The Story of being Under the Net

Under the Net by Iris Murdoch is a story about a struggling writer Jake Donaghue who, over a few weeks (the period this story is set in), attempts to set right his life. When one wants to go ahead, one needs to rectify the mistakes of the past. One needs to close loose ends, make amends, give due apologies, and then if needed, break ties, to truly be able to move on. Jake attempts to do just that. But what follows in his pursuit of retrospective alteration is a series of hilarious situations, and some surprising revelations, leaving him at a lot different from where he started off or thought he would end at.

After being thrown out by his girlfriend, he goes about finding a new accommodation at his ex (who he strongly believes he still loves and is his destiny) and finds himself faced with an unavoidable situation of having to contact his arch-nemesis, who was also his friend at one point in time. From then on, we traverse through a series of happenings that never cease to take you by surprise.

Take it from me, throughout the novel, you will never be able to guess the turn each chapter takes!

The Story of Red – a colour, an emotion, and death

A murder mystery, a calmly wild game of cat and mouse, making you constantly guess who the killer is.  A story of love and betrayal, manipulations and jealousy, human nature tested at every twist of fate but most importantly, very real. And all this is set in a dreamy world of painters and storytellers of ancient times when kings ruled the land and beauty was measured in time.

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novel translated into over 60 languages, English being one of them. It is everything you could ask for, for a thrilling reading experience. Teenage lovers being reunited later on in life, check. Cold blooded murder and then some more, check. Deceit, betrayal and all that comes with the politics of business, check. Kings and kingdoms with its fascinating quirks, check. A run down through history that shaped the nature of events in the story, check. Insight into the deep yet twisted workings of the human mind, check. Dwelling into what truly drives our actions, check. And a justification for each action, good or bad, check.

What makes this book marvellous is not the fact that it actually has in it all the essential tropes of a good story, but the way in which it is told. Orhan Pamuk has used the first-person reference throughout the novel and taken it a step further.

The Story of Human Bondage

In Of Human Bondage, William Somerset Maugham tells a story of a young man who spends his life trying to find his true calling. We traverse through his life in his own words, seeing it as he did, through the eyes of a young orphaned child living with his uncle who is a vicar and wants him to follow in his footsteps, to the man he finally becomes.

This young boy moves out of his uncle’s house and to follow his passion or what he believed to be his calling. He finds some semblance in art but that doesn’t give him the life he wants. He takes up an interest in medicine and starts to study to be a doctor. Then he dabbles in the stock market and loses all his savings. Being absolutely broke he is driven to take up a job at a retail store but his special skills are noticed and he does well enough to sustain himself. Once stable, he sets out again.

Throughout all this, he makes some interesting friends who shape his thinking and open his mind to the wonders of literature and travel. His ultimate goal thus being formed of him being able to travel to Spain one day.

The Story of a Kite Runner

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini is a heart-wrenching story of two boys Amir and Hassan, set in the backdrop of a changing Afghanistan with the overthrow of their government and the growth of the Taliban Regime, and how their lives are permanently changed because of being born in such tumultuous times.

The Story of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck is a story of two workers who travel together in search of work, mostly farming, in the hinterlands of America. This is however not a story about their times or their hardships or the lives that they and millions of other lowly paid workers like them led. It is rather a touching story of brotherhood and broken dreams.

The title tells you nothing about what the book entails, yet when you finish it, you realise that there couldn’t have been a more apt name.

A novella that has just a few sequences in it spread across just a couple of days, the arrival of the two workers – George and Lennie – at the farm, them working, them talking of their dreams, a series of unfortunate events and finally the end. That’s it. A book that doesn’t take you too long to finish but stays with you long after.

“As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.”

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

The Story of the Song of Solomon

All human relationships come down to it. Would you save my life? Or Would you take it?

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is set in a time in America, when even though slavery was abolished, the coloured people led a life far from being free or fair. They didn’t get justice like the whites did, nor were they treated equally, still barred from entering certain places or buying property. What was theirs was being taken from them by the whites just because the latter didn’t believe that the former deserved it, especially and only because of their colour.

At such times was born Macon Dead, the protagonist of this story who lives a rather privileged life being the grandson of the only Doctor in their clan and son of a wealthy real estate businessman. The book is about Macon’s life, of his lack of empathy towards ‘coloured people problems’ because he hasn’t had to face any, his disinterest towards his own history or the relevance of it in his life, his inability to understand why the people around him – his father, his mother, his sisters, his aunt, his lover or his best friend – are the way they are, always angry within, always seeking some form of justice. He isn’t stupid. He is just your regular unsympathetic observer.

Macon on ‘Deserving’

And then the change happens.

The Story of Alice and her Adventures

At first glance Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol, is a magical tale where a young girl Alice, bored out of her wits on a hot summer day, spots a rabbit talking to itself and carrying a pocket watch. Now there may be many a rabbit who can talk, but carrying a pocket watch, now that piques one’s interest. So off she goes following the rabbit down a rabbit hole and thus begins her adventure.

What follows her fall down the rabbit hole is a fascinating turn of events leading to many a crazy character, conversation and situations. People/animals/birds she never thought she’d encounter like this, questions that puzzle her more than the answers do, reactions she never fathomed, all makes this Wonderland a curious place to stumble upon.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”

“I don’t much care where –”

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”

Alice and The Cheshire Cat

The Story of a Christmas Carol

There is only so much I can add to all that is written about Charles Dickens and his famous novel A Christmas Carol, a story that has apparently never been out of print since its first edition in the late 1800s. One can only aim of such success. So what is it that makes this novel so special. In one word, I’d say, relatability.

We are introduced to a grumpy old rich man Ebenezer Scrooge, who despises people, pleasantries, cheer, charity and frankly anything and everything related to being a good human. He doesn’t hurt anyone but is the personification of stinginess and unpleasantness. One day he is visited by the ghost of his dead friend and partner, who seems to be chained by the bad deeds that he did in his lifetime and is forewarned that he will be visited again by three ghosts. These are the ghosts of Christmas – Past, Present and Future.

The Story of a Moonstone

Moonstone, written in the early 19^th century by Wilkie Collins is a detective story where instead of a detective solving the crime, it’s the readers who discover the thief through a series of narrations. A very interesting way to put it. And quite skillful too

The plot starts with how the Moonstone comes into the hands of a Colonel, through a series of plunder of the Hindu temples that happened during the 600 yr rule of the Mughals and British in India. It then talks of its journey to England and there it is bequeathed to the Colonel’s niece during her 18^th birthday. She receives it on her birthday dinner but the following day, it is found to be missing. Who stole it, How did it find its way out of the house into a banker, Who then recovers it, forms the rest of the plot

The Story of a Hitchhiker and the Galaxy

… This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And that’s how this book starts. A mad mad book. Absolutely hilarious and with a logic so warped that you give up on it, Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a comedy sci-fi adventure novel (if there is such a genre in the first place that is) that redefines all three – comedy, sci-fi and adventure.

It starts off with our hero, Arthur Dent, being whisked away by his friend Ford Prefect (who is in fact an alien who is desperate to get out) onto a spaceship minutes before his house and all of Earth for that matter is demolished to make way for an Intergalactic Highway. Imagine being so insignificant that the entire planet is nothing more than a boulder to be pushed out of the way in the whole scheme of events in the universe. Puts individual problems into perspective.

Moving on, Arthur Dent finds himself in this spaceship with another human being and a two headed President of the Galaxy who is on the run for stealing the very spaceship they are in. Together with a depressed robot (yes, depressed robots. You’d be depressed too if you are made to do menial tasks like bringing tea when you have the brain with a functioning capability of a planet) they set out on a journey to find, well, with no particular purpose at all.

And this madness is only the beginning. What follows is not just a plot that beats all the obvious predictions you can make as a story unwinds, but also a style of writing that leaves you part laughing part snickering at the turn of every page. Dry wit. At its best. Douglas Adams is my absolute favourite when it comes to humour and creativity. Read him once and you’ll know why he has the cult following that he does.

Somewhere in the middle of the book, you find a statement like this…

… followed by this

The Story of a Stranger

Albert Camus’s French masterpiece, L’Etranger translated into English as The Stranger has an interesting synopsis. It says that it is about ‘The nakedness of a man faced with the absurd’.

When I read this, there were a lot of situations that I drew up in my mind; situations which could qualify as ‘absurd’, and I was curious what kind of nakedness would each bring about. But as you read the book and turn the last page, you realise the extent of absurdity that Albert Camus scripted into the life of his central character – Mersault, who finds himself stuck in an irretrievable place in life; a no-turning-back moment. The cause and effect of that moment and the judgment meted out to it. The absurdity stares you in the face.

This novel is a narration of a series of events that happen in Mersault’s life starting with his mother’s death. As you go through the narrative, mostly in his words, you begin to see two sides to the whole story. How he sees it and how the world perceives it. He sees it as it is, as a natural progression of thoughts and events, a logical approach to accept or not accept someone who is seeking to listen or talk. The world, however, perceives it with all the baggage it carries. It is unfair from the start.

Like how when a little kid doesn’t cry when hurt, it is assumed that the wound must not have been deep enough, that the pain must not have been much. Not for a minute, not even for a second do we pause to think that probably this kid has seen much more such that this pain isn’t as much, or the kid is too numb to shed a tear, or the kid is actually strong and is holding back his tears, or plain and simple, the kid is so exhausted from a lot of other things that aren’t going right in his life that he is just too tired to cry. Just far too tired.

But no. It’s always no tears implies no pain. No outward show of sympathy indicates that there is nothing inside.

And having nothing inside is apparently a far bigger sin than having something bad. For good or bad means that the heart is full in some sense of the word. But empty? Oh, so dangerous.

Is it afterall a sin to be aware that everything eventually culminates into nothingness?

You might wonder what is it that I am rambling about. For those who have read the book, they know. They know what I am talking about. And I am sure they resonate.

For those who haven’t, please pick it up. And when you do, read it at one go and brace yourself for the end. The end when Mersault’s nakedness is revealed. You can hear his screams. You can feel his resigned breathing. And you can sense the numbness of the finale.

One of those books that stay with you long after you’ve closed it. Pick it up. It’s something you shouldn’t miss.

The Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities is a story set during the French Revolution when the oppressed common folk could no longer withstand the apathy of the ruling class and took over the castle and imprisoned everyone who seemed affluent. The latter’s fault being that they were not poor. The charges being that, for generations, they did nothing to better the lives of everyone around them. The accusations being that they abused, physically and mentally, the poor. All those who faced these charges were thrown into the prisons and sentenced to death, with no formal hearing or justification. To be executed. In public. By the strike of the guillotine christened as La Guillotine – a symbol of their freedom. Execution soon becomes the need of the hour, feeding La Guillotine with hundreds of heads becomes the only thing they look forward to every day. Human nature takes a beating. Society as a whole takes a beating.

When humans are suppressed for a long long time and are treated as nothing less than animals, they become that. In fact, they become worse. No sympathy, no law of the land, no compassion, no conscience and most importantly no forgiveness.

And in between this rises a story of love.