies touted as "award winning" and "classic" by the mainstream media and the critics here are, in fact, merely mediocre shows. That technical brilliance, good screenplay, arresting cinematography or stirring music alone is not enough to make a movie great. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/10/movies/andrzej-wajda-towering-auteur-of-polish-cinema-dies-at-90.html?smid=tw-nytimesarts&smtyp=cur&_r=0