The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus

'The Myth of Sisyphus' had come up in a discussion I was having with a dear friend of mine (one of the many we had had). She had suggested me this book when I had told her that I had read Camus's 'The Outsider'. The topic, as she had described it to be, did interest me. So I got hold of a copy but I was not expecting an essay. Not having the appetite for it back then and feeling myself rather lost in Camus's reasoning, I had put the book back on the shelf using the excuse that his arguments were rather difficult to follow because I had no idea about the references that he was making My friend did assure me that the references did not matter, and that if I persisted it would all be lucid in a bit. But I shelfed the book anyway. It was only when I recently read Sartre's 'Nausea' that I thought of getting back to this book.

I would like to believe that I now had the required existentialist knowledge to follow Camus. He builds up on the theory of Absurdism and looks at the possible options that an absurd man has for himself. He tries to argue the futility of suicide as an answer to the existentialist question. Camus recognises the absurd and advocates the acceptance of the absurd as the only reasonable option to counter it. He uses the works of other philosophers and writers, like Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Kafka, etc., to make his case against suicide as a viable option. He argues that ending one's life serves only to reinforce the absurd. He even dismisses the leap of faith as shown in the works of Dostoyevsky and Kafka as a philosophical suicide and suggests that it does nothing to defy the absurd. His solution is acceptance and rebellion; to live out the absurd as an act of defiance. Camus does make a convincing case of it. Though I think that he (and probably others) disregards other options that are present to the "absurd man". Sisyphus, who has been condemned by the Gods to the task of pushing a boulder up a hill and watching it roll back down as he sets to repeat his effort again, strikes Camus as the quintessential of absurd. The acceptance of his fate by Sisyphus, says Camus, is his true freedom; his rebellion against the absurd that he has been condemned to.

The other essays in the book were pieces on his Algerian travels. These were far easier to assimilate than the main one. They were also far more personal and engaging. Camus describes, not so much in events than the emotions stirred in him, a summer spent in Algiers, his travel to Oran and a nostalgic return to Tipasa. Any travel writer could look for inspiration in these short works.

Camus was as brilliant as I remember him to be. I think it is the personal touch that he lends to his works that make them even more endearing; more real. I am not sure whether I which of his works I will pick up next, fiction or non-fiction; but I surely will read more of him.

Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

'Love in the Time of Cholera' was recommended to me by a friend. I usually disregard books that blatantly seem like love stories. I am simply not a big fan. However, her last recommendation was Pamuk's 'My Name is Red', one that I thoroughly enjoyed. So despite the name, I decided to give this one a shot as well.

I could not have been wronger about the book. It was absolutely not a love story. It was rather a romantic story, and disgustingly misogynist. Fortunately I had read a pedantic work by A.L. Basham between this and Khushwant Singh's 'Company of Women', else it would have been an overdose of sexual fantasies of old men. Gabo's version was much more polished though. But his virile fantasies were staring back at me through the pages. His story is full of "selfless women" who were willing to please Florentino Ariza at any hour of the day. Women whose door our dear protagonist knocks and is received with great love. A womanizer who can make prostitutes fall in love with him, get married women killed for infidelity and stir passion in the hearts of widows. All this he does without the help of good looks. Gabo had created an amalgamation of every man's fantasies! On the other hand was Fermina Daza who time and again kept contradicting her own character. Gabo ties these two in a timeless love (?) and a Dr. Juvenal Urbino is thrown in to make things more interesting.

The story is about how Florentino Ariza falls in love with Fermina Daza. His pathetic self moves Daza to accept his proposal and they fall in a feverish young love. Daza's father tries to intimidate Florentino, failing which he takes away Fermina for a long vacation to her home land, in the hope that she would forget Florentino, but they manage to keep in touch and remain in love. However, when Fermina returns, she is another, more mature, woman and on the first meeting with Florentino, she refutes him and their engagement. Dr. Urbino is a local hero and the saviour of the city from the grips of cholera. He sees Fermina and falls in love with her "plebeian charms". Fermina keeps on turning down his various advances and one fine day she changes her mind and marries him. They have a stable marriage where they travel and have two children and are the center of the town's affairs. Florentino Ariza, on the other hand runs amok and keeps laying one girl after another in the hope that they would cure him of Fermina's love. But none do and he is still in love with her when Dr. Urbino dies of an accident fifty years after Daza had said no to Florentino. He woos Fermina again, makes her fall in love with him and their "young love finds a new life in the twilight of their lives".

For multiple reasons I did not like the story. The characters were inconsistent, the plot was too unrealistic at times. However, the only ting that made it bearable was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's writing. His style was rather simple but the way he connected his stories was very seamless. There were fillers that did not seem so and in no part was I actually bored, despite not liking the story too much. People tell me that his 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is better. But I don't think I am picking up another Gabo unless I have nothing else on my plate.

The Company of Women - Khushwant Singh

I admit it. I had always been curious about what Khushwant Singh wrote like. He was openly lauded as the 'dirty old man' when I was growing up. But since I had never read any work of his apart from a small snippet (which turned out to be from this very book) in a magazine, I remained curious. So when I was browsing around for a new set of books, I suddenly recalled my curiosity. The result of which was this book which I chose since Khushwant Singh is known for his 'expertise' on the matter. It sat in the shelf for a few months before it was its turn.

I developed an apprehension in the opening pages of the book that turned into mild amusement when I was a couple of scores down. I think it was the puerility of my mind that had led me to be intrigued by the snippet in the magazine years back. But when the cover boasts :

Khushwant Singh is India's best known writer and columnist.

and 

This book is a triumph.

then one can do little but shake his head at the sorry state that India's literature has been in for so many years. No wonder people hail the likes of Chetan Bhagat as a writer in India. Half baked stories and mindless plots grab the country's interest. Our brains have been rotted over the ages. Anyway, back to the book, it was one of the most pathetic attempts at literature I have ever read. Though it was not exactly literotica, it failed to match up to the standards of the free pieces available online as well. I breezed through the 230 odd pages in a couple of days and put the book back in the shelf.

The story is about a certain Mohan Kumar who went to went to Princeton and was a lauded scholar. He comes back to India to his widowed father who gets him married. He calls it quits after a few years of tumultuous married life and his wife goes to her parents with their two children. He places an advertisement for female companionship in the newspapers. The story is about his recollections of his trysts in Princeton and the women who respond to the advertisement. Oh, he also has a huge penis.

Now I am not too sure what made Khushwant Singh's books so popular. Maybe this was a bad specimen to judge by. But even the fact that it was a book published by a reputable publisher in his name makes me doubt a lot of things now. Even though he adds a disclaimer that it was just his fancies, it could have been done better. I am not even remotely inclined to try any of his other books now. Good bye and good riddance.

Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre is one of the most prominent names in existentialist philosophy. I have been reading Dostoyevsky for some time now, so the philosophy itself is not alien to me. But outside of the Russian, seldom have I ventured to other authors of the pedigree. A book by Camus (The Outsider), Kafka (The Metamorphosis), Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) are the few ventures. I did read Nietzsche but the existentialism in his work was shrouded in layers of hubris. In a dearth of better options and a search for something different, I went for "Nausea".

Sartre described existentialism as : the attempt to draw all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism; which is what he has attempted to do in this book. This book follows the thoughts and actions of a young man in a city. He is facing his existentialist crisis; his 'Nausea'. Through the protagonist, Roquentin, Sartre debates on the act of existing and the necessity of it. He calls the world and its population superfluous and absurd. To quote my favourite line from the book :

Every existent is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.

This line is representative of the philosophy expounded in the book. Sartre ridicules all 'bourgeois' sentiments and squashes them into a state of absurd. Art, travel, love, learning; all hold no meaning in a world that is random and beyond one's control. Even death would be nothing more than another random event.

Antoine Roquentin is a young man living in Bouville - a fictitious character in a fictitious setting. He has travelled far and wide and has settled down to write a book on a historical figure of the eighteenth century. As he struggles through his research and his life, he records his thoughts in a diary which is presented to us readers. His life is quite ordinary; he spends time in the library for research, goes to cafes for food, is physically intimate with the pattronne of the cafe, goes for walks. But his thoughts are anything but ordinary. He is constantly struggling with a 'nausea' that attacks him from time to time. In this nauseous state he finds himself questioning the existence of himself and everything around him. He has a friend of sorts, who he has nicknamed the Autodidact, who believes in humanity and then there is Anna, his old love and his only hope of salvation.

Sartre more than impressed; enough for me to want to read his more acclaimed work "Being and Nothingness". He excels in writing about abstracts. The long rants about meaningless and unreal things adorned his book immensely. His settings were not very thorough though. There was something amiss in every scene he created. Nevertheless, "Being and Nothingness" enters my list somewhere in the upper echelons. Would definitely want to read more of this one.

The Landlady - Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky

It was about time that I made progress with my list of Dostoyevsky's works. The list had only few novels left. Just one post-underground, which I will probably save for the last, and four pre-underground. I decided to take up 'The Landlady' next. With a seventeen hour flight coming up, the rather small novel found a very comfortable niche in my itinerary.

This was Dostoyevsky's third novel, after 'Poor Folks' and 'The Double'. Of the recurring themes that Dostoyevsky would use later in his writings, 'The Landlady' had glimpses of the "religious fool" and the delirious protagonist. Dostoyevsky has attempted to describe a complicated relation in this book. One that born of and ends in the fantastic. There is little that is rooted in realism, much that is obscure and in parts, it is downright difficult to follow. Of all the Dostoyevsky's I have read thus far, this is probably the least I appreciated. But it is possibly because I have read his later works. The contemporary audience to whom this novella was presented accused Dostoyevsky of plagiarism. But this book seems much in line with Dostoyevsky's later works. Not as polished and complete; perhaps missing a few chunks here and there; but it certainly has all the elements.

Vasily Ordynov, the protagonist, is an unemployed nobility who has dedicated his life to the obscurely described realm of science. He lives a solitary life and when his landlady moves out of Petersburg he is forced to look for new lodgings. While roams the outskirts of the city, he sees an old man and a young woman in a church. He is drawn to the woman and follows them to their quarters. The next day, he lands at their building and asks for lodgings. The woman accepts and then follows a series of delirious episodes where Ordynov lapses into sickness and is nursed by his landlady Katerina. They develop a relation and he tries to figure out her relation with the old man.

Yes, I continue to be awed by Dostoyevsky. And this has been a terrific journey thus far. Twelve down, four to go. I think I will pick up his unfinished work 'Netochka Nezvanova' next.

The Complete Maus - Art Spiegelman

'Maus' was a recommendation on goodreads. It had been a while since I had read a graphic novel and this book had really rave reviews. Although the Nazi holocaust was becoming redundant of recent, I decided to go ahead with this book. I ordered 'The Complete Maus' and picked it up after I was done with Murakami's short stories.

I started it in the dead of the night right after I came back from watching 'Fury', another story from the second world war. The first few pages were quite catchy and I had read three chapters by the time I decided to doze off. The following day, I picked it up as soon as I was back from work and put it down late in the night after having completed it. The book really was un-put-down-able! It was not so much the story. It was how it was written. Art Spiegelman had not limited the book to just the holocaust and survival. He had written the book depicting him asking his father for the story. The book uses animal analogies to depict races. The Jews were mouses, the Germans cats, Poles were pigs and Americans dogs. There were the caricatures of his father, his second wife, himself and his wife in the book. It is this personal aspect of the book that sets it apart from the other holocaust stories. It speaks of Spiegelman's father and how he was as a person before and after the war; Spiegelman's own complex relation with his father; his memories of his mother and rivalry with a ghost-brother. In short, the personal touch that Spiegelman adds to the redundant holocaust story makes it different and captivating.

The book tells the story of Spiegelman asking his father Vladek to tell him the story of his survival. Vladek and Anja, Art's mother, had survived the holocaust. Vladek tells him of his life before the war. His life when he met Anja and they married. His successful business and of Richieu, their first born. Then the war struck and they slowly lost their families. The story is of Vladek's survival. He and Anja somehow managed to be together throughout. Through luck and wit he managed to stay alive in every camp and ghetto. Eventually in Auschwitz as well, they somehow stayed clear of the chambers and survived long enough to see the war end. Vladek also talks about how others whom he knew survived the war. He tells about the conditions they were forced to live in, the tricks they had to resort to, the sacrifices they had to make. As he puts it, there were no family or friends in those days; it was every man for himself. Interspersed in between is Vladek's character as a part of the storytelling. He is the typical miser Jew who is pained whenever he has to part with any money. This leads everyone around him to anguish. Whether his character is a result of his survival or vice versa is left unclear.

The book was very captivating. The animal analogies were interesting but wore off rather quickly. It was the Vladek's caricature and simultaneous narration that held the book together. There was no boring rant about the hardships in the camp. It was a personal story, a subjective point of view of two people, the one writing the story and the one narrating it. Though I really liked it, I have not been looking at Spiegelman's other works. And I have had enough of the second world war for some time.

The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami; I had read the name on my facebook wall one day. Intrigued, I had looked him up. Seemed like an interesting author to start reading. But I had left it there until my last visit to the local Crossword store. I was looking for Neil Gaiman but instead returned with this collection of short stories; the back cover had a compelling teaser. And although I had planned a short break from reading books, I found myself looking at a twenty hour train journey to Chennai. So I packed the book in my backpack and started flipping the pages as the train started it's slow journey.

I like reading short stories. They make for interesting fast paced story telling. The author is not bothered with filling up spaces between episodes and thus spares the reader of potentially drag stretches. Murakami is another case. At times there were no defined episodes to his stories. At times they were taken up rapidly. And most of the times, he danced about the bush to his heart's content. Surprisingly, I liked almost all of them. For very soon it was evident that Murakami is not trying to relay stories. He is trying to communicate thoughts and personalities. Stories were secondary. Rather, this book was a collection of short sketches of people who Murakami drew and detailed with evident pleasure.

There were some stories that stood out for me. The Last Lawn of the Afternoon was probably the best of the lot. Then there were Family Affair and Barn Burning. All these stories (and the others as well) present a very believable narration. At times it is evidently fantastic and strays from the realms of normalcy. But it is still believable : incredibly credible. One could imagine a sibling's hatred for his sister's fiance. One could imagine a quality assurance manager develop a fancy for a complaining customer based on her letter. And a hunger stricken couple holding up a Mc Donald's for burgers? Or a woman divorcing her husband for a pair of shorts? Murakami writes in a way that makes it all a possibility.

I really liked this collection of stories. More for the way they were written than the stories themselves. Murakami will resurface in my reading list soon. I will reserve more comments on his writing till a later date, when I have read more of him. These seventeen short stories were not enough.