Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud

April 16, 2013 Leave a comment

extremely_loud_and_incredibly_close_bookExtremely Close and Incredibly Loud

by Jonathan Safran Foer| 368 Pages | Genre: Fiction| Publisher: Penguin Books| Year: 2005 | My Rating: 9.5/10

This brilliant fiction is a story of a  very intelligent  and sensitive, alternately exasperating and hilarious nine-years old boy, Oscar Schell, who goes across five boroughs of New York looking for the right lock, which can be opened by a ‘black’ key his father left, who died in 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Centre. This incredible novel explores shattering emotions and human connections through the prism of a disaster.

Oscar being an internet whizkid is an information sponge and a walking encylopedia chatting. His calling card, which he uses while meeting people, reads: “Inventor, Jewelry Designer, Jewelry Fabricator, Amateur Entomologist, Francophile, Vegan, Origamist, Pacifist, Percussionist, Amateur Astronomer, Computer Consultant, Amateur Archeologist, Collector of: rare coins, butterflies that died natural deaths, miniature cacti, Beatles memorabilia, semiprecious stones, and other things” .He even goes to the extent of flattering women his mother’s age by complimenting them on their beauty and sometimes telling them that he’d like to kiss them! His search brought him into contact with survivors of all sorts on an exhilarating, affecting, often hilarious, and ultimately healing journey.

I have first read this book in 2009 and fell in love with Foer’s style of writing. The use of pictures, visuals and the mesmerising style of writing is so refreshingly inventive. This book which made me laugh and yet mourn the grief of Oscar Schell is my ‘Read of the Week’.

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The Tiger’s Wife

April 13, 2013 2 Comments

8366403When your fight has purpose—to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent—it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling—when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event—there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it.”
― Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife

This novel full of historic and human complexities of Balkans through its principal narrator, Natalia Stefanovic, a young doctor who lives with her mother, grandmother and grandfather in an unnamed Balkan city early in the 21st century, is my “Read of the Week”.

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The Sense of an Ending

April 12, 2013 Leave a comment

b3“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

The Sense of an Ending is a quiet, unsettling novel that lingers long after its final page. The memoir like novel is narrated by Tony Webster, who looks back on his friendships, his first love, and a moral failure he barely understood at the time of his youth. What begins as a calm story in nostalgia gradually turns into an examination of how memory deceives, and flatters us.

The author is less interested in what happened than in how we remember what happened. Tony believes he has lived an ordinary, decent life, but a late-life inheritance forces him to confront the possibility that his past actions had darker consequences than he imagined.

The writing is spare, precise, and simple. Barnes resists sentimentality, allowing ambiguity to do the emotional work. The novel ultimately asks unsettling questions about responsibility, guilt, and time. Do we ever truly understand our own lives, or do we merely settle for a version that feels bearable? It is a small book with a profoundly disturbing aftertaste.

This 2011 Booker Prize winning, witty, cynical and ironic novel is my “Read of theWeek”

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The Cat’s Table

April 10, 2013 2 Comments

Cat's TableWe all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table

 The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje is a luminous novel about memory, chance, and the strange alchemy of growing up. The story is set aboard a ship sailing from Colombo to England in the early 1950s. It follows a 11 year-old boy, Michael, who is seated at the ‘cat’s table,’ the least prestigious place in the dining room, far from the authority of adults. From this marginal position, the novel unfolds the ability to see the world obliquely, through curiosity rather than control.

Ondaatje writes with a restraint that is deceptive. The plot is episodic, almost drifting, mirroring the ocean that carries its characters. Michael and his companions—Cassius and Ramadhin move through a floating society of eccentrics, which includes a jazz pianist in disgrace, a mysterious prisoner, a silent tailor, and adults whose private griefs remain partially hidden. These encounters linger like half-remembered stories, suggesting that childhood understanding is always incomplete.

What elevates The Cat’s Table beyond a simple coming-of-age tale is its adult consciousness looking back. The older narrator reflects on how friendships, betrayals, and moments of wonder gained meaning only years later. Memory, is less an archive than a reconstruction shaped by emotion and loss.

The sea voyage becomes a metaphor for life in transition between cultures, innocence and knowledge, belonging and exile. There is no dramatic climax, no grand revelation. Instead, the novel leaves a gentle ache, the sense that some journeys matter not for where they end, but for the fleeting connections made along the way.

The Cat’s Table is a beautiful novel on how childhood experiences quietly, irrevocably shape the adults we become. This bittersweet story of memory & place, of three boys who take a journey by sea from one world to another, which flourishes in the gaps between fact and fiction is my “Read of the Week”

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River of Smoke

April 10, 2013 Leave a comment

150px-River_of_smoke“Opium is like the wind or the tides: it is outside my power to affect its course. A man is neither good nor evil because he sails his ship upon the wind. It is his conduct towards those around him – his friends, his family, his servants – by which he must be judged”

– Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke

River of Smoke, is a novel on trade, empire, and cultural encounter in the age of the Opium Wars. The story is set in Canton in the 1830s, where the novel shifts from the sea-bound drama of Sea of Poppies (first in the Ibis trilogy ) to a more contemplative, cosmopolitan world shaped by commerce and ideas.

Canton, in this story is neither completely Chinese nor European, it’s a place where merchants, sailors, painters, and exiles coexist uneasily. Characters such as the opium trader Bahram Modi and the painter Robin Chinnery are not heroic figures but moral intermediaries, caught between profit and conscience. Through them, Ghosh explores how global capitalism takes root not only through violence, but also through everyday transactions, friendships, and compromises.

The novel is dense, patient, and immersive, demanding attentive reading. Historical detail is worn lightly, yet it is a critique of imperial greed and cultural misunderstanding. Unlike conventional historical fiction, River of Smoke resists dramatic climax, choosing instead to trace the slow, inexorable drift toward catastrophe.

‘River of Smoke’, a brilliant historical fiction set in late 19th century China is my “Read of the week”.

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