Existentialism is a Humanism | Sartre

One of the plights that existentialism as a philosophy has endured over time is multiple interpretations as well as multiple meanings. One of the main reason is that though the term was coined in 20th century, it was then pinned on the works of some previous philosophers who wrote about some questions and problems that [...]

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1Q84

Yeah, the title looks interesting and one can only imagine how interesting a book by the same title is going to be, as it is the latest offering by Haruki Murakami. Yup, the master’s done with his new book and it is due for release in Japan this May. It will take some time for [...]

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RIP J.G. Ballard

British novelist J.G. Ballard, famous for works like Crash and The Empire of the Sun, and after whose works the term Ballardian has been coined, died following a long illness.
Here’s Guardian’s obituary.

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Remembrance of Things from Past

Ah, its no Proust post, and you already know it seeing the book cover on the left, anyhhow am just reading Bill Bryson’s A short History of Nearly Everything. It’s been two days and am more than halfway through and its been a pleasure till now. Every second page you turn and some name from [...]

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My Turkish Library – Orhan Pamuk

I regret that I have not been able to shake off the enlightenment utilitarian idea that books exist to prepare us for life. Perhaps this is because a writer’s life in Turkey is proof that they are. But it also has something to do with the fact that in those days Turkey lacked the sort [...]

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Good news for Bolano lovers

Two new novels by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño have reportedly been found in Spain among papers he left behind after his death….[...]..It follows the discovery of another novel, entitled The Third Reich, which was shown to publishers at the Frankfurt book fair in October.
Publication of the books would add to the number of works [...]

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Murakami for Nobel?

From
The Nobel Prize for literature has been set for October 9, the prize awarders said Friday.
Perennial favorites, from American novelist Philip Roth to Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, top the list of hopefuls for this year’s prize.
Well, it normally happens that every year somebody gets the Nobel Prize for Literature and then I get started with [...]

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Victor Pelevin

I haven’t been reading anything these days, but yeah there’s some occasional reading about books cinema n all. It’s while that kind of reading i came to know about Victor Pelevin, first in bookforum and then now in NYT, both reviews about his new book. He looks good, something like Murakami, though can’t say that [...]

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How Indian Is Indian Writing In English?

From
At a reception organized at Santiniketan to pay homage to Rabindranath Tagore’s literary genius after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Tagore said, “The insult and infamy that was my lot to suffer at the hands of my country were not inconsiderable in quantity and so long I had borne them with [...]

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Broken April | Ismail Kadare

Broken April by Ismail Kadare is mostly a description of Blood feuds in Albenian highlands, bound by the laws of Kanun. It starts of as a story about a man, Gjorg Berisha, who is bound in a blood feud, spanning several decades and almost 70 deaths between two families. Now it is his turn [...]

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Reviews of Ballard’s Biography

Here at LRB Thomas Jones talks about Ballard’s views on Crash while reviewing his biography “Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton“.
Crash, Ballard’s most controversial and second most famous book, explores the idea that there is ‘a strong connection between sexuality and the car crash, a fusion largely driven by the cult of celebrity’: just think [...]

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Things Fall Apart

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
– W B Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is shows life in an African village Umuofia, of Ibo society, right before and after the Foreigners, or the so called [...]

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Waiting for the Barbarians

For Coetzee there are no absolute truths, but several small, big, convenient, not so convenient, approachable truths. And these seemingly approachable truths support, contradict, elevate, and undermine each other. All having their share of doubts and conflicts, further muddled by our human lives, the beliefs, the situations within. Take any fictional work of Coetzee, whenever [...]

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Pamuk on his Writing & Sufism

I am interested in Sufism as a literary source. As a discipline comprising positions and actions that train the soul, I cannot engage with it, but I look at the literature of Sufism as a literary treasure. As I sit at my table, the child of a republican family, i live like a man committed [...]

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The others experienced nothing like it, even though they heard the same tales.
- Novalis

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Mythologies | Roland Barthes

The difficulty of starting with a contemporary author, of philosophy, having tall reputation is that they seem not to engage with areas which seem basic or eternal but are the by-products of a generation or two feeding upon those basic or eternal things. It’s the same feeling that I seem to have with certain directors [...]

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Reading Jung

…Philemon and other figures of my fantasies have brought to me the crucial insight that there are things in psyche that I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own existence..[..]..”If you see people in a room you would not think that you made those people, or that you were responsible for [...]

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Reading this year

It was a very good year in terms of amount of reading done, though the amount of reading dwindled in the second half. Below are few lines about the authors and the books.
Orhan Pamuk – Snow, My name is Red & Other Colors: Essays and a Story:
Unlike booker, with Nobel Prize one definitely gets to [...]

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Life & Times of Michael K.

It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it [...]

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Art and The Artist

….The entire comedy of art is neither performed for our betterment or education nor are we the true authors of this art-world. On the contrary, we may assume that we are merely pictures and artistic projections for the true author, and that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art– for [...]

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Almost Invisible

The ancients built Valdrada on the shores of a lake, with houses all verandas one above the other, and high streets whose railed parapets look out over the water. Thus the traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada [...]

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The Brothers Karamazov

I am just through with the third part, abt 700 pages, of this mammoth saga about man’s destiny and existence. It has been quite a laborious read till now, mainly because of the melodramatic intensity with which Dostoevsky writes. Almost all his characters keep on brimming with emotions. Its a conscious approach i guess, which [...]

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Another week

It was quite a rainy weekend, which just made me stay indoor most of the time. Though i couldn’t resist going out on Sunday evening. It did trickled a bit but then who can resist the last shivers of a receding winter.
Watched few movies :
American History X: Starts promisingly but then just flatters as [...]

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My God Died Young

Alone in my room, i wonder sometimes if these people can or should be answered. How does one explain the whole business of alienation in a short sentences; the sheer tearing pain of not being able to belong to the very place where one wants to send down roots.?This side of the twentieth century we [...]

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January and me

Blogging can be really boring when you don’t take time out of it.
Isn’t that same for every other thing we just don’t care about or can’t find time to care about. Anyhow, its not that i don’t like blogging or anthing but just that somehow i couldn’t blog this whole of Jan. Even the soliatry [...]

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The Parrot

Here’s a short story that was in Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes. It was found among some press cuttings that Flaubert collected over his life time.
********* 
In Gerouville, near Arlon, there lived a man who owned a magnificent parrot. It was his sole love. As a young man, he had been the victim of an ill-starred [...]

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Murakami’s Wonderland

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

[Some spoiler here]

I was born by the sea. I’d go to the beach the morning after a typhoon and find all sorts of things that the waves had tossed up. There’d be bottles and the wooden geta and hats and cases of glasses, tables and [...]

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The Plague

The Plague – Albert Camus

How should a man confront death when it stares him in his eyes? Should the character of the calamity be responsible for human action or should it be the human character that should define the calamity? Can a man be scared to death for something when that same thing is giving [...]

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About Harold Pinter

I have been going through Various Voices : Prose, Poetry, Politics( 1948-1998)- Harold Pinter for quite some time and have been quite fascinated by how Pinter approaches his work, life and society. What quite strikes is his honesty, which he embodies in every walk of his life. To him writing is a struggle both on [...]

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The Remains of the day

The Remains of the day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Have you ever wondered how we form our decisions in life, how we take the turns and accept the changes in and around our lives.
At times things are based predominantly on some very particular event or situation that happens to happen with our life. But most of the [...]

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Kundera’s Slowness

Read Slowness by Milan Kundera this week.

The novel was an inquiry about the loss of pleasure of Slowness in today’s fast tracked world. The author weaves a libertine novel where two stories separated by a century or two are told in parallel. Few more things like hedonism, exhibitionism and discretion also get their share of [...]

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Slowman is indeed a slow affair

Slowman – by J M Coetzee

What happens when you see yourself standing at some point where you are not sure where to move and no path is visible to you, let go any goal or destination. You stand there muttering, cursing, lamenting and at times assuring and reasoning yourself. And then suddenly out of nowhere [...]

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Countenance

When she looked into his eyes she thought he could be the same person. When I looked into his eyes I thought I saw recognition. Now I know. You fake it. If you think you’re supposed to recognize somebody you, you just pretend. You bluff it to get a pat on the head from the [...]

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Harold Pinter on Shakespeare

The mistake they make, most of them, is to attempt to determine and calculate the source of wound. They seek out the gaps between the apparent and the void that hinges upon it with all due tautness. They turn to the wound with deference, a lance, and a needle and thread. At the entrance of [...]

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An artist of the Floating world

An artist of the Floating world – by Kazuo Ishiguro
Its Oct 1948, Japan is resurrecting after the shattering and mournful World War II. People are learning new things which they at times call western things and also are trying to unlearn few old things also. At one side young men are brimming with confidence, as [...]

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Overemphasizing syndrome

Have you ever had a feeling that the other person may not be able to tell the precise point that you are trying to tell?
Or he may not be able to see the thing the way you saw?
Let us see from listener’s perspective.
Don’t we at sometime or the other have a feeling that the speaker, [...]

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