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” Brother, I’m Dying” by Edwidge Danticat

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Brother, I'm Dying

An incredible true-life story recounted by a member of a family that was torn between Haiti and the United States. A heart-rending tale of two brothers who loved and trusted each other but were compelled by circumstances to live apart. Joseph, the elder, lives in Bel Air, a hilltop neighbourhood overlooking Port-au-Prince harbour. The younger brother, Andre, moves to New York in the prime of his life leaving behind a wife and two infants. The elder of the two is the author of this book. She was barely two when her dad disappeared. Two years later, her mom follows dad. Edwidge and her brother Bob wait another eight years to make the crossover to privilege and prosperity. Dad slowly and painfully builds a future in a strange country, driving taxis to make a livelihood. Two of his four children are born in the United States.

Of her father’s migration the author says simply, “Because he had a job, a wife and two children as incentives to return to Haiti, my father was granted a one-month tourist visa. But he had no intention of coming back.” While Danticat avoids the temptation of getting too sentimental, any reader can easily feel the intense pangs of separation felt by every one of the characters in the story. Imagine the pain of a mother having to abandon a two year old and a four year old and make a leap into the unknown!

Abandoned children were aplenty in Joseph’s household. His grandson Nick was more or less forsaken by both parents, who separated soon after his birth, his mom moving to Canada and his father Maxo to the US. Marie Micheline, the precious orphan, who lost her Haitian mother and was abandoned by her Cuban father when she was six months adds sweetness and pathos to the story. Raised by Joseph and Denise, she bear four children out of wedlock, escapes domestic violence, and works as a nurse, until her life is brutally cut short when she was only thirty seven. “Nasty, brutish and short,” Rousseau would have opined.

Joseph’s wife Tante Denise appears as a larger than life figure, presenting a portrait of grace and stoicism in the face of adversity. Interestingly, the author’s own mother is mentioned less often.

Joseph loses his voice in 1978 following illness and surgery. There’s no dearth of tragedies – to list them would be next to impossible. Yet the book is not a tear-jerker but a thought-provoker, a true measure of the author’s literary finesse.

The book traces Haiti’s descent into political instability and social chaos, and speaks of abject poverty, lawlessness, gang wars, police raids and indiscriminate violence. “It was Thursday, July 15th, 2004, the fifty first birthday of Jean Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s twice elected and twice-deposed president. Having been removed from power in February 2004 through a joint political action by France, Canada and the United States, Aristide was now spending his birthday in exile in South Africa.” That’s an interesting way of putting it.

“The hill in Bel Air on which the house was built had been the site of a famous battle between mulatto abolitionists and French colonists who’d controlled most of the land since 1697 and had imported black Africans to labor on coffee and sugar plantations as slaves. A century later, slaves and mulattoes joined together to drive the French out, and on January 1st, 1804 formed the Republic of Haiti.” Wow! That’s the only example of slaves vanquishing a mighty colonial power. I’d read about this before but Danticat’s narrative is particularly interesting because it triggers some rare thoughts. Why did the Declaration of Independence (from Britain) by white colonists (in North America) become a globally acclaimed historical event, while a more stupendous feat achieved by poor and unarmed black slaves has gone unnoticed by the world?

And what follows is even more fascinating: “More than a century later, as World War I dawned and the French, British and Germans, who controlled Haiti’s international shipping, rallied their gunboats to protect their interests, President Woodrow Wilson, whose interests included, among others, the united Fruit Company and 40 percent of the stock of the Haitian national bank, ordered an invasion. When the US marines landed in Haiti in July 1915 for what would become a nineteen year occupation…” Oh! So one hundred years later (with mass produced social media ‘fake’ news at our fingertips) if some of us expect President Donald Trump to be driven by his economic interests, that wouldn’t be so far-fetched would it? After all, history is said to repeat itself.

“In the fall of 1994, Aristide returned to Haiti, accompanied by 20,000 US soldiers. Citing the brutality of the military regime and the menace of a mass exodus of Haitian refugees to nearby Florida, then President Bill Clinton launched Operation Uphold Democracy.” The author points out that while Cuban refugees were welcomed with open arms Haitian refugees were often imprisoned and deported. Joseph dies in tragic circumstances and Andre follows soon thereafter.

Danticat is humble enough to say, “What I learned from my father and uncle, I learned out of sequence and in fragments. This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at recreating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time. I am writing this only because they can’t.”

Overall assessment: Don’t miss this masterpiece.

Brother, I’m Dying
Author: Edwidge Danticat
Publisher: Random House
Year of Publication: 2007

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka

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The Metamorphosis

I was in Prague in the summer and Franz Kafka’s name came up somewhere somehow. The Czechs are incredibly proud of him. He is among the 20th century’s most celebrated authors and many of his quotes are mind-blowing. Consider this one: “Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.” One hundred years after the Russian Revolution we can clearly see what he means – but Kafka died seven years after 1917.

When I started reading The Metamorphosis, a sense of deja-vu set in almost immediately. I began to feel that I’ve read this book before. I was an avid reader in my schooldays, so perhaps I must have read it, though the memory is nebulous. The creepy feeling, however, subsists to this day, as I soon found out. The book takes you on a bizarre journey into an unfamiliar domain. Wonder how the author dreamed this up. Should I call it science fiction? But no, the story line is too well-grounded. And it does bring home some home-truths. It is fiction that touches both science and sociology.

Gregor Samsa is a travelling salesman who wakes up one morning to find himself turned into an ugly beetle. Until then he had been a conscientious worker, doing the daily grind, bringing home the bread and butter, supporting his parents and sister, and living a mundane life. But everything changes in a horrific instant. As Gregor’s life changes, the people around him are compelled to readjust their lives rather abruptly. His home-bound father starts going to work. His sister Grete starts taking care of him. His mother keeps a distance.

The cast of characters is minimal. A colleague from Gregor’s office who comes in search of him on Day 1 of the horrendous transformation, and three bearded paying guests who are taken in to supplement the family’s dwindling resources are the only other players in the game.

The original novella was written in German and published in 1915. There have been innumerable translations since. The text is barely 56 pages. The rest of the compendium is comprised of the Introduction, a whole lot of critical essays (some of which I didn’t bother to read) and some key documents including a letter from Kafka to his father (with whom he had a troubled relationship).

Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924 at the age of forty. He never married, though he had several known liaisons with women. He did not attain fame during his lifetime. He was a Jew and his three sisters perished in the Holocaust. There have been speculations that Kafka suffered from a schizoid personality disorder and/or anorexia nervosa. He was believed to be a loner with suicidal tendencies.

Kafka’s friend and biographer Max Brod was responsible for turning Kafka into a celebrity. Kafka’s wish was that his works should be destroyed but Brod ensured their publication instead. The Trial was published in 1925, followed by The Castle in 1926 and Amerika in 1927. Max Brod fled to Palestine in 1939, taking Kafka’s papers with him. In 1988, two decades after Brod’s death, an original manuscript of The Trial was auctioned for $2 million.

“A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.” Wow, Kakfa! What a quotable!

“I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became.” Yes, he proved it. He was trained to be a lawyer, worked for an insurance company, and look what he became!

Overall Assessment: Eerie and thought-provoking.

The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung)
AUTHOR: Franz Kafka (translated from the German by Stanley Corngold)
PUBLISHER: Bantam Classics
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 1972 (first Bantam Edition) (German original published in 1915)

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be” by Frank Bruni

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Where You Go

New York Times best-selling author Frank Bruni shows why rejection from an Ivy League college does not spell disaster but may even be a blessing in disguise. In his book, Where You’ll Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, Bruni takes on the myth that getting an Ivy League education is not only necessary for success as an adult, but also a stepping stone to wealth and prosperity. He examines the chaos of the college admissions process in the US, looking at college rankings, SAT scores, and acceptance rates of elite colleges.

Bruni connects the mayhem of admissions to the emphasis on privilege and branding, which ends up categorizing people by their race or their family’s income. Too often, admission into a top college becomes the number one priority, while trying to go to a school where you get the best education takes a backseat. Crafting a student’s resume begins as early as in preschool, as community service, sports abilities, and other extra-curriculars all contribute to where the student ends up attending. Students can only relax when they are finally accepted somewhere.

Bruni writes, “The sale is more important than the product,” as he uses his own personal experiences to show that being rejected from Ivy League colleges may, in fact, be a blessing. Bruni uses Arizona University as an example of a great school that is not in the Ivy League. Arizona offers high quality education, with a faculty that includes two Nobel and five Pulitzer Prize winners. Getting an education from your top choice, even if it is not in the Ivy League, is still the best option, but rejection can lead you off the path, where you have to learn to be self-reliant and more flexible, increasing your chances of success.

Where You’ll Go Is Not Who You’ll Be is a must-read for students heading into colleges, as it reminds them that just because a college may be higher ranked or has more prestige does not mean it’s a better place for their education. Written in a dynamic style but containing a lot of valuable information, this is a book that families and students cannot overlook as they get into the bedlam of college admissions.

Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania
Author: Frank Bruni
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Publication Date: March 2015

Reviewer: Sahil Kurup is a high-school student at St. Francis High School in Mountain View, California.

“Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World” by Tracy Kidder (Adapted for Young People by Michael French)

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Mountains Beyond Mountains

This was a book I borrowed from a schoolgirl in Columbus, Ohio. She has a dream of becoming a doctor and I was curious to know what she was reading. I picked three titles from her home library and ‘Mountains Beyond Mountains’ was the first one I read. Quite predictably, it was a version adapted specially for kids. The original book was authored by Tracy Kidder and published in 2004. Michael French was responsible for the adapted version.

The book is about a medical man with a noble mission. Dr. Paul Farmer, born in America in humble circumstances, goes to Duke university on a scholarship and chooses his life’s work in disease ridden Haiti, one of America’s poorest neighbours. He works and travels 24/7, treating patients, raising funds, and convincing global opinion makers that the poor must have options too, that healthcare would be ineffective if it targeted only the wealthy.

The book traces the amazing journey of an amazing individual, an inspiring saga of energy, enthusiasm and professional excellence. It’s a MUST READ for any one who has interest in the medical profession.

Paul Farmer and some of his most committed team members go on to found Partners in Health (PIH), a non-profit organization that combats diseases such as TB, AIDS and malaria in far flung places such as Peru, Kazhakhstan, Russia, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Malawi, Lesotho and Rwanda.

The book introduces us to many interesting personalities. Tim White is the ultimate philanthropist who supports Farmer’s ventures until he is down to his last penny. Jim Yong Kim, who partnered with Farmer to found Partners in Health is now President of the World Bank. Didi Bertrand is the Haitian woman who marries Farmer and shares his vagabond lifestyle while bringing up the children. She lived in Paris for years before moving to Rwanda with her husband. Ophelia Dahl, daughter of Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal and celebrated author Roald Dahl, meets Farmer in Haiti when she was just eighteen. She finds her calling and becomes one of the prime movers behind PIH.

Overall Assessment: Great story, great subject, but a bit laboured.

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World
AUTHOR: Tracy Kidder (Adapted for Young People by Michael French)
PUBLISHER: Random House
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2004

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“The Heart” by Maylis de Kerangal

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The Heart.jpg

As a book lover, a strong recommendation for a book from someone you greatly respect is impossible to ignore, and that is how I came to read the book, The Heart – it was recommended by none other than Bill Gates (in a recent issue of Time magazine). Not that Bill Gates is a literary expert, but as the co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, one of world’s most successful companies, and more recently, as the leader of the Gates Foundation, a philanthropic organization that he started with his wife, his book recommendations are certainly noteworthy. According to his blog – in which he has a dedicated section for books that he recommends – he mostly reads non-fiction but read The Heart, a novel, on the recommendation of his wife, who told him it was different from other books.

It certainly is. At its essence, The Heart is the story of a heart transplant. The heart in question belongs to a young man, Simon, just twenty years old, who meets with a fatal accident one day on the way back from an early morning surfing expedition with his friends. It was just a matter of chance that he was sitting in the middle and not wearing a seat belt. His friends, who were wearing seats belts, were also seriously injured in the accident, but they survive. The story of the  heart transplant is told through the lens of all the people directly involved in the process – Simon’s parents, who are utterly and completely devastated but eventually give their consent to the donation of his organs; the doctor and the nurse in charge of Simon at the ICU in the hospital where Simon is brought in after the accident; the liaison for the organ donation; the surgeon and nurse team who actually harvest the heart and transport it to the hospital where a recipient is being prepped to receive it; and finally, the recipient herself, Claire, a middle-aged woman whose own heart is failing rapidly and for whom a successful heart transplant is her only shot at survival.

The Heart is unapologetically a tragedy. There is no attempt to find any kind of silver lining in the situation—what can there be in the face of a young man dying so abruptly at the prime of his life? About the only positive thing in the story is the fact that Simon’s parents consent to his organs being harvested for donation, and we get to see firsthand the impact of the donation of one of these organs – his heart – and how it could potentially save the life of someone who would otherwise have died of heart failure. Other than this, the book is heart-breaking all the way through — it captures the shock and devastation of Simon’s parents so vividly and in so much detail that anyone who has lost a close family member will be able to identify completely with how they feel. In contrast to the grieving parents, it also shows how the doctors and nurses stoically go about their work — they have got to do what they do to keep our hospitals going, healing the people they can, and trying their best to save even those that they can’t.

Unlike most novels, The Heart is not a story that is told in a straightforward manner. The usual plot lines are simply not there. While you would expect the story to be primarily centered on Simon’s parents and on Claire, exploring their thoughts and feelings — perhaps with some profound insights on life — the book actually captures the background and personalities of each of the key people involved in the transplant. While this was interesting, I found that it seemed to detract from the overall impact and cohesiveness of the story — it was so broad that it just didn’t seem to come together. Also, some of these people got only a single chapter in the book for their story while others got several, and it wasn’t clear as to why that was the case. The Heart also goes into extensive, and sometimes excruciating, detail about the science and medical aspects of heart transplants — details that I didn’t particularly want or care to know about. Another point of departure for The Heart is the writing style, which is different and takes some getting used it. Sentences seem to go on and on, sometimes even for entire paragraphs, which, in turn, are often longer than a page.

In conclusion, I found The Heart an interesting book, with some aspects of it that were brilliant — notably in capturing the nightmare of a parent dealing with the sudden and irreversible loss of their child — but others that I could not really appreciate. Perhaps, I am too much of a traditionalist when it comes to novels to appreciate a book that is so unconventional.

Getting back to Bill Gates who strongly recommended this book, you can read his take on it at https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/The-Heart.

The Heart
Author: Maylis de Kerangal (Translated from French by Sam Taylor)
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (English edition)
Publication Date: 2016 (Originally published in French in 2014)

Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani runs a technology publication in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

This is the amazing story of a young African – American woman who became ‘immortal’ after cervical cancer claimed her life in 1951. The cells from her cervix came to be known worldwide as HeLa cells and continued to grow and multiply ad infinitum. They were the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory. They were the first living cells shipped via postal mail. They facilitated the development of the polio vaccine in 1952. They aided cancer research and virology studies, besides cloning and gene mapping. Both Russian and American scientists had managed to grow HeLa in space. But no one had ever heard of the cell donor.

Was Henrietta Lacks really a donor? Was she aware that her cells had been cultured? Poor Henrietta knew only pain and hopelessness. She didn’t know the cells that were killing her by the second were going to live forever.

The author gives us interesting details of the life and family of Henrietta Lacks and brings up interesting questions about medical ethics, informed consent, and donor rights. It was only two decades after her death that Henrietta Lacks was actually named in a publication as the source of the HeLa cells. Only then does the world realize that the cells came from a black woman. Only in 1973 do her children learn that her cells are still alive and multiplying. Only in 1975 do they understand that the cells are being bought and sold and that companies and individuals are earning profits while they themselves can barely afford medical treatment.

Henrietta Lacks, wife of David Lacks and mother of five children, died when she was just over thirty. She had been born Loretta Pleasant in Roanoke, Virginia in 1920. Her mother had died in childbirth when Loretta was only four years old. No one knows how or when Loretta became Henrietta. She was brought up by her grandfather, a poor tobacco farmer. She married her first cousin when she was twenty. By then the couple already had two children. It is a tragic tale of poverty and the acute deprivations that accompany it. Henrietta fell victim to cervical cancer, suffered acute distress, both physical and mental, and finally succumbed.

The book is as much about the life and journey of HeLa cells as it is about Henrietta Lacks and her family. You have to be greatly interested in science, anatomy, genetics and medicine to really enjoy the book. It is extensively researched, is acclaimed as a New York Times bestseller, and the subject is fascinating. Yet it is hard to sift through the scientific facts and get a grip on the story. The book unearths some unusual facts that most of us are unlikely to have heard of. “When the first humans went into orbit, Henrietta’s cells went with them so researchers could study the effects of space travel, as well as the nutritional needs of cells in space, and how cancerous and non-cancerous cells responded differently to zero gravity. What they found was disturbing: in mission after mission, noncancerous cells grew normally in orbit, but HeLa became more powerful, dividing faster with each trip.”

The sad part is that none of Henrietta’s children were able to break out of the vicious cycle of poverty and deprivation that marked their mother’s life. The paths trodden by the five children are all too predictable, given the circumstances of their birth and family history and the reader can’t help sympathizing with them. What became of Elsie, the first daughter who was committed to a mental institution while still a child, is particularly heart-rending. Deborah, the younger daughter learns of her existence decades after Elsie’s death. Neither their father nor their eldest brother, Lawrence, had ever mentioned her.

Dr. George Gey was the man who cultured the first HeLa cells. This was at John Hopkins. He gave them away to anyone who asked for them. He had no profit motive. But soon the distribution of HeLa cells became commercialized and a multi-million dollar industry was born. Samuel Reader, the owner of Microbiological Associates was first to make big money out of this. But it was John Hopkins that Henrietta’s children were wary of. The author traces the history of this world renowned institution which makes interesting reading. “John Hopkins was born on a tobacco plantation in Maryland where his father later freed his slaves nearly sixty years before Emancipation. Hopkins made millions working as a banker and grocer, and selling his won brand of whiskey, but he never married and had no children. So in 1873, not long before his death, he donated $7 million to start a medical school and charity hospital.” And the rest, as we know, is history.

The author informs us that, “A search of the US Patent and Trademark Office database turns up more than seventeen thousand patents involving HeLa cells.” The 1980 Supreme Court decision in the case of Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, who had been denied a patent for a genetically engineered bacterium that could consume oil and help clean up oil spills was an interesting piece of information.

Overall Assessment: Interesting, though not an easy read.

Title: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Author: Rebecca Skloot
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Year of Publication: 2010

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“My Life with Bob” by Pamela Paul

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My Life with Bob

Of the thousands of podcasts that are now available, there are only two that I subscribe to, the New York Times Book Review podcast and NPR’s Fresh Air. In fact, I listen to them so regularly that the voices of their hosts – Pamela Paul of the New York Times Book Review podcast and Terry Gross of Fresh Air – seem more familiar to me than the sound of my own voice. So when I heard of the book, My Life with Bob, by Pamela Paul that was published recently, I had to, of course, read it – despite the fact that I have a marked preference for fiction and My Life with Bob is more of a memoir. (Interestingly, Pamela Paul was interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air shortly after her book was published, so I had a chance to listen to both of them in the same podcast!)

Contrary to what you might expect, the “Bob” of My Life with Bob is not a guy, but a list of books that Pamela Paul has maintained for twenty-eight years, starting from the time she was in high school. This becomes obvious from the subtitle of the book, which is “Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues.” Thus, Bob here is an acronym for “Book of books.” It might seem strange to keep such a list – it’s not something people commonly do – and it is a testament to how much Pamela Paul loves books that she has kept a record of every book that she has read since high school. And not only that, her Bob is so precious to her that if she was forced to evacuate her home in a hurry, Bob is what she would choose to take – after her family, of course, but before critical documents such as passports and birth certificates. (Bob, is contained, so far, within a single notebook and is hand-written, and while I can see the importance of maintaining the hand-written aspect of it, I think it can at least be scanned and archived, so she does not live in mortal dread of losing it!)

For a fellow book lover, My Life with Bob provides a fascinating glimpse into the life of someone who has always been passionate about books since she was a kid. Keeping a list of books may have started out as a whim for Pamela Paul – one of those things you embark upon in your teens but soon lose interest in – but it actually became almost a necessity for her, as books were the one constant in her life that she was always passionate about. Her list starts with Franz Kafka’s The Trial on a summer-abroad trip to rural France as a high-school student and continues till the present day, following the arc of her life through college, early adulthood living in Thailand in the soul-searching “What do I want to do with my life?” phase, early career as a freelance writer in which she was able to land prestigious gigs such as a monthly column in The Economist, a first marriage ending in divorce, her second marriage, the birth of her three kids, and her professional ascent in the editorial and publishing world that has culminated in what would seem to be the pinnacle for someone who wants to work with books – becoming the editor of the New York Times Book Review.

Contrary to a personal journal or dairy which is commonly used by people to capture the events, thoughts, feelings – and very often, angst – at specific times in their lives, maintaining a list of every book that she has read is much more meaningful to Pamela Paul, as it concisely captures the trajectory of her life. Instead of reading her thoughts about what she felt at a certain time if she had captured them in a diary – most people who maintain regular journals will probably have hundreds of them – she can simply look at any book in her list and remember the event or experience associated with it, even if it was twenty years ago – similar to how a photograph can trigger long forgotten memories. In her list of books, she even indicates which ones she was not able to complete, which is also illuminating, as what a person does not like is as indicative of their personality as what they do like. While a list of books cannot always be a good filter to find like-minded people, a person’s reading list does tell you a lot about their personality, and the immediate affinity you feel towards someone who feels the same way about a specific book as you do is undeniable.

As you would expect from someone who is the editor of the New York Times Book Review, Pamela Paul is an accomplished writer, and while I have not read any of her earlier books, I found My Life with Bob very well written. It was fascinating to get an inside look at the life of someone whose world revolves around books, all the way from being a “bookish child” who always felt book-deprived, to her current position where she is surrounded by a glut of books and can only manage to read a tiny fraction of them.

My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
Author: Pamela Paul
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Publication Date: May 2017

Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani runs a technology publication in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“The Martian” by Andy Weir

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The Martain

Mark Watney, who is an astronaut on spaceship Ares 3, is sent on a mission to Mars and left stranded following a storm. His crew thought he was dead after seeing his suit lose pressure, and they made the tough choice to abandon him. He somehow survives, but has to find a way to stay alive until he can be rescued. He has no idea how to contact NASA back on Earth. His food, water, and oxygen will only last so long, so he needs to devise a plan that will keep his alive until help arrives. There’s little room for error, though, and Watney comes dangerously close to disaster on numerous occasions, using “Sols,” or days, to recount his stunning story.

The Martian is a different kind of book, a true science thriller in which math and science play the main role in the plot. Many pages are just Watney’s thoughts, filled with dissecting complex calculations about the planet’s orbit or his calorie consumption.

That doesn’t mean the book was long-winded or boring. It was interesting to see what a person on Mars thinks, as none of us has ever experienced it. Author Andy Weir creates a hilarious character in Mark Watney, who cracks jokes at random times, which keeps the readers entertained. Watney is also easy to empathize with. While no one can relate to his Mars experience, we can all relate to his emotions, and Watney makes it easier to take in the scientific part of the book without becoming overwhelmed.

I would recommend this book to all readers, as it would appeal not only to space travel enthusiasts but also regular people looking for a gripping plot. Although there may be a lot of description, Watney’s wittiness and his Mars adventures keep readers interested and captivated.

The Martian
Author: Andy Weir
Publisher: Broadway Books
Publication Date: October 2014

Reviewer: Sahil Kurup is a high-school student at St. Francis High School in Mountain View, California.

“Ties” by Domenico Starnone (Translated from Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri)

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Ties

I have to confess that the only reason I read this book – that it even appeared on my radar in the first place – was because it was associated with Jhumpa Lahiri. Last year, I had written about her memoir, In Other Words, which she wrote in Italian and which was then translated into English by another translator – despite the fact that she is, or at least was until then, an English author. It is incredible to me that someone who has achieved so much success in one language – she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Interpreter of Maladies in 2000 – would deliberately choose to discontinue all association with that language and attempt to adopt another language, which in her case was Italian, to the extent of actually moving to Italy with her family and talking and writing only in Italian. Well, she must have accomplished some of what she set out to do since she is back on the English scene, albeit not as an author but as a translator. I don’t know anything about the Italian literary scene, but the author of Ties, Domenico Starnone, is apparently a highly regarded writer in Italy, and Jhumpa Lahiri, after reading the book in its native Italian, jumped at the opportunity to translate the book to English and make it available to the English-speaking world. She has also written an Introduction to the English translation which was very illuminating, providing not only some interesting insights about the book but also about her journey from English to Italian and back.

Getting back to the book, Ties is more of a novella rather than a novel, which means that it is a relatively quick – and easy – read. (This is not to say that all short books are an easy read, but Ties was not in the least bit dense.) It is a story told in three parts, and is, at its heart, the story of a marriage beset by trials and tribulations. The protagonists of the story are a couple, Vanda and Aldo, who have two children, a boy, Sandro, and a girl, Anna. The novel opens when Vanda and Aldo have been married for twelve years, and Aldo walks out on his family to be with a younger woman who he has fallen in love with. Infidelity in a marriage is hardly an uncommon occurrence, but what makes Ties different is that that first part of the story is told entirely in the form of a series of letters written by Vanda to Aldo, entreating him to come to his senses and return home. She does not work and is having a hard time paying the bills; also, the kids miss their father terribly and feel abandoned. These pleas, admonishments, and guilt trips do not really work, as Aldo does not return and Vanda is forced to go out and find a job and singlehandedly run the home and bring up the children. Needless to say, she ends up becoming very hard-hearted and embittered.

The second part of the book fast-forwards several decades and is narrated by Aldo. Both he and Vanda are now in their seventies, and surprisingly, they are together as a married couple. At some point, therefore, Aldo did come back after all. This part of the book has a lot of reminiscing by Aldo on why he left and the reason that he came back. But the main reason for focusing on this particular time of their lives is because of a major incident – Aldo and Vanda have just returned from a vacation to find their house completely vandalized, turned upside down, and Vanda’s beloved cat missing. It is extremely upsetting, and as they go about starting to clean up, we come to know that Aldo has some compromising photographs which have gone missing, leaving him to think it was likely blackmail. At any minute, he is expecting a call threatening to show the photographs to his wife if he doesn’t pay up.

The “mystery” – if we can call it as such – is revealed in the third part of the book, and of course, I cannot write about it without giving it away, except to say that it was totally unexpected.

So, did I like the book? I definitely found it interesting as it captured personalities and a culture that I don’t know anything about. Also, it was a short and quick read, which I really appreciated. And the ending did come as a complete surprise, but not in any kind of unbelievable way. In fact, it brought the story back to the family unit, showing that the “ties” in any relationship, once they are weakened, do not really heal, despite our best efforts. This was particularly true of the marriage between Vanda and Aldo, which had started to develop fissures and cracks, and while it may seem that it all worked out in the end – Aldo did return to his family eventually – the damage was done. The rot had started to set in, and despite being together, neither Vanda nor Aldo was really happy. The situation also took a toll on the children, with both Sandro and Anna damaged in some way as a result of the problems in their parents’ marriage.

As Lahiri explains in the Introduction, the title of the book “Ties” is her interpretation of the Italian title “Lacci” which literally translates into laces. There is some reference in the book to the actual tying of shoelaces, and it seemed liked an apt metaphor for Lahiri to capture the essence of the story.

Does this signal the end of Jhumpa Lahiri’s hiatus from English? I certainly hope so, as she is a very talented writer, but we will just have to wait and see.

Ties
Author: Domenico Starnone, Jhumpa Lahiri (Translator)
Publisher: Europa Editions
Publication Date: March 2017

Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani runs a technology publication in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever” by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard

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Killing Lincoln

Lincoln has his premonitions. Two weeks before the assassination, he has a nightmare which he recounts to his wife and colleagues after a few days: “There seemed to be death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room. No living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms. Every object was familiar to me. ” Lincoln goes on to describe how he reaches the East Room and finds a corpse surrounded by soldiers and mourners. He asks one of the soldiers, “Who is dead in the White House?” Pat came the reply, “The President. He was killed by an assassin.” Thereupon the crowd burst into a loud outpouring of grief.

Bill O’Reilly is a household name in America. Together with Martin Dugard, a historian, he puts together a highly interesting account of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on 14th April, 1865. The history books had told us the dark deed was done by an actor, John Wilkes Booth. And we knew there were unexplained coincidences and conspiracy theories. This book tells us a lot more. The authors adopt a countdown format, with the narrative beginning six weeks before the assassination. The events of each day are outlined minute by minute. These are the concluding days of the Civil War and there is violence, bitterness and hatred all around.

It wasn’t a lone wolf attack. There were co-conspirators.William Seward, Secretary of State, who was seriously ill was attacked in his bed on the same day at the same time. He was wounded but survived. Seward went on to buy Alaska for the United States.

While Booth was shot dead 12 days later, 4 others were sent to the gallows within 3 months while a few more served prison sentences. Lewis Powell, the man who attacked Seward, was among those hanged. Mary Suratt, who provided arms and lodging to the conspirators became the first and only woman to be hanged in the United States. Whispers were doing the rounds that Edwin M Stanton, Secretary of War, formerly a brilliant Ohio lawyer, was somehow in the know of things. Was he among the conspirators? No evidence could be found.

The Montreal based J J Chaffey Company had paid $15000 to Booth and a whopping $150,000 to one Lafayette Bayer, a former spy, who was hand-picked by Stanton to head the man-hunt for Booth.

A telegram was sent to Chicago from Water Street on April 2nd, 1865, stating, ” J W Booth will ship oysters until Saturday 15th.” Booth never had anything to do with oysters or shipping but he shot Lincoln on April 14th. After his death, 18 pages of his diary mysteriously disappeared. Booth could have been captured alive but he was killed.The diary was found on him, but the contents were revealed only two years later, when Stanton handed it over. Did he remove the missing pages? It is anybody’s guess. Apparently it was Lafayette Baker who had handed it over to Stanton. This was revealed in 1867 when Baker published a book. Baker feared he would be killed – and he was.

Strange coincidences were a dime a dozen. On the day of the assassination, Lincoln’s bodyguard went on a drinking binge leaving the President unguarded at Ford Theatre. And he was never punished! Earlier, Lincoln’s eldest son Robert had been pushed from a railway platform on to the path of an incoming train. And guess who hauled him to safety? It was none other than Edwin Booth, elder brother of John Wilkes Booth. Another twist in the tale: Robert Lincoln was enamoured of Lucy Hale, who had secretly agreed to marry John Wilkes Booth.

Does the book merit a read? You bet!

Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever
Authors: Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin
Publication Date: September 2011

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“Olive Kitteridge” by Elizabeth Strout

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Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout is a well-known novelist who has written several highly acclaimed books, including last year’s My Name Is Lucy Barton and the new Anything Is Possible, However, she is most famous for her 2008 novel, Olive Kitteridge, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009. I read an article about her in a recent issue of the New Yorker, which piqued my interest. I had tried reading My Name Is Lucy Barton when it came out last year, but didn’t really enjoy it. After the New Yorker article, I thought I should give her writing another try. And what better book than her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Olive Kitteridge?

It was a good choice. While I can’t say that I loved the book – to the extent that I would go out and buy a copy of it to add to my personal collection – I found it extremely well written and can see why it won one of the highest literary honors there is for fiction. It is also very unusual in its format. Set in the small town of Cosby in Maine, the book tells the story of several different people in the town, with each of its thirteen chapters devoted to a different story. It’s almost like reading a collection of short stories, except that there is a common thread between them, an older woman called Olive Kitteridge. While some of the chapters are specifically about her and the significant events in her life – such as her husband having a stroke and eventually dying, and her son whom she doted on getting married to a somewhat obnoxious woman, moving away from home, getting divorced, getting remarried, and having a child – many of the stories center around other people in the town and she is peripheral to them. In fact, in some of them, she barely makes an appearance.

Typically, most story collections like this start off being disparate and disconnected but then bring all the threads together, with all the different characters’ lives somehow intersecting towards the end. But this is not the case with Olive Kitteridge. Only the stories that are focused on her seem to have some kind of story line, tracing her life as a young mother and school teacher—prone to impatience, somewhat insensitive, and completely unapologetic—to an old woman who has lost her husband and doesn’t quite know how to live by herself. The other stories are like snippets into the lives of different characters and their thoughts and emotions – such as a young man who is struggling with depression and lacks the will to live, a middle-aged piano player who is still haunted by a failed romance, a young girl suffering from anorexia who eventually dies, a young mother whose husband dies and she finds out that he was having an affair on the day of his funeral, a family whose young daughter runs away from home to be with her lover, and a psychologically disturbed woman who is planning to commit arson. What is common to all these stories, and to those about Olive Kitteridge as well, is how authentic and poignant they are. They seem to capture the different types of personalities people have, the range of emotions that they experience, and the different life events they are going through, all so realistically that it never seems for a moment that this is just something that someone made up. There is not the slightest hint of melodrama in any of them.

As a reader, I seemed to need the kind of continuity one expects from a novel, which is why I found the stories that were focused on Olive Kitteridge’s life the most compelling and wished there were more of them. And even though I greatly appreciated the other stories, I found myself not that caught up in their characters. I think this book should be approached more as a collection of short stories than a novel. I can see why it won the Pulitzer Prize, but I might have enjoyed it better if I knew in advance that it was not a novel in the conventional sense. It is best read, not in a stretch as I did, but as a collection of finely crafted stories, best enjoyed spaced apart rather than all at once.

Olive Kitteridge
Author: Elizabeth Strout
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: September 2008

Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani runs a technology publication in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“My Cousin Rachel” by Daphne du Maurier

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My Cousin Rachel

My Cousin Rachel is a book by Daphne du Maurier, who is most well known for her 1938 novel, Rebecca. While I have read Rebecca, years ago, I don’t remember much of it except that it was mysterious and suspenseful – and very good. I don’t think, however, that I got a chance to read any other novels by Daphne du Maurier at that time, perhaps because she never reached the kind of fame and ubiquity that novelists like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Somerset Maugham enjoyed, whose books have become enduring literary classics. Lately, however, Daphne du Maurier has re-emerged in public consciousness with another one of her books, My Cousin Rachel, being made into a movie that has just been released. (Rebecca was made into a movie in 1940 by none other than Alfred Hitchcock). It provided me with the incentive to go out and get a copy of the book to read before watching the movie, as I hate it when my own visualizations of the characters in a book – usually the best part of reading – become overlaid by the actors playing those roles in the movie adaption. I found the book so good that I finished it in the course of a weekend.

My Cousin Rachel tells the story of a young man, Philip, who becomes infatuated with an older woman, Rachel, whom he was all set to detest. Philip is an orphan who has been brought up by his cousin, Ambrose, a wealthy landowner in England. Philip aspires nothing more in life than to be like Ambrose, and is very much like him in looks and in nature – shy and reserved with no social graces as such and little interest in material comforts, yet hardworking and generous to his servants and tenants. The story is set in the 19th century, at a time when there were still estates and landowners and large houses with many servants. Ambrose is a confirmed bachelor and has no interest at all in romance and marriage, until he travels to Italy one winter to escape the damp English weather that is making him unwell. (It was very common at that time for the English to go abroad every winter, typically somewhere warm and dry.) In Italy, he meets a widow, Rachel, marries her, continues to stay in her villa for several months, and is in the seventh heaven of bliss until his health rapidly deteriorates and he suddenly dies. All of this is communicated to Philip back at home through letters, which initially show how besotted Ambrose is by Rachel and subsequently, as time goes on, become darker and more paranoid. Ambrose starts to think that Rachel is a spendthrift, that she is too close to the Italian man who is her friend and financial advisor, and finally, when he has become extremely sick, that Rachel is trying to poison him. Philip rushes to Florence as soon as he gets Ambrose’s last few letters foretelling doom, but it is too late – Ambrose is already dead.

Naturally, Philip is devastated – and furious with Rachel, who is now his cousin. He is told that Ambrose might have suffered from a brain tumor similar to that which his father died from, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling almost a murderous rage towards Rachel. But that is before he meets her. She comes to visit, and Philip is soon as besotted with her as Ambrose was, to the extent that he eventually signs over all of his considerable property to her and gives her all his family jewels, which are worth a fortune. He doesn’t care – he is in love with this woman, and despite their age gap, wants to marry her. They have a one-night tryst, an occurrence which makes him think that she has agreed to marry him, when in fact, for her, it was just a “one-night stand” – as we would it now – with someone she has affection for and who has just given her a fortune in jewels. Naturally, she shoots down the idea immediately. Philip falls ill, and while Rachel continues to stay on in England to nurse him, things are different between them now – she remains affectionate, but also distant and firm. At the same time, her Italian friend comes to visit, and Philip, like Ambrose, hates him, thinking they have something going on between them. The final straw is when Philip finds some poisonous seeds in her bureau – is she trying to poison him like she did Ambrose?

While, of course, I can’t give away the ending, I would have to say that the book was so suspenseful that I couldn’t put it down until I had finished it, despite the fact that it was not a thriller or a murder mystery. I also found it beautifully written, very evocative, almost haunting. It is told from Philip’s point of view and captures all of his emotions – his diffidence, rage, jealousy, infatuation, and confusion – so authentically and in so much detail that we seem to be inside his head, actually experiencing all these feelings. I also found it such a welcome change from contemporary novels, many of which attempt to be “clever” but end up just being obscure and convoluted, not to mention pretentious. My Cousin Rachel is a wonderfully crafted story, told in a straightforward manner and without any artifice whatsoever. I wish people still wrote books like this today.

My Cousin Rachel
Author: Daphne du Maurier
Original Publisher and Date: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1952
Reprint Publisher and Date: Sourcebooks, Inc, 2009

 Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani runs a technology publication in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“Into the Water” by Paula Hawkins

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Into the Water

Into the Water is the new book by Paula Hawkins, whose debut novel, The Girl on the Train, was such a huge success, not just commercially but also critically — it was on the New York Times Bestseller list for over four months following its release in 2015, which surely has to be a record, at least for a first book. I absolutely loved that book and wrote about it shortly after I reread it last summer and found that I enjoyed it as much as the first time I read it. Naturally, my expectations were really high from Into the Water, although I was also afraid that it wouldn’t be as brilliant as The Girl on the Train. After all, wasn’t it possible that the resounding success of her debut novel had blunted the artistic sensibilities of the author as well as her drive and motivation? Could Paula Hawkins really come up with something that would be as good as The Girl on the Train?

As it turns out, I needn’t have worried about not enjoying Into the Water as much as I did The Girl on the Train. It is as brilliantly written and as much of a taut, suspenseful thriller as The Girl on the Train – I couldn’t put it down and read it in the course of an evening, staying up till the early hours of the morning to finish it. I simply had to know what happens.

Into the Water is set in a small town in England that has a river running through it, one part of which happens to be a treacherous spot where people can drown – either by jumping into the water or by being thrown off. This spot, known to locals as “the Drowning Pool,” has a troubled history, with many women losing their lives there – hundreds of years ago, when people believed in witchcraft, women thought to be witches were thrown into the water, and more recently, it has become somewhat of a suicide spot for troubled women to end their lives. The book begins with the death of a woman, Nel, in the drowning pool. Did she jump into the water or was she pushed? Nel’s death seems to be connected to the death of Katie, a teenage girl, in the same spot about six months ago, which was believed to be a suicide. It’s also possible that the connection actually began with the death of another woman, Lauren, in that spot thirty years ago.

The story is told from the points of view of several characters: Nel’s long estranged sister, Jules, who is forced to come back to the town she and Nel grew up in; Nel’s teenage daughter, Lena, who also happened to be Katie’s best friend; Katie’s mother, Louise; the local detective to whom the case is assigned, Sean, who is also Lauren’s son; and several other characters including Katie’s brother, Sean’s wife, Sean’s father, the high school teacher with whom Katie was having an affair, and last but not least, a local psychic who everyone thinks is crazy but who actually has some important insights into what actually happened. Nel, who was a single mother, had always been obsessed with the Drowning Pool, and her research on it was not appreciated by the others in the community, particularly those whose lives had been affected by it, such as Katie’s mother, Louise. Katie’s brother was just a young boy, but he had seen his mother go out the night Nel died – had she something to do with Nel dying in the water? And why exactly had Katie committed suicide? Why was Jules estranged from her sister all these years? If Nel had indeed killed herself, maybe if Jules had responded when Nel had reached to her, she wouldn’t have been so troubled as to commute suicide? Why was Lena so difficult? Was it normal teenage rebelliousness compounded by the irrevocable loss of her mother, or was she hiding something? Why did Sean seem disturbed so often in the course of the investigation?

By the end of the book, you, of course, get the answers to these questions and things make sense. I was gratified to find the quality of the writing to be as good as The Girl on the Train, and it was just as suspenseful and thrilling, making it impossible to put the book down.

That said, while I thoroughly enjoyed reading Into the Water, I don’t see myself re-reading it with the same level of enjoyment as The Girl on the Train. For one, there are many more characters here, and not only is it initially confusing to the reader, I think it is also more difficult for the author to “get inside” the heads of so many characters, leaving us with a little more than a cursory understanding of many of them, even though they narrate their parts of the story in first person. Also, the reason behind Jules’s estranged relationship with Nel did not seem very convincing. And finally, I felt that the book does not sufficiently clarify every single question — and it could be because there were too many interconnected threads in the plot.

In short, I found Into the Water a great read, but not the kind of book I would go out and buy a copy of for my personal library, as I did for The Girl on the Train.

Into the Water
Author: Paula Hawkins
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publication Date: May 2017

Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani runs a technology publication in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“The Stranger” by Albert Camus (translated from French by Matthew Ward)

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The Stranger

After a series of books lately that left me somewhat disappointed – and made me question whether I was losing the pure, unadulterated enjoyment of books that I used to have as far back as I can remember – I picked up Camus’ The Stranger, at the recommendation of my high school daughter, who had been assigned this as one of her reading books this year. The Stranger is a classic that I had not read, and I hoped that a book that had withstood the test of time would get me out of my reading blues. While Albert Camus was familiar to me by name, I had not actually read any of his books, so I really did not know what to expect. But I was heartened by the fact that it was a slim book, as it meant that even if I didn’t like it, I could stick it out till the end. It was a classic, after all, and I wanted to see what it was about the book that had made it so enduring, well past the author’s death.

I would have to say that The Stranger helped restore my faith in books and reading. It tells the story of Monsieur Meursault, a man who is seemingly ordinary but who has such an unusual outlook on life – he is an atheist, and not only does he not believe in life after death, he also does not believe that there is any meaning to life itself – that it is almost impossible for most people to relate to him. He doesn’t wear these feelings on his sleeve, however, so up until the time the book starts, he was living a regular life – he worked in an office, was reasonably social, and had girlfriends, like most young men of his age. Things start to change when his mother, who has been living in a home for the elderly for the last few years, dies. He goes for the funeral, where his seeming lack of emotion strikes everyone else as a little strange. While he accepts his mother’s death as a matter of course and is not devastated by it, it doesn’t not occur to him to fake some emotion to show to others that he cares – he simply doesn’t think like that.

After the funeral, he goes back home and resumes his normal life – and as his mother was not staying with him, this was relatively easy. He meets an ex-girlfriend the next day and takes up with her again, going swimming, then to the movies, and finally to his place where they spend the night together. She soon becomes his regular girlfriend and they start seeing each other more often. At the same time, he becomes friendlier with one of the neighbors in his apartment building, Raymond, and somehow becomes involved in a conflict with Raymond’s enemies, culminating in Meursault thoughtlessly shooting one of them on a beach. There was no particular reason why he did this – it was something that happened on impulse rather than something he had planned or even thought about doing.

Needless to say, he is arrested and brought to trial, and this is where his unusual attitude to life – which is not only alien to everyone else dealing with his case, but also extremely annoying and frustrating – comes to play. While there is no question that he actually shot and killed a man, the argument centers around his character. The prosecution tries to prove that this was a premeditated crime and that he was a fundamentally cruel and evil person, as evidenced by his cold demeanor at his mother’s funeral where he didn’t show any emotion whatsoever. The fact that he hooked up with his girlfriend just a day after the funeral is an additional nail in the coffin. The defense attempts to contradict this reasoning by bringing some of his friends to testify on his behalf. But ultimately, the prosecution wins and Meursault is sentenced, not just to death but death by the guillotine – which was still around in France in the 1940s where this book is set.

The book ends with a chaplain making an unsuccessful attempt to make Meursault believe in God and an afterlife and to feel remorse. He just can’t fathom how someone can be so totally indifferent to death and not cling to some kind of meaning in life. But Meursault is like this, and he awaits his death with the same manner in which he has lived his life so far – by taking things as they come without getting caught up emotionally in them — making him the ultimate “stranger” compared to how most people think and feel.

I found it interesting how this attitude comes so close to the Buddhist philosophy of detachment, or even Krishna’s exhortation to Arjun in the Gita (Hinduism’s sacred text) to continue to act without being motivated by the fruits of your labor. There are millions of spiritual seekers in the world who aspire to have the same kind of outlook on life that the fictional Meursault has – to live without becoming wedded to the “pleasures” of the world, to not get caught up in it. Of course, for Meursault this comes from the conviction that “it doesn’t matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy,” and I imagine it would be hard to feel that sense of detachment without this conviction.

I am also amazed at how Camus was able to explore such deeply philosophical questions – which are still being debated today as much as ever – in his very first book. I was not surprised to find out that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. I also have to say that I am even more impressed with how famous this book has become, given that the protagonist is someone that I think not many people can relate to or identify with. I think we deserve a lot more credit that we give ourselves.

The Stranger
Author: Albert Camus (translated from French by Matthew Ward)
Publisher: Vintage International
Publication Date: March 1989
(Originally published in French as L’Etranger by Librairie Gallimard, France, in 1942.)

Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani runs a technology publication in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma” by Thant Myint-U

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The River of Lost Footsteps

I really, truly loved this book. Let me tell you why. Myanmar is India’s neighbour alright but this is the first time I came across a book written by a Burmese author. It is both historical and personal and tells us what has been happening in this closeted country during the last 100 years. The legacies of British colonialism, the brutalities of the Second World War, the bloody civil war of the late 1940s, the Chinese invasion in the 1950s, independence in the 1960s and subsequent rule by the military are laid bare with rare insight and political acumen.

India and Burma have overlapping histories and a common experience of British occupation. Having lived in India all my life, I had read history and understood international relations through my own special nationalist prism. I found Myint-U’s perception of historical events refreshingly different and authentic too.

The book provides much food for thought. The author points out that like Bahadur Shah Zafar, India’s last emperor, who was exiled to Rangoon, Burma’s last king, Thibaw, was exiled to Ratnagiri in India. His description of the fall of Singapore in 1942 to Japanese forces is revealing: “Despite all the frenzied preparation (at the expense of Burma), the ‘impregnable fortress’ of Singapore fell on 15 February, and Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, with knobby knees and in short khakhi trousers, surrendered at the Ford motor factory to the much smaller force of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the bull-necked ‘Tiger of Malaya’. No fewer than seventy-thousand imperial troops – British, Australians and Indians – had been defeated by thirty thousand Japanese.”

The author informs us that the Buddha died in 484 B.C. at the age of 80 after eating contaminated pork. When Chandragupta Maurya defeated Alexander’s general Seleucus Nicator and a peace treaty was concluded, the Macedonians “ceded most of the occupied territory in return for five hundred elephants.” The Burmese word for college, tekkatho is derived from Taxila. When Pagan was at the height of its glory in the 12th century, the kings and nobles wrote in Sanskrit and Pali and experimented with various Indian scripts until finally the Burmese language was reduced to writing (with a script from South India).

In 1106 when a delegation from Pagan reached the Chinese imperial court at Kaifeng, the emperor ordered that they be accorded the same rank and respect as the Cholas of South India. (The author calls them Colas. I guess he too is a victim of Americanization!) However, the Grand Council observed that the Colas were subordinate to the Sri Vijaya Kingdom of Sumatra whereas Pagan was now a big and independent kingdom. (This was one hundred years after Raja Raja Chola built the Brihadeeswara Temple at Thanjavur.)

In 1657 following the death of Shah Jahan, when Aurangzeb seized the throne, his brother Shah Shuja fled to Burma with his family and was sheltered by Sanda Thudamma, the king of Arakan. The king soon fell in love with Shah Shuja’s daughter Ameena and asked for her hand. Shah Shuja was horrified – and planned a coup in response. The plot was discovered and Shah Shuja fled to the jungle, where he was captured and killed. The princesses ended up in Thudamma’s harem, but soon afterward the king suspected another plot and slaughtered all the members of the Mughal royal family, including a visibly pregnant Ameena. A furious Aurangzeb besieged the Burmese kingdom. A year later when Chittagong fell to the Mughals, two thousand Arakanese were sold into slavery.

Ayutthaya, the capita of Siam (named after Ayodhya of the Ramayana), was razed to the ground by the Burmese in 1767. In the 18th century they were on an invasion spree – they routinely invaded Manipur, and on one occasion almost wiped out the entire population. In 1817 they occupied Assam.

Here’s something I really need to share: “The modern war rocket started its life, not in the West, as one might expect, but in India. In 1799, as the British laid siege to Seringapatam , Colonel Arthur Wellesly (the future duke of Wellington) advanced with his men toward a small hill nearby, only to be attacked by a tremendous barrage of rocket fire and forced to flee in complete disarray. When the fortress finally fell, among the enormous loot sent away to England were two specimens of Mysorean rockets.” This triggered a vigorous R&D program at the Royal Woolwich Arsenal and an improved version soon emerged – the Congreve rocket. Eight years later Copenhagen received the first shower of 40,000 rockets. In 1812 Washington DC was bombarded, burnt, and captured for the day. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The author can be forgiven for saying that Bihar is the birthplace of the Buddha. It was Gautama’s karma bhumi after all. What if he was born in Lumbini in Nepal?

Overall Assessment: Absolutely brilliant.

The River of Lost Footsteps – A Personal History of Burma
AUTHOR: Thant Myint-U
PUBLISHER: Faber and Faber Ltd., Bloomsbury House, UK
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2007

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.