Ian McEwan – The Children Act, Mar 26, 2021

 

First edition, September 2, 2014

In the novel the law confronts profoundly and sincerely held religious beliefs. Fiona Maye is a high-court judge fifty-nine years old.  She is the Duty Judge, who deals with any kind of legal emergency, when somebody needs a rapid decision. The duty lasts for a week at a time.

In the instant case, the boy almost eighteen, needs a blood transfusion to save him, but he is refusing it on religious grounds as he is a Jehovah’s Witness. The hospital can’t proceed against the will of the patient, for it would be tantamount to criminal assault.

Judge Fiona Maye decides to visit the boy to ascertain his state of mind; though unorthodox, the procedure is not without precedent. But this sets off emotional consequences in Adam Henry, the boy, and novel follows the ensuing chain of events arising out of the meeting. Her own childlessness plays into Fiona Maye’s own emotional attachment.

She is compassionate and self-sufficient as a person, very rational as judges ought to be, indifferent to religion but respectful of people’s beliefs. She feels for the boy, and admires his artistic abilities, and his creativity in music and poetry. But like many rational people she is unable to weigh up her own personal problems. She begins to see in the boy the child she never had. The novel is about the boy as much as the judge.

The case turns on the Children Act of 1989, and hence the name.  In its very first clause the Act says:

“When a court determines any question with respect to the upbringing of a child, the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration.”

The child’s welfare is central – not the parent’s needs or the parents’ faith.

In an interview Ian McEwan speaks of  a judge by the name of Alan Ward who did preside over a Jehovah’s Witness case. Judge Ward did go and visit the boy who was a ward of the court. Alan Ward went to the boy’s bedside, and they talked about football non-stop. Judge Ward ruled that the hospital could treat against the boy’s will. The boy made a recovery. Later Judge Ward took him to a Manchester United match, and the boy met all his football heroes. Seven or eight years later, the judge learned as a footnote in the papers, that in his twenties the boy got ill again, went to the hospital, and died there, refusing the transfusion. Alan Ward told the story to Ian McEwan while they were waiting for a concert to begin, and McEwan thought what a gift this was – he had actually heard the essence of a short novel – it rarely happens like that.

Poetry Session – Feb 26, 2021

The poetry session of February did not have a special theme, but because the bi-centenary of Keats’ death fell in the same week on Feb 23, two readers dealt with Keats. There were worldwide celebrations of Keats with special readings and plays and a visual tour of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome where the poet died in the arms of his beloved friend, the painter Joseph Severn.

Poems lose a lot in translation. One of them in Bengali by the modernist poet Jibanananda Das was particularly subject to loss as his imagery is soaked in the rural countryside of East Bengal. Robert Lowell observed that poetic translation requires not so much translation per se as the composition of a new poem based upon an original in another language.

The other poem in Hindustani of a colloquial kind, did not suffer as much, as many have an ear for the language in India. But nevertheless a gloss in English has to be provided, according to our rule.

Thommo offered a lyric from a rock song, and why not, since Bob Dylan won the Nobel Literature Prize. Thommo sang it for us and promised a better version for the blog. Certainly many songs have unforgettable lyrics, whether of loss or joy, and need to be kept alive in the popular imagination. But since we recall it along with the music it is difficult to separate the two.

We sampled some living poets, older poets long dead, and even an ancient poet – David who became a King of the Israelites circa 1000 BCE. This brings the matter of translation again, from ancient Hebrew. Many may know the psalms only from the translation available in their own language; we heard its recitation in the 400-year old English of the King James Version that Geetha used.

Virginia Woolf – Mrs Dalloway, Jan 29, 2021

 First Edition 1925, The Hogarth Press

The novel really has no story or plot. It’s about a party. It begins with Clarissa Dalloway going out to buy flowers for the party she’s holding in her house that evening; and ends when the party is breaking up after the VIPs have been standing around and watching each other, exchanging trivia and gossip.

Through all the meandering prose, consisting of long sentences that ramble on ruminating on everything, we hear not the narrator’s voice, but the staccato fits and starts of what’s going on in people’s minds. The longest sentence of 196 words mimics the prolixity of Proust whom Virginia Woolf (VW) greatly admired: 

And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, …

Characters like Septimus Smith are introduced who have no connection with the  main theme of people attending the party, except that his suicide by impaling himself on iron railings becomes an overheard conversation at the party – and any talk of death disturbs Clarissa. Septimus is like a patient carried around on a stretcher throughout to render a dose of medical barminess to the barmy goings on of the rich and ineffectual people in the novel.

If you consider the number of suicide cases among retuning American soldiers from tours of duty in the Middle East, it seems we are no better now at treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD, then called shell-shock). An analysis in 2016  indicates that an average of 20 American veterans die from suicide per day. The solution obviously lies in ending such wars, and not in spending useless billions on mental health for veterans.

What do we learn about the party-going elite from the upper crust of London society? First, we learn that they cannot hold a conversation on any serious subject. Second, that there seems no sparkle of wit in them (should we blame Virginia Woolf for that deliberate omission?). Third, that persons of average intelligence from the lower classes would have more gumption. And fourth, they are entirely devoted to the trivia of who is going up and who is coming down in their society.

A study of Clarissa, the central character in the novel will find she is a victim of her desire to hold parties that celebrate nothing – getting people together only to  announce that she as a hostess has the drawing power to pull in people of substance to a perfectly dull affair. She’s also a nervous wreck who requires much cosseting, and soothing, and has never put her talents to any use. The idle rich, one might call them. In her preoccupation with minutiae, she seems to be losing her marbles as well.

The film Mrs Dalloway, screenplay by Eileen Atkins, is available on Amazon Prime and free on YouTube. It’s a marvellous film with the incomparable Vanessa Redgrave playing Clarissa, unflappable on the surface, as hostesses should be, but  teeming with feelings within. Geeta remarked it’s a novel without a story. Please see this film if you can. It’s not only a beautiful rendition of the novel, but the screenwriter has managed all the disparate scenes so that they make the faithful account of a day’s journey. It all comes together to yield something tender and bruised at the end.

There is a lot of description that borders on the poetic with similes often used:

– She read on Lady Bruton's face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life

– as if he had set light to a grey pellet on a plate and there had risen up a lovely tree in the brisk sea-salted air of their intimacy

– the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp

– she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish

Humorous Poems – Dec 11, 2020

 

The variety of poems spanned old favourites like Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and recognised poets like Elizabeth Bishop and Byron. Shel Silverstein and Roald Dahl continue to figure annually. Unusually we had a scientist, Haldane, in their midst. It is obvious these authors get much relish out of writing humorous stuff that shows the world and themselves in a comical light.

It comes at the end of a year that in real life gave us few laughs, barring the gaucheries of Mr Trump. POTUS at one point suggested research into treatment of the novel coronavirus by injecting disinfectant into the body. As a result the group’s WhatsApp conversations within the reading group are filled with haikus, tetrameters, and story lines sending up POTUS in waves of laughter. We would have been entirely thankful for the comic relief he afforded – had he not also been responsible for countless Covid deaths among his followers by instructing them to flout the elementary means of protection mandated by keeping distance, wearing masks, and not gathering in crowds.

Covid-19 has given rise to poetry that matches its malevolence, like Scott Momaday’s In the Time of Plague:

We endure thoughts of demise
And measure the distance of death.
Death too wears a mask.
But consider, there may well be good
In our misfortune if we can find it. It is
Hidden in the darkness of our fear.

If limericks do not figure among the holiday offerings of KRG, this one by Anonymous tells why:
The limerick packs laughs anatomical
In space that is quite economical
But the good ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones are so seldom comical.

Devika made up her face with eyebrow pencil and lipstick of different colours; the effect resembled Tā moko, the permanent marking practised by the Māori people of New Zealand. KumKum showed up in a bright witch's costume with a wilting crown of croton leaves:

Joe was dressed as a colourful Bene Israel rabbi, or a Paris priest, who had decided to scandalise his flock:

Kavita showed up in a conical hat;

Priya appeared with numerous moles and a trishul. Arun is here in spectacular face paint:

And Thommo as a black-hat cyber hacker –

Geeta was in humanitarian garb as a nurse administering the Covid-19 vaccine:

Zakia smiles in a moustache, while Pamela makes her appearance as a witch in black with a long nose and claws:

and Geetha in a cape:

Arundhaty who won the costume prize is shown below in full-length modelling her dress:

The group are all gathered for the event:

Everyone agreed the next novel (Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf) for Jan 2021, though short, is a formidable book; ‘tough’ was the word used. It is slated for Jan 29 reading.

J.M. Coetzee – Disgrace Nov 27, 2020

 

First edition cover

The novel is short and not designed to offer reading pleasure. The characters seem to act in ways that destroy their own chances of making a reasonable future in South Africa after apartheid, at a time of turmoil in the country. A number of issues are raised: racism, sexual harassment, rape, the future of a country, and animal rights (in recent times, a favourite theme of Coetzee).

No novel has excited as much discussion among the readers, during the session, and continuing afterward in the reading group’s WhatsApp. The passages selected for reading were short, but representative of the novel, covering all the themes and characters and major events. Some readers found the novel complex with honest depictions of various protagonists and the socio-political history of the times. Others found it dark, almost dystopian.

The question arose regarding the title – why is it called Disgrace? One reader answered it was because of the disgrace heaped on the two central characters, David Lurie, and his daughter, Lucy. For David Lurie, the main character, the author has plotted a path of abasement and degradation, one step at a time. The gloom of the novel arises from the failure of all the escape routes, held out and then withdrawn. KumKum added that the book contains disgraceful actions by several characters besides David Lurie – you could include the rapists and Petrus.

Another reader, Priya, said, the book presents a dystopian world , sad and abnormal. It is a difficult book, she said, with bizarre situations, desolate and dreary, loveless , joyless and frightening. It derives its strength from negativity, a space where no ray of hope exists and everything ends in hopelessness. 

J.M. Coetzee  Self-portrait, 1955–1956

One of the pessimistic predictions of the novel (buttressed by the emigration of the author himself) is that S Africa is not a place where white people can live with fairness and justice.

Joe said in a well-written novel we come away with the impression that the characters are free spirits governed by their own fancies and predilections. And the choices they make may be capricious, not in accord necessarily with the active reader’s judgement, but we concede the character made them freely. In this novel we have the distinct impression of the authorial hand guiding every major mis-step of the characters.  The locus of their decision-making is out of their hands. They are contorted into unnatural modes to satisfy the puppeteer, Coetzee. Removing their independence of action constituted the greatest flaw in this novel. 

Some of the readers on Zoom

Women Poets Session — Oct 23, 2020

 The theme announced for this month's poetry session was Women Poets. As it turned out Louise Glück (the surname rhymes with click) was announced on Oct 8, 2020 as the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. She is only the third woman poet to get the prize, the first being Gabriela Mistral in 1945, and the second, Wisława Szymborska in 1996. 

Louise Glück was cited for ‘for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal’ – Photo by Katherine Wolkoff

Isolated by necessity since the Covid-19 virus struck, we have been forced for six months to have our gatherings on the Web, with only occasional glimpses of each other. We are longing to meet surrounded by birds and trees. Shoba has invited us to her little piece of forest in the heart of the metro as soon as the virus is defeated:

The women showed up for the session in dangle earrings in various styles. Shoba is wearing silver bidri craft earrings that come from Hyderabad. You can see below adornments worn by some others:

Saras

Devika

The six novels for reading next year have been nominated and accepted; three are by women authors and three by men, and they suitably alternate between long 500-page novels and shorter ones that are like novellas. Coetzee's novel Disgrace is slated for the November reading, and the last session of the year in December will be happy or humorous poems. The custom has been that people dress up in costumes in the holiday season to make the observer a bit giddy. 

Readers recalled the general air of slight madness that animates the group. Geeta did not realise it when she joined, and KumKum said Gopa certainly did not bargain for the December reading in 2019 when everyone came in madcap costumes. It was such fun, said Devika. Aren't you glad we did those crazy things when we could still meet, asked KumKum? Devika said we continue in the same vein even now. KumKum said even Joe wanted to wear a pirate-style dangle earrings when he heard the women were going to sporting such ornaments today. Devika suggested KumKum could give her bangle for Joe to hang from his ears! The longer the better some women say, others don't favour such earrings, yet show them off on occasions like this. Devika said this is total women-talk and Joe does not have to tune in.

We have missed the feasts for a number of birthdays this months. Kavita, the youngest member celebrates her fiftieth on Oct 24, for Devika Oct was her sixtieth and for Joe it was his eighty-first. Devika said not to worry, when the coronavirus is defeated we will make up for all the missed feasts! We miss the coffee with which sessions used to begin when we met at the Yacht Club. 

Geeta had many colours of kumkum and used to apply it with a cigarette butt. Zakia joined and wished birthday greetings to Joe and Devika and offered Durga Puja wishes. KumKum said the Bengali association in Kochi is delivering the puja feast in boxes to the homes of all the senior people – the younger members may pick it up from the premises. Devika jokingly said she will come and visit when the bhog is delivered, if she is alerted.

Kavita briefly appeared before she had to disappear for a visit to Aluva with her sister-in-law. Everyone wished her. Geetha showed up on Zoom and displayed her long earrings. 

Zoom pic of the gathering

Joseph Heller – Catch-22, Sep 25, 2020

 

Written as a satire on war, questioning the pieties spouted patriotically by politicians and generals to urge soldiers on to heroic fighting, this novel was based on the experiences of the author who was a bombardier in a bomber squadron based in Corsica during World War II. The anti-hero is John Yossarian, also a bombardier, whose war-time perch was lying flat in the nose of a B-25 Mitchell bomber, aiming bombs at targets while the plane was piloted over enemy targets enveloped in dangerous flak (anti-aircraft fire).

Mitchell B-25 bomber – about 10,000 were built, 40 are still flying

In another peace-time perch he could also be found naked up a tree at the air-base contemplating who was trying to kill him. He was convinced everyone, most especially the commanding officers and generals, were out to get him. The number of missions to be flown before rotating the airmen back home was continually increased to win laurels for the commanding officers. 

The airman could escape the Sisyphean toil of flying ever more bombing missions if he was declared insane. But he could not ask for a mental evaluation to determine whether he was fit to fly, for such an attempt to avoid dangerous missions would prove the airman's sanity, since: 

“... concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.”

That was the Catch-22, a catchphrase that has entered the English language. Catch-22 occurs at points in the novel, to explain a paradox caused by applying a rule; every such problem has a solution which is contradicted by the problem itself.

The novel has lots of repetitions and nobody will say it is elegantly written. It is a collection of episodes with no real story-line to thread its progress. All one can sense is that Yossarian is getting increasingly desperate, and more and more paranoid, seeing enemies everywhere bent on snuffing him out:

   "They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told [Clevinger] calmly. 

   "No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried. 

   "Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked.

   "They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered …

As the number of missions keep increasing Yossarian takes evasive action: he alters the line of bombing on maps; he presents himself naked at a medal ceremony; he marches backward; etc. For a generation yet to come of age during the Vietnam War, the novel made eminent sense, justifying evading the military draft, burning draft papers, and even desertion, as being superior to an immoral war. Orr with his survival technique of ditching his plane in the sea and paddling to Sweden in a life-raft with survival techniques he'd practiced becomes the active antidote to Catch-22.

Readers meeting on Zoom for the Catch-22 session

Romantic Poets Session –– Aug 20, 2020

Ten Famous Romantic Poets

The Romantic movement in Britain in the late 18th century embraced a deep interest in Nature as a source of inspiration for poetry. It emphasised the primacy of the individual's expression of imagination and emotion. Furthermore, it departed from all types of classicism and rebelled against social rules and conventions.

Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) one of the foremost poets of her time

While the names on everybody’s lips are those of Keats, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, there were female poets too in abundance during the Romantic period. Women such as Joanna Baillie, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Robinson, Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Tighe were respected and widely read practitioners of the art of poetry. Hemans was a bestselling author of the nineteenth century, and Baillie, the foremost playwright of her time.

Charlotte Turner Smith (1749 - 1806), Romantic poet and novelist

The Romantic Poets were  a varied lot. Wordsworth, you might call almost an establishment figure with his sober ways and accession to Laureate status. Blake was a mystic and deeply religious thinker, though inimical to established religion and its pomps. Shelley was a free-thinking poet and pamphleteer who even got rusticated from Oxford University for an essay The Necessity of Atheism. Dying young was the common fate of several Romantic poets: Keats, Shelley and Byron, but like other geniuses they accomplished incandescent work by their early twenties. Because Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote a radical essay to preface their joint collection called Lyrical Ballads, they are considered the theorists and elder statesmen of the Romantic era. However, the letters of Keats can also be mined for a deep understanding of his insights into poetry and the creative process. So too Shelley's seminal essay A Defence of Poetry lays out the dominant role of poetry in language and how poetry enables the mind to realise “a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.”

Shoba

Devika

The Romantic movement extended to France and Germany as well. Many famous French poets of the nineteenth century participated, poets such as Gérard de Nerval, Alfred de Musset, Théophile Gautier and Alfred de Vigny. Later it gave rise to symbolism in France. In Russia Romanticism flowered with Pushkin who elevated the Russian language to a high level of artistry; his pioneering work benefited subsequent poets like Lermontov and Nekrasov. 

Zakia

KumKum

The number of readers selecting a poet was distributed as follows: Wordsworth (3), Blake (2), Shelley (2), Keats (2), and one each for Charlotte Smith, Joanna Baillie, Byron, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Alexander Pushkin, to make 15 readers in all – a record number for our Poetry readings.

Zoom gallery pictures of the reading in progress are captured below:

Ken Kesey – One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, July 25, 2020

First edition cover Feb, 1962

Ken Kesey's story of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (OFOTCN) began when he started working in 1960 as a paid volunteer in a Stanford University program to test an experimental drug Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) which they hoped would cure the insane. He discovered instead it could drive normal people insane! Twenty years later it became known that the funding agency was the CIA, the agency of the US Government infamous the world over for its dirty tricks.

Later he worked in a hospital’s psychiatric ward at the nearby Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital. During the night shift there he used to converse with the patients. He observed that many of them were thinking people who acted abnormally according to societal standards, but who were otherwise fine. It was the push to conform that had ejected them from the free society in which they lived.

The book depicts therapies for the insane ranging from group discussions under an iron-willed nurse, to the invasive Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT) and surgical Lobotomy. The inventor of Lobotomy, Egas Moniz, won the Nobel Prize in 1949; but its use has been entirely discontinued after the 1950s because the results were poor. Besides, newer psychiatric drugs were coming on stream with hopes for better results. 

Ken Kesey – the Oregon Author who lived a colourful life

ECT has remained on the treatment list as a last option for maladies like depression and bipolar disorder, but with two radical changes: 
1) it is performed only under anaesthesia, and 
2) it is done with far lower currents and voltages than originally used and employs an ultra brief pulse of less than 0.5 millisec

McMurphy – locked up and alienated, he nevertheless tried to resurrect the spirits of the inmates

The novel can be read as McMurphy’s attempt to liberate the patients of the asylum from the tyranny of Nurse Ratched and the system she represented, so that they could live with dignity even within the precincts of the loony bin.

As before the readers gathered online using Zoom (courtesy of Rachel Cleetus) and were immensely comforted to listen and talk with each other in these trying times of Covid-19. Here is a group picture – only Kavita is missing: