OBOC - Angola

For Angola I stumbled upon Jose Agualusa's "The Book of Chameleons" and it was a fascinating book. Set in the early 1990s in Angola, just after the end of a long-drawn civil war, it is the time in Angola when new wealth was being discovered. So there is the contention between new money and the elite-portugese speaking old money. The leveller being, now everyone with money wants and can finally afford a glorious past.


That's where Felix Ventura comes in with his promise to "Guarantee your children a better past". He specializes in inventing to the minutest detail a glorious past for anyone in need of one. An albino who lives by himself, well almost... he has a gecko as his companion, he has the uncanny ability to spin a tale about the past that he doesnt have to get into forging documents to guarantee it.

The gecko is more than just a house pet, it is the reincarnation of Borges (for whom the author has huge admiration), and besides being the narrator of the incidents in the house he also constantly recalls his past lives as a human. He interacts with Felix through the common dreams they both share. Besides the dreams, they also share an aversion to light, and ironically the two people who change their lives forever are both photographers with a passion for light. Who are these two strangers? Are they connected? What part of their memories are real?

The book in the end is about memories both real and fictional. At one point the Gecko says that "Memory is a landscape watched from the window of a moving train". There is a great chapter where Felix recounts his childhood to the Gecko and that chapter is so poetic with vivid descriptions of the Angolan landscape complete with Locusts, Red Ants, White Ants, Butterflies and the first rain and a heaven full of chickens. I loved the writing in that chapter, and despite being well acquainted with Felix by then i still fell for it and needed the Gecko to remind me not to trust him :) " I envy him his childhood. Maybe it is not real. But I envy it all the same" says the Gecko. That was an interesting aspect of the book - discerning which parts are real and which are not.

I guess we all have selective memories and remember things the way we want them, maybe not really lying but definitely exaggerating, embellishing and downplaying as we see it fit. Felix is more professional than many of us.

Overall a great book, i think the translator must've done a fabulous job. The appendix has an interview with the author which helped give some perspective. I was unfamiliar with Broges until i read this interview. A quick read about him in Wikipedia helped me understand the perspective of the Gecko a bit.

There is an interesting piece of advice which the Gecko received from its mother in its human life... "You can find everything that exists in the world in books - sometimes in truer colors and without the real pain of everything that really does exist. Given a choice between life and books my son you must choose books". Made me wonder if i was trying to do just that with the OBOC project ? :)

OBOC - Sweden

Apologies, for not sticking to the A's. This one by Reidar Jonsson was on my reading list for a long time and I had to finish it. A Swedish friend recommended the book as one that has managed to capture the soul of Sweden. How can I turn down the book after such a recommendation! Also i am still waiting for Argentina and Armenia to arrive :)

I've seen the movie long before I read the book, but like with so many adaptations, while I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, the book tops it hands down. The big difference is the first person narration - the same reason I preferred "To Kill a Mockingbird" the book 10X times to the movie. While the movie wrapped up everything as a beautiful package with a bow, the book on the other hand left you hanging and therefore was more tragical.

From the sympathy he feels towards the dog in space, to his morbid metaphors ("Going home w/o glasses is like volunteering for San Quentin's gas chamber"), his musings on life ("you become what you are if you are where you are", "isn't it funny - the best thing i've got in life is a loan" and my favorite "People's fate are often determined by timetables") and his amusing encounters with the people of Smaland - eccentrics and individuals in their own right, the book makes your heart reach out to Ingemar. How he deals with the tragedy of his mother's death, being passed around from one person to the other and coping with being split up from his siblings and his pet dog Sickan all topped with a generous layer of guilt ("I had done it again. I had killed her a little again") is the crux of the book.

Although the story is very much set in a small town in Sweden and is replete with imageries and events from Sweden in the late '50s the story is in some sense universal. How do you feel when everyone around you wants to move on, but you are still not ready? Ingemar does the only two things he knows, pretending - which he is very good at, and running away - which he is not so good at.

As I said the book triumphs because of its first-person voice, Ingemar's voice tugs at your heart strings and many times I just wanted to shout out what he wanted to hear - "It is not your fault". How can you not feel for a 13 year old struggling to manage his life despite everything ?

A beautiful coming of age story, powerful in its brutal honesty. This one is going to stay with me for a long time!

OBOC - Albania

Albania – again a country that I didn’t know much about other than that it was part of the Communist Block at some point in history. Once again I picked my book by Googling and came upon Ismail Kadare’s “The General of the Dead Army”.



I don’t know if I am doing some kind of sub-conscious self-selecting here, but once again I stumbled upon a book that is very relevant for today. The story is set in the ‘60s when an Italian General is sent to Albania to recover the remains of the dead Italian army from WWII. He is accompanied by a Priest and he also chances upon a German General tasked to do the same.

The novel is written completely from the point of view of the General. He makes no attempt to understand the local culture, and mostly dismisses off Albanians as barbaric, crude, violence seeking group and tries to keep his distance from them until the very end of his bleak task. Kadare makes no attempt to correct any prejudices through any of the characters and goes along portraying the bleak nature of the task, the weather and the environment.

The glory of war when commanding a real army Vs the morbidity of “commanding a dead army” is beautifully portrayed. Even after 20 years the pain of losing a dear one in a foreign land remains deep within families who view the General as the last hope. In the process of digging up the remains he opens up unhealed wounds on either side and this leads him to question the value and meaning of his thankless task.

Spoiler alert:
I especially liked the last wedding scene in the book where the General goes uninvited to a wedding feast, where he is not the least welcome, but is tolerated by the Albanians, and when he overstays his welcome he leaves in disgrace – I thought it was a clever allegory to how the Italian forces under Mussolini would’ve felt when they invaded Albania during the WW and by extension applies to similar war time invasions.

OBOC - Afghanistan and Algeria

So finally here is my attempt at becoming more organized with my OBOC project - starting with the A's; Afghanistan and Algeria



For Afghanistan, I used "Kite runner" as the book. A lot has been said and written about the book, so there is nothing left for me to say except that I loved it. Also I am a little bit more aware of Afghanistan thanks to close friends from there and the current geo-political situation.


Algeria on the other hand, I had no clue about. I am ashamed to admit that i would've hard a teeny bit of difficulty locating it in Africa. So I relied on Google to find me an author from Algeria. I chanced upon Assia Djebar's "Children of the New World". I had high expectations for the book - view of the Algerian war from the women of Algiers, had all the right ingredients - colonial history, a feminist going behind the veil literally and figuratively. Unfortunately except for a few interesting insights and a few well etched characters, this book didn't hold my attention. I forced myself to finish it. Having said that after completing the book I realized that the book is very relevant for today's time. The impact of war on ordinary people's lives, the brutal nature of torture as a MO for war, different kinds of violence - from the highly overt forms to the hidden emotional violence that women face.

I hope I will come back to Assia's other books at a later date, but right now off I go to Albania!

OBOC - South Africa

South Africa offered many choices w.r.t books, but i wanted something that described the post-apartheid situation. Somehow the biggest story that remained in my mind of post-apartheid South Africa was the "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" headed by Archibishop Tutu. I had also heard of the very high incidence of rape (even the reported cases) in South Africa. So I picked "Disgrace" by J.M. Coetzee which I believe is a Booker Prize winner.




The book left me quite disturbed. The landscape painted was very bleak and full of misery. Hasn't the changed political situation done anything good to alleviate misery? That was the question that the book left me with.

The book deals with one painful subject after the other, sexual harrasment, rape, anarchy, racial tension, animal rights, land rights. Coetzee's brilliance is how he weaved all this together and still made you turn the page without feeling like you couldn't go along any further. There is the line in the book ""One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet". I almost felt like I had to keep going to see how much harder it is going to get!


The book almost seemed to say that the only way to survive and move forward was to give up everything, submit to the environment around you however brutal and demeaning it can be and when you have nothing more to lose you redeem some of your dignity by simply existing and putting your next step forward.

I guess that is how the entire nation must have felt during the apartheid years and at the end of apartheid maybe that is how many feel as they are attempting to rebuild their lives.

An awesome but very disturbing book!

OBOC - Nigeria

Before I embarked on this project, the only things I knew of Nigeria were from Fela Kuti’s music. So all I knew was civil war, corrupt Governments and Oil and to me that looked like almost all of Africa (the danger of a single story). I had heard of Chinua Achebe but never got around to reading any of his work. So as part of OBOC I picked up “Arrow of God” and I absolutely loved it!! It is very different from the Nigeria I hear in Fela Kuti’s music as it dates to the early 1900s when the Colonizers were just starting their colonization process in Nigeria. So it gave me a whole new insight into the Igbo people and their culture.
As I read this book I could not help but imagine many of the rituals that were described, a testimony to Achebe’s narrative skills. The importance of yam, the kola nut, the various masks, musical instruments, their market festivals were all finely detailed. I was also pleasantly surprised to see a very balanced book on colonial conflicts - tribal life was not idealized, colonizers were not demonized - so in that sense i found the book very refreshing.
The book appealed to me on many levels and raised more questions that it would’ve been wonderful to be part of a book club or a class and read the book together and have a discussion around it. Is it a story of conflict? If so conflict between whom? God (Ulu) and Priest (Ezeulu), one God over the other (Christianity Vs Ulu), Colonizers Vs Colonized, Father Vs Son, Power groups within the tribe, Men Vs Women, Tradition Vs Change? Was Ezeulu just being an arrow of God or was it his ego/anger at his own people that led to the downfall of their tribal group? Also, the status of women in the tribe was much more subservient of women than I would’ve imagined of tribal cultures. Is this an impact of colonization, other changes? Something that happened in the 19th century?
As I said a thoroughly fascinating read, and if I didn’t have another 190 odd countries to go through I would’ve stayed with Nigeria and Achebe for a long time!

After the long silence...."One Book One Country"

Let's face it, i really don't have much to say, not even rambles! Writing is hard work, and writing about nothing at all is much harder. So I took a break from writing and realized that it is much more difficult to get back on the horse. And then i stumbled upon this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg

An excellent talk by Chimamanda Adichie, which resonated with me so much. Some of her experiences growing up on British books just brought back so many memories to me. For e.g my fascination with scones! That was one of the first things i tried when i set foot in the UK... why? i've read so much about having scones with Tea!

But of late i've been grappling with what kind of books i should expose my pre-schooler too. I've been looking for a variety that exposes her to a number of cultures. Nope i didnt want a book which just had a few people of color thrown in as your "token diversity" representations. I wanted books that expose her to different cultures, including her own.

So I made a list of children's books that I thought will be a good sample and here is my list

1) Lights for Gita
2) I love my hair
3) Jalapeno Bagels
4) Old Turtle
5) Seventh Spot
6) Dona Flor
7) The first strawberries
8) Peach Heaven

Lights for Gita especially proved to be handy as we celebrated our first Diwali with her.

This led me to a project for myself which I am calling "One Book One Country". My aim is to read one book from an author from each country of the world, something that will give me some perspective about the country outside of what I see in the news (if they indeed make the news) or in wikipedia. Of course since i can read only English I have to make do with translations in some cases.

And this gives me a great way to keep blogging and keep writing about my experiences as i get exposed to maybe one other story about each country and its culture.

First I started doing this in an adhoc manner - done with South Africa, Nigeria, and right now reading Sweden. Since then have made it more orderly - will start from the A's and work my way down to the Z's. So its been a month of Afghanistan, Albania and Algeria for me.

So from now on the blog will focus on my reviews and rambles on the books i read from each country.

That's a wrap!