Elias Khoury's Gate Of The Sun

Elias Khoury is often compared with Tolstoy for the range and depth of his works. His most famous novel, Bab El Shams or Gate Of The Sun in English has been translated into a few languages including Hebrew. Khoury is Lebanese and Christian but importantly an Arab and is generally considered to be an important Arab writer. This novel is an ambitious plan to convey the stories of dispossession, of displacement of Palestinians after Israel was created.

Khoury visited the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon for stories from a previous era for he had not witnessed those himself. To write is to act, to transcribe on paper is to prevent an oblivion of these stories, stories of loss, disgrace, pain, exile, heartbreak and the loss of identity and one's home. Susan Sontag describes in an essay how true Literature must reflect the past, the memory of the lost past and not dwell on the immediate present. That gives Literature not charm but grace, not topicality but breadth, humanity and not bravado. On these scales, Khoury excels, and does so remarkably, passionately.

This is not a polemical Palestinian novel, this is not rhetoric, this is not blame but a remembrance of the nakba, the disaster, the catastrophe that Palestine suffered. Because these stories might be forgotten, ordinary stories of ordinary people, Khoury writes them down in a prose of such hesitant beauty, such melodious music and profound melancholy. The novel revolves around stories told by the narrator to an aged Palestinian fighter lying comatose in a hospital. It is a reversal of the Arabian nights for here, the narrator wants to save the dying man's life. The stories reveal the heart wrenching stories of loss and separation, of love and disaster. The fighter is reminded of his wife, whom he used to meet outside a cave called Bab El Shams.

We are told of their courting, their romance, love making and so on, for as important as politics is here, which is there for granted, Khoury takes the task of story telling. Stories of normal people not of myths for the myths are different and are not considered here.

This novel won the Palestine prize and is regarded generally as an epic, brilliant, monumental and groundbreaking. Khoury has been associated with An-nahar, a cultural edition of a Lebanese daily, besides being directly involved with Palestinian politics. This is narration on a grand scale, beauty and pain, joy and despair on the same page. This novel must be read to be felt, for these stories of loss transcend nations and cultures. This novel is unlike anything that Handke might ever write, even though the comparison is wrong. The final lessons, if there are any, is to recognize and feel the awfulness of violated memories, of not being allowed to even voice the pain of pain, of suffering. For the general experience of displaced people worldwide, their voices get drowned amongst the cacophony of fraud messiahs. It is only poets and writers who can save them from fanaa, from total annihilation.

A link to a movie based on this novel here, and and an article by Jeremy Harding here.
An excerpt from words without borders.

2666

Since Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives has already won Latin America's highest literary award, it seems that 2666, his posthumous masterpiece is not eligible for the same. It is mentioned here that the masterpiece that the savage detectives is, is mere juvenilia in comparison to 2666!

Never before have I waited expectantly to read any novel. I understand from the Internet that it will be available in English next year. 2666 is already a masterpiece and has achieved classic status in the Spanish world. The Anglophone world has been raving about Bolano, as his lyricism is being recognised. His savage detectives has been compared to one hundred years of solitude, and at the cost of not sounding extravagant, I think one hundred years, even though it is a great novel, pales in comparison, having read both. Some are talking of a reader antipathy towards Bolano in the English speaking world because of him being constantly praised, as if that matters!

Some interesting reflections on Bolano here. I think my stuttering post does not make obvious the agitation and restlessness that Bolano's writing creates, the haunting night of his prose, the chaining lyricism of his words. I hope that 2666 is translated as brilliantly as his other works so far.

Cronopios and Famas : Julio Cortazar

Beneath the apparent, calm calmness that the world presents us with, beneath the general air of restrained music, before sunrise and after sunset, even beneath the music of jazz, between the lines on a sheet of paper, there is violence. We do not know the hidden dangers lurking in each shadow, behind each smile. Storms are easy to behold, sometimes run away from. Thunder, lightning, the brazen act of treachery, the unrequited passion, the false love, the useless poem, the boring novel, the hidden malignancy and disappointing jobs and smokeless days, with all these one can live with and later die of; but it is the false veneer of civilized serenity, the lack of control over external shadows, the lurking danger at each step in this fading world that is grotesque.

Macabre and bizarre, well this is a way of describing this collection of short stories, improvisations and at best prose fragments by Julio Cortazar that defy description, that baffle imagination for they are really what I have seen no writer attempt before. Published as Historias de cronopios y de famas, I came across this 2 years ago in Borges' the library of Babel list. I have read it intermittently, when I want to remind myself of how poetry can still break and create melancholy, how imagination and creativity can save a dull and boring hour, of how bereft of everything life would be without literature, of how well Cortazar wrote. And it is this similar sense of dread and foreboding that I experienced while reading these stories or fragments that I mentioned in the beginning, that grotesque sense of humour, a black art.

Divided into 4 sections, the book starts with the Instruction manual, followed by unusual occupations, unstable stuff and ending in Cronopios and Famas. The instruction manual instructs on how to cry, how to sing, how to be afraid, how to comb the hair, how to kill a witch and wind a watch amongst others. Unusual occupations are short prose pieces including a hilarious piece called the loss and recovery of the hair. Unstable stuff has some fantastic passages and literary rarities like the the behaviour of mirrors on Easter island and this fantastically named story On tending to illustrate the uncertainty of the stability within which we like to believe we exist, or laws could give ground to the exceptions, unforeseen disasters, or improbabilities, and i still want to see you there. The book ends with Cronopios and famas, what a name, what writing, what imagination!

Cortazar claimed to have written this book for fun, and it is considered less important than his other works. However, I think these short and occasionally longer prose writings allow the uninitiated reader into this amazingly rich and imaginary world of Cortazar. There is humour, often dry and black, reflecting in an unglorified way the absurdities of everyday life but with such a heightened sense of invention and literary charm that one finds the game worth more than fun prose. I sense that the other way of describing this work is bizarre, out of ordinary, incomparably rich in a fantastic imagination that this very exaggerated dreamy imagination lifts this work into the heights of sublime literature. This is not just surrealistic prose but also a way, a pose, a smile, a cry and poetic license turned upside down.

The book begins thus, giving a taste of what to expect.......

The job of having to soften up the brick everyday, the job of cleaving a passage through the glutinous mass that declares itself to be the world, to collide every morning with the same narrow rectangular space, the same taste of the same toothpaste, the same sad houses across the street...............
tighten your fingers around a teaspoon, feel its metal pulse, its mistrustful warning. how it hurts to refuse a spoon, to say no to a door, to deny everything that habit has licked to a suitable smoothness. how much simpler to accept the easy request of the spoon, to use it, to stir the coffee.

In his on how to be afraid, Cortazar writes......

opening the door of the wardrobe to take out a shirt, an old almanac falls out which comes apart immediately, pages falling out and crumbling, and covers the white linen with millions of dirty paper butterflies.

Cronopios and famas ( a good link here) are imaginary creations of Cortazar, along with Esperanzas, first used in this book. he avoids giving them definite characteristics apart from describing them as indolent, naive, sensitive and idealistic in contrast to fa mas who are opposite and Esperanzas who are dull. In fact, the great novel 62: A Model Kit is dedicated to Cronopio Paul Blackburn, translator of Cortazar's few works. It is an amazing feat of imagination, for this is literary daring at its best. It also suggests something bizarre, outre, fantastical, out of the ordinary. Herein are described the behaviour of these fantastic creatures, their habits, dances, moods. how they travel, how they preserve memory ( here) and their songs.

One should never commit this sin of asking the point of these stories. That is a facile, puerile task. This book or collection showcases the talents of a literary giant, a bohemian poet, an artist, a great humorist, a lover of music, a tragedian and a master of sad music. The unimportant or academic question is....Is he Latin America's greatest writer?

Maybe The Most Beloved

I like this Julio Cortazar poem a lot, especially the last two lines. It is in his poem collection called Save Twilight. ( Salvo el Crepusculo) A good guide to Save Twilight here.

You gave me stormy weather
with just the shadow of your hand
across my face.
You gave me the cold, the distance,
the bitter midnight coffee
among empty tables.

It always started raining
in the middle of the movie,
and waiting amid the petals
of the flower I brought you: a spider.

I think you knew it was there
and enjoyed the awkward moment.
I always forgot the umbrella
when I went to pick you up,
the restaurant was always crowded
and on the corners they were hawking war.

I was a tango lyric
to your indifferent tune.

The Melancholy Folklore Of Exile : Roberto Bolano

A poet writes Roberto Bolano in the short story Enrique Martin can endure anything. Which amounts to saying that a human being can endure anything. But that is not true. There are obviously limits to what a human being can endure. Really endure. A poet, on the other hand, can endure anything. But, that way lie ruin, madness and death. Thus Bolano sets the tone for the exiled, distressed poet or writer, giving the poet the role that is his or her right, and also setting no limits for this trade. Art for arts sake does not matter here, this is a difficult path, ending in ruin and madness and death.

I think that after Manuel Puig, the writings of Bolano have always excited me. Well, I mean that Bolano gives me a heartache. It sounds quite puerile, almost dilettantish twitter. Bolano gives words to the night of emotions, to a sunset he will add more fire, to parting more pain. Since he is also a poet, he writes his prose like a poet, thus becoming a prose poet. And since he writes about the past, in the past tense and gives it that favourite music of sadness, my favourite music, Bolano enters the pantheon of greatness as a writer. I have been remiss in not writing about him earlier but I am amending that mistake now.

I will write about his Savage Detectives or By Night In Chile some other time. For now, I want to share my thoughts on the collection of his short stories called Last evenings on earth. ( A good review here) .These 14 stories are generally linked together by a theme..........the theme of failure, in this case as a writer in permanent exile. Most of the characters, there stories narrated to us by another writer called B, are living away from Chile, sometimes in Spain, in Mexico or elsewhere. The common link is this desire or unfulfilled desire to write, to publish and to be known. But in one way or the other, their desires have melted into the sands of time, along with the currents of their own youth. He talks about failed writers, barely scraping a living. Bolano makes one understand their incessant attempts from their point of view, without the narrator moralising or trying to pass judgement on their work. Most of the time, B is sympathetic to the exiles and he recognizes their point of view.

Each story has its niche in this collection, though some are outstanding. My personal favourites are Sensini, Gomez Palacio, Vagabond in France and Belgium, Dentist and Dance card. Some others are sketches, equally good. B is himself a vagabond, a drifter, an artist, a writer, an activist, exiled, on the run, witness, poet, martyr, sufferer. He collects suffering, he looks for faded poets, failed writers. This is acutely visible in the vagabond story. Why..........because nobody else is. In Sensini, the older writer whose son has disappeared in Chile encourages B to send his stories to literary competitions, for the obscured writer, that is salvage. In this story there is an acute sense of loss but no sentimental melodrama.

Bolano is a literary stylist. But this seems quite natural. It seems to come without effort. The prose has menace, tightness, economy of expression and a spare beauty. The sentences are sometimes short, tight lipped, as if a detective story is being narrated. Then there is lyricism, poetry, wit, biting wit, self censure, sarcasm, irony but no sentimentalism. This is very evident in last evenings on earth and the dentist. The protagonist is always wary of something, something is bound to go wrong. This adds to the atmospheric chill and danger of his landscapes which are bare, coarse, tacky and sad. Consider this marvellous passage, when B's friend invites him to read a young Mexican Indian's stories somewhere in the middle of the night.........

from somewhere deep inside i was watching our movements, which seemed to be orchestrated with an almost supernatural precision, and although i knew that those movements were not leading us toward any physical risk, i was also aware that in another sense we were venturing into dangerous territory, from which we would not be allowed to return without having paid a toll of pain or estrangement, a toll that would eventually come to regret.

Something deep lurks in the shadows. One thinks that some secret police or informer is out to nab our poets for he has escaped, for he is exiled. This merges with supernatural descriptions, questions, doubts, like in Gomez Palacio........what color is the desert at night? a stupid rhetorical question, yet somehow i felt it held the key to my future, or perhaps not so much my future as my capacity for suffering.

In Dance Card, which is hauntingly eloquent, B ponders about Hitler, Neruda and women tortured in Mexico by fanatical regimes, saying that they eventually died of sadness, after being tortured. Is it possible to die of sadness? yes it is. it is possible to die of hunger. it is even possible to die of spleen, of morbus melancholicus.
I think of the poets who died under torture, who died of AIDS, or overdosed, all those who believed in a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell. i think of their works, which may, perhaps, show the left a way out of the pit of shame and futility.

Bolano the writer is Bolano the activist. He takes sides, suffers. The true path of literature lies in taking sides, in allowing the artist, the sad but committed artist, the path for an affirmation. In this quest, Bolano has succeeded. This is realism, not magic realism. Roberto Bolano is easily the best Latin American writer of the last 25 years.

Last Year In Marienbad

I walk on, once again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this structure of another century, this enormous, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hotel, where corridors succeed endless corridors--silent deserted corridors overloaded with a dim, cold ornamentation of woodwork, stucco, moldings, marble, black mirrors, dark paintings, columns, heavy hangings, sculptured door frames, series of doorways, galleries, transverse corridors that open in turn on empty salons, rooms overloaded with an ornamentation from another century, silent halls ........

This is how the narrator starts to take his grip on us as he begins speaking in slightly hushed and later more raspy tones. The movie Last Year In Marienbad begins with a melodious, long tracking shot of this hotel described above, and we are seemingly at a loss as to what is going to be shown. Released in 1961, made by Alain Resnais, this movie was released to critical acclaim. It has created a raging debate since then. The new wave of French cinema was going hand in hand with nouveau roman, in the literary world. To this debate was added this fascinating, timeless movie. I read a review of this movie in Sontag's essays and that encouraged me to watch it.This movie is based on a novel written by Alain Grillet, who seems to have been inspired by another Latin American novel. This movie is profusely reviewed on the Internet. My post is just a homage.

As the movie progresses, we see the same corridors again, the hotel in all its somber majesty, its faded but charmed brilliance and the voice..............

Between these walls covered with woodwork, stucco, moldings, pictures, framed prints, among which I was walking--among which I was already waiting for you, very far away from this setting where I now stand, in front of you, still waiting for the man who will no longer come, who no longer threatens to come to separate us again, to tear you away from me. Are you coming?

As we progress through this maze, we get to understand a bit of the story. A man, called X, is trying to make the beautiful Delphine Seyrig, A, remember their affair at Marienbad last year. It seems that A is married to M, though it is not clear. A refuses to believe X or any reference he makes to their affair. She denies ever seeing him, telling him it might have been Frederiksbad and not Marienbad where they might have met. X spends the whole of the movie trying to persuade A to remember and A seems genuinely distressed with his approach at times. M spends time in playing numerous card games, including the matchsticks one, which he always wins. The movie ends with A accompanying X but it is not clear whether they are going together. I am still reeling, after nearly 24 hours of having watched this movie, from the hypnotic effect of what I saw. The first shot, long tracking, slow melodious with X speaking in the background is simply mesmerizing.

The incessant repetition of what I have quoted above adds to this trance, aided superbly by the haunting ambiance of this hotel, captured majestically. Some scenes are wonderful paintings, and I paused many times to just look and take in the effect. The most famous scene is in the gardens, long shot from a distance, actors just standing, shadows looming ahead, like statues, merging with the trees, fern and foliage. I think the acting is stilted, cardboard like, with actors just like cardboard like figures, like statues, but that is exactly what is required. I do not think it is a very difficult movie to follow but was amazed at the different interpretations this movie has inspired. One, which seemed quite far fetched is that this movie expresses the anxieties of the nuclear age. I personally think that this is a meditation on time, on memory, on loss of time and the unbelievable effects it has. It is perhaps also a deconstruction of memory and an attempt to piece together events that happen, from external aid, from another person as to the actuality of what happens. In other words, multiple perspectives about a single situation, or a past event, re-examined after some time do not seem the same.

It seems there is something that did happen in Marienbad last year, and the female character is afraid of thinking about it. In other words, she is trying to repress something, and one cannot be actually sure what it is. Critics have talked of rape, sexual aggression and so. The role of M, possibly her husband is intriguing, for in the end, he thinks the two of them cannot live together.

Even if I am totally offtrack here, I think I will not hesitate to watch this movie again for it draws you in, which movies seldom do.It does not matter what this movie means. What matters is the fantastic, almost eerie meditation on time, memory, love and loss that it deals with. To the psychologically dark, restless corners of the mind, to a seething mind, to a wandering mind, to a restless heart, this movie is an ode.

You want to wander yourself through the labyrinths of Marienbad, through this baroque hotel, you want to be a part of that furniture, just stand there, just get lost in the freezing, solid statues and the crumbling sands of time.
You want to be left behind in that hotel, in Marienbad, and not wonder about meaning and psychology, just stand next to A, look at M playing his games and listen to X as he says.....

I walk on, once again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this structure of another century, this enormous, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hotel, where corridors succeed endless corridors--silent deserted corridors overloaded with a dim, cold ornamentation of woodwork, stucco, moldings, marble, black mirrors, dark paintings, columns, heavy hangings, sculptured door frames, series of doorways, galleries, transverse corridors that open in turn on empty salons, rooms overloaded with an ornamentation from another century, silent halls .................

Goytisolo : Makbara

This short extract is for Alok, from Dispatches.

This is the beginning of Makbara ( cemetery in Arabic) and I wanted to share the music of this opening. I have tried Eliot's technique of Auditory imagination, reading it aloud without concentrating, without trying to know what is being said but how.

********************
in the beginning was the cry : alarm, anguish, terror, chemically pure pain? : prolonged, sustained, piercing, to the limits of the tolerable: phantom, specter, monster from the nether world: a disturbing intrusion at any event: disruption of the urban rhythm, of the harmonious chorus of sounds and voices of supernumearies and beautifully dressed actors and actresses: an oneiric apparition: an insolent brutish defiance: a strange, transgressive presence: a radical negation of the existing order: an index finger pointed accusedly at the happy, self confident Euricraticonsuming city: with no need to raise his eyes, strain his voice, extend his beggar's hand with a black gesture of Luciferan pride: absorbed in the obverse side of the spectacle he is creating:indifferent to the horror he inspires as he passes by: a virus contaminating the collective body of the city in the Wake of his delirious journey through it: dusky, bare feet, insensitive to the rigors of the season: ragged, threadbare pants with improvised skylight's at the knees: a scarecrow's overcoat with the collar raised to conceal a double absence: walking, lost in sel-contemplation. down the sidewalk of the boulevard teeming with humanity: past the tobacco store, the haberdasher;s shop, the terrace of the cafe restaurant, the slot machine parlour:

Delirium : Laura Restrepo

Laura Restrepo is a South American writer who is not yet as famous as her other contemporaries, at least not in the Anglophone world. She has won numerous prizes, some quite major and her novels have been translated into various languages. From Colombia originally, she lives at present in Mexico. I came across Restrepo's work on the Internet a few weeks ago and decided to read Delirium, a novel described by no less than Jose Saramago as one of the finest in recent memory.

Writing a great novel in the form of a detective story or a mystery is not a new concept. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano, Sultry Moon by Giardenelli, the master Borges himself and numerous others have attempted so. My particular impartiality towards Latin American literature apart, I find that this merging of literary anxiety in a detective story achieves all that real writing can and should.

The story is told through multiple narrations, each from the perspective of different characters, each narration mingling with and preceding the other, enhancing the meaning of the previous one. It involves an ex- university professor's wife Agustina going mad, losing her memory and turning insane quite suddenly, after her husband Aguilar returns from a business trip. Aguilar is told to pick his wife up from a hotel room and he begins his investigations as to his wife's breakdown. The other narrations involve Midas , Agustina's ex- lover, now a drug dealer, linked directly to the real Colombian drug baron Pepo Escobar.


The recent events of Colombian history, its political, social, economic and cultural events are a background against which the story unfolds. Agustina is described by her husband and from her own perspective as having visions, with the ability to foresee events in the future. This adds another dimension to the story, for we are left in the realms of speculation as to the reality of her symptoms. Being a rationalist himself, Aguilar never believes in his wife's supposed powers but tries to construct her persona through various narrations and after building her story up from the accounts of other's too. Agustina's Aunt, who drops in at their home suddenly to help adds another dimension for she claims to understand her neice and her illness. The stories are also narrated of Agustina's upper class parents, her Grandfather also who it seems had some form of mental illness too.


The style and prose is lyrical, taut, full of suspense and narrated in a complex and at the same time in a cyclical manner. Midas , for instance speaks in a street smart, sing song, waxy and musical manner. I found those sections very engrossing indeed. With Aguilar, we have sympathies for we want to unravel the mystery of Agustina's sudden illness, her Delirium. When you read Restrepo, you find a certain familiar tone here and then you realize that this prose, this narration and the actual style is profoundly influenced by Saramago. The sentence constructions, the small speeches are interpersed with the narration, without warning, and we have sentences ending in small wistful sad speeches or words.

This is a tale of terror, an inner terror told without hurry for the reader, along with Aguilar knows that something more than Delirium is affecting Agustina but what? And because of the other narratives, a kind of meta-narration adds to the air of mystery that Restrepo weaves with such mastery, for we have to go back in time incessantly, to Agustina's grandfather, her Mother, her Aunt Rosa, her Aunt's affair with her Dad and the threatening shadow of Midas himself, which hangs like the shadow of political uncertainty around Colombia itself. This is how Aguilar describes his wife Agustina.........

since the dark episode my wife had succumbed to slovenliness in matters of appearance, everything yielding to the pure centripetal force of her introspection.......Madness is navel-gazing, my wife spends days and night in pajamas, or at most a sweatshirt, forgetting to eat, to listen, to look, as if her entire horizon of events is contained within herself. i am trying to reach into the quagmire of madness to rescue Agustina from the depths, because only my arm can pull her out and save her from drowning.
Agustina, my beautiful Agustina, is shrouded in a cold brilliance that signals distance, behind the barred door of the delirium that won't let her out or me in.

I was amazed to find a review of Delirium here. Immediately after reading this novel, dated September 1, while there was nothing much I could find before I bought this book. As symbols go, Agustina's story can be read at multiple levels, with its obvious political and social elements that have affected Colombian history recently, with her Delirium the country's Delirium too. Here I admire Restrepo for her attitude, style, sympathies and politics is revealing and understanding. Within the remit of a detective story, she has made it possible to narrate a difficult chapter in recent Colombian history. As to its style, fans of Saramago will admire its subtle poetry, incessant air of loss, of an upheaval, of an extra sensory air of perception that hangs around the whole story. While the influence of Saramago is clear to me, we must say that this is a new voice, clear, candid, poetic and wistful. I will not mind reading more Restrepo and would encourage the lovers of Latin American literature to add one more voice, if they haven't already, to the list of this great literary tradition.

The Shoe Tester Of Frankfurt

It is usually my habit to write about a novel or any book I read days, weeks or sometimes months afterwards, but on this occasion, I am making an exception, for this novella is an exceptional one, having bought it alongside 9 others recently in a fit of melancholic mania, which is an oxymoronic state of mind. I think I have just invented a new mental state, one which is neither recognizable nor describable.

Wilhelm Genazino is a German writer and as far as I am aware, this is the only novel of his that is available in English, translated wonderfully by Philip Boehm, and published by New Directions, a publishing house that has given us Krasznahorkai and other great new writings. Genazino has written quite a few novels and has won the Georg-Buchner-Preis, Germany's highest literary prize, in addition to numerous other literary accolades.

The story, told to us by the narrator is simply this: a man in his forties is employed by a high-end shoe manufacturer to test their new products, that is shoes. And our narrator, who discloses his profession by page 40 or something tests his shoes by walking the streets of Frankfurt, submitting his reports to his employers and earning his wage. During the course of his travels, he describes the things he sees on the streets, recollecting events from his past life, childhood with an uncanny sense of observation. He does not pass judgement on what he sees but describes the events that unfold with the burden of a man who fails to understand the purpose of his life.

During his travels, he describes not only the city but his own state of mind, and then weaves them together and paints a picture of existential frustration and helplessness but not rage. His resigned attitude towards not understanding his life, his reflection on his failures is attached to the impossibility of his coming to terms with the purpose of life in general, to what he calls his unauthorized life, a life that he is living without his being asked to. He also describes his relations with the women he has known, whom he meets quite frequently on his travels, and his unrequited emotions are not a source of rhetoric against them. In particular, he talks of his loneliness after one Lisa has left him, knowing that she won't come back. In the end, forced to resign from his shoe testing, he reverts back to his previous occupation of breezy writing, for he no longer desires to scrutinize myself, waiting for the outside world to finally fit my inner texts.

This short novella is written with such subtle beauty, economy of emotion and dignity of space that I finished it in two stints, forced by the brilliance of its atmosphere. And what a novel idea.......shoe tester! I have never heard of any profession like this one before. The prose is charming, witty, ironic but not self consciously so. What makes this novel different from other existential rants is the melancholia that pervades each page. This is a melancholic existential triumph, for unlike such other novels, the protagonist actually achieves a compromise, a kind of peace in the end.

A striking thing about Genazino's novel is its striking resemblance to the art of Thomas Bernhard and particularly his the loser. At one time, I thought I was reading Bernhard, for at times the narrator lets go of himself. The difference between this narrator from a Wertheimer or Roitheimer is that he does not go on long rants but immediately rushes into a melancholic apology. Yes, that is quite crucial for he is more conscious of his fragility. And like in Bernhard, there is another character, an estranged friend, who is not or does not appear as sane as our narrator. However, the women here have more substance and more wit.Some of the expressions that Bernhard has coined are matched by Genazino. I will give a few examples here......

liar's asylum, silence schedule, private craziness, unauthorized life, play- craziness, crying threshold, and experience proletarians, are among a few of the numerous inventions in this novel. Another striking resemblance with Bernhard is repetition, though it is not as forceful or as incessant in the former, for when it is about to achieve its hammering effect, he mellows down, slows and becomes sad. For instance.....

I recently came up with the idea of sending a silence schedule to everyone i know- or, to be precise, everyone who knows me. anyone who refuses to comply with the silence schedule would no longer be able to speak with me at all. Monday and Tuesday are/ would be listed as non-stop silence. Wednesdays and Thursdays non-stop silence only in the morning; the afternoons would be considered relaxed silence-.........Sundays would consist of total silence.

Another passage......a little wrapper sails onto the street where it makes a nice soft noise as i pass. i would like to stop and listen to the crinkle of the candy wrapper for a few more seconds. i would like to name the collective peculiarity of all life crinkle. And this..... a little gloomy melancholy flies up to me, i carry it with me across the bridge. an equally small pain clowns around inside me saying: you need to look for what you stand to gain, and accept the offer. i can cope with the pain, but i have to do something about the melancholy.

I could quote more but suffice to say here that this is not just a great novel but a readable one unlike other great novels that are not always readable. Originally published in 2001, the English translation came out in 2006. Unfortunately, no other work of Genazino is available in English. This is a new voice, soft, sound, melancholic and harsh. It is important too for it tackles the important question of the futility of life if there is no afterlife. I say to the few readers of this blog.......acquaint yourself with the shoe tester of Frankfurt.

The Dictionary Of The Khazars

The Dictionary of the Khazar's, a novel in hypertext, is one of the most original, bold, daring, brilliant and wonderful piece of writing that one could come across. I read it last year and have read it in parts again since then. I got to know this novel by chance, what gifted chance!

Written by the Serbian novelist Milorad Pavic, it has been brilliantly translated by Christina Pribevic-Zoric . Milorad Pavic is quite well known, beyond Serbia. He is a poet and literary historian too. He has published numerous novels and essays, but my first encounter was the Dictionary, and it is a rarity, a pleasure and acutely sensational. The novel is about the historical ethnic group of the Khazar's, a nomadic group of people who disintegrated and seem to have disappeared by the 10th century. The Khazar's, ( Turkish Hazer, Persian Khazar, Tatar hazer, Latin Gazari ) converted en masse to Judaism perhaps but had alliances with numerous dynasties. This is known historically. However, Pavic then constructs his novel and weaves story upon story, myth upon myth.

The khazars were powerful once, warlike and nomadic who came from the east and settled in the caspian. They fought against the Arabs and after that vanished. They converted to one of the three monotheistic faiths but which one? and after they converted, the state collapsed. This is told in the beginning by the writer. But much before we read.......we are warned......
here lies the reader who will never open this book. he lies here forever dead. The writer has instructions on how and when to read this novel and only if one has to. It should be read the way one catches leap-fever, an illness that strikes only on feminine days of the week.

Fundamentally, the novel is written in the form of a usual dictionary. The book is divided into three sections, each section devoted to Christian, Jewish and Islamic versions, named after the three religious colours respectively, Red, Yellow and Green. Each item, word or character has a different story attributed or a different text in each of the three sections; for eg, the princess Ateh has sections devoted to her in the three sections and in each of these, you get to hear a different person, thus what you believe depends upon which source, which history and which fable you might want to trust. You can read it like a dictionary, from back to front or start in the middle for instance. It hardly matters what you do so long as you look up a word, event or person. Each section can be read linearly or not, depending on your whim. The most intriguing thing is this......the novel has a male and a female edition, and the difference is one paragraph!

This is hypertext at its amazing best. The prose is Arabian nights like, stories told so delicately, words flowing so effortlessly that one gasps in wonder. Pavic has such fertile imagination, such powers of invention that it seems this is the work of a wizard. However, this effect just lulls you, for this is a deeply symbolic work and it is so unabashedly allegorical and reflective. I thought the novel is a response to two things.....a deconstruction of conventional history writing, wherein most people fail to recognize how history is not just facts but facts plus myth plus fiction. Also, it tells the reader the importance of recognizing and believing your interpretation of history, of events, both new and old and thus the inherent bias in understanding history. Thus we have facts but we also have the interpretation of those facts.

The whole book can be quoted. I am not getting carried away here. The Times called it phantasmagoric, surrealistic; the N Y Times ebullient, and the Sunday Times simply a masterpiece. The influence of Borges is evident but Pavic has his own style. Consider this..............
.Ku- a type of fruit from the Caspian sea. the Khazar's cultivate a kind of fruit that grows nowhere else in the world. It is covered with fish scales, it grows on very tall trees, and the fruit on the branches look like the live fish innkeepers hang up by the fins above the doorway to indicate that they serve fish chowder. sometimes the fruit releases voices that sound like a chaffinch. it has a cold and somewhat salty taste. it carries a pit that pulsates like a heart, the Khazar saying goes the Arabs will eat us thinking, like the hawk, that we are fish but we are ku. the word ku was the only word the devil left in the memory of the Khazar princess Ateh after she forgot her own language. sometimes at night you can hear ku-ku! that is the Khazar princess uttering the only word she knows and weeping as she tries to remember her forgotten poems.

Coming from a Serbian writer, this novel is politically important too. Even though it was published in 1988, much before mayhem was unleashed on Bosnia, it could be seen as a symbol or totem for the disintegration of Yugoslavia. I think that this might not have been the writers point however. His sweep is broader, more fantastic, for by talking about the Khazar's, he wants us to question the aspects of history that we are witnessing everyday, events like the Iraq war now, where debate still rages as to why the war actually happened, after millions have been displaced and thousands killed. Thus this sordid convulsion can have numerous histories depending upon your political persuasion or your area of origin. The real lesson must be however for the objective reasoner to discern as to the actuality of facts, if facts are true too.

Notwithstanding its concerns, the novel has unending literary merits for it is the dream child of fable married to a modern novel, allegory weaved with facts, drama and surreality merging with a prose of hypnotic, alluring and magnificent charm. I own the female version of this novel, but have been reassured that the male one is not different. For those who are martyrs to literature, Milorad Pavic is the writer to read.

Moon: Lover or Demon?

During nights of unrest, which are not infrequent, one gets up, opens the usual window, and balancing one's chin on the ledge, lights up another cigarette. And then, out of a primeval habit, One looks up and tries to find out that round of light, that halo of mystery. If one is lucky, we find the Moon, sometimes languidly flitting across thin and bare clouds or racing across a carbon paper sky, for a rendezvous with an estranged lover. The Moon is so fascinating, so bewildering, so deep and disturbing, so secretive and beautiful, so uncomplaining, yet so ethereal and charming, so blase, but so bright and giving, so near yet so far away. Throughout the ages, men have written odes about the moon, comparing it to lovers, love or despair itself.

Poets have often complained about moonlight, declaring it harsh and cruel, like some ungiving mistress or some unrequited love. The harshness probably reflects nights spent away from the lover, in a barren state, devoid of sexual pleasures. Quite often, the cycle through which the moon goes, from newly born to a crescent to that full roundness has been likened to the stages of love, of murmuring of vows, of assent, of the declaration of faith, of the maturity of love itself. And an uncompromising or harsh lover is oft compared to the innate scientific barrenness of the moon, to perhaps like an infertile woman, of a woman bereft, a woman lost, sad.

There are many poems and popular songs wherein references are made to the moon, some joyous and some not so. The ordinary one is usually lovers finding bliss under a tree covered by moonlight, exchanging kisses and lives. In his Rhapsody on a windy night, which comes to my mind now, Eliot finds the whole street held in a lunar synthesis, whispering lunar incantations and thus dissolving the floors of memory. La lune ne garde aucune rancune, quotes Eliot from Laforgue ( the moon holds no grudges) and later he tells us that the moon has lost its memory. Even though it is a poem about urban ennui, by bringing the lunar symbols, Eliot equates the moon with an existential dread, emitting boredom and suffering or so I understand.

My other favourite Moon poem is called Elm by Sylvia Plath. She calls the moon merciless.........she would drag me cruelly, being barren. Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her. Here the poet is perhaps recuperating, though this is a poem about lovelessness. The barrenness equates probably with the Moon having no light of its own, though the Moon is still actually radiant.

A very famous Pink Floyd album, (reputedly 1 in 13 households in Britain has one) is called The Dark Side Of The Moon. We are reminded in a song that the moon has no dark side really, matter of fact it is all dark.The song called Brain Damage, has references to a man piecing his life together, considered a lunatic, waiting for release, perhaps bewitched by the moon or possessed by it. The lunatic is on the grass, Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs............ And if the dam breaks open many years too soon, And if there is no room upon the hill, And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too, Ill see you on the dark side of the moon.

In ancient times, the moon was worshipped as a Deity and perhaps now, through many lunar missions, the moon has been demystified, stripped of its mystic appeal. However, the Islamic calender is a lunar one and the crescent is a symbol of the Muslim religion, and throughout centuries, the cross, the crescent and David's star have fought each other and still do.The moon is also regularly evoked by ancient and modern witches for spells, witchcraft and sorcery. There are many Arctic, Siberian and Native American myths about the moon man and the moon woman. There is abundant literature on this subject, and years ago, one of my close friends wanted to become an official witch, having started reading an Indian text on this subject. She however felt it was too easy to bewitch without any spells and I have not heard of her as a Wiccan since then.

Various Epileptic phenomena have been attributed to the moon, with the moon noted to have an effect on the subject through its various phases. An interesting variety of Epilepsy, called Catamenial Epilepsy occurs only in women, and is related to menstrual cycles. It was generally assumed to correspond to the cyclical nature of menstruation, with each cycle causing new attacks and each attack occurring because of the moon. Galen, the ancient physician, vehemently believed so but it is easy to deconstruct this and assume it as the usual male domination, a consistent pattern that dis empowers women even today.

This brings one to ask the question, why is the moon a symbol for a woman or has been considered so? Is it because the moon is just too near to be dominated by earth, meaning men or is it because it lacks light, is not luminous and is thus dependent, vulnerable? I doubt whether ancient men of reason would know that. What is it about the moon that is so mysterious and yet so much a subject of lunacy, of disease, of barrenness, of even widowhood, of loss of memory, of loss generally? I find it puzzling that lack of sexual pleasures have been blamed on the Moon in Romantic Poetry, though romance needs the moon, night, shadows, shade.

But I know, on particular nights, after the useless images of day have been spent, after sleep has gone and fled, after the printed word has lost colour, after the window ledge has just turned a bit cold, after stars have started to melt and fade, the moon still lingers there, against a dull carbon paper sky.

Thomas De Quincey's On Murder

On Murder is a unique and brilliant work, a collection of essays and a story by Thomas De Quincey,
the 19Th century British writer and essayist, most famous for his Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
Born in Manchester in 1785, De Quincey won a scholarship to Oxford, though he did not eventually get a degree there. He published extensively for London magazine and then for Blackwoods, the magazine that was the undoing of Keats. De Quincey was an opium addict and wrote on opium addiction. He contributed to other leading magazines and his essays were penetrating insights into various literary, cultural and philosophic aesthetics of his times.

I have not read Confessions but I chose to read On Murder, for as a genre, detective stories have always been a weakness, having grown up on the exploits of the great detective myself. On Murder includes his famous essay called On murder as one of the fine arts, second paper on murder and a postscript and the short story called The Avenger. In addition, there are manuscript writings, a note to Blackwoods editor and another paper on murder as a fine art. However the first essay is called On The Knocking at the gate of Macbeth, a fine piece of literary criticism.

The short story the avenger is a tale of revenge, of a series of murders in a German village, where young and old are mercilessly murdered, without any care for robbery. For months, the main actors wonder at the reasons till finally we find out that the culprit lives within, an esteemed young man, who has carried out these acts for personal reasons, wreaking havoc at the people who had broken his family apart. His mother being Jewish is cited as a reason for having suffered, and thus we have religious persecution followed by a kind of terrorism, a revenge, apolitical but with motive. De Quincey says that this tale has moral lessons and deserves deep attention but I must admit I could not find any moral lesson here, apart from the brilliant prose.

Knocking at the gate of Macbeth refers to Macbeth, wherein, after the murder of Duncan, Macbeth asks" whence is that knocking? how is it with me, when every noise appalls me?" This is De Quincey at his best, from philosophy to black satire, and he equates the Eastend murders to nothing less than the work of a supreme artist, liberating the audience from painful ennui. The murderer has hell within him, and we must look into this hell. The interest must be with the murderer, a sympathy of comprehension, not a sympathy of pity. After the London murders, De Quincey warns that the next crime must be spectacular because the amateur auteur will be dissatisfied with a paltry one. I found this essay to be really brilliant as it fore runs much Criminal and Forensic psychology and actually allows it to be discussed as a separate discipline, away from purely social constructs.

The essays On Murder are an aesthetic consideration on murders from antiquity, preferably in the Western World. De Quincey traces murder to its first roots, that of Abel by Cain down to the 19th century. It is not the ordinary murder that entices him, but one that has a bizarre, an outre aura attached to it. A murder done for material gain is dismissed outright. It has to be the work of an artist, a sketch, a painting, for it must draw the interest of the connoisseurs of crime, like De Quincey himself. He evolves for us the personality of the ideal murderer, for the murderer must be an artist, an auteur, a romantic. He must play to the gallery, to the club that De Quincey was a member of. the result of murder should be to improve and to humanize the heart; Any person who did not have the sword of Damocles hanging on his head, even if he was a philosopher is not worth his salt. He talks us through the dark ages, to The old man of the mountains, the secret sect of the hashishi, from where we get the word Assassin, the Arab Syrians, who were a scourge of their fellow people.

Writes De Quincey" if a man calls himself a philosopher and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; He traces a connection between philosophy and murder and we are in the 17th and 18th centuries, Hobbes and Kant having eluded their murderers. Then we have De Quincey talking about the qualities of a murderer. He should be a good man, and not kill to save himself, and the murdered person should not be a public person, for that would be an assassination and not murder.Tthe pope is not suitable, for he is never seen, I suspect most people regard him as an abstract idea. The subject chosen should be in good health.

De Quincey writes extensively on the artistic aspects of a series of murders in London's East end in 1811. He devotes two essays towards unravelling the psychological profile of the supposed murderer, besides alluding to other sensational murders of his day. In particular, he writes about the murderer John Williams who in 1811 killed 7 people brutally in London's East end. He builds up the killers profile and while he wants to be on his side all the time, he does sympathize with the victims and also constructs the psyche of the witnesses. He also allows the reader to understand the role of a solver of crimes, a detective.

The reading is aided by the excellent introduction and notes in the Appendix, for there is a profusion of literary references and Latin quotes. De Quincey was enormously well read and he adds to the newspaper stories of his day in addition to punning on the major works of his predecessors, especially Coleridge and the romantics. He quotes Shakespeare extensively and his quotes are a wicked humorous take on him. The style is witty, the prose smart and there is a toying, a playfulness in his words. De Quincey assures us that I never attempted any murder in my life and for the higher departments of the art, I confess myself to be utterly unfit.

Nowadays we have Forensic psychologists who build up criminal profiles and personality characteristics and let us know the possibility of future offending. But here we have De Quincey pioneering this art itself, drawing us into the metaphysics of murder, the philosophy of cleansing the heart by means of pity and terror.

This is a strange but brilliant collection of essays. It is dark and morbid but it allows an insight into the 19th century here in Britain, a public wanting to read sensational literature. De Quincey gives that and more. He romanticizes crime unlike anyone and places it on a philosophic pedestal, an aesthetic throne. To me he sounds much like Ivan Karamazov and Bakunin, the Russiann nihilists like Vera, who romanticize political homicide. I endorse this work unreservedly for those who want a psychological insight into crime and murder besides some fantastic literary critiques. And, it is so well written too.

Julio Cortazar And Hopscotch

Even though it may sound arbitrary, I have always judged most fiction keeping Latin American writing as a benchmark. It is the works, as they say. It has the Rings Of Saturn and Cupid's arrows, it has things concrete and things abstract, and its influence notwithstanding, it has won new converts to reading.

Of all great Latin American writers, it is Julio Cortazar who is the most daring, the most poetic, for with him, writing reaches those rarefied heights wherein the missed arc of his thoughts notwithstanding, the sheer delight of his prose is unending. With Cortazar, prose becomes proxy for love, proxy for the usually unattainable bliss, for surreal heavens, for shade, for light, for magic and honey and colour, for near revelations, for heartache before and after pain, for new music, for old love. Cortazar's prose has a hum, it has music which of course some other prose too has, but it has jazz which is usually different, played on a rainy night, near a burning fire. Cortazar lifts the clouds from a dull page and gives it colour, gives it sheen, gives gloss, gives the page love, a different song.

And all these qualities can very confidently be found in his Hopscotch, a novel that has mesmerised me for long, ever since I saw the femme fatale on its cover, ever since I read the lush translation of Gregory Rabassa. I think the whole of Cortazar's fiction is one Hopscotch after the other, and as you get familiar with his methods, there are further surprises, more hops and further jumps.

Hopscotch is usually considered as an example of the genre of Hypertext, and even though I am more fond of conventional story telling, I have found Hypertexting as more suitable to explore the subtle and not so subtle psychological ways in which human beings interact with each other. In other words, this becomes a very good method for exploring memory and then attempting to differentiate it from desire, which has always been my own undoing, one obsession. To read and analyse any story randomly needs an act of faith from the writer, and once the reader is invited to participate in this exercise, in this game, the demarcation between figure and ground disappears, from the read and unread, from the character writhing on the pages to the reader struggling on it, from desire to action, from memory to desire, from longing to pain.

I wish I could read Spanish, just for this book, for La Rayuela, as it is called. Set initially in Paris, and then later on in Argentina, I have been a victim of the symbols of this novels, of the shimmering claws of the memory it evokes in me, of my own life, of my own La Maga, my own club. It will be pointless to paraphrase or summarise this novel, for even if I wanted to, I feel incapable of just doing that. Suffice it to say here that this novel tells us the story of a man who lives by indulging in intellectual myth making. This novel is an account of his stories but it is also about La Maga, his lover. He lives with his friends in Paris, involved in intellectual, poetic, musical and political solutions for the world. After his lover disappears, he returns to Argentina, looking for La Maga in a different person ending nearly insane. The novel can be read whichever way you want, from chapter 1 to 56 or from 73 to 1, though Cortazar has provided a table of instructions, in case of confusion or forgetfulness. He also advises the reader to ignore these instructions, if the reader so decides.

This novel is filled with literary references and with jazz. The prose is jazz like and the style extremely rich. This novel is Literature itself, abundant with style and it conveys a certain approach, a style of living, something which I was incapable of doing in a certain time, words, days and nights that just came and went, superficially touching the fingertips of poetry, and leaving behind only ash, only regret, only promise, stale aftersmoke. Hopscotch is a dream when you read it, and one wonders at the genius of its style. One can quote chunks of it, any time. The great Pablo Neruda wrote about Cortazar............"Anyone who does not read Cortazar is doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who has never tasted peaches. He would quietly become sadder...........and, probably, little by little, he would lose his hair".

One must not hurry while reading Cortazar, for everything is turned upside down. We must sing or try to hum a bit of his song, his jazz. Hopscotch is a fascinating novel or text that one could read for years and never tire. How many books could you say that for?

Soma : Drink Of Gods?

The Gods have usually had superior drinks for themselves, the secret ingredients of which have generally not either been revealed to humans or even hinted at. For if everything was revealed, then the very source of such delights would get ravaged, as humankind bears testimony to such acts. One such drink that ancient Gods favoured in India was Soma.

I was surprised that a recent BBC documentary, ( The Story Of India, Michael Wood) traced the origin of Soma to Ashkhabad in Turkmenistan, where the tree or leaves that ultimately produce the drink were found millenia before. It seems that following a wave of migration, this tree might have been or its seeds transported first to Northwest Hindukush mountains by people who started calling themselves Aryans. After sometime, the Aryans moved eastward, down and along the great Indian river Ganges and the plant seems not to have survived, because of humidity. Thus some origin of certain practices like drinking Soma might have originated elsewhere, in Central Asia and adopted or taken away by migrants.

The great Rigveda mentions it and it seems its writers or those who collected the hymns actually would drink good amounts of soma, for it would allay anxieties, heighten perception and improve more intelligent thought. The Hindu God Indra, God of thunder and rain, was used to drinking huge amounts of Soma, but being a God, it seemed to affect him less than other ordinary mortals. The Greek Ambrosia might be the Indian Soma, though interestingly, Soma does not seem to have survived in later day Hindu culture. It is interesting to note the more Central Asian origins of Soma and its migration westwards, giving the entire region a common Godly drink, something for its present day sons to mull over! Soma also has got aphrodisiac qualities. It seems to contain poppy, cannabis and ephedrine, and the latter will naturally lead to more sympathetic effects, for I understand it has cardiorespiratory effects. Others claim that it contains amanita muscarina, deadly mushroom.

Soma seems to be hallucinogenic and no wonder it was needed for more delicate and heroic thought. The whole history of mysticism is one unending convulsion followed by another, perpetuated by deep thought and spurred by Ambrosia, Soma, hallucinogens and so on. I am not sure if intoxicants are allowed in the Hindu faith but it would be a paradox if it was not so, for awareness of Gods was enhanced through mediums like Soma in more godly times. I am not sure what Manna was composed of, God granting it to Moses and Moses to his puerile disbelievers. The mention of manna is there in the Quran too, as food providing sustenance for the Israelites in the morning and Quails in the evening. More modern research has suggested that manna might have contained magic mushrooms or be akin to Soma. These are however pure speculatory ideas. Imagine many a King or sage refusing a heavenly drink! It would refute the very idea of benevolent shadow hood of God on earth.

The partaking of Soma was generally led to lead to the flowing of the rivers of poetry and deeper understanding of the heart; making it known as the God of speech, the elixir of life. Substitute it for inspiration and we have the same theme, minus ephedrine, minus palpitations and minus real poetic worth. We all do need intoxicants from time to time, of ego, of pride, of money and little useless fame, of the jingle of youth and the promise of sun, of worth, of ambition, of sterile desire. It seems that the primeval Gods were cleverer, for they knew the source of inspiration, and being perhaps politically incorrect, they snapped at it and drank it. How interesting it would have been to live then!

To end, I was just wondering where the sources of strength and inspiration come from, and more celestial powers need them too. A poet needs rhythm and beauty in verse, a writer of prose needs besides inspired talent, patience. Writing thus becomes a heavenly kind of trade. And it is then that man, sundered and thrown down, guilty and helpless, looks at the moon, fills the cup brimming with Soma and picks up the pen.

An Extract From Juan The Landless: Juan Goytisolo

I haven't read this book yet but cannot resist to convey the magic of this prose. This is the beginning of Juan The Landless, part 3 of the Marks Of Identity trilogy by Juan Goytisolo. The first sentence is 6 pages long and I am quoting just a short extract. The splendour of this long sentence will convey the lush richness of Goytisolo's oeuvre and the complexity of its psychological motives.

***************

according to Hindustani gurus, in the superior phase of meditation the human body, purged of its appetites and desires, abandons itself with delight to an ethereal existence, freed from passions and vices, attentive only to a gentle flow of a time without end, as light winged as those soaring little birds of passage seemingly obeying only the soft and melodious inspiration of an invisible breeze and musically absorbed in remote contemplation of the sea: sensory stimuli and sensory excitations no longer have any effect on it, and immersed in the beneficent languor of an eternal present, it loftily disdains the absurd slavery of lustful pleasures, pure, svelte, airy,weightless, with the delicate fluidity of those clouds which at eventide enhance the majesty of autumnal landscapes, far from the world's feverish, frantic hustle and bustle: rising above the tyranny of pretty contingency and hence offering to the devout admiration of the vulgar the solemn and tranquil demeanour of the ascetic purified by his acts of penitence and his fasts, the smiling indifference of the Brahman martyr face to face with the preparations being made for his own death, the serene composure of the fakir gracefully reclining on his bed of nails: but the body that observes you from the corner of the table, from the bright coloured jacket of the Hi-fi record, appears to be proclaiming violently, in a shriek almost, that never, absolutely never, will it attain, even in the improbable case that this might have been a deliberate goal that it had set itself, to the superior phase of transcendental meditation, the austere but ineffable pleasures of the beatific contemplative life: neither an anchorite nor a fakir nor a Brahman: merely a body: an extension of matter in space: an offspring of the earth, to earth forever united: united of a tight neat line, a carefully confined surface, a lissome slenderness, a plethora of flesh, baroque splendor, an opulent and fruitful, bountiful, fertile body, solidly rooted in the inferior world that to a pair of feet which, though left out of the artistic composition of the portrait, give one every reason to believe that they are the equal of the rest in grandeur, prodigality, and excess: naked feet, doubtless, seeking the direct, symbiotic contact that draws forth from the primordial substance the life-force, the powers of generation: for a rich sap nourishes this body and sustains it, generously helps it to thrive, invents fabulous convexities: the confining edge of the low cut neckline can scarcely contain them and favours a vast unfurling of waves which, although concealed beneath the velvety suppleness of the fabric, nonetheless prove appetizing to the eyes of the judicious spectator: roiled, towering surfaces which, from the imposing chin line downward, descend with windmill-like fury to the frontal apotheosis: a double crest, a supreme sea swell that the fearful Antillean hurricane has catapulted to the dizzying heights of an incredible prominence: the fatal wave rising in awesome splendor moments before crashing down upon the disaster area and sweeping away with wrathful provision the habitations, chattel, towns, industries, crops of an area teeming with life, transforming it, in the wink of an eye, into a dreary and desolate quagmire, abandoned to the moans of the victims, the barking of dogs, the hovering of vultures, sacking by looters and the starving, and the eager though tardy zeal of well-intentioned international charity organizations.............................