Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel Lecture 2010

"We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal."

"From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalisation, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the one we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story. That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility."

Read the full Nobel  Lecture here

The End of the Novel of Love

By VIVIAN GORNICK
Beacon Press
Read the Review

CHAPTER ONE  

In a thousand novels of love-in-the-Western-world the progress of feeling between a woman of intelligence and a man of will is charted through a struggle that concludes itself when the woman--at last--melts into romantic longing and the deeper need for union. There are, however, a handful of remarkable novels written late in the last century and early in this one--among them Daniel Deronda, The House of Mirth, Diana of the Crossways, Mrs. Dalloway--where, at the exact moment the woman should melt, her heart unexpectedly hardens. Just at this place where give is required, some flat cold inner remove seems to overtake the female protagonist. In the eyes of the world she becomes opaque ("unnatural" she is called), but we, the privileged readers, know what is happening. The woman has taken a long look down the road of her future. What she sees repels. She cannot "imagine" herself in what lies ahead. Unable to imagine herself, she now thinks she cannot act the part. She will no longer be able to make the motions. The marriage will be a charade. In that moment of clear sight sentimental love, for her, becomes a thing of the past. Which is not to say the marriage will not take place; half the time it will. It is only to say that in these novels this is the point at which the story begins. 

The response of these intelligent fictional women--Gwendolen Harleth, Lily Bart, Diana Warwick, Clarissa Dalloway--to the prospect of married love goes against the grain. Not only because we all know that love is the most formative experience a human being can have and marriage, any marriage, at least in its beginnings, reminds one of its promise, but also because the idea that a woman, any woman, could really want anything other than to be safely settled in the world with a husband has, until very recently, been unthinkable.

So what is it with Gwendolen, Lily, Clarissa, and Diana? 

In Daniel Deronda George Eliot pits the beautiful Gwendolen Harleth (shrewd, vain, ambitious, hungry for a place in the world) against Henleigh Grandcourt, the aristocrat who wishes to marry her, apparently setting in motion the classic struggle between a woman and a man who are evenly matched: in this case both cold, smart, and determined. In the bargain, Gwendolen seems malicious: she taunts and manipulates the arrogant lord as if the exercise of sexual power in and of itself is a necessary plesure. But slowly, steadily--it takes Eliot 200 pages to get them married--we are moved deeper inside Gwendolen and we see that her behavior is meant to be off-putting. She is desperate to keep the action going, delay the moment of decision. We see that she is buying time. She dreads marriage. "It was not," Eliot observes of her, "that she wished to damage men, it was only that she wished not to be damaged by them."

Read the rest here

All Time is Unredeemable

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                              But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

BURNT NORTON
(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')

T.S. Eliot

In the Knowledge Derived from Experience.

There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
but all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

EAST COKER
(No. 2 of 'Four Quartets')

T.S. Eliot

Sometimes Fate is like a Small Sandstorm

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."

— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore) 

This has  also been used in the scintillating trailer of Innaritu's forthcoming  movie 'Biutiful'.Javier Bardem's power packed role in this movie has already fetched him the best actor at Cannes

Mario Vargas Llosa : Peruvian Humour Unveiled

I just finished Mario Vargas Llosa's 'Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter'. It was a rambling piece of work. A novel which had a innovative narrative technique with eclectic array of soap opera like short stories without a clear end. The main story which is a sort of  semi autobiographical  is about the love affair between Mario with his 'distant' Aunt (Julia) who is 14 years older to him. There is no second distinct story rather we find dozens of different soap opera style fascinating stories. These amusing stories are manufactured by a cranky somewhat brilliant scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho. This  Bolivian scriptwriter's piquant radio plays is the unique part of the novel . The novel alternates between  Mario's real life narrative and Camacho's soap opera plays.  Camacho's intriguing different short stories are quite fascinating like a superb soap opera but at the end of the novel the stories get jumbled up and intertwined in the most absurd ways and in most cases leading to the  sudden annihilation of many characters due to some natural catastrophe. 

The sharp funny moments that dominate the narrative makes the novel quite a real fun to read. This would be one of the most funniest fascinating novels that I have read. The others like this which would come to my mind are Kundera's ' TheLast Waltz' ;V S Naipaul's 'The House of Mr. Biswas' and definitely Marquez's 'Hundred Years of Solitude' and also Rushdie's 'Midnights Children'. In terms of humour I think it stands among these masterpieces.

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Art of Fiction

Mario Vargas Llosa got the 2010 Nobel prize for literature for “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”. He is a fantastic writer. I recently  read his "Feast of the Goat". Reading the book I thought that the  brilliant inter temporal and non-linear narrative structure that we see in Alejandro González Iñárritu's movies can be inspired by Llosa. In the interspersed use of time we can see Faulkner' influence who was one of  Llosa's favourite authors

I recently read his quite interesting article that he wrote long back in New York Times in 1984 'The art of fiction'. Some insightful marvelous excerpts that I found are -

 "In fact, novels do lie - they can't help doing so - but that's only one part of the story. The other is that, throgh lying, they express a cruious truth, which can only be expressed in a veiled and concealed fasion, masquerading as what it is not. This statement has the ring of gibberish. But actually it's quite simple. Men are not content with their lot and nearly all - rich or poor, brilliant or mediocre, famous or obscure - would like to have a life different from the one they lead. To (cunningly) appease this appetite, fiction was born. It is written and read to provide human beings with lives they're unresigned to not having. The germ of every novel contains an element of non-resignation and desire."

"Real life flows without pause, lacks order, is chaotic, each story merging with all stories and hence never having a beginning or ending. Life in a work of fiction is a simulation in which that dizzying disorder achieves order, organization, cause and effect, beginning and end."

"Fiction betrays life, sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally, encapsulating it in a weft of words that reduce it in scale and place it within the reader's reach. Thus the reader can judge it, understand it and, above all, live it with an impunity not granted him in real life."

"At the heart of all fictional work there burns a protest. Their authors created them since they were unable to live them, and their readers (and believers) encounter in these phantom creatures the faces and adventures needed to enhance their own lives. That is the truth expressed by the lies in fiction - the lies that we ourselves are, thelies that console us and make up for our longings and frustrations. How trustworthy then is the testimony of a novel on the very society that produced it? Were those men really that way? They were, in the sense that that was how they wanted to be, how they envisioned themselves loving, suffering and rejoicing. Those lies do not document their lives but rather their driving demons - the dreams that intoxicated them and made the lives they led more tolerable. An era is not populated merely by flesh and blood creatures, but also by the phantom creatures into which they are transformed in order to break the barriers that confine them."

Dostoevesky : The Great Seer

There are great works and greater works of fiction but not close to that of Kafka, Camus and Dostoevesky. The work by these triplets are experiences that not all can undergo as it makes one to reflect in a way that may crack the moribund cosy fragile structure in which we all seem to survive. This is the reason that these works are not for 'faint hearted' people as these sort of works makes one  to reflect and the narrative exudes the experience into the reader providing some sort of unease. As Dostoevesky said "It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word." Einstein had once said that "Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss". What is in the narration of Dostoevesky that it spellbinds thinking people across the spectrum. An evolutionary experience is not necessarily joyful but it may be the pathway to 'real joy'. Peaks are reached through arduous and exhausting paths and reading Dostevesky one also reaches the peak of novel writing. A great  work of art has the characteristic of closing the gap between the seer and the object of art,  or in other words the concept portrayed by the  artist  would be an experience in itself for the observer . This is what we can experience in Dostoevesky's Crime and Punishment.
 
The story revolves around the crime of double murder committed by the main protagonist Roskolnikov and then its ramifications. While reading the novel we can experience in the most acute way the near full experience of crime and we are sucked into the psyche of Roskolnikov who commits the crime. The narration is such that we also experience the inner working of the capillaries of the criminal and after the novel is complete we may feel our self as an exhausted  person who was also part of the event. Crime and Punishment cannot be just characterized as a psychological thriller but this a work comprising of astonishing  philosophical undertones. As in any great novel characters are just not individuals rather they are metaphors in large scheme of things. Roskolnikov portrays here the disenchanted bright youth which undergoes unwarranted crime due to the distorted and malaised society in which he lives. "Roskol' niki were sort of gnostic groups who protested against the church and adhered to old rituals opposing the present established authorities. In Crime and Punishment Roskolnikov also is the disenchanted 'youth'  with the socialist and reformist undercurrents prevalent in his society. He finds his own solution to resolve his problems. His 'Napoleonic'  solution for his miseries is based on the premise that if  unworthy people are eliminated for the betterment of a brighter person than the crime is not a crime but a just act and beneficial for the overall society.

"I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound... to eliminate the dozen or hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity. But it does not follow from that that Newton had a right to murder people left and right to steal every day in the market. Then, I remember, I maintain in my article that all... well, legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on, were all without exception criminals, from the very fat that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held sacred by the people, and they did not stop short of bloodshed either, if that bloodshed - often of innocent persons fighting bravely in the defense of ancient law - were of use to their cause. It's remarkable in fact, that the majority indeed, of these benefactors and leaders of humanity were guilty of terrible carnage. In short, I maintain that all great men or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals - more or less, of course. Otherwise it's hard for them to get out of the common rut; and to retain in the common rut is what they can't submit to, from their very nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to it. The common people preserve and populate the world, the extraordinary move the world and lead it to its goal...."


But Dostoevesky in Crime and Punishment shows that there are exterior laws that bring order and a crime committed gets penance through suffering of the soul and the act of redemption would lead the person to a 'gradual renewal, his gradual rebirth, his gradual transformation from one world to another , of his growing acquaintance with a new,hitherto complete unknown reality' . The other major protagonist in the novel is  Sonya (or "Sofya" meaning "wisdom" in Greek ) is sort of alter ego of Roskolnikov and she shows him the way to redemption. She undergoes suffering  throughout the novel and she provides the courage and wisdom to Roskolnikov to achieve redemption through penance. He loves her with a reverential attitude, "I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity."..."They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life. They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other."

It is not easy for a novice like me to analyze thoroughly a complex novel such as this. But it is always pleasure trying to understand the work of such great masters as Dostoevesky who is considered more as a prophet than a novelist.

'Herzog' by Saul Bellow

 Saul Bellow is the first proper American novelist that I have read. Herzog was an  ecstatic, enriching and soul searching  novel for me . A very interesting novel which is sort of  meditations of a man named 'Moses Herzog' on self and the human condition. Herzog writes 'what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization." 
 
Herzog is a man who lives in contradictions while being both profound and  mad at the same instance or say precisely a matured 'unpractical' man. "If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.".."In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too" 
The novel is the rapturous exploration of the mind of Herzog where he strips and scrutinies the  individual ,the society and the  human condition . Through out the novel we find this unbundling or outpouring of the mind of Herzog. Herzog does this explorations through sort of a peculiar exercise by writing letters to people which are never sent. "One way or another the no doubt mad idea entered my mind that my own actions had historic importance and this fantasy (?) made it appear that people who harmed me were interfering with an important experiment."

One of the interesting things about the novel is that there is no proper story line. It is just an egocentric ruminations or say philosophical vent out of Moses Herzog. We also get a good glimpse into the lives and peculiarities of American Jews. The 1960's America which was undergoing a societal, cultural and individual transition somewhat resembles the transition phase that urban India presently is undergoing. 

The spontaneous letters that Herzog writes is the soul of the novel. It has silly ponderings to sublime thought formation. His letters are addressed to eclectic array of people from Nietzsche to Kierkegaard to President Eisenhower to his ex wife to his mother who had died some thirty years ago. The novel is a sort of a metaphor of the mind which erratically delves into things that reason itself cannot fathom. Herzog engages with people in his letter in his most truthful way. In the fascinating letter to Nietzsche he writes, 

""No, really, Herr Nietzsche, I have great admiration for you. Sympathy. You want to make us able to live with the void. Not lie ourselves into good-naturedness, trust, ordinary middling human considerations, but to question as has never been questioned before, relentlessly, with iron determination, into evil, through evil, past evil, accepting no abject comfort. The most absolute, the most piercing questions. Rejecting mankind as it is, that ordinary, practical, thieving, stinking, unilluminated, sodden rabble, not only the laboring rabble, but even worse the "educated" rabble with its books and concerts and lectures, its liberalism and its romantic theatrical "loves" and "passions"--it all deserves to die, it will die. Okay. Still, your extremists must survive. No survival, no Amor Fati. Your immoralists also eat meat. They ride the bus. They are only the most bus-sick travelers. Humankind lives mainly upon perverted ideas. Perverted, your ideas are no better than those the Christianity you condemn. Any philosopher who wants to keep his contact with mankind should pervert his own system in advance to see how it will really look a few decades after adoption. I send you greetings from this mere border of grassy temporal light, and wish you happiness, wherever you are. Yours, under the veil of Maya, M.E.H."


Sigmund Freud in his masterwork 'Interpretation of Dreams' puts forward this ingenious argument that unfulfilled desires of a person are accomplished through his/her dreams. Dreams in a sense are an outlet for say repressed thoughts. In Herzog also we find that writing letters has this purging attribute where his unexpressed thoughts are poured out in his letters. This helps him to think through various thought processes in his life and reach conclusions in a way. If we also realize that while completely thinking through a process of thought we aspire for a convincing conclusion which is reached by going through various pros and cons. But the experience of this whole process matures the mind and brings joy in a sense. At the end, Herzog seems to have reached such a joyful state where he is now relishing his solitude. He grows though these letters that he wrote to become a 'sane' person. "The knowledge that he was done with these letters...At this time he had no messages for anyone.Nothing.Not a single word." 

Great Movies of World CINEMA not to be Missed !!

Persona (1966) - "Bergman at his most brilliant as he explores the symbiotic relationship that evolves between an actress suffering a breakdown in which she refuses to speak, and the nurse in charge as she recuperates in a country cottage. To comment is to betray the film's extraordinary complexity, but basically it returns to two favourite Bergman themes: the difficulty of true communication between human beings, and the essentially egocentric nature of art. Here the actress (named Vogler after the charlatan/artist in The Magician) dries up in the middle of a performance, thereafter refusing to exercise her art. We aren't told why, but from the context it's a fair guess that she withdraws from a feeling of inadequacy in face of the horrors of the modern world; and in her withdrawal, she watches with detached tolerance as humanity (the nurse chattering on about her troubled sex life) reveals its petty woes. Then comes the weird moment of communion in which the two women merge as one: charlatan or not, the artist can still be understood, and can therefore still understand. Not an easy film, but an infinitely rewarding one.


Blue - Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Blue," the Polish director's French film,which is one of my favourite movies of all time is about Julie (Juliette Binoche), a grieving widow and mother whose husband, "one of the most important composers of our time," and young daughter are killed in the car accident she survives."Blue" is a lyrically studied, solemn, sometimes almost abstract consideration of Julie's attempt to liberate herself from her sorrowful love and to establish a new life. But love, which is a contradiction of liberty, cannot be easily fooled.


3. Wings of Desire - Wim Wender (1987) is a remarkable modern fairy tale about the nature of being alive. The angels witness the gamut of human emotions, and they experience the luxury of simple pleasures (even a cup of coffee and a cigarette) as ones who've never known them. From the angels' viewpoint, Berlin is seen in gorgeous black-and-white -- strikingly beautiful but unreal; when they join the humans, the image shifts to rough but natural-looking color, and the waltz-like grace of the angels' drift through the city changes to a harsher rhythm.


4 . Baran (2001) - Iranian director Majid Majidi's very touching love story between a Iranian boy and a destitute young Afghan girl, told in gestures and glances, skillfully binds together the broad social theme of refugees with Majidi's vision of the spiritual purity that is attainable through selfless love.


5. Citizen Kane - Orson Welles (1941)


6. The Solaris (1972) - Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris is a visually hypnotic, deeply affecting story of conscience, love, and reconciliation.Solaris deals with self-confrontation. In Solaris, a tenuous communication is established with the planet and, having faced up to his demons, the hero attains a degree of peace with himself.Solaris is an unsettling portrait of man's inequitable, often destructive interaction with his environment. Inherent in the tenets of the Solaris mission is a preconceived theoretical filter that accepts only those phenomena that can be logically explained or physically proven. Some scientists have hypothesized that the Solaris ocean is a thinking substance, a primordial brain, capable of realizing thought. However, lacking concrete evidence, Berton's deposition to the Solaristics board is met with skepticism and calls for the immediate termination of the program. A mission scientist, Dr. Messinger, eventually succeeds in dissuading the board from canceling the project by exposing their innate fears, which lead them to impose artificial barriers to conceal Truth, and proposing that the strange phenomenon, itself, is cause for further study, and not an excuse for an apprehensive retreat. In reality, it is not the failure of technology that impedes the attainment of Truth, but humanity's own inertia and myopic vision.


7) Dogville (2003) - Lars Von Trier -Dogville, an austere Brechtian critique of an unjust society, via a self-reflexive bit of wisdom.
Link of a critic of Dogville


8) Mar Adentros 2002 (Alejandro Amenabar) - The real-life story of Spaniard Ramon Sampedro, who fought a 30 year campaign in favor of euthanasia and his own right to die.(Spanish)


9) 12 Angry Men (1957) - is a courtroom drama. In purpose, it's a crash course in those passages of the Constitution that promise defendants a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. It has a kind of stark simplicity: Apart from a brief setup and a briefer epilogue, the entire film takes place within a small New York City jury room, on "the hottest day of the year," as 12 men debate the fate of a young defendant charged with murdering his father.


10) Akira Kurosawa Ikiru (Living/To Live) (1952) It tells the story of Mr Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), a senior public servant who finds out he has terminal cancer and only a short time left to live. Mr Watanabe comes to the realisation that he has become trapped in his life, and seeks to give meaning to his last few months. What differentiates this film from thousands of Hollywood telemovies on the same subject is Kurosawa's non-linear use of time, and the utilisation of different character perspectives. The title of the film comes from the Japanese word for living.


11) Au Hasard, Balthazar (1966) - Robert Bresson - This Bresson creation, the donkey Balthazar, is one of the most intriguing and powerful in all cinema. Balthazar, whilst not the protagonist, is certainly the film's central character, and Bresson refuses to anthropomorphise him (except in a deep sense). The film's main structural idea is facile and effective - Balthazar gets passed from owner to owner, experiencing (and bearing witness to) all kinds of human love and hate.Balthazar is a parable of sin and suffering, but barely a religious one. The Biblical echoes in it in fact seem referential (not reverential), more of a cue been taken from Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. In that novel (which Bresson obviously plundered for Pickpocket and L'Argent), there is a harrowing scene where a workhorse is beaten and beaten till it crumples to the ground. It is hard not to be moved by the scene, and the same applies to Bresson's film. Like Dostoyevsky, Bresson is acutely realist, and only unconventionally spiritualist.


12) A Short Film About Killing (1988) - Krzysztof Kieslowski - This film is so potent that it is partially credited with the Polish government abolishing the death penalty.A Short Film About Killing shows the destruction brought on by a brutal murder committed by Jacek, a troubled young Polish punk. Jacek is disassociated from society. He meanders about Warsaw stewing in his emotional distress. Across town, cabdriver Waldemar Rekowski, a belligerent and horrible man, makes his way through his day. Finally, there is Piotr who, after winning his life's dream of becoming a barrister, must face the reality of being a part of the legal system. The three lives collide in a devastating story that will bring into question the meaning of violence, murder and capital punishment.

Khasak and Macondo: Magical Realism Foretold

I just read O V Vijayan's 'The Legend of Khasak' and one thing that struck me was his style of narration and story formation which seemed quite close to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. According to me he is the Indian Marquez not belittling him. Both wrote their masterpieces at the same time but they hadn't heard of each others work.  Both 'The Legend of Khasak' and 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' has narrative styles which can be tagged as 'magical realism'. In the most simple interpretation 'magical realism' portrays a situation where paradoxes exist like rationality and fantasy. It consists of a world where we could find paradoxical co-existence of 'rational view of society' along with the acceptance of a 'supernatural or occult or mystical' as a normal mundane reality. Oxymoronic world is very much part of their existence. Marquez has put this quite brilliantly in his Nobel lecture, 

"A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude."

What place to know of magical realism better then  India where it oozes and pervades a large part of the folks.

 If we compare both the author's magnum opus than we can find that both the stories evolve and revolve around the imaginary town's created by them. In a sense in both the masterpieces the role of the protagonist is not played by the 'individual' but by a 'small fictional town'.The legend of Khasak has 'Khasak' and One Hundred Years of Solitude  has 'Macondo'. Town's where fantasy, supernatural or occult practices are part of their everyday existence. The story unravels within these towns. The story is strictly not woven around a central character  like say Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's 'The Portrait of a Artist as Young Man' rather we find  multitude of characters occupying the pages. Especially in Marquez the breadth of characters is huge with many generations living through a single novel. This sort of a  intertemporal narration provides a evolutionary view of the society than of individuals which is a commonality  found in most of the novels.We can say there is no 'existentialist angst' in the characters except in Ravi in the Legend of Khasak. But in a wider view existentialist pursuit exists in both the works. In  One Hundred Years of Solitude 'existentialist' crisis can be understood by the 'solitude' that embraces Macondo (Latin America in more broader way). The solitude  is not of a character but of  the whole town or say country or continent. The dysfunctional leaders, the wars, lawlessness and other misgivings has uprooted the existence of a 'proper state' leading to its solitude. Solitude is not somber like loneliness. But as  solitude is gained with maturity so Macondo also revels despite its misgivings.In legend of Khasak, Ravi has come to Khasak to experience solitude as part of soul searching 'existentialist' pursuit to unwind the moralistic guilt that he is carrying due to an incestuous affair. Here Khasak is meant to provide him the solitude to uplift his existence from the moralistic fall that he has undergone.As O Y Vijayan has also asserted  about the novel "It moves along, if you will, in a deeply emotional mode, in a constant search for cosmic mystery". 

This is just a first rough entry on these two great authors but  I would definitely try to show more shades of these giants of literature as I decipher them more.

Life as a Fascinating Novel

Life is like a fascinating novel with its ebbs and flows. Everybody is a protagonist surrounded by characters and situations to deal with. Is it a predestined script or not is a mystery. But this uncertainty in a way makes  life interesting to live.  If we observe closely every life portrays a drama pitched with tits-n bits of a thriller with occasional suspense. There are situations during our childhood that border on 'magical realism' with  the perception of the world bordering on fantasy whereas when some  of us enter the idealistic 'romanticized' youth  we are confronted with the 'realism' of life and in some cases where critical self evaluation occurs then questions related to ' existentialism' enraptures us.  An individual is like a character which in a sense is a creation child of society. Certain events and people lead the character to create a view of life that it aspires for. The character grows with the event that it faces. These life changing or progressive events are mostly melancholic in nature.There are also life changing happy events but mostly it seems that despair can be considered as the catalyst  which enriches the human being in totality. Happy events are something that everyone craves for but these sporadic melancholic events provides maturity to the character. These uncalled for events makes the character sometimes stop and ponder about the despairing pursuits and this mostly leads the character to venture into a new and  better terrain. These glitches small or big are wisdom lessons to be unraveled otherwise an event less single dream-state would finish the richness of life with it.

This novels (life's) main narrator is the mind. The main narrator is formed by humongous collection of sub narrators (thoughts). The mind in a sense is an eternal juggler and the human life in a way is sustained by the play of this eternal juggler. In other way we can say that life is like a jig saw puzzle where you may be placed at any part of the puzzle board but it is the mind that makes you to believe that you are down or up. From above (objective point of view) if you look to the board there is nothing like up or down. It is the way the mind views or places the board. reality is perceived. It is like this fascinating Zen story -

"There was once a stone cutter who was dissatisfied with himself and with his position in life.

One day he passed a wealthy merchant's house. Through the open gateway, he saw many fine possessions and important visitors. "How powerful that merchant must be!" thought the stone cutter. He became very envious and wished that he could be like the merchant.

To his great surprise, he suddenly became the merchant, enjoying more luxuries and power than he had ever imagined, but envied and detested by those less wealthy than himself. Soon a high official passed by, carried in a sedan chair, accompanied by attendants and escorted by soldiers beating gongs. Everyone, no matter how wealthy, had to bow low before the procession. "How powerful that official is!" he thought. "I wish that I could be a high official!"

Then he became the high official, carried everywhere in his embroidered sedan chair, feared and hated by the people all around. It was a hot summer day, so the official felt very uncomfortable in the sticky sedan chair. He looked up at the sun. It shone proudly in the sky, unaffected by his presence. "How powerful the sun is!" he thought. "I wish that I could be the sun!"

Then he became the sun, shining fiercely down on everyone, scorching the fields, cursed by the farmers and laborers. But a huge black cloud moved between him and the earth, so that his light could no longer shine on everything below. "How powerful that storm cloud is!" he thought. "I wish that I could be a cloud!"

Then he became the cloud, flooding the fields and villages, shouted at by everyone. But soon he found that he was being pushed away by some great force, and realized that it was the wind. "How powerful it is!" he thought. "I wish that I could be the wind!"

Then he became the wind, blowing tiles off the roofs of houses, uprooting trees, feared and hated by all below him. But after a while, he ran up against something that would not move, no matter how forcefully he blew against it - a huge, towering rock. "How powerful that rock is!" he thought. "I wish that I could be a rock!"

Then he became the rock, more powerful than anything else on earth. But as he stood there, he heard the sound of a hammer pounding a chisel into the hard surface, and felt himself being changed. "What could be more powerful than I, the rock?" he thought.

He looked down and saw far below him the figure of a stone cutter."

This illustrates in a sense that every character gets the best in life but it's his/her mind that makes him/her pathetic or a loser. Mind and hence the world thrives on this dualism. How the mind makes you like/love a particular process or person is a puzzle in itself? As argued earlier a character is impregnated with a  particular view(s) of life on the basis of the impressions created by certain persons and events. Say P likes K. K is not that physically attractive but has good nous. So this shows that P gives more weight to internal bearings to external ones. But this attraction may be like a thought that we regress so much that it becomes the most pleasant process in the world. But that unusual pleasantness without sound reason is just a thought regressed.

Sketching a bigger view of life affiliating it to a  novel we may come to the conclusion that it is the narrator (mind) who makes it a great or absurd novel.

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The Buddha, by the Mexican artist Octavio Ocampo.

Tao

You cannot take hold of it ,
But you cannot lose it.
In not being able to get it, you get it.
When you are silent, it speaks;
When you speak, it is silent.

(Cheng Tao Ke)

Unbearable Lightness of Being

I was thinking about Kundera and trying to understand why I find him so interesting. In a way I was trying to dissect Milan Kundera.One  of the most interesting aspects about his writing is his art of dissecting his characters psychologically.  Another great aspect of his writing is usage of metaphors and taking a word and creating a world out of it. Like the word 'eternal recurrence' which he uses in his most beautiful novel, 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'. In the starting couple of pages he dissects 'eternal recurance ' and then after doing this he merely transports most lucidly to the characters of the novel. The novel starts with these lines..

"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?"......."

and then after a while he writes ... 

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).

If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.

The introduction of 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' is staggeringly beautiful due to its cogently philosophical narrative and also due to the  sublime metaphorical construction of one of the main characters 'Tereza'. In Kundera the characters are not born in a city but they are born out of a metaphor or a situation. In 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being', Tereza is also born out of a metaphor, "she seemed a child to him, a child someone had put in a bulrush basket daubed with pitch and sent downstream for Tomas to fetch at the riverbank of his bed" .Kundera knows the power of metaphors and hence the danger of it. "Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love".Through a metaphor he creates the underlying theme of the novel which is deciphered at various levels in the novel. 

Kundera is like Bach where the technique of counterpoint plays a very central role.Two diverse themes merged to create a work of art which resonates on a central core.His novels are like great fugues. In Kundera contrapuntal form dominates his novels where diverse characters would converge towards a central core. This paradoxical narrative structure is thoughtfully brought out in 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' . The two main female characters are created on this paradox.  Sabina is the most fascinating character according to me in the novel. She portrays the 'lightness of being' , a being who is not burdened with any sense of morality or value judgement, which can be said as the most burdensome aspect in a human being. She in a sense is a pure amoral being. Contrasting to her is Tereza. She is loaded with the 'unbearable' burden of fidelity, morality and value judgement. She in a sense characterises the usual emotional human being. But as Kundera says " But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become". 

The process that binds  the characters in the novel  is the most contrapuntal word in real staggering proportions. The word symbolises sublime beauty, utter catastrophe, bliss, pure madness etc and is something without which life would be incomplete.This colossal word is 'love'. The main male protaganist in the novel has been struck by this ambiguous word. He is portrayed a real 'Don Juan' , a bard of coitus, a pragmatic man of the world for whom falling in love was like falling to die. But as Kundera counters for the notion of 'eternal recurrence' that you are born once and your life remains incomplete if you have not fallen in love. So it happens that for Tomas, Tereza becomes the sole person in his life who enters his poetic memory. Another sublime metaphor has been used by Kundera here,'poetic memory' which denotes impressions that touch the heart and stays there. Tomas is surgeon who know quite well to stitch normal wounds but this wound of love by Tereza is not healed completely and he leaves even his job for her and goes to the country side to live with her. 

The novel has lots of political metaphors also which I am not interested in but I think this is one work of art that should be consumed by all.    

A Thought came to My Mind Today..

Suddenly a  thought came to my mind today when I was starting my meditation before sleep that I should jot down something on myself and the activities that I underwent today. This urge for writing  was clearly inspired by my reading of Pamuk's 'Black book' which I have been reading for the last few days. I am finding it to be voluminous, engaging, philosophical and sometimes abstract work. This intriguing novel deals with the person Galip who finds one day that his wife Ruya has left him. The novel's central theme is related to finding Ruya but this cannot be the simple interpretation of such a novel having many philosophical strings attached to it. Half of the novel I have finished and one thing that I notice is that the novel is exploring the role of identity and making it fluid again and again in the various characters.

Pamuk asserts a very poignant role related to identity which most of us face. The desire to be that someone 'other'. This primal desire of becoming from one to someone 'other' can be considered an inate desire of every human mind. This 'other' which can be defined as the refined,prosperous and  better part of the  present self (self as a singular person). But this makes me think that this is the play of the mind whose core nature is to make a person restless and fool itself of the other which is illusive. The illusion arises because we are prey to the folly that the other 'being' is  necessarily better then  me ,not understanding things in  totality.

Here I think I am getting abstract but I think this 'other' which leads to all sorts of complexes makes a person a pathetic being from what he can be. The truth is whatever we are is perfect in the right way even if it may seem irrational or pathetic in many ways.It is unintelligible mind that cannot grasp the perfectness.

What is the most illogically consistent thing that a person can think about? The spontaneous answer that hit me was 'Life !!'.  

My Perception on Antaheen.

Antaheen is a Bengali movie which got the National Award for Best Film in 2009.

A refreshing movie but with a somewhat poignant take towards the end. The film cannot be said to be poignant in totality as it was a beautiful movie portraying the inner feeling of the characters. There was an overall subtleness in which the movie was operating with some great cinematography. The ending now I realise was quite effective doing justice to the unconventional message it was trying to potray. Life may not be refreshing and joyful in the linear conventional way (with marriage) as most of us think. This could also be alluded by the single characters in the movie. Every character in the film had a different take on life but love, wait and loneliness (more optimistically solitude) was common to them all. The central theme of the film can be captured by the sufi line written by Aparna Sen in the Rumi's book that she gifted to Ronno (her husband), "The closer you get , the more you become elusive...the further you go, the clearer you become". 

There were two stories operating simultaneouly. First story which was the dominant story of the movie  operating bw Rahul Bose and Radhika through there virtual chat ; whereas the second story was bw Aparna Sen and her husband 'Ronno' where both of them were living separably. It seemed quite clear that the story was quite inspired by the wise words of Rumi where his metaphor on god was translated to human relations. Distance is essential for the eagerness or love to blossom but too much nearness may not be that pleasant . Elusiveness with anything (here relations) has the beauty of its own as it always keeps the mind craving for something more.  

How can a really great work be 'produced'?

Or to put it the other way round, can it really be ‘produced’? I had been somewhat consumed with this question for a while and have been trying to understand the dynamics behind it. Einstein was the one that came to my mind. How did he produce such great corpus and what common nature such great minds have ? Was he having some special gifts that his fellow peers or normal human beings didn’t have? 

The truth is he was not a Mozart type early prodigious talent. On the contrary , he was ridiculed to be a useless fellow in his school days and he didn’t even find the job of a school teacher after his graduation. The greatest gift or talent that Einstein had was his unrelenting stubbornness and  to think abstractly. He used to visually try to find solutions to the problems that he was confronted with and to persist with a problem till he got a satisfying solution to it ( He got his famous E=MC2 equation through his persistence and patience of ten years). This nature can be found common in Beethoven, Kafka, Feynman etc. 

The thing that really comes out common with great scholars is their ability to meditate on the problem that they are confronted with and to pursue it till its completion with consuming passion. The word “passion” here is very important because for getting the right question, perseverance is required but to produce a great work, passion all the way is required. Passion can be replaced by the word ‘intense pleasure’. The indomitable spirit towards their work that  these masters had  can be considered as an  aggregation of all pleasures that a human being can desire.

The human mind or ego lives with various forms of pleasure or to put it precisely normal human beings consume eclectic pleasures. However, scholars or people who produce great work (genius) have singularity of pleasure. Their work is for them their greatest pleasure or passion. But then a question that would obviously confront us is – Can a person following the above procedures produce great work. It can be  done but that requires dedication like a zen monk or like a unrelenting maverick. This was shown in the case of Susan Polga the first female chess grandmaster. Susan's father was a psychologist and he believed in the concept that genius can be made. He trained Susan and his other two daughters to make chess their second nature and he made them to be just consumed in that from early childhood. All the three became the first three female chess grandmasters. It is the sustainable passion for the work that is important.  The production of a great work  is not a pure logical process , rather the concept of intuition plays a crucial role to achieve the end process. The subject and the object gets diluted when a great work is produced. It’s like the Zen story in which a pupil asks his master of how to produce a great sketch of a tree around, the master tells him to meditate on the tree to undo the plurality i.e to become the tree.