Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos (* * * * *)
Ogas, Ogi
About fifty years ago, I chanced upon a book that changed my life. It was called Design for a Brain by W Ross Ashby. It was my first book on Cybernetics. I was just out of high school, and before that, I had never read a book that built up a powerful idea so elegantly, step-by-step, and answered so many questions I was asking myself. It was also my first book that tried to offer a mechanical explanation of how some aspects of our brain work. It so happened, after many years, my Ph.D. thesis advisor did his doctoral work under the supervision of the same Ross Ashby.
Reading this book provided the same sense of excitement and revelation, and answered even more questions. Those who know me know that understanding the functioning of the mind, and specifically our conscious experiences, has been a passion of mine for the last decade. I read many books on the subject. Some try to mystify this phenomenon as something beyond ordinary science and seek answers in exotic fringes. Others try to characterize consciousness as an illusion of our functioning mind, and question its existence. A growing number of scientists view it as an emergent property of a system that has crossed a certain threshold of complexity. Then, in the last decade, a few candidate theories started to take shape. After thousands of years of philosophical speculations, it seemed a real explanation was within our grasp.
In this book, the authors focus on the work done primarily by cognitive scientist Stephen Grossberg and his colleagues. The journey starts with some of the simplest and earliest biological "minds", from archaea, bacteria, and amoeba to fish, birds, monkeys, and humans, and gradually builds up how each subsequent evolutionary step solved some problems these minds faced. In this journey, they expose the underlying continuity of this development. The logical buildup is beautiful and powerful.
During this gradual journey, it becomes clear why self-awareness is necessary to solve some of these cognitive tasks. Consciousness emerges as a consequence of Grossberg's Unified Theory of Mind, a mathematically rigorous model of the mind. It describes specific abstract mechanisms and dynamic processes and claims that these correspond to many experimental results in psychology and neurobiology.
The most surprising section of the book is when it explains that individual minds, hosted by a single brain, are not where the journey ends. Humans have created a collective super-mind through society, language, and writing. This super-mind follows the same architecture of individual minds, but can solve much bigger problems. Mind you, this is not just a metaphorical extension, but the description of a system built with sharp logic and rigor.
I can't wait to read Grossberg's book now. It's my next read. If you are interested in understanding our minds, I strongly recommend this book.
Giovanni’s Room (* * * * *)
Baldwin, James
It is one of those books I wish I had read long ago. Not because it could have imparted some useful wisdom, but because it has the power to change one's outlook on humanity without knowing how. Like all great novels, it is not easy to categorize, and impossible to summarize its essence.
Baldwin is not alone in writing a novel about an American trying to find himself in Europe, particularly Paris. Like all similar works, this is also partially autobiographical. However, he made a remarkable conscious choice. His protagonist is also a young American, discovering his homosexuality in a far more accepting Paris. However, unlike himself, his character is white. This is a particularly interesting choice in view of the current trend to exclusively explore one's identity in the art we make. It is hard to find anyone with a minority identity, be it black, gay, or any other label, to create art that does not focus on that identity. Yet, here he took the challenge to tell a story where he deliberately erased his black identity.
It is primarily a love story, but it is distinctly different from any other love story I have read. Here, all loves are sprinkled with self-doubt, be it love for the adopted city, his fiancée, or his gay lover Giovanni. I believe that is where the book touches us at a relatable level. Aren't all loves carry some doubt?
I'll end it with a beautiful quote from this exquisitely written book --
“He smiled, "Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home." He played with my thumb and grinned. "N'est-ce pas?"
"Beautiful logic," I said. "You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don't go there?"
He laughed. "Well, isn't it true? You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
Go Tell It on the Mountain (* * * * -)
Baldwin, James
I have never been a religious person and have never quite understood people who design their lives around some religious belief. Yet, knowing that many perfectly intelligent people do, I have always wanted to understand it from their perspective. Until now, that has never worked.
This book is filled with characters whose lives are governed by deep religious beliefs and codes. All of them are wounded by social injustice and personal conflicts. And, everyone is conflicted in the moral choices they made. In that background, they all struggle to live a Christian life.
It is this inner contradiction, compounded with faith, that finally made me better understand where such feelings come from. It is hard to understand another person until you can respect their lives. Baldwin creates a spectrum of characters, each very different, and makes the reader respect the circumstances that made them who they are, and thereby render them understandable.
The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life (* * * * -)
Davies, Paul C.W.
What is life? Is it unique in the universe? How was life created from inorganic matter? What is consciousness? These are age-old questions that have been asked and discussed by many before. For a long time, these were discussed philosophically and, as usual, did not throw any clarifying light. Then, starting in the last hundred years or so, they became scientific questions. Surprisingly, the most interesting discussions often did not come from biologists, but from Physicists. This, if you think about it, is not all that surprising. Physicists are trained to look at things in terms of fundamental principles, without getting too tangled in the details. And that is precisely what is needed to tackle big questions like this.
In this book, physicist Paul Davies tries to understand life in terms of broader principles like information theory, thermodynamics, and quantum physics. It is an excellent compilation of research results that have come out only in the twenty-first century, challenging many older ideas, and allowing us to revisit these questions from a different perspective.
Like any good scientist, he maintains a healthy degree of doubt about many of these findings, like the involvement of quantum mechanics in cellular processes. One area where his explanations were limited was when he discussed the problem of consciousness. He did not mention some of the credible candidate theories, like the work by Stephen Grossberg.
I particularly appreciated his admission that we still don't know how life was created from inanimate matter. He discusses all the possible theories, but correctly points out that each narrows the huge gap from matter to life, but there is still a vast chasm that we cannot adequately explain. If jumping this gap was an incredibly unlikely accident, then we are unlikely to find life elsewhere in the universe. But if we find life anywhere else, even one, that would prove there is a way for nature to cross that chasm, and life should be abundant.
Notes of a Native Son (* * * * *)
Baldwin, James
It is a set of deeply thoughtful essays on the experience of being black in America. Baldwin's perceptions are intense, philosophically deep, non-obvious, and powerfully communicative. As an outsider, it is hard for me to understand what it means to live with the history of slavery.
He talks about his experience in Paris in the 1930s, where he met many North Africans who also lived in the city. He describes the subtle differences in someone who can claim a definite root, based on the experience of a black American, for whom slavery erased any such connection. However, at the same time, he could find common ground with anyone who is not white because the perceived hierarchy is always present. When he visits a small Swiss village where the people have no exposure to black people, whether from America or Africa, and who have never traveled outside their village, the innate sense of white superiority is still there.
I listened to this book in audio form while working out at a gym on Chicago's south side. Most of the people around me were Black. Through the window, I could see the massive structure of the Obama Library under construction. Could Baldwin have imagined that someday there would be such a building, honoring the legacy of the nation's first Black president? Maybe, or maybe not. But has the deeper reality changed much? Even the least accomplished white person can still feel pride in connecting themselves to our cultural giants—Da Vinci, Beethoven, Newton, Shakespeare. They created modern culture, which remains the only culture that truly matters and the one that shaped who I am.
The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip (* * * - -)
Witt, Stephen
It is an interesting story about the unlikely evolution of a video game accelerator company to become one of the biggest technology companies in the world. More importantly, it is the captivating story of its CEO, Jensen Huang.
He is certainly an exceptional character, which makes the book a page-turner. But apart from his personality, he could be the driver of a technology revolution unlike anything in the past or the focal point of one of the biggest stock bubbles. Only history will tell how we ultimately remember him. But one thing is for sure, he is one of the most remarkably focused and confident business leaders.
Like any business biography, the book paints a larger-than-life image of the subject. However, the last chapter is an interesting departure.
For Two Thousand Years (* * * * -)
Sebastian, Mihail
The book is set in Romania, between the two World Wars. It is the story of a young Jewish person living in a place he identifies with, but amidst increasing antisemitic sentiments that are rapidly becoming explicit, violent, and threatening. It was a time when everyone had to take a side and justify their position, but the protagonist could see through the vacuous arguments and tried to detach himself.
Apart from making the readers feel the isolation, anxiety, and intellectual struggle of the main character, the story also seems uncannily contemporary. It makes us realize that fascism is not a foreign idea that just a minority of people believe in, but how it can corrupt and change the minds of entire societies. You can read it as a warning signal in the world we are all living in, where simple solutions to incredibly complex problems are rapidly becoming mainstream. Where slowly escalating violence is getting normalized and acceptable.
Liberation Day (* * * - -)
Saunders, George
So far, my experience reading Saunders has been uniformly good. He has a surprisingly unique style, and his ideas are dazzlingly novel. This collection of short stories is no exception. However, unlike what I read in the past, this collection felt a little uneven to me. The ideas behind these stories are extremely original, especially the ones with sci-fi themes, but not all of them engaged me fully. Perhaps they require a second reading, but with so much more to read, it is unlikely I will go back.
Mother Mary Comes to Me (* * * * *)
Roy, Arundhati
A long time ago, I came to the conclusion that it is humanly impossible to write a truly honest autobiography or memoir. No matter our intent, we cannot help but paint ourselves in a favorable light. Even when we write something negative, we hope the readers will praise our courage and honesty. The net result is always a positive impression of self.
However, I also realized that true honesty lies on a spectrum. Some memoirs are more brutal than others, and some people can go a lot further in shining a harsh light on themselves. On that scale, Arundhati Roy put herself very close to one end of that scale in Mother Mary Comes to Me.
Writers can be far more honest when they write fiction. After all, most fiction is biographical to some extent, and in fiction, one can hide behind their characters and tell the truth. Arundhati probably did that when she wrote her first novel -- The God of Small Things. Reading her latest memoir, it becomes clear that the world she described there was a reflection of her own life as a child. After many decades, and only after her mother died, she felt it was time to open up her life for public scrutiny.
I have read almost everything she has written since her debut novel, so it should not have come as a surprise that she is an amazing writer. It still surprised me. It is a book that is hard to put down. As she bares herself, warts and all, it cuts through our skin and makes us face our own shortcomings, hypocrisies, fears, and shallowness. As with all great memoirs, it is not just about understanding the author's life, but it acts as a mirror to see your own from an unseen and unforgiving angle.
I do not have the ability to adequately describe this book. I would urge everyone to experience it themselves. It may change you. I wish I could write like her, but more importantly, I wish I could feel life as she does.
The God of Small Things (* * * * *)
Roy, Arundhati
I first read this novel more than twenty-five years ago. I must confess, I started reading it to find reasons to dislike it. That was my default reaction to any Indian writer writing in English. I was extremely fond of Bengali literature and felt it was underappreciated in world literature simply because it was rarely translated and lacked the clout enjoyed by many other regional literatures. This feeling was further exasperated when I heard it had won the Booker Prize. I wanted to dismiss it as a shallow depiction of Indian reality, which can only impress foreign eyes.
I was stunned by the book. When I finished it, I immediately called my father in India, and to my surprise, he had already read the book and was just as moved. We talked at length and felt her language was so visual and cinematic. I remember we talked about the passage where she introduces the fruit juice vendor, who eventually molests the young boy, and how she describes his toothy yellow smile. As readers, we could visualize a close-up shot of his mouth.
I generally avoid rereading a book I liked before because I fear I will dislike it the second time. It is better to cherish the old memories. However, after reading Mother Mary Comes to Me, my curiosity about discovering biographical details in the novel was irresistible. I am glad that I did. I think I got much more out of the book this time, not just because I am a bit older, but because I have read a lot more since then, and perhaps can appreciate good writing better.
Someone once said about this book that a great book discovers its own language. And what a language it is. She is bold and unapologetic. She was writing not to impress anyone, but just herself. So many great writers fail to be so unselfconscious. She can also play with incredibly complex characters, because she is not trying to judge. To have a moral position is good, but to climb above it is great.
Can someone make a film out of it? There are great novels that I would not like to see as a film. This is different. It begs to be filmed, but capturing the world she creates won't be easy. Like the book, the film has to invent its own visual language -- a conventional narrative will fail.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (* * * - -)
Desai, Kiran
Exactly seven years ago, I read Kiran Desai's earlier novel, her second, The Inheritance of Loss. By then, she was already famous, as the book won many awards, including the Booker Prize. She took seven years to write it, and it was published nineteen years ago. I liked it for its range without sounding ideologically overloaded, but I found some of the characters a little overdrawn.
My reaction to her latest novel, her third, after an extraordinary nineteen-year gap, is less positive. Once again, it is shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, which automatically prompts the reader to expect more. I am not sure if my slight disappointment is due to this overexpectation.
Like her previous novel, she tackles the broad issue of identity, but it goes beyond the usual range, touching upon cultural identity, immigrant identity, female identity, and racial identity. Her ability to tackle so many dimensions through a relatively small number of characters, time scale, and geographical location is very impressive. However, I felt all the characters were overemphasized. As if she were worried that the readers would miss the point if she kept it more subtle. The overdrawn characters also get into situations and react in ways that are less than credible.
For example, early in the novel. Sonia is introduced as a student at a US university. She feels culturally lonely, especially during the summer break, when most local students go back home. This is when she meets an enigmatic artist who is thirty years older than her. The artist entices her to visit his home/studio. On this very first visit, she goes to bed with him, almost casually, and for the very first time. This felt too contrived to me, and psychologically unreal. The relationship that develops continues to remain just beyond convincing.
All the characters introduced beyond that are recognizable, but they all seem caricatures of the real thing, always a bit more emphasized than the real people I have seen. It is like watching a movie that is ruined by a touch of overacting.
So, the question is, why did the Booker Prize judges fail to see these defects? Perhaps it is only visible to people who have lived these experiences—of being Indian, growing up in India, and being an immigrant in the US. Perhaps it all fits the expectations of a Western reader. Or, perhaps, I am wrong in my assessment. Now, I am eager to read some of the other books on the shortlist before the award is announced.
Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos (* * * * *)
Ogas, Ogi
About fifty years ago, I chanced upon a book that changed my life. It was called Design for a Brain by W Ross Ashby. It was my first book on Cybernetics. I was just out of high school, and before that, I had never read a book that built up a powerful idea so elegantly, step-by-step, and answered so many questions I was asking myself. It was also my first book that tried to offer a mechanical explanation of how some aspects of our brain work. It so happened, after many years, my Ph.D. thesis advisor did his doctoral work under the supervision of the same Ross Ashby.
Reading this book provided the same sense of excitement and revelation, and answered even more questions. Those who know me know that understanding the functioning of the mind, and specifically our conscious experiences, has been a passion of mine for the last decade. I read many books on the subject. Some try to mystify this phenomenon as something beyond ordinary science and seek answers in exotic fringes. Others try to characterize consciousness as an illusion of our functioning mind, and question its existence. A growing number of scientists view it as an emergent property of a system that has crossed a certain threshold of complexity. Then, in the last decade, a few candidate theories started to take shape. After thousands of years of philosophical speculations, it seemed a real explanation was within our grasp.
In this book, the authors focus on the work done primarily by cognitive scientist Stephen Grossberg and his colleagues. The journey starts with some of the simplest and earliest biological "minds", from archaea, bacteria, and amoeba to fish, birds, monkeys, and humans, and gradually builds up how each subsequent evolutionary step solved some problems these minds faced. In this journey, they expose the underlying continuity of this development. The logical buildup is beautiful and powerful.
During this gradual journey, it becomes clear why self-awareness is necessary to solve some of these cognitive tasks. Consciousness emerges as a consequence of Grossberg's Unified Theory of Mind, a mathematically rigorous model of the mind. It describes specific abstract mechanisms and dynamic processes and claims that these correspond to many experimental results in psychology and neurobiology.
The most surprising section of the book is when it explains that individual minds, hosted by a single brain, are not where the journey ends. Humans have created a collective super-mind through society, language, and writing. This super-mind follows the same architecture of individual minds, but can solve much bigger problems. Mind you, this is not just a metaphorical extension, but the description of a system built with sharp logic and rigor.
I can't wait to read Grossberg's book now. It's my next read. If you are interested in understanding our minds, I strongly recommend this book.
Giovanni’s Room (* * * * *)
Baldwin, James
It is one of those books I wish I had read long ago. Not because it could have imparted some useful wisdom, but because it has the power to change one's outlook on humanity without knowing how. Like all great novels, it is not easy to categorize, and impossible to summarize its essence.
Baldwin is not alone in writing a novel about an American trying to find himself in Europe, particularly Paris. Like all similar works, this is also partially autobiographical. However, he made a remarkable conscious choice. His protagonist is also a young American, discovering his homosexuality in a far more accepting Paris. However, unlike himself, his character is white. This is a particularly interesting choice in view of the current trend to exclusively explore one's identity in the art we make. It is hard to find anyone with a minority identity, be it black, gay, or any other label, to create art that does not focus on that identity. Yet, here he took the challenge to tell a story where he deliberately erased his black identity.
It is primarily a love story, but it is distinctly different from any other love story I have read. Here, all loves are sprinkled with self-doubt, be it love for the adopted city, his fiancée, or his gay lover Giovanni. I believe that is where the book touches us at a relatable level. Aren't all loves carry some doubt?
I'll end it with a beautiful quote from this exquisitely written book --
“He smiled, "Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home." He played with my thumb and grinned. "N'est-ce pas?"
"Beautiful logic," I said. "You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don't go there?"
He laughed. "Well, isn't it true? You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
Go Tell It on the Mountain (* * * * -)
Baldwin, James
I have never been a religious person and have never quite understood people who design their lives around some religious belief. Yet, knowing that many perfectly intelligent people do, I have always wanted to understand it from their perspective. Until now, that has never worked.
This book is filled with characters whose lives are governed by deep religious beliefs and codes. All of them are wounded by social injustice and personal conflicts. And, everyone is conflicted in the moral choices they made. In that background, they all struggle to live a Christian life.
It is this inner contradiction, compounded with faith, that finally made me better understand where such feelings come from. It is hard to understand another person until you can respect their lives. Baldwin creates a spectrum of characters, each very different, and makes the reader respect the circumstances that made them who they are, and thereby render them understandable.
The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life (* * * * -)
Davies, Paul C.W.
What is life? Is it unique in the universe? How was life created from inorganic matter? What is consciousness? These are age-old questions that have been asked and discussed by many before. For a long time, these were discussed philosophically and, as usual, did not throw any clarifying light. Then, starting in the last hundred years or so, they became scientific questions. Surprisingly, the most interesting discussions often did not come from biologists, but from Physicists. This, if you think about it, is not all that surprising. Physicists are trained to look at things in terms of fundamental principles, without getting too tangled in the details. And that is precisely what is needed to tackle big questions like this.
In this book, physicist Paul Davies tries to understand life in terms of broader principles like information theory, thermodynamics, and quantum physics. It is an excellent compilation of research results that have come out only in the twenty-first century, challenging many older ideas, and allowing us to revisit these questions from a different perspective.
Like any good scientist, he maintains a healthy degree of doubt about many of these findings, like the involvement of quantum mechanics in cellular processes. One area where his explanations were limited was when he discussed the problem of consciousness. He did not mention some of the credible candidate theories, like the work by Stephen Grossberg.
I particularly appreciated his admission that we still don't know how life was created from inanimate matter. He discusses all the possible theories, but correctly points out that each narrows the huge gap from matter to life, but there is still a vast chasm that we cannot adequately explain. If jumping this gap was an incredibly unlikely accident, then we are unlikely to find life elsewhere in the universe. But if we find life anywhere else, even one, that would prove there is a way for nature to cross that chasm, and life should be abundant.
Notes of a Native Son (* * * * *)
Baldwin, James
It is a set of deeply thoughtful essays on the experience of being black in America. Baldwin's perceptions are intense, philosophically deep, non-obvious, and powerfully communicative. As an outsider, it is hard for me to understand what it means to live with the history of slavery.
He talks about his experience in Paris in the 1930s, where he met many North Africans who also lived in the city. He describes the subtle differences in someone who can claim a definite root, based on the experience of a black American, for whom slavery erased any such connection. However, at the same time, he could find common ground with anyone who is not white because the perceived hierarchy is always present. When he visits a small Swiss village where the people have no exposure to black people, whether from America or Africa, and who have never traveled outside their village, the innate sense of white superiority is still there.
I listened to this book in audio form while working out at a gym on Chicago's south side. Most of the people around me were Black. Through the window, I could see the massive structure of the Obama Library under construction. Could Baldwin have imagined that someday there would be such a building, honoring the legacy of the nation's first Black president? Maybe, or maybe not. But has the deeper reality changed much? Even the least accomplished white person can still feel pride in connecting themselves to our cultural giants—Da Vinci, Beethoven, Newton, Shakespeare. They created modern culture, which remains the only culture that truly matters and the one that shaped who I am.
The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip (* * * - -)
Witt, Stephen
It is an interesting story about the unlikely evolution of a video game accelerator company to become one of the biggest technology companies in the world. More importantly, it is the captivating story of its CEO, Jensen Huang.
He is certainly an exceptional character, which makes the book a page-turner. But apart from his personality, he could be the driver of a technology revolution unlike anything in the past or the focal point of one of the biggest stock bubbles. Only history will tell how we ultimately remember him. But one thing is for sure, he is one of the most remarkably focused and confident business leaders.
Like any business biography, the book paints a larger-than-life image of the subject. However, the last chapter is an interesting departure.
For Two Thousand Years (* * * * -)
Sebastian, Mihail
The book is set in Romania, between the two World Wars. It is the story of a young Jewish person living in a place he identifies with, but amidst increasing antisemitic sentiments that are rapidly becoming explicit, violent, and threatening. It was a time when everyone had to take a side and justify their position, but the protagonist could see through the vacuous arguments and tried to detach himself.
Apart from making the readers feel the isolation, anxiety, and intellectual struggle of the main character, the story also seems uncannily contemporary. It makes us realize that fascism is not a foreign idea that just a minority of people believe in, but how it can corrupt and change the minds of entire societies. You can read it as a warning signal in the world we are all living in, where simple solutions to incredibly complex problems are rapidly becoming mainstream. Where slowly escalating violence is getting normalized and acceptable.
Liberation Day (* * * - -)
Saunders, George
So far, my experience reading Saunders has been uniformly good. He has a surprisingly unique style, and his ideas are dazzlingly novel. This collection of short stories is no exception. However, unlike what I read in the past, this collection felt a little uneven to me. The ideas behind these stories are extremely original, especially the ones with sci-fi themes, but not all of them engaged me fully. Perhaps they require a second reading, but with so much more to read, it is unlikely I will go back.
Mother Mary Comes to Me (* * * * *)
Roy, Arundhati
A long time ago, I came to the conclusion that it is humanly impossible to write a truly honest autobiography or memoir. No matter our intent, we cannot help but paint ourselves in a favorable light. Even when we write something negative, we hope the readers will praise our courage and honesty. The net result is always a positive impression of self.
However, I also realized that true honesty lies on a spectrum. Some memoirs are more brutal than others, and some people can go a lot further in shining a harsh light on themselves. On that scale, Arundhati Roy put herself very close to one end of that scale in Mother Mary Comes to Me.
Writers can be far more honest when they write fiction. After all, most fiction is biographical to some extent, and in fiction, one can hide behind their characters and tell the truth. Arundhati probably did that when she wrote her first novel -- The God of Small Things. Reading her latest memoir, it becomes clear that the world she described there was a reflection of her own life as a child. After many decades, and only after her mother died, she felt it was time to open up her life for public scrutiny.
I have read almost everything she has written since her debut novel, so it should not have come as a surprise that she is an amazing writer. It still surprised me. It is a book that is hard to put down. As she bares herself, warts and all, it cuts through our skin and makes us face our own shortcomings, hypocrisies, fears, and shallowness. As with all great memoirs, it is not just about understanding the author's life, but it acts as a mirror to see your own from an unseen and unforgiving angle.
I do not have the ability to adequately describe this book. I would urge everyone to experience it themselves. It may change you. I wish I could write like her, but more importantly, I wish I could feel life as she does.
The God of Small Things (* * * * *)
Roy, Arundhati
I first read this novel more than twenty-five years ago. I must confess, I started reading it to find reasons to dislike it. That was my default reaction to any Indian writer writing in English. I was extremely fond of Bengali literature and felt it was underappreciated in world literature simply because it was rarely translated and lacked the clout enjoyed by many other regional literatures. This feeling was further exasperated when I heard it had won the Booker Prize. I wanted to dismiss it as a shallow depiction of Indian reality, which can only impress foreign eyes.
I was stunned by the book. When I finished it, I immediately called my father in India, and to my surprise, he had already read the book and was just as moved. We talked at length and felt her language was so visual and cinematic. I remember we talked about the passage where she introduces the fruit juice vendor, who eventually molests the young boy, and how she describes his toothy yellow smile. As readers, we could visualize a close-up shot of his mouth.
I generally avoid rereading a book I liked before because I fear I will dislike it the second time. It is better to cherish the old memories. However, after reading Mother Mary Comes to Me, my curiosity about discovering biographical details in the novel was irresistible. I am glad that I did. I think I got much more out of the book this time, not just because I am a bit older, but because I have read a lot more since then, and perhaps can appreciate good writing better.
Someone once said about this book that a great book discovers its own language. And what a language it is. She is bold and unapologetic. She was writing not to impress anyone, but just herself. So many great writers fail to be so unselfconscious. She can also play with incredibly complex characters, because she is not trying to judge. To have a moral position is good, but to climb above it is great.
Can someone make a film out of it? There are great novels that I would not like to see as a film. This is different. It begs to be filmed, but capturing the world she creates won't be easy. Like the book, the film has to invent its own visual language -- a conventional narrative will fail.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (* * * - -)
Desai, Kiran
Exactly seven years ago, I read Kiran Desai's earlier novel, her second, The Inheritance of Loss. By then, she was already famous, as the book won many awards, including the Booker Prize. She took seven years to write it, and it was published nineteen years ago. I liked it for its range without sounding ideologically overloaded, but I found some of the characters a little overdrawn.
My reaction to her latest novel, her third, after an extraordinary nineteen-year gap, is less positive. Once again, it is shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, which automatically prompts the reader to expect more. I am not sure if my slight disappointment is due to this overexpectation.
Like her previous novel, she tackles the broad issue of identity, but it goes beyond the usual range, touching upon cultural identity, immigrant identity, female identity, and racial identity. Her ability to tackle so many dimensions through a relatively small number of characters, time scale, and geographical location is very impressive. However, I felt all the characters were overemphasized. As if she were worried that the readers would miss the point if she kept it more subtle. The overdrawn characters also get into situations and react in ways that are less than credible.
For example, early in the novel. Sonia is introduced as a student at a US university. She feels culturally lonely, especially during the summer break, when most local students go back home. This is when she meets an enigmatic artist who is thirty years older than her. The artist entices her to visit his home/studio. On this very first visit, she goes to bed with him, almost casually, and for the very first time. This felt too contrived to me, and psychologically unreal. The relationship that develops continues to remain just beyond convincing.
All the characters introduced beyond that are recognizable, but they all seem caricatures of the real thing, always a bit more emphasized than the real people I have seen. It is like watching a movie that is ruined by a touch of overacting.
So, the question is, why did the Booker Prize judges fail to see these defects? Perhaps it is only visible to people who have lived these experiences—of being Indian, growing up in India, and being an immigrant in the US. Perhaps it all fits the expectations of a Western reader. Or, perhaps, I am wrong in my assessment. Now, I am eager to read some of the other books on the shortlist before the award is announced.
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