captivated by India Between the Assassinations

This second book by the Man Booker-winning author Aravind Adiga, is written as a travel guide of short stories within a fictional Indian town of Kittur, between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and her son Rajiv in 1991. Over one week, the reader is taken to all the important areas and introduced to everyday individuals who are trying to eek out a living within the cultural mixing pot of traditional and post-colonial India. At first, the cultural complexity seems to be the key point of difference; the caste system, the blatant corruption, abject poverty and the arrogance of wealth. But slowly each story tells of the eternal human struggle, to be the best person you can, amidst the universal apathy, greed and despair. And in tune, the complex physical surroundings are carefully described as being anything between strikingly beautiful and pungently filthy. Minute details are explained so that it is easy to feel as though you are there in the middle of it all, with an understanding of why things happen the way they do... Kittur symbolises the universal crossroads of our civilisation, between naive enthusiasm and endemic corruption, the brightest, most educated and those unable to read, the downtrodden and greedy, and the crazy rich and unimaginably poor; all within the spiritual and cultural complexity of modern day India. We meet upper-caste bankers and lower-caste rickshaw pullers, Muslim tea boys and Christian headmasters, capitalist factory owners and communist sidekicks. Each character has their own story which gradually emerges. First of all we meet 12 year old Ziauddin, one of "those lean lonely men with vivid eyes who haunt every train station in India". Then there is Ramakrishna "Xerox", who has been arrested 21 times for selling illegally photocopied books to students; Shankara, the mixed-caste Brahmin-Hoyka student, who sources products from the underworld to set off a bomb in a Jesuit school to protest against the caste system; Abbasi, the idealistic shirt factory owner, who offers drinks laced with his own shit to corrupt government officials; Mr D'Mello, an assistant headmaster who desperately tried to keep his favourite student away from the pornographic cinema in the middle of town; Ratnakara Shetty, the fake sexologist, who sets out to find a cure for a young boy with venereal disease; the Raos, a childless couple who seek refuge within the forested outskirts of the town and their own circle of social intelligentsia who cannot help mocking them; Keshava, the village boy who achieves his aspiration to become a bus conductor; Gururaj Kamath, the newspaper columnist who incessantly "looks for the truth"; Chenayya, the cycle-cart puller who "could not respect a man in whom there was no rebellion"; Soumya and Raju, the beggar children on a mission to buy smack for their drug-addict father; Jayamma, the sixth daughter for whom her Brahmin father could not afford a dowry, who seeks comfort in DDT fumes; George D'Souza, a mosquito-repellant sprayer who systematically elevates himself to gardener, then chauffeur of a lonely rich Mrs Gomes, before he loses it all by trying to be someone else; and Murali, the loneliest member of the Marxist-Maoist communist party who falls in love with the poorest young woman in dire circumstances. He cannot afford to marry her and must concentrate on developing his skill for writing stories about real people who want nothing. The book is a compulsive read, if only for a sense of hope at the end. Perhaps the resounding message is the simplest, to appreciate what we have...

travelling with the surreal Passengers

I felt the need to escape reality and chose to see this romantic sci-fi drama of a spaceship full of frozen people heading off to start a new life. It was a combination of a futuristic space machine and a super tech cruise ship, with 5000 passengers in suspended animation for 120 years. As if we could ever get that technical accuracy! But the movie did not disappoint. It was entertaining in every way. The meteor hits and Jim (Chris Pratt) is awakened 90 years too early. Despite using his engineering skills to exploit every luxury on board, he becomes very lonely and bored and he is challenged to wake up the lovely Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence). His dilemma is shared with the android and very humanoid barman. There is quite a charming moral story about the fact that we can't always have what we want, and if we do, then we can't recognise or appreciate it until its too late, or almost too late! There are some brilliant visual effects of a swimming pool that bubbles out into space and the idea of a corporation running this scale of tourism is quite quirky.

The myth of Jackie

I was uncertain about seeing the film Jackie; would it be a historical documentary, a piece of american propaganda or something more than that? I should have realised that the Chilean director, Pablo Larrain, would not have grown up in America, surrounded by the Kennedy myth. Instead, he created a visual and emotional masterpiece, that covered the first few days after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, in November 1963. Jackie Kennedy was being interviewed for her lived experience and we were transported back to key events. She introduced the Camelot myth – in which he was an old-fashioned but tragic hero. But in reality she must have been in shock, some say PTSD, and was trying to honour her husband and country and be a mother to their 2 young children. The film has an amazingly discordant sound track contrasted by beautiful dresses and set design. Natalie Portman plays the emotions honestly and believably, and as she communicates with the priest, played by haunting and elderly John Hurt, she displays both her determination and vulnerability.

magical: All the light we cannot see

This novel offers a brilliant life affirming reading experience. It is a magnificent feat of creativity inspired by research for the multiple award-winning author Anthony Doerr. It is such an intricate weave of 2 young lives in 1940's Europe; a resilient blind French girl and a smart German orphan, whose life paths move towards their fleeting meeting in occupied St Malo at the end of World War II. They are both so amazingly strong and adept at surviving through challenges most of us would never consider possible. Before the war, Marie-Laure lives with her widowed father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master lock smith. She is blinded at six and her father whittles a wooden miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. At twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and she flees with her father to the walled Saint-Malo, to the sanctuary of her reclusive great-uncle. They carry with them what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous diamond; even they do not know if it is real or one of the 3 fakes created to deter the Germans. At the same time, in a northern German mining town, Werner grows up with his younger sister in an isolated orphanage. He seeks escape through his fascination with and skills in repairing radios. While he is excited to earn a place at an elite training academy, his sister has premonitions of its futility. As he tracks the resistance, Werner realises the human cost of his intelligence. The sensitivity of the meeting between Werner and Marie-Laure at the final stages of the war is truly tragically romantic. And in the final few chapters, it is wonderful to read forward to current times and realise the intergenerational beauty of such an amazing connection. There can be goodwill created in the most dire of circumstances.

the underbelly emerges in The Dinner

This book takes the reader along to a popular restaurant in Amsterdam with two brothers and their wives for a summer evening 5 course meal. Paul, the narrator seems like a calm and observant family man, who is somewhat in awe of the publicity his brother is receiving as a future prime ministerial candidate. While there are the usual brotherly spats, what we don't fully realise is the reason for the dinner; a discussion about their 15 year old sons should but does not really happen, and probably would never have been a discussion. We quickly realise there are no polite happy families and the horrific behaviour of both boys may not have just been a coincidence. They were caught on a grainy CCTV camera and are recognisable to both parents - but there are differences of opinion about what to do next. There is also the threat by the older adopted brother to release a youtube video. Throughout the first few courses, we begin to appreciate Paul's sinister and violent underbelly. While the promise of a diagnosis is confusing, it probably does not matter whether he has a personality disorder, Aspergers or is a sociopath. What is important is that there is a genetic link and that medication could be helpful, if taken as prescribed. It is also quite shocking to realise that Paul's wife is fully aware and not only accepts but covers for her husband and son. It seems inevitable that this boy has amazing capacity for violence, which his father is slow to recognise. By the end of the meal, it is clear that decisive action is needed, and violence seems inevitable...

An enjoyable experience, reading The Art Lover

This was a book and an author I have never heard of - but as friends' recommendations goes, it was a good one! The author, Andromeda Romano-Lax has a Greek first name, Italian and German heritage, and she married into a Jewish family. She grew up in Chicago, worked as a travel writer and freelance journalist before becoming a writer and living in Anchorage, Alaska. It seems this book unpacks something about individuals' search for meaning in Europe between the wars. The novel opens in Munich in 1938, where an introspective young German, Ernst Vogler is learning to make sense of the present by understanding Greek and Roman art. He works on the Sonderprojekte, which is a quest by Hitler, to amass European masterpieces, to promote human strength and beauty in natural settings.The book opens with the disappearance to Dachau of his artistic mentor, but he is given a book and a personal story, which match and underpin his work project. He is sent to deliver the classical sculpture "the discuss thrower" from Rome to Germany. This simple plan slowly turns into a dangerous detour of deception, corruption, lies and murder, across the beautiful Italian countryside. Ernst is both naive and unprepared for the situation that evolves, largely involving twin brother drivers being chased by a greedy German diplomat. There is sufficient depth of character of the three young men who share the front seat of the truck while the sculpture is hidden in the back. Gradually, the Italian family life emerges and it is not surprising that Ernst realises a few days in Italy can change his life; the advice given to him by his mentor! The elder sister's story matches his own in strange ways and he learns more about himself as a result. Then it is quite a treat to read forward 10 years to when he is tasked to return the sculpture to Rome and he revisits the Piedmontese hillside where the family lived...

The Fencer emancipates Estonian children

The Fencer is a Finnish-Estonian-German coproduction based on the true story of Endel Nelis, a championship fencer who worked as a sports teacher in Haapsalu, a small coastal Estonian town. It is important to know that the Soviets occupied Estonia in 1940 and drove out the Nazis; but also persecuted the Estonian men who had been forced to join the German army. Many were executed or sent to Siberia, so the small towns were populated by children without fathers. Estonia only regained its independence in 1991. Back to the film, and just after the war, Nelis (Mart Avandi) arrives as the new sports teacher. The suspicious principal (Hendrik Toompere) remarks that fencing is not a proletarian sport, and therefore not suitable for the children. After his attempt to set up a skiing club is scuppered by the army taking all his equipment, and he is observed by young Marta practicing, he sets up a Saturday fencing club. It is great to see the children and later the parents supporting their development and expressing themselves; they start using branches as foils and only gradually acquire donated equipment. There is a back story that Endel fled Leningrad and he must make a difficult choice as to whether to support his team in the national fencing tournament in Leningrad. There is a real sense of despair and depravation, that is somehow mediated by individual focus and achievement in the structured sport of fencing. We see a few children liberated by their ability to compete, despite a lack of practice and equipment. There is also a desperation mirrored in Endels who is clearly running away but has also learned to love and inspire the children to do their best.