Good Things on Other Blogs

The latest literary gossip from local bloggers:

Is Kafka Austrian or Czech? Raman recounts a diplomatic tug of war and writes about Milan Kundera's new book The Curtain (which I was tempted to buy when I slipped into Silverfish yesterday ... such is the power of blog reviews.)

MPH Bookstores blog Redwhitespot has sadly gone under just as it was beginning to get interesting with some of May Lee's posts. I think the name had bad feng-shui and wanted to warn them, as it always made me think of a pimple. (So sorry!) May Lee and Rodney and the rest - if you feel the need for a space to blog, feel free to tumpang a space here.

Talking of MPH though, super-editor Eric Forbes has a nice post which talks about how book reviewers are developing in Malaysia - and I have to agree with him and he ties this to reviews of James Wood's essays which now I have to buy. (Expensive business, reading other book blogs.)

Eli James of Novelr wrestles valiantly with the question of purple prose.

I've not been very good at turning up for events organised by other people, much to my shame. I sincerely apologise to the folks who would like to have seen me there. I'm grateful to those who give me a vicarious glimpse of what went on, including Ted (left) who posted pictures of last months Katasuara at Raja Ahmad's gallery. Jordan Macvay (spelt right!) writes about being part of Bernice's Ceritaku storytelling event.

I've always has a great phobia of dentists, and when I can avoid 'em I do. Deepika had a very special "dentist" take a look at her teeth during a panel discussion which she was moderating at the Galle Literary festival in Sri Lanka: it was none other that Vikram Seth! (See photo right.) In his round up of festival events, Nury Vittachi tells the story :

At one point, he (Vikram) told an entertaining story about a relative who was a one-armed dentist. To illustrate the challenges involved, he put his arm around the head of moderator Deepika Shetty and duly inspected her back molars. ... What the author didn’t know – but many of the rest of us did – was that Singapore journalist Ms Shetty has just completed a lengthy dental treatment which involved carrying around a quarter of a ton of metal in her mouth for more than a year. Thus his good reports about her dentition carried great weight.

Postscript :

Oops. How did I forget to say welcome to the new Kakiseni blog?

Immortality

Immortality is a book I enjoyed very much. This seems like a cue to stick in a review I wrote long ago:

As much a conversation with the reader as a novel, Kundera obeys his own maxim "A novel should not be like a bicycle race but a feast of many courses": the plot meanders at a leisurely pace and explores ideas about the nature of immortality, human love and sexuality along the way, drawing in characters historical figures such as Goethe and Bettina, Hemingway and Dali. At the same time, the distinction between story and storyteller becomes blurred, the picture frame becoming part of the picture, as the writer enters his own story, meeting up with his characters in the final scene.

One of Kundera's greatest skills is to show the internal landscape of his characters, the very colours of their souls, and in so economical a fashion. A puppet master showing the strings, Kundera creates his main character from a gesture, with casual sleight of hand, and the main events for his story from half heard extracts of radio programmes.

There's plenty to chew over, even after finishing the book. My mind keeps coming back to the scene where Agnes imagines a stranger visiting her and asking her (in her husband's company) whether she wants to be together with him in her next incarnation in another world. The acid test for any love. She is faced with the dilemma of telling the truth and hurting Paul, or lying to save his feelings.

There are also some wonderfully quotable lines in the book and I kept finding myself reaching for a piece of paper to write down some of the best. I loved:- "Our heads are full of dreams, but our behinds drag us down like an anchor". How true!

Kundera is very good company and I enjoyed the book, but feel that The Unbearable Lightness of Being is by far the stronger novel.