Social wishers

The challenge used to be in making the effort to remember birthdays. Earlier, you had to make a note of it in a diary or embed it in memory. And you only reserved this privilege for the important few. Now, people know it’s your birthday because Facebook tells them. You can write a wish without having to look at the date. Coz, hey, Facebook will prompt you next year as well. With minimal effort, you can hammer out a few words and then get on with checking someone’s vacation photos, or comment on someone’s status.

Here's Absolute Lee on Facebook birthday wishes (and the changing nature of birthday-wishing in general). I once wrote a rant on the subject too. This year I went to Settings a few days before my b-day and changed the date, to avoid a repeat of last year's creepy outpouring of good wishes, mostly from people I don't know. (Since I use Facebook mostly to link to my writings/spread info about the books and not for personal stuff, I accept friend requests from pretty much anyone.) As I've grown older and greyer I've become a little more tolerant of birthday wishes in general, but I draw the line at being wished in a manner that reminds me of the spam ads in my Gmail inbox.

Orhan Pamuk on readers and writers

[Did this review for The Hindu earlier this year]

In one of the essays that make up The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, Orhan Pamuk mentions that after reading memoirs and conversing with other novelists, he came to realise that “compared to other writers, I put more effort into planning before I put pen to paper...I take somewhat greater care to divide a book into sections and structure it”.

This tone of this revelation is not self-congratulatory – it’s the tone of critical analysis, based on the understanding that there are different approaches to writing, each with its own strengths and limitations. If Pamuk takes some pride in his meticulousness, there are also times when he appears to express a melancholy envy for authors who are less self-conscious and to whom writing comes more easily.

The Nobel laureate’s repeated use of the words “naive” and “sentimental” in this book derives from Friedrich Schiller’s 18th century essay “Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung”, which distinguished between two types of poets: the “naive” ones who write spontaneously and unselfconsciously, almost as if they are being dictated to by an unseen power; and the “sentimental” ones who are painfully self-aware, reflective, questioning everything around them, including the artifice of their own writing. Novelists can be similarly classified, Pamuk proposes.

But it would be a mistake to think of this divide as a clear-cut one: the creative process is a mysterious and multilayered thing, in which “deliberate effort” and “natural, unforced talent” constantly overlap with and inform each other. For instance, if you read Pamuk’s own novels, you’ll probably agree that much of his work has a formal, cerebral quality that can have a distancing effect (an early book, The New Life, is a good example of this). But in the best of his writing – Snow and My Name is Red come immediately to mind – this quality coexists with an easy knack for humour, fluid use of language and a sense that the author succeeded in fully immersing himself in the world of his creating.

Of course, a novel hardly exists in isolation; it acquires a new life when readers respond to it, and readers can be categorised as naive and sentimental too. Extreme examples of the former are the literal-minded sorts who always read a text as an autobiography or as a disguised chronicle of the author’s experiences; on the other hand, there are completely sentimental-reflective readers who think all texts are constructs and fictions. “I must warn you to keep away from [both types of] people, because they are immune to the joys of reading novels,” writes Pamuk, tongue firmly in cheek. But somewhere between these two extremes lies the ideal reader, and as you turn the pages of The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist you begin to think that Pamuk himself must be very close to being one such.

Among the many pleasures of reading a good novelist’s reflections on his art is the pleasure of discovering that this writer is himself a passionate and opinionated reader, and that he responds to certain books and authors in the same way as “ordinary” readers do. Pamuk's descriptions of the effect that his favourite novels have had on him – “sometimes twilight would pervade and cover everything, the whole universe would become a single emotion and a single style” – are eloquent and moving. He uses great works of literature like Anna Karenina and Moby-Dick to illustrate important aspects of the reading and writing process (everyone, from Homer through Cervantes to Naipaul, is grist to his mill) and reflects on the novelist’s use of the tools available to him – character, plot, time and objects. What operations does the mind perform while we read, he asks. How do novels provide a rich second life for their readers? He also writes – somewhat enigmatically, not always with clarity – about the “secret centre” that a great novel should have, which the reader should – consciously or unconsciously – be seeking.

In such passages, some of Pamuk’s reflections can be arcane, especially if your level of engagement with literature isn’t as intense as his. But it’s a measure of the scope of this book that it allows this highbrow writer to show a charmingly down-to-earth side – when, for example, he compares the experience of following a soccer game on radio to reading a novel and transforming the writer’s words into mental pictures; or when he remarks that a reader like him has no hope of finding any kind of accessible meaning in James Joyce’s notoriously difficult novel Finnegan’s Wake.

Speaking of the artistic calling that he almost took up before becoming a full-time writer, Pamuk admits, “I have always felt more childlike and naive when I paint, and more adult and sentimental when I write novels.” It was as if – he says in a very revealing passage – he wrote novels only with his intellect, but produced paintings solely with his talent. However, he also reflects that with age and experience, he may have found “the equilibrium between the naive novelist and the sentimental novelist within me”. His best novels are certainly a testament to this, and The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist is a good companion piece to them, a window into the mind of a very special writer and reader.

Tennis, then and now

With the US Open beginning this week, the latest issue of Forbes India has an essay I've written about men's tennis - it's a comparison of the major rivalries at the seminal 1981 US Open (Bjorn Borg's final Slam) with the ones that we see today, 30 years later, as well as a comment on how sporting narratives get written, fandom then and now, and the mythologising of top players. I've also touched on Steve Tignor's fine book High Strung: Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe and the Untold Story of Tennis's Fiercest Rivalry.

Will only be able to put the piece on the blog after 10 days (and it will also be on the Forbes India website then), but if you're interested in reading it now do pick up the magazine.

(Also coming up soon: a piece about Rafael Nadal's new autobiography)

Shades of Ray: the restored Jalsaghar

One of my Bengali friends tells me that when he watches a Satyajit Ray film on DVD with his non-Bengali wife, it takes them twice the movie’s running time to get through it. “I have to hit Pause every two minutes just to explain the finer points of a dialogue that was mangled by the subtitles.”

Wretched subtitling on home-grown DVDs is one among many reasons to welcome the fine new Criterion release of Ray’s 1958 classic Jalsaghar (The Music Room), about a music-loving zamindar living his last days alone in his decrepit palace as the world changes around him. Another reason is the film’s tremendous visual and aural beauty, something I could fully appreciate only when I saw it on this restored print – much superior to the faded, scratch-ridden TV version that assailed my senses a few years ago.

Right from the opening-credits shot of an ominously swaying chandelier (which will be an important part of the film’s mise-en-scene), Ray’s distinct visual sense and Subrata Mitra’s camerawork draw us into a world of grandeur lost and briefly regained. There are many exquisite shots, such as the one of the protagonist, Biswambhar Roy, gazing into an unpolished mirror, wiping the dust away with a puzzled expression, almost as if wondering if the great days of his past were an elaborate dream. Or the plaintive shot of him leaning on his stick, watching a lonely elephant in the distance. The new transfer makes these images vivid, perhaps bringing them close to the images Ray had in his head when he set about conceptualising the film. And the audio restoration is just as important, for Jalsaghar’s background score is by Ustad Vilayat Khan, and the film contains performances by such classical-music doyens as Begum Akhtar and Wahid Khan as well as a brief appearance by Bismillah Khan. A story about a magnificent, all-consuming obsession for music deserves nothing less.

This is a film about hubris and decay - classic themes of great drama - and about a society in transition, but at a more intimate level it’s the story of an individual falling into madness. Ray’s attitude towards the feudal system was not an approving one, and you can’t imagine him being over-sympathetic towards his tragic lead character - in fact, he had some reservations about Vilayat Khan’s score because it seemed to romanticise the zamindar. But Biswambhar Roy isn’t merely a representation of an archaic, hyper-privileged way of life that is now crumbling into the sand like Ozymandias’s statue: he is also a melancholy old man who has lost his family, most of his possessions and his status, and who is watching the only world he ever knew becoming irrelevant. Whatever you think of the class he belongs to, you can’t help feel for him on some level, and Chhabi Biswas’s magnificent performance, along with the film's use of music (and our perception that this haughty landlord was a genuine patron of art and artistes) makes us emotionally ambivalent towards Roy.

This friction propels the film. On one of the extras on the DVD package, director Mira Nair observes that given her own utter lack of interest in royalty, it’s remarkable how much she felt for the central character. I know what she means.
 

****

Jalsaghar is also a key work in the context of Ray’s career: made shortly after the first two entries in the Apu trilogy, it came at an early stage in the forming of his reputation, both in and outside India. At that time, based on Pather Panchali and Aparajito, it was possible to pigeonhole him as a director who would operate in the mode of documentary-like minimalism; an objective chronicler rather than a stylist. (Hard as it is to imagine, during the earliest days of his career, some Western critics assumed that he came from a rural, uneducated background and that Pather Panchali, with its village setting, was an autobiographical work! Even today, some movie buffs are largely unaware of the rich vein of fantasy in his family background, and of his children’s films like Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and Sonar Kella.)

But it’s clear that from the start, Ray intended Jalsaghar to be a film of visual flourishes. In an essay in Our Films, Their Films, he admitted that having won an award at Cannes shortly before making this movie, he allowed himself the indulgence of a crane for overhead shots (an accident with the bulky equipment would lead to the death of a coolie, causing Ray immense regret; clearly, he lacked Werner Herzog’s stoicism when it came to the casualties of filmmaking!). There are carefully composed shots which draw attention to themselves – the chandelier reflected in a glass, a spider scuttling across a portrait, a view of a stormy sky seen through the windows of the music room – as well as zooms and tracks that stress the contrast between the zamindar’s past glory and the delusions that now crowd his mind. One constantly gets the impression of a director trying to use the camera in inventive ways.

Perhaps this might explain why Jalsaghar was a bit of a puzzle to its initial audiences (who had formed their own ideas about the “type” of director Ray was going to be) and why it took relatively long to be rediscovered and appreciated. But happily it’s here to stay now, and I think it’s close to the first rung of his work.

P.S. This will sound whimsical, but Jalsaghar’s opening-credit sequence, with the camera moving ever closer towards that chandelier, and Vilayat Khan’s score becoming increasingly urgent, reminds me – of all things – of the opening sequence of John Carpenter’s Halloween, with the glowing pumpkin pulling us towards it. Yes, I know I have a weird mind. But just wait till I write that thesis about how both the chandelier and the pumpkin are deceptive facades, eventually revealed to be hollow, and symbolic of the inner emptiness of the central characters...

[Some earlier posts on Ray: Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, Speaking of Films, Beyond the World of Apu, Charulata]

Eena Meena Deeka, a patchwork on Hindi-film comedy

Literature on popular Indian films is still so scanty and unorganised, one tends to be grateful for any book that puts some information together, however patchily. And so, the first thing to be said about Sanjit Narwekar’s Eena Meena Deeka: The Story of Hindi Film Comedy is that it contains some decent trivia, especially from the earliest days of Hindi cinema. Even the keenest movie buffs have little or no firsthand knowledge of such comic pioneers as Dixit and Ghory (“the Indian Laurel and Hardy”), Noor Mohammad Charlie(!), Bhudo Advani and V H Desai, which means that the first few chapters of this book have some value as research; literary merit isn't too relevant.

Some of the chapters about specific personalities work fairly well as short profile-essays. In “The Reluctant Comedian”, Narwekar reminds us that Kishore Kumar’s multiple talents sometimes made it difficult for him to concentrate on any one skill, and that comedy was a genre he stumbled into while yearning to become a playback singer. “Play it Again, Johnny!” begins with an anecdote about a bus conductor-cum-raconteur named Badruddin Jalaluddin Qazi who so impressed one of his passengers (the actor Balraj Sahni) that he was invited to join films and given the name Johnny Walker. And “The King of Comedy” examines the phenomenon of Mehmood, who became such a show-stealer that regular leading men were reluctant to appear in films with him.

There are flashes of insight in all these sections (and no shortage of movie stills), but there is hardly any fleshed-out analysis. For example, I wish a little more space had been given to one of the paradoxes of Kishore Kumar’s career – that although he was one of our best-loved movie personalities, there were few takers for some of his most ambitious jaunts into full-blown absurdist comedy (as in the 1974 film Badhti ka Naam Daadhi). Instead, Narwekar hurriedly describes Kumar’s impromptu solution to a continuity problem (he inserted a shot of himself sitting in the director’s chair and telling viewers “I decree that this scene will now continue with different costumes”) and concludes that the idea proved to be “too zany for the conventional audience”. (This same assertion is repeated two paragraphs later.)

In any case, the book’s dominant mode is that of the paragraph-length mini-review: short write-ups on comedy films (or films that can loosely be classified thus, such as the lighter work of Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chaterji) with plot synopses and a few superficial observations. Little attempt is made to analyse the use and impact of comedy in these works, there are factual errors (the song used in Jaane bhi do Yaaro is not “Saare Jahan se Accha”, it’s “Hum Honge Kaamyaab”), and the careers of outstanding actors like Deven Verma and Utpal Dutt are summarised in a few sentences.

I suppose the thing to be said in Narwekar’s defence is that he’s taken on a giant canvas: to do justice to eight decades of Hindi-movie comedy (along with the hundreds of major and minor talents who worked in the genre), this would probably have had to be a multi-volume series, with more than one author. As it stands, it’s a just-about-adequate reference work.

[Did a version of this for my weekly books column]

Mini-review: The Devotion of Suspect X

[From my weekly books column]

As a reviewer one has to constantly keep an eye out for the “major” homegrown releases – the Big Books, the potential trend-setters and so on – which means much of my reading is regimented. Serendipitous discoveries are few and far between; only rarely does one have the time, mental space or motivation to start reading a new novel that one has never heard of. And when this does happen, the book must be instantly gripping, otherwise it’s off to the sky-high “never to be read” pile.

Keigo Higashino’s Yogisha X No Kenshin, recently translated into English as The Devotion of Suspect X, didn’t made it to that dusty stack – it’s one of the most successful thrillers published in Japan in the past few years, and I can see why. The story begins on a serene note – with a reticent, middle-aged math teacher named Ishigami showing romantic interest in his neighbour Yasuko – but it escalates, almost before you realise it, into a clever psychological murder mystery.

This isn’t a whodunit, though. The murder – committed mainly in self-defence – occurs within the first 30 pages, and the buildup and the actual killing are dispassionately described. The suspense comes from the cover-up and the investigation that follows. The reader is simultaneously made aware of the detectives’ progress on the case and the relentless plotting of Ishigami, who is trying to protect Yasuko and her young daughter Misato. When a physicist named Yukawa becomes involved, a cat-and-mouse game between two very intelligent men ensues – and their battle of wits leads up to a twist that took me unawares. What appears at first to have been a fairly straightforward, even mundane, exercise in alibi-creation soon turns out to be something much more complicated.

The Devotion of Suspect X is a page-turner that can be read in a couple of quick sittings, but it’s also a character study – a selective one, it must be said, for Yasuko and Misato are genre stereotypes, almost ciphers. In the writing, I occasionally sensed a tension between the need to tell a fast-paced, conversation-driven story and the desire to give these women a little more depth. But there’s no such faltering when it comes to Ishigami. Impassive genius, master strategist, melancholy lover, protagonist and antagonist at once (depending on whose eyes you see him through), he isn’t someone you’ll forget in a hurry.

[Also see this post on a fine thriller series from Japan, Koji Suzuki’s Ring cycle]

Forfeit the eel, O Effete Hitler (and other muddled notes on the tree of life)

Shortly after watching Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, I discovered that the film’s title can be rearranged to spell “O I left the reef”, “I tether elf foe”, “File other feet”, "O I feel the fret", “Felt heifer toe” and “Feel it thereof”, among other phrases. (Go on, add your own.) All these anagrams are thematically consistent with the film’s content - and how could they not be, given that The Tree of Life encompasses EVERYTHING?

I’m a Malick fan with high tolerance for the massive self-indulgence of his cinema (two earlier posts here and here), but I thought this film was portentous and overblown even by his usual standards. Main gripe: the randomness inherent in taking vignettes from the lives of a specific 1950s American family and placing them against a canvas that tries to accommodate the history of the Universe as well as key questions about existence and consciousness. While the ambition is admirable, a two-hour-long film is scarcely enough to deal with such a subject on the scale that Malick wants to deal with it. (Quite possibly, even a 12-billion-year-long film wouldn’t be enough. Even if we’re living inside it.)
 

Jim Emerson once pointed out that some movies work better when seen in private, because they are too personal to share with an audience. If you watch a film you feel strongly about alongside a bunch of indifferent or critical viewers, it’s a bit like “having other people in the most private recesses of your consciousness, making fun of your dreams as you're dreaming them”.

Malick's films fit this thesis well, and I may have liked Tree of Life better if I had seen it in solitude. But a south Delhi multiplex hall is about as far as you can get from the private viewing experience; within the first 20 minutes, I realised this was going to be an effort to sit through. And though I was irritated by the viewers who knew nothing about Malick and had come to see “a Brad Pitt movie”, I could also feel some sympathy for them.

One such lady was sitting behind me with a companion (whose sex I’m unsure about because he/she didn’t say a word; or maybe the lady was talking to herself throughout). She tried to follow the anti-narrative but eventually took to shifting about in her seat, sighing loudly and flapping her hands like one of those poor tortured trees in Malick’s last film The New World. During the lengthy passage that deals with nothing less than the birth of our solar system, the dawn of single-celled life in the primeval soup, and the gradual appearance of “higher” forms (eventually resulting in the multiplex audiences of today), she said: “I think they must be showing what happens to that guy after his death.”

Not a terrible interpretation really, when you consider how abstract the sequence is (especially for those who haven’t brushed up on their evolutionary biology), and how seemingly unconnected to the 1950s family story. The problem is, she went on saying it even after the dinosaurs appeared. (The Afterlife is Jurassic Park? Who knew.)

And so it went until the lights came on, whereupon some people hooted loudly and others stumbled out of the hall wailing.

Personally I was disappointed too. On one level it’s pleasing that a respected filmmaker – with resources and big-name actors willing to perform cartwheels for him – is going all out to realise a deeply personal, audience-alienating vision. But in this case I didn’t think the vision was worth the effort, the money and the time.

So, zero stars. (And you know I don’t believe in giving marks or stars to a film.) That’s right, a big round zero. Not even a consolatory half a star for nobleness of intention or grandeur of vision.

But would I pay multiplex-ticket money to see The Tree of Life a second time? Yes – in a heartbeat. (Only if I’m assured an empty hall, or at least one with where I wouldn’t be able to hear any boos or chuckles.)

P.S. I don’t spend a lot of time reading film reviews these days, but I made an exception for Tree of Life, because it’s interesting to observe the different ways in which good writers react to Malick’s cinema (and my own responses to those writers are always pleasingly muddled). Of the reviews I’ve read, the one I most agreed with overall was this negative one by Stephanie Zacharek (“Malick’s slavish attention to detail is more a kind of ADD distractibility, where every flickering butterfly passing by, every dust mote dancing in the sun, is supposedly loaded with so much meaning that in the end, nothing has any weight”). At the same time, unlike Zacharek, I admire Malick’s refusal to take an anthropic view of life. (I was puzzled by the critics who complained that The Thin Red Line wasn’t so much a World War II movie as a film about a beautiful island and its flora and fauna, where a few human beings just happened to be busy killing each other. Surely that was a large part of the point.)

Meanwhile, Peter Bradshaw goes magnificently, shamelessly over the top about The Tree of Life in this review, and I liked the fact that Roger Ebert looked at the film largely through the prism of his own childhood memories of growing up in a 1950s Middle America very similar to the one depicted here. (I can completely see why someone with a life trajectory similar to that of the Sean Penn character might have intensely personal feelings about this film.)

And from Andrew O’Hehir’s ambivalent piece in Salon, a good summation:

We are here, living and dying on this little blue rock in the middle of space, mesmerized by the mysterious relationships between parents and children that define our lives, connected at every point – a tree we plant, an animal we feed, the earth we dig in, the thoughts we think – to something much larger we can't really understand. Trying to get at some of that in a 2011 movie-star vehicle that cost many millions of dollars to make, and is partly an autobiographical family story and partly an indecipherable spiritual allegory – well, that's nuts. Right now I suspect that "The Tree of Life" is pretty much nuts overall, a manic hybrid folly with flashes of brilliance. But even if that's true it's a noble crazy, a miraculous William Butler Yeats kind of crazy, alive with passion for art and the world, for all that is lost and not lost and still to come.