A death in the family – a father and son story
Being summoned by the cops to a mortuary to identify a dead body is never going to be a walk in the park. More so when the deceased is your son whom you have not seen for the past 10 years. A blank expression hung uncomfortably on his face. His eyes watered and turned red.
With clinical detachment, the doctor explained to him the cause of death, pointing out various blemishes and scars on cold dead skin. He nodded and asked a question in a quiet voice as if it was expected of him. Not doing so was tantamount to confessing to the crime of infanticide.
Yes he killed him. He killed him by not being there. By putting off picking up that phone. By always finding something else to do that was more important than looking him up. By pushing away his mother and breaking the family into pieces all those years ago. He killed his own son by closing the door to their house for the very last time 10 years ago.
Audiobook….NOT!
I recently downloaded Denis Johnson’s “Tree of Smoke” as an audiobook from Audible. This came about after listening to a few techno-centric podcast proclaiming that the format was the best thing since sliced bread. After downloading the DRM-protected audio files, I loaded them into my iPod and plugged into the revolution. Trust my miniscule attention span to wander after about 10 minutes. At the end of half an hour I gave up and started writing this post.
Call me old fashion but I need the physical sensation of holding a bunch of glued-together dead trees. In a sense I need murder between my fingers for my mind to stay put in one place. Something in the smell of printed pages enriches my soul. Conceptually, having someone read to you is all fine and dandy but it takes away a whole lot of what makes the act of reading a book, fun.
I listen to the radio and podcasts all the time but those formats do not require the kind of commitment reading a book demands. Podcasts are rarely about any one topic for a substantial amount of time. The majority of podcasters flit from one thing to another at a rapid pace. The closest equivalent it has in the world of prose is poetry and anthologies of short stories. Both of which I am not fond of. Give me a juicy book with a beginning, a middle and the inevitable end any time of the day. I make no apologies for the internal wirings of my neurons and synapses.
So excuse me while I take a rain check on this technological advancement.
“The Hobbit” – 70th anniversary
Many may not know (I didn’t) that yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the publication of “The Hobbit” by one JRR Tolkien. For the crowd who howled in disbelief when Peter Jackson’s screen adaptation of “The Lord of the Ring : The Fellowship of the Ring” ended abruptly with Frodo and Sam embarking on a boat to the Gates of Mordor, this is the start of it all. The prequel to the greatest story of the century.
Malaysian author makes it into the Booker Prize list
What wonderful news on a Sunday morning (which I had to spend in a nondescript hotel room)! One of our own has made it into the ‘long‘ list of the prestigious Man Booker Prize (to give it its full and cumbersome title).
After Aw Tash’s nomination in 2005 for ‘The Harmony Silk Factory’, its incredible that another of our native son have been given the seal of approval by the venerable judges. More importantly they have chosen to preserve the name of the author as it should be in Chinese and not rearranging it to suit Western standards. Twan Eng Tan just sounds wrong to these oriental ears.
Tan Twan Eng’s (a big thank you to the white man) novel ‘The Gift of Rain’ was selected from a list of 110 entries in total. Though I have not read it, its now on my grocery list.
Travels in the Scriptorium – Paul Auster
Laboring under an unwieldy title, the latest book from Paul Auster plods along aimlessly with a listless and muddled plotline. Basically it concerns itself with one Mr. Blank who mysteriously finds himself in a room and without any knowledge of how he got there. During his entire stay there, we are informed that he is being observed 24/7 by a camera taking still photos of him every few seconds. To what end this endeavor serves is never made clear.
Various characters are trudged onto the scene ostensibly to interact with the main protagonist but their backgrounds are equally mysterious. All of them are supposedly people from Mr. Blank’s past and who have somehow been wronged by him. Under what circumstances these crimes were committed are anyone’s guess.
Clocking in at 130 pages, this is a slim undertaking by Mr. Auster. Sadly the end does not arrive soon enough. Tight story telling has always been this author’s forte judging from his previous outings. In a misguided attempt to push the literary envelope, Auster stumbles and ultimately irks the reader into fits of abject frustration. Consider this a miss.
Potter mania in the tropics
Despite 4 major retail outlets’ decision not to stock “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”, fans came out in droves to get their hands on the boy-wizard’s swansong elsewhere. Many expressed dismay over the big retailers’ apparent lack of concern for the common-man’s perpetual strapped-for-cash plight. When hypermarkets Tesco and Carrefour decided to bring some welcome relief by slashing the price by almost half, the big boys pouted and stamped their feet.
When I walked into one such outlet yesterday morning, things were extremely quiet with a touch of unease amongst the employees. The Harry Potter cardboard rack looked on accusingly sans the offending tome though it was well stocked with older books in the saga.
I have never read a single Potter book and don’t plan to in the near future. Be that as it may, I dare say that this price war episode may be infintely more interesting than anything originating from JK Rowling’s fevered imagination.
More coverage here.
Update : Read views from various people on the topic.
Harry Potter and the deadly price war
What a farce! Woke up this morning to the news that the much anticipated final book in the Harry Potter series will not be on sale after all in the outlets of the local major book franchises of MPH, Popular, Times and Harris. The reason is purely monetary. Putting aside their rivalry for once, they have banded together against hypermarkets Tesco and Carrefour, who decided to cash in on the Potter madness by slashing the price of the book by half at their respective outlets.
This begs the question; how much does it really cost to glue together a whole bunch of paper, some cardboard and then to print some ink on the resultant product? Probably a lot less than the asking price of what stands as the final book. Sure J K Rowling has to be paid and so do her editor and publisher. The guys manning the printing machines have to feed their families. Even then I find the price exorbitant and where the hell is the paper back edition? Why do you think the soft cover versions of most books usually takes about a year to appear after their hard cover counterparts?
For once let the common man (or children) enjoy some relief from the shearing heat of greed emanating from the corporate ivory towers. More power to the hypermarkets!
Alias Grace – a play
Bless my sister’s soul for having the foresight to purchase an extra ticket for yours truly to catch the one woman play “Alias Grace” last night at the KL Perfoming Arts Centre. It was free seating and being ‘kiasu’ Malaysians we naturally found ourselves sitting in the very first row, a meter and a half from the edge of the stage. The stage area itself was narrow as there was this huge wooden multi-faceted panel placed in the middle of it. Seemingly random phrases and words are scrawled across the surfaces, simulating the pages of a book, I guess, to highlight the fact that this play is adapted from Magaret Atwood’s tome of the same name. Rose petals are strewn on the stage guarded by two wooden chairs on both ends.
Australian Caroline Lee is a powerhouse of acting chops, balancing twisted innocence with violent intelligence. The story is set in 19th century Canada and revolves around the mysterious double murder of one Thomas Kinnear and his mistress Nancy Montgomery. Of the two who were accused of the heinous crime, one was hung at the gallows while the other, Grace Marks, was incarcerated in an asylum. She was 16 at the time.
Grace recounts her life through a series of interviews with the young Dr. Simon Jordan, an early practitioner of Psychiatry, a new branch of medical science at the time. In turns funny and haunting, Grace tells of her family’s migration from poverty-stricken Ireland to Canada. During the journey her mother dies and is cast off the ship into icy waters while her children watch in horror, forever damaged.
Condemned to a life of servitude, she moved from one household to another as a chambermaid catering to the whims and fancies of the rich and famous. Beneath the opulent veneer of high society, lies the treacherous world of scullery politics. Handicapped by poverty, servants etch out a living any which way they can, occasionally pushed into clandestine affairs with their employers. As an illustration, Grace recounts the tragic story of her best friend, Mary Whitney, who gets involved with her master’s son and resolves to get an abortion with borrowed money. She bled to death in the arms of Grace.
In her monologue, Caroline Lee takes on different parts, capturing the tone and nuances of a bumbling Dr. Simon Jordan, the boorish James McDermott who hung for his part in the murders and various members of the gentrified Canadian upper class. She imbues the main character with a barely contained lust for life and the ensuing frustration at her lack of it brought on by crushing poverty. Thrust into the world thus, she floats like a fallen leaf on murky waters until the fateful day when she is elevated to the status of ‘celebrated murderess’. Until the end we are never sure if she did indeed have a hand in the crime and that resonates with the power of mystery that the story would have lacked if it had ended otherwise.
There could have been worse ways to spend a Saturday evening.
JPod
It was a momentous event! I finally finished a book after more than a year of not doing so. Well what else could I do on an eight hour flight? This of course is selling the book in question short but let me assure you here that Douglas Coupland’s ‘jPod’ is a great read. Its about a group of video-game programmers seemingly caught in a limbo of boredom, bone-crushing cynicism and weird hippie parents.
It must have been a nightmare trying to balance the geeky in-jokes and conventional story telling without alienating the mainstream reader. For example, it must been strange for regular folks to come across multiple pages of numbers and nothing else nestled between the paragraphs of prose. Only the geek squad would appreciate the beautiful symmetry of the 8,363 prime numbers between 10,000 and 100,000. Do you know all the 972 three-letter words allowed in Scrabble? After reading this book you will. Will it alter an inch of your life? Probably not but nevertheless it holds a certain cosmic allure. Coupland is privy to this and milks it for all its worth.
Ultimately the characters are vacuous and bumbles along aimlessly in life. Far from being stupid they however choose to warp their mind with useless factoids and inconsequential sound bytes. They remind me of people in the real world who can remember the birthdays and favorite colors of their pop idol but cannot even get the days of the week correct. Coupland’s eye for details is peerless and this smartly observed book is further testament to his reputation as a literary force of nature.
