Honor Arundel - The High House

Publisher: Piccolo Books (1966)
Author: Honor Arundel
Title: The High House

Good books stay inside you forever, no doubt about that. I read this book when I was in my early teens, during the 70s. How it came to be in our house in Bangalore, I don't know.  My father was a compulsive book collector and somehow this was among his stuff. What could a Professor of Political Science have in common with a young adult novel? Nothing. Maybe one of his students left it in his house and he just lugged it around.

Whatever the reason, it was  fortuitous for me. I loved the book and read it several times. Later, nothing remained in my mind except that it was probably called High something and was about an orphan girl forced to live with her eccentric aunt.  I had to look for various combinations, trying my search via the name 'High Place' or something, and also via the plot. After much searching, I hit paydirt when I found a mention of the book on Goodreads.

From here it should have been plain sailing. But wait. The book was no longer in print, not on kindle and available only in certain countries. As I have a daughter in one of the countries, I asked her to buy the Emma series for me.  When I visited her, the books were on the bookshelf.  The first thing I did, before I had been cured of my jetlag, was to read them.

The High House is about a newly orphaned 13 year old girl, Emma, and her brother, Richard. They have lived happily in London in the comfort of their house, loved by their parents and looking forward to a good life. Tragedy strikes when their parents are killed in a car crash.  They have two aunts, sisters of their mother and father, who decide to take one child each.

Richard is offered a home with Aunt Laura, their father's sister, as she has a son already and figures that the boys will be good company for each other. Emma gets her mother's sister, Patsy.  Patsy is an artist and lives in Edinburgh.  She has a reputation for being eccentric.

Emma is methodical in her ways, a creature of habit.  She is horrified by the untidy aunt who cooks and cleans fitfully.  However, she is very kind to Emma.  After comparing notes with her brother, she finds that Aunt Laura would have been more suited to her tastes.  She is the one who runs her house like a ship, with set timings for everything.  In fact, once their Insurance money comes in, Laura may taken in Emma as well.

When the time comes, will Emma like to go away from her school, her friend Elizabeth, the ancient High House where Patsy lives, and her life in Edinburgh?

The book is beautifully written in a sparse style where more is conveyed through less. In skillful words we get a wonderful sketch of Emma, Aunt Patsy, Richard, Aunt Laura and the attractive city of Edinburgh.  It is a charming book and I can imagine why it did not leave my head even after nearly 5 decades.

Publisher: Piccolo (1968)
Author: Honor Arundel
Title: Emma's Island

This is a sequel to the wonderful book listed above.

Emma is now 15 and her eccentric Aunt Patsy and her new husband Stephan have suddenly decided to go live on Stranday, an island near Oban.  So poor Emma is uprooted once more.

Life on a small island is quite something else, and Emma soon learns how to tackle it.  Aunt Patsy cannot do without her, it is clear. Stephan also depends on Emma a lot and she is happy to be of use.

Things cannot remain the same, however.  Emma has to decide what to do after her school is up.  She ought to be thinking of college but is loth to leave the island.

She also feels the pangs of first love when she meets Alistair.

Publisher: Piccolo (1970)
Author: Honor Arundel
Title: Emma in Love

The lovesick Emma decides to continue her education in Edinburgh.  It would be lovely to be close to her brother Richard once more, not to mention Alistair who lives in nearby Glasgow. She returns to the school she went to when she last lived in Edinburgh, Parkhill and reunites with her friend Elizabeth.

Emma has a tendency to be a doormat because of which her brother Richard and her Aunt Patsy are content to walk all over her.  She is able to meet Alistair, but not as often as she likes.  Our beloved Emma has yet to learn of life and love.

These are young adult books and they are lovely. All written in a simple style and bring out the predicaments of Emma very well.  They are a far cry from the kind of young adult books available these days.

Utkarsh Patel - Kannaki's Anklet

Indus Source Books
Utkarsh Patel
Kannaki's Anklet

Silapapadikaram is a well known Tamil epic poem of the Sangam Era.  The authorship is credited to a Jain monk called Ilango Adigal.

I had heard of Silappadikaram and knew the outline of the story. The book has been translated into English but I never got around to reading it. When I discovered that Utkarsh Patel had brought out his version of the classic, I had to read it.

Kannagi (or Kannaki as Utkarsh prefers to call her) is a lovely damsel, daughter of a prosperous merchant who lives in Puhar, a port town in Chola kingdom.  She is married to  Kovalan, who lives in Puhar too and is the only son of another merchant.  They are over the moon to be married to each other, being young and beautiful. Their life is full of honey and happiness. On a silly whim, one day, Kovalan pays for the favors of the courtesan Madhavi.  He is smitten by her wiles and refuses to return home.  He keeps sending for money to lavish on Madhavi and reduces his family to penury.

His wealth depleted, his poverty earns him the ire of Madhavi's mother which opens his eyes and he returns home.  He has nothing, his father's business is gone, his reputation is in shreds.  He decides to go to Madurai with Kannagi to make a fresh start.  Will Kannagi finally lead a long and a happy life with her beloved Kovalam in Madurai?

Patel's book has two parts, Puhar and Madurai. The first part deals with Kannagi's life in Puhar. It is full of the anticipation of the young Kannagi, about to be married to the prince of her dreams.  Their wonderful time together as a newly wed couple.  Their life in Puhar, the various legends attached to temples and people there. The wretchedness that Kannagi faces when her husband goes to Madhavi. In contrast, Kovalan and Madhavi have some wonderful moments together.  The description of various festivals of Puhar are beautifully depicted.

Madurai is another gorgeous part where Kovalan and Kannagi embark on a journey by foot to Madurai.  The road is hard and beset with dangers. They are fortunate to find a Jain Sadhavi Kavunti to accompany them. She becomes their guide and protector. They meet all kinds of people on the way, a fool, a lecher, some wise men, even a wood nymph who tries to lure away Kovalan.  There are numerous legends associated with the places they visit which are recounted for our edification and entertainment.

Patel has done a wonderful job of narrating this classic tale.  The prose part is in a simple and direct language. The poetry in it is charming and lyrical.  In fact, it was the poetry part that I read as an excerpt on Facebook that drew me to the book.

The book had me turning pages and despite my busy schedule, I finished the book in two days.

In the Acknowledgements section Patel writes, "This book is a result of the quest to look for female heros in  mythology." He succeeds, I must say.  The fire and brimstone that Kannagi spews at the end of the book and brings down a King and a City is worthy of Heroine.  As explained elsewhere in the book the path to righteousness should be followed assiduously no matter who you have to face.

Remember to focus on the principle; Not on who it is against

If you wish to be acquainted with the story of Kannagi, this book is the best place to start.

Alex Garland - The Beach

Penguin Books
The Beach
Alex Garland

I came across the book in a very roundabout way.  I first spotted Leonardo Di Caprio in a wonderful movie called Romeo and Juliet by Baz Luhrmann. In my mind it was wonderful to see characters in modern settings mouthing Shakespeare.  Titanic mania swept me as it did the rest of the world which in turn, chasing Leo, brought me to the breathtaking cinematography of The Beach.  It was later that I learnt about the book.

I expect I read the book sometime in early '00. Most times I was just checking the book to see how much the movie matched to it. I loved the book, of course, but for some strange reason failed to absorb it.

It was a remark by my mother that brought the book back to me.  We were staying on Khao San road in Bangkok on a recent visit and mother said that the road became very famous after it was mentioned in the book. I wanted to re-watch the movie and re-read the book as soon as I returned home.

I had spent 12 hours travelling back to Chandigarh and all that staying awake wearied me.  I fell asleep within 2 hours of reaching home. I woke up at 1.30 in the night and started searching for The Beach on my bookshelf.  I read a couple of pages, found myself captivated, and fell asleep again.

I watched the movie, went back to the book and read my eyes out.

The movie is not a patch on the book, this is how most movie-book comparisons end up being described..

The book starts with Richard arriving in Bangkok and making it to a guesthouse on Khao San Road. He describes it to perfection.

The main function of the street was as a decompression chamber for those about to leave or enter Thailand, a halfway house between East and West.

Khao San Road has more foreigners than Thais. The Thais here speak English and know the ways of the tourist perfectly.  Tuk Tuks and Taxis cruise the narrow streets during the day. At night the road is taken over by hawkers and tourists sit and drink or eat al fresco, watching the gaieties. There are live bands and festoons and lights and the street does not seem to sleep.

A little while later Garland describes a Canal with a shanty market beside it which sounds like the thriving market beside the Chao Phraya river.  Soon he gets down to business. There is a crazy guy in the room next to his who gives him  a map to The Beach, a secret getaway no one else knows about. Along with two other backpackers, Richard sets off on the quest of this pristine beach where no one may go.

The book is an amazing piece of work.  Travel here is an extreme adventure, not staying in hotels and travelling to tourist spots.  It is a nod to the itinerant life of  backpackers, who are forever on the move and forever in search of an unspoiled destination, a willingness to live and travel rough. It is also a sort of a coming of age novel as Richard has taken to travel to escape being dumped by his girlfriend. It worked. The minute he sat in a plane, he forgot about the life in England, his imminent heartbreak. He learned to cope with life.

At the start, when Richard and his companions, Etienne and Francoise, reach the beach, and start living with the commune there, it is like 'The Swiss Family Robinson'. A bunch of people devising means to survive away from civilization. It descends into 'The Lord of Flies' soon after.

Garland's description of Richard's time on the beach is both real and psychedelic. It is both believable and a fantasy. It is a travelogue to a place that does not exist. From start to finish it is a gripping book that makes the most mundane of things look interesting.

I especially liked the short chapters, it makes the book succinct, like a terse report of the happenings.

The book is also about the loss of innocence. Richard, Etienne and Francoise have wandered into Eden and soon discovered the serpents.

It is an amazing debut for a writer, to turn out a book like this, about such an off beat topic with such conviction.

I am grateful to the movie for having drawn my attention to the book, and to Leonardo Di Caprio to have drawn my attention to the movie.  But that is about it. The movie does not capture too much of the book.  By its very nature, it is forced to summarize and let go of some characters.  It could not, for fear of attracting censorship, give us the full impact of the madness that is the climax of the book. It serves, with its stunning visuals, a good image for the beach, and to imagine what Richard looks like.

It is particularly off-putting that western movies cannot bear the thought of their protagonist going without sex for a long stretch of time. The book does not put any emphasis on sex lives of the characters, unlike the movie.

The unkindest cut I feel was the book being shown as a sort of an airport read in Bridget Jones, the Edge of Reason, when it is so much more.

Bae Suah - Nowhere To Be Found

Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Author: Bae Suah
Translator: Sora Kim Russell

The trend in publishing these days is novellas.  Short novels, tad longer than a short story are found to be the best reading for time starved people of today.  In the hands of wrong people such Book Shots (as the novellas are sometimes called) can go horribly wrong.  In the hands of right authors it can become a potent weapon.

I have read two short books today. One was The Vegetarian by Han Kang, not a very long novel. This is my second read, this novella Nowhere to Be Found by Bae Suah.

The girl in the story is in her early twenties, a college graduate, but a drifter.  She is not able to make any headway in her career by two seeming reasons. One, she does not seem to have any particular ambition; Two, she has to work hard just to put food on the table.  Her brother is a low paid janitor. Her mother is a nurse who cannot work because she is an alcoholic. Her younger sister is in school and her father is in jail.

Even so, while working in mind numbing jobs, she observes everything acutely.  She notices that the people she is in touch with now will not have any memory of her in a few years time, while there are people that she runs into on the subway who will become known to her in future.  This same fluidity is incorporated in the story when she goes to visit a 'sort of' boyfriend at his military base one day.  Due to a mix up at the reception, she is led off on a wild goose chase after her boyfriend through a bleak cold countryside.  All the time, she was carrying a bag of chicken that the boyfriend's mother had prepared.

All through the bad day, she gathers hatred for chicken, and hatred for the kind of life her boyfriend's family leads.  The day becomes a benchmark for all things horrid for her.  A day that she revisits in her mind for a long time.  Yet that day was transitional for her. She is no longer in touch with her boyfriend of the day.  All she has are the feelings she gathered.

Through disjointed narrative, Bae Suah takes us into a journey through a girl's mind.  A girl who is ordinary on the outside, but fiercely independent and strong.

The prose is sharp as knife and does not make any allowances for its readers.  It seeks neither to explain nor describe.

The story was nominated for PEN Translation Prize for the year 2015.  Bae Suah is an acclaimed writer from South Korea.

Han Kang - The Vegetarian

Han Kang
@Changbee Publishers
@Portobello Books

This book won the Man Booker International Prize for the year 2016.

We go through life expecting it to run smoothly and on predictable lines. We are born, we go to school, find a job, marry, have children and in turn, watch our children go through the same cycle. What if the life throws us a curveball? How do we react?

Life throws a curveball at Young-hye and it affects the lives of two families, Young-hye and her husband, her sister In-hye and her husband find themselves shaken by a dream that Young-hye has one night.

Young-hye dreams of a violent massacre of life which suddenly turns her off meat.  She throws out all eggs and meats out of her house and refuses to cook or eat them.  Her husband is immediately affected as he is fond of his non-vegetarian diet.  He feels his wife is being unreasonable and stubborn.  He is supported by Young-hye's parents who try to talk her out of her newfound vegetarianism.

Her parents decide to convince Young-hye again when they meet at a dinner at her sister's place. When their pleas fall on deaf ears, her father loses his temper and tries to force-feed some meat to Young-hye.  This pushes her over the edge and she tries to commit suicide.  This is the watershed moment to which other family members reactin  different ways.

The novella is narrated in three books, representing the varying viewpoints of three people in Young-hye's life.  The first section, The Vegetarian is narrated by Mr. Cheong, Young-hye's husband. The second section, Mongolian Mark is narrated by her brother-in-law, who is an artist and finds a strange fascination for Young-hye after the suicide incident.  The third, and the most intense part, is narrated by In-hye. She cares for Young-hye after her suicide attempt and tries to go deep into the psyche of her sister in an attempt to understand her.

The different voices of the narrators make us feel differently about the affliction of Young-hye. At the end of it we realize that without deep love there can be no understanding.  In-hye has to go to the core of herself to understand what Young-hye is feeling.

The novel left me feeling emotionally wrung out.   It has been translated from Korean to English by Deborah Smith.  It is an excellent translation.  The language is spare and evocative. The author does not fear to look deep within the minds of her characters and lay them bare for us. As can be seen from the example here.

This is the first novel I have read by a Korean author. Previous to this, The only Far-Eastern novelists I have read before this are Japanese authors Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto whose works also dabble in the internal workings of the mind.  There is such a connection between these authors and Kafka.  If you get goosebumps from reading about Gregor Samsa, then The Vegetarian should be a mandatory read for you.

Agatha Christie - Death Comes as the End

@Dodd Mead and Company
@Agatha Christie

Death comes as the End was the only historical whodunit that Dame Agatha Christie wrote.  Considering the fact that her husband, Sir Max Mallowan, was an archaeologist in Egypt, it is easy to see what inspired it.  During her stay in Egypt Agatha Christie read some ancient letters (translated by Battiscombe Gunn) by a man who wrote home frequently complaining about the behavior of his family and the mistreatment by them of his concubine.  These letters formed the basis of the plot of this book.

Imhotep is a Ra-priest in charge of a tomb that is to be maintained by a large farmhouse surrounding it.  He is aided in his work by his adviser Hori who has been with his family for a long time and is devoted to them.  Imhotep has three sons, Yahamose, Sobek and Ipy.  His daughter Renisenb is recently widowed and has returned to her father's house.  She is still grieving and wants to find comfort in the well known patterns of her family home.

Things change very soon when her father returns from a business trip with a beautiful young concubine, Nofret, in tow.  The family is unhappy at this new development.  Things take a nasty turn when Nofret is found dead, fallen (or thrown?) from a high path.  Things do not rest here and there are other deaths that cannot be wished away as accidents. Are these deaths the work of some evil spirit or some disgruntled family member or employee?  Suddenly, everyone is a suspect.

From the Wikipedia entry I learn that Agatha Christie had a different ending in mind.  For one wild moment I also thought of an ending that was much darker and involved the main protagonists.  Even so, the ending is satisfactory and is explained well.  Agatha Christie brings out the life in the times of 2000 BC Thebes very well.  The novel is fast paced and you race along, loth to put it down.  You are made to swing between various suspects and wonder who really did it.