Read Book Review

Before reading The Yellow Wallpaper I did not even know that a state of mind called Postpartum Depression exists. Wikipedia describes it better:

[…] is a type of clinical depression which can affect both sexes after childbirth. Symptoms may include sadness, low energy, changes in sleeping and eating patterns, reduced desire for sex, crying episodes, anxiety, and irritability. While many women experience self-limited, mild symptoms postpartum, postpartum depression should be suspected when symptoms are severe and have lasted over two weeks.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is written in 1892 as journal of a woman who failing to relish the joys of marriage and motherhood, is sentenced to a country and is forbid by her doctor and her husband to write. The novella can be regarded as the a autobiographical work of the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She was a prominent figure during the first-wave feminist movement in the United States. Much of her life’s work was influenced by the experiences of her early life. [You can read the full review of The Yellow Wallpaper here].

Gilman in her novella does justice on describing the misunderstood postpartum depression before the 1900s but operates in context of today’s world. She uses a character, the wife, in the story to shine some light on the issue that doctors, particularly men, claimed to know more than they actually did. I am sure this is still happening in some or the other parts of the world. Any kind of depression can be misdiagnosed, and is being misdiagnosed.

The whole idea behind this is to understand deeply what the depression is doing to a person instead of isolating and accusing them for symptoms that were never there. I see postpartum depression more as a society constraint in which women are made to feel as if there is something wrong with them and something shameful and they have to be hidden away from the society alias isolating them.

The Yellow Wallpaper resembles the isolation that Gilman suggests to tear it down since it separates us from each other, from ourselves and inflicts more pain.

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My Rating: 4/5

 

Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity

This is a call for self-honesty and harmony with nature in the writings of Henry David Thoreau.

Walden was published in 1854 written during the reign of transcendentalists of which Thoreau was a central figure. Transcendental was a philosophical movement that was influenced by romanticism, Platonism and Kantian philosophy in which one must examine and analyse the reasoning process which governs the nature of experience. German philosopher Immanuel Kant developed the base idea for this movement.

The first chapters of Walden are the most interesting and need your attention as in these chapters Thoreau talks about simplicity. He rads against the frivolity of new clothes, meaty diets and other expenses. One of Thoreau’s major arguments in Walden is that men wouldn’t have to work for a living if they lived more simply. To which Thoreau built a house for under thirty dollars during a time when the average house and his records are shown in the book. By work, I think he meant that the kind of work that one does not wants to do.  For instance, reading book is a work to the mind. I can’t imagine a life with sitting with nothingness and not doing something I enjoy to do.

For two years Thoreau lived in that house. He spend time cultivating his beans and other crops, making bread, and fishing. With his house paid for and his food in good supply, he swam in Walden Pond, walked in the adjoining woods, wrote, daydreamed, reflected, and – rarely – visited the town.

What Thoreau points calls society constraints, I call them “society constraints” too. He thoroughly believed that most of life’s expenses were unnecessary and for one occasion was imprisoned for not paying taxes that he disagreed with. But there is a major difference between those constraints and your own constraints. You might get sense of freeing up from the society constraints while reading this book and you must do but do take care of not fleeing your own conscious mind as it holds all the self-constraints. These self-constraints differ for everyone but majority of them are same and we fail to recognise them since we are all entangled with society’s constraints which are a major reason for the complexity around us which we tend to inject in our work, our relationships and our expenses. This remind me of Eddie Vedder’s song “Society”. Do check it out.

To conclude this review, I would say you should read this book and along with Thoreau, start thinking about simplicity and “what” and “how” you can simplify various things around you.

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I know, most of you are familiar with the terms: The Bard, and the Bard of Avon. Recently, the world celebrated The Bard’s 400th death anniversary on April 23, 2016, and the Bard himself is unaware of.

Why “The Bard”?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

It is almost summer everywhere and I was wondering the other summer day why is the Bard is called The Bard. In general terms, ‘bard’ means a poet. In medieval times, all bards were travelling poets who made living out of performing and telling stories. Thus so, edging out the Medieval times, our Bard was a performer in plays and loved to write plays himself.

Why Celebrate his Death Anniversary?

The reason being Shakespeare’s birthday remains unknown to us till date.

400 years, you say?

It has been four centuries since William Shakespeare wrote his last words that are still influencing the English language and a reader’s mind. Shakespeare introduced near about 1700 word to the language through his comedies, tragedies, histories and sonnets.  Such as fashionable, and eyeball. Some of them are insulting.

Where to start with Bard?

To start reading William Shakespeare, I suggest you to take a look at a Goodread’s infographic:

Some facts about the Bard you may not know:

• Shakespeare got married when he was 18, his wife, Anne Hathaway, was 26.
• He wrote as well as performed in his own plays and of other playwrights too.
• The Comedy of Errors is Shakespeare’s shortest play at just 1,770 lines long.
• Shakespeare never actually published any of his plays. They are known today only because two of his fellow actors – John Hemminges and Henry Condell – recorded and published 36 of them posthumously under the name ‘The First Folio’, which is the source of all Shakespeare books published.
• Shakespeare’s plays have been translated to more than 80 languages including Star Trek’s Klingon
• American President Abraham Lincoln was a big fan William Shakespeare as he loved para-phrased the bard. John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln, used to perform in Shakespearean plays.

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People have been reviewing Great Expectations for 150 years. It’s the essence of a classic to survive such a long time and still being read. It is also a writer’s name that adds to a classic’s character, but that is not always the case. However, with Charles Dickens it is the former case and readers have expectations. I do. Whenever I start reading a Dickens novel, I expect it to be long, and contain all the elements of a story telling. Certainly, Dickens is one of the masters of the art.

The story is of an orphan,Pip, who from the beginning of the novel is not an ideal protagonist who have to be heroes or emotionally and physically strong. The story in short is tale written in first person narrative is about a person and his “great expectations”. It is the tale of self-understanding and perception. As a young boy Pip, lives with his sister ad her husband, kind soul, of whom he is fond of in his childhood. One day his presence is at demand in front of a strange woman who lives in a grand house with her niece. This is the starting of Pip’s “Great Expectations”.

If you read this novel for the first time, but if it is not your Dickens first novel, you will be able to predict the plot and that will be a bit uninteresting. I did predict a few moves in my mind and they did not seem as shocking or astonishing as some do believe. The plot has a tendency to drive itself forward as most of the Dickens’ books do. The characters are firm, original, but they lacked an asset which I have found in any of the Dickens book I have read before Great Expectations. For example, the character of Miss Havisham did not impress me at all even though she was full of tricks.

The pace of the book depends on the timeline which was something new to me. It starts slow, and after certain observations manage to gain the flow as a reader has been familiarised with every other character. In my opinion, Great Expectations is not Charles Dickens best novel. But one should give it a try. You never know what might be interesting to you until you read it.

3 out of 5!

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Most of the times when you see a book, you read its blurb at the back of the cover and then only few remains in your memory. Until you go to a deep sleep or you pick the book and start reading it. That’s what happened with me when I took William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in my hands.

The title of the  novel is taken from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, act 5 scene 5. It’s a tragedy. This is not a spoiler, I am just making you aware of what you have to deal with once you are deep down a hundred pages. The tragedy is about Compson family in America, featuring Caddy, Benjamin, Quentin, and Jason. Four siblings who are synonyms of rebel, immature, sensitive and obsessive, and brutal. It consists of four chapters, and the first two ones are the most difficult ones I have read.

The first chapter use a narrative technique known as the Stream of Consciousness. You might have seen it in James Joyce’s Ulysses but in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the mode is at its best. Nobody could have written it better. Or someone might, but that’s just a rational hypothetical converse. The second chapter is the silver lining between intelligence and torment. It stretches the narrative technique to its extreme. There are no punctuation at times to associate with the stream of text so one has to read it very carefully. The non-linearity of both the chapters will highly demand one’s attention.

The last two chapters drives the story forward and to a conclusion followed by the Appendix which is a reference about all the characters and what happens to them in later years along with the complete Compson family history.

The book is surely a classic but it’s the work of modernist. Faulkner’s writing really surprised me in first two chapters when it’s challenging to keep a tally of the past and the present for a reader, how hard would it have been for a writer to write in such a way. The conclusion of the book is adrift but highly emotive. The book is rich in imagination and one reader will have a great visual experience while doing so with characters and scenes in it.

4 out of 5!

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Jack London’s Martin Eden is a rare book that would indulge any reader from page one. It is also rare since it does resemble the typical American writing as one can observe in the writing styles of American writers of early twentieth century. It’s a powerful book, one that will definitely have an impact on its readers and will leave a reader thoughtful in the end.

Set in San Fransisco, this semi-autobiographical work is the story of a sailor called Martin Eden who pursues ambitiously, dreams of education and literary fame. For a start with help of the girl, he falls in love with, he educates himself feverishly and becomes a writer, hoping to acquire the respectability sought by his society-girl. However, fame is a cruel mistress and takes her own time to develop but that doesn’t mean it will knock on one’s door. Martin pledges towards his writing everyday, once he feels confident of himself being an intellectual he starts writing articles, essays and stories and sends them to magazines and newspapers all across the country. 

He gets rejected by most of the magazines and newspapers for quite a time until then the breakthrough appears as well as fame. Lost love turns false and Martin pledges himself back towards the sea. The plot is gripping, I hardly find plots of novels that do not fall under the sub-category of being a thriller or a crime fiction so gripping and fast. I managed to read the book in one sitting. Character of Martin Eden is important. It is well-developed by the author and does not lose focus. Other minor characters are not disappointing. The narrative is a marvellous. Every sentence seems to be in rhythm with every other sentence. Enriched in both emotionally as well as intellectually.

Martin Eden is portrayal of an artist’s life. A showcase of how one can if ambitious and hard-working can deal with society to achieve yet never the satisfaction is lost. The book is available in public domain.

4 out of 5

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You can go on reading books after books for fifteen days or you can read Tolstoy’s undoubtedly masterpiece: War and Peace. How was it, you ask? Easier than I expected. Choosing the right translation plays a major role when you are reading books written in languages you are not familiar of.  We will talk about that more, later.

Saying that I haven’t read Tolstoy before will be an understatement since I remember my failed attempts with Anna Karenina, twice I think. The Confession is a petite novella and is lying on my shelf just like that for months. Not a single attempt-to-read yet. War and Peace is humongous. Lots of characters introduced in first few chapters will seek you attention. Don’t start this book before going to bed. Especially before going to bed when you are starting to read it. The characters introduced in those first few chapters may help you doze off to sweeter dreams, thus you might end up loosing any interest that was the result of earlier motivation.

With lots of characters comes a lot more story lines. Tolstoy does a fantastic job in describing those story lines along with timeline of historical events, recounting them deeply and the blending of the fictional characters along with the historical ones. In short I can say, War and Peace is about five families during Napoleonic War in Russia. But that doesn’t satisfy me at all. It is about a lot more than that. It explores of human emotions during various circumstances including, war, patriotism, money, love, marriage, betrayal, forgiveness, gossip, et cetera.

The book is divided into five volumes. First one starts in 1805 when Russia is at war with Napoleon Bonaparte’s France. Tolstoy introduces his list of characters at an evening gathering held by a socialite. This party introduces us to many of the characters such as Pierre Bezukhov, and Prince Andrei are major ones. The major part of the story is either played in St. Petersburg or in Moscow. Rest are shown in various fields and outposts where the French and the Russian army are getting net to neck. Tolstoy makes the reader familiar by indulging some of the major characters in war at this time. The war is interesting if Tolstoy is describing it to us. At some point in the book Tolstoy arguably defies historians and the events described by them. He certainly disliked their way of forging with historical events. He also denies the fallacy that history is a production by some great men, instead suggesting it is the result of minute moments and decisions made by a large number of men and women. Many of the events described by him are graphic and you will end up visualising them in front of your eyes just as you see reality merely by reading Tolstoy’s words.

Tolstoy explores both good and bad sides of patriotism with war. The glorifying violence and unable to think critically, radically and in other ways during the war, the self-sacrifice, one wrong movement causes, well, the whole warfare to change. Some characters are too emotional at times of war. I think in 1440 pages, Tolstoy does put this nicely about the patriotism that if patriotism for the sake of romance and glory will only lead to violence and death.

Other than the action on-field, the action revolves around marriages. The concept of marriage is shown in two ways. Married for money. Married for love. The first one certainly does end well for the couples, and not for those who married for money, but this who had money. The second one, marriage for love, is shown in true essence and takes a lot of development between the characters and their feelings. Again these events are totally circumstantial.

Believe it or not, and at first I had difficulty realising that the events described in the book are actually described by the author. I am considering here the events about alternative religion and the occult. Maybe it was the part of society at those times as I remember reading the same state of affairs in an English classic written almost at the same time as of War and Peace. I think, the occult part is conclude well and the characters involve realise that there is fulfilment outside it.

Leadership is a major role of personality played by the characters in Tolstoy’s book. A good leader can save lives of men unexpectedly, against the odds where as a bad example of leadership, no matter how much dominance in the past, today is different day, tomorrow never comes.

There are incidents when you can relate to different characters and understand the act of moral and to do good at times. I can’t say much about finding flaw with characters, I don’t think there is any. Some of the characters described in the events of this book are more than the just characters. They may stay in your memory for lifetime.

I favourably chose Anthony Briggs translation published by Penguin, though there might be a better one. Some of the other are Garnett, Maude, Dunnigon, Pevear and Volokhonsky, and others. You shall choose what suits you. I remember reading somewhere that this particular person has read War and Peace more than four or five times just because she wanted to try different translations.

In my opinion, just treat it like another book you reading, the only difference is that this one is long but over time you will forget about it’s length once you get indulge into the story. The time spent reading this book is worth and as I said, it will become a part of your memory. Read it for the writing.

5 out of 5!

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Notes From Underground is not doubt one of the most challenging books I have read in years. It needs a reader’s attention from the page one and till the last page. It must be read when you aware that you are conscious and you are reading the book. This book needs time absorb in a reader’s intellect. It has the power of to kick you in your guts straightaway from the first line of the book. The narrator introduces himself as a man who lives underground and refers to himself as a ‘spiteful’ person whose every act is dictated by his spitefulness. Many people would say that Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella marks the beginning of the modernist movement in literature. Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis are some other contenders.

It is a two part novella and addresses the reader directly. First person narration is contributed by a forty something man, a retired mid-level government bureaucrat, who ruminates in his poor apartment. If somebody remember reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, they will some similarities between both of the work. Both works manage to share a solitary, restless, irritable protagonist and a feeling for the feverish.

This narrator is portrayed through Dostoyevsky’s words as a sensitive, intelligent, idealistic and morally paralysed. In the first part of the novel the protagonist, after introducing himself, complains about everything: industrial capitalism, scientific rationality, and any sort of predictive, mathematical model of human behaviour. He points out that some people love things which are not to their best advantage. His objection continues that the scientific trend is trying to define a way for a society that will function for man’s best advantage and the theory will prove a man to be a rational being and in this utopian society not a single man would need to suffer but the narrator argues that without suffering there will be nothing left that of a man’s desires. With the scientific way, the freedom to choose life in one’s own way also subsides.

In the second half, he takes the reader back to one his memory when he is twenty-four and remembers some incidents from his social life. He then talks about a grievance against an officer who had casually picked him up and moved him out of the way in a public house. The moment was nothing but his resentment knew no bounds. In the same year, he invited himself to a dinner party thrown by old school classmates. They were unworthy, insensitive and thick young men for which he hated them all but he still longed for their respect.

The context of the book is contemporary. Society has its norms and the scientific theory of formulating the society that Dostoyevsky described still exists and is being worked upon in a similar or by a different approach. It might be Dostoyevsky’s most difficult work but somewhere in the book it fails to grab my attention wholesomely. The second half of the book, especially. The idea expressed through the Notes From Underground is satisfying and appealing but the narrative manner in which they are described did not work out for me well. There could have been a hundred pages more or less, I don’t mind, but the Dostoevsky’s writing of the text disappoints me in this. I remember reading The Idiot which I consider is well written in terms of writing.

2 out of 5.

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A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens  is a book full of quotes. It is the book, in which the lines must be quoted and not para-phrased. I remember first picking up this book when I was fifteen but never finished. Until last year, when I finished the book. Charles Dickens has been a very important personality in my life. I got to know him when i was thirteen when I remember reading Oliver Twist which had an impact over me at that time.

Dickens characters always has never failed to amaze me but A Tale of Two Cities is all about the storyline which is set during era of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. It is a story of love, betrayal, courage, and of sacrifice and redemption. A Tale of Two Cities begins with Miss Lucie Manette and Mr. Jarvis Lorry make a trip to Paris because they believe they’ve found her father. Dickens describes their venture as on their, “way to dig someone out of the grave.” After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the ageing Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter.

Years later after Doctor’s release, Lucie and Dr. Manette take part in the trial of Charles Darnay, who is found innocent, and Darnay seeks Lucie’s hand in marriage. When revolutionaries learn that Darnay is related to an evil aristocrat, they imprison him the next time he is in France. Sydney Carton determines he can bring value to his life by rescuing Darnay. The novel successfully cover the theme of self-sacrifice and self-worth. It also provides social commentaries on British and French culture and politics. 

Charles Dickens based his historical details of French Revolution and the private lives of a group of people caught up in the cataclysms of the French Revolution, on Carlyle’s great work – The French Revolution – and also on his own observations and investigations during his numerous visits to Paris. Unlike the descriptions of London, Dickens fails to interest me in his observations of the French Revolution. He oversimplifies the causes of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.

Many people say it is a mystery novel but the point is arguable that it is not. A Tale of Two Cities fails to astonish me as Dickens other work, especially the ‘real’ mystery novel Bleak House and satisfying David Copperfield.

3 out of 5.

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David Copperfield  by Charles Dickens is considered to be the most closest work resembling Dickens life. It is autobiographical. is the story of a young man’s adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist.

There is a funny anecdote related to this book. At the time when I was reading David Copperfield, a friend of mine tells me that the first book Sigmund Freud gave his fiancee, Martha Bernays, on their engagement in 1882. At the moment, I wanted to question his anecdote but I thought it otherwise. I said to myself, ‘Why not read this 900 pages book and find the answer to that ‘why’ myself?’ And indeed I did.

The first half of the novel begins with the childhood of David Copperfield. The childhood starts of with his father’s death only when he is three years old. His mother, very young, pretty, and inexperienced, raises the boy with the help of her loyal maid, Clara Peggoty. Things go well, young David is growing up in a happy, loving home until his mother marries again. David’s stepfather, believes that firmness is the only way of dealing with boys. He ends up sending Davy away to a boarding school run by a cruel schoolmaster.

When David’s mother dies, Mr. Murdstone decides that even this kind of education is too good for his stepson and promptly gets rid of him by sending him to London, to work at a blacking factory. David is only ten when that happens. After many trials, he decides to run away and search for his aunt who eventually adopts him.

The second half of David Copperfield displays Dickens at his best. A reader will certainly adore and admire Dickens writing manner. The most solid foundation of the book, I consider are the characters. Dickens typically seems to employ static characters to represent the good and bad elements of life and nature. Every character is given his own distinctive and instantly recognizable voice. Some of them are timeless including the Copperfield himself.

As the story picks up and becomes more complicated, with David Copperfield establishing himself in business, falling in love, breaking friendships, and traveling abroad, the language weave an interesting web around him and his journey, one which connects the reader to David and encourages him to come along, to see what happens, to experience what David was experiencing. If more, Dickens draws revealingly on his own experiences to create this story with equal measure of tragedy, and comedy. The last hundred pages become a drag as Dickens closes on various characters lives along with the protagonist and narrator, David Copperfield. Though the conclusion is satisfying enough. There is no doubt David Copperfield is one of the best work of Charles Dickens.

4 out of 5

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