'Kite Runner' By Khaled Hosseini changed my reading habit forever. Somehow I made up my mind to get OFF the American settings and to venture into more Indian based novels.
Well here are some of the best and not-so-best ones and some blurb on it. (Fact of the matter is I guess I lost the habit of getting a review right and surprisingly I stopped at least three books reviews mid-way because I couldn't wrap it up in a page or two and the essense was lost..)
1. Inheritance of Loss: (By Kiran Desai)
The booker award being the sole criteria I picked this book. It was utterly boring book to begin with and never really took off. Most of the time I kept flipping through the pages to see when will it end. There are three or two ( or whichever i don't remember) parallel stories here. One about orphan girl Sai left to be cared under her aging Grandfather who himself has a very dark past and it takes quite a chunk of the book detailing his background which more or less is about the racial abuse of 60's. Because of some tragic incidents she has her studies cut out. The other is about this servant's son who somehow with all money poured in by his father reaches US of A and does every menial job possible working as a illegal immegrant and moving from one job to another in similar gruelling and worse conditions. The main plot involves the former one and how their lives (i.e. Sai, grandpa and cook...) are changed when things start going bad after a local revolution begins. There is a small romance between Sai and her teacher, aunt-bickering, racial discrimination, etc. all good enough for a nice pot-boiler but sadly falls short. Enought of it.
2. Life of Pi- Yanni Martel
A Gem of a book. This is one of those rare books - the books that at first I crib about page after page, and curse myself for how stupid I could be for picking such a book and at the end of it is a priceless treasure that is worth reading again and again just for the courage it inspires and one that makes you think hard about life. It is the story of Piscine Patel a.k.a Pi and a tiger and the wholesome adventure that follows. When their family decides to move out from Kerala to Columbia (some place) along with all the animals of the zoo a disaster strikes leaving all his parents and the entire crew of the ship dead and leaving behind Pi and the tiger. Reading the backpack I thought it is one of those family made movies churned out by Hollywood where you have animals talking with children and how it gets last and finally everything-back-to-normal happy-ending type ones. Surprise , surprise it literally meant the story of Pi and the half-ton Bengal tiger. My hopes went deep down after realizing it halfway through the book when no magic appeared and the only characters being Pi and the tiger.
Amazing thing about the book is the ten year old kid does things that I bet twenty year olds just can't imagine. The entire book is about the act of survival. The chances pitted against anyone in such a scenario being 2-3 months a the max following the survival guide, Pi goes on to live for 5 months and beyond. It more or less looks and feels like 'Cast Away' minus the land. The author must be commended for his brilliant potrayal of life and it's meaning. It also reminded me of the V forVendetta's V's torturing the reporter and settting here free because she feels afraid no more.
The ending could have been much more subtle by not including those funny Laurel and Hardy characters in the end with natural flow of events.
More to follow....
