Book Review: Money by Martin Amis

Money by Martin Amis
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

My old review from 2016.
Amis’ book is about the bacchanalian life and the debauchery of a film director that leads to his ultimate descent into ruination and decrepitude. The compulsive onanism/self-gratification is akin to Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint”.
Despite the depravity of the sundry characters, the prose is lyrical and vivid. Here is the famous inclement dismal and dank London weather:

Through these chutes of slates, you could inspect the weather, which was making a comeback of the stalled-career variety, the sun all rusty and out of condition, glowing then failing suddenly like a damp torch.

This is his take on bees:

Metallic, superdynamated, these creatures of the lower air moved about like complicit demons, so heavy that when they hovered they seemed to be idling from invisible threads.

The birds are at the receiving end of smoggy weather in metropolises:

The birds of New York shivered and croaked among the bent branches. The birds of New York have or less given up the ghost, and who can blame them? They have been processed by Manhattan and the twentieth century. A standard-issue British pigeon would look like a cockatoo among them – a robin redbreast would look like a bird of paradise. The birds of New York are old spivs in dirty macs. They live off charity and welfare handouts. They cough and grumble and flap their arms for warmth. Declassed, they have slipped several links in the chin of being; it’s been rough all right. No more songs or plump worms or flights to summer seas. The twentieth has been a bad century for the birds of New York, and they know it.

The protagonist thinks and lives pornography:

As I walked home through streets the colour or oyster and carbon, the air suddenly shivered and shook its coat like a wet dog, like the surface of worried water. I paused – we all did – and lifted my face to the sky……. Up in the clear distance basked a hollow pink cloud, a rosy cusp fastened by tendrils at either end, like a vertical eye, a vertical mouth. In its core lay a creaturely essence, meticulous, feminine….. I am probably not alone in supposing that I am shaped by how I see things. And the cloud up there certainly looked like a pussy to me.

Nature being affected by modern day civilization:

City life is happening everywhere. The wasp was dead. That sting was its last shot. Flies get dizzy spells and bees have booze problems. Robin redbreasts hit the deck with psychosomatic ulcers and cholesterol overload. In the alleys, dogs are coughing their hearts out on snout and dope. The stooped flowers in their sodden beds endure bask-pinch and rug-loss what with all the stress about. Even the microbes, the spores of the middle air are finding all this a little hard on their nerves.

Here he talks about physical pain. I disagree somewhat, pain gets worse and assumes a pathological form as time passes

Pain is very patient but even pain grows bored occasionally and wants to try its hand at something else. Even pain gets pissed, and craves variety. Pain doesn’t always just want to hand around hurting all the time.

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Book Review: दीवार में एक खिड़की रहती थी

Divara Mem Eka Khiraki Rahati Thi by Vinod Kumar Shukla
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This dreamy narrative of a newly married ambidextrous maths teacher proceeds with elephantine grace. There are meandering conversations – almost at cross purposes – as if the participants are tripping on LSD or cannabis. Try to figure out the symbolism of the elephant, unclaimed bicycles, the boy in the tree (akin to the cameo of Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22), the old woman in the window, and the window itself. The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds seem to have influenced the psychedelic visits into the window – almost like the paranormal The City & the City or the alternate reality of 1Q84. The lyrical description of the sounds of the ripening and sweetening of fruits is a delightful example of synaesthesia. The lovemaking of the romantic couple is portrayed cryptically as a series of innocent abrasions on the touchstone rock made by the jewellery of the writhing bride. Despite the simple language the book is very evocative.
I'm now planning to read नौकर की कमीज़.

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Book Review:Translation of खिलेगा तो देखेंगे

Once It Flowers by Vinod Kumar Shukla
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An Alice's Adventures in Wonderland type of book, खिलेगा तो देखेंगे is narrated in a dreamy, surreal, poetic style.

There must be a silencer mounted on time as well. Try as one might, it’s hard to make out time’s passing. Maybe the silencer in Guruji’s rooms has tiny perforation that let time’s ticking through

The nightingale sang while the sparrow was visible. Using playback technology, the sparrow sang the nightingale’s song.

The bucolic pace meanders along with lethal wooden guns, seismic events, conversations like Vedic incantations enlivening the narrative.

A person can’t run his hands over the day to feel out its shape the way he can run his hands over a flute to tell it is a flute

At one point there is a crescendo of ticking clocks like Pink Floyd’s Time.

Families painted a safety charm on the wall of their huts. They would pick up a fistful of cow-dung and paint the image of a man and woman protected by a circle. The charm was painted during the rainy season. The pain families bore in their routine life was sufficient for them. The circle was intended to prevent their suffering from brimming and overflowing, to keep the suffering in their own houses rather than have it leak out to a neighbour’s

They played small flutes as was their custom. Only now did the morning truly arrive. The other morning had been false. People who owned watches reset the time. The sum moved back and started the morning all over again.

Dirt went into the cracks when she walked on dry earth. When she walked over cracked soil, the cracks themselves stuck to her feet

Such evocative descriptions are littered all over the book, strongly recommending further reading of Vinod Kumar Shukla's works.

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Book Review: Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Like Lucas Marsh (Not As a Stranger) and Andrew Manson (The Citadel), Martin Arrowsmith was dedicated to Medicine and not to the commercial aspects of the profession. He is a flawed hero, with no social skills – turning into a sociopath by the end of the story. Crucial to the 'success' of all three protagonists is the role of the women in their lives. This was the town-doctor’s room that inspired Arrowsmith to turn to medicine

The central room was at once business office, consultation-room, operating-theatre, living-room, poker den, and warehouse for guns and fishing tackle. Against a brown plaster wall was a cabinet of zoological collections and medical curiosities, and beside it the most dreadful and fascinating object known to the boy-world of Elk Mills – a skeleton with one gaunt gold tooth… On the wall was a home-stuffed pickerel on as home-varnished board. Beside the rusty stove, a saw-dust box cuspidor rested on a slimy oilcloth worn through to the threads. On the senile table was a pile of memoranda of debts… The most unsanitary corner was devoted to the cast-iron sink, which was oftener used for washing eggy breakfast plates than for sterilizing instruments. On its ledge were a broken test-tube, a broken fishhook, an unlabeled and forgotten bottle of pills, a nail-bristling heel, a frayed cigar-butt, and a rusty lancet stuck in a potato. The wild raggedness of the room was the soul and symbol of Doc Vickerson.

The book is a satire on mediocrity and the bane of self-aggrandizing charlatans that sprout like mushrooms in the rains – charlatans like Wesley Mouch (Atlas Shrugged). It is an indictment of imposters and frauds in science that come up with committees with fanciful names that canvass against innovation and original research.

There was an eerie feeling of déjà vu when I read this

From Yunnan in China, from the clattering bright bazaars, crept something invisible in the sun and vigilant by dark, creeping, sinister, ceaseless; creeping across the Himalayas, down through walled market-place, across a desert, along hot yellow rivers…and here and there on its way a man was black and stilled with plague

And again

the value of face-masks in influenza epidemics

This Pulitzer Prize winning novel (although the author did not accept it) propelled with other satirical works like Babbitt and Main Street eventually deservedly propelled the author towards a Noble Prize in Literature.

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