Tag: fiction

Half an Indian Girl

So my first attempt in twelve years to read pulp fiction ended midway, as I gave up reading Chetan Bhagat’s One Indian Girl after around 130 pages (~40% into the book).

My main problem with the book is that it uses too many words for what it has to convey. There are shades of good writing sprinkled through the part of the book that I read, but at least once every ten pages you start wondering where the story is going, and wondering if so many more pages are worth reading.

Based on the plot that I gathered through my reading of the book, it seems written with a Bollywood script in mind. And while it might make for good screenplay, the quality of writing means that the amount of effort and patience required in ingesting and finishing the book is way too high.

In a way, the book reminded me of a short story by Mulk Raj Anand (ok outragers can start outraging now) called Old Bapu that I’d read a few years back as part of some course at IIT Madras. That story begins with the observation that in the split-second before death, one’s entire life flashes in one’s mind.

And so you have this book, set at the protagonist’s wedding, where she looks back at her life and relationships so far, and that I think is a fine premise. The protagonist’s character is also fairly well chosen and most of the events in the part of the story I read seem fairly realistic.

And then, as they say in Bollywoodese, there are some kahaani mein twists and for someone who had largely appreciated the book for what it was thus far, it can be a bit throwing off. And then when you see that after these twists you have a further 160 pages to go, you end up losing all motivation.

So I shut the book, and turned to my wife who had finished reading through it (albeit after some struggles) a week back. She narrated the rest of the story in her own way, a hundred and sixty pages compressed into two minutes of speech. And having heard this narration, I’m glad I didn’t waste time reading those pages.

A long time back I’d blogged about whether the length of a book is a bug or a feature, and suggested that in fiction one would look at extra words as a benefit, since it’s likely to keep you entertained. I revise that observation now, to say that extra words in a book of fiction (or any book) are fine if and only if they add to the story.

This book, in my opinion, has too many of those extra words, which makes it damn easy to get bored as you read it, and very soon you can’t stop wanting the book to end soon!

The Bollywoody plot aside, I could think of this book being written in 100 pages, which would have made it far far better! I don’t know when I’ll attempt reading pulp fiction next!

Also read my analysis on why Half Girlfriend, Chetan Bhagat’s earlier book, failed at living up to its potential.

Reading fiction

In the semester of January-May 2004, I took a course on Indian Fiction in English. This was in order to satisfy the quota for “humanities” credits at IIT Madras. The course was mostly good, and taught well, and we got a glimpse of how Indian writing in English developed, and the motifs that have been unique to such writing. There are a number of short stories we read as part of the course that I still remember vividly. But then there was the book.

For a one semester course, having lots of short stories makes sense, but no course is complete without analysing a novel, and so we were asked to read Jaishree Misra’s Ancient Promises, a truly depressing and mindfucking piece of literature. I don’t know if it was a consequence of that, or that I didn’t read much anyway, that the number of books of fiction I’ve read since then can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Soon after graduating from IIT (after some wrangling – I had attendance issues in the said Indian Fiction in English course, thanks to all the IIM interviews and some casual bunking), I paid Rs. 95 for Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone and devoured it. Fresh out of IIT (and having spent a summer at IIT Delhi, I could relate to the settings in the book), I must say I loved it. A few days later I borrowed To Kill A Mockingbird from God. Loved that, too. Then I borrowed (from God, again) Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Never got past the initial pages. I don’t think I even returned the book to God.

Then I bought Catch 22 and didn’t read it (the book was soon in tatters and I gave it away). Through IIM, I was too busy reading the Business Standard and blogging and indulging in unsavoury activities to have any time for reading. And after graduation I turned to non-fiction (I started with Duncan Watts’s Six Degrees, then James Suroweicki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, Freakonomics, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, James Gleick’s Chaos, etc.) – mostly books on science and history and economics. I was hooked and for the last eight years this is what I’ve mostly read. The only book of fiction I remember reading in this intervening time period was Amit Varma’s My Friend Sancho. I had gone for the book’s launch in Delhi (more of an excuse to meet Amit and other friends who were going to turn up there), bought it out of sheer social pressure at the occasion and read it. I must say I quite liked it (though I like Amit’s recent writings on risk and ancient writings on freedom much better).

So scroll back (or forward – depending on which frame of reference you are in ) to about a month back, after I had left twitter and facebook when I decided I must use the now available time to read some fiction. I started off with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (free Kindle edition), struggled though to about 50% and promptly gave up. I needed some fiction that would inspire me.

Some ten years back Madness had recommended that I read Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. I promptly ignored him. Eight years back he made the same recommendation. I ignored him again. In 2008 I decided to read the book, but couldn’t find a copy (pre-Kindle days, remember). Sometime in 2009 or 2010 I found a copy in Blossom, and bought it, and it was sitting in the back of my bookshelf till two weeks back. I didn’t start reading from that, though.

When I had my accident in Rajasthan back in 2012, I had injured the ligament in my left thumb, and the greater injury of my fourth right metacarpal had meant that I had ignored this ligament injury until it was too late. So I have a weak left thumb. And that means it is hard for me to hold open a paperback with my left hand – it has to be placed somewhere. This means most of my reading in the last two years has been on the Kindle.

And so I got a sample on my Kindle. The first scene involving movement of currency in Shanghai had me hooked. Soon I was through the sample. Before I hit that “buy” button on my Kindle, though, I checked the bookshelf to see if the physical copy still existed. It did, though it was yellow (perhaps it was already yellow by the time I bought it). So I picked up the physical copy. And over the last ten or twelve days I’ve read it. All 918 pages of it.

It’s been a fabulous book (if a work of fiction has to hold my attention for this long it ought to be fabulous – my ADHD makes me a very good judge of books and movies). Insane fundaes on cryptography, privacy, the second world war, American legal system and just about everything else. It’s been so insanely full of fundaes that I actually sat through 918 pages of it! Can’t recommend the book enough!

I wonder if I would have read it had I still been on Twitter and Facebook. I probably would have – despite being on these media I did read a sufficient quantity of non fiction in the last 2-3 years. But I had the kind of mental space I didn’t for a long time (possibly in part with living alone). And so I read. It’s been fabulous.

The next two books I plan to read are Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (I’d begun reading it two years back and liked it before I had a problem with that Kindle and had to exchange it) and Dr. Sid Lowe’s Fear and Loathing in La Liga (considering I’m traveling to Catalunya next month). I still don’t know which one I’ll pick up next (figuratively – both books are on my kindle).