Tag: #bookstagram

Greek Lessons

📍 South Korea 🇰🇷 

A woman is losing her ability to speak, for the second time in her life. A man is losing his vision. He is a teacher taking evening classes of Ancient Greek in Seoul. She is his student, wanting to learn a new language, hoping that, it would somehow help her speak. 

The woman, whose story is narrated in the third person, is bereaving her mother and is simultaneously fighting for the custody of her son. She feels devastated and defeated by death and separation. She overflows with rage and rancour that consume her. She is subsumed with an overwhelming sense of love which at the moment seems uncertain and unwanted even. The man, who is narrating his own story, is trying his best to acclimatise himself to Seoul after having moved from Germany. His anguish over his past strained relationships, strains his ability to adjust to his present situation. His loneliness, his longing for a city and people that are no longer present become the fodder for his lamentations on the pathological darkness that is enveloping him slowly and steadily. Through the class, the man and the woman, come together, to provide respite to their troubled yet kindred souls by being that requisite restrained sense to each other’s losing sensibilities.

Han Kang, is a South Korean writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024, a first for an Asian woman and for a Korean. Her other book, The Vegetarian, became the first Korean language novel to win the International Booker Prize in 2016. This book, has been translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won.

Greek Lessons, is a master storytelling on grief and its flagrant consequences. The book is seeped in all kinds of grief and loss, portrayed at various levels of intensity, conscientiously. This subtextual presence makes it ominous and omnipresent. This book also meanders on the characters’ existentialism, romanticising the desperation and the futility of it. The author has depicted Seoul to be this unwanted and cold third character, that is failing to provide warmth to its people. Han Kang’s words are measured, meticulous and mundane. Language drives the pathos, at times its dissolution drives the sentiment. Words are metaphorical, full of palpable melancholy. This is a piece of literature that is deliberate and visceral, but beautiful nonetheless.

~ JUST A GAY BOY. 🌺

Orbital

Six astronauts are inside the International Space Station; Anton, Chie, Nell, Pietro, Roman and Shaun. The book is a snapshot of a day in the lives of the astronauts as they orbit the earth 16 times during the earthly 24 hours. They grapple with a sunrise every 90 minutes which remains juxtaposed against the indescribable ethereal beauty of the planet Earth. On this particular day, there is a catastrophic typhoon that is approaching the Philippines whose path the astronauts are feverishly trying to follow as they zoom in and out of their orbital planes. The typhoon and the anticipated destruction that it would leave in its wake often becomes a vague segue and at times literature’s metaphorical liberty to delve into the internal cosmos of the individual astronauts while they themselves remain scattered in the grand cosmos of all. 

The book meticulously describes the space and how space stations orbit our planet without using any technical jargon. Earth in all its glory comes alive in the words of the author and simultaneously she transports us into the world of death and grief as one of the astronauts bemoans her mother’s death while the other, a dying relationship. Peering onto the earth, moving through the 16 orbits, the book provides a lingering, at times fleeting, but mostly a longing look at all the continents from the Americas to Antarctica, then getting more granular and microscopic as it describes the countries it crosses, all the lightness and darkness in the innumerable cities of these countries on our planet as they respond to the earthly sunrise and sunset which when observed whilst being suspended from a spacecraft can appear to be elliptically elegiac.

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, is a piece of literature that is here to let us know that books need not always be having a proverbial plot and a protagonist. Sometimes literature at its finest can be discombobulating, it can be nebulous, it can be meandering, but at the same time be a yardstick for a soulful sojourn across human lives and emotions which are unique, malleable, flawed and fascinating. Harvey’s ingenious writing can seem deceptively simple but every word of every sentence represents the complexities of the human existence when ironically the existence is now 250 miles away from the very planet that makes us human. This is a book that will stay with you for its indecipherable melancholy and literary gravitas as we continue to orbit the planes of living and existing. 

~ JUST A GAY BOY. 🛰️🌏🌎🌍

Purple Lotus

Tara, is a reticent and docile girl, who grows up in Mangalore with her grandparents and a schizophrenic uncle. Her parents along with her younger brother, move to Dubai during her formative years leaving her with her grandparents despite her disapproval and reluctance. She grows up to becomes a journalist, works for the local newspaper and has an arranged marriage with Sanjay who lives in Atlanta. After the marriage, he leaves her behind in Mangalore and Tara is only able to meet him after three years once she herself goes there. Undeterred by the abandonment and the questionable intentions of Sanjay, Tara hopes for a blissful life in the US. However, all her hopes come crashing down, as Sanjay continues to ignore her, remains non communicative and disapproving of her likes, behaviour and even her friendship with a Russian girl, Alyona. Tara continues to tolerate his mercurial temperament, his gaslighting, his passive aggression which gradually morph into physical and verbal abuse. When her parents dismiss her concerns about Sanjay and instead ask her to compromise, she feels betrayed. One day, after a particularly violent incident, she leaves her house and Sanjay, and with the help of friends manages to start her life from scratch. Later on she meets Cyrus, who develops feelings for her, as does Tara; but her unresolved past issues come to wreck havoc in her new oasis and she doesn’t stop short of self sabotaging everything that is loving and deserving of her.

Purple Lotus is an intense meditation on abandonment and shame. Through Tara, the author has portrayed how these emotions overpower our lives until a resolution is achieved. Brushing them aside, never makes them go away, rather they always come back with a vengeance in the most vulnerable of times. Tara is made to feel guilty by her parents for choosing her freedom from an abusive marriage. She carries this shame and countless other moments of shame from her growing up years, till it snowballs into a disaster that is ready to upend her life. Unbeknownst to Tara, others’ disappointment in her for her actions, and her constant longing for their approval, makes her tied to them in an emotionally calamitous way. However, through her self-actualisation which is indeed painful and unpleasant, the author shows us all that, there is always the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

Veena Rao’s debut work, Purple Lotus, is a poignant and urgent read on abuse, domestic violence and its unsettling impact on the victims. Though the language is easy to read and engaging, the story does hit you hard. Through this book, she highlights the various ways in which abuse can present itself and it necessarily needn’t be physical and torturous. She also makes an emphatic case for gross emotional abuse that is often disregarded not just by the victim but by the people close to her. The narrative does a sharp commentary on how Indian parents especially ignore their daughters’ call to distress and instead of comforting and supporting them, often reprimand them for even having such thoughts. 

2024 is coming to an end and Indian women are still fighting off abuse and striving for an equal stance in a marriage. Indian men are very easily given the benefit of doubt, let off the hook even in grave circumstances and celebrated for just being in the relationship. The fact that nobody questions them and challenges their innate chauvinism and misogyny, sometimes deceptively disguised as feminism and hence difficult to decode, has created this dictatorial monster that is soon becoming a monolith of unwavering patriarchy. 

That’s why we need to read this book, Purple Lotus. 

~ JUST A GAY BOY. 🪷

Prophet Song

Winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, Prophet Song is deliberately dark and perversely poignant. Set in contemporary Ireland, the story is about Eilish Stack, who is a molecular biologist by training and working in biotech in Dublin. She has four children, one being an infant, Ben. The story begins when Larry, her trade unionist husband is taken in for questioning by government officials. While Eilish receives no news about Larry despite her umpteen attempts to contact him or the officials; the country is soon descending into a political quagmire. A right wing “National Alliance Party” stakes claim to be the government and begins attempts to fight the anti-nationals and the rebels. Totalitarianism sees a rapid ascent and fascism soon starts dominating every aspect of civilian life. Freedom becomes conditional, defence forces become authoritarian, paving the way for a deadly civil war.

Eilish remains forever worried about Larry, wondering whether he’s even alive. Her eldest son Mark joins the rebels and soon disappears. Her other son Bailey, remains angst ridden and obstinate. Her daughter Molly remains her only support through this ordeal. As Eilish battles her anxieties, her insecurities, her losses, her grief, her helplessness, her hopelessness, and simultaneously care for her infant and a rapidly progressing dementia suffering father; she needs to make a decision if she has to leave the country or cross the borders illegally; as the society around her continues to disintegrate, and life becomes an endless cacophony of gunshots, sirens and missile strikes.

Paul Lynch’s prose can be generalised as an urgent and compelling commentary on the steady rise of totalitarianism in the world. His writing has a claustrophobic atmosphere, a sense of foreboding and is suffused with an unrelenting uneasiness. Lynch evocatively translates Eilish’s impuissance and anxiety into his words and onto every page. The scenes where Eilish expectantly awaits Mark’s phone call and when she goes hospital to hospital in search of her injured child are especially gut wrenching, depicting an awful sense of dread. The writing almost feels like a stream of consciousness; there are sections and chapters in the novel but no paragraphs. The dialogues between characters are without any punctuations; so much so that, there’s no difference between a thing said and a thing thought.

Now, Prophet Song may have been set in a dystopian Ireland, but closer home dystopia may soon become a reality. Economic development has been used as a tool to conceal fascism and autocracy. Jingoism and zealotry are being given a free run while any form of dissent is being deemed antinational and subsequently penalised. If you are one amongst many who still chooses to look the other way as this is happening right now, and thinking ‘this won’t/ will never affect me’; read Prophet Song. Paul Lynch was probably imagining an Ireland like that, but we don’t have to imagine it.

~ JUST A GAY BOY. 👿