Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Book Review This Booker winner of 2011 is a short novel that takes you to peaks of insights and intellectual probes into life.  But the plot nosedives to the standards of mediocre thrillers with the suspense revealed at the end.  The author is a brilliant writer and hence the reader is not left disappointed in spite of that apparent flaw.  What is life?  This is the most fundamental question raised by the novel.  Can it be understood and explained by logic and reason?  Can people live together without causing “damage” to one another?  How do we react to the ineluctable damage?  Is life mostly about the damages and our responses to them?  “Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.” (44) * Adrian and Anthony are two of the four

Painting by  Jean-Léon  Gérôme Yet another Good Friday is here and Jesus will be crucified yet again.  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  Jesus will lament yet again writhing on the crosses erected in churches whose architectural splendour will proudly proclaim the imperial glory of the religion founded in his name. The heroes of the Beatitudes will metamorphose into caricatures in the sermons delivered by impassioned priests from the fourteen stations of the Way of the Cross.  The Good Samaritan will withdraw to his hermitage and scribble in his diary, “History is not only the lies of the victors but also the self-delusions of the vanquished.” The seeds of the Kingdom of Heaven have been genetically modified in the capitalist laboratories.  They sprout truths for the new gospels.   And the truths metamorphose into crosses.  The crosses will mark Good Fridays. I salute you, Jesus.  Your destiny is to be crucified again and again.  Or else, be locked up in t

Book Review Only extraordinary writers can write a gripping novel without a neat plot.  Akhil Sharma’s slim novel (228 pages in the hardbound edition that I got – it would be just half of that if formatted a la the old Penguin pocket edition) tells the story of the Mishra family in America.  Everything is going fine for this newly migrated family when tragedy strikes in the form of an accident that the elder son, Birju, meets with.  The accident renders Birju practically lifeless: severely brain-damaged.  The novel shows how this tragedy affects the other three family members.  The story is told by the younger son, Ajay, who is eight years old at the beginning of the novel.  Ajay grows up seeing his father becoming an alcoholic and mother struggling to cope with the hardships.  Ajay has a grudge somewhere within him about mother’s fondness for the comatose Birju.  What makes the novel marvellous is the way the novelist expresses the feelings, emotions and attitudes of his