Harris Books and Literature Blog

  ( Buy on Amazon ) I haven't liked much of whatever I have read of M T Vasudevan Nair’s fiction so far, except Naalukettu , especially because of its ending, and one of his short stories. And every time I read one of his books, I sincerely hope I would like it. However, it's only now that I’ve found a novel by him I can honestly say I love and admire. This book Manju (Mist) is different from most of his other works; the story doesn't take place in Kerala but in an exotic Nainital, and perhaps this is his only novel with a female protagonist. It’s not a novel, but a novella with sixty-odd pages and is sweet like a little melancholic poem. Vimala is a boarding school resident teacher in Nainital who stays in the school quarters even during the summer vacation when all the students and staff leave for home. She hardly visits her family. It's the end of winter and the start of the tourist season where Vimala sometimes talks to the boy known as 'Buddhu' who operate...

"You considered neither 'faggot' nor 'homo' nor 'queer' as slurs because you were none of these things. You were simply a handsome man who enjoyed beautiful boys" - The Seven Moon of Maali Almeida , Shehan Karunatilaka Buy from Amazon I feel this quote is simple yet stunningly beautiful (not for its homosexuality content) because it points to the meaninglessness of naming and defining things and how far names and definitions could be away from the truth. It mocks compartmentalizations and isms and rips straitjackets. Your emotions and the essence of your existence are dynamic and fluctuating every moment as the universe itself (And concerning 'moment' I'm yet to know if it is a second or a millisecond or a femtosecond or even smaller). By the time you call someone gay, their mind might have slipped into some other shade of sexuality or even one of the million subtle nuances of being gay itself. Language fails and is inadequate as it cannot ...

                                                                         The Runaways The Runaways   by Fatima Bhutto is a story mainly revolving around three young characters, Sunny, Monty, and Layla. It has a simple plot yet involves some complex themes and is narrated in a captivating language. Sunny is from a Pakistani family in the UK. Monty and Layla are from Karachi. They go their own separate ways and reach the Islamic terrorist camp in the deserts of Iraq, each of them with their own intentions and missions to accomplish. The narrative continuously switches between the past and present events, which added to the excitement of the read. However, the past stories are not mentioned as mere reminiscences in a ha...

                                                                       Delhi: A Soliloquy (Malayalam) Delhi Gathakal  portrays the lives of ordinary people in Delhi beset with the turmoil of Indo-Pak and Indo-China wars and their aftermath, the Emergency, and the anti-Sikh riots. The novel progresses through the stories of a bunch of protagonists, especially Malayalis living in Delhi from the early 1960s to the present. The work is important in that it records, using the tools of fiction, a certain period in the history of a particular region. However, a major disappointment was that the narration was purely linear following a traditional storytelling style and hardly using any modern techniques of fiction. The novel is almost entirely set in Delhi and hence replete with...

  Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho In 2002, the author Paulo Coelho met an old gentleman in his seventies with his wife and granddaughter at the Grotto in Lourdes, in France. The man embraced him and told him about the importance of his books in his life. They made him dream. The words frightened the author because he knew that his upcoming novel  Eleven Minutes  dealt with a subject that was supposedly coarse, decadent, shocking... Coelho has dedicated this novel  Eleven Minutes  to that old gentleman, Maurice Gravelines, nevertheless, with these words: “I have a duty to you, your wife and grand-daughter and to myself to talk about the things that concern me and not only about what everyone would like to hear. Some books make us dream, others bring us face to face with reality, but what matters most to the author is the honesty with which a book is written.” After finishing reading the book, I was convinced he has indeed kept his word. He has been totally honest...