The Golem's Eye: Bartimaeus Trilogy

Stroud, Jonathan. The Golem's Eye: Bartimaeus Trilogy. New York: Hyperion, 2004.

Nathaniel and the djinn Bartimaeus are back in this novel, refreshingly bickering. Nathanielis 14, apprenticed to Jessica Whitwell, and the government's pet boy. he is dealing with the resistance movement. He is forced to call Bartimaeus again.

At the same time, a series of horrible attacks are being committed by a Golem controlled by an unknown wizard. This sends them off to Prague in a desperate attempt to uncover the true menace behind the attacks.

The book acts as a critique against the powerful through Stroud's imagery of the magician/politicians. it is a dark world controlled by magic and the violence of it. The djinn, who has nothing to do with human affairs, do give the most important philosophy to Kitty,the resistance leader. Speaking about her resilience to magic, he says that it is important to study history and to know that greater empires have fallen due to people with resilience coming together.

The Amulet of Samarkand

Stroud, Jonathan. The Amulet of Samarkand. London: Corgi Books, 2004.
This is one the Bartimaeus trilogy of Stroud. One of the young magicians summons Bartimaeus, the evil, but lovable djinni through his magic. Nathaniel alias John Mandrake, is just a 12 year old apprentice, that too, of a not too good magician, Arthur Underwood. In his trials to summon a true Djinn, Nathaniel manages to summon Bartimaeus himself. He has already developed a rivalry with another magician, Simon Lovelace. Nathaniel employs a reluctant Bartimaeus to steal the amulet of Samarkand from Lovelace. What follows is a hilarious journey of the Djinni and his young captor.

Pnin

Nabokov, Vladimir. Pnin. London: Penguin Books, 1997.

A Yellow Raft in a Blue River

I am reading Michael Dorris' book. I really liked it. What I liked so much was Dorris' sensivie understanding of women characters - not romanticising but, almost as if he could feel what they are. The disturbed lives of three generations of women from the Native American community could be read in the novel - the granddaugher Rayona, the mother Christine and the Grandmother Aunt Ida are the characters. It raises questions about the community, gender, problems of alcholism, disturbed families, foster parents etc which, I realized later, Dorris would have faced in his personal life.
Dorris is accused of abuse by his foster child and another child of his was also planning to give a case against him. Louise Aldrich and he shared a legendary writing career, but they separated at some point. Dorris committed suicide later.

Sights Unseen

Gibbons, Kaye. Sights Unseen. New York: Avon Books, 1996.
The book explores the consciousness of Hattie Barnes. She remembers her mother who was suffering from mental illness. The excruciating pain of those years when she was a maniac depressive is recounted with extreme love and care. The father, Frederick Barnes and brother Freddy is also there in the picture along with Pearl Wiggins, the strong woman who is the housekeeper. The grandfather, Mr. Barnes and Ms. Woodward, his sister-in-law were “keeping company.” So, he had left his estate to her, which finally passed on to Hattie. It is in this house that Maggie Barnes, the mother finally dies. She misses a step while carrying luggage from the top of the stairs and tumbles down to her death.
The style is light and almost humorous, though the incidents which are described are not quite so.

Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch

Sijie, Dai. Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch. London: Vintage Books, 2006.

Audrey Hepburn's Neck

Brown, Alan. Audrey Hepburn's Neck. New York: Pocket Books, 1996.
This is the growing up story of Toshi Okamoto, a young man from Japan. From his nineth birthday onwards he develops a crush for Audrey Hepburn, especially her beautiful neck. He sees the movie with his mother, with whom the boy shares a special relationship. This leads him to a series of affairs with American women which are disastrous. The novel is about the intercultural exchanges between Japanese, the next generation after the neuclear war and their children who revers "foriegners." It is also about the misconceptions that happen between two groups of different languages.

The Miss America Family

Baggott, Julianna. The Miss America Family. New York: Washington Square Press, 2002.

In this stunning follow-up to the acclaimed Girl Talk, a fading beauty-pageant veteran and her sixteen-year-old son team up as the delightfully nimble co-chroniclers of one family's soulful, mordantly funny remembrance of things past. With her irreverent evocation of suburban dissolution, Julianna Baggott gives us a fictional world whose emotional complexity and comedic dysfunction closely resemble our own.

It's 1987 in Greenville, Delaware. Ezra Stocker is the son of an insomniac ex-Miss New Jersey named Pixie and a gay, absentee father; the stepson of an ex-quarterback dentist with a taste for turtle-patterned golf pants; and the grandson of a superstitious, stroke-addled woman with a passion for birds and some truly odd notions about fish and the family ancestry. He has created for himself a specific goal this summer vacation: to make a list of "Rules to Live By," his own set of guidelines to take him through life. A boy whose chief distinguishing traits include webbed toes and a knack for standardized aptitude tests, Ezra has no reason to expect that by the end of this particular summer, due largely to a doomed romance with a wealthy podiatrist's daughter and a fateful episode with a gun, every one of those rules will be tossed out the window.

It's 1987 in Greenville, Delaware, but Pixie Stocker is consumed by the past. When she was Ezra's age, she too sought the secret rules and how-to's for negotiating life and attaining her dream of the all-American family. Pixie had found her answers in the comfortingly black-and-white strictures of Emily Post -- and later in the rigid absolutes of the beauty pageant circuit. Such certainties have long since vanished, replaced by the relentless haunting of her memory, and the ceaseless reverberations of a long-ago act of brutal violation. When Ezra's grandmother, disoriented from her stroke, reveals to her daughter an explosive and long-buried family secret, she spurs Pixie toward a...

The Inheritance of Loss

Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss.

"The Inheritance of Loss" opens with a teenage Indian girl, an orphan called Sai, living with her Cambridge-educated Anglophile grandfather, a retired judge, in the town of Kalimpong on the Indian side of the Himalayas. Sai is romantically involved with her math tutor, Gyan, the descendant of a Nepali Gurkha mercenary, but he eventually recoils from her obvious privilege and falls in with a group of ethnic Nepalese insurgents. In a parallel narrative, we are shown the life of Biju, the son of Sai's grandfather's cook, who belongs to the "shadow class" of illegal immigrants in New York and spends much of his time dodging the authorities, moving from one ill-paid job to another.
What binds these seemingly disparate characters is a shared historical legacy and a common experience of impotence and humiliation. "Certain moves made long ago had produced all of them," Desai writes, referring to centuries of subjection by the economic and cultural power of the West. But the beginnings of an apparently leveled field in a late-20th-century global economy serve merely to scratch those wounds rather than heal them.
Almost all of Desai's characters have been stunted by their encounters with the West. As a student, isolated in racist England, the future judge feels "barely human at all" and leaps "when touched on the arm as if from an unbearable intimacy." Yet on his return to India, he finds himself despising his apparently backward Indian wife.
The judge is one of those "ridiculous Indians," as the novel puts it, "who couldn't rid themselves of what they had broken their souls to learn" and whose Anglophilia can only turn into self-hatred. These Indians are also an unwanted anachronism in postcolonial India, where long-suppressed peoples have begun to awaken to their dereliction, to express their anger and despair. For some of Desai's characters, including one of the judge's neighbors in Kalimpong, this comes as a distinct shock: "Just when Lola had thought it would continue, a hundred years like the one past — Trollope, BBC, a burst of hilarity at Christmas — all of a sudden, all that they had claimed innocent, fun, funny, not really to matter, was proven wrong."
There is no mistaking the literary influences on Desai's exploration of postcolonial chaos and despair. Early in the novel, she sets two Anglophilic Indian women to discussing "A Bend in the River," V. S. Naipaul's powerfully bleak novel about traditional Africa's encounter with the modern world. Lola, whose clothesline sags "under a load of Marks and Spencer's panties," thinks Naipaul is "strange. Stuck in the past. . . . He has not progressed. Colonial neurosis, he's never freed himself from it." Lola goes on to accuse Naipaul of ignoring the fact that there is a "new England," a "completely cosmopolitan society" where "chicken tikka masala has replaced fish and chips as the No. 1 takeout dinner." As further evidence, she mentions her own daughter, a newsreader for BBC radio, who "doesn't have a chip on her shoulder."
Desai takes a skeptical view of the West's consumer-driven multiculturalism, noting the "sanitized elegance" of Lola's daughter's British-accented voice, which is "triumphant over any horrors the world might thrust upon others." At such moments, Desai seems far from writers like Zadie Smith and Hari Kunzru, whose fiction takes a generally optimistic view of what Salman Rushdie has called "hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs."
In fact, Desai's novel seems to argue that such multiculturalism, confined to the Western metropolis and academe, doesn't begin to address the causes of extremism and violence in the modern world. Nor, it suggests, can economic globalization become a route to prosperity for the downtrodden. "Profit," Desai observes at one point, "could only be harvested in the gap between nations, working one against the other."
This leaves most people in the postcolonial world with only the promise of a shabby modernity — modernity, as Desai puts it, "in its meanest form, brand-new one day, in ruin the next." Not surprisingly, half-educated, uprooted men like Gyan gravitate to the first available political cause in their search for a better way. He joins what sounds like an ethnic nationalist movement largely as an opportunity to vent his rage and frustration. "Old hatreds are endlessly retrievable," Desai reminds us, and they are "purer . . . because the grief of the past was gone. Just the fury remained, distilled, liberating."