Skip to main content

Book man and his follies



Those who live by the book will die by the book’s folly.

“After all, as a book man, I should judge a book for its literary merit, irrespective of its subject matter.  Poppycock.”

The above quote is from Vikram Kapur’s article in today’s [4 Nov] Hindu Literary Review.  I would have certainly expected more sense from The Hindu editors than this poppycock from Mr Kapur who claims to be “a book man” but depends more on Google than books.

Mr Kapur’s article is poppycock par excellence.  He says Hilary Mantel did not deserve the Man Booker Prize for her first novel, Wolf Hall, merely for:

1.      Thomas Cromwell’s name had to be searched by Kapur on Google.
2.      Henry VIII married 6 times.
3.      Thomas Cromwell did not have the temerity to murder Henry VIII unlike Oliver Cromwell who did possess that temerity to kill his monarch and hence is familiar to Kapur.
4.      The theme of Wolf Hall is not relevant today since “there is no altercation between the Protestants and the Catholics.”  The altercation is between “the West and fundamentalist Islam.” [emphasis added]
5.      The novel is not set “in the days of the Crusades.”

I wonder why Mr Kapur did not bother to consider the title of the novel at least.  And the repeated statements in the novel about “man being wolf to man.”  Wolf HallI is about the theme of man being wolf to man, a theme which is relevant at any time. 

Kapur admits that he did not even bother to read Mantel’s novels.  Having searched the Google to ascertain that his knowledge about Henry VIII’s 6 marriages and Thomas Cromwell’s role in the monarch’s life, Kapur decided that it was “the end of my desire to read Bring up the Bodies [Mantel’s second novel to win the Man Booker Prize, Mantel being the only writer to win the Prize two times in the 44-year history of the Prize] or, for that matter, its predecessor Wolf Hall.”

In short, Kapur did not even read Mantel’s books.  What right does he have to write anything about her books?  Why did The Hindu publish his “poppycock”?  And that too in a literary review supplement?
Kapur thinks Mantel won the Prize because of the British nostalgia for its ancient eminence!  But why on earth would The Hindu want to support the British nostalgia?  I don’t know.   Why in hell would The Hindu publish an article on an author by a writer who has not even bothered to read the author?  That indeed is a mystery to me.

Is The Hindu really competing with The Times of India? J

If yes, I won’t laugh really.

But I am also a man who loves books.


PS. I have already bought Mantel’s second Prize Winner novel.  Looking forward to time for reading it after completing all the never-ending duties assigned to me by my ever-increasing number of bosses…

Comments

  1. Flies like Kapur are part and parcel of the market. What is tragic though, they are being accorded undue prominence.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I really wanted to ignore Kapur. But the temptation to put my aversion in black and white became irresistible. Hence this blog. I mailed a letter to the editor of the Hindu too.

      Delete
  2. Sounds like they had some empty space and didn't know what to do with it. To me, it reflects badly on the newspaper rather than on the person who wrote that article.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It does reflect badly on the newspaper, Deepak ji. That's my major problem. The Hindu's literary supplement is something I used to rely on for substantial articles. The paper is corroding my trust.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...

Chitrakoot: Antithesis of Ayodhya

Illustration by MS Copilot Designer Chitrakoot is all that Ayodhya is not. It is the land of serenity and spiritual bliss. Here there is no hankering after luxury and worldly delights. Memory and desire don’t intertwine here producing sorrow after sorrow. Situated in a dense forest, Chitrakoot is an abode of simplicity and austerity. Ayodhya’s composite hungers have no place here. Let Ayodhya keep its opulence and splendour, its ambitions and dreams. And its sorrows as well. Chitrakoot is a place for saints like Atri and Anasuya. Atri is one of the Saptarishis and a Manasputra of Brahma. Brahma created the Saptarishis through his mind to help maintain cosmic order and spread wisdom. Anasuya is his wife, one of the most chaste and virtuous women in Hindu mythology. Her virtues were so powerful that she could transmute the great Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva into infants when they came to test her chastity. Chitrakoot is the place where asceticism towers above even divinit...