Skip to main content

Sorting Out Sid


Book Review

Reading Yashodhara Lal’s novel, Sorting Out Sid, is like watching a Bollywood comedy, especially of Priyadarshan type.  There is lot of fun and frolic in the first half and then the plot becomes more lifelike, sorting out problems created by the fun and frolic.  One difference is that in Lal’s novel, the fun and frolic runs into two-thirds of the book. 

That is a major flaw in an otherwise captivating novel.  There is something Wodehousean about the novel.  The protagonist, Sid [Siddharth], may remind the reader of Bertie Wooster.  He gets into all sorts of embarrassing situations because of his immaturity, superficiality and idiosyncrasies.   We meet him in the very first chapter walking into his friend Aditi’s house, later than he should have been, and wishing her “Happy Birthday” while it is actually her little son’s birthday.   We find Sid in many such comic, sometimes bordering on the farcical, situations.  The comedy drags on a bit too much into about 200 pages.  Unlike Wodehouse’s, Lal’s comedy fails to be brilliant flashes on human foibles and peccadilloes. 

Hence the novel remains a light entertainment for the most part.  Occasionally, though, Lal displays flashes of brilliance.  For example, the conversation between Aditi, who is a kind of mentor with an ‘elder sister’ bearing , and Sid about the latter’s relationship with Neha who is the lovely, spunky mother of a little kid and separated from her husband:

‘So you’re not serious about her?’  [Aditi asks Sid.]
‘There’s nothing to be serious about.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously.’
‘So you’re not going to sleep with her?’
‘Adu...’  He glared.  ‘What is this?’
‘Look.  I’m asking because I’m concerned.’
‘That’s a very personal question.’
‘Oh my god, you slept with her on the first date!’
‘I have not!  It wasn’t a...’  He swallowed. 

The plot is very lifelike.  The characters are drawn from the next door.  You know them; you have seen them.  They belong to our own society, with its superficiality, lack of both emotional and intellectual depth.   Rather, unwillingness to probe deep into oneself.  Relationships bubble and froth like beer which flows abundantly in the novel.  And threaten to fizzle out eventually.

But there are redeeming factors: people who genuinely care, though they are very human too, all too human with the usual foibles and peccadilloes.   That is how life actually is.  And the novelist has shown us that life.
Yashodhara Lal

However, the author’s failure to bring in the “intensity” of life keeps the novel a light comedy.  Life is not “all fun and games, after all,” as the novel itself says.  But that realisation comes a little too late, on page 301.  By that time, the reader is saturated with an excess of “fun and games”. 

When Shelley declared that “our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” he was not merely being petulant.  The deep truths of life lie far beneath superficial fun and games which the contemporary world, especially of the economically better off, has become addicted to.  There is a touch of melancholy about those truths.  Lal tries to touch that melancholy but fails. 

“Tears and laughter are, aesthetically, frauds,” asserted Ortega y Gasset, Spanish philosopher and essayist.  A good novel probes deep beneath both laughter and tears to show the deeper meanings of human existence.

Sorting Out Sid rises to a certain degree of eminence in the third and last part.  Sid approaches the ineluctable self-understanding. 

For those who love light reading, the novel is a boon.  Personally, I felt that Yashodhara Lal is capable of more depth.


Acknowledgement: Thanks to Harper Collins India for sending me a free copy of the book, autographed by the author, in association with the Book Review Project of Indiblogger.


Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community of Indian Bloggers


Comments

  1. sounds like a good book to pick up next

    ReplyDelete
  2. I too have got the copy but yet to read. But it seems I should read it as I'm anyway going through bit of bad phase! This might help me laugh more right now :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. It is a nice book and you have written a brilliant review. Keep it up. I am also thinking of writing a review of the same book for www.keveinbooksnreviews.in

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Do I Dare?

Alfred Prufrock was sitting in a dimly lit café when a young boy, who was yet to reach adolescence, walked in. The boy looked as inquisitive as Prufrock looked flurried. ‘Hello,’ the boy said. ‘You look so… lonely. And sad too.’ ‘Sad? No, not sad. Just… contemplating. I am, as they say, measuring out my life with coffee spoons.’ ‘Aw! That’s strange. On my planet, I measure things by sunsets. I love sunsets. How can you measure life with something so small as a coffee spoon?’ ‘Did you say “my planet”?’ ‘Well, yes. I come from another planet. I’ve been travelling for quite some time, you know. Went to numerous planets and asteroids and met many strange creatures. Quite a lot of them are cranky.’ The boy laughed gently, almost like an adult. Prufrock looked at the boy with some scepticism and suspicion. He was already having too many worries of his own like whether he should part his hair in the middle and roll up the bottoms of his trousers. ‘They call me Little Prince,’

Why Live?

More than 700,000 people choose to commit suicide every year in the world. That is, nearly 2000 individuals end their lives every day and suicide is the leading cause of death in the age group of 15 to 29. 10 Sep is the World Suicide Prevention Day . Let me join fellow bloggers Manali and Sukaina in their endeavour to draw more people’s attention to the value of life. One of the most persuasive essays on why we should not choose death voluntarily in spite of the ordeals and absurdities of life is The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. Camus’s basic premise is that life is absurd. It has no meaning other than what you give to it. The universe is indifferent to you, if not hostile. The confrontation between the human need for clarity and the chaotic irrationality of the world can lead to existential despair. Suicide is not the answer to that despair, however. Camus looks for a philosophical answer in his essay. Not many people find consolation in philosophy. Most people seek a

Ashwatthama is still alive

Fiction Image from Pinterest “I met Ashwatthama.” When Doctor Prabhakar told me this, I thought he was talking figuratively. Metaphors were his weaknesses. “The real virus is in the human heart, Jai,” he had told me when the pandemic named Covid-19 started holding the country hostage. I thought his Ashwatthama was similarly figurative. Ashwatthama was Dronacharya’s son in the Mahabharata. He was blessed with immortality by Shiva. But the blessing became a horrible curse when Krishna punished him for killing the Pandava kids deceptively after Kurukshetra was brought to peace, however fragile that peace was, using all the frauds that a god could possibly use. Krishna of the Kurukshetra was no less a fraud than a run-of-the-mill politician in my imagination. He could get an innocent elephant named Ashwatthama killed and then convert that killing into a blatant lie to demoralise Drona. He could ask Bhima to hit Duryodhana below the belt without feeling any moral qualms in what

Live Life Fully

Alexis Zorba, the protagonist of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Zorba the Greek , lives life to its fullness. He embraces human experience with his whole heart. He is not interested in rational explanations and intellectual isms. His philosophy, if you can call it that at all, is earthy, spontaneous and passionate. He loves life passionately. He celebrates it. Happiness is a simple affair for him. “I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing happiness is,” he tells us. “A glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.” You don’t need a lot of things to be happy. Your possessions don’t bring you happiness. All that money you spent on your big house, big car, big everything… It helps to show off. But happiness? No way, happiness doesn’t come that way at all. Zorba loves to play his musical instrument, santouri. He loves to sing. To dance. But don’t get me wrong. He works too. He works hard. There’s no fullness of life without that hard w