Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

 

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Archetypal Murakami – ears, breasts, hyperreal dream sex, and the ever-present shadow of evil.

Ideas are like beards. Men don’t have them till they grow up.
Strictly speaking, it might not be a dream. It was reality, but a reality imbued with all the qualities of a dream. A different sphere of reality, where – at a special time and place – imagination had been set free.
A distinct half-moon hung above, like a battered piece of pumice stone that had been tossed by someone and gotten stuck in the sky.
One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.

Cruel of Murakami to have left unresolved the following: Shiro’s decision, Yuzu's murderer and the reason, Hadi and his role in the vivid dream sequence, the contents of the pianist’s bag. Red herrings like this leave a feeling of vacuum.

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Spotted Owlet (Athene brama)

 

Indian Grey Hornbill (Ocyceros birostris)

 

Serrated beak

Broken Horn

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One has to wade through an amalgam of magic, quantum physics, a hidebound military bureaucracy, acronyms – corny ones at that, and a very-very convoluted plot. The book begins on a positive note and the narrative gallops along, but then it gets bogged down in its own complex web of time travel and its paradoxes.

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Wanderers, Kings, Merchants by Peggy Mohan

 

Wanderers, Kings, Merchants by Peggy Mohan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Cher sang Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves, that is what the title sounds like. Seriously, this is an intriguing book – it traces the history of what is now India from the perspective of the evolution of languages in various parts of the country – Kerala, Nagaland, Maharashtra and, of course, the so-called Hindi speaking ‘cow-belt’.
Rather dense prose, at times pedantic and incomprehensible with all the scientific terms used in linguistics – koines, ergativity, calques etc. can make the going rather heavy.
I did not know that it was the recognition of Hindi/Devnagri and rejection of Persian/Urdu by the ruling British that sparked the stirring of the Partition of India along communal lines. Another bit of trivia

India is on its way to becoming, by a few orders of magnitude, the largest English-speaking nation on Earth.

And to supplement this Tower of Babel is our own unique creole Hinglish - Yeh dil maange more

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Tailor Bird

 

Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home by James Triptree Jr.

Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home by James Tiptree Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This classic SF anthology by Alice Sheldon aka James Triptree is about deep-deep space, aliens and humans on weird worlds in weird situations. The cryptic style and obscure allusions are not always easy to comprehend. There are funny, serious, poignant themes but also an underlying refrain of lascivious aliens and humans.

Man is exogamous – all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger. Or get impregnated by him; it works for women too. Anything different-coloured, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying. That’s a drive, y’know, it’s built in.

Here she quotes from who she call the first space poet - Hart Crane:

Launched in abysmal cupolas of space
Toward endless terminas, Easters of speeding light-
Vast engines outward veering with seraphic grace
On clarion cylinders pass out of sight

Some of the titles are as poetic as the stories - And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side, Faithful to Thee, Terra, in Our Fashion, I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool Is Empty, Mother in the Sky with Diamonds.
A 'must-read' for SF fans.

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The Bawaji

The Bawaji by Berjis Desai
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Vignettes from the lives of everyday characters – all memorable – with their unique Parsi flavour and foibles. You will not find the stereotype cranky, crotchety, cantankerous Parsi – ready for litigation at the drop of a hat – although some inveterate “litigationophiles” do find mention.
Many of these unforgettable characters have found a voice in the author’s Towers Of Silence.
I wish the delightful illustrations were bigger in size.
The stories are about Parsi men and women, charitable, selfish, scheming, suave, unkempt, religious, atheists, well off, middle class, poor and it is about the latter that is an eye-opener

Every one of the villages in south Gujarat, with a Parsi population, was an eye opener. The widowed mother and her ten-year-old daughter subsisting on one scrambled egg as the only meal of the days. Naked toddlers of Parsi farmers running about in the strong sun with distended bellies indicative of Vitamin D deficiency. Parsi octogenarians not able to see due to easily operable cataract. Constipated teenage girls too embarrassed to relieve themselves in the open fields. Middle aged women making half a dozen trips daily to the well to fetch water. Aching ribs due to constant coughing bouts. The aged trembling in the bitter cold with out a wood fire to warm their limbs. Tuberculosis. Malnutrition. Even starvation. Miscarriages. Infant mortality. Feeding mothers with dried up breasts. No hospital. No doctor. No midwife. All Parsi Zoroastrians. Shattering the myth that there are no poor Parsis.

As the author says, all incidents are true – just the names have been changed - to avoid possible litigation! There is an autobiographical touch and the Berjis Desai's favourite trope – mysticism and magic is quite evident. He can be downright cruel too

Her mental grasp was slightly better than that of an orangutan.

This is describing someone's sister.
Deserved five stars but subtracting one for the repetitive and passages copied verbatim from Towers Of Silence.

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The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem

The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Can only be written by an unhinged genius and translated by another genius with an even higher loopiness quotient. These are tales concern two friendly rivals – the impulsive Trurl and the more circumspect Klapacious – who are Constructors on a galactic scale. They inhabit a truly weird universe inhabited by entities who are bonkers and who requisition the fabrication of machines for insane purposes. These miscegenations tell stories, fulfil wishes, answer questions, even produce objects that begin with ‘n’:

machine that could create anything starting with n… needles, then nankeens and negligees, nail the lot to narghiles filled with nepenthe and numero... nimbuses, noodles, nuclei, neutrons, naphtha, noses, nymphs, naiads, and natrium.

The translators brilliance shines through with the evocative word play…

dragons are thermodynamically impossible only in the probabilistic sense, as are elves, fairies, gnomes, witches, pixies and the like. Using the general equation of improbability, the two constructors obtained the coefficients of pixation, elfinity, kobolding
Though it is easier not to believe in electrons than in dragons: electrons, at least taken singly, won’t try to make a meal of you
...mysterious words as ‘discontinuous orthodragonality’, ‘grand draconical ensembles’, ‘high-frequency binomial fafneration’, ‘abnormal saurian distribution’, ‘discrete dragons’, ‘indiscrete dragons’, ‘drasticodracostochastic control’, ‘simple Grendelian dominance’, ‘weak interaction dragon diffraction’, ‘aberrational reluctance’, ‘informational figmentation…

Whimsical illustrations add to the eerie narrative

His Royal Highness Protuberon Asteristicus, sovereign ruler of the sister globes of Aphelion and Perihelion, hereditary monarch of Aneuria, emperor of all the Monodamites, Biproxicans and Tripartisans, the Grand Duke of Anamandorinth, Glorgonzigor and Esquacciaccaturbia, Count of the Euscalipii, the Algorissimo and the Flora del Fortran, Paladin Escutcheoned, Begudgeoned and of the Highest Dudgeon, Baron of Bhm, Wrph and Clarafoncasterbrackeningen, as well as anointed exarch extraordinary of Ida, Pida and Adinfinida, to invite in His munificent name Your Resplendent Grace to our kingdom as the long-awaited savior of the crown, as the only one who can deliver us from the general mortifaction occasioned by the thrice-unhappy infatuation of His Royal Highness, the heir to the throne, Pantagoon.’

Poetic

‘We are the Steelypips, we have a machine, a dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every respect, we saved up all our atoms, put them all together ourselves, we hadn’t a care, no spats in our vats, no rules, no schools, until something flew up, landed, sat down and won’t budge.’
‘We tried a scarechrome and a servospook and a megalomechanism, all hydraulic and high caliber, spouting mesons like caissons, pi- and mu- and neutrinos too, protons and photons, but nothing worked.’
...long list of the differences between fiddle and faddle, not to be confused with twiddle and twaddle or tittle and tattle, then all the words that rhyme with ‘spinach’
...where all of us have arms he had only a gentle breeze, and where there are usually legs he had nothing but a shimmering rainbow, and in lieu of a head he sported a plumed fedora; his voice issued forth from his center, and indeed, he was a perfect sphere, a sphere of the most engaging appearance and girdled with an elegant semipermeable cummerbund
Fine, now give me that kludge-fudger, that winch-pincher, sprocketmonger, edulcorated data-dumper, that wretched reject of a widgeteer cowardly hiding in the grave!

Phew! A must-read for lovers of wacky SF in the vein of Douglas Adams.

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The Book of Dog

The Book Of Dog by Hemali Sodhi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Essentially a book of loss – a catharsis, a ventilation of the grief experienced by hoomans who have been owned by doggos and puppers. There are some heart-warming stories of rescue dogs.
The photos of the protagonists should have been with the article and not in a ‘rogues gallery' at the end of the book – almost as an afterthought. Similarly, the brief bio of the authors should have been at the end of each story.
Better quality photos, photos of Gaddie dogs and a photo-essay of the plump doggies of CP, like that of the dogs of Marine Drive would be have been welcome.
The story by Naomi Barton stands out, as does the hilarious sermon by Cyrus Broacha in his inimitable style.

Dogs. From the Latin dogustus. The Greek dogander. The Gujarati kuttro. What a group! As far as I’m concerned, dogs are in the top Three. Alongside wolves and The Beatles...
Dog people, I cannot stress this enough: Walk the doggie, feed the doggie, groom the doggie yourself! Or will away your house, property and money to your domestic worker, and stay in your room (which I'm assuming has Wi-Fi).

Here is a lyrical extract:

She stopped howling and turned and looked at me. Her eyes were huge. They were what puppy-dog eyes were named after. Pools took notes on how to be limpid

A must read for all dog-lovers.

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Towers of Silence

 

Towers Of Silence by Berjis Desai
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Brilliant!
The breathless narrative style of Rushdie meets the occult suffused world of David Mitchell, interlaced with healthy dollops of Murakami’s preternatural secret pathways. This engrossing multi-generational eidolic tale gallops along with an unflagging pace. It is ‘peopled’ with benign phantasms, evil spirits and reincarnations paying off karmic debts.
Despite a graphic genealogical tree, relationships of the protagonists are unclear due to matrimonial alliances within the chthonic incestuous Parsi community. The author graciously projects the foibles of some of his community’s inbred feeble-minded individuals who are nonetheless memorable characters.
Is it somewhat autobiographical? Berjis (Desai) and the protagonists Burjor, both are lawyers...
A must-read!


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