The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar is the only novel written by the American writer and poet Sylvia Plath. Originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963, the novel is semi-autobiographical, with the names of places and people changed. The book is often regarded as a roman à clef since the protagonist's descent into mental illness parallels Plath's own experiences with what may have been clinical depression. Plath committed suicide a month after its first UK publication. The novel was published under Plath's name for the first time in 1967 and was not published in the United States until 1971, pursuant to the wishes of Plath's mother and her husband Ted Hughes. The novel has been translated into nearly a dozen languages.
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Bahubali

What's with all the hoopla, seriously?

Since its release, SS Rajamouli’s Telugu film ‘Bahubali’ has been making news, for being the highest grossing Indian film ever, and that too, a film, which has managed to woo the critics as well. Even foreign publications like The Hollywood Reporter and The Guardian reviewed the movie and gave brawny points for the film’s use of special effects, among other things. It has been hailed as a true-blue blockbuster, even when the film ends at the mid-point, a veritable cliffhanger, between telling of two stories of a king murdered and a son who must get his inheritance back.

The major reason why Bahubali is making news is its use of state-of-the-art CGI imagery, Made in India. It is being hailed as India’s answer to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Ring trilogy and James Cameron’s technology wonder Avatar. It is also being hailed as the best sword-and-dhoti epic India has ever produced (I rather like the epithet, sword-and-dhoti epic), as India’s answer to Gladiator and 300.

Elsewhere, fans are also claiming that the film is a worthy descendant of quintessentially Indian epics like The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, and are saying that it is a ‘Hindu’ epic. The liberals, on the other hand, are a little uncomfortable with the poster of the hero in the movie, carrying a giant shiv linga on his shoulder. There is also a giant statue of Goddess Kali overlooking a giant battlefield.

Anyway, after hearing the constant chatter for three days, I went to see the film in a theatre. It was the first time since Avatar that I went to see a film looking for a spectacle. It was also the first time since Ravanan that I went to see a south India film dubbed into Hindi (though strictly speaking Ravanan was not a dubbed film). Anyway, the film was not as satisfying as Avartar (which I loved as a spectacle, despite its flaws) and it was not as maudlin as Ravanan.

Yet, I don’t understand this hype.

The film begins with a series of water-soaked scenes which is the best in Indian cinema I have ever seen since the aforementioned Ravanan (the ‘behne de behne de’ song). The scenes of our hero jumping from cliff to cliff were spectacular. But these early scenes have a problem which in turn informs the problem of the entire film. We are told that the huge waterfall is unscalable, and we are shown the hero, since his childhood, trying to climb up the fall. And then, one day, he finds the wooden mask of a girl, he becomes obsessed with her and two months later, climbs the fall, as he imagines the girl, in a fancy dress, singing to him, goading him to jump from one cliff to another. This is a disorienting scene to enjoy with a straight face. You admire the photography and the aerobics done by the stunt person, the stand-in for the hero, and yet you are distracted by the sexy posturing of the heroine, singing a not-really-a-hummable song (the music is by MM Kreem, of ‘tu miley dil khiley’ fame). Again, as the camera is more interested in showing the beauty of the landscape within the given frame, we do not really get a feel of the actual geography of the huge waterfall (unlike say, the Halleluiah mountain scene from Avatar). I wish if they would skip the song and show us some more action.

This is, of course, not possible. Even with its extraordinary technical prowess, Bahubali is a Telugu film and it cannot escape from the tropes of a Telugu film, which must feature a superhuman hero who can make 50 villains scatter with a single punch, who can jump and somersault in slow-motion and who can stalk and almost rape the object of his affection before she falls in love with him, almost immediately (I was particularly squeamish about the wooing scene. She is a warrior woman and our hero begins to undress her, a la Draupadi, before re-dressing her, making her a beautiful woman, as if the only role of a woman is to remain beautiful so that the hero can fall in love with her. Is the scene misogynistic? I thought so, but in the world of Telugu cinema, or Indian cinema for that matter, this is how love blooms). There are also scenes of rousing speeches by various characters, and the cheering of the assorted crowd of extras, a staple of all South India films. But, a good south India film can take all these elements and can make a loud, rousing film that tugs at your heart. This Bahubali does, more or less successfully (For example, the sequence of a shirtless Prabhas carrying the huge siva linga was particularly good, with thumping music, Kailash Kher singing in the background and extras reacting appropriately. The same was case with the scene involving a huge statue.).

Yet, it is a Telugu film that wants to be a blockbuster Hollywood film. It not only wants to emulate the blockbuster formula (turning one film into two, among other things), it also wants to emulate other films, starting with the ‘Cliffhanger’ beginning. It was fun to spot the inspirations. The seduction scene is from ‘The Mask of Zorro’, the running from avalanche scene is from ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’, the imprisoned royal mother channels Rakhi from Karan Arjun, the blackface villains in the end are inspired by LOTR’s Orcs, down to their invented language (I am not sure if the invented language was successful. In the theatre when the villain spoke, by clicking his tongue, there were bouts of laughter; anthropologically speaking, however, clicking of the tongue is a part of many tribal languages.).

There are two things that stand out. One, the creation of the kingdom of Mahishmati. Indian cinema is not really good at world creation. Thus, you must praise Rajamouli and his team for this superb accomplishment. In a combination of set and CGI, they create sequences which are breathtakingly beautiful. It may not be in the same league as Peter Jackson’s creation of Minas Tirith, but Mahishmati inches closer. There is a shot in the middle of the movie where we see the entire kingdom like an architect’s diorama and it is spectacular. (Though I am not sure about the geography. In the same territory, we see a mighty river, snowcapped mountain and dry rugged hills. What kind of terrain are these?)

Second, the reason why the film is raking mullah at the box office is the climactic battle scene, which runs for more than 30 minutes and the entire sequence is meticulously constructed, and this scene can complete with anything from Peter Jackson. Unlike the major Hollywood films where most high-octane action sequences are incomprehensible, Rajamouli gives us the details of the war. It’s really the edge of the seat stuff.

Before you make up your mind about Bahubali, however, the concluding part is coming next year, which will give you more or less the same story, a love triangle, a betrayal, and a huge climatic battle scene.

Hold your breath!

Omar Sharif

Omar Sharif (Arabic: عمر الشريـف‎, Egyptian Arabic pronunciation: [ˈʕomɑɾˤ eʃʃɪˈɾiːf]; born Michel Demitri Chalhoub [miˈʃel dɪˈmitɾi ʃælˈhuːb]; 10 April 1932 – 10 July 2015) was an Egyptian actor. He began his career in his native country in the 1950s, but is best known for his appearances in both British and American productions. His films included Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Funny Girl (1968). He was nominated for an Academy Award. He won three Golden Globe Awards and a César Award.

Sharif, who spoke Arabic, English, Greek, French, Spanish and Italian, was often cast as a foreigner of some sort. He bridled at travel restrictions imposed during the reign of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, leading to self-exile in Europe. The estrangement this caused led to an amicable divorce from his wife, the iconic Egyptian actress Faten Hamama, for whom he had converted to Islam. He was a lifelong horse racing enthusiast, and at one time ranked among the world's top contract bridge players.

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Omar Sharif, the dashing, Egyptian-born actor who was one of the biggest movie stars in the world in the 1960s, with memorable roles in “Dr. Zhivago,” “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Funny Girl,” has died. He was 83.

Sharif suffered a heart attack on Friday afternoon in a hospital in Cairo, his agent said.

It was announced in May that he had Alzheimer’s disease.

With the global success of David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” starring Peter O’Toole, in 1962, Sharif became the first Arab actor to achieve worldwide fame, thanks to his charismatic presence in the epic film — and the Oscar nomination he drew because of it.

In its wake he very quickly became a busy Hollywood actor: Sharif made three films in 1964, including “Behold a Pale Horse” and “The Yellow Rolls Royce,” and three in 1965, including his first lead role in an English-language production, as the title character in Lean’s “Dr. Zhivago,” for which he won a Golden Globe.

Thanks to his gentle continental accent and dark but hard-to-place good looks, the actor was not ethnically typecast: In “Behold a Pale Horse” he played a Spaniard, in “Zhivago” a Russian, in “Genghis Khan” a Mongol, in “Funny Girl” a New York Jewish gambler and in “The Night of the Generals,” a German major during WWII.

Nevertheless, there was no little controversy about his role in “Funny Girl”: When 1967’s Six Day War between Israel and Arab countries including Egypt occurred, Columbia execs considered replacing Sharif; later, when a still depicting a love scene between the actor and Barbra Streisand was published, the Egyptian press began a movement to revoke Sharif’s citizenship.

Streisand remembered her costar in a statement: “Omar was my first leading man in the movies. He was handsome, sophisticated and charming. He was a proud Egyptian and in some people’s eyes, the idea of casting him in ‘Funny Girl’ was considered controversial. Yet somehow, under the direction of William Wyler, the romantic chemistry between Nicky Arnstein and Fanny Brice transcended stereotypes and prejudice. I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to work with Omar, and I’m profoundly sad to hear of his passing.”

Other significant late-’60s films for the actor included J. Lee Thompson Western “MacKenna’s Gold,” with Gregory Peck and Telly Savalas, and tragic European political love story “Mayerling,” in which Sharif was paired with Catherine Deneuve.

During the 1970s Sharif remained busy, but there were fewer notable projects. Standouts included Blake Edwards thriller “The Tamarind Seed,” with Julie Andrew, and Richard Lester’s thriller “Juggernaut.”

Since the mid-1980s Sharif returned sporadically to Egyptian cinema, where he got his start.

In 2003 Sharif won acclaim for his role in Francois Dupeyron’s “Monsieur Ibrahim” as a Turkish Muslim shop owner who becomes an avuncular figure for a Jewish boy in Paris. Although the role was perceived as representing something of a career resurgence for the actor, he had in fact been working regularly over the previous decades in film and TV and continued to do so after “Ibrahim.”

The same year he starred in the 23-episode French anthology TV series “Petits mythes urbains,” in which he played a mysterious cab driver; he also wrote for the series.

He had a substantial role in 2004’s “Hidalgo,” with Viggo Mortensen, and appeared in ABC’s 2006 “Ten Commandments” miniseries and NBC’s 2009 “The Last Templar” miniseries. On the bigscreen he was the narrator for Roland Emmerich’s “10,000 BC.” He also worked a great deal in film and TV projects not distributed in the U.S.

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Omar Sharif, the Egyptian actor who rode out of the desert in the 1962 screen epic “Lawrence of Arabia” into a glamorous if brief reign as an international star in films like “Doctor Zhivago” and “The Night of the Generals,” died on Friday in Cairo. He was 83.

His death, at a hospital, was caused by a heart attack, said his agent, Steve Kenis.

Mr. Sharif — who later became as well known for his mastery of bridge as he was for his acting — was a commanding, darkly handsome presence onscreen. He was multilingual as well, and comfortable in almost any role or cultural setting.

He had appeared in a number of Egyptian films before the British director David Lean added him to the cast of “Lawrence of Arabia,” a freewheeling depiction of the real-life exploits of the British adventurer T. E. Lawrence, who led Arab fighters in a series of battles against Turkish occupiers. Peter O’Toole starred in the title role.

Mr. Sharif played the Arab warrior Sherif Ali, who joins forces with
Lawrence. The scene depicting his arrival is widely regarded as a classic piece of cinematic art. In it he appears at first as a tiny speck on the desert horizon and then slowly approaches, until he materializes into a figure riding a camel. Mr. Sharif’s performance, in his first English-language film, brought him an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor.

The 1960s proved to be Mr. Sharif’s best, busiest and most visible decade in Hollywood. In quick succession he appeared in “The Fall of the Roman Empire” (1964), as a king of ancient Armenia; “Behold a Pale Horse” (1964), as a priest during the Spanish Civil War; “The Yellow Rolls-Royce” (1965), as a Yugoslav patriot intent on saving his country from the Nazis; “Genghis Khan” (1965), as the conquering Mongol leader; “Doctor Zhivago” (1965), as a Russian physician-poet whose world is torn apart by war; “The Night of the Generals” (1967), as a German intelligence officer; “Funny Girl” (1968), as a shifty gambler, and — in a rare early-career misstep — the critical and box-office disaster “Che!” (1969), as the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, opposite Jack Palance as Fidel Castro.

There were more films to come, but it was Mr. Sharif’s performance in “Doctor Zhivago” that is generally considered the high point of his career. Adapted from the novel by Boris Pasternak, the film was a sweeping portrait of war and rebellion in Czarist Russia. Mr. Sharif, in the role of the sensitive, brooding Zhivago, plunges into a doomed love affair with another man’s wife, played by Julie Christie, as violence engulfs their lives.

World War II was the setting for “The Night of the Generals,” a drama about the Nazi high command in Warsaw that reunited Mr. Sharif and Mr. O’Toole. Mr. Sharif played a junior officer assigned to investigate a trio of generals, one of whom (Mr. O’Toole) has been killing prostitutes.

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Mr. Sharif appeared in dozens of movies after the 1960s, but his film career was clearly headed downhill. He liked to gamble, became an aficionado of horse racing and spent more and more time playing competitive bridge. An expert on the game, he wrote a syndicated bridge column and a number of books on the subject, including “Omar Sharif’s Life in Bridge” (1983). His autobiography, “The Eternal Male,” written with Marie-Thérèse Guinchard, was published in 1977.

He was philosophical about the ups and downs of his career. “Look, I had it good and bad,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1995. “I did three films that are classics, which is very rare in itself, and they were all made within five years.”

He attributed his change of film fortune to what he called “the cultural revolution” at the end of the 1960s. “There was a rise of young, talented directors,” he added, “but they were making films about their own societies. There was no more room for a foreigner, so suddenly there were no more parts.”

There were in fact at least a few parts. Mr. Sharif continued to appear in films, many made for television. In “Pleasure Palace,” shown on CBS in 1980, he was a European playboy who comes to Las Vegas for a no-holds-barred gambling duel with a millionaire Texan. In the 1995 A&E film “Catherine the Great,” starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, he was a Russian prince.

His later films included “Monsieur Ibrahim” (2003), set in 1960s Paris, in which he played an aging Muslim grocer who befriends a rudderless Jewish teenager; and “Hidalgo” (2004), as an Arab sheik who invites an American cowboy (Viggo Mortensen) to participate in a survival race across the desert. His most recent film role was in the French family drama “Rock the Casbah” (2013).

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Sharif was "an actor's actor," said Jack Shaheen, an author who has written extensively about Arabs and Middle Easterners in cinema. "Not only was he the first Arab star in American cinema, but he played Russians, Jews, Hispanics. He was Che. He was Genghis Khan. He did it all. What I admired about him most of all was his willingness not to be typecast. He would play Arab villains or heroes, or any role. If he liked the role, he took it."

Sharif said he landed his breakout role in "Lawrence" simply because he spoke English. "They looked at photographs of all the Egyptian actors, and David said if he speaks English, bring him here," he recalled to The Times in 2012.

Sharif's performance in the film earned him two Golden Globe awards and an Oscar nomination for supporting actor. He also forged an enduring friendship with O'Toole.

Three years later, Sharif played the title role in Lean's adaptation of "Doctor Zhivago," the Boris Pasternak novel about a sensitive Russian poet-doctor who finds himself torn between his wife and the love of his life against the backdrop of World War I and the Russian Revolution.

Sharif won another Golden Globe and reportedly received 3,000 proposals of marriage after the film debuted.

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Lawrence of Arabia made him a truly international star. The film earned seven Oscars and nominations for both Sharif and his co-star, Peter O'Toole.

He followed this with another intense portrayal, that of the eponymous Doctor Zhivago, in Lean's 1965 Russian epic, based on the novel by Boris Pasternak.

With his black eyes and famous gap-toothed smile, Sharif was depicted as a type of Rudolf Valentino of the 1960s.
I don't know what women are attracted to but certainly I have no notion about having any sex appeal

He later called this a triumph of hype over accuracy, but he certainly escorted some of the world's most glamorous women.

Sharif admitted to falling madly for his co-stars, among them Ingrid Bergman, Catherine Deneuve and Ava Gardner.

But, disillusioned with the regime of Colonel Nasser in Egypt, he began spending more time away from his native country.

The Egyptian authorities were also angered by Sharif's role in Funny Girl, alongside co-star Barbra Streisand.

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On the whole, though, nothing he subsequently did on screen could compare to that sparklingly authentic first appearance, on a camel as an Arab chief in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.
It brought him a nomination for an Academy award, and leading parts in many other epics as assorted princes and warriors, though artistically speaking he seemed happiest in the company of, or pining for, beautiful women.

Sharif was a civilised man with cosmopolitan tastes and his first love was often said to be bridge. He found it hard, given the quality of most of his films, to take them as seriously as the pleasures of contract bridge; and by the 197Os he had begun to win as much acclaim and admiration for his poise and prowess at the bridge table as for his conquests on the screen.

Off it he also famously conducted a series of well-chronicled courtships of leading ladies, former leading ladies or leading ladies from other films, notably Miss Streisand, Catherine Deneuve, and Dyan Cannon.

“I definitely want to do mainly theatre now,” he would say when one of his blockbusters was released to little critical acclaim, “or two weeks in a film for a remarkable amount of money.” In 1983 he starred in a West End revival of The Sleeping Prince.
He was a syndicated columnist on bridge for various papers and periodicals and apart from writing a book on bridge also made an instructional video.

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The actor Omar Sharif, who has died aged 83, was introduced to the international screen in one of the most dramatic star entrances of film history. This was the scene in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) in which Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) first makes contact with the Arab chieftain Sherif Ali (Sharif), who will become his key ally in the desert fighting, and the latter, in a daringly protracted sequence, develops from a speck on the horizon into a towering, huge horseman, rifle at the ready.

Sharif was instantly elevated by this debut into a major box-office figure, and went on to star in a succession of big-budget films during the 1960s, most notably the contrasting blockbuster hits Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Funny Girl (1968), as perhaps the last of the “exotic” Hollywood heartthrobs in line of descent from Rudolph Valentino.

This situation, however, proved comparatively short-lived. Almost like the protagonist of a Victorian novel, Sharif was overtaken by his own success, to the extent that in order to service the debts incurred by gambling and a playboy lifestyle, he was thrown back on accepting any work that came his way, and entered a downward spiral into trivial and meretricious movies.

He was born Michel Chalhoub in Alexandria, the son of well-to-do Lebanese-Syrian Christians, Claire (nee Saada) and Joseph Chalhoub, and educated at a private school and at Cairo University. He worked briefly and reluctantly in his father’s lumber business but fell for the lure of acting, and was delighted when a friend, the director Youssef Chahine, offered him a role in the film Struggle in the Valley (1954). The female star was Faten Hamama, who was greatly taken by her leading man and in the same year became his wife, Sharif converting to Islam in the process. The marriage lasted for 20 years and the couple had a son, Tarek, who was to make a brief appearance in Doctor Zhivago in the guise of Yuri Zhivago’s childhood self.

Sharif became established as a principal figure in Egyptian cinema and also starred in the French-backed Goha (1958), which afforded him wider recognition, if only in the arthouses.

But it was his selection by the producer Sam Spiegel and the director David Lean to play Sherif Ali in Lawrence of Arabia that proved the turning point in his career. As he later observed: “Maybe if I hadn’t made Lawrence, I would have gone on living in Cairo and had five children and lots of grandchildren.” He blamed the eventual failure of his marriage on the simple fact of his constant absences in Europe and the US.

The role of Sherif Ali was pivotal in the film’s dramatic scheme, and Sharif’s swarthy, romantic aura was played off to great effect against the blue-eyed blondness of O’Toole’s Lawrence. The two became close friends while making the film. Sharif’s performance won him Golden Globe awards as best supporting actor and most promising newcomer, as well as an Academy Award nomination, though he ruefully recalled that he had signed a contract with the studio that netted him only £8,000 for this and several subsequent appearances.

Fluent in English and French, he worked steadily for the next few years, though as an all-purpose “foreigner”, mainstream cinema never having been especially concerned about precise ethnicity. Thus he played a Spanish priest in Behold a Pale Horse (1964), the title role in a comic-strip historical extravaganza, Genghis Khan (1965), a Yugoslav partisan in The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), and even, a little later, a Nazi officer, complete with blond-streaked hair, in The Night of the Generals (1967).

But it was as the Russian hero of Lean’s Doctor Zhivago that he achieved his best-remembered screen role, a brooding, magnetic presence, even if some critics felt that the performance, like the whole film, manifested a degree of shallowness.

There was no doubt about his box-office stature, though, and it was revealing that the film version of the musical Funny Girl, which in the theatre had been an unabashed vehicle for Barbra Streisand, was marketed on the basis of her co-starring with Sharif. As the shady gambler Nicky Arnstein, by whom Fanny Brice (Streisand) was enslaved, Sharif was the essence of the homme fatal, and even weighed in with a couple of song numbers. There were rumours at the time that the stars’ relationship had blossomed off-screen too, a notion that was ill received in Sharif’s native land in the light of Streisand’s pro-Israeli sympathies.

Sharif later admitted that he had briefly imagined himself in love with Streisand, and also recalled being smitten by Ava Gardner, his co-star in Mayerling (1968), in which he brought a suitable intensity to the doomed Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, and Gardner, with some incongruity, played his mother.

Mayerling was hardly a distinguished film, but was considerably superior to some others in which Sharif went on to appear, not least Che! (1969), a dully temporising Hollywood account of the life of Che Guevara, in which at one point Sharif’s Guevara is confronted by Jack Palance’s Fidel Castro with the mumbled expostulation: “Che, sometimes I just don’t understand you.”

The Last Valley (1971) and The Horsemen (1971) were poorly rated would-be spectacles. It seems significant that in the French-made thriller The Burglars (1971), Sharif was cast opposite a contemporary European box-office favourite, Jean-Paul Belmondo, but in the guise of a stereotypical scheming villain, who ends up smothered by Belmondo in a deserted silo under tons of grain, an intimation of the fate that was to befall him professionally as he appeared in increasingly obscure productions.

But there were still one or two brighter spots to come. In 1975 he reprised the role of Arnstein in the Funny Girl sequel, Funny Lady, and the previous year gave one of his most effective, because downplayed, performances, as the captain of a stricken cruise liner in Juggernaut. Of his playing in this film, the American critic Pauline Kael percipiently remarked: “He is not allowed to smile the famous smile, or even to look soulfully lovesick. He is kept rather grim.”

At this time, Sharif was perhaps more readily associated with the game of bridge than with acting. Though he took it up in adult life, he developed into a world-class player. In addition to competing in international tournaments, he wrote a syndicated column on the subject for several years for the Chicago Tribune, was the author of several books on bridge, and licensed his name to a bridge computer game.

He was also an inveterate high-stakes gambler, a regular at the casinos of Paris and elsewhere, and at the racetrack in Deauville. He maintained that claims of his philandering were ill-founded, but his lifestyle certainly encompassed heavy drinking and smoking more than 50 cigarettes a day, at least until he underwent heart bypass surgery in 1993. And the cost was high in financial terms as well.

Professionally, he drifted from one minor role to the next in a run of TV movies and mini-series, often costume dramas of one kind or another, and mostly of the sort only liable to be found at off-peak hours on the more obscure channels. He candidly told a journalist in 2003 that “for 25 years I have been making rubbish movies”.

There were, moreover, some unedifying moments in his private life. In 2003, he headbutted a policeman in a Paris casino rumpus and was subsequently fined and given a suspended jail term, tactlessly telling the press that to assault a cop was “the dream of every Frenchman”. Two years later, he slugged a parking attendant at a Beverly Hills restaurant. He was placed on probation and ordered to pay restitution.

But at least he had returned into the realms of serious acting by taking the leading role in the 2003 French movie Monsieur Ibrahim, in which his characterisation of an elderly Turkish Muslim shopkeeper secured him a best actor César award, the French equivalent of an Oscar.

In 2006 he declared that he had abandoned gambling and even bridge in favour of family life, and described himself as semi-retired from the screen.

In the previous year he had been the recipient of a Unesco medal for contributions to world cinema and cultural diversity. Lawrence and Zhivago might by then have seemed a long way in the past, but despite – or possibly even because of – the intervening vicissitudes of his life, Sharif’s reputation remained undimmed.

He is survived by his son and two grandsons.

Omar Sharif, actor, born 10 April 1932; died 10 July 2015

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The Pregnant King

The Pregnant King is a book written by Devdutt Pattanaik. It follows the story of Yuvanashva, a childless king, who accidentally drinks the magic potion meant to make his queens pregnant. It is set in the backdrop of the Mahabaratha and makes references to characters and incidents in the Kurukshetra as well as the Ramayana.

Among the many lesser-known sub-stories in the Mahabharata is one told by the sage Lomasa to the exiled Pandavas, about a king named Yuvanashva who accidentally gets pregnant, later revealed that it was no accident but by design by the ghosts of 2 young boys who were burned alive by the King at the stake. For the author, Devdutt Pattanaik, a medical doctor, marketing consultant and mythologist deeply interested in the relevance of old myths in modern times, this was an instantly intriguing story. Pattanaik has written several books on myths and rituals already, but The Pregnant King is his first work of fiction, a retelling of the Yuvanashva tale to examine gender roles, the blurring of lines between parental duties and the malleability of Dharma to fit a given situation.

The conflict between desire and social obligation/destiny is a major theme in the book. It also speaks about questions around the idea of gender.

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Among the many lesser-known sub-stories in the Mahabharata is one told by the sage Lomasha to the exiled Pandavas, about a king named Yuvanashva who drinks a potion meant for his barren queens and ends up pregnant himself. For Devdutt Pattanaik, a medical doctor, marketing consultant and mythologist (!) deeply interested in the relevance of old myths in modern times, this was an instantly intriguing story. Pattanaik has written several books on myths and rituals already, but The Pregnant King is his first work of fiction, a retelling of the Yuvanashva tale to examine gender roles, the blurring of lines between parental duties and the malleability of Dharma to fit a given situation. The result is a sporadically successful book that tells an engrossing, subversive story but meanders a little too much.

According to the Mahabharata, Yuvanashva, king of Vallabhi, lived many generations before the Kurukshetra war. The Pregnant King situates the story at the same time as the central narrative of the epic, making him a contemporary of the Pandavas and Kauravas, and one of the few kings who doesn’t participate in the war (because he’s preoccupied with the more important business of siring an heir). This shift in chronology allows Pattanaik to use episodes in the epic as parallels or counterpoints for the Yuvanashva story. The characters in this book make chatty references to the lives of their more famous contemporaries in Hastinapur, and the effect is a little like Delhi Times readers discussing the latest on Aishwarya-Abhishek or Saif-Kareena (“ooh, did you know Kunti is rumoured to have had a son out of wedlock?”). The question of whether the impotent Pandu and the blind Dhritrashtra were fit to become king are set against similar dilemmas involving characters in Vallabhi. Shikhandi, who was born a woman but procured a penis from a yaksha later in life, has a small but important role. There is some healthy irreverence on view: when a messenger arrives with the momentous news that the war is over, no one in the kingdom is particularly interested, being more concerned about internal matters. When the hero Arjuna makes what amounts to a guest appearance and is asked about a story Bhishma narrated to the Pandavas before he died, his reply is a curt, “I’m sorry but I remember no such story. He said so many things” – a neat dismissal of the ponderous Shanti Parva, Bhishma’s long deathbed discourse about a king’s duties.

Expectedly, wry humour runs through the story. Long before Yuvanashva finds himself in the family way, the kingdom has had to permit the bending of convention: his mother Shilavati, widowed at a young age, is a proxy ruler, and the Brahmana elders are disturbed because “they were not used to a leader who nursed a child while discussing matters of dharma”. (It’s notable that the unconventionality of Shilavati’s own life doesn’t make her any more tolerant of her son’s situation later on, which underlines the point that non-conformity/anti-tradition can take many shapes, and these aren’t always kindred spirits.) There are multiple references to bulls, fields, soil and seeds as euphemisms for sex and conception, and to illuminate the vexing question of “ownership” that arises when a woman is made pregnant by someone other than her husband. And then there are those troublesome dead ancestors, the “pitrs”, waiting for the arrival of a child so they can be reborn in the land of the living. Taking the form of crows, they perch outside bedchambers, waiting for quick results, flapping their wings impatiently when foreplay goes on for too long. (“Does it not bother you that your son’s seed is weak?” one of them indelicately asks Shilavati.)

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The Hobbit

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again is a fantasy novel and children's book by English author J. R. R. Tolkien. It was published on 21 September 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald Tribune for best juvenile fiction. The book remains popular and is recognized as a classic in children's literature.

Set in a time "Between the Dawn of Færie and the Dominion of Men", The Hobbit follows the quest of home-loving hobbit Bilbo Baggins to win a share of the treasure guarded by the dragon, Smaug. Bilbo's journey takes him from light-hearted, rural surroundings into more sinister territory. The story is told in the form of an episodic quest, and most chapters introduce a specific creature, or type of creature, of Tolkien's Wilderland. By accepting the disreputable, romantic, fey and adventurous sides of his nature and applying his wits and common sense, Bilbo gains a new level of maturity, competence and wisdom. The story reaches its climax in the Battle of the Five Armies, where many of the characters and creatures from earlier chapters re-emerge to engage in conflict.

Personal growth and forms of heroism are central themes of the story. Along with motifs of warfare, these themes have led critics to view Tolkien's own experiences during World War I as instrumental in shaping the story. The author's scholarly knowledge of Germanic philology and interest in fairy tales are often noted as influences.

Encouraged by the book's critical and financial success, the publisher requested a sequel. As Tolkien's work on the successor The Lord of the Rings progressed, he made retrospective accommodations for it in The Hobbit. These few but significant changes were integrated into the second edition. Further editions followed with minor emendations, including those reflecting Tolkien's changing concept of the world into which Bilbo stumbled. The work has never been out of print. Its ongoing legacy encompasses many adaptations for stage, screen, radio, board games and video games. Several of these adaptations have received critical recognition on their own merits.

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Chronicle of a Death Foretold

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ is known for his short stories and novels, especially ''One Hundred Years of Solitude,'' which has magical vitality and a great abundance of remarkable characters and incidents. He is also known as the winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. His new novel, ''Chronicle of a Death Foretold,'' which is very strange and brilliantly conceived, is a sort of metaphysical murder mystery in which the detective, Garcia Marquez himself, reconstructs events associated with the murder 27 years earlier of Santiago Nasar, a rich, handsome fellow who lived in the Caribbean town where the author grew up. Thus, as a character in his own novel, Garcia Marquez interviews people who remember the murder and studies documents assembled by the court. He accumulates many kinds of data - dreams, weather reports, gossip, philosophical speculation - and makes a record of what happened first, second, third, etc. In short, a chronicle.

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We had suspected for a long time that the man Gabriel was capable of miracles, because for many years he had talked too much about angels for someone who had no wings, so that when the miracle of the printing presses occurred we nodded our heads knowingly, but of course the foreknowledge of his sorcery did not release us from its power, and under the spell of that nostalgic witchcraft we arose from our wooden benches and garden swings and ran without once drawing breath to the place where the demented printing presses were breeding books faster than fruit-flies, and the books leapt into our hands without our even having to stretch out our arms, the flood of books spilled out of the print room and knocked down the first arrivals at the presses, who succumbed deliriously to that terrible deluge of narrative as it covered the streets and the sidewalks and rose lap-high in the ground-floor rooms of all the houses for miles around, so that there was no one who could escape from that story, if you were blind or shut your eyes it did you no good because there were always voices reading aloud within earshot, we had all been ravished like willing virgins by that tale, which had the quality of convincing each reader that it was his personal autobiography; and then the book filled up our country and headed out to sea, and we understood in the insanity of our possession that the phenomenon would not cease until the entire surface of the globe had been covered, until seas, mountains, underground railways and deserts had been completely clogged up by the endless copies emerging from the bewitched printing press, with the exception, as Melquiades the gypsy told us, of a single northern country called Britain whose inhabitants had long ago become immune to the book disease, no matter how virulent the strain ...

It is now 15 years since Gabriel Garcia Marquez first published One Hundred Years of Solitude. During that time it has sold over four million copies in the Spanish language alone, and I don’t know how many millions more in translation. The news of a new Marquez book takes over the front pages of Spanish American dailies. Barrow-boys hawk copies in the streets. Critics commit suicide for lack of fresh superlatives. His latest book, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, had a first printing in Spanish of considerably more than one million copies. Not the least extraordinary aspect of the work of ‘Angel Gabriel’ is its ability to make the real world behave in precisely the improbably hyperbolic fashion of a Marquez story.

In Britain, nothing so outrageous has yet taken place. Marquez gets the raves but the person on the South London public conveyance remains unimpressed. It can’t be that the British distrust fantasists. Think of Tolkien. (Maybe they just don’t like good fantasy.) My own theory is that for most Britons South America has just been discovered. A Task Force may succeed where reviewers have failed: that great comma of a continent may have become commercial at last, thus enabling Marquez and all the other members of ‘El Boom’, the great explosion of brilliance in contemporary Spanish American literature, finally to reach the enormous audiences they deserve. Already, John Fowles in a Guardian essay has used the Chronicle to great effect as a prism through which to see the battle for the Malvinas. No doubt the Sun will shortly advise its readers to do the same. No doubt Sandy Woodward is a fan of the tale of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who organised 32 armed uprisings and lost them all. No doubt Mrs Torture (as an Indian politician once immortally referred to our beloved leader) is appalled that Mario Vargas Llosa’s enormous critical study of Marquez has never even been published here. Great forces are at work.

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A poet has to find his tenor and timbre, an interview with Manohar Shetty by Dibyajyoti Sarma, published in Reading Room, Sakal Times.

Flood

This is how the river visits you
Not like a long-lost lover, but like a coy bride
Tentative and silent and determined
It coils around you like a frozen snake
As you wake up and find your feet under water
Like a coy bride, the river bares its heart
Filled with green slime, rotten leaves and dead
Hyacinth roots, tiny tadpoles and taste of the red earth
You are a virgin bridegroom, entranced and fascinated
You remain a virgin bridegroom, entranced, as the river
Takes over your house, like a coy bride, one item
At a time, your bed and your study table, your books,
Which are easiest to dissolve, your fountain pen, which is now
Its colour, your shirts, your gas stove, your cooking pots, and you
Limb by limb, with slime and grime, limb by limb, the river takes you…

This is how the river departs
Not like a coy bride, but like a long-lost lover
Heartbroken and furious and vindictive
The river, its purpose done, recoils from you
Like a drunk patron in the red light district after
Premature ejaculation, leaving on you traces of
The violent fervour, green slime and grime and
Rotten leaves and tiny tadpoles and dead hyacinth roots
You remain rooted inside your house, like a jilted lover
You cannot touch the river, its coils like a frozen snake
Its shimmering presence vanish like a love song half forgotten
What remains is the red earth that sticks to your brown skin
Like manifestation of a venereal disease, your shame
Around the torn pages under the muck, next to the pen without a nib
And cooking pots and discoloured clothes marking your territory…

(C) Dibyajyoti Sarma

ৰ'দ পুৱাবৰ কাৰণে মতিবানো কাক |

ৰ'দ পুৱাবৰ কাৰণে মাতিবানো কাক ?
ৰ'দ পুৱাবৰ কাৰণে মতিবানো কাক?
ওলাই দেখোন আহিলেই ৰহদৈৰে জাক
লগে লগে লৰি আহিল সেউতীহঁতৰ মাক 
পাহাৰ বগাই নামি আহিল ডালিমীৰে জাক
শুৱনীকৈ অসমীৰে একতাৰে সূতাবোৰে মহুৰাতে ল'লেহি পাক।
অ' আইতা আইতা অ'
এনেই আইতা নাচনী তাতে নাতিনীৰে বিয়া
অসম আকাশ পোহৰ হ'ব উৰুলিটি দিয়া।..
তেজীমলা কোন ?
সোৱণশিৰীৰ সোণ
সোণ চেঁকুৰা মাটিতে সিঁচি
দোকমোকালিতে চোতাল মচি
আজি হেনো দেখিছে গাঁৱৰে কঠীয়াতলীত
পোহৰ শিশুৰ কোমল হাঁহি
নতুন দিনৰ ধুনীয়া সপোন
চেৰেকীতকৈ চৰিছে যে আইতাৰ হে পাক। ..
আজিৰ মূলা গাভৰুৱে দপদপাই ওলালে
হেংদানে মাকো দেখি ক'ৰবাতে লুকালে
মূলাই আজি সমাজ শালত চেনেহ চেলেং লগালে
সজাবলে' পৰাবলে' কাক?
মকৰাৰে পুৰণি জালবোৰৰ এলান্ধু
সাৰি-পুচি নিবলৈ আহিলে বতাহ এছাটি
তাতে উৰে হেজাৰ কপৌৰ জাক
পৃথিৱীৰে আকাশৰে শুকুলাকৈ ডাৱৰে
উলাহেৰে সাবটিছে তাক।
অসমীৰে চোতালতে ৰ'দ কাঁচলিত বহি বহি
ব তোলাই ব তোলে বাটি কঢ়াই কাঢ়ে
আমাৰ দেশৰ চেলেংখনিত নতুন ৰহণ চৰে
সজাবলৈ হেজাৰ জনতাক
আনন্দতে পুৱাই উৰিল
হেজাৰ হেজাৰ কপৌৰে জাক
ধিয়াই মাথোঁ ৰঙা বেলিৰ
জীৱন যচা তাপ।

লুইতত ভোটোঙাই ওলাল শিহু by Bhupen Hazarika

লুইতত ভোটোঙাই ওলাল শিহু 
আজি বোলে ৰঙালী বিহু বিহু
যেন লেতেকুৰে থোক
এ' দলদোপ দলদোপ হেন্দোলদোপ
ধেমালি চাই যা ধেমালি চা।
সমাজৰ পথাৰত কোন খেলুৱৈয়ে
কাক বা সাজিছে ঢোপ
ৰাইজৰ এইগাল লোক
দলদোপ দলদোপ হেন্দোলদোপ
ধেমালি চাই যা, ধেমালি চা।
এ' ইফালেদি লথিয়ায়-- ৰংমন-ভদীয়াক
সিফালেদি লথিয়ায় তোক
নাজিতৰা, ইফালেদি লথিয়ায় তোক
ৰঙালী বিহুটিক কঙালী কৰিলে
পোটৰো নুগুচে ভোক
নাজিতৰা, পেটৰো নুগুচে ভোক
এহ দুদিন বিহু কৰি এবছৰ কান্দিবি
গিলিবি দুখৰহে ঢোক
এ' ৰাইজৰ এইগাল লোক
এ' দলদোপ দলদোপ হেন্দোলদোপ
ধেমালি চাই য়া, ধেমালি চা।
এ' বিহু কাপোৰ বিচাৰি খালো হাবাথুৰি
সূতাও মহঙা হ'ল ঐ গোৱিন্দাই ৰাম
হুৰৰ বৰ বৰ দেউতাৰ পদূলি সাঁৰোতে
ককাল মোৰ ভাগিয়ে গ'ল ঐ গোৱিন্দাই ৰাম
চাওঁতে চাওঁতে গ'লবাৰ বিহুতে
গৰুহাল বন্ধকীত গ'ল ঐ গোবিন্দাই ৰাম
কোনোবা সমুদ্ৰত বোমা ফুটুৱালে
ক'ৰবাত পৰিলে ছাঁই
এগণ্ডা বোমাৰে পৃথিৱী পুৰিব
ক'ৰবাৰ ৰণ বলিয়াই
উদজান বোমাৰে গুণগান বখানি
ন'কবি ভণী তই মোক
বোলো ৰণ হ'লে খাম কি
ৰণ হ'লে গাম কি
মৰিব দেশৰহে লোক
শান্তিৰে নিঃজৰাত নিজৰি নঃ নগলে
আমি হ'ম বৰশীৰে টোপ
অতিকৈনো চেঃ চেনেহৰ বহাগৰনো বিঃ বিহুটিৰ
সুৰটিনো পাবগৈ লোপ
ৰাইজৰ এইগাল লোক
দলদোপ দলদোপ হেন্দোলদোপ
ধেমালি চাইযা ধেমালি চা
বোৱতী সূতিটিক ভেটিবযে নোৱাৰি অ' আইতা
ভেটা ভাঙে ঘনে ঘনে
দেশৰে ৰাইজে অ' আইতা কঢ়িয়াই লৈ যোৱা
অ' আইতা সময়ক ভেটিব কোনে ...

The Hotel New Hampshire

Perhaps John Irving will now calm down and return to his typewriter. He has, in recent weeks, told so many readers of so many magazines so much about himself and the various meanings of his new novel and why the reviewers aren't going to like it or him that the book itself - quite a good one, incidentally - all but snores under a pile of symbolic spinach. Mr. Irving, like a Nabokov in jogging shorts, commits pre-emptive criticism.

We are told that even a child can understand ''The Hotel New Hampshire,'' and that critics will resent this because they prefer unintelligibility; that the novel is a fable and will therefore disappoint the low American appetite for realism; that the three hotels - in New Hampshire, in Vienna and on the coast of Maine - represent childhood, adolescence and responsible maturity; and that Mr. Irving has been influenced by everybody from Donizetti to Turgenev to Freud to Carl E. Schorske.

Tireless Explainers

As if that weren't already enough advice, the characters in ''The Hotel New Hampshire'' are tireless explainers. ''Everything is a fairy tale,'' says Lilly. ''There are no happy endings,'' says Father. ''You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed,'' says Iowa Bob. ''Happy fatalism,'' says Frank. ''If Father could have bought another bear,'' says John, ''he wouldn't have had to buy a hotel.'' ''What?'' says Egg. ''Keep passing the open windows,'' they remind themselves and each other.

''Keep passing the open windows'' is repeated over and over again, and it is excellent advice, especially if, like the Berry Family, you spend most of your time in hotels. Stop at a window and you may jump out. The Berry family is on intimate terms with violent death. ''Sorrow floats'' is also repeated, far too often. Sorrow, in this case, is a stuffed dog; love and doom likewise float. ''Thus the family maxim was that an unhappy ending did not undermine a rich and energetic life.''

Of course, there is a rape. This wouldn't be a John Irving novel without a rape or a bear or Vienna or body-building or social privilege. There are, in fact, two rapes and two bears, as there are two Freuds and two blind men and two faces to the stuffed Sorrow. ''Retrieving Sorrow is a kind of religion, too,'' we are told. A child I asked didn't understand that sentence.

Win and Mary Berry, in the summer of 1939, buy a motorcycle and a performing bear from a man named Freud. When the bear dies, they buy an abandoned girls' school and turn it into a hotel. When the hotel fails, they sell it to a circus and fly the whole family off to postwar Vienna, where this same Freud, the wrong Freud, has another hotel, occupied by prostitutes and implausible terrorists. When the terrorists fail to blow up the Vienna State Opera, the Berry famliy, what's left of it, comes home. Two are dead, one is blind, one has been raped, one is homosexual and one will commit suicide. Their third and final hotel is a rape crisis center.

I haven't mentioned the Black Arm of the Law, the King of Mice, Chipper Dove, lesbianism, incest, schlagobers or ''The Great Gatsby.'' Win Berry, the father, is a reincarnation of Gatsby, a dangerous dreamer whose ''pure love'' is for the future, whose ''imagination was his own hotel.'' In seeking to protect his children, he exposes them to a series of terrifying accidents, pure lethal chance, the arbitrariness that is our contemporary substitute for evil. Gatsby is America, denying history, trapped in the receding future. He is also a figure of death, the man in the white dinner jacket, the last stupid romantic, a bewildered guest in his own bleak house.

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The Heather Blazing

The Heather Blazing is the 1992 novel by Irish writer Colm Tóibín. It was the writer's second novel and allowed him to become a full-time fiction writer. The intensity of the prose and the emotional tension under the colder eye with which the events are seen, provided him with a faithful readership both at home and abroad. It won the 1993 Encore Award for a second novel.

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FOR ALL that Ireland is a culture of language, much is concealed and unsaid. This is the theme of Colm Toibn's second novel.
Eamon Redmond is a judge, in charge of a landmark case in which he will decide that a pregnant girl who has had an abortion cannot return to her school. Behind the brutality of the decision is Redmond's own childhood, dominated by the loss of speech and the repression of feelings. The only child of a teacher with a barely spoken history of involvement in the events of 1916 and after, Redmond grows up motherless, absorbed in homework until his father has a stroke. The boy watches with shame and love his father's attempts to teach his classes, hardly intelligible at times as he struggles with his twisted tongue.

Grown-up, Eamon marries Carmen, a fellow activist in the Fianna Fail party, but he is past the capacity to express his feelings and his son and daughter grow up estranged. He approaches the case of the teenage girl with the dignity of logic, arriving at what he believes can be the only correct decision: the right of society is greater than that of the individual. Later Carmen herself has a stroke and eventually dies. The sea at their holiday home is eroding the land. Redmond is left with almost nothing except the possibility of a relationship with his young grandson and the memory of the fire of the past when the IRA set the heather alight.

Toibin's Catholic upbringing makes him concerned with what should be the only subject for any writer: revealed truth. His writing is pure and understated, with an almost complete absence of literary pretension - journalistic prose (and Toibn was once a reporter) which resonates with deeper meaning. The novel is narrated dispassionately and with deceptive simplicity, moving between the public figure of the judge in his study and the terrible deaths of childhood and after, the boy's growing sexual awareness, and hints of a kind of Irish history we know little of: it was Redmond's father's job, we discover, to travel up to Dublin to gain permission from headquarters for an IRA arson attack.

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Love in a Dark Time

Love In a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar is a collection of essays by Irish writer Colm Tóibín published in 2002.

The first essay was a long review, published originally in the London Review of Books, on A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition by Gregory Woods. The other pieces are devoted to individual artists.

'Writing these pieces' said Tóibín, 'helped me to come to terms with things - with my own interest in secret, erotic energy (Roger Casement and Thomas Mann), my pure admiration for figures who, unlike myself, weren’t afraid (Oscar Wilde, Bacon, Almodóvar), my abiding fascination with sadness (Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin) and, indeed, tragedy (Thom Gunn and Mark Doty).' The book also contains an essay on Henry James, a figure to whom the author would later devote a novel, The Master.

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In 1993, Cólm Toibín was asked by an editor of the London Review of Books to write personally and polemically about his sexuality. In his Introduction to this book, Toibín describes the meeting as if it were a scene from an espionage thriller ('...he walked quickly past me and across the room to the window'). Would this spy come in from the cold? He wouldn't. He couldn't, since part of him remained 'uneasy, timid and melancholy' about this issue.

Love in a Dark Time is not the outpouring or manifesto that the LRB might have had in mind. Instead, it's a collection of reviews and essays about gay writers, artists and public figures, many of which did appear in the pages of the LRB (the magazine conducted a sort of campaign of attrition, sending out a steady stream of gay-themed books).

Writing these pieces helped Toibín 'come to terms with things'. When he does strike a personal note in these pages, it's clear that he is still armoured against disclosure. Writing about his boyhood discovery that two young men who lived together in his home town of Enniscorthy had been 'packed off to jail' and ruined, he declares: 'It was clear to me as I grew into my teens that being gay in this country would require care and attention.'

This is manifestly a fabricated tone, and even a fabricated vocabulary - 'gay' would hardly have been the standard term at the time, even in a more metropolitan place. If Cólm Toibín had been capable of such dry bravado in the late Sixties, how could there be enough unease, timidity and melancholy left over to inhibit his self-expression a quarter of a century later?

Very few books of essays are planned as wholes. More often they're what the experts on the Antiques Roadshow (speaking of, say, Cromwell chairs that only loosely match a dining-table) refer to as a 'harlequin set'. Their coherence is of a secondary order. The coherence of Love in a Dark Time is perhaps lower than this, with some slapdash readings and arguments scattered among sophisticated ones.

There's a tendency to claim particular aspects of gay lives as beyond the understanding of the outside world. Describing the catastrophic relationship between Oscar Wilde and Bosie Douglas, Toibín writes: 'In most societies, most gay people go through adolescence believing that the fulfilment of physical desire would not be matched by emotional attachment. For straight people, the eventual matching of the two is part of the deal, a happy aspect of normality. But if this occurs for gay people, it is capable of taking on an extraordinarily powerful emotional force.'

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In the introduction to this perceptive collection of essays, Colm Tóibín admits to an "abiding fascination with sadness...and, indeed, tragedy". It should be stressed that this is a sympathetic fascination, not a morbid or mawkish one, as his brief accounts of the painful lives of Elizabeth Bishop and James Baldwin - two of the best pieces here - testify.

The calm surface of Bishop's poetry gives little indication that her life was every bit as troubled as Robert Lowell's or John Berryman's. That calmness, Tóibín suggests, was her slow and steady artistic triumph over such familiar demons as emotional insecurity and alcoholism. In his expanded review of One Art , the selection from her vast correspondence edited by her friend and publisher Robert Giroux, he remarks on her "fierce simplicity" and continues: "The search for pure accuracy in her poems forced her to watch the world helplessly, as though there were nothing she could do. The statements she made in her poems seem always distilled, put down on the page - despite the simplicity and the tone of casual directness - only with great difficulty."

It is clear from her wonderful letters that she was intrigued by other people and had no truck with openly confessional poetry. Tóibín quotes from the cautionary missive she sent her friend Robert Lowell on discovering that he had transformed the letters written by his estranged wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, into sonnets in his book, The Dolphin . "That is 'infinite mischief', I think...one can use one's life as material - one does, anyway - but these letters - aren't you violating a trust? If you were given permission - if you hadn't changed them...But art just isn't worth that much."

Bishop was writing from bitter experience, since three years earlier, her great love, Lota Costellat de Macedo Soares, which whom she had lived for a blissful decade in Brazil, had committed suicide in New York, while another lover had endured a massive breakdown. You don't have to be aware of these facts to appreciate her beautiful villanelle "One Art", with its repeated mordant line "The art of losing isn't hard to master."

Tóibín obviously loves Bishop's poetry, just as he loves the early fiction of James Baldwin. Of Go Tell It on the Mountain he writes: "The subject is the flesh itself and sexual longing, and how close to treachery lies desire, how the truth of the body differs from the lies of the mind. Like other gay writers, Baldwin could take nothing for granted."

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The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts

The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts is a novel by Louis de Bernières, first published in 1990. It is the first of his Latin American trilogy. The other two parts are Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman.

It is de Bernières' first published novel, but is an accomplished and complex work. His recognition of evil is combined with sympathy for those characters trapped in evil patterns of behaviour, a characteristic of his later work which is perhaps more pronounced in this early work than in his greatest hit Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

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Beautiful Losers

Leonard Norman Cohen, CC GOQ (born 21 September 1934) is a Canadian singer, songwriter, musician, poet, and novelist. His work has explored religion, politics, isolation, sexuality, and personal relationships. Cohen has been inducted into both the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame as well as the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is also a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honor. In 2011, Cohen received a Princess of Asturias Awards for literature.

The critic Bruce Eder assessed Cohen's overall career in popular music by asserting that "[he is] one of the most fascinating and enigmatic … singer/songwriters of the late '60s … [and] has retained an audience across four decades of music-making.... Second only to Bob Dylan (and perhaps Paul Simon) [in terms of influence], he commands the attention of critics and younger musicians more firmly than any other musical figure from the 1960s who is still working at the outset of the 21st century."

One of his notable novels, Beautiful Losers (1966) received attention from the Canadian press and was considered controversial because of a number of sexually graphic passages. The Academy of American Poets has commented more broadly on Cohen's overall career in the arts, including his work as a poet, novelist, and songwriter, stating that "Cohen's successful blending of poetry, fiction, and music is made most clear in Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, published in 1993, which gathered more than 200 of Cohen's poems … several novel excerpts, and almost 60 song lyrics... While it may seem to some that Leonard Cohen departed from the literary in pursuit of the musical, his fans continue to embrace him as a Renaissance man who straddles the elusive artistic borderlines."

Cohen's first album was Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967) followed by Songs from a Room (1969) (featuring the often-recorded "Bird on the Wire") and Songs of Love and Hate (1971). His 1977 record Death of a Ladies' Man was co-written and produced by Phil Spector, which was a move away from Cohen's previous minimalist sound. In 1979 Cohen returned with the more traditional Recent Songs, which blended his acoustic style with jazz and Oriental and Mediterranean influences. "Hallelujah" was first released on Cohen's studio album Various Positions in 1984. I'm Your Man in 1988 marked Cohen's turn to synthesized productions and remains his most popular album. In 1992 Cohen released its follow-up, The Future, which had dark lyrics and references to political and social unrest. Cohen returned to music in 2001 with the release of Ten New Songs, which was a major hit in Canada and Europe. In 2006 Cohen produced and co-wrote Blue Alert, a collaboration with jazz chanteuse Anjani Thomas. After the success of his 2008–13 world tours, Cohen released the highest charting album in his entire career, Old Ideas, to positive reviews. On 22 September 2014, one day after his 80th birthday, Cohen released his 13th studio album, Popular Problems, again to positive reviews.

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Beautiful Losers is the second novel by Canadian writer and musician Leonard Cohen. It was published in 1966, before he began his career as a singer-songwriter, and Cohen has yet to publish another.

Set in the Canadian province of Quebec, the story of 17th-century Mohawk saint Kateri Tekakwitha is interwoven with a love triangle between an unnamed anglophone Canadian folklorist; his Native wife, Edith, who has committed suicide; and his best friend, the mystical F, a Member of Parliament and a leader in the Quebec separatist movement. The complex novel makes use of a vast range of literary techniques, and a wealth of allusion, imagery, and symbolism. It is filled with the mysticism, radicalism, sexuality, and drug-taking emblematic of the 1960s era, and is noted for its linguistic, technical, and sexual excesses.

Cohen wrote the novel in two eight-month spurts while living on the Greek island of Hydra in 1964 and 1965. He fasted and consumed amphetamines to focus his creativity on the novel. Despite a lavish rollout, sales were disappointing, and critics were initially unsympathetic or hostile. The book gained critical and commercial attention only after Cohen had given up novel-writing and turned to the songwriting and performing upon which his fame rests today. Beautiful Losers has come to be seen as having introduced postmodernism into Canadian literature. It has become a steady seller, and is considered a part of the Canadian literary canon.

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The Heart of a Woman

Maya Angelou (ˈmaɪ.ə ˈændʒəloʊ/;born Marguerite Annie Johnson; April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American author, poet, dancer, actress, and singer. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry, and was credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.

She became a poet and writer after a series of occupations as a young adult, including fry cook, prostitute, nightclub dancer and performer, cast member of the opera Porgy and Bess, coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the decolonization of Africa. She was an actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. In 1982, she earned the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Beginning in the 1990s, she made around 80 appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" (1993) at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, making her the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961.

With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou publicly discussed aspects of her personal life. She was respected as a spokesperson for black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of Black culture. Attempts have been made to ban her books from some U.S. libraries, but her works are widely used in schools and universities worldwide. Angelou's major works have been labeled as autobiographical fiction, but many critics have characterized them as autobiographies. She made a deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Her books center on themes such as racism, identity, family, and travel.

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Outlander

Outlander (published in the United Kingdom as Cross Stitch) is the first in a series of eight historical multi-genre novels by Diana Gabaldon. Published in 1991, it focuses on 20th century nurse Claire Randall, who time travels to 18th century Scotland and finds adventure and romance with the dashing James Fraser. A mix of several genres, the Outlander series features elements of historical fiction, romance, adventure and science fiction/fantasy. Outlander won the Romance Writers of America's RITA Award for Best Romance of 1991. A television adaptation of the Outlander series premiered on Starz in the US on August 9, 2014.

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