Victory City (*****)
Rushdie, Salman
Victory City is a modern-day epic. It is told in the style of other Indian epics, like the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and it follows the life of a woman who lived a magical life for 247 years. Pampa Kampana built a city using her imagination and magical powers, and gave each citizen a complete memory and history. The rest of the story is about the evolution of this kingdom into a vast empire and its eventual decline. The forces altering the history of this place have parallels in the real history of India, but the author takes the liberty of mixing the actual historical stream with fantasies to create a magical world.
While the story is captivating, the author's effort to inject profound social meaning seems forced and ineffective. For example, there is a continuous feminist thread in all the stories, but I am not sure it resonates with contemporary feminist values. Is sexual freedom the primary goal of feminists while still being under the power of a king? All the other contemporary issues that were introduced, including gender identity, religious identity, environmentalism, and imperialism, seemed too contrived to me.
Despite my reservations, it is a great read, and I felt sad that it ended. Rushdie's prose is excellent and brings the magical world to life. I can also imagine a blockbuster movie coming out of it, with special effects, battle scenes, and superpowers.
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (*****)
Rushdie, Salman
What can be more compelling than to hear about the experience of being stabbed by a religious fanatic, especially from a master storyteller? Rushdie's memoir about being stabbed more than three decades after the Iranian state declared a fatwa for his assassination and his subsequent unexpected recovery is a powerful story. The author combines his personal life with his immediate family and friends, giving it a more personal and intimate tone. He does not portray himself as a brave hero but just as an ordinary person, afraid of physical pain and mortality.
What he went through to recover is unimaginable. I wish he did not make such a big deal about common medical procedures, such as the insertion of a catheter, or the anxiety about prostate cancer, which is fairly common among men of his age. By doing so, he probably diluted the severity of the unusual pain and agony he went through earlier. Of course, it shows his honesty in admitting that he is not a particularly pain-tolerant person.
I just wish the book was much shorter. About halfway through, I felt he had said everything he had to say. What remained unsaid, I could imagine myself.
Prophet Song (*****)
Lynch, Paul
Prophet Song tells the fictitious story of Ireland, in some recent future, taken over by a rightwing party that imposes harsh totalitarian rule. The story follows one family's struggles to survive.
I have not read too many novels that can create this intense feeling of claustrophobia, doom, foreboding, and desperation. The storytelling is superbly vivid, and I felt I was right in the middle of the situation the characters are thrown into. It was hard to stop reading.
Several things made the book relevant to me. It reminded me of the realities of fascism during Hitler's time and that such things can come back again unless we are extremely vigilant. It reminded me of the happenings in Latin America during the sixties and seventies but transplanted into modern-day Europe, telling us that what could have happened in the third world could happen again, but this time in the first world. It reminded me that the political winds blowing all over the world may suddenly slide into this dark reality. If we are complacent, we may not be safe. It made me feel more viscerally what people in Gaza might be going through, but of course, much worse than the characters in the book.
Beyond the political implications, just at a human level, the protagonist in this book, a mother of four, had to constantly make terrible decisions, and any decisions she made were the wrong ones. In extreme situations like this, we are incapable of making good decisions, because all decisions lead to a tragic outcome. That is the ultimate claustrophobia of this novel.
Kairos (*****)
Erpenbeck, Jenny
I love stories about individuals set against the backdrop of historical events. The fall of the Soviet system and German Unification were probably my lifetime's most consequential historical moments. I never lived in the eastern block, but growing up in India, I was surrounded by Marxist and socialist ideology. The worldview of our generation was deeply influenced by the leftist movements throughout the world. Therefore, the changes that took place in the late eighties profoundly affected many of us. We could not avoid questioning whether all the sacrifices and loss of life were in vain. My father, a filmmaker in India, also made a film that portrayed a middle-class family in Calcutta in the backdrop of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The novel is built around a disturbing relationship between a married intellectual in his late fifties and a young woman in her early twenties. Throughout their turbulent relationship, there was tremendous political turmoil in German politics. The author remains ambivalent about the two systems, which is reflected in the contradictions within the main characters. This non-partisan perspective is what makes it such a great read. However, the only thing that bothered me throughout was the incredulity of the relationship from a psychological perspective. I constantly felt that the behavior of the two characters was a bit contrived to fit the author's thesis.
The book received the Booker Prize, but I am unsure if this is the best novel written in 2023. It is certainly a remarkable book, written with great intellect and amazing style, but is it worthy of the prize?
The Day I Became a Runner: A Women's History of India through the Lens of Sport (*****)
Chattopadhyay, Sohini
This is a book I would not have picked up in a bookstore simply because sports and athletics never attracted me too much. Like anybody else, I get excited by certain professional team sports, and I enjoy watching the Olympics on TV. Still, the interest was never deep enough to entice me to read a book on track and field participants, and that too of mediocre performance. Because of that, unless I accidentally came to know the author, I would have missed out on one of the most meaningful books I have read recently.
It is a very personal book, where the author talks about how she got into running, though not professionally, and as a woman in India, how that changed her perspective about women in sports. Her unique perspective led her to research several female athletes from India from the early part of the twentieth century to the present times. What comes out of it is not just a series of astonishing biographical sketches but a vivid portrayal of so many aspects of Indian society. It is this insight that makes it such an important and memorable book.
Behind every good nonfiction is a profound idea. Without that, it is just a collection of interesting facts. Once in a rare while, we come across a book that nurtures the seed of an idea and illustrates and expands that with documentary examples. This is one of those rare books. I may forget the names of these athletes and even forget their stories, but the ideas that germinate will stay with me forever.
I am so glad that she did not adopt a scholarly tone. Written with warmth and tenderness, the stories will touch your heart and make you think. Although there were plenty of opportunities, she steered away from sentimentalism. It is an honest book with deeply felt perceptions.
Moby-Dick or, The Whale (*****)
Melville, Herman
Moby-Dick is one of those books you always plan to read but perpetually postpone until next year. I finally made my pilgrimage and came back with very mixed feelings.
It is a surprising allegorical novel with many ways to interpret it. This ambiguity makes it one of the most remarkable novels of that era or perhaps of all time. It made me think, and it left many questions in my mind, trying to think how to draw parallels between the whale and the people chasing it with my life and my experiences.
Of course, it took some effort to adjust to a reality where whaling is the accepted norm, where racial and cultural biases are the accepted behavior. The beautiful writing quickly transported me into the world inside a whaling ship. The author also exposed everything scientifically known about whales in those days. There are surprising passages about the fear of species extinction and faulty arguments about why whales were here to stay despite rampant hunting.
In the end, despite all its merits, I could not but compare it to other nineteenth-century writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. While these authors can still speak to me today, Melville's novel failed to do so. I could not discover the emotional and psychological depth of these other writers. Is that Melvile's fault, or the fault of the overenthusiastic critics, primarily American, who try to put him on a pedestal above almost everyone else?
The Edge of Knowledge: Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos (*****)
Krauss, Lawrence M.
During my high school days in India, we could find many Russian books in English on the market. Due to the political ties between our nations, they were highly subsidized and, therefore, very affordable. I was particularly attracted to the science books, many of which were written by famous Russian scientists for a younger audience. One such book was a high school textbook on Physics. I no longer recall the name of the book or the author, but I remember how well-written it was compared to the textbook that was prescribed by my school. What I found most remarkable, inspiring, and different was that each chapter ended with an open problem in that area of Physics. These are unsolved problems that a student at that level can appreciate. Unlike most other high school level books, where the author had the voice of an omniscient god, pretending they can answer any question, this author had the scientist's humility to expose what we do not know. This had a magical effect on my young mind, to be challenged and to know there are still many things we cannot understand and explain.
This book by Lawrence Krauss, one of the most well-known names in contemporary theoretical physics, attempts to do the same at a larger scale. It covers big ideas such as space, time, life, and consciousness, and takes us step by step to the frontier of these concepts, and then describes the known unknowns.
That is a daunting task because appreciation of these ideas requires a thorough knowledge of what has happened before. Modern theoretical physics, life science, or consciousness research are complex ideas, very often only possible to describe with a step-by-step build-up using advanced mathematics. This is why most popular-level physics books on contemporary physics become magical hocus pocus rather than truly explaining what they try to explain. The author here faced similar challenges and has done a reasonably good job. The portions on modern physics may still sound like a bit of magic, but I am not sure there is any way around that. Physics is no longer intuitive at extreme scales of space and time. They depart so far from what we experience at our human scale that there is no way to make them intuitively understandable. Still, they are equally difficult to understand intellectually without the mathematics involved.
Despite all these caveats, it is a wonderful read that will take the reader to the edge of known knowledge and make us see the vast chasm beyond the edge. It will probably make them sad to realize that our lives are finite, and we may not see the answers to many of these essential questions in our lifetime.
Determined: Life Without Free Will (*****)
Sapolsky, Robert M.
This is not my first book that debates this fundamental and essential question, and it will probably not be the last. I have heard the arguments from both sides. Until a few decades ago, it was tough to argue against what we all feel within ourselves: that we make our own choices and decisions and are, therefore, responsible for all the bad things we do and earn praise for all the good.
There is overwhelming evidence that questions this position, which has only been gathering in the last few decades. It comes from experimental neuroscience, genetic research, physics, and other branches of science. The author has gathered all this evidence in a single narrative, sequentially examined all the arguments for the existence of free will, and dismantled them one by one. His arguments are strong and are not based on philosophical wordplay but on experimental results and logical deductions.
Let's take the example of someone pulling the trigger of a gun. The immediate cause of this is the triggering of the finger muscles. Then one must ask what caused that neuronal signal, and you will eventually reach the motor control section of the brain. Neuron by neuron, we will discover antecedent causes that make a neuron fire. It is a long chain of events—no neuron fires by itself. The causes can be the levels of various chemicals flowing through our body and the brain moments before the event. It could be events that happened a few minutes, hours, or days ago. The action of the neurons can be traced back to one's entire life, childhood, and even in fetal conditions. It does not just stop there. Genetic factors can be inherited, or cultural factors can affect the behavior of neurons in our brains. These millions of variables generate each of our behaviors in incredibly complex ways. As with all complex systems, like the weather, it is not predictable or deterministic, like the movement of planets, but it is still the emergent result of physical laws.
After making the case that there is no free will, he then focuses on why we still believe it does. In fact, at a personal level, even the author cannot accept that he should not pay for the evil deeds and get rewarded for all the good things.
Finally, he explores the possibility of a society where we no longer believe in free will and the immediate consequences of that in our criminal justice system and societal reward mechanisms. There is no question that some people will still need to be isolated from the rest of society, but the question is, should it be with a sense of retribution or just safety? We remove a car with a faulty brake from the road, but we don't question the car's moral character. Even if everyone is convinced of the absence of free will, can we really change our deep feelings? Could we ever give up the belief that we should be credited for whatever successes we have achieved?
The Life of the Mind (*****)
Smallwood, Christine
It is an intimate novel about a young academic woman in a big city whose hopes of obtaining a secure academic position are slowly slipping away. She recently had a miscarriage, but her reaction to it is anything but conventional. Apart from that, nothing much happens. The readers are plunged into her complex inner world, which is intelligent, sensitive, conflicted, and confused. While I enjoyed reading it, I often felt her streams of consciousness were sometimes a little contrived. It reminded me of someone I met many years ago who, talking about James Joyce, questioned whether those are streams or canals. The most remarkable aspect of this book was the fresh and unconventional perspective of a young woman toward motherhood.
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