Book Review - The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sequels disappoint and this is no exception. Sequels can never equal or transcend the original – unless they have been planned as linear shorter forms of an ungainly epic. To milk the popularity of The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments has been written after nearly three decades.
Margaret Atwood’s forte is dystopic future scenarios – as seen in the palindromic Maddaddam Trilogy Series 3 Books Collection Set By Margaret Atwood.
Gilead is a near future misogynistic Christian theocratic state – Biblical sayings justify the ‘use’ of Handmaids Rachel said to Jacob: “Here is my maid Bilhah; go in to her, that she may bear upon my knees and that I too may have children through her.” Out of this arrangement, Bilhah gave Jacob two sons and became the mother of Dan and Naphtali (Gen. 30:3-8). Ideas borrowed from Islamic Sharia turn women into mere chattels.

Even with grown women, four female witnesses are equivalent of one male, here in Gilead.

Hair was permitted inside a dwelling unless there were men around, because men had a thing about hair, it made them spin out of control, they said. And my hair was particularly inflammatory because it was greenish.

There are even echoes of Fahrenheit 451

There was no lettering on the stores – only pictures on the signs. A boot, a fish, a tooth.

Censorship and imagined prurience by the self-appointed moral police attains ridiculous levels:

The books I was given to learn from were about a boy and a girl called Dick and Jane. The books were very old, and the pictures had been altered at Ardua Hall. Jane wore long skirts and sleeves, but you could tell from the places where the paint had been applied that her skirt had once been above her knees and her sleeves had ended above her elbows. Her hair had once been uncovered.

Much to my chagrin, I witnessed this phenomenon a couple of decades ago in Saudi Arabia.
The narrative putters along, but then speed increases exponentially – almost as if the author was in a hurry to finish the arduous task of spinning the tale.

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Book Review: The Untoucable by Mulk Raj Anand

Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The practice of cleaning mephitic dry latrines and carrying away the shit (faeces, if you will) is euphemistically called “manual scavenging”. Can scavenging be done non-manually? dictionary.com defines a scavenger as 1. An animal or other organism that feeds on dead organic matter, 2. A person who searches through and collects items from discarded material, 3. A street cleaner. There is no mention of scraping off the turds and other consistencies of anal excrement into leaky baskets and carting off the load on the head to dispose it elsewhere.
Reading this book made me want to shrivel up and disappear from this unjust Universe. I am ashamed of our caste-ridden society. Sadly, the abhorrent practice of “manual scavenging” and the attendant boycotting a section of people prevails in some villages, notwithstanding Modi’s best efforts. The bureaucratic inertia will take some more decades to crawl out of its lethargy. This is the protagonist’s younger brother:

He seemed a true child of the outcaste colony, where there are no drains, no light no water; of the marshland where people live among latrines of the townsmen, and in the stink of their own ding scattered about here, there and everywhere; of the world where the day is dark as the night and the night pitch-dark. He had wallowed in its mire, bathed in its marshes, played among its rubbish-heaps; his listless, lazy, lousy manner was a result of his surroundings, He was the vehicle of a life-force, the culminating point in the destiny of which would never come, because malaria lingered in his bones, and that disease does not kill but merely dissipates the energy. He was friend of the flies and the mosquitoes, their boon companion since his childhood… his dirty face on which the flies congregated in abundance to taste-of the sweet delights of the saliva on the corners of his lips.

What a malodourous, soul wrenching, humiliating and psyche-crushing existence of this unfortunate section of society, not even included with in the ambit of humanity.
I did not like this book for its verbiage and quaint style of writing.

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Book Reivew: The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The Help by Kathryn Stockett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

South Africa was at the receiving end of crippling isolation due to the reprehensible practice of apartheid. However, racial segregation persisted even in the Sixties in the southern states of America. This was during the time of the Bob Dylan, Hippies and Woodstock.
The derogatory so called Jim Crow laws from the 1880s had been diluted but the social distinctions persisted. Public parks were forbidden for African Americans to enter, and theatres and restaurants were segregated. Segregated waiting rooms in bus and train stations were required, as well as water fountains, restrooms, building entrances, elevators, cemeteries, even amusement-park cashier windows. Laws forbade African Americans from living in white neighbourhoods. Segregation was enforced for public pools, phone booths, hospitals, asylums, jails, and residential homes for the elderly and handicapped.
Some states required separate textbooks Black and white students. New Orleans mandated the segregation of prostitutes according to race. In Atlanta, African Americans in court were given a different Bible from white people to swear on. Marriage and cohabitation between white and Black people was strictly forbidden in most Southern states. It was not uncommon to see signs posted at town and city limits warning African Americans that they were not welcome there. Some example of these despicable laws

No person shall require any white female to nurse in wards or rooms in which negro men are placed.
It shall be unlawful for a white person to marry anyone except a white person. Any marriage in vilation of this section shall be void.
No coloured barber shall serve as a barber to white women or girls.
The officer in charge shall not bury any coloured persons upon ground used for the burial of white persons.
Books shall not be interchangeable between the white and coloured schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them.
The Board shall maintain a separate building on separate grounds for the instruction of all blind persons of the coloured race

The characters may appear to be stereotyped and cliched, but this well scripted yarn is engaging, suspenseful and yet poignant.
Despite reservations, urbanization and the social churn in India, we have yet to get over our abhorrent caste system and the prosecution of Dalits - saddening examples of which still occur tragically frequently, especially in the countryside.

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Book Review - नौकर की कमीज़

नौकर की कमीज़ by Vinod Kumar Shukla
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Incredibly hard to classify, this book falls into no mould or style of book. It is the banal story of a newly employed and married government clerk from a poor socioeconomic background. Despite being a graduate, this cantankerous but helpless individual is exploited by his superior officer and treated as a domestic servant. Similarly, as the couple struggle with their hand-to-mouth existence, his subservient and despairing wife too is exploited by her rich landlady. Yet the characters stay on inthe reader's memory. Although the mystical element of Divara Mem Eka Khiraki Rahati Thi and Once It Flowers is missing, the "real realism" (to coin a phrase) is more bitter than the magic realism the author commonly employs – a leaky roof, rations on credit, a fractured arm, fever and delirium, etc. There are echoes of Divara Mem Eka Khiraki Rahati ThiWindow – the newly married couple, a doting mother, low paid job, an understanding boss, daily commute to work etc. The language is simple and the conversation about mundane subjects, straying occasionally into the philosophical realm.

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Book Review: Book of Shadows by Namita Gokhale

Book Of Shadows by Namita Gokhale
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The book starts with a seismic bang, but then meanders along in a maudlin fashion before exploding in a series of volcanic eruptions. These eruptions are the result of the actions of individuals damaged physically, mentally, and spiritually who come to inhabit the house central to the story. They are a bunch of eccentric, cruel, perverted, lecherous and sadistic persons over succeeding generations.
I picked up this mystical and literary book both for the nostalgia for my childhood spent in Nainital and Ranikhet, as well as for my partial Kumaoni ancestry. The author’s style of writing is very evocative – I could hear the cacophony of cicadas, smell the chir and deodar trees, taste the tart wild strawberries, tangy kaphal and syrupy pulpy hisaaloo and visualize the sylvan slopes. I could even hear the distant flute amidst the clanging cow-bells:

It’s cloying, it’s creepy, it’s crawly, it’s crepuscular.

The end is rather abrupt and unsatisfying, hence the three stars.

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