The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams

I had heard about this book from too many people to recount here. This book had been on my list for a long long time before I finally got around to ordering it. I knew close to nothing about the book. So when I searched online and found a "complete and unabridged" edition, I thought it would be the complete and unabridged edition. Even though it was, turned out that H2G2 is a 'trilogy' in six parts (as of this date). But then this book would let me know whether I wanted to continue with the others in the series.

It took me two or three odd sittings to wrap up the book. Not something that happens frequently now a days, given the kind of schedule I have. It was partly because the book had grabbed my interest and partly because it was the most senseless thing I had ever read! The book is indeed meant for children. The immature humour was entertaining for a change but I am sure I would not have managed to endure it in long doses. The book is scrawling with sentences that make no sense either grammatically or logically. But then that is the charm of this book. After a tiring day, what better than occupying oneself with a book that lets the brain snooze for a while?

Despite the mayhem of senselessness, there is in fact an underlying plot to the novel. Arthur Dent, the protagonist, finds himself rescued by his best friend, Ford Prefect, when Earth is vaporised to make way for a new inter galactic highway. Ford is in fact an alien from around Betelgeuse who has been stranded on Earth while researching for the new edition of an extremely handy book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" which has information about everything. After they hitch a ride to get off Earth just in time and are thrown out in space, they find themselves on a spaceship with Ford's semi-cousin and the Galactic President, Zeephod Beeblebrox who is on the run. Thus begin's Arthur's first unearhlt adventure.

Although not wholly remarkable, the book was fun to read. It is one of those senseless books that you remember for its whacky concepts and funny dialogues. I do intend to finish the series, but not immediately.

From Hell - Alan Moore

I bought this book in a blind sale, not at all aware that it was a graphic novel. And since I had never tried graphic novels before, I was not particularly inclined to start off with this one as soon as it arrived. Therefore it stayed in my book shelf as I finished one book after the other but could not get myself to pick up this one. Until one fine day, I did.

'From Hell' was known to me as a Depp movie. One that I did not particularly remember, but had a faint recollection of. I knew it was about Jack the Ripper in some sort of way. So I picked up the book thinking that it would replay the movie for me, but it did not. In fact, the book and the movie were far far apart! I had to watch the movie again just to compare. And it was the novel that held me in awe. The motion picture looked almost puerile in wake of the work that Alan Moore had done. The book looks at the historic tragedy through the eyes of Stephen Knight, whose theory propounded that Jack the Ripper was a conspiracy to cover up the traces of a royal baby. The book has Sir William Gull, the alleged Ripper, as the protagonist and traces the course of the events through his chains of thoughts.

The novel starts with the inception of the frivolity that started it all. Prince Eddy marries a shop girl and fathers a child of hers. Sir William Gull, the royal physician, is commissioned with the task of covering up for Prince Eddy to avoid a scandal. Sir Gull, a freemason by heart, disillusioned since a heart stroke, takes up the task with zest. He puts the shop girl, Annie Crook, into a mental facility after making her insane surgically. And when it is later found that four prostitutes know about the secret and are creating a nuisance, he sets out to silent them. In doing so, he performs a ritual that he believes will show him the real truth. He gives birth to the legend of Jack the Ripper.

Alan Moore was astounding in more than one respect. There is apparently a humongous amount of research that he has put into the book. It is evident in the appendix where almost every scene is explained with a bibliographical detail. So much that I gave up reading the details after three odd chapters. Moore also brings his characters very vividly to life. In no way did it feel that he relied on the graphics to make his novel sell (they just made the book fatter I guess). Anyhow, Moore is up top on my list at the moment. In fact, I am expecting another book of his in a couple of days.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner - James Hogg

This was another idle buy resulting from a compulsive browsing through a bookstore's offerings. The name seemed interesting enough to pick the book and look at the teaser on the back cover. That being interesting as well, I bought the book and it lay in my shelf while I tried to finish the ones that were already scheduled.

James Hogg was a surprise for me. In the opening chapters I was quite unsure whether to treat the book as a serious work or a comic one. Hogg has tried to hold in ridicule a few social stigmas that must have plagued his times. A few of them still plague ours. The way the author has gone about it though is very unique. As the title suggests, the book is the memoirs of a "justified sinner". It talks about how one justifies his sins. How one makes a world in which he can live with himself after enacting monstrosities. There are two parts to it. The editor of the notes giving a background and his perspective, and the memoirs themselves.

The book begins with the editor telling us of a Scottish folklore about a certain laird of a certain Dalcastle who married a deeply religious woman. This woman mothered two sons, one to the laird and the other allegedly to her preacher. This bastard son, Robert, is the author of the memoirs. He is brought up in a gravely religious household and develops a fanatic view of Christianity. He reads into the scriptures to further his own interests even as a child. He sins, is aware of his sins and can justify his sins. He then encounters the devil, whom he takes to be a holy prince of another land. Together they commit murders and crimes in the name of religion. Robert is finally driven to despair by his supernatural friend and lives a life of anguish.

The book was extremely entertaining in bits. Especially because of the double meaning puns that are scattered all over the two narratives. But in parts it was a little drag and uninteresting. As of now, I have no intentions of looking at other works of this author.

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

It was back in hostel that I had first heard of this book. It had been suggested as a good read to me by a senior. The title had even caught my attention. But someone else managed to snatch the book before I could. And I was not an ardent reader back then anyway. So I let the book go and never thought about it again till the movie came out. My flatmate had bought a copy and I got myself registered as the next in line. But I went to see the movie first.

The book was a comparison for me. The movie versus the story. Ang Lee had certainly entertained me. And I knew the story. And I knew the characters. My imagination was bounded. But the book turned out to be a surprise. Not a complete surprise but in parts. The story digressed and expanded from the story in the movie. In parts the movie was better and in parts the book outshone the movie. Yann Martel had depicted the protagonist's helplessness and changing psychology in the Pacific with much more detail and credibility. Ang Lee had shown the beauty of the ocean and the ferocity of the tiger like an art. There was no comparison at all.

The story is about the son of a zookeeper, Piscine Molitor Patel, who finds himself stranded on a lifeboat after a shipwreck in which he loses his family. He discovers a few animals on this lifeboat, one of them a royal Bengal tiger, Richard Parker. The story is a depiction of his survival through the two hundred plus days on the boat, alone save for a tiger. His struggle against the elements of nature as well as the wild animal. His metamorphosis from a strict vegetarian to a human animal. His fears, his hopes, his faith.

Yann Martel did a beautiful job with the book. There are places though where the story seems a little incredulous, and the fix is reflected in the screenplay of the movie with which Martel helped a lot. Martel can engross a reader in his story. There were no dull moments and the story was never a drag, even when it went into biological or zoological details. But I think I will give this author a rest till another recommendation comes my way.

The Eternal Husband And Other Stories - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

This is another one of those books that I ordered as a step forth in my attempt to complete Dostoyevsky's works. The name of the primary story was somewhat intriguing and Dostoyevsky is always a good bet. Hence I ordered it without much thought. The book turned out to have five short stories, two of which ("Bobok" and "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man") I had already covered in another compilation. The other three, I read with relish.

A very short note about Dostoyevsky's writing in this book : the translators has chosen a set of stories that focused on Dostoyevsky's idea of the "underground" man. Since I have read only the "underground" stories of Dostoyevsky, I am unable to comprehend a difference. But the stories do seem to have his usual essence (reading the introduction might make this point clearer).

The first story, "A Nasty Anecdote", talks of an "actual state councillor" Ivan Ilyich Pralinsky who holds the belief that humaneness can bring the people of Russia together and that is the only way diplomats can be popular among general folks. He debates this with a few friends over drinks and managing to get drunk, on his walk back home tries to make himself an object of an anecdote by going to attend the wedding celebrations of a junior in his department so that people could recount stories of how he "embraced morally" people below his rank. Things do not go as expected and at the end of a scandalous dinner, Ivan Pralinsky manages to make himself an object of a nasty anecdote instead.

The Eternal Husband is the story of the meeting of a cuckolded middle aged man and his wife's erstwhile lover. This lover, Velachinov, is the protagonist of this story and the other "eternal husband" looks up to him despite all the spite. It is mutual hatred and contention over their loved ones that leads to multiple meetings between the two. Each trying to justify himself to the other.

The third new story in this book : The Meek One, is the ramblings of a husband standing over the corpse of his wife who jumped out of the window. They are he ramblings that explain his distress at finding himself alone once more. He accuses himself; accuses her; looks for ways to justify her acts. But his pain is evident at the loss of one he loved and for whom he had agreed to change.

All three stories were very interesting. I specially liked "The Meek One" more than the others because of the rambling nature of the story. It was nothing more than the mindless babble of a widower. But it was very beautifully portrayed. I will resume my Dostoyevskian journey after a short break now.

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

I had picked up Flaubert long back. I must have been freshly out of my final year or into my first job. Among a few others that included Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, Flaubert's Madame Bovary got picked into my shopping cart and since then had lay collecting dust on the shelves back home. It was probably the lady on the cover page that had caught my eye. But it was certainly a feeble memory of having heard about the novel somewhere that made me buy it. But I was in no hurry to start off with the book. Hence the long wait.

On the face of it, Madame Bovary looks like any other classic. But it is a pleasant surprise when mid way through the book you realise that you have not been bored as often as you had expected to be. Flaubert is exceptionally good at creating scenes and, of course, stories. His stories run into each other giving a sense of continuity that is often missing in other classics. There are no "fillers". That coupled with the exceptional character portrayal of the protagonist and her husband make Flaubert exceptional in my opinion.

The story is primarily about the boredom that plagues the middle class household. A certain Charles Bovary romances and marries a certain Emma, the daughter of one of his patients. This Emma Bovary, protagonist of the story henceforth, is a starry eyed girl when we first meet her. Gradually, she realises that all her dreams of a glamourous life are too far out of the reaches of her husband. She gets bored immensely in his household while he is beatific in his settled life. She starts hating her husband, she indulges in adultery, running after anyone and anything that holds even a remote promise of something other than her life while the unsuspecting cuckolded man continues his life just the same.

Flaubert was exceptional in the way he built his characters. All were very real and very believable. There was nothing in the story that could be called fantastic. But the way Flaubert grips his readers with such limited exaggeration is very creditable. He is certainly one author I would like to read more of.

The Double and The Gambler - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In search of more of Dostoyevsky's works, I came across this book at flipkart. None of the books I had read till now publicised any other work of Dostoyevsky other than a couple mentions of "Poor Folk". So these stories seemed to be as good a choice as any other to continue on my Dostoyevsky collection. Plus, the combination of these two in one book seemed to be appealing for some reason. Hence I ordered the book.

The two stories are quite remarkable in their own sense. The Double is a hallucinatory ramble by a "titular councillor". It was written in the early years of Dostoyevsky and not received with the appreciation that it deserved. But it served as the basis of Dostoyevsky's character building style and later resurfaced in traces in many of his more prominent works. Dostoyevsky tries to explore the consciousness of a clerk who is trying desperately to hold on his own. What Dostoyevsky actually intends to convey by the "split" of characters is vague and confusing. Whether the split is psychological or physical is left to the reader's discretion. But the book is enjoyed more for its character build than its story's flow. In contrast, The Gambler is much more refined and understandable. The characters are well defined and well expressed in the typical Dostoyevskian way. And the store is far less incredulous than The Double. In The Gambler, Dostoyevsky tries to put his own experiences around gambling into a compendium that he wrote in haste. This story was produced side by side with his most famous work - Crime and Punishment and was done with a dead-line strangling him. Never the less, none of these reflect upon the story itself.

Mr. Goliadkin is the protagonist of The Double and he is a titular councillor in the service of his excellency (whoever that is). But Goliadkin is not good with words. He is not slick and lacks even the most basic of etiquette. The artless protagonist humiliates himself in a ball in front of the one he loves and while he returns to his quarters in anguish and daze, he encounters his double. The story meanders there on. This double replaces him in his office as well as in society. People do not seem to notice the horrid circumstance that has befallen the unfortunate Goliadkin while he tries to maintain his originality and hold himself as his own in the presence of a demeaning and cunning double.

The Gambler is the notes of Alexi Ivanovich, an outchitel or tutor in the household of a general who is indebted to a frenchman and in love with a french seductress. The hero is in love with the general's stepdaughter who in turn is mysteriously tied to the frenchman. They are all counting on a certain inheritance to deliver them from the dark fate that they behold. But the grandma who is supposed to mete the inheritance suddenly turns up in the foreign town they are vacationing in and blows away all her fortune on roulette. Alexi Ivanovich, a compulsive gambler, waits for his time and when his love, Polina comes to him to bare her heart, he goes out to the tables to win for her. And he never manages to recover from his lust for the tables.

I particularly favour The Gambler over The Double. The reason in part is the uncertain flow of the story which gives a very uneasy feeling of being lost while reading the story. Even so, the character of Goliadkin is probably much better expressed than any other of Dostoyevsk's characters, despite it's ill form. The Gambler was a much more engrossing and satisfying piece of work. Needless to say, my journey through the Dostoyevskian lands is far from over.