Thursday, December 24, 2015
A 5-star Text Review of "Fated and Fateless" by Lana
I'm pleased to announce that my debut novel Fated and Fateless has just garnered a 5-star review by Lana, who described it as "an inspiring and heartfelt book"!
Here's the link:-
Lana's Review
The retail price for the e-book at Amazon has just been reduced to US$4.99 (for a limited time):-
Amazon's Product Page for Fated and Fateless
Happy reading!
Sunday, December 6, 2015
Book Review - "A Place of Greater Safety" by Hilary Mantel
I was
reading this epic novel non-stop for the last seven days and, with a sigh of
relief, I finally reached the end yesterday. While mulling on how to write this
review, an immediate thought that came to mind was that the novel could’ve been
tightened and slimmed down by a fifth to a quarter. I’m giving it a rating of 4.2
stars out of 5.
On
the whole, it is a rigorously researched work of historical fiction describing
in minute details the emotional, sexual and political lives of the three
leading actors who played pivotal roles in the French Revolution (Maximilien Robespierre,
Camille Desmoulins and Georges-Jacques Danton) and who were surrounded by a
myriad cast of secondary characters; and the entangled and mind-boggling
relations and interactions, sexual or political or otherwise, between the one
and the other.
In
terms of crafting a spell-binding historical novel, Ms. Mantel is a talented
storyteller who knows how to titillate her readers. I was particularly
impressed with the last third of the book, where the irony of
bad-outcome-from-good-intentions helps to build up hair-raising tension. Having
said that, I still came away with a tinge of disappointment that the author
chose to bypass the chance to examine some salient issues from the viewpoint of
ordinary French folks (for example, the underlying reasons as to why they
thought there was no better alternative than to resort to bloody violence; how
the epochal ideological shift affected the average Parisian on the streets and
what his/her reactions to that shift were).
Set
in one of the bloodiest and most tumultuous periods in French history, the
novel no doubt gives a kaleidoscopic view of important historic events and personages.
But the fictional elements of the novel tend to dwell interminably on Danton’s sexual
and material voracity, Desmoulins’ bisexual perverseness and Robespierre’s frenzied
self-abnegation. Couldn’t they have been simply hot-headed, starry-eyed young idealists
who started out thinking it was their ineluctable duty to reform a rotten
system in their beloved country, but ended up being sucked into the vortex of
power addiction, which ultimately destroyed lives unnecessarily, including
their own? If Robespierre’s ascetic traits were still credible, the salacity
attributed to Danton and Desmoulins just seems to me to be a bit forced.
All
in all, this made for good complementary reading alongside Thomas Carlyle’s
non-fiction title The French Revolution:
A History, which I commenced reading before starting on Mantel’s novel. With
these two books, I’m learning a lot about this cataclysmic phase in French
history.
Friday, November 27, 2015
Book Review - "The Age of Innocence" by Edith Wharton
About
a decade or so ago I had seen on TV for the first time the 1993 film adaptation
of this novel that starred Michele Pfeiffer and Daniel Day-Lewis. It had made a
deep impression on me, especially the performance of supporting actress Wynona
Ryder, who played May Welland. After that I saw TV repeats of it a few more times,
which left me ever more bewitched. Last week, I finally came round to reading
the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The power of Wharton’s beautiful prose, along
with the pathos of a tragic-ending love story plotline, made it a sublime
reading experience.
What
the author brings into the novel, set in 19th century New York, is
much more than pathos of forbidden love. Her clear-eyed insight into the
hypocrisy and pretentiousness of high-society New York in what was called the “Gilded
Age”, which insight her upper-class up-bringing had chanced to cultivate, gave
that much more emotive profundity and even raison
d’etre to the storyline.
During
the reading, I had that nagging feeling that the author seems to treat the
devious and cold-hearted May Welland and her lot with too much leniency. Then I
found out from Wikipedia that Wharton meant for The Age of Innocence to be an “apology” for her earlier novel The House of Mirth, which had been much
more critical and brutal about the same theme - how social dogmas restricted
individual freedom. It just goes to show how unforgiving and oppressive certain
moral fetishes can be, under the guise of preservation of family/social traditions.
I
don’t know if I’m the odd one out here, but the one character in the novel whom
I admire is the joyously obese Mrs. Manson Mingott, if only because she is as
generous and non-judgmental in her compassion as in her appreciation for food.
Lastly,
I just have to say that I love the satirical ring to the title name. Allegedly
the title was inspired by a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, which was
originally named A Little Girl and
later changed to The Age of Innocence.
It makes me think that the story’s protagonist should be May Welland rather
than Countess Ellen Olenska. Welland’s innocence is the “invincible” kind of
innocence, the innocence that seals the
mind against imagination and the heart against experience.
Sunday, November 1, 2015
Book Review - "The Death of Ivan Ilych" by Leo Tolstoy
I
had expected this novella to be all dark and depressing. But it turned out to
be dark with a silver lining. Through telling a story about the life of a
Russian judge, who falls ill at the height of his career and life
accomplishment, Tolstoy leads the reader into the inner struggles of the
protagonist as he is confronted with the threat of death. The writing is simple
and calm but has an intimacy and immediacy about it that it rattles one's
nerves and fibers. The questions raised about life and death will haunt the
reader probably for as long as he/she lives, but there is still a glimmer of
hope and salvation.
Book Review - "De Profundis" by Oscar Wilde
This is a
piece of beautiful, honest, philosophical writing that flows from a chastened
soul. It is a long letter that Oscar Wilde wrote while he was in prison, addressed to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. At the time of the letter's first publication, parts of it were suppressed (the parts where Wilde recounted his relations with Douglas and how he was utterly swayed by his influence). When Douglas failed in his libel action re: the letter against the publisher, he resorted to writing a venomously bitter rebuttal called Oscar Wilde and Myself.
These passages in Wilde's letter tug at my heartstrings:-
"To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul."
"Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit."
These passages in Wilde's letter tug at my heartstrings:-
"To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul."
"Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit."
"Of course when they saw me I was not on my pedestal, I was in the pillory. But it is a very unimaginative nature that only cares for people on their pedestals. A pedestal may be a very unreal thing. A pillory is a terrific reality. They should have known also how to interpret sorrow better. I have said that behind sorrow there is always sorrow. It were wiser still to say that behind sorrow there is always a soul. And to mock a soul in pain is a dreadful thing."
"Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul."
"Time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of thought, the imagination can transcend them and move in a free sphere of ideal existences. Things also are in their essence of what we choose to make them; a thing is according to the mode in which we look at it."
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Book Review - "Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel
I’ve
been agonizing over how to rate this novel. I think I’ll give it 3.5 stars.
Before reading the novel I had seen the BBC Wolf Hall series and would say that
I enjoyed the TV show more than the book.
Mantel
does a great job in convincing readers (me included) that historians probably
didn’t do Thomas Cromwell justice in painting him in a dark villainous light.
She tells a believable story about Cromwell’s love-starved childhood that is
caused by his abusive, alcoholic father, and how he, in spite of it, forges a
life of success and fame for himself and manages to rise from strength to
strength in his political career, first as a an aide to Cardinal Wolsey during
his last days of glory and then as a favorite courtier of Henry VIII’s. His
childhood scars are a blessing in disguise and transforms him into a
strong-willed, self-sufficient and goal-oriented go-getter. It is a totally
plausible rags-to-riches life story.
What
bothers me is that in her narrative, Cromwell’s character is drawn as being the
opposite (or superior) to that of Thomas More, who is portrayed as vain, hypocritical
and cold-hearted. I find it hard to stomach that Cromwell, whose opportunistic
drive to climb to the top is borne out by his calculating and self-serving schemes,
can be such a whole lot different from (better than) More, as Mantel tries to
make him out to be. If those traits of Thomas More carry any grain of truth, then
Cromwell, who is just as subservient and sycophantic to the despotic King Henry,
cannot possibly claim any moral high ground. It can be said though, that they are
both victims of the times, when lives are expendable at a monarch’s whim, but
at least More has the gall and dignity to die for his principles.
In
the Afterword, Mantel implies that her inspiration for the novel came from
George Cavendish’s (Wolsey’s gentleman usher) memoir about Wolsey. Mantel’s
meticulous research does shine through the novel. One gets good insight into
the rancorous power contention between monarchial and ecclesiastical
hierarchies in Europe, as well as the religion-related intolerance and thought-oppressive
violence of the times.
As
for the writing, I admit that at times I had to go back a few lines to decide
who “he” is. I had the feeling that I had to constantly solve riddles. At some
places, the disjointedness threw me off. But there’s also no lack of beautiful
prose, though it sometimes gets a bit cumbersome. Here are a few samples of
delightful lines:-
“He will remember his first sight of the
open sea: a grey wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.”
“He never lives in a single reality, but
in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities.”
“….she must have teased from her silver
saints some flicker of grace, or perceived some deflection in their glinting
rectitude…..”
“You can have a silence full of words. A
lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings,
holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with
curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with
ghosts.”
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