Philip Roth- the Voyeur

The cutting effect of getting old, the rotten smell of death lurking around the corner, and the childlike insecurity in back to the future like mode is inflicted on every page of Roth’s two Kepesh novels- The Professor of Desire and The Dying Animal.
In both novels the recurrent theme is breaking away from all barriers that stifle you, primary target being the institution of marriage.
Professor of desire takes a close look at commitment, its flora and fauna along with its desert.
Freudian- desire conquers all. Whatever the situation, whoever is at the receiving end, irrespective of time and place, human beings are susceptible to desire like no other emotion. How many times has the background faded before your eyes and all you could see was someone’s movements in the mist of your agonizing lust? Has there been any barrier as to who has smitten you- age, color, religion, relation, conflicting ideas, no ideas? Only the act or the dreams.
It can be the bride in a wedding, a nurse in a hospital, a nun in a church, someone’s wife, another’s girlfriend, or someone just walking down the street. Pangs of desire hit you and hit you hard, like a meteor of some another planet and you shake under that spell for long after the hit. Does it take even a minute to feel weak in your knees on seeing a drop of sweat trickle down someone’s neck? Or a hand lifting a glass? A foot resting atop a table? Just the careless loop of hair, from the back, on a bus? Cleavage lurking beneath chiffon? Buttocks pushing you at the edge of universe? Skin waiting to be pricked and licked? Sigh.
Has the eyes ever been more intent and the heart more content than on seeing an Aphrodite galloping on wings of ecstasy? Your ecstasy. I don’t remember. Do you?
A masterpiece. No Picasso, no Mozart nor Shakespeare, but the slight protrusion at the back of a wavering figure amongst the crowd. Euphoria.
Roth’s prose has the same sharpness, the same perfection, the same longing and desperation, as of a female form. Cuts straight through, your eyes, your senses, your realm. And of course with the meticulous inch of the cut.
The dying animal is more ruthless. Here the confusion transforms in to almost begging. Running for breath, trying to reassure him that sea-sawing emotion inside oneself is an antithesis to what has been sold from time immemorial. Love doesn’t bring two people together enough than pulling them further apart.
The confusion is paramount. And in your last days you are bound to go with your theory that you have established and believed over the years.
You can’t help but marvel at his love for the skin, the scrutinizing eye, for giving words to our most common yet indecipherable, inexplicable aching.
The animalism let run loose. The stigma dissolved in its own flavor and drunk with a pinch of salt. Release.
Yes, I’m a voyeur. Roth is. All of us are. Beneath all that socialized, civilized, logical, pragmatic face lies that original, instinctive yearning for the human form that drives you to a cliff and thrown you off it with just a wave of a hand or a flash of an eye.
Scratch the surface, unleash the beast.

Lolita- Iceberg of paradise

Orhan Pamuk recommended the book to me. The seeds of reading this book were sown in my head long ago when I came to know of its existence through Kubrick’s adaptation of the book. It was always at the back of my mind that I will pounce on this tigress the day I get a chance.
A few days ago I happened to come across a copy in a crossword store that I frequented in my Nasik days. I could see the book glaring at me amongst a dozen who claim to give the same dose of daze in the romance corner of the bookstore. And I would’ve bought right at that moment if the shop’s machine had accepted my debit card. But I knew that copy was mine.
A few days later while I was reading Pamuk’s Other Colors, which is another giant of a book, he talked about his love for Nabokov and how he packs Lolita and Ada, while going on a trip, as medicines.
I was amazed at the excitement this short piece of adulation filled me with. Within seconds and without even finishing that chapter I was on the street madly forcing my steps on the pavement.
Within no time I was in my bed with my Lolita.
On reading the first lines of the book I new I would be finishing it in no time. The only time when I lost interest in this book was when Lolita disappears. Lolita without Lolita is unbearable, for Humbert as well as the reader. The obvious unimportant questions that’ll spring to your mind after reading this work are:
1. What is this all about?
2. What is the point of this lunacy?
3. What purpose does it serve?
4. How can you ramble on for some 300 pgs on a subject like that?
5. How can he write about such a perverse subject with such light heart?
If any of the above questions come to your mind then you can’t quite enjoy this book. Now without trying to sell this book to you, I’ll come to my thoughts about it.
• This is a perfect, yes perfect book. Why? There couldn’t have been any other tone for the book. The self mocking, sarcastic tone in which the writer degrades himself is the only way he can try to say what he’s saying and confess, what is for all mankind, a pervert’s tale. There couldn’t have been a better premise, context or climax, which is amongst one of the best I’ve ever read. Every line is written with only one thought in mind-to glorify Lolita and to glorify Humbert’s love for her.

• Nabokov couldn’t have written this in Russian. Writing what he has written in his mother tongue would’ve made him guilty about writing it. I will try to explain it. The freedom of wandering aimlessly in an unknown city is unparallel. In your own city, you know every corner, you are too sure of every turn, you can never be lost. While creating something, this momentary loss or detachment is essential because it is only at that moment when you can come out of yourself in order to look at yourself as an outsider. In Russian, he would’ve thought his prose to be far-fetched, flowery and farce. But in English he can really let go off himself.

• Why is this thought so disturbing? That of a middle-aged widower falling for a 12 year old. I don’t know why but I didn’t find it so disturbing or perverse. This thought of not being disturbed disturbs me. It’s unimaginable that after reading her you won’t be in love with her.

• The prose is delicious. Whether it’s Humbert’s first sight of Lolita, her playing tennis, his anxiety when she disappears for 20 minutes, or the climax in which he murders Querty so cold-bloodedly, you are on the edge of your seat thinking as to how he can write a better scene than the previous one. He never falls short. And that’s when you begin to marvel at Nabokov’s command over an adopted language. This thrill of bumping into finer jugglery of words alone will make you read this book to its last page. And you’ll never, never for a line, be disappointed.

• The afterword sums up the work so well that there’s no need for anyone to explain anything. I don’t understand why Nabokov wrote it, because I don’t expect someone like him justifying the existence of his work or its value. I guess Nabokov wants us to know that he is, after all, a human.

• I can’t assume this work to be all fiction as Nabokov calls it. How can someone go on with such great detail in so thought out words about anyone but himself? This is the only thing that puzzles me about this work.

• Lolita can be and should be read only for reason, the only reason for reading fiction, for the sheer beauty of its prose. It’s a madman’s love affair with English language like those pangs of extreme emotions you feel when you look at an unknown face in a magical land that can be a bus stop or a train, a sidewalk or a park.

recent ramblings

While I try to visualize Kundera’s Prague and his pain, through the corner of my huge balcony gazing into an arrow of streetlights, which is inflicted on every page of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, I am able to explain the ineffable-what pisses me off the most right now?

I am an evolving audience of both my beloved art forms-cinema and literature.
As a reader I started from Sidney Sheldon and then moved to likes of Kundera, Marquez, Rushdie, Kafka (not as much to be proud of), Ghosh. What made me change my writers?
Its part me and part the authors. I was able to relate to their works, see a tiny Raza or a Zain on some page or the other and a wide array of societies-Prague, Latin America, Calcutta and their idiosyncrasies along with the protagonist which is part me and part someone else. So I’m all of them and they are all me set against that picturesque landscape of fleeting transcendence. Also a completely different idea helps me understand a dime here and there about myself. Now that self-realization is not essential for some, but I believe the best way to understand the motor of the world is by understanding oneself. I think both of us are created from the same matter and along similar principles. The divine intervention, of course. And I also feel that this world is exactly as to what it appears to me. But how does this world appears to me? There is no concrete answer to that question except that you search for all those tiny Raza’s and Zain’s and extract them from various pages and lines and assemble them to get the whole picture.

Same goes with cinema. Earlier it was strictly Indian cinema, popular Hindi films to be precise, seen because time is there to be passed and some activity has to be performed in order to claim that one has passed his time doing something selective.
The change happened due to the repetition of plots and their impact on me which dimmed with every passing movie. So I ventured outside my fixed realm making it a point to learn a thing or two about what I’ve seen through newspapers and other articles. I always try to attain a different height of emotions, which is because when you are at a height the desire to go further up never ceases. Especially with emotions. So here I am continually evolving or contracting, who knows, but there is a prominent change.
But things around me-people, society, parents, relatives, situations, response to situations, even friends, their nuances or wit, similar dialogues, similar expressions, even their stories more or less the same.

If I am going through so many amounts of curves and heights and sometimes absurdly bizarre thoughts in a matter of just few minutes, why aren’t things or stuff around me changing at that similar or even at some pace?

Come on, think just a bit differently, try to see death as something that’s coming towards you rather than you going towards it, search for the meanings to your replies as to what’s the logic behind the explanation you have been giving for the past one hour, look back not just to extract a good story but to extract yourself as to how you were-your stories should be more about you rather than some other loser, you as the loser is much more interesting than a stranger as a hero.

Like Kundera said-when someone says that Children! You are the future. It does not imply that children will one day be adults and so they are the future, but that the society is becoming more and more like a child.