Patrick Bateman is one of the most attractive characters I've encountered. I'd be lying through my teeth if I said his psychopath tendencies have nothing to do with it. Despite the fact that if he were a real person he would probably murder me with one of his many ingenious methods of torture (or probably because of that), I still wonder what we'd talk about if we had dinner at a posh Manhattan restaurant. At a good table. Would he include snippets of his psycho-killer desires between ordering entree and dessert? Would I hear him? What would he say about my obviously brand-unconscious clothes, the mismatches, the casual slippers and lack of faux pearl earrings, and the fact that I really don't mind nonvintage champagne? Would it make him want to kill me faster? How would he do it? Am I starting to sound a little obsessive?

Is there a job that pays to read and get excited about buying new books?

Today I bought Junichiro Tanizaki's The Reed Cutter & Captain Shigemoto's Mother. After I'm done with Camus' The Plague (yes, finally) I shall pick it up. Not unless my sister's colleague who is visiting Goa this week comes back with any of the four books (I had to really narrow it down for the sake of courtesy) I've asked him to pick up. We're unsure what the Goa scene is like, whether there are as many bookstores there as there are in Delhi. I'm keeping my fingers, toes and other knottable parts crossed. The list is as follows: Stephen Alter's Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief; Chitrita Banerji's Eating India; Anjum Hasan's Lunatic In My Head; Vikram Chandra's Love & Longing In Bombay.

I kid you not, the anticipation is killing me.

Piers Anthony - Being A Green Mother

I've never liked juggling books because it takes the longest time to finish a single text, especially when you are an an idiosyncratic reader like me who scans well-written sentences over and over again to relish their glorious syntax. At the same time I can't help it, I am overcome with an insuppressible desire to know what the other book contains. There are problems for book jugglers, though. Having to remember where we left off, recapping the chronology of events, and sometimes even flipping back to check which character is which (if you've been on a hiatus long enough to warrant this) completely ruins the continuity and sometimes makes reading difficult to enjoy. It is unavoidable, I suppose. Some books we leave on the shelf after the first chapter and completely forget about them. Some books we find an extraordinary power to complete if it's the last thing we do - but it's not always worth the trouble.

Such as this. The last couple of days, I've been reading Piers Anthony's Being A Green Mother. I've got the whole series on loan from my friend and thought what a great idea it would be to complete another fantasy series after years. That's a great sense of accomplishment right there. But it struck me as odd that the book didn't seem to want to finish. Could it be - supernatural? Even when I was 80 pages from the end, it kept going on and on and on. That's when I realized I was reading at a snail's pace, purely for the sake of finishing it, because it was quite terrible compared to his other novels in the series. This one was pure lackluster - and it wasn't because of the idea, which was good, but rather the way Anthony chose to flesh it out that didn't resound with me.

Being A Green Mother is the story of the human who takes over the office of the Nature. Orb, our Irish protagonist, dances and sings in her search for the most powerful but elusive song, the Llano. She first joins a gypsy carnival group in India, and later travels the world with her band, made up of 3 junkies, one black girl and one succubus, inside a giant flying fish.

Dear Mr. Anthony (I want to ask him),

Where did the genius of On A Pale Horse and Bearing An Hourglass go to? In the former, you deftly tackled the morbidity of death with an admirable clear-headedness. You crafted the mysterious, intelligent, compassionate Thanatos from an irritating, self-destructive Zane. The ideas were crisp and sharp, you gave insightful, sensitive answers to the question of mortality. However, that character development and insight is completely lost in Green Mother: Orb remains the same, hesitating woman with a determined, uncompromising goal: to find the Llano, wherever it is. Her magic grows, no doubt, but she doesn't. Her righteous morality keeps getting into the way when she meets new characters, and she resolves her issues by choosing not confront them. With Bearing An Hourglass, you demonstrated your power over the language - which I fail to see in Green Mother. Orb's personality is strictly limited to dancing the tanana (the provocative gypsy dance meant to incite erotic response - great idea, by the way) or singing on her harp. When reading this, one gets the feeling that you wrote purely for the sake of it. The adjectives got overused after a while; the idea of affecting nature with song - at first interesting - soon lost its novelty. As did the entire book.

Best,
Preet

I wrote a few thoughts last month on another book in Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series, which you can read here.

A Child's Garden of Verses

I must have been eleven or twelve, I imagine, when a teacher gifted me with a tiny book hardly the size of my hand. It was an enchanting little thing and I carried it around in the pocket stitched into my school uniform. It was a big pocket and I remember how during recess the girls in school walked around the canteen with their wallets bulging from below the fabric. I stole nuggets of time for nuggets of poetry, skimming through (not without guilt) the longer verses, hoping they’d finish faster. I might not be wrong to suppose that that was when I first cultivated an appreciation for poetry that could capture an entire idea in eight lines or less. A Child’s Garden of Verses BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVEN- (skip a line) SON, illustrated by Charles Robinson, whose black and white drawings in this collection established his reputation. He went on to contribute work to hundreds of editions, including Alice In Wonderland and The Secret Garden. Every poem, however tender and true, is accompanied by images equally tender and true. They burrowed a secret passage out of the mundane, rigid lessons in school and boring family dinners; I had repeated a few quietly to myself so many times that they were committed to memory. ‘The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings. The world is so full of a number of…’ I dare say some kids thought I was a nut but no one understood, or maybe I couldn’t explain, the magic I carried inside me. I am bigger than you, I think I might’ve said then (but I didn’t for surely that would have invited a host of criticism since I was a fairly large child). So I sank deeper and deeper into myself and into my kingdom of happy thoughts. Eventually I lost it in heaps and piles of rubbish accumulated over the years, gradually forgot about it and gave the memories free rein to recede into the gray area of time and age. Imagine my surprise and delight when today, while clearing drawers and sweeping up a decade of memorabilia, I chanced upon my childhood imaginary world, this wonderful tiny book of escape! Stevenson says it best when he writes, 'But the glory kept shinning and bright in my eyes, / And the stars going round in my head.'

Junichiro Tanizaki - The Key

Junichiro Tanizaki's The Key, published in 1956 and set in post-war Japan, is a frightening story of sexual obsession and compulsion in a twenty-year-old marriage. The husband, who remains nameless throughout the novella, is a middle-aged retired academic who finds himself unable to keep up with his wife's, Ikuko, sexual appetite. A peek into Ikuko's diary shows that she finds her husband increasingly inadequate and clumsy in bed and is often unsatisfied after their love-making. A chap named Kimura, supposedly dating the couple's daughter, soon enters this sexually fraught tableau and complicates the marriage, although the text betrays that this complication was neither unexpected nor unwanted.

Tanizaki's novella is written in the form of diary entries belonging to Ikuko and her husband. New Years' Day marks the first entry on his side and, literally, the beginning of a new chapter for Ikuko's husband.

"This year I intend to begin writing freely about a topic which, in the past, I have hesitated even to mention here. I have always avoided commenting on my sexual relations with Ikuko, for fear that she might surreptitiously read my diary and be offended... I have decided not to worry, but perhaps I really stopped worrying long ago. Secretly, I may have accepted, even hoped, that she was reading it. Then why do I lock the drawer and hide the key? Possibly to satisfy her weakness for spying."

Thus begins an enchanting but devious tale of furtive seduction. Ikuko's husband is often is a high state of unfulfilled arousal. He is still passionately in love with her but, unfortunately for him, lacks the vitality and vigour to demonstrate it. Having no lack of experience with other women, he knows she possesses a natural gift for love-making and mentions pointedly that her physical endowment is equaled by few other women. As much as this excites him, it cripples him too, for his physical stamina is "no match for hers". Ikuko's husband, I imagine, is in an uncomfortable position: he desires his wife, seeks to satisfy and please her but lacks the necessary apparatus to achieve this; the constant awareness of his lack rouses his insecurities. He writes, "If by any chance another man knew of (her natural gift), and knew that I am an unworthy partner, what would happen?"

Through the diary entries, we learn that Toshiko, the couple's daughter, is being courted by a chap by the name of Kimura, although how the courtship is developing is not very clear. Toshiko appears to be uninterested in the young man and refuses to go out alone with him unless accompanied by her mother. Indeed, later on in the novella, it will appear as though Toshiko and her father are closing the distance between Ikuko and Kimura, although what the daughter's motivations are remain ambiguous. Ikuko's husband remarks in his diary, "I wonder what he's after. Which one attracts him? ...Perhaps his real aim is to win Toshiko. Since she seems unenthusiastic, he may be trying to improve his chances by integrating himself with Ikuko..."

One thing that is inescapable is that Ikuko's husband is adamant on inspiring sexual jealousy. From an early stage, he feels jealous of Kimura but admits that he secretly enjoys it. "Such feelings have always given me an erotic stimulus...That night, stimulated by jealousy, I succeeded in satisfying Ikuko. I realize Kimura is becoming indespensible to our sexual life." We find that he feeds his sexual appetite by courting danger in the form of infidelity; his vigour rises to the occasion (no pun intended) only when it is threatened by an external stimulus. For this reason, he implicitly encourages her to incite his suspicion for "the sake of her own happiness."

A strange, illicit love affair develops, prompted by both husband and daughter. Ikuko falls into this easily, too easily, it seems, but it is not difficult to understand why. Already disgusted by her husband, his "waxy skin", his repulsive love-making and "revolting habits", his insistence on poring over every detail of her body and his unnatural attraction to her feet, she writes in her diary as an ending thought, "Are these gross, sticky, nasty caresses what you have to expect from all men?"


But even while Ikuko violently dislikes her husband, she obliges him as much as she can, especially (or conveniently?) in the matter of Kimura. One wonders, despite her "old morality" and old-fashioned Kyoto upbringing, whether she quietly enjoys the two-fold attention. On one hand is a desperate, ageing husband who gets off on the idea of jealousy. On the other is the instigated lust of her daughter's suitor, a young, handsome man who maintains only a paper-thin distance from her when she faints after too much brandy and has to be undressed in his presence; or when, asked by her husband, Kimura develops the naked pictures of Ikuko taken by her husband's camera. Ikuko claims to heed her husband's implicit/explicit promptings in the name of duty ("I was only obeying your father," she tells her daughter. "I do whatever he wants even against my will") yet doubt lingers over the text. Given that both husband and wife are unreliable communicators in that they write in their diaries thinking and knowing that the other reads it, normal laws of morality, modesty and truthfulness stop applying. This surreptitious dialogue between the two destabilizes what we assume are the normal laws of communication: Ikuko knows what her husband wants and is free to indulge herself as long as she does not admit that she reads her husband's diary. Similarly, her husband will encourage her behaviour even when he knows she is being unfaithful as long as he maintains the facade of ignorance. The art of subversion takes precedence over truthfulness in the text. Indeed, Tanizaki, without judging his characters, makes it seem as though it is a more important virtue to uphold than honesty.

Towards the end, Ikuko's husband becomes more and more aware of his single-mindedness. Rightfully, he calls himself "an animal good only for mating", an animal of the night. While his mind teems with sexual fantasies, his brain is "steadily deteriorating". At the same time that his concentrated need for sex and satisfaction takes priority, his body suffers the effects of neglect by responding to his fanatical over-doing, over-action with a paralysis of limbs, which leaves him bed-ridden for a good couple of weeks. I won't spoil the ending but I will say this: it ends on an ambiguous, amoral note that captures the very essence of the ambivalence Tanizaki employs in his language to discuss the sexual tensions in the novella..