BOOKS - REVIEW

BOOKS - REVIEW

SENSE OF AN ENDING

Julian Barnes

If there is a definitive Barnes, this is the one. This 2011 Man Booker prize winner gathers in all pages almost all the Barnes's pets themes- an eroded sense of seriousness in the English psyche, class, ageing, mortality, tricky remembrance. The title is a reference to literary critic Frank Kermode's book of the same name , where he explains how writers bring in plot twists to make reader readjust there sense of an ending. Expectedly, Barnes does the same , showing how we restructure memories in the way we want things to happen , while reality might have been otherwise. A novel of ideas, glittering with intelligent insights.


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THE SELLOUT

Paul Beatty

This booker winner means to offend, and ho. The satire is scathing, and it spares none. Set in LA, the novel is narrated by Banbon , who observes and describes his black community with a zen detachment. In this process , the hollowed tenets of the U.S. Constitution are challenged, and the idea of racial equility turns on the head. But Beatty, the first American to win the Booker, flights shy of calling his novel a satire: indeed, he is reluctant to talk about it at all, believing that a work of art should speak for itself.

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BRING UP THE BODIES

Hilary Mantel        

The tudors never fail to thrill - you have the endless books, movies and television series on them as proof. Bring Up The Bodies takes up the story Wolf Hall, about the crafty Thomas Cromwell, plotting, fighting, dismembering with gusto. Here the worthy opponent is Henry VIII's mistress, and later wife, Anne Boleyn, who is famous as a flirt but also have a very clever head on her shoulders. Cromwell appreciates her pro-Reformation ideas, and the way she occasions Charch of England's break with Rome thorough her marriage to Henry, till she tries to get read of him. Her head rolls, of course. Cromwell comes across as dark deep, self-aware , ruthless, but with flashes of tenderness. Sequels usually disappoint - Mantel's doesn't.


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THE LIVES OF OTHERS

Neel Mukherjee

Mukherjee has a genius for imagining the lives of others in their entirely and that skill is honed to perfection in the novel set in the Calcutta of the 1960's and the paddy fields on the edges of West Bengal. The eldest son of the well-to-do Gupta family, Supratik, joins the CPI(M), hopping for a classless society. It's a dream, of course, and the novel shows how class privileges are taken for granted even by Supratik. Food and it's lack is a running theme - Supratik who has berated his mother for the heaps of food she prepares, recognises hunter for what it is when he joins the ragtag bunch of rebels. The descriptions of nature are beautiful and the examinations of inner lives incisive.


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