The Life and Adventures of a Bibliophile

I read all the time; at the dining table, while surfing the net, at work, at school, in the car, on the train. Except while on a plane and on the loo. Sometimes I take a break from books and watch films and TV shows instead. This is what I have done for most of my life and now I am beginning to burst with the overflowing, accumulated mass of memories, emotions, people and events. So it's time I channeled this flood to where it belongs: a notebook. I track #soonha. Looking forward to hearing from you.

[in-love-with-remus-lupin]

Tonks : *makes Remus a cup of tea but puts salt in it to prank him*

Remus : *sips the tea

Tonks:

Remus : *finishes the tea

Tonks : Didn't it taste bad?

Remus : Yeah, but I didn't want to hurt your feelings so I drank it all.

Tonks : *tearing up*.. Oh, okay.

[soonhaabro]

The Life and Adventures of a Bibliophile

(by Soonha Abro)

The Life and Adventures of a Bibliophile has moved to Wordpress. Please follow the link to view the new blog.

[soonhaabro]

On reading my first novel by Anaïs Nin: A Spy in the House of Love

A friend had lent the book to me in a rather poor condition. I first looked at the cover, read the title and the author’s name. Then, I flipped the pages; there was a tear that ran across the middle of the page about half way down to the bindings. My friend wanted to tell me the story, but he stopped because, well, spoilers. I assured him spoilers won’t affect my reading of the book, but in fact, they will help me to understand it better. So he told me the story of the book; his eyes, facial expressions, mannerisms, all of which indicated his excitement.

I started reading the book some time after I had finished reading another book. It might have been a day or two before I could start reading House of Love, I can’t remember exactly. But I stopped when I was at page 5 or 7. What for? I asked myself.

I wanted to take notes. The language, the prose, her use of aesthetic devices, characterisation etc. all of which have made me want to imbibe not just the story but Nin’s themes, which is the Matter, of course, and the Form. I want to absorb the entire novel within myself. I want to annotate, as well, an essential method of active reading. But I can’t. The book belongs to my friend. I can’t deface somebody’s property. I know I would hate it if someone spoiled my precious books.

Nin’s prose is unlike any other writer’s prose. I have never read anything quite like it. Perhaps, this might be what has made me feel so strongly about the book. A writing style so crisp; paragraphs that do not have more than 5-7 lines, maybe 10 at most. A perfect balance between the long and short sentences; the long ones make sense and leave us a realisation that they are perfect and were meant to be that way, whereas the short ones are capable of expressing a whole lot of emotion in a few words. A single paragraph encapsulates, encompasses an entire world. I really have never read anything quite so beautiful, so accomplished.

Reading Nin’s House of Love feels like I hold a beautiful slippery, but tangible, object in my hands, overwhelmed with the feeling that I might lose this most important thing when I have finished the book. It might be this niggling ominous sensation that might be preventing me from racing through a novel that is only 124 pages long.

At least, I can get the whole book photocopied, and annotate it as much as I want to. 

[soonhaabro]

On Writing and Writers’ Block

Disclaimer:

This blog is entirely my own work and is not intended -- in any context, sense, or by any definition or meaning -- to be a duplication of my blog detailing my experiences with the National Novel Writing Month 2014 that I wrote for and published on the Desi Writers' Lounge (DWL) blog. The piece I have published below is meant to be a cathartic exercise in fighting off the writers' block that I sadly suffer from. Whereas the blog I wrote for DWL was meant only to detail my experiences and the lessons I've learnt in the month (of November) just gone by. 

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy the piece that will follow.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Earlier this year, sometime in May, I decided that 2014 would be the year in which I will embark on the hellish ride that is known globally as the National Novel Writing Month. I had prepared myself mentally to the extent where the energy and passion was present, but I had no structure, no plan for the story that had been germinating in my mind for the last four years. Therefore, I was in no position to actually start the novel. I conveniently procrastinated on starting the planning process; technically, I should have started in July or August, but it was October when I realised that I had only one month in which to plan an entire 50,000-word novel right down to the most minor detail. Despite this realisation, I didn’t start planning until the last couple of days of October; even then, my plan was brief and sketchy, not as comprehensive as I’d have liked it to be.

I started writing on November 3, two days late. About a week later, and having averaged only about 1,000 words a day, I lost all my energy and passion. I had reached a block, which seemed insurmountable to me because I haven’t trained myself as yet in the methods of how not to be encumbered by the infamous and terrible writers’ block. I forced myself to start again in the last ten days of November, and I never even reached the 10,000-word mark. In any case, November is now over. I have lost the challenge.

I had stopped wanting to write. I just couldn’t continue anymore without it feeling like my entire being was revolting against being forced to vomit out a novel. Maybe it was due to the lack of a clear plan for the novel. Maybe it was because the original story idea has now begun to reek like stale piss, or alcohol; a possible signal that I should just scrap the idea and discover other story ideas.

I even had other matters to take care of, an excuse that no serious writer should ever make. Writing should never be a pastime for someone like me, who is serious about writing and wants to be published one day. I want to make it my vocation, a job, from which I earn money for writing about things that I am passionate about. I want to attend writing workshops across the globe; but in order to be selected for these workshops one must provide some good writing samples that show my writing skills and help identify the spaces for improvement, both for me and any potential writing mentors. But, I barely have any writings to show to anyone.

Maybe I should start with something small: writing exercises in how to structure a plot, describing a setting, a dialogue, in characterisation and character development. Maybe I should actually write down those short stories that I have made notes about on my phone. Hopefully, that will help me to get over my writers’ block.

Also, I need to read more, a lot more than I already read. I need to read more Chetan Bhagat, even though he can be a terrible writer. I need to read more prose pieces that are both published and unpublished, on various online blogs and forums that I follow.

Read more terrible fiction so I know what things to avoid in my writing. Read the good stuff so I can be inspired to write something good.

Read about the tropes of literary fiction, of the South Asian literature in the English language, of crime/mystery/thriller fiction. And, most importantly, I should read that eBook version of The Elements of Style by W. Strunk Jr. and E.B. White.

Most of all, I should write in my bloody journal more often so I am better able to confront the myriad of events that occur to me and my loved ones every day; and, about the people that I have met in my own life, so they can come to life and even reach the ends they deserve in my writing. Make notes about the people I meet, those I have known for years, the ones I dislike or am disgusted by, and the ones who evoke a warm and fuzzy, happy feeling in my heart. Create characters out of them for my characterisation exercises.

Do writing exercises, at least once a day, or twice or thrice a week. As long as I am writing, I will be fine, safe, secure, and as exhilarated as I get when I am flying through a book. That’s what I want to feel from writing: a sense of exhilaration that I also get while reading. Although I confess that until now, I have mostly felt just a sense of forcedness; like whatever I am writing is just being forced out of me. There is no happiness or exhilaration, no sense of comfort or relaxation. In a way, this could constitute pain. I think writing will remain a painful activity for me until I reach a point when I can write, without thinking what others will think, what my parents will think when they read about what goes on in my mindscape. I should stop worrying about that, seriously. This niggling self-doubt will never let me become the writer I want to become because I always let it take over my mind.

That’s another thing I need to start doing. Start taking control of my mind by first understanding how exactly does it function; what goes on in there; how can I understand and then use my creative and thought processes to aid me in my writing.

Practice with formal-looking font styles. So far, I like Georgia and Garamond fonts for writing. Georgia easily mimics typewriter fonts. I can fool myself into thinking that I am writing on a typewriter. Times News Roman is better suited for any professional work-related writing, like those reports I wrote for Piler.

Oh look! I’ve managed to write over 900 words on writing and writers’ block. I believe it’s time to write that short story. First, I’ll just go with the breakdown of the plot, setting, character, and theme before I start writing. Then, I can polish it up before the next meeting on December 9. Woohoo!

Postscript: I made a few changes, here and there, and now this blog’s word count stands at exactly 1,075 words, including this postscript.

[soonhaabro]

A blogpost I wrote for the Desi Writers' Lounge about my experience of participating in the National Novel Writing Month challenge this year.

[persephonierose]

[soonhaabro]

10 Books Challenge: The beauty of reading

The ‘10 Book Challenge’ that has been doing the rounds around on Facebook recently has made me really happy. I found that there are so many people who read, even if it's just a couple of books a year, and that some of these books stay with them for the rest of their lives. There are copious amounts of books that I have seen people citing as the greatest influences in their lives, each varying in genre, language, and literary tradition. It’s reassuring to discover that there are other bibliophiles like myself out there who have connected to a writer and their work across the boundaries of Time. So I’m not the only crazy one here, then; there are others, too.

One of my cousins commented on my 10 Book Challenge: “You can tell a lot about a person from the books they read.”

He’s right. This challenge has indeed turned into a window to the souls of the people we know; those we meet frequently, and those who we haven’t seen in years; those whom we have recently met and those whom we have known, intimately, for many, many years. I think that this challenge might have brought many book-lovers closer to each other, which is amazing.

I discovered a large number of writers that I’m either yet to read or will read them in near future through this challenge. For an aspiring writer like yours truly, seeing people love lesser-known books is the most encouraging and inspiring thing to happen. Indeed, it is the best thing to happen to me at this point in my writing career. At least I know that someone somewhere out there will be mad enough to understand what I’m trying to express through my writing. It is a great consolation to know that I will definitely be able to reach out to someone through my stories. What more could a writer want?

Things like this challenge never fail to sustain my faith in the power of reading and books. A happiness of the purest kind courses through my veins in such situations, for example, when I weave my way back and forth through the swarming multitudes at the Karachi Literature Festival, and the Karachi International Book Fair. The phrase, commonly seen on the Internet, ‘faith in humanity is/has been restored’ describes exactly how I feel when I see people who are simply delighted to be around books. Watching children running into the bookshop with gleeful grins, pleading their parents to buy them some books, and then walking out of the bookshop cradling their latest bookish purchases in their arms with the love and respect that a book must be always be given is the most joyful sight that I have ever seen. 

[soonhaabro]

My thoughts so far on Elif Shafak’s The Flea Palace

Initially I was slow to start reading The Flea Palace. I can provide several reasons to explain myself; all of them equally valid. Mainly it was because I was distracted: I went through a severe book hangover after reading The Blind Assassin, and could only manage to read something simple, like The Adrian Mole Diaries by Sue Townsend. I was also distracted because a lot of valuable energy went into completing some personal work, and also wasted some of it in worrying over that same work. Don’t ask why, I just did. Eventually I managed to start reading The Flea Palace.

  The first few pages were a tough read. The prose can be a bit convoluted for a reader who is unfamiliar with Elif Shafak’s writing style. Yet I plodded on, hoping the narrative would start making more sense, and all the loose ends will be tied up. So far it seems that that is going to be the case. I have finished reading the expository section of the story, but I wanted to write this piece before I started reading the next section, which seems, so far, to be the main action of the novel.

  The exposition was interesting, to say the least. There are three separate stories; all of these are engaging, but the connection between the three doesn’t become apparent until we get to the story of Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova, and how the block of flats – that is the main setting of this novel – was built.

  So here I am, waiting to plunge into the main action of The Flea Palace. It better be fun. I believe it will be.

  Update on The Flea Palace:

I have, by now, covered about 66% of the book. The prose is still excessively choppy, rather philosophical in places, but the plot has begun to make sense to me. Each chapter is like an internal monologue of the characters who are all residents of the Bonbon Palace flats. Each one of them is wholly sick of the garbage-y smell that permeates the flats. I’m quite enjoying the book at this point and can’t put it down, despite the clunky, choppy writing style. I can’t quite shake off the feeling that this book might be one of Elif Shafak’s earlier works, as The Forty Rules of Love didn’t have such writing. Even though The Bastard of Istanbul had a slightly irregular prose, it wasn’t as bad as it is in The Flea Palace. Still, I quite like the book.

  Next book on my reading list is Honour by the same author.

[soonhaabro]

Thoughts on The Blind Assassin after re-reading it

The last time I wrote something here was when I’d just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin. Since then I’ve been re-reading the novel, read her short story Happy Endings, as well as some other amazing short stories by writers like Alice Munro, Kate Chopin, John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway and a few others as well. I’ve also been reading Elif Shafak’s The Flea Palace (more on that in the next blog).

  In my previous post on my experience of reading The Blind Assassin I wrote that from my second reading of the book I was hoping to learn more about the intricate plot points, and subtleties that I’d missed during my first reading. I’m happy to report that I really do understand the novel better now that I’ve read it right to the end already so I know what is happening. Based on that knowledge I’m able to perceive what happens in the earlier parts of the story. For one, I now know that the unnamed woman and man – who, it is apparent from the beginning, are clearly embroiled in an illicit relationship with each other – are actually the main narrator Iris Griffen nee Chase, and Alex Thomas, probably the only man with whom the narrator and her sister Laura could have had a certain romantic and/or physical attraction for.

  Second, I’ve also understood that the entire narrative has three distinctive parts to it. It’s as if the plot moves in three different sections of Time and Space.

  One plotline is the older Iris who has returned to the town – or village, if you may – of her birth and is now permanently established there. She is writing an account of her past life, a memoir. She doesn’t specify any agenda that she might have in writing her autobiography. One might assume that she might be trying to leave something to her granddaughter Sabrina, from whom she has been estranged for a long time, so the young lady might be able to reach a reconciliation with her grandmother. There you have a hint of a serious family conflict. When Iris talks of Sabrina you can sense her desperation to reconcile with the only living memory of her daughter Aimee who was taken away from her when she was a child. The sense of desperation is also heightened because Iris has been diagnosed with a weak heart presumably caused by old age. She has resigned herself to her impending demise and talks about it in her chronicles, too. But she also despairs when she thinks about the possibility that she might die before she has had a chance to complete her account of her life.

  The second narrative is the story of Iris’ childhood spent in Port Ticonderoga and at Avilion, her family home, and her subsequent marriage. This is where we get to know her sister, Laura.

  The third storyline comprises the clandestine meetings of an unnamed couple. It also involves a telling of a science-fiction story about a city on a distant planet, its people, its temple and the guild of the blind assassins.

  One thing I haven’t been able to understand yet is the significance of the novel’s title. I’m hoping that my current re-reading of the book will enlighten me on this. If not this time, maybe this will occur on my next reading of the story.

[soonhaabro]

Anna Kashina's guest post on terribleminds.com discusses her book The Guild of Assassins. A really informative, well-written blog, it offers important advice for writers who plan to write fantasy fiction.

[thelittlelift-deactivated201708]

One of my favourite feelings in the world is when my plane is landing in Bombay airport. It’s usually the middle of the night, and I can see all the lights of the city that I love and the city that I hate. There’s no order to the lights. The streets lights are a dim orange; the apartment...

[soonhaabro]

Just came across this blog just now. So many of the emotions and experiences discussed here are exactly what I've been through before. Funnily enough, our cities are like sister cities. :P I'm from Karachi, and this person is from Bombay.

[soonhaabro]

On The Blind Assassin

Today I finished The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. Few writers have had a similar impact on me like she has. And believe me when I say few: that number currently stands at 5, and will continue to increase at a snail-like pace.

Every sentence, every phrase, every single word, even the punctuation read like they were meant to be taking up all that space they were occupying on the pages of her novel. Every little bit in the story reads as if it were so important to the narrative that the novel would be incomplete without it. Nothing seems superfluous, incongruous. It is just beautiful.

When I read Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower last year, I had raised an eyebrow when Charlie says that once he has finished reading a book he immediately turns back to the first page and begins re-reading it. I think I’m going to do the same with The Blind Assassin. There is much that I seek to understand about the book: plot points, subtleties that I probably missed out during the first reading.

Obviously, this is because I loved the book. It was the experience of reading Atwood’s novel that I thoroughly enjoyed. I say this because before her novel, I had finished reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and, dare I say, detested it. I wouldn’t want to re-read that.

So here I am, having just started re-reading The Blind Assassin, hoping to delve further into the world Atwood created in her novel. I hope I succeed in learning more about her writing (I don’t even know what it is but I hope to find out soon enough).

[explore-blog]

Although many writers had had periods of significant depression, mania, or hypomania, they were consistently appealing, entertaining, and interesting people. They had led interesting lives, and they enjoyed telling me about them as much as I enjoyed hearing about them. Mood disorders tend to be episodic, characterized by relatively brief periods of low or high mood lasting weeks to months, interspersed with long periods of normal mood (known as euthymia to us psychiatrists). All the writers were euthymic at the time that I interviewed them, and so they could look back on their periods of depression or mania with considerable detachment. They were also able to describe how abnormalities in mood state affected their creativity. Consistently, they indicated that they were unable to be creative when either depressed or manic.

The relationship between creativity and mental illness – a fascinating study based on writers from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Kurt Vonnegut was among the subjects. (via explore-blog)

[soonhaabro]

Rest in peace, dear Seerat

Five months ago, one of my nieces passed away in a car accident which took place as we were returning from a wedding party. Back then, another niece who I was very close to kept weeping inconsolably and said that she doesn't want to live either, how can God just end a life at 10 years of age. I scolded her then, so did my sister. Now after all those months she has left us too.

And what she die of? A stupid metal rod that was holding up the swing in her neighbour’s house fell on her and she suffered a blunt trauma injury to her abdomen, particularly her liver which sustained about 65% damage. She was in and out of the ICU for the last 2 weeks or so; she had to have 35 bottles of B- blood transfused into her; her kidneys stopped working so she had to have dialysis too. But nothing worked. Nothing worked despite all of us hoping against all odds, praying like it’s never been done before. And now another baby of my family has left us today.

My little niece, the one we hung out with on every family occasion. The biggest bundle of joy to everyone in the family: her parents, her sister and brother, her aunts, cousins, my sister, and mother and I. She’s gone now. It’s unbelievable.

All I’d wished for was one chance to make her promise me that she’ll never ask for death again, never wish it on her family, on us. But that didn’t happen and God’s taken her from us.

Too soon, God, too soon.

[soonhaabro]

Why I came to love Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Goliyon Ki Raasleela: Ram-leela despite disliking Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

As a voracious reader and a student of Literature, I have read several works of William Shakespeare. I especially enjoyed King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, The Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night. However, I never warmed to his Romeo and Juliet, which is touted as the most romantic tale in human history. In fact I find its protagonists childish and immature in their loathsome lovesickness. Their needless, avoidable tragic end makes me want to vomit.

  My aversion deepened when I first heard that Sanjay Leela Bhansali had based his new film on Romeo and Juliet and that his version included guns, sensuality bordering on the vulgar, foul language, violence and cheap songs. I could not come to terms with the fact that Bhansali had ended up making such a mainstream film. Although I knew that the intense emotional content of Bhansali’s films has the potential to cause serious emotional pain to the viewer, I still avoided watching Goliyon Ki Raasleela: Ram-leela when it released due to my distaste for Romeo and Juliet-esque Bollywood love stories of the 1990s era. Then one day I watched it on TV and was captivated. Then I watched it again, paying full attention this time, absorbing every little bit of it. My mind began draw comparisons to the original play; I wanted to write about it. I also heard people saying the film was horrible and wanted to prove them wrong. So I bought the original play and began to read it.

  Although my opinion on the play has not changed very much, I believe that Ram-leela is a better story than Romeo and Juliet. The play contains several points that I consider are debatable and potentially problematic.

  Bhansali’s film makes it easier to digest the tragic love story of the two “star-cross’d lovers” (The Prologue, Romeo and Juliet, p. 1) from warring families because writers took some artistic liberty while writing the screenplay and the portrayal of the characters, which differs from the source text. These alterations have resulted in a more logical narrative that makes it easier for the modern adult audiences to relate to Ram-leela’s characters and also understand their motivations and actions.

  The film’s protagonists, Ram and Leela are fascinating characters: mature, intelligent characters who truly love their families. Ram is depicted as the macho man of his village, freshly returned from Ahmedabad, who is also a staunch advocate of peace between Rajadis and Saneras. He breaches the village tradition by carrying an unloaded gun with him, an act that sets him apart from all the other men in Ranjhaar, whether they are Rajadis or Saneras. One more feature sets him apart from his compatriots: his perception of his masculinity. He is ridiculed for his refusal to fight in the Rajadi-Sanera feud and ultimately take his position in the lineage of the Rajadi dons, by extension in the entire conflict. This is considered to be his true destiny as the son of the Rajadi chief. As a result, his kinsmen believe that he lacks the manliness that it takes to be fully integrated into their community. In contrast, Ram thinks that his manliness lies in his sensuality, and he proudly flaunts this. He is depicted as just another young man who is out to get as much sexual activity he can get without having to commit himself.

  Leela, on the other hand, is depicted as a strong-willed young woman who is trigger-happy and would not waste a second in shooting you dead if you mess with her. At the same time, she could easily fall deeply and completely in love with you. She, like any other youngest child of a family, is rather carefree and is not bothered about having to assume the chieftainship of her clan eventually, and even dislikes the idea of her becoming the Sanera chief.  What I liked most about her was that she is sensitive to her sexuality and proud of it, even if she does not exhibit it like Ram does. Her sensuality permeates her every meeting with Ram, as if she is responding to the feeling he evokes in her, which is clearly genuine love – combined with a healthy amount of lust – that gushes from every pore of her body. The love they share is so complete that it engulfs both her and Ram, and even the viewer.

  On the other hand, Romeo and Juliet allow themselves to be swept away in the tide of the events that lead to the final tragedy. Unlike Ram and Leela, Romeo and Juliet are self-indulgent, foolish, obviously only in love with the idea of love. Romeo is first introduced as being in love with another girl. It takes him just a few minutes to fall in love with Juliet. Who does that? Even if you do fall in love immediately, how can you feel prepared to kill yourself if it so happens that you are unable to live with your beloved?  

  Shakespeare’s protagonists are too young (presumably 14 or 15) for their so-called great love to actually have any significance today. We have not had such ostensibly great fictional love stories in our times. Even in a typical Bollywood flick the protagonists are usually adults who met and fell in love in their childhood. They never come across as intelligent, perceptive, mature young people like the ones that we see around ourselves today. They are also depicted as having no control whatsoever over their circumstances and the direction that their love story takes. My readers may find this weird but I cannot help but seethe at their stupidity in committing suicide over their incomplete love story. The above differences reflect on the characters’ individual qualities, their level of emotional maturity and their respective strengths and weaknesses.

  Also I cannot forget that Romeo is in love with a different woman at the beginning of the play, and he falls in love with Juliet so quickly that the sheer speed of it makes me sick in the stomach. They also never fight. The only intense emotions they express are love and sorrow. Their most intense scenes usually involve immense grief that is intolerably one-sided. More mature individuals, like Ram and Leela, in a similar situation would presumably experience a myriad of contradictory emotions. You never get the feeling that Romeo and Juliet might be experiencing an emotional turmoil within, which any one of us would definitely feel if we were in a similar situation. Due to these reasons, the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is lost on me.

  I found the tragic aspect in Ram-leela to be greater than it was in Romeo and Juliet. I believe it has much to do with the characterisations, as described above, and how the screenplay plays out.

  For example, Ram and Leela are forced by the circumstances to take up the leadership of their respective clans. This rips them apart from within, obviously, and we can understand this based on our understanding of how they were at the beginning and how much they have changed now. Their becoming the heads of their families and the uncharacteristic actions that they must take in their new positions are symbolic expressions of the methods of death chosen by Romeo and Juliet, as stated by writers Siddharth-Garima in their interview on Bollyspice.com.

  Juliet’s action of poisoning herself becomes Leela’s action of having been compelled by circumstances to take over the responsibility for her family. Romeo kills himself by stabbing himself with a dagger, which then becomes Ram’s action of having to change his ways and words because he has been made the new Rajadi don as a reward for killing Dhankor’s only son and for his so-called public shaming of Leela. This so-called reward is a symbolic dagger that he must stab himself with because he has no option but to accept this so-called honourable reward bestowed on him by his father and other kinsmen. Therefore, Ram and Leela’s symbolic deaths that occur before their actual deaths heighten the tragedy of their story.

  Their shooting each other dead becomes their last act of dissent against the torture of doing the very things that they had always despised. Their end is so much more tragic than Romeo and Juliet’s simply because they choose to go this way since it is the only solution and the best option available to them. Their lives have brought them so staggeringly close to a breaking point that death is merely a release from it, and that is all they need by this point. It is a better option for them compared to dying at the hands of each other’s kinsmen. They would rather die for their love instead of becoming just two more lives sacrificed on the altar of the centuries-old feud that has consumed numerous lives without anyone knowing why the enmity began in the first place.

  Another reason that makes the film’s climax more tragic is the juxtaposing of Ram and Leela’s last moments with the scenes that occur in the courtyard of the Sanera mansion. It makes the deaths of Ram and Leela more heartrending because they are unaware that Dhankor Baa has offered to lay down arms and make peace with the Rajadis, which undoubtedly means that now the two lovers could finally be together. Mistaking the noise of a celebratory aerial firing for a raging gun battle they shoot each other dead.

  Another qualm I have about Romeo and Juliet is its timeline: the play’s events and tragic outcome are spread out over 5-6 days, almost a week. I find this highly improbable. How can you fall in love with someone, propose, get married, get separated from them and then commit suicide in just a week? In fact I find it more probable that one can fall in love over the course of a week. This is why I found Ram-leela more appealing: its timeline of events is realistic, and therefore, more logical and easier to relate to. Although it is not clearly defined in the film, one may assume that the story takes place over at least 5-6 months, starting from the Holi festival and ending with the Dussehra festival. One year is more than enough to change our entire lives so it is unsurprising that a simple meeting during Holi celebrations could have had the potential to make such a huge difference to the lives of Ram and Leela, and the fate of Ranjhaar.

The aspects of Ram-leela and Romeo and Juliet that I have described and compared above were glaringly obvious to me since my very first viewing of the film. Of course, many other facets, themes and motifs have not been discussed in this particular blog. I do hope to discuss them in future blog posts. In the meantime, I will end by saying that Ram-leela is essentially an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet; whether it is good or bad depends on how each viewer responds to it. The play itself is meant to be performed, either on stage or in film and TV. That is why its text is so sparse; the emotions so scant that there is a whole vacuum to be filled by the actors’ performances. Different versions of Romeo and Juliet will be better or worse in regard to how the actors perceive their characters and how they adopt this to improve their performance. So in essence each version of the play, even Ram-leela, will nearly always differ from one another. Viewers will always love one version better than the rest; maybe they will even love the original play more than any of its adaptations or performances. Even if I do not particularly like the play itself, I am still excited about watching Zeffirelli’s or Baz Luhrmann’s versions, or even films like Ishaqzaade because despite the similar storyline one can always find something to relate to in such films.

[soonhaabro]

Virginia Woolf on how to read a book, via Brain Pickings.

[electricliterature]

"Recovery Period" by Sasha Graybosch, recommended by Electric Literature

Issue No. 113

EDITOR’S NOTE

In Sasha Graybosch’s “Recovery Period,” a sardonic woman called Greer suffers from a degenerative eye disease. “Eyes going Greer?” her boyfriend Lucien asks, as if she is both the victim and the cause of the disease, a patient zero. Keratoconus, it’s called, causes the cornea to protrude into cone. A Google image search of the condition reveals bulging eyeballs like those of surprised cartoon characters, and it’s fitting somehow to picture Greer that way—disoriented and flabbergasted—when she learns of Lucien’s death:

“Lucien’s exit from Greer’s apartment and then her life was incomprehensible; it disrupted the logic she’d once trusted—a grid had been twisted into additional dimensions. His death curled backwards over his entrance, so that when she reached for the beginning, or the middle, she always came up with the end.”

“Recovery Period” is one of the most extraordinary and sophisticated depictions of grief I have read. The world, viewed through Greery eyes, becomes both a reflection and a projection of her unstable emotional state: “Abruptly the temperature plummeted and a stretch of freezing rain bound the earth’s surface to the sky, one grey layer compressed beneath another. The trees, unable to prepare, suffered.” That kind of resonance between the inner and outer worlds is what elevates “Recovery Period” from subtle observation to gobsmacking truth.

But it’s not all straightforward. The story’s pathos is complicated by mysterious postcards that arrive from nowhere, and phone calls that may or may not come from purgatory. Graybosch makes reference to the famous eye slicing in Buñuel’s Le Chien Andalou, and I am reminded of another film that is not for the squeamish: Michael Haneke’s Caché. In it, a couple receives videotapes in the mail of their house, of them sleeping. The film, like this story, never reveals who is behind the missives. Though there are clues, I prefer the interpretation that the videotapes exist independently of a maker, as ontological evidence of their subject. To be watched one must exist, and so when Greer’s mysterious pen pal writes, “Lick your lips as you chop vegetables tonight, lovely lonely lady, and I’ll know it’s a sign,” and inadvertently she does it, the gesture is more than just a communication. It’s a sign that she’s alive.

I could go on, but I’ve already spoiled enough. “Recovery Period” is a tremendous story; why don’t you see for yourself.  

Halimah Marcus Editor-in-Chief, Recommended Reading

Support Recommended Reading

Recovery Period

by Sasha Graybosch

Original Fiction

Recommended by Electric Literature

Sight-wise, Greer had developed a high tolerance for disturbance. Buildings doubling, streetlights smearing into ribbons, cars in the fore twitching against cars in the back, one pigeon appearing as a flock—fine. She could walk. She could still collect the mail, pick up bagels, get about. She learned to sit in the front at the movies, blink longer, take breaks, take the bus. When the world shook and danced at her windows, and she didn’t feel much like dancing, she could pull the blinds, shut her eyes. And Lucien was beside her in the dark.

It began early in the morning after her thirty-fourth birthday, an occasion she commemorated with an all-night jigsaw puzzle. Greer settled the last piece into place and stood, bleary, ready for bed, and noticed, bleeding from the kitchen light and the microwave clock and the hallway lamp, luminous halos. She rubbed her eyes. Bright cores diffused into ghosts. Lucien stirred on the couch, where he’d been sleeping since midnight. “What is it?” he said.

The troubles with her eyes emerged slowly—a faint stretch at the edges of distant words, the occasional wiggle of movement she mistook for a bug. Her glasses lenses were weak, she assumed. Lack of sleep, she thought. The distortions came and went; she often convinced herself she was getting better. The body had a way of sorting itself out.

At times, though, even the television was too much. “Balls gone bad?” Lucien would say when Greer squinted at a commercial. Or, “Eyes going Greer?” Or, “Greery?”

“Very Greery,” she’d say, the screen glaring into a muddle. They would click the show off, push her glasses back and do things up close that didn’t require looking.

Greer had met Lucien on a blind date arranged by a mutual friend, a self-proclaimed matchmaker named George. Greer knew George through cooking club, and George knew Lucien from an addiction recovery support group. George said he had been jogging with his wife along the river when Lucien surfaced in his mind, and then Greer, one figure folding into another. “It was a moment of inspiration,” he told Greer on the phone.

Greer was skeptical. “You met this guy in rehab?”

“That was years ago. You won’t like him at first, so be prepared for that. But I think you’ll be great together. I see how people can fit. He is the trees and you are the forest. He is the spicy pepper and you are the milk. He’s a piece of smoking meat left to burn in a pot, and you’re like a wet towel, or a lid. But not in a bad way.”

Greer decided not to be offended. “Does he have any other issues I should know about?”

“He’s had to work through some things—haven’t we all,” George said, the last phrase like punctuation, “and he’s a good person. Great listener. Not bad looking. His parents are rich, but you can’t hold that against him. I know you’re not judgmental, or all that excitable—that’s why I thought of you. You’re an open spirit, even if it’s not easy to see at first. I already told him about how calm you were when Cynthia hacked her thumb cutting pineapple. How everyone was falling over themselves and you just wrapped her hand up in a kitchen towel, led her out to get stitches.”

Greer was flattered. She realized George thought of her as some kind of stoic, a protector. She’d never thought of herself that way, as the someone who was good for someone. She suddenly felt curious. Open.

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