The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka – Nov 30, 2023

 

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida – first edition Aug 2022

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, the second novel by its author, was published in Aug 2022. Its reputation was assured when it won the Booker Prize for 2022 a few months later. The novel is set in Sri Lanka in the 1980s. Maali Almeida, a photographer, though dead is still active in his after-life. His engrossing interest now is to find out how he died. Just one week (“seven moons”) is given him to complete his detective task. In the hybrid world created by the author, Maali Almeida may move freely between the realms of the real world and the limbo world after death. But if he does not discover the solution in seven moons, then even the chance of rebirth will elude him forever.

Photographer with Nikon camera

The secondary quest in which Maali Almeida engages is that of finding what happened to the stash of negatives of photographs taken with his Nikon camera when he acted as a photo-journalist working for number of news agencies. He also worked at times as a fixer who could arrange meetings between the warring parties of the civil war that raged and terrorised Sri Lanka till the end of 2009.  His pious hope had been that these photographs recording the barbarity of civil war would reveal its true ugliness and the crimes that were being committed by all the parties – not just by the Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam (LTTE) headed by its notorious chief, Velupillai Prabhakaran. 

During the seven moons the reader is exposed to real-life characters, thinly disguised, often maintaining the same name as the actual commanders and politicians they represented. The reader begins to appreciate the selfish agendas of the numerous actors in the Sri Lankan civil war and why it was fated more or less, to end in the large-scale atrocities that were ultimately heaped on civilians who happened to be living in Eelam controlled areas in the North-east of the country.

Bloodbath on the beach 10th April 2009 in Sri Lanka

Strangely for a novel pretending to write historical fiction, Shehan Kaarunatilka nowhere lays bare that it was Chinese weapons that helped the Sri Lankan military’s  bloodbath. Thousands of trapped civilians died in 2009 as government forces decimated the Tamil Tiger guerrillas in a brutal military campaign, which resulted in the killing of twenty thousand civilians and a forced ethnic cleansing of Tamils while a mute UN Secretary General (Ban-ki-Moon) watched.

Sri Lankan Air Force JF-7 fighter jets

Chinese Jian-7 fighter-jets (a licensed production version of the Soviet MIG-21), anti-aircraft guns, JY-11 3D air surveillance radars and other supplied weapons played a key role in the Sri Lankan military successes against the Tamil Tigers. After a daring 2007 raid by the Tigers air wing wrecked 10 government military aircraft, Beijing was quick to supply six warplanes on long-term credit. Such weapon supplies, along with $1 billion in Chinese aid to the tottering Sri Lankan economy in 2008, helped tilt the military balance in favour of the government forces.

What is equally shameful is how the UN under the weak leadership of Ban Ki-moon enabled the Sri Lankan government’s ethic cleansing of the displaced Tamils and then refused to investigate the human rights violations. For the real history behind this you may read the paper by Matthew Russell Lee – Sri Lanka's ‘Bloodbath on the Beach’ Made the UN's Ban Ki-mute Moot.

In the end we learn who the killer of Maali Almeida was, and why he was killed, but the elusive question of where the explosive negatives have vanished and whether  they can be traced remains unanswered. The wandering spirit of Mail Almeida in the next world cannot rest.

Poetry Session – Oct 26, 2023

Elizabeth Bishop watercolour, gouche and ink – Tombstone for Sale

Poetry attracts the most diverse practitioners of the art as the selection from this month’s session indicates. From primates to feminists, people of all genders and sexual inclinations adopt poetry as their mode of contemplating the world, and if possible reforming it, according to their vision. Our collection this month is a sprightly representation of the manifold well-springs of poetry.

Coincidentally, all four nations comprising the United Kingdom were represented: Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Their voices could not have been more different, nor their preoccupations more varied. It was uisge beatha (whiskey) in Scotland, farting frogs in Ireland, tadpoles in Wales, and serving tea to friends in England. Even their language was distinct: from joyous singing and revelry in Scotland, to the dull monotone of England; the loving naturalist’s gaze on a precisely observed body of water on an Irish farm, to the textual metaphors of a Welshman obsessed with language.

UK Poets – Burns, Eliot, Heaney, Williams

At this session there were three winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature – the second woman ever to win it, Syzmborska; and Heaney whose birthright language was Gaelic; and of course, T.S. Eliot who won it in 1948 “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.” Syzmborska was initially allied to the Communist ideology but later renounced her earlier views and defended free speech. Heaney will be remembered for his magnificent translation of Beowulf, a classic of Olde English. Heaney renders into poetry – a throbbing action-packed tale of the hero Beowulf, summoned by Hrothgar, king of the Dames, to defeat the under-sea monster Grendel.  Joe read excerpts from it at a 2006 session of KRG (not on the Web).

Seamus Heaney – Beowulf cover

Five women and five men among the poets selected, speaks to an even gaze on the world of poetry. Our women readers are as likely to choose women poets as they are to incline to poets of the male order. In the past we have had sessions exclusively devoted to women poets, as a theme, but they seem to rise up even without pre-selection. 

Women Poets Collage: Barnes, Bishop, Szymborska, Doshi, Limon

The Good Earth by Pearl Buck – Sept 28, 2023

Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973)

Pearl Buck was born as Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia. She spent most of her young life until the age of forty in China as the daughter of Presbyterian Christian missionaries in Zhenjiang (Jiangsu province), then a small city lying at the junction of the Yangtze River and the Grand Canal.

She was fluent in Chinese and American and got her college education in a women’s college in West Virginia. She had begun to write essays and stories in magazines in the 1920s. The Good Earth was her second novel published in 1931; it became a best-seller in 1931-32, won the Pulitzer Prize, and the Howells Medal in 1935. 

The Good Earth, First Edition 1931, published by John Day

It was adapted as a major MGM film in 1937 featuring Paul Muni as Wang Lung the farmer, and Louise Rainer as O-lan, his wife. 

Wang Lung and O-lan working on the farm

Wang Lung, though born as a poor peasant barely making a living on a farm, has ambitions, derived from a fierce love of the land. Land, he thinks it the only asset that survives famines, bad times, and the depredations of the warlords. Through all the hardships he makes headway, finding in his wife the sort of helpmate who propels him forward while taking care of his domestic needs and their familial obligations to elders.

Indeed it is she who in a moment of luck carts away a bag of jewels and bullion secreted in a cache in the Great House of the local overlord and mistress, when their wastrel family fell on bad times. O-lan asks only to keep two pearls, handing over the bag to Wang Lung. He lets her keep it; O-lan, however, did not want to wear it ostentatiously, but keep it as a store of wealth against future adversity. Sadly, Wang Lung later plucks it away from her to present to his mistress, the beauty of the local whorehouse, Lotus.

Lotus and Wang Lung

Toward the end of the novel when Wang Lung finds himself alone, surrounded by quarrelling members of his family after his wife’s death, he sorely regrets that he had snatched away the small gift O-lan wanted to retain.

O-lan may be seen as the real story Pearl Buck wanted to tell: of women who were the true up-builders of the family and community, toiling without ceasing, barely acknowledged, rarely rewarded, and entirely subservient to men. Bearing children, caring for elders, and husbanding meagre farm resources so that the children would have a better life – this was the life of rural women. 

All this, of course, changed with the revolution. Women are no longer uneducated. Women are no longer tied to serial child-bearing. They do not even have to marry, if they do not want to, and increasingly in modern China it is hard for a man to get a woman to say Yes! But all this advance does not mean patriarchy has disappeared. As this article, Patriarchy in China, notes, men still dominate in the political sphere even today, although women have equal economic power. Foot binding has been eliminated totally and arranged marriages are extremely rare. 

Romantic Poetry Session — August 25, 2023

Poets for the session on Aug 25, 2023

In addition to the usual English suspects, Shelley and Keats, we had two American poets Whitman and Emerson, a French poet Victor Hugo, and a Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz. 

Within the English Romantic poets there was the younger generation consisting of Shelley, Keats, and Byron, that rebelled against the the older generation, signified by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Not only was the lifestyle of the youthful poets freer, but they were uncompromising in their support for the French Revolution, and for greater freedom of speech and belief, which they hoped would usher in a freer Britain. Byron’s contempt for Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge (the old guard) led to the creation of a freer and even more Romantic era of poetry.

Wordsworth and Coleridge were close collaborators in writing poetry and in developing theories about poetic values and how poetry arises, culminating in the Lyrical Ballads. That joint collection of poems, first published in 1798, is generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The 1800 edition had the famous Preface that set out the changes Wordsworth hoped to bring about by treating poetry not as elevated speech, but common speech enlivened “with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness” toward Nature. He gave his famous definition of Poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”  

The Young Romantics – Keats, Shelley, and Byron

The younger generation knew each other’s work and generally had good opinions to share. Keats did not come from nobility as Shelley and Byron did, and did not have the benefit of University education that came as a birthright for the well-born. However he made up for it by reading everything he could get his hands on via his friend Cowden Clark. 

Shelley and Byron did collaborate during their famous 1816 sojourn in Switzerland. Poems like Julian and Maddalo by Shelley about two friends: Julian the idealist who is like Shelley, and Maddalo the aristocrat who resembles Byron.  That Swiss contact made by Lake Geneva where the Shelleys and Byron rented villas, had many other literary consequences. There Byron found the medieval Château de Chillon, which inspired his long poem, Prisoner of Chillon. Mary Shelley wrote her famous thriller, Frankenstein, Or, the Modern Prometheus. And Byron finished the third canto of his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in the villa Diodati.

Villa Diodati in Cologny, Switzerland by Lake Geneva where the Shelleys and Byron met in 1816

The modern poet Vijay Seshadri writes about how he was inspired by the grand old poet – Whitman. Seshadri says in an interview that he is amazed by the delicacy of Whitman’s technique, the more so because he is thought of historically, as “massive and powerful.” Seshadri says Whitman “has a control over the minutiae of poetry that is of the same order as Emily Dickinson’s. You can just marvel and marvel at the little effects, and the little changes.” But the greatest challenge in Whitman is “the visionary life and the prophetic experience” he brings. Can one rise to that?

Fathers and Children by Ivan Turgenev – July 21, 2023

 

Turgenev – Fathers and Sons, First Edition, 1867, English translation bay Eugene Schuyler

Fathers and Sons is a novel by Ivan Turgenev published in 1862. Its reputation in Russia and abroad remains stout as ever after it gained a following in continental Europe as the foremost Russian novel of the 19th century. It highlights the conflict between the established order and the younger, more radical generation in society. In a way it is a preview of the Bolshevik revolution to come. 

Statue of Turgenev, made by the sculptors Yan Neiman and Valentin Sveshnikov, using Turgenev's death mask when sculpting the writer's face

Bazarov, the central character of the novel, representing the younger generation, is represented as a ‘nihilist’, or a skeptic about any political causes and philosophical –isms that are advocated in society by their champions. However, though Bazarov sets himself up as a nihilist, he has humanist tendencies; for example, he puts his medical skills in the service of the peasants he freely associates with, though he is the son a small landowner himself. So too the brothers Kirsanov with whom he has arguments have long since freed their serfs; their liberal-minded egalitarian nature is evident.

Falling in love is treated in various ways. There is the simple seigneurial manner in which Nikolai Kirsanov takes to Fenechka; the romantic manner in which Arkady ultimately falls for Katya, sister of Odintsova; and finally the more intellectual, and at the same time refined attraction that emerges between Odintsova and Bazarov. Bazarov’s first reaction is: “What a magnificent body; shouldn't I like to see it on the dissecting-table.” But when his plan to possess her physically fails, he won’t fall for chivalrous sentiments. He has to admit finally the fact that he is in love with a real but unattainable woman.

The duel scene in Chapter 24 is set up on the flimsiest of excuses, that Bazarov who stole a kiss from Fenechka, the concubine-mistress of Nikolai, has been caught in the act by Pavel, Nikolai’s brother. Some see it as the dramatic high point of the novel, but it is in fact a comic absurdity. Whether Turgenev meant it thus is debatable, but our readers derived only general merriment from the scene.

Turgenev lived in Paris in the latter part of his life with his friends, Madame Pauline Viardot and her husband. Turgenev, it seems, had a passion for painting and was a discerning critic. 

Turgenev, Pauline Viardot, celebrated mezzo-soprano, and husband Louis, cultural entrepreneur and art dealer, critic

Poetry Session – June 16, 2023

 

Collage of Readers on Zoom

We had ten poets represented, five American, three British, and one each from Russia and Argentina. The only translated poems were those of Pasternak from  Russian, and Borges from Spanish.

The poem chosen by Thomo, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, is from the 1939 book of poems by T. S. Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Its  presentation in modern times occurred when the book was turned into the 1981 musical Cats composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber. The most famous song in the musical was Memory, adapted from the Eliot poem with lyrics by the musical's director Trevor Nunn. Memory is sung primarily by the character Grizabella as a melancholic remembrance of her glamorous past, and as a plea for acceptance.

Elaine Page as Grizabella in the musical Cats

The enigmatic Jorge Luis Borges from Argentina is best known for his short stories in Ficciones and his essays on various subjects. Every reader will be transported by reading his short story The Library of Babel which begins:

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below-one after another, endlessly. 

But at this poetry session we tasted a poem of Borges in which he successively refines the concept of a tiger, having never seen one,  

conjuring in my poem

is a tiger made of symbols and of shadows

– and thus

creates a fiction, not a living creature,

not one of those who wander on the earth.

The Other Tiger

The venerable Robert Frost who doesn’t like walls was about this very task of mending one. Each spring they find gaps from fallen boulders in the low stone walls between their houses and attempt to repair the gaps:

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

Robert Frost and a wall

Apparently the adage ‘Good fences make good neighbors’ urges them on to complete a task, which is actually redundant to the aim of trespassing for there are no cows to wander across. Frost philosophically reminds the reader

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

Boris Pasternak, whose poems we’ve read before, reappeared when KumKum read a poem out of his famous novel, Doctor Zhivago. The poem is titled Parting and we are reminded of the line from our recent Shakespeare session when Juliet confides to her lover Romeo that 

… Parting is such sweet sorrow

That I shall say “Good night” till it be morrow.

But the occasion of Pasternak’s poem is the final parting, out of many in the novel, between Lara and Yury, the doctor, who also writes poems; he is left alone in the deserted house and muses –

In years of strife, in times which were

Unthinkable to live in,

Upon a wave of destiny

To him she had been driven,

…

And now, so suddenly, she'd left.

What power overrode them?

The last parting of Yuri and Lara in Doctor Zhivago

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar – May 23, 2023

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar - First Edition

Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya is the background to this novel, set in the days after he had taken power in a 1969 coup against the monarchy backed by the West. His aim was to set up and implement an ‘Islamic socialism’, to which end he nationalised the western-controlled oil industry and used the state revenues to bolster the military and implement social programs like housing, healthcare and education. But power corrupts and soon he was in the dire business of squelching dissent internally and funding foreign militants.

Colonel Gaddafi in his golden braid

The novel is a kind of bildungsroman, and follows the plight of Suleiman, a young boy whose father, though a prosperous import businessman, supports anti-Gaddafi activities. His young mother, Najwa, is his comforter in the home, and outside it, his best friend Kareem and his father’s friend Moosa are the people he can look to for escape from fear and panic.

We are given a historical perspective by Usthath Rashid, a university professor who moves with his son Kareem next door to Suleiman’s home. Libyan history dates to  the time when the Phoenicians from present-day Lebanon settled in the north-west corner on the coast, and it was later expanded by the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus to form the port of Leptis Magna (now called Al-Khums) in 200 CE.

Leptis Magna – Severan Basilica

The dramatic highpoint of the book is when Usthath Rashid after public interrogations is led to his execution. The crowd are rabid, being incited by the regime to condemn a traitor to Libyan socialism. His own father has disappeared and that too induces a sense of panic in the young Suleiman’s heart. Ultimately, his parents smuggle him off to Cairo where he grows up and becomes a pharmacist under the care of Judge Yaseen, Moosa’s father. The book peters out in Cairo. There is no great return to Libya possible, nor any desire.

A Libyan dissenter Shaheed Sadiq Shwehdi executed in public at minute 2:10 of video

Clearly the autocratic regime of Gaddafi and the suppression of dissent are the thrust of the book, showing how it affected ordinary people, and caused the multitudes to fall in line. In the end we have to remember also that Libya was bombed in 1986, supposedly in retaliation against terrorism, and Gaddafi was killed by US, UK, and France acting in concert. They sowed the mayhem and civil war that continues to this day.

Romeo and Juliet, a Shakespearean Evening – April 25, 2023

 

Poster  of the 1968 film directed by Franco Zeffirelli

Romeo and Juliet was written by William Shakespeare before he was thirty. As usual with him the story was adapted from an existing one written by an Italian, Matteo Brandello, and translated into English a few years before Shakespeare was born. Again, as usual, after borrowing the plot he expanded it by developing additional characters and converting it into the poetic form of blank verse that ran through his oeuvre. The poetry is bewitching in many places and adds to the dramatic effect. He uses all his resources – sonnets, heroic couplets, striking metaphors, and puns. He adds comedy into the mix to heighten the effect and provide the entertainment that people craved when they came to the Globe Theatre.

Mercutio says, “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man,” introducing a pun on ‘grave’ at a not very comedic moment when Mercutio has just been stabbed and knows that he is about to die.

Many expressions in the play have entered into the common discourse of English-speakers, and remain current four and a half centuries later, such as
What’s in a name?

But Shoba pointed out that P.G. Wodehouse was a constant quoter of Shakespeare, whom he called “brother-pen” in his novels. For instance, he uses Mercutio’s description of his wound:

No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as
a church door, but ’tis enough.

in several of his novels to describe a person’s income; a trap; an oak chest, etc.

And the line from Talitha’s passage in which Abraham asks Sampson (servants of the rival families) about a supposed insult:

Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

– even this finds its way into P.G. Wodehouse, who was a veritable repository of Shakespeare quotes, hundreds of which are sprinkled throughout his works. For a complete tracking down of allusions to Shakespeare in P.G. Wodehouse see:

https://www.madameulalie.org/annots/pgwsqa.html

                                  

Olivia Hussey in Romeo and Juliet (1968) by Zeffirelli

Perhaps the most sensuous and beautifully filmed version of Romeo and Juliet is the one directed by Franco Zefirelli. The costuming was a stunning recreation of medieval Verona. The actors are as young as the play supposes, and take on their parts with a naturalness that makes everything come alive. The music too (composed by Nino Rota) was hauntingly beautiful with this signature theme song (lyrics by Eugene Walter, voice Glen Weston):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mvaw3FoUec

A rose will bloom
It then will fade
So does a youth
So does the fairest maid

Shakespeare being Shakespeare cannot avoid the bawdy in his plays, probably out of the need to relate to the various classes of people attending the theatre, from groundlings to nobles. Take a look at this banter among servants, who draw their sword, itself a figure of speech for the penis:

Sampson.
when I have fought with the men I will be cruel with the maids,
I will cut off their heads.

Gregory.
The heads of the maids?

Sampson.

Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads;
take it in what sense thou wilt.

In the classic glossary compiled by Eric Partridge in 1947 titled Shakespeare’s Bawdy, we learn the full reach and extent of the use of erotic imagery prevalent throughout Shakespeare’s works; one can only have an incomplete understanding of his plays without an acquaintance with his enormous vocabulary on the animal spirits of mankind, and how they are clothed in metaphors and images of the male and female bodies.

You can read here some of the risqué double entendres that are sprinkled throughout the otherwise dewy romantic play – from Mercutio’s “the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon” (Act 2, Scene 4) to the Nurse’s “your love / Must climb a bird's nest soon when it is dark” (Act 2, Scene 5). In Shakespeare’s case it extends even to French – in Act 3, Scene 4 of Henry V , Princess Katherine receives a memorable language lesson almost entirely in French from Alice, her maid-in-waiting, on the English names for parts of the body, which in Katherine’s French for ‘foot’ and ‘gown’, are easy to confuse with French vulgarisms.

One reader raised the agonised question why Shakespeare had turned the wonderful account he gives of youthful passion into a dark tragic ending. As in Hamlet numerous deaths pile on toward the ending. It is not any fatal flaw of Romeo that results in tragedy, but a combination of two circumstances: 

1. He reluctantly fights and kills Tybalt of the house of Capulets and is banished, and 

2. Fate decrees he should not receive the message sent by Friar Lawrence about Juliet being under the influence of a potion that fakes death, while not actually being dead.

The greatest tales of love that survive in world literature are either cases of unrequited love, of separated lovers, or those that end in the death of the lovers.

Orpheus glances back at Eurydice, 1806 oil painting by Christian Stub

Take Orpheus and Eurydice, the ancient Greek myth, narrated by the Latin poets Virgil and Ovid. Eurydice once dead, could be revived by the music of Orpheus who goes in search of her with his lyre, but she is sundered forever by a fateful backward glance as he brings her back from Hades.

The account of the actual potent love of Héloïse for her teacher Abelard a thousand years ago in France, survives in the wondrous letters he is forced to address to a woman who is now beyond his reach in a cloister.

In the Celtic legend of Tristan and Isolde the two mistakenly drink a love potion, but are nevertheless separated in life until Tristan’s death.

Laila and her obsessed lover Majnun, is a story of Arab origin made epic by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi. Laila dies of heartbreak from not being able to see her beloved. Majnun was later found dead in the wilderness in near Layla's grave. He had carved three verses of poetry on a rock near the grave, which are the last three verses attributed to him.

                           

Dante meets Beatrice at a bridge in Florence

Dante, after meeting Beatrice and being greeted by her on a bridge over the river Arno in Florence, forever remembered her in his Vita Nuova and later in the classic The Divine Comedy Beatrice assumes the role of his guide to the next world.

Life of Pi -Yann Martel - March 20,2023

2001 first edition of Life of Pi, published by Alfred A. Knopf

A tale of survival on a lifeboat for 227 days by a boy who learns to train a tiger who is his mate on the lifeboat. The tale is prefaced by the godly yearnings of a young boy who decides that the Threefold Way suits him best: being Hindu, Muslim and Christian all at once.

The Golden Rule unites religions

He is given the name Piscine Molitor by his father, an excellent swimmer, because that was the name of the most wonderful swimming pool in all of Paris. Why Paris – because he lived in the French colony, Pondicherry, which sent its award winning students to study in France.

Piscine Molitor Paris after renovation in 2015

But the humiliating sibilance of piss in his name caused him to drop it in favour of the shorter Pi, and then a Gujarati surname Patel just to confuse his future enemies. He takes care to point out a peculiarity, namely, that Pi, the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, is an irrational number. But had he been tutored a bit more, he would have learned that it was even more unfathomable: a transcendental number, and that would have given a boost to his search for the divine.

Calculation of approximations to the transcendental number Pi by successive generations of Indian Mathematicians

But the divine was not keeping him company when he set out with his parents for Canada, the only known case of refugees seeking asylum there from Mrs Indira Gandhi’s declaration of Emergency in 1975. En route a shipwreck occurs in which the animals they were transporting aboard the SS Tsimtsum, are thrown on the seas and a few (a zebra, an orang-utan, a hyena, and a Bengal tiger) are stowed away with Pi on a well-provisioned lifeboat.

Zebra, Orang-utan, Hyena, and Bengal tiger with Pi in the lifeboat

The prey-predator relationship goes to work to reduce their numbers and ultimately Pi is left with the Bengal tiger (who has the unlikely name of Richard Parker, after a shikari who hunted tigers) with only a tarpaulin to separate them. This is the ultimate matchup to decide who will be the Alpha male.

There is also the mundane task of assuaging hunger and thirst. Perhaps the most Robinson Crusoe-like part of the story is Pi’s slow education by trial and error, with a great deal of improvisation, on how he went about getting food and drink from the ocean and the sky using various crude implements he devised. Flying fish, turtle-meat, dorados, and the all-important rain-water collection apparatus (an inverted umbrella) provide sustenance.

A gaff – A large iron hook attached to a pole or handle and used to land large fish

Ships sail very close and yet Pi could not alert them with flares. They chance upon the most fantastic island, a huge living flotsam of an unknown species of tree/plant, that sucks up sea-water and desalinates it by osmotic action, forming pools of fresh water on its surface and having a single species of fauna: meerkats.

The island –  Pi is astonished  ‘I know I will never know a joy so vast as I experienced when I entered that tree’s dappled, shimmering shade and heard the dry, crisp sound of the wind rustling its leaves’

The meerkats multiply and climb the vegetal heights at night. From time to time they get devoured by the mysterious all-pervading carnivorous plant. Not to fear: plant and meerkats thrive and multiply nevertheless.

Meerkats

We are left with this as the only curiosity to be followed up. They are not rescued, but wash up unceremoniously on the coast of Mexico and the end fizzles out like a damp squib with Pi being interviewed by two Japanese on behalf of the insurers of the vessel that was lost at sea, perhaps in an explosion.

The film of the novel was made by the well-known director Ang Lee in a 2012 adventure-drama film, whose screenplay was written by David Magee. It stars Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Rafe Spall, Tabu and Adil Hussain in lead roles.

Tabu (Tabassum Fatima Hashmi) acts as Gita Patel, mother of Pi Patel in the film

Poetry Session - February 16, 2023

W.B. Yeats and Maud Gonne was a great Irish romance.

W.B Yeats had one great romance in his life, pursuing the fiery activist Maud Gonne and proposing to her three times, being turned down each time. As his lifelong muse she inspired several of his poems. When Yeats told her he wasn’t happy without her, she replied: “Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness, and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.”   

The Wild Swans at Coole which Devika recited has these wonderful lines about swans, who reportedly mate for life:

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still

Amy Lowell – Garden by Moonlight

Amy Lowell in a quiet poem presented by Arundhaty speaks of a Garden by Moonlight – besides flowers, there are animals and insects too. A vision of her dead mother appears:

Then you come …

Quiet like the garden

And white like the alyssum flowers,

… do you see those orange lilies?

They knew my mother,

But who belonging to me will they know

When I am gone.

Edgar Allan Poe's poem 'A Dream Within A Dream' questions the nature of reality and human existence

Edgar Allan Poe has a meditation on life as maya. His poem A Dream Within a Dream has the unmistakable sound and rhythm of his great poems; it was rendered by Geetha with great understanding. By the sandy shore the poet grasps at grains of golden sands and wonders 

O God! can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

… can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

He meditates finally  

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

One of the poets recited was Christopher Reid, who lost his wife to cancer after 35 years of marriage and felt totally lost. He writes about his Conundrum as a widower in a mini poem by that name that Joe intoned:

I’m the riddle to an answer:

I’m an unmarried spouse,

a flesh and blood revenant,

my own ghost inhabitant

of an empty house.

Kanakakunnu Palace, Trivandrum – the second edition of the Hay Festival was held there 17-19 Nov, 2011 and Simon Armitage was among the poets who presented poems.

We had a poem from KumKum by the current Poet Laureate of UK, Simon Armitage, whom she met in 2011 at the Hay Festival in Trivandrum; she heard him recite this very poem, The Shout.  He is a prolific Poet who takes his responsibilities to compose for royal occasions seriously – with happy results. As it turned out Pamela too lighted on the same poet, filling the evening with two more nature poems.

Vikram Seth – The Humble Administrator’s Garden cover

Priya chose a poem from Vikram Seth, harking back to his student days in China when he was gathering data for an Economics doctorate. There in the town of Suzhou he chanced on the ancient park laid out on classical lines by a high official who relinquished his career and built a garden to meditate in and there live frugally. There is a Chinese saying: in the sky there is heaven, on Earth there is Hangzhou and Suzhou (pronounced su-jow). VS brings to bear his observant eye in describing the quiet pleasures of Suzhou garden, now a UNESCO Heritage site:

As magpie flaps back to pine.

A sparrow dust rolls, fluffs, and cheeps.

The humans rest in a design:

One writes, one thinks, one moves, one sleeps.

As often, VS writes in the sonnet form, using iambic tetrameter, following the pattern of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which he was to adopt later for his tour-de-force in verse, The Golden Gate.

Anti-war poems by Denise Levertov, a passionate advocate of peace and justice

A wonderful poem, Making Peace, by Denise Levertov seemed especially relevant in our time when bombs and missiles are raining devastation in Europe, and the belligerents have yet to consider the alternative of peace.

Levertov writes –

A line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses …

That seems to be the key: to stand back, pause, and ponder – weigh the suffering of blown limbs and snuffed out lives against the necessary compromise that will gain a peace, fragile, but still achievable.