Photo Essay: State Libraries

Do you wonder what state libraries would be like with their enormous, and envious, collections of rare and historical books, manuscripts, and maps accessible mainly to incumbent presidents and prime ministers, kings and queens, parliamentarians and senators, and popes? Here's a virtual look at some of them. I couldn't get a handle on any of the British royal libraries.

President of India Pranab Mukherjee in the newly renovated
Rashtrapati Bhavan Library, New Delhi. © www.presidentofindia.gov.in

US President Barack Obama during an interview
in the White House Library.
© Pete Souza/www.whitehouse.gov

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff with
Pope Francis in the Vatican Library.
© www.en.mercopress.com

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his wife Laureen visit the Parliamentary Library with Felipe Calderón, President of United Mexican States, and his wife Margarita Zavala,
in Ottawa.
© www.pm.gc.ca

Reading Habits #11: Who did you read in school?

A few days ago, I visited ‘Landmark’ in my suburb. It's a leading chain of bookstores owned by one of India’s largest business houses. I was browsing through the books, with no intention of buying any, when I saw Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw in the Classics section. I’ve had an affinity for Shaw and his writing ever since I studied an abridged essay in high school. I don’t recall the title but I remember being highly impressed by his prose.

Many years later, Autobiography of Anthony Trollope by the English author had the same effect on me. This is how Trollope opens up on his life in the first chapter…

“In writing these pages, which, for the want of a better name, I shall be fain to call the autobiography of so insignificant a person as myself, it will not be so much my intention to speak of the little details of my private life, as of what I, and perhaps others round me, have done in literature; of my failures and successes such as they have been, and their causes; and of the opening which a literary career offers to men and women for the earning of their bread. And yet the garrulity of old age, and the aptitude of a man's mind to recur to the passages of his own life, will, I know, tempt me to say something of myself...”

The only way to enjoy reading the above passage, and the rest of the book, is to read it very slowly, pausing at just the right moment and then reading again, all along feeling and absorbing the rich texture of each word and sentence. Rapid reading simply won’t do with Trollope here.

The sighting of Pygmalion, which I also had in school, brought back memories of some of the finest essays, stories, and poems I’d the privilege of studying from my English textbooks. Until the late eighties, I think, English as a school subject was influenced by English literature based on a pattern of British curriculum. The textbooks have since been Indianised, in terms of both writer and content, and while they have retained some of the English and American literary heritage, they’re not the same anymore.

Who else did I read back in school? As far as I can recollect, besides Shaw, there was Chekhov, Kipling, Buck, Dickens, Maupassant, Shelley, Blackmore, Wilde, Sewell, Melville, Hugo, Bunyan, Swift, Doyle, Shakespeare, Twain, Verne, Carroll, and Dumas.

The best I can recall from my school days are the poems—Death Be Not Proud by John Donne, O Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman, Paradise Lost by John Milton, Daffodils (or ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’) by William Wordsworth, and The Lord of the Isles by Sir Walter Scott. I loved them but don’t ask me to recite from by heart.

A word about Charles Dickens and Mark Twain: for some inexplicable reason, I want to re-read Pickwick Papers and A Tale of Two Cities, and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I delight in the mere thought of being able to read these books again.

Are there books that do this to you? Who did you enjoy reading in school?

For previous Reading Habits, see under 'Labels'

Musings on a fifth Thursday

I’m trying to take my writing beyond newspaper reports and blog posts. I’m working on a collection of short stories set in my city. The stories are in the making and I’m still playing around with a few ideas one of which includes an Indian version of an American cowboy, a gunslinger or a marshal, on horseback and in full western gear. He’ll carry six-guns and he'll be fast on the draw. I don't know if I can lasso the character, the story, and the setting the way I imagine but there’s no harm in trying. I want each of the stories to be as outlandish as possible.

I'm also working on a book on self-help that has a huge market in India. Everyone seems to be writing one these days. The problem with writing self-help is that you tend to get preachy and the last thing I want to produce is another cure for insomnia. I'm rewriting the three chapters I've written so far and I’m fighting to keep my eyes open. I'm thinking of consulting other self-help books.

Four decades ago, my late father wrote nearly a dozen short stories, mostly family dramas. He was a fine journalist and a gifted writer. I envied him his language but I was also proud of it. He wrote them with a fountain pen in long hand and typed them out neatly on foolscap paper, on his dull blue Smith Corona typewriter (not the one in the picture). I'd been sitting on this little treasure of tattered and yellowed pages all this while. A couple of months ago, a dim bulb lit up over my head and I decided to transfer them onto the computer, and try and publish them as a book or an ebook. I owe it to him.

I've also been writing something else off the top of my head. I think it could turn into some kind of a story, maybe flash fiction. It begins like this…

I woke up Tuesday morning and finally cleared my bowels. What a relief it was. It’s not the best opening, pun or no pun, but it’s certainly the best way to start the day. I rejoiced in that single act of self-gratification. It beats Christmas morning. If only my ritual the previous day had been as productive, I'd have top-scored at the interview. I was squirming in my seat and my inquisitors, a grim-faced restaurant manager and a mean-looking head chef, took my discomfort for a nervous attack. They looked at each other and telepathised, “This guy is shitting in his pants.” I wish. They said they'd call me before sundown. They never did. That was yesterday.

A paragraph somewhere in the middle of the story goes like this…

I took a bus that dropped me outside the restaurant. I stood there and looked at the place. I didn’t like it. It looked shady and it smelled of vice. It was a bar and restaurant and not the other way around, which meant nice families didn’t go in; only inconsiderate men did, the kind who drank and gambled and thought they deserved a break from their wives and mistresses four times a week. The food was an inducement to drink more booze and blow up more money, and then take an advance on next month’s pay.

By the time I reached 900-odd words, I was in my element…

As we neared the door it was opened by Quasimodo’s twin. We entered the room and the door banged shut behind us. I wheeled around and saw the hunchback in front of the door, his broad twisted frame blocking my escape, a hideous grin pasted on his freaky face. I was trapped and I was very afraid. My mind pressed a dozen panic buttons. I was going to be framed for a crime and spend the rest of my life in prison. Worse, I was going to be sodomised, tortured, and murdered. 

I have no idea where this is going, if it is in fact going anywhere at all.

Abwärts, or Out of Order, 1984

A German entry for Overlooked Films, Audio & Video over at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom this Tuesday.

It took me a good ten minutes to trace this little-known film on the internet.

When I googled “Out of Order” I got a film by that name but it turned out to be a British comedy I’d never heard of. It had George Baker whom I know from Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969), but definitely not from I, Claudius, a BBC adaptation, or Ruth Rendell Mysteries (1987-2000) where he plays Inspector Rex Wexford, or a couple of James Bond films I’d seen.

My search also threw up a namesake Rod Stewart album and a 2003 television mini-series that had some fine actors like Eric Stoltz, Felicity Huffman, William H. Macy, Kim Dickens, Peter Bogdanovich, and Lane Smith. I haven't heard or seen either.

I then looked for movies about elevators and actually came up with two, called Elevator, made in 2004 and 2011. Their plot—stuck in the lift and something happens—was similar but neither of the films was what I was looking for.

There should be a universal ban on the use of the same title more than twice for books, films, television, and music. It’d narrow down one's search.

I went back to IMDb and this time scrutinised the results carefully, and there it was, Abwärts (1984) aka Out of Order. And that was when I found out that it was a German film and not a Hollywood product. Abwärts means ‘downwards’ in German. In this film it could mean anything. I don't know if it was dubbed in English. I saw it thirty years ago. 

  

Directed by Swiss-born Carl Schenkel, Out of Order is a mini thriller about four strangers—three men and a woman—who are trapped in a small high-rise elevator on a Friday evening. The lift has been under repairs, the alarm system is not working, and there is little oxygen. Will the four people come out alive on Monday? And even if they manage to survive the next seventy-two hours, can they survive each other in the interim?

The occupants include an elderly bookkeeper who has robbed his employer and is carrying the stash with him, a middle aged man and his girlfriend, and a young man. Inevitably, tempers fly, egos clash, and conflicts arise. As I remember the boyfriend and the young man quarrel from the start, right through their efforts to find a way out of the lift. The girl flirts with the young man which makes it worse for everyone inside. By the time they're rescued, a lot happens, and it’s no longer about spending a few claustrophobic hours in the elevator without food and water. The end is a bit of a cliffhanger.

An article on Wikipedia sums up the film thus: “The main theme of the movie is the sudden life threatening situation unsuspecting people find themselves in the most normal of circumstances on a most usual day. The film also explores the rivalry between men over a woman and being faced with becoming obsolete, either by being fired like Gössmann, who is too old to learn to adapt to computer bookkeeping and apparently also Jörg, being fired for unspecified reasons and losing his lover to another man.”

Out of Order is a stark depiction of human nature and its shortcomings as evident from the dishonesty, insecurity, and jealousy of the four disparate characters none of whom stand out in the movie.

Apparently, the film and its maker received both critical acclaim and several awards. Carl Schenkel (1948-2003) also made Tarzan and the Lost City (1998), Knight Moves (1992), and The Mighty Quinn (1989), and the television movies Murder on the Orient Express (2001) with Alfred Molina as Hercule Poirot, and Missing Pieces (2000) with James Coburn in the lead.

The Intruders by Evan Hunter, 1954

This week’s contribution for Friday’s Forgotten Books over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

I had almost forgotten, when they came and reopened all the old wounds—the woman who swam naked before my unseeing eyes, and the man who had already killed once…

Just over six thousand words, this short story by Evan Hunter (alias Ed McBain) is not as gritty and hardboiled as the blurb hints. Instead, what you get from the legendary crime fiction writer is only a degree of suspense and the atmosphere of a thriller. It’s enough to keep you glued to every word in this cracking story. 

Adventure, April 1954

Jeff Toland is a brave young man, a former soldier, and blind. He is angry and frustrated because he is patronised. His older brother, Tom, treats him like a simpleton and his father follows him around lest he trips and kills himself. Jeff rebels. He wants to be left alone. He decides to go up to the cabin in the woods next to a brook and live there all by himself.

"I had liked the world I made. It was a world of quiet darkness, with no people in it."

And then one day, Jeff is walking along the trail he knows too well and making his way back to the cabin guided by familiar sounds and smells of nature. He steps inside the cabin and makes his way across the room when his toe hits the leg of a chair that isn’t supposed to be there. That’s when he realises something is wrong. The next moment a .45 is rammed into his back.

Sam, the owner of the .45, is hiding from the law. He has killed a man in a fight. He is not really a bad man, only a victim of circumstances, we are told. He and the woman with him, Dot, want to spend a few days in the cabin. Sam is threatening until Dot tells him that Jeff is blind and can't do harm. When Sam mocks Jeff about his blindness, he reopens his old wounds. Jeff seethes with rage and plots his revenge.

Bestseller Mystery,
March 1959

Evan Hunter weaves the suspense nicely into the narrative. Jeff’s furtive search for his rifle in the closet and the hidden chemistry between him and Dot are the notable suspense elements in the story while Jeff’s mental picture of Dot and his exuberance upon learning that she is Sam’s sister and not his wife or lover add a touch of humour to it. None of this means anything for Hunter ends the story on a bit of an anticlimactic note. But he doesn’t leave you in a blind alley.

The Intruders, one of dozens of short stories Evan Hunter wrote in crime, mystery, and science fiction, was apparently first published in Adventure: The Man’s Magazine of Exciting Fiction and Fact, April 1954, and reproduced in Bestseller Mystery Magazine, March 1959. I read the story in the latter, online.

Reading Habits #10: Controversial books

I’m currently reading a historical fiction about WWII by a writer who has been accused of never having written it. Do I continue to read it? I know I will because the book is so fascinating in a shocking and terrifying way that I can’t stop now.

The book is The Legion of the Damned, 1957, the first of several WWII novels written by Sven Hassel, a controversial Danish-born writer. His novels have been compared to pulp fiction.

The accuser is Erik Haaest, an equally controversial Danish journalist who apparently hated Sven Hassel and denounced all his books on several grounds.

Both Hassel and Haaest died in 2012.

The Legion of the Damned (‘Fordømtes Legion’ in Danish) is the first-person account of a deserter in the German Army narrated over years. It begins with his arrest by the dreaded SS and incarceration in a concentration camp and later transfer to a penal concentration camp where he is trained like an animal to fight on the Russian front. Anyone who is held captive in a penal camp is better off dead. Not half-dead, but dead. The deserter is a courageous German soldier who is put through weeks of brutal and inhuman training with little water, food or sleep. After the training, which is described in graphic detail, our “hero” is posted to a penal battalion that must fight a terrifying war through Europe and the Russian front. The deserter wears a uniform adorned with ordinary unit badges. He is not entitled to other ribbons even if he has earned them.

I’m still on page 59 of the 186-page novel. In just those pages I have asked myself a dozen times: how can any man treat another like this? Yet they did, in this war and in every other war, or genocide, before and after.

Sven Hassel tells us that the narrator of The Legion of the Damned is none other than Sven himself who came back from the war and recounted his experiences through fourteen translated books which sold very well in the sixties and seventies. He has been forgotten since then.

Hassel’s literary success was, however, marred by the controversy: Erik Haaest, whose father was involved with the Danish Resistance, believed that Hassel never went to war, that he stayed put in occupied Denmark, spoke to those who actually fought the war on the Russian front, had the first book ghostwritten, and got his wife to write the rest. Not only that, Haaest was also convinced that Sven was actually Børge Pedersen, a member of the auxiliary Danish police force created by the Gestapo. Apparently, Hassel did not deny he was Pedersen. 

Although the internet gives some credence to Haaest’s version, there is no evidence that Hassel, described as an anti-war writer, did not author the books and tell the world his frightening wartime stories.

For the reader there is a way out of the dilemma: if you even remotely believe Erik Haaest’s account, then read the book as war fiction. All of Sven Hassel's novels, translated into some twenty-five languages and sold in the millions, were immensely popular and at least some of them need to be read. I'm basing my opinion on 59 pages and just this one book.

But would you read a book whose authorship is questioned? I would in this case.


For previous Reading Habits, see under Labels.

Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl, 1953

In celebration of ‘Crime Fiction of the 1950s’ for Friday’s Forgotten Books (and short stories) over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

The room was warm, the curtains were closed, the two table lamps were lit. On the cupboard behind her there were two glasses and some drinks. Mary Maloney was waiting for her husband to come home from work.

I’m going to keep this review short as Lamb to the Slaughter, an unexpected crime fiction by Roald Dahl, is only 2,393 words long.

Devoted housewife Mary Maloney is beside herself with joy when her husband, police detective Patrick Maloney, returns home after a long and tiring day at the police station. She idolises her husband and looks forward to his company each evening. They sit opposite each other and sip their drinks. 

Mary is glowing. She is sewing, probably clothes, for their unborn child. After finishing his second drink, Patrick breaks the news to her, quietly and gently. He tells her that he has thought about it a lot and that there is no other way. He promises to give her money and take care of her needs. The reader can only infer that he is leaving her for another woman.

Mary is puzzled and shocked. She gets up from her chair, leaves the room, and returns with a big frozen leg of lamb that she and Patrick were going to have for supper. When her husband tells her that he is going out, Mary finds a new, if chilling, use for it. 

Lamb to the Slaughter is not so much about the murder of Patrick as about a calm and composed Mary who prepares herself before ringing up his friends at the police station, to report the tragedy that is about to destroy her beautiful life.

I, for one, did not know that British novelist Roald Dahl had written a crime story bordering on noir and police procedural with a strong whiff of dark comedy. Included in Dahl’s anthology Someone Like You, this is probably the best short story I've read so far this year. I recommend it highly.

According to Wikipedia, Lamb to the Slaughter was initially rejected by The New Yorker and later published in Harper's Magazine in September 1953. It was adapted for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 1958, the story appearing on the two-disc special edition DVD of Hitchcock's Psycho, and Roald Dahl's British TV series Tales of the Unexpected. It has also been adapted in other creative forms including cartoon and fabric painting. The idea for the story was apparently suggested by his friend Ian Fleming.