Fun Home - An exploration

I was prompted into reading Fun Home by Sinduja (See below. Warning: plot spoilers in her review as well as mine). A tragicomic, in the same vein as Persepolis, Alison Bechdel uses the brevity of the format with great effect to explore her complex relationship with her father. I’ve come to believe that the Graphic novel is a powerful way to deal with difficult and emotionally overloaded subjects in an engaging, thought provoking way with the illustrations speaking a thousand words. I also enjoyed the thematic organization of the narrative instead of a strictly chronological one.

To me Fun Home, in many ways, illustrated how we often use childhood experiences to justify the way we turn out as adults (not an entirely unfounded argument) but the fact is causation is mostly retrospective. Bechdel for example, traces her obsession with keep her spaces spare to her father’s obsession with creating a Victorian home, a restoration project that lasted his lifetime.

I enjoyed how Alison describes the effect of growing up in a family that ran a funeral home and how this stunted her ability to express grief at her father’s demise.

Alison then muses about how we believe we will react to certain events in specific, stereotyped ways and how, when actually confronted by those situations we discover that our reactions are quite different – that we perhaps cannot shed those public tears and labour under a much more private coming to terms with.

Another part that struck me as particularly poignant was how she tried to claim some responsibility for her father’s death and holds on to guilt as a lasting bond. I was reminded of this particular portion again yesterday as I was watching No Reservations, one of my absolutely favourite movies, for the umpteenth time. There’s a scene in the movie where Zoe is found by Kate at her mother’s grave and Zoe tells Kate that she came there because she was afraid of forgetting her mother.

Through the journey of the graphic novel, Alison traces, one by one, the various things that bonded her with her father in both antagonistic and compassionate ways. From books to their aesthetic preferences to her sexual orientation, Alison finds the hand of her father in every aspect of her life and eventually realizes that she can understand that bond only to a certain extent through rational contemplation, and that perhaps, she depends on him far more than she knows or cares to admit.

Review also posted here.

Fun Home: A tragicomic

Fun home calls itself a 'Tragicomic', a justified name, because Alison in this book, tries to make sense of a heartwrenching tragedy called 'loss of a loved one'. For the most part, I thought Alison was objective and distant while trying to comprehend her father's death, with a wry underlying sense of humor, dark ironies, and obsessions which are best understood only in the face of a grave tragedy. Dark humor is no fun without the darkness, and the darker the better. I enjoyed her critical reconstruction of her childhood, and her identity as she grows out of her childhood, as she introspects about her relationship with her father. I don't know if her relationship with her father was complex, but her understanding of the same definitely was. 

What stays with me is that she and her father were 'inversions' of each other; completely polarised in their most fundamental beliefs; her father being a man, loved flowers, and was thought of as a 'sissy' by her. Her father, on the other hand thought she was too manly for a woman. The fact that they both flouted others' expectations of them, from their gender and yet, disapproved of each other, connects them on the deepest levels. It's almost like Alison wanted to be a man and feels her father is lucky to be a man, and yet does not seem to enjoy it and vice versa. Disconnected badly, and yet connected deeply, they are placed in a conflicting, a lifelong emotionally draining situation. 

Her father was a mess. That he was a closeted homosexual, and had discrete affairs with several of his students, was OCDish about flowers and restoring their Victorian house did have strong implications on Alison and her siblings. Alison implies that most of his obsesssions and dedications derive their roots from his conflicts in accepting himself and his sexual identity. Alison on the other hand, chooses to accept her homosexual identity openheartedly and is comfortable disclosing it to the world. But to be fair, she and her father were products of different times; and Morever, Alison had the advantage of seeing her father, his mistakes, and his right doings. I think Alison acknowledges this when she says in the end 'But he was there to catch me.'

Alison calls her father obsessive, but she is obsessive too. Not just about believing that even numbers were better than odd numbers, and such like from her childhood days, but even about understanding her father and dealing with loss. Who would otherwise draw parallels with Proust, Gatsby, Icarus and several others, counting days and pages and draw intimate connections out of the most mundane details? But I understand what she did, and I think her philosophical observations, and her literary parallels and explorations only help her understand the depth of her pain behind the loss. It was more difficult for her, because she always roamed around death, owing to the 'Fun home' (Stands for funeral home, that her father was the director of). She thought she would be prepared for death, but faces one of many life's evil surprises - that indeed she wasn't. So if she could skip the steps, 'Denial and Anger', what would she replace them with? All the suggested rules in the rule book for behavior or understanding that worked for others, don't work for her. This also reminded me of how I thought, so many of our unexplored emotions are defined by films, television and other forms or media that we are exposed to. Like whenever I imagined someone's death, I always thought I would 'cry' like the way an actress did in a movie, or if I had to be sexy, I would do that someone else did somewhere. Many times we behave and believe a certain emotion (especially the ones that we don't go through very often) needs to look and feel like this. Alison didn't have a choice, because she just couldn't act like anyone else, because her situation was distinctly different.

I loved her confusions and her making sense process, because when faced with something like death of a loved one, the amount of confusion we face is just boundless; It's like quicksand that sucks you deeper the more you try to get out. It's daunting to even think about, and the best reaction is to use the everlasting drug to any problem - escapade and procrastination. By reading this, I am inspired to enter a room I have locked within, and battle the cobwebs, and understand.

Alison had made up her mind that she was a lesbian even before she experimented, in the 'intellectual way'..I thought her coming to terms with her father's loss was similar too - A spiraling intellectual ladder, but she falls into his lap in the end. And acceptance blinds it all, like white light.

Revisting and retelling history

Amitav Ghosh has a talent for description. He describes in a way that makes me feel like I was right there, looking, watching, hearing. It's the quality I loved about Hungry Tide - I could use that book as a tour guide when I do make it to the Sundarbans. In an Antique Land also has that power. It makes me want to get up, go explore, see a new city beyond what tourists see.

It moves between the 1980s and the 1100s, smoothly; the Egypt of the Jews interwoven with the Egypt of Muslims.It encompasses two countries - India and Egypt - and examines the layers of their relationship with each other - the demands of politics and economics bringing them together, the differences in culture setting them apart. The discourse of three religions that have been in constant conflict in modern times - Islam, Judaism and Hinduism - throws up a synthesis that the modern mind would not imagine.

Through the story of a Jewish merchant and his slave and the Author's quest to decipher their lives, Ghosh shows how history is constructed and how we ourselves never examine the stories that build our interactions and notions of other communities. It is a fascinating journey of discovering little told or remembered stories, the kind that make you think that you too will be a part of history someday. It is a story that makes you realize that most of history is outside the textbooks, hidden in memories and tales

The book is slow, and there are no heroes - much like real life. It is a slow re examination of ingrained notions and its pace is as determined by the reader as by the author.

The difficulty of being good

Being good - something we all aspire to however rebellious or conformist. Varied conceptions of good, standards of goodness, expectations of others and of oneself. "Good" and "right" are among the most loaded words in any language and the rubric on which any human society has been built. Defining either of these however poses great difficulty and we all settle for meanings of the moment that apply to our restricted contexts.

Gurcharan Das in his book explores the larger ideal of being "good" and yet living in the world materialistically, comfortably and happily. He uses the Mahabharat as the text through which he explores the idea of morality, moral values and moral rules. The Mahabharat is perhaps one of the most al encompassing pieces of literature ever written. Running into over 100,000 verses and 13 books, it explores various facets of human lives and raises more questions than it answers.

Through the principal characters of the story and the choices that they make through the plot of the epic, he explores the concept of Dharma, its relativistic and ever evolving nature. He applies lessons learnt through his readings of the Mahabharat to modern day living, the idea of a democratic state, realpolitik, the corporate world and individual questions of conscience that each of us faces everyday.

What I love about the book is that he does not pronounce judgement. Gurcharan Das merely lays bare, with complete simplicity and lucidity, all the moral choices and the human emotions explored by the Mahabharat and their transcendence to the 21st Century. His personal view, he makes clear, is just that. He does not impose it on the reader. His analysis is critical, objective and logical. He takes the reader through his own mental process of questioning and counter questioning the lessons of the epic. At the same time he does not over explain or get lost in verbosity. The pace rivals that of a work of fiction and the chapters are innovatively and curiously titled.

All in all a lovely read. Something I am definitely going to go back to in greater detail bit by bit.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC by Daniel Levitin

Ever wondered about why you always get goosebumps when you hear the guitar solo on Comfortably Numb? Or why people close to the stage during Metallica concerts behave the way they do? Or why, when you play your favourite hip-hop tracks, your parents have probably asked you to turn 'that rubbish' down? And why they probably like bhajans better?

Levitin's brilliant book is about all this and more. It's about how the brain reacts to music, what exactly goes on in that little pink blob in our skulls when we close our eyes and listen to an orchestra play Vivaldi, or when we slip on our headphones and let Iron Maiden pound, or when we listen to SRK shake a leg to some lifted music during a Hindi movie at the nearest Inox.

Levitin takes pains to make the book as accessible to non-musicians as possible, and that effort does come through. However, despite this effort, I would still call it a moderately tough read because of all the terms (musical as well as biological) involved. So if you're one of those who prides yourself on your killer reading speed and are able to run through books faster than Robert Mugabe's able to collect farms in Zimbabwe, then you might have to put your ego on the backburner and take it slow here. I myself took a good two weeks to get this book over with.

To Levitin's credit, at no point in the book does the pace slack, or slow down. He keeps the book alive with real examples and a poker-faced sense of humour, as he takes you through the journey of scales and notes, the various people he's met and worked with (the gamut of people range from rock stars to Watson and Crick, the DNA dudes), and of course, the various experiments that he and his colleagues have performed. In this way, this book is probably the most interesting laboratory report you'll ever read. Some of the experiments are fascinating and are guaranteed to raise eyebrows. The last chapter of the book was my favourite - the role of music in evolution, and when you read his logic, you can't help but saying, "Shit, that's so true!"

One great thing about this book is, it gets you thinking not just on music, but a lot of other things itself. Why do you love your girlfriend and what about her attracts you? How are you able to recall exactly where you put that Led Zeppelin tee-shirt in your wardrobe? How does your mom know how to cook innumerable number of dishes? How do we all remember each other and our lives when we wake up, despite the fact that our brain has been fairly inactive for the last 8 hours? Why do we like the smell of chocolate and not hydrogen sulphide? The best part of this book is how thought-provoking it is - fields of music or otherwise.

Yes, it's a slightly serious and tough read. And no matter how simple Levitin tries to keep it, it still will be a tough read for someone who's never been involved with music training / playing before. Many of the examples are sadly songs which we may not have and you can't help but feeling that the movie / live version of this book would be so much easier to understand (to Levitin's credit, he's ensured all the music is up on the book's website).

Overall, a wonderful book, and a very different read. Levitin is a rock record producer and a neuroscientist, so there really is noone better qualified to understand the importance of the right levels of sound and at the same time, how they are understood by our brains. I highly recommend this if you're looking for something more challenging to read. You'll come out smarter and more inquisitive after it, I promise you that.

And thank you to my roomies Ajinkya and Sushil for giving me this book on my birthday :-)

Operation Shylock

Operation Shylock by Philip Roth is more than just the confession he purports it to be in his subtitle. I will not get into the details of the plot which can be accessed here and here. I am only going to talk about why I found this novel interesting. Let me begin with all that is not good about it. First, unlike my previous (and first) experience with a Philip Roth novel, it is verbose. Long sentences where I lost track of the beginning or the train of thought were a definite disappointment. Second, the beginning is slow and torturously so.

Past these stumbling blocks onto what made the novel worth a read. It explores the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in more than one (or even two dimensions). It impressed on me the fact that it is not as simple as an argument and a counter-argument. That it is a complex web of emotions, intent, conflicting selfish motives and historical legacy; a pot-pouri of thoughts that have often swirled through my head in the context of India's conflict with Pakistan over Kashmir. It brings to fore, through a few conflicted characters, the tangle that a prolonged conflict can become; that it no longer remains a matter of simple logic to identify causality and assign responsibility to one group or another or both find a workable solution. It juxtaposes patriotism against humanitarianism and leaves the reader feeling that neither is as easy to praise or condemn.

Operation Shylock also explores the idea of Jewishness and how the holocaust perpetrated by Hitler may have changed that. It digs into the things that constitute ethnic identity even if one has not been a part of the experience that shaped that community. The conflicts of an American Jew vs. those of an Israeli Jew vs. those of a holocaust survivor all come together to raise questions about the basis of communal identities. It impressed upon me the need to understand why one chooses to identify oneself with a community (social, religious, economic, political or philosophical) and the need to articulate those reasons to one self.

And the final reason why Operation Shylock, despite its failings, will remain a good read to me is the manner in which it explores the curiosity of a writer.

WILT IN NOWHERE BY TOM SHARPE

Tom Sharpe was first introduced to me by a boss at my former company, who knew my well-documented love of Wodehouse, and said that this was a contemporary version. Big shoes, that. He'd handed me the interestingly named Blott on the Landscape. The first few chapters had me rolling, it was indeed quite Wodehousean, in fact, it was almost like Sharpe was trying a little too hard. Face it, Tom... A lot of people can put together big words, but noone can do it like Plum can. Still, I granted him the read because it was quite entertaining and Tom had a more sarcastic style. Unfortunately, that book got drenched and destroyed, so to replace it for my boss, I bought another interesting looking 'Wilt In Nowhere'.

And I was a little disappointed, I must say.

The sarcasm of the previous book was just not there, neither was the punch. The storyline by itself is quite interesting. Henry Wilt, an English college teacher, is nagged on by his rather voluminous wife to visit rich relatives in the USA in an attempt to suck up to them and fund their quadruplets' (you heard me right) further education. Henry detested the very thought of visiting the old hags and cooked up an excuse that he had to teach a course at college during that period. And off he goes exploring the English countryside. The word 'desultory' comes to mind, since he had no plan, he just wanted to go off exploring.

And then things get murky, as he gets inebriated and lands up at the site of an arson attack. In the meantime, on the flight to the US, a drug dealer tries to hide his batch in the quadruplets' luggage and the police trace the Wilts down, and become cognizant of some of the 'merrier' happenings of the rich uncle. This screw-up, compounded with Wilt's unfortunate presence at the earlier mentioned pyrotechnics, result in what should have been a hilarious mash-up of events. But somehow the laughs don't come as easily, though the book isn't sluggish in any way.

Mind you, there are good moments. Hilarious, even. The quads (as they're called) are a constant source of merriment, and the moment they talk back to the Reverend is probably the funniest moment of the book. Another scene features the quads sending obscene emails to all of the uncle's business associates and destroying his business (a little hyperbolic, but, what the heck).
Other parts like Wilt acting like he had amnesia were not too convincing, and felt more like a badly made Bollywood film than an English comic novel.

All in all, it's imminently readable. Sharpe is supposed to one of those satirists who pokes fun at current English society and that comes through nicely. Pick it up if you see it at the library or a friend's, and can finish 280 pages in 2 days, and want some light-hearted reading between all the Engineering handbooks and Noam Chomskys you generally read.

Had this been the first Sharpe I picked up, I probably wouldn't be tempted to pick up another. But having read the first few chapters of Blott on the Landscape, I know he's capable of better stuff, and will probably try some out again in the future.