Apu’s World

Thanks to the award winning movie, Schindler’s List, most people, even those who haven’t actually seen the movie, have heard of Oskar Schindler, the German/Austrian businessman and trader who saved over a thousand Jews from the Holocaust.

In most cases, one watches the movie after reading the book (and usually comes away disappointed). In this case I saw the movie first, as a teenager, and remember being deeply moved by the movie’s portrayal of human suffering on an unimaginable scale. Reading Thomas Keneally’s book Schindler’s Ark recently, many years after watching the movie, I underwent the process in reverse, and was struck by how many additional layers a book adds to the story.

Schindler’s Ark is the Booker prize winning novel based on which the movie was made. One of the things I found most curious about the book is that Keneally claims it is a novel, although based on extensive interviews with Schindlerjuden (as the Jews rescued by Schindler called themselves)  and others who knew Schindler during and after the world war. Keneally mentions at the beginning that he wrote the book as a novel because Schindler’s larger than life personality could not quite fit into any other format. However, while reading the book, I never really felt that it was a novel I was reading; perhaps the fact that the Schindler story is so well known now makes it difficult to perceive the book as fictional in any way. Moreover, although incidents are dramatized, to give readers the feeling of authenticity, Keneally interjects at so many places with phrases like “It is possible Schindler may have…”  or “Perhaps he thought that…” that it is hard to ever forget the journalist’s voice. So, Schindler’s Ark did not work for me as a novel, although I didn’t find that a problem.

Instead, it is an excellent read as a very well researched, insightful account of a complex man, who put himself at great risk, for motives never completely understood. It is evident that Keneally wants the book to avoid being seen as a hagiography, so he is at pains to look at Schindler from many angles; the desire to be rich and successful, the willingness to bend rules, to dine with evil in order to accomplish some good (while feathering his own nest), his love of women and shabby treatment of his wife are all as much a part of Schindler as his refusal to toe the Nazi line on Jews and the craftiness with which he is able to save so many from death in the concentration camps.

I remember the movie as focusing on Schindler’s rescue of the Jews, but the books makes it clear that he did far more than that - he also passed on information about the situation in Poland to Jewish organisations in Hungary and Israel which were collecting evidence even during the war itself, and gave evidence at the trials after the war, and well into the 60s.

Given the mass hatred of Jews that had been whipped up among the German-Austrian population of the time, quite where Schindler derived his convictions from and what drove him to undertake such enormous personal risks (he was arrested thrice) were never quite clear, and while Keneally does his best to trace the possible influences on Schindler, he admits that some questions about the individual human mind are perhaps never fully answerable.

For anyone interested in the history of this period, or even a well-written look at an unusual man at a time of great stress and ferment, Schindler’s Ark is a book worth reading.

apu The Literary life

Sita’s story presents itself as fertile ground for endless re-imagining, centuries after the original was sung. Here is a great love story, a story in which a man climbs mountains, allies with monkeys, fords the mighty ocean, devastates an army and almost loses his own life and that of his brother for the sake of the woman he loves, and yet, at the end, there is no happily ever after. This is the tale of a love where one of the two lovers goes missing at the end. The reader may be forgiven for asking, what kind of a love story is this?

A new book review, of Samhita Arni’s The Missing Queen, a novel that begins where the Ramayana ends.

apu The Literary life

I’ve heard so much about Anjum Hasan’s writing from various sources that I’ve wanted to read at least one of her books for some time. My introduction came about recently, with Difficult Pleasures, a collection of short stories.

I love short stories; the way the best ones get to the heart of the matter in a little over a few pages, often using a situation that builds up over a few hours or days to illuminate a character sharply. I love their tautness, and I love especially modern short stories that cut through to the inner workings of a person but don’t quite tell you what happens to them. Tightly constructed stories with loose endings - incidentally, watching movies together with my husband made me realise how differently people react to ambiguity; I revel in it because it lets me continue the story in my own head, and he hates it - the not knowing ‘what happens next.’

Coming to Difficult Pleasures, this is going to sound presumptuous, but all through the book, I had a feeling of deja vu, as though these were stories I had written myself. It is some time since I have written any fiction and I haven’t written anything half as well crafted as Anjum Hasan’s stories, but there it was - this feeling that I could have written these myself. I’m not sure what set that off, perhaps some sort of unreasoned empathy with her characters, a sense that these would be the kind of people I would write about too.

What I loved about this book was the beauty with which the characters were written - it’s not easy to write characters that come alive, with dreams and doubts and idiosyncrasies, and Anjum Hasan does that wonderfully. In ‘Eye in the sky’, the woman who goes away to Goa on a whim because of a fight with her husband appears whimsical - but as the story progresses, hidden troubles of a mild and persistent nature surface. In ‘Hanging on like death’, the little boy who is so proud of being cast as a mushroom in the school play, waiting for his alcoholic father to turn up at the event could have been an obvious attempt at pathos in the hands of a less competent writer, but not here. Hasan lays bare the fractured nature of relationships, the gentle or brutal cracks rarely visible on the surface, and does it in a manner that makes your heart quake at the realisation of how fragile our lives really are.

A couple of stories didn’t work for me - ‘Water’ and ‘Good Housekeeping’ seemed to lack the crisp construction of the other stories, and the protagonist seemed little more than a hazy mass of discontent; the neighbourhood seems less real than in many of the other stories - etched in detail enough, but details that don’t seem to matter to the story. Thankfully, that is not the case with most of the stories, and Hasan is one writer whose milieu is clearly urban angst and chaos, done beautifully, with the city as a vivid backdrop to human frailty.

Read Difficult Pleasures if you’d like some stories unravelling beautifully and leading you on a string to nowhere particular, but feeling illuminated.

apu In General, The Literary life

Men own spaces, women in public spaces merely beg the fleeting use of them. Try sitting at the beach by yourself (if you are a woman) and you will know exactly what I mean. A lone woman, doing nothing, is an oddity that must be leered at and of course made fraandship to. A friend who visited the beach with her child recently, told me how two young men who gave children horse rides brought their horses uncomfortably close to her, and while the horses peed, indulged in crude jokes about the animals’ penises; because you know, even if a man is the one talking rubbish, it is a woman who must feel dirty. A lone woman learns to arm herself with the righteousness of purpose.

More from me at Women’s Web, on Indian women in public spaces.

apu Women & Feminism

One of the advantages of having signed up for a lending library this last year has been the freedom to experiment with genres and authors, and not feeling compelled to buy something that I know I would definitely like. Given the cost of books, the lack of space for storage as well as the environmental implications of growing numbers of people buying growing amounts of paper products, I have been trying to minimize buying - which tends to make me rather conservative in my choices. Subscribing to the online library Book & Borrow has freed me up from that.

So last month I decided to order a copy of Tess Of The D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, considered to be among the best novels of the Victorian era, and one of Hardy’s best novels too (and he wrote a lot of novels!)

I had read Tess.. when I was in college, but at the time, my interest in a lot of books tended to be purely from a story perspective, and the fatter the book, the more in a rush I would be to get to the ‘ending’. So this time, I wanted to re-read the novel to gain a better appreciation of Thomas Hardy’s writing, and also given the theme of the novel, I thought it would be interesting as an insight into the life of women in the England of that time.

For those who are unfamiliar, the plot of the novel revolves around Tess, a young girl from a rural family, raped by a rich young man and her struggles in a world where ‘purity’ is all important for a young woman, including in her own eyes. That is a very basic description though and the novel addresses many other themes such as mechanization of a rural ecosystem, the courage and survival of young women, faith, and human frailty.

This time, I took my time reading and it was a pleasure reading Hardy’s descriptions of rural life and landscapes, as well as his acute insight into what drives human beings - the lust, vanity and arrogance of the wealthy landowner D’Urberville as well as the superficially moral impulses of Angel Clare, whom Tess loves. More vivid than the black (D’urberville) or the white (Tess) is the grey - Angel, who places Tess on a pedestal, but is unable to look beyond her history once he learns of it.

The cruelty of some kinds of morality is made stark in the contrast between Angel whose cannot think beyond the norms prescribed by ‘good society’ (even though he claims to be a rebel) and the inhabitants of Tess’ village who treat sex and its possible consequences as facts of life.

The novel’s prose is ‘difficult’ by the standards of today’s short awareness spans, but those willing to take some trouble will enjoy the precision with which Hardy crafts descriptions of people and places to make them ‘visible’ to the reader, and the irony and sarcasm woven into the writing - ever so gently.

apu The Literary life