Notes on Tharoor, Huxley and Anthony

And no, the Anthony mentioned above is not the same Anthony whose book I've been reading for the past two months. _Transgressions in Art_ gets a bit tedious after a while; it's one of those books that is necessary to take slow, something like dating a really beautiful woman - you don't want to fuck it up by rushing through the main course.

Anyway, I started on Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel with glee, especially after reading so much about it on lit blogs and other online reviews. Suffice to say I raced through the beginning, laughing my way through, reminded very much of Rushdie's style in _Midnight's Children_, the writer and his audience, the run-on sentences, rhetoric questions, hyperbole, the ever-running thrope of inseparability between country and self, history and self, etc. I thought it was a particularly clever idea to use the Mahabharata in re-writing the history of independent India, to go back to a mythical past in order to re-tell a country's politics: fantasy versus politic, phantasmagoria against realism, past/present and the tragedy and unites them. Even though I cannot claim to have read the epic in its entirety, Tharoor's integration is quite seamless. You really don't need to know the original to read his version. I'm losing steam towards the end though, and while I admit this probably has more to do with juggling several books at once, I cannot deny that Tharoor's version of post-independence is a lot less exciting - fictionally speaking, of course - than the pre-independence period. Needless to say, he speeds up his plot by cleverly injecting poems where he knows, I think he surely does, his narrative is threatening to sedate readers. Overall, it's a sharp text, witty and undoubtedly patriotic and slightly anti-Gandhi - but it's fiction, so it's not like you can point a finger at him and say "But you have a moral responsibility to this text!" Be prepared for an entire barrage of alliterations, though.

A few weeks ago, a good friend introduced me to Piers Anthony, who has turned out to be one of the most readable fantasy writers I've come across. Each book in his 'Incarnations of Immortality' series stands by itself and does not require one to read everything to get an idea of the continuity, unlike a lot of fantasy literature. The basic premise is thus: Death, Fate, Time, Nature, War, Evil (Satan), and Good (God) are made of a group of humans who occupy the bodies of the immortals for a certain time until they have to hand their office over to the next in-charge. Thus, the order of the universe prevails. I've read Bearing An Hourglass and completed With A Tangled Skein last night. On the whole, the latter, which focused on the trials of the three aspects of Fate - Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos - I found to be lacking when compared to Hourglass which felt like it was a greater challenge to write, and hence a greater pleasure to read, due to the complexities I assume were involved in talking about the idea of time and time travel without slipping into heavy scientific jargon. Keeping in mind that I am not a feminist, I think with Tangled Skein, Piers Anthony was attempting to presume too much about the female psychology. There's a scene where a thiry-two year old grandmother strips with her twelve-year-old daughter and grand-daughter: "We're all women, there's nothing to be ashamed of". True, but still a disconcerting image. At one point, the aspect of Atropos was given over to the care of an old black woman, which made Anthony feel, for some reason, that his character should communicate in ghetto talk. For obvious reasons, this made her entire character highly laughable and two-dimensional, especially in the scene where she bursts into a teenager's room to find her with two teenage boys. After shooing them out, Atropos lectures this (presumably) black kid in some strange mix of grandmother-ghetto talk that proceeded to throw off the entire scene for me. Would it have been too much to assume that a black woman was capable of communicating without falling into a stereotype? In trying to make his character more authentic, Anthony misjudged the situation and turned the tables on himself, instead. Moral of the story: white men should never try to talk like anything other than white men. All this aside, Tangled Skein still retains a characteristically readable quality. Actions and events are packed tightly together, forming a constantly interesting, unputdownable narrative. Heck, I'll still recommend it.

And even though I haven't finished it yet, I should admit that I'm finally reading Huxley's A Brave New World. I know someone who read this at twelve. Wow, right? At twelve I was too busy getting through Sidney Sheldon.