Brajesh's Review: Marathon Baba

Utter cr@p. Avoid this book at all cost. A smart marketing ploy with some awesome stuff on jacket made me pick this book. Reminded me of the old adage "never judge a book by the cover". I am not sure who published this book and for what reason. The writer obviously wrote this in a haze of dope, but publishers should have better sense. Actually I should have had better sense. Won't waste any more words on this useless print.


Rating: 0.5/5

Kim's Review: The Devotion of Suspect X

This book has sold over 2 million copies in Japan, has been made into a cult film and has become a national obsession was the tag line that greeted me as an introduction to "The Devotion of Suspect X". Obviously, that piqued my curiosity and interest. So I went a step further to google this book. The Times called the author - Keigo Higashino "The Japanese Steig Larsson" and that was enough for me.

Inspite of being frantically busy setting up house in a new city (We just moved from Guwahati to Ahmedabad), I just HAD TO apply to review this book, since I knew I was going to order it, even if I wasn't selected to review it. Lucky me, I was chosen by blogadda.com as one of the reviewers.

Today being Sunday, I awarded myself a day of rest and started to read a book after almost 2 months. The startling thing was that the book jumped right into the murder within the first 30 pages itself after giving a complete introduction into the victim and the murderer and a clear glimpse into the motive for the murder. So where can a 'murder mystery novel' go from here, when its no longer a 'whodunnit'?

And in the answer to that question lies the genius of Keigo Higashino.

Yasuko Hanaoka is a hardworking nightclub hostess turned cashier at a bento deli. She has a daughter Misato from one of her previous marriages. Her last marriage to Shinji Togashi ended in a divorce 5 years ago when his company fired him for skimming and he turned into an abusive alcoholic. Yasuko finally gathered the courage to divorce him and stay focussed on her job and raising her daughter, however Togashi kept reappearing in her life with demands for money.

On his final visit, he turns physically abusive against Yasuko and Misato and they kill him in self defense, and Yasuko is on the verge of turning herself in to the police when her genius mathematician neighbour Mr Ishigami offers to help her out of her predicament.

What follows next is a brilliant game of cat and mouse between Mr Ishigami, Yasuko and Misato on one side, and detectives Kusanagi, Kishitani and their chief Mamiya on the other. If anything can disrupt this balance, it is the involvement of Ishigami and Kusanagi's classmate (and friend to both) from the Imperial University - the Physics Professor - Manabu Yukawa.

The Devotion of Suspect X, is engrossing and I finished it in one sitting. It is very well written and its easy to for a reader to get immersed in the story. I did begin to have my suspicions about the ending a few chapters before the end, but it still came as a stunner.

The city of Tokyo sets an interesting background to the story and is almost a character in itself. There aren't too many new terms bandied about in the book, so it can be easily read without reaching for a dictionary or google/wikipedia.

I would have loved a little more detail into the bento boxes being sold at Benten-Tai and more details into the culture and customs, but I think the author initially wrote the book with a local rather than an international audience in mind, so he just glides over these aspects.

Also in the final chapter, Misato's character is left hanging in the balance and I wondered how Yasuko takes the decision that she does. In the entire book she is an extremely concerned mother, trying to protect her daughter from everything, in light of this and her other circumstances, her final decision comes as a surprise - Is assuaging her own guilt more important to her than protecting her daughter?

I do not know how much has got lost in translation, but the story is still a very good one and definitely worth a read if you like good crime/mystery fiction. I'm also looking forward to watching the movie.

Rating: 3.75 / 5






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Kim's Review: Shades within Shadows

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that this book is written by my uncle - my mum's sister's husband. Uncle Alan has a special interest in the history of Mangalorean Christians and his first 2 books - Saraswati's Children and the Captivity of 1784 specifically focus on the historical and geneological aspects of the community.

When asked why he was writing "Shades within Shadows", Uncle Alan jokingly remarked that his nieces and nephews did not read his first books, finding them too technical and history textbook like, so he had fictionalised it so we would read his book and learn more about our community's history

If this was his objective, then he has most certainly achieved it. After reading this book, I'll definitely re-attempt reading "Saraswati's Children" once our household goods are delivered and book cartons are opened.

The tales told within this book begin with the forced conversions of Goan Hindus to Christianity and their subsequent persecution between the Santo Officio - Portugese Inquisition, increased taxes to fund the Portugese missions & wars and the local chieftains who run thieving incursions into the villages of the converts and take away their harvest, livestock, gold or anything else that they can get their hands on.

Over the next 200 years, some of these converts flee to South Canara to make a better life for themselves in slightly less daunting circumstances and slowly build up their land holdings, reputations and businesses over generations.

Life progresses steadily until Tipu Sultan comes to power. After his skirmishes with the British, Tipu needs a new "enemy" and the 40,000 Catholics of South Canara are targeted. The 'Captivity' occurred in 1784, when on Ash Wednesday, the Canara Christians are deported to Srirangapatna. Males who survive the arduous trek are circumscised and conscripted into the army, females are inducted into the harems. In the next 15 years the captives who didn't die were converted.When they were finally set free in 1800, less than a third of them returned. Inspite of their return, the Christian population of Canara had fallen to 10,000.

Shades within shadows tells the fictionalised tales of these converts, the trials they face, their joys and sorrows, the myths and lore. There are so many stories in this book, that at times you lose track of the charaters, but this is exactly the kind of story telling that grandma indulged in. Jumping from one to another until everything ties up into a neat loop, with the irrelvant threads left hanging for another day.

Some of the stories of bhutas & daivas in the book were familiar to me, because I remember nana telling us these tales on cold, dark nights in the spooky environs of the power-cut engulfed estate bungalows. There are almost 2 distinct voices that weave this tale together, one is a poetical voice that waxes lyrical about the greenery, or the water and the other is a bit more stacatto, focussing on the facts that weave the story line.

Its initially a bit confusing to follow with the multitude of characters introduced in the first 5 pages, but when you stop focussing on the characters and their names and just let the story wash over you, is when you really start getting involved and drawn in.

I highly recommend this book to any Canara Christian who wants to know more about their collective history. Its also an engrossing read for any Mangalorean. And even if you don't fall into either of these categories, this is a lovely prolonged ajji kathe, (grandmothers tale) that has a lot of local lore and historical details to keep you engrossed.

Rating: (I don't rate books written by family or close friends, but I will recommend this book highly)

Kim's Review: The Lost Daughter Of Happiness

Geling Yan's "Lost Daughter of Happiness" is set in San Francisco during the Gold Rush Era. The story revolves around Fusang, a young girl kidnapped from her home in China, shipped under inhuman conditions to San Francisco and sold into prostitution at China town.

Whether, Fusang has resigned herself to her situation, too slow-witted to realise her predicament, has the serenity of a saint or just too amiable a disposition is not clear. But whatever her reasons or her qualities, they help keep her alive in a profession where her fellow workers contract innumerable diseases and drop dead like flies.

The other girls in your line of work started losing their hair at eighteen, their teeth at nineteen, and by twenty, with their vacant eyes and decrepit faces, they were as good as dead, silent as dust.

 There is a bit of a love triangle too. Chris a young boy of European descent first purchases her services as a 12 year old "little white devil", he is besotted with her and follows her around and even saves her life, but he faces tremendous pressure from his family and society to conform. Ah Ding / Da Yong is a Chinese mafioso of types who may or may not be the husband she was married to, in absentia in China. He controls a large part of all the prostitution rackets and other gang activity in China town, slowly involving himself in fostering a union of underpaid and overworked Chinese mining labourers. He is not sure of his feelings for Fusang, especially after she is gangraped.

Fusang is sold in slave auctions, has people coming from miles to see her deformed bound feet, has suitors fight bloody duels for her, almost dies of TB, is saved by the Christian ladies of the Rescue society, stolen back by Da Yong, brutally gangraped by a white mob, yet she survives it all.

Fusang is a real person who achieved a notorious kind of celebrity in her time, Geling Yan may have tried to unravel the mystery around her, but reading the book just left me with more questions.

The narrator is a later wave Chinese immigrant who tries to draw parallels between her own life and that of Fusang's, but neither her character or Fusang's is ever completely revealed. The identity of the narrator is left as a mystery and she just drops hints of what she is going through, but her voice keeps distracting from the main story, although her character doesn't develop beyond that.

The book does protray Gold Rush San Fransisco in all its ugliness, the prostitution, the hatred for Chinese immigrants among the earlier European immigrants, the stoic Chinese who just keep going back no matter what is thrown at them.

As a work of historic fiction, it is a good read with insight into the era, but as a story, at the end, the reader is left with more questions than answers.

Rating. 2.75 / 5

Kim's Review: One Thousand and One Nights

As a child, on a visit to a friends house Hanan Al Shaykh saw a beautiful collection of leather bound books in a book case which turned out to be the complete works of Alf Layla Wu Layla, (One Thousand and One Nights) She was itching to feel the books and read them, but her friend said that her father kept the books under lock and key as it was belived that any woman who read the complete collection would fall down dead. It was only much later on in life that Hanan realised that the original Alf Layla Wu Layla, dealt with sexuality and other adult themes that were deemed inpappropriate for women to read and the childrens fairytale versions available in the market weren't really part of the original Arabic epic. Aladin, Sindbad, Ali Baba were all stories added by Antoine Galland and other European translators.

However, her love for the opus endured and when Tim Supple asked her to translate a couple of the stories for him to produce on stage, she was quite willing to do it. This book is a corollary of some of the work that she did for the screenplay.

This book is not a complete translation of the original, but only covers some of the stories that were adapted for stage. The tale of course begins with King Shahrayar's cruel order for a virgin bride each night, who is put to death the following morning. The viziers daughter Scherazade marries him and prolongs her life by telling him a new tale each night, always leaving it at a cliffhanger stage, thus postponing her death one day at a time.

Her tales make King Sharayar see that it isn't just women who are fickle and untrustworthy, but men too and women aren't always to blame for their perfidy. So the stories don't just keep him engrossed, but also provide valuable insights and guidelines for living.


The stories are all interesting, but given the nested third and fourth degree narratives, its easy to lose track of who is telling whom which story and to what intent.

This is definitely not a "childrens" edition although the language flows very smoothly and easily.

Rating: 3.5 / 5

Brajesh's Review: Great by Choice

Speed read this one at Crossword today.

Jim Collins has loaded the book with many new terms which are powerful and could easily become part of the new management jargon. 10xers , 20 mile march, bullet then cannonballs, level 5 ambition, SMaC, ROL (Return on Luck) are words we need to get used to :) :) good modelling, sound and convincing logic. Can't comment on veracity of research as I didn't read the last empirical analysis part, but has to be correct given author's stature.

Rating: 3 / 5

 

Brajesh's Review: Chanakya's Chant

If you haven't read Rozabal Line & built up huge expectations from this Sanghi book, you would love every moment of the modern political fiction constructed along the ancient Chanakya's story. If I would have read this one first I would have given this a 3.5,  BUT his first book is such a stunner that I expected a similar level of complexity.

Now I know why Ashwin told me that he loved his first book more & hasn't taken similar risks in this one due to the pressures of delivering a best-seller.

Also read my review of Ashwins first book and masterpiece - The Rozabal Line and Kim's Review of Chanakya's Chant

Rating: 2.5 / 5

 

Brajesh's Review: The Sense of an Ending

Picked this one through a friend's reccomendation & Man Booker tag. The book was a 4 for me till the last 25 pages. Other books would have gotten penalised by 0.5, for letting me down, but given the title, had to bring this one down by a full point.

However I must say that, if you enjoy human psyche insights & are intrigued by behavioural nuances, this one is for you. Author has brilliantly used the language and story construction to take us on a memory ride. Had me questioning lot of my memories with sufficient intesity.

Rating: 3 / 5 

Brajesh's Review: In the Country of Men

The novel is set in post revolution Libya seen through the eyes of a 7 year old kid. The kid learns about life and his country run by Qaddaffi in one rollercoaster ride. The timing of jasmine revolution and fall of Libya made the read very contemporary.

Rating: 3.5/5

Brajesh's Review: The Secret Life of Tigers

India's biggest tiger crusader Valmik Thapar, pours his heart out in this beautiful book. He along with Fateh Singh Rathore re-wrote the history of Ranthambore. Today these two legends are the reason we have Ranthambore surviving & thriving. Do read if you love tigers and surly read if you don't, because after reading this you will :) :) Passionate writing bring the tales alive. The insights break a lot of standard myths, e.g. Male tigers don't get involved in raising family.

Rating: 3.5/5