While waiting for a client to call

Have got exactly an hour-and-half to kill before the call. Dont have no specific thoughts i want to write about, so read the below at your own risk.

Am simultaneously reading two books at the moment. Started off with The Gathering written by Anne Enbright and winner of the 2007 Man-Booker prize for literature. A dark, depressing, but strangely hilarious story of a large Irish family with too many (12) siblings growing up at the same time. Told through the eyes of one of the intelligent but masochistic sister, it talks about happenings in the family when one "problem" brother decides to drown himself-first with whiskey-then(and finally) with sea-water. I quite like the way the main protagonist, who happens to be quite close to the guy who drowned, feels guilty while at the same time has a fervent belief that she's not to blame.

A good read but somehow the Booker seems to be only interested in promoting depressing, elegiac, slow, beautiful, but utterly unreadable novels. In recent years The Gathering, Inheritance of Loss, Disgrace, God of small Things seem cases in point. Somehow chances of bright, pithy and hopeful stories like Life of PI seem to have drastically gone down. As Robert Harris, the bestselling author of novels such as Fatherland and Enigma, said in an interview that authors were being forced by agents to write 'Booker-winning' novels that were “grim and unreadable and utterly off-putting for many readers”. Sad.



P.S. :- Dont have a rat-ass's idea about who Robert Harris is or what his novels Fatherland and Enigma talk about, but he seemed like an authority and being a consultant i'm practicing building a penchant for quoting authority ;-)


The other one(thankfully) is a cheerful, freewheeling collection of short stories by Lavanya Sankaran based on the theme of Bangalore. Called "The Red Carpet" this one surprisingly has a very corny tag line which says "Every Family has a Story" which kinda makes it like a Ekta Kapoor-show wannabe. Or something out of bollywood like "Daag-The Fire" , or the hindi translation of Arnees Eraser, "Eraser-Naam aur nishan mitaa dunga".

But dont go just by the name-this is actually a very good read. Have found this nice review of the same online which also has her photograph prominently displayed (va-va-voom!)

http://www.hindu.com/mp/2005/05/09/stories/2005050901540100.htm

A random thought, but would authors who look like a fairer version of Smita Patil + Chitrangada Singh combine end up automatically selling more copies particularly if they grace each and every one of their reviews?

Anyways, gotto sign off, its past 6 PM and the client never called.