All in Fiction
Seven Sixes Are Forty Three is a series of fragments of the life of Kushank Purandare, a writer living off the kindness of people in this big bad world. Disillusioned with the lack of certainty and empathy in a world that is largely incoherent and unsalvageable, Kushank drifts about wallowing in his past and doing bizzare jobs.
Kundera has long explored themes of impermanence and fluctuating identity--often to memorable effect, particularly in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and now even more so in Immortality. People believe that they can achieve immortality to a smaller or greater degree by maintaining an identity of themselves in people’s minds up until they die. In other words, death and immortality, ironically, is an inseparable pair more perfect than milk and cookies. When death approaches, so as immortality.
The century since Franz Kafka was born has been marked by the concept of modernism— a self-consciousness new among centuries, a consciousness of being new. After his death, Kafka epitomizes one aspect of this modern mind-set: a sensation of anxiety and shame whose center cannot be located and therefore cannot be placated; a sense of an infinite difficulty within things, impeding every step; a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage and religious belief, must record every stroke as pain.
Published in Kundera’s exile in 1984, and without betraying the title, there is certainly a fundamental weightlessness to this book. Even after the third read, I can only recall fragments about the characters. A tangible milieu, a well-paced plot, and the extended passages of straightforward philosophical and political speculation, made it clear that this is not for readers who prefer the conventional storytelling.
The Moon and Sixpence is a book about the life of an unassuming British stockbroker, with a secret unquenchable thirst for art that he is willing to abandon the trivial pleasures of bourgeois life for the penury and hard life of an aspiring painter without considering himself ridiculous or vain. He is cold, selfish and uncompromising in this quest for beauty.
When the outbreak of a pandemic swine-flu wiped out 99% of humanity, what will happen to the survivors? This book is not so much about apocalypse as about memory and loss, nostalgia and yearning, and the attempt of art to deepen our ephemeral impressions of the world. Whereas most apocalypse stories push harshly forward into terror or dystopia, this novel moves back and forth in time, illustrating the pre-apocalyptic world and twenty years after civilization has collapsed, when the worst is over and survivors have grouped themselves into isolated settlements.
My favorite novel about Absurdism.
Just like his existentialist comrades, Mersault is buffeted like wreckage in the indifferent waves of the ocean. He is neither cynical nor optimistic. He demands nothing from life or people, and cultivates nothing. His indifference is not stoicism, for he buys into to no larger sense of nature. Nor is he a recalcitrant Diogenes, sneering at convention with derision…….
This is a world where an institution has perfected the ability to predict when someone is going to die. This same world has a call center named Death-Cast, that’s responsible for phoning individuals during midnight to let them know they are dying in the next 24 hours. Furthermore, this cruel world has an app, Last Friend, much like a dating service, that allows people to find other to-be-dead people to spend their End Day together.
Literary masochism required.
His penetrating insight that life is in essence a meaningless process of gradual, inexorable death lead him to his degradation. His feelings that he is a disqualified human being, is driven by his sensitivity to the frailty of human bonds in the urban world. Death is the only escape.
Let me just put it this way: The book is magic. The writing is magic. The plot is about magic. When I said modern literature can hardly measure up to the classics, I didn’t expect to run into this sparkling and mesmerizing prose. The descriptions were immersive, atmospheric and pure enchanting that they encapsulate your emotions at the very point of the book they are placed.
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secretes of the Universe is about two boys, Aristotle Mendoza and Dante Quitana growing up in El Paso, Texas during the 1980s. When Ari, a perpetually annoyed and angry teen met Dante, a sentimental and know-it-all young man, their whole world changed. As readers, we witnessed their lives from age fifteen to seventeen, watching their relationships with oneself, each other, and the world grow, change and strengthen.
The Man Who Laughs is a sad and sordid tale of the protagonist, Gwynplaine in early 18th century England. This poor little boy is deformed as he had his lips cut off and his mouth split open from ear to ear, mimicking a creepy smiley face. His face is frozen in a permanent rictus which makes him the subject of mockery. This tragic destiny echoes that of an entire martyred people, waiting for the coming revolution….
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”
—Henry D. Thoreau
There is the past and death. Then there is future and life, served on a silver platter, which one do you take? Seems like a no brainer. But what if the dead carry so much of ourselves that living without them is not quite living anymore? What if the prospect of the future feels like a brutal betrayal of the dead? Norwegian Wood is a sprawling peak into the lives of a group of severely broken youths confronting the realities of emptiness.
