The Pearl That Broke Its Shell

No Country For Women

People would not even be able to imagine the horrors that Afghan women go through, were it not for a steady stream of books coming out, even if they are written by women (and some men) who have been able to escape the country.  Afghanistan was reported to be the worst country in the world for women by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Nadia Hashimi, whose debut novel The Pearl That Broke Its Shell makes for a disturbing read, is an American of Afghan origin—her parents emigrated to the US before she was born. Still, she wrote a book about her country’s unfortunate women, in a simple, direct writing style.

There are two stories set a century apart, but linked by their spirit of misery and hope. Rahima is one of five daughters, which is a curse in her country, since women have practically no rights. Very few have access to education or a say in who they marry.  Rahima’s father is a useless junkie, who works for a powerful warlord.

When things get unbearable, Rahima’s mother resorts to the Afghan custom of bacha posh—or dressing a pre-adolescent girl as a boy.  This enables Rahima to go to school, run errands for her family and also work for a living, something her mother and sisters cannot do, because they are not allowed to leave the house unaccompanied by a male relative. The strange thing about bacha posh is that everyone knows about it, but pretend that the girl is a boy.  But what happens when it’s time for her to revert to being a female?

Rahima and her sisters’ link to the outside world is their hunch-backed aunt, Shaima whose birth defect, has made her unmarriageable, but also given her a limited freedom to move around.  She tells Rahima and her sisters the story of their great grandmother Shekiba, who tried to make a life for herself as a boy, when she lost her entire family in an epidemic. She was burnt as a child and has a horribly disfigured face, that condemns her to a single life.

Shekiba is, however, caught by her greedy relatives, who enslave her and then pass her on to others as a slave, till by a quirk of fate, she is sent to the emperor’s palace in Kabul. There, she joined a posse of women dressed as men, hired to guard King Habibullah’s harem because the king doesn’t trust men to do the job.

Both try to hold on to their freedom, but are forced into terrible marriages. Their limited freedom in disguise as men, gives them an insight into the lives of women in their country.  Trapped at home with men who can marry multiple times, existence inside the cloistered women’s quarters is fraught with dangers of a different kind, as women fight for extra scraps of attention from their men. What gives them a modicum of respect is the bearing of sons. The trait of women treating women as their enemy arises from a situation like this, where men hold complete power over women. The atrocities a women endures as a young wife does not teach her to sympathise with others like her, but makes a mother-in-law mistreat her daughters-in-law; a sister-in-law or ‘co-wife’ to try to make life miserable for a newcomer into the zenana.

Despite its somewhat upbeat ending, Hashimi’s book is a depressing read, yet needs to be read if only to learn to value our own freedom.

The Pearl That Broke Its Shell

By Nadia Hashimi

Published by: William Morrow

Pages: 464

Ajaya: Epic of the Kaurava Clan- Rise of Kali (Book 2)

Twist In The Tale

The Indian epics and mythology have become trendy all of a sudden, with Amish Tripathi reaching blockbuster status (rare in the publishing world today) with his books on Shiva and Ram. There are dozens of Ramayan and Mahabharat spin offs on book shelves, written with young readers in mind—readers who may have outgrown Amar Chitra Katha comics, but not their fascination with Indian mythology.

Anand Neelakantan has his own take on the epics. He wrote Asura from the point of view of Ravan. He followed this with a two-volume Ajaya: Epic of the Kaurava Clan,  which is the Mahabharat seen from the Kaurava side. It’s amazing what a difference this switch of perspective makes to the story most Indians grew up with.

Not having read the first, Roll of The Dice, picked up Rise of Kali, and it made for an engrossing read anyway.  A basic knowledge of the Mahabharat would help, but the book works by itself, and may actually encourage readers to pick up the real epic.

Ajaya: Epic of the Kaurava Clan- Rise of Kali (Book 2)

By: Anand Neelakantan

Published by: Platinum Press

Pages: 530

The English Spy

Artistic Assassin

Daniel Silva’s first Gabriel Allon book, The Kill Artist came out in 2000. Since then the Israeli secret service expert appears in a new book every summer.

While he has been at it--- protecting his small homeland from constant attacks-- the world has changed, particularly post 9/11; Silva has picked current affairs and included them in his books, sometimes predicting events before they happened.

Allon is the most unusual assassin—he was plucked out of art school by his mentor and father figure, Ari Shamron to join a crack team and avenge the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. When he returned, he had aged much beyond his years and also become almost indestructible, although he came close to death several times.

Over 17 books, Allon completed many successful missions, but when is not at work for Israel, he is the world’s best art restorer, and many of Silva’s books are set against an art background (the connection of art thefts to money laundering and terrorism has been detailed in earlier books). Not the latest though—The English Spy is about tracking an Irish bomb maker with links to terrorist organizations around the world. Silva has no qualms in naming Iran and Russia as enemy countries, along with Libya, Syria, Aghanistan; it’s only a matter of time before an Allon novel is set in Pakistan.

In this book, Allon is about to be a father of twins and also take over “The Office," Israel’s intelligence organization. He is lured out of temporary inactivity by the murder of a British princess (resemblance to Diana purely co-incidental), carried out by Eamon Quinn, the mercenary bomb-maker with an IRA past, who is now a loose canon.

Allon heads to Corsica to pull his friend Don Orsati’s best hitman, the reportedly dead Christopher Keller, back to the world of the living. Together they go after Quinn, even though initially they are played like puppets by their prey. Madeline Hart, The English Girl of an earlierbook makes an appearance, as Quinn kidnaps her to lure Allon and Keller out into the open, when Allon fakes his own death, which nobody really believes.

The two, with the blessings of UK’s MI6 Chief Graham Seymour, travel all over the world in pursuit of Quinn, ending up in the mean streets of rural Ireland. For both this is personal and involved women they loved.

The English Spy is an action-packed page-turner, with short emotional breaks to take in family, friends, past sorrows, like Allon’s first wife Leah living in a tragic twilight state in an asylum after a bomb (made by Quinn) killed her child and wounded her badly. Allon’s visits to her are always the gentler parts of the violent narrative, while his current wife Chiara provides the romantic diversion.

Silva’s books are not just enjoyable, they are also well-researched and full of facts ripped from headlines. You can’t help feel that with Allon watching over the world, it is a much safer place.

The English Spy

By Daniel Silva

Publisher by Harper Collins

Pages: 475

Finders Keepers

King of Thrillers

The echoes of his last book, Revival  (reviewed here in February this year) were still booming in the mind, when out comes another Stephen King Book, Finders Keepers.

This  is a sequel to his terrific thriller, Mr Mercedes (2014), and is intended to be a trilogy starring the retired detective Bill Hodges. He was pulled out of mind-numbing boredom by the horrific incident in which a man driving a Mercedes deliberately ran over a queue of poor job seekers—an act of astounding cruelty and open challenge to Hodges.

The old cop, still sharp though out of shape, had tracked down the killer, Brady Hartsfield, and thwarted just in time his plan to blow up a concert hall packed with music lovers, with the help of his friends Holly Gibney and Jerome Robinson (his mimicry of black working class speech is hilarious!), who reappear in the second book. Hodges now runs an agency called Finders Keepers with the still emotionally fragile but recovering Holly as his computer wiz assistant.  Brady Hartsfield is still alive, but comatose. There’s no doubt that he will cause mayhem in the next book titled The Suicide Prince.

King takes the crazy fan idea from his own book Misery, in which a psycho reader Annie Wilkes, unhappy with the ending of her favourite writer Paul Sheldon’s latest book, forces him to write another by imprisoning him and chopping off his body parts to terrorize him. In Finders Keepers, there’s the nutty reader Morris Bellamy, who kills a celebrity writer John Rothstein, because he felt let down by the character of Jimmy Gold he had written about. (“You created one of the greatest characters in American literature, then shit on him... A man who could do that doesn’t deserve to live,” he screams, before shooting the writer.)

In Rothstein’s safe, he finds money and notebooks that point to two more Gold novels. An excited Bellamy steals the contents of the safe, kills his accomplices and buries the trunk containing the books and money in a deserted spot, hoping to retrieve them when the media and cop bedlam over the murder cools off.

Bellamy covers up the murder of the writer very cleverly, but unfortunately for him, he gets arrested and convicted for rape. Nealy thirty years later, the trunk is found by another young book lover Pete Saubers, whose family is going through a grave financial crisis because his father was incapacitated in the Mercedes incident.

Pete sends money in small installments to his family anonymously, but is fascinated by Rothstein’s writing. When the money runs out, he tries to sell the notebooks to an unscrupulous rare books dealer, Drew Halliday. He doesn’t know that Drew used to be a friend of Bellamy, and that the killer is out of prison. Bellamy wants the money to start over, but more than that he is desperate to get his hands on the notebooks to find out what happened to the fictional character he idolized.

Pete gets into deep trouble, which only his kid sister understands. She asks Hodges for help, and the chase begins to stop Bellamy from going on a rampage—since he has little to lose.

In typical King fashion, the tension and suspense builds up gradually and moves towards an action-packed climax. In spite of two gut-churning murders, King writes about the Saubers family with a great deal of warmth.  This is a book Stephen King fans will like--though out of his recent output, 22/11/63, the time travelling story about the Kennedy assassination remains unbeatable.

Finders Keepers 

by Stephen King

Published by Scribner

Pages 448

Go Set A Watchman

Sequel Sensational

Harper Lee’s To Kill To Kill a Mockingbird is a timeless classic (its popularity undoubtedly helped along by the Academy award-winning movie starring Gregory Peck) which did a good job of wringing white America’s conscience over its rampant racism. The Pulitzer award-winning novel about a lawyer’s defence of a black boy accused of raping a white girl, gave the country a hero in Atticus Finch. The remarkable man stood up to the intolerant white community of the deep South, the part of the US where slavery flourished before the Civil War’ and ‘nigger’-hating groups like the Ku Klux Klan popped up afterwards.

So, when over a half a century later a sequel appears, it naturally becomes a publishing sensation. It also comes at a time when the US is facing an increasing number of racism scandals and so, the issue isn’t quite dead yet.

Go Set A Watchman was reported to be a first draft of TKAM, which was discarded on the advice of the editor. It certainly reads like a bunch of rough notes. Reports say that GSAW was the book Lee set out to write, about a young girl’s disillusionment with her father, whom she hero-worships as a righteous man. But she rewrote it as TKAM telling the story of racial tension exploding in the sleepy Southern town of Maycomb, as seen through the eyes of a young child, Jean Louise aka Scout. She is spending a blissful summer with her brother Jem and friend Dill (who was supposedly inspired by Lee’s childhood friend Truman Capote), when the ugliness bursts through the seams of a town divided over the case.

 In GSAW, 26-year-old Jean Louise returns to Maycomb from New York; the short trip is meant to be vacation, but one that will decide if she will marry her long-time suitor Henry Clinton and stay on in Maycomb, or leave it forever.

Being raised “colour blind” by her father, Scout is shocked to see that the racism is still entrenched in Maycomb. Her exposure to life in New York makes her judge people of the town—including her Aunt Alexandra—as narrow-minded bigots.  But what shocks her almost out of her mind is that Atticus Finch and Henry are also out-of-the-closet racists. Her beloved brother Jem is dead, Dill has left for good, so she has no confidant except her eccentric Uncle Jack, who first spouts a bizarre lecture at her when she tries to talk about her father, and much later, punches her in the face for misunderstanding the situation.

In between, the book has several strange and unrelated passages, like a flashback about Scout’s fear of pregnancy and attempted suicide. But the scenes in which she tries to understand how the town functions—like the cruelly funny Coffee her aunt gives in her honour—are full of perceptive details and sharp dialogue.

Atticus, now suffering from a painful ailment of the joints, is a somewhat distant figure, treating Scout’s tantrums with paternal patience that borders on indifference.  Henry comes out as a wimp who only wants to leave his white trash past behind and gain social status by marrying a Finch girl. He does love Scout, but that is secondary to him.

Scout cannot comprehend just what is going on, why her nanny Calpurnia is aloof (“She sat there in front of me and she didn’t see me, she saw white folks”), why the black people she grew up with close have closed ranks against her, why the race issue has become so bitterly politicized that a man like Atticus has to abandon his progressive stance. (He says things like, “Do you want your children going to a school that's been dragged down to accommodate Negro children?”) Or perhaps, on re-reading TKAM the signs will show up, that he was never as principled as Scout imagined him to be. If as a child Scout was rebellious and tomboyish, the grown up Jean Louise seems a little too strident and inflexible—not a very likeable character.

The first book (based on an incident in Lee’s own childhood) was about loss of innocence, the second is about maturity, compromise and unconditional love.  It’s nowhere near the old masterpiece, and at best, can be read out of curiosity—like a forgotten diary lying in the attic—but still an important chronicle of American life.

Incidentally, the title of the book comes from the Old Testament, : "For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth" (Isaiah 21:6)

Go Set A Watchman

By Harper Lee

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 278

Killing Monica

Girls Will be Girls

Candace Bushnell may not have invented the chick lit genre, but she did redefine it.  Between 1994-1996 she wrote a column for The New York Observer, which was adapted into the bestselling book Sex and the City, which in turn was the basis for the hit TV series of the same name and two movies. She followed up with the bestselling novels, 4 Blondes, Trading Up,Lipstick Jungle, One Fifth Avenue, The Carrie Diaries, and Summer and the City, but will known forever as the writer of SATC.

Her world of designer outfits, Jimmy Choos and sleek men became aspirational for millions of women around the world who bought into the dreams of a glamorous high life she sold.  Her latest book, Killing Monica is said to mirror her real-life friendship with Sarah Jessica Parker, who played Carrie Bradshaw in SATC.  It is also the lament of a writer whose creation becomes bigger than her and threatens to smother her imagination.

The protagonist of Killing Monica is a successful writer, Panemonia ‘Pandy’ James or PJ Wallis. She wrote a super successful series of books about a golden-haired, wonder girl called Monica, who is sort of alter ego.  The Monica books have a massive fan following and have been turned into a series of films, starring Sondrabeth Schnowzer. The actress and writer become such close friends that they are referred to in the media as Sondrabeth.  They fall out eventually over a man (naturally!) a film star called Doug Stone.

When the book opens, Pandy and her silly gaggle of pink champagne guzzling friends are having a party in her trendy New York loft.  Pandy has divorced her husband, Jonny Balaga, a celebrity chef, who siphoned off all her money. The only way to be solvent again is to write another Monica book, which she does not want to do. She tries to get her agent, the patient yet outspoken Henry, to try to sell a historical novel about an ancestor, Lady Wallis. She wants to be taken seriously as a literary writer, not just a chick lit hack.

When things go down the tube, and Pandy is caught in a fire in her ancestral home, that leaves her bald and, for some odd reason, impersonating her mysteriously missing sister Hellenor. The estranged gal pal SondraBeth reappears with a battalion of mediapeople. When she finds out Hellenor is actually Pandy, they cook up scheme to kill off Monica, who is the cause of all Pandy’s current troubles, financial and romantic.

Most of the book has women getting drunk, sleeping around, trying to find stability and happiness before it’s too late—even if it means getting entangled with self absorbed and useless men like Doug and Jonny.  After the fire, the story takes on a frenzied pace and goes into madcap territory—episodes that involve TV shows, revolving stages, burkhas, gangsters, screaming fans and a huge Monica cutout.

Even though it’s mostly predictable, the book does squeeze in a twist in the end, that actually redeems the silliness that precedes it.

Bushnell’s books are not to everybody taste, and can’t be taken seriously, but to the credit ofKilling Monica, Pandy and SondraBeth are not complete simpering idiots— they make their blunders and are manipulated by men, but also possess a half-way feminist spine.  

Killing Monica

By Candace Bushnell

Publisher: Grand Central

Pages: 320