Weird, tiresome and good-looking.

1) Because it is beautiful, both the story and the language.
2) Because it is so funny.
3) Because it is tragic yet uplifting. Only tragic is no good, if you ask me.
4) Because Chris Cleave can really get inside your head, whether you’re a teenaged black girl or a 30-something white girl.
5) Because you can’t put it down or help but be moved by it, like, say, The Kite Runner, but neither do you have to be embarrassed because it is anything but soppy, naive or badly-written. It is, in fact, the opposite.
6) Because if you don’t like this, you need to have your head examined.

Update: Hmm…on second thoughts…

The sort of book that makes you wish your train had taken 5 hours instead of 4, so you didn’t have to stop reading and pick up your bags and get into a car and get to read just a few more pages and then get home and rush irritably through breakfast and almost dump your boyfriend because you’ve simply got to get back to the book and nothing else matters, see?
The sort of book about which you have a feeling when you first see the cover, and you can remember it from among the hundreds in the sales presentations. Then the manager who can’t stop gushing about it makes the warehouse send you a copy, sweet of her – maybe because you’re new, you think. It stays on your desk, among the unread bad books that come free with the job. But you’re careful not to read certain sorts of books sometimes. And it sounds like that sort of book.
Then you clear up before the holidays and take it home anyway. Where it stays among all the unread good books that are waiting to delight you. Or at least instruct.
You pack your reading for the holidays – not too many, you decide, a mix from both work and home – and there it is, orange and unignorable.
And you finally open a page. You read it. Just the first sentence actually. That’s enough, you know you have to make space for it in your bag or you’ll keep thinking about it, you won’t have any rest till you’ve read the rest of it.
So you do, and then you have to tell everyone about it as soon as you’re done…

Was curious to read this, and found a free copy floating around at work. Disappointing, badly written, very badly edited. The movie was surprisingly much better.

Slow to start, it nevertheless keeps you engaged and the climax is really worth it. It was refreshing to read a largely if not wholly unpretentious historical novel set against such a familiar cultural background. The characters are believable and stay with you. It isn’t brilliant from a purely literary point of view, but is utterly, deeply human and a very satisfying read.

The first time I heard about this film was in 1991.
I was playing the Chinese emperor in a school play. The mum of one of my courtiers had fixed her up with a yellow satin gown. But Mrs. GKS, our English English teacher, had a problem with that because being emperor, I was the only one who could wear the Imperial yellow, ‘like in The Last Emperor!’. So the production team were all debating whether the said courtier would have to wear another gown or what. But it was slightly late to discuss all that because my poor ignorant mum had already jazzed up this glorified red velvet (!) bathrobe thingie with a brocade dragon and what not. Eventually they had to settle for a satin sash in Imperial yellow to hold the emperor and the dragon together inside the red robe.
Had forgotten all about it till I saw the film today :)
I wonder where Mrs GKS watched it. They didn’t release them here then, nor did we have cable yet. Maybe on her annual trip to the UK with her son Alexander? Or at home on the VCR? I wonder what else she had on VHS…wish she’d shown us that film.
My favourite lines? ‘If the emperor does not get spectacles, I will resign.’

Finally. Completely mind-blown.

Corridor has fabulous illustrations but narrative is not Sarnath’s forte. It is very fragmented, and it is supposed to be fragmented, but that totters a bit instead of marching ahead assuredly and weakens the impact of the book. I just read it this afternoon so the images are still fresh, as is the sense of wistfulness that pervades it, like the fog that diffuses the winter dusks in Delhi.

There are several strands in this book, all to do with characters who visit Jehangir Rangoonwalla, a roadside bookseller in CP, – ‘enlightened dispenser of tea, wisdom and second-hand books’ says the blurb. Brighu Sen – who looks suspiciously like Sarnath, long hair, goatee, glasses, earring and all – collects things, from rare LPs to leather-bound volumes of Phantom comics to the gallstone that killed his granddad etc. To put it crudely, he’s looking for a love life, gets one, but screws it up when he cheats on his girlfriend Kali, a documentary filmmaker. There are other minor characters, but will stick to two.

Digital Dutta, is ‘torn between Karl Marx and an H-1B visa’. Marx visits him every night in the one-room space of his head. DD lives here for the most part, a space that allows him to be a quantum physicist, top athlete, war reporter, linguist, Sandinista (this is spelt Sandanista in the book, I noticed), faith healer, Kalari expert, conqueror of Everest and so forth.

There’s newly married Shintu, who only knew about sex from Cosmo and played Scrabble on his wedding night. He’s looking for the ultimate aphrodisiac. So follows a series of visits to the hakims of Old Delhi. This was the most prolonged and definitely the most memorable part of the book. The frames/ illustrations here are very high quality postmodernism.

Another memorable set is the two toothbrushes of Brighu and Kali turning into the yinyang symbol over a few frames, as he moves in with her.
All in all, I thought it was textually weak, but the illustrations were great. He’s working on his second illustrated novel The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, should be out next month.

I have yet to watch an Almodóvar film I do not like. Loved this too though had been warned it was not as good as the others. Guaranteed this is a more straighforward narrative, more Hollywood melodrama than his usual, but it was still very moving. Am utterly depressed now.

Totally love UFO Smugglers – bounce on your feet trance.