Book Review
They are vivid, they are fresh
By Carlton Samarajiwa
Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, which won the prestigious
Booker Prize, deals unabashedly with local themes and characters in Kerala,
where "Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into it like tea
from a tea bag."
Roy does something else - unabashedly: she uses English with a freshness
that presses the global language into service through page after page of
analogy, metaphor and simile. She provides a feast of analogy, metaphor
and simile-the resemblances between things otherwise unlike. In her book
they appear and reappear, vivid and fresh as a nut or apple, rustic, down-to-earth,
and at times bawdy, grotesque and repellent, and sometimes even done to
excess.
Grieving Margaret
When Margaret Kochamma saw her little daughter Sophie Mol's corpse -
dead from drowning - "shock swelled in her like phantom applause in
an empty auditorium". Sophie's face was "pale and wrinkled as
a dhobi's thumb from being in water for too long" and the old yellow
church with the new paint, where the body lies, "swelled like a throat
with the sound of sad singing". The sad priests dusted out their curly
beards "as though hidden spiders had spun sudden cobwebs in them".
Mammachi's tears trickled down.. and trembled along her jaw "like
raindrops on the edge of a roof". Margaret's grief and bitterness
at her daughter's death coiled inside her "like an angry spring".
She shattered "like glass".
Roy personifies in language that clarifies and compresses "the
memory of death that lives on for so much longer than the memory of the
life that it purloined. Like a fruit in season. As permanent as a Government
job". The loss of Sophie stepped softly around the Ayemenem House
"like a quiet thing in socks. It hid in books and food. In Mammachi's
violin case. In the scabs of sores on Chacko's shins that he constantly
worried. In his slack, womanish legs."
Chacko and Mammachi "grown soft with sorrow, slumped in their bereavement
"like a pair of drunks in a toddy bar".
Margaret had first met Chacko at an Oxford cafe when he had looked "like
an untidy beatified porcupine". After a year of marriage to him, which
she entered "with the quiet gasp of a warm body entering a chilly
sea" she had tired of him, and been drawn towards biologist Joe "like
a plant in a dark room towards a wedge of light".
At the Kottayam Police Station
Inspector Thomas Mathew, whose moustache bustled "like the friendly
Air India Maharaja's tapped Ammu's breasts with his baton. Gently, tap,
tap. "As though he was choosing mangoes from a basket. Pointing out
the ones he wanted packed and delivered".
These comparisons of two dissimilar things appeal to the senses; they
illuminate through an intuitive flash of recognition that surprises and
fascinates.
June in Ayemenem
The dampness of the monsoon air in Ayemenem was such that "swollen
cupboards creaked. Locked windows burst open. Books got soft and wavy between
their covers. Strange insects appeared like ideas in the evenings and burned
themselves on Baby Kochamma's dim- 40 watt bulbs. In the daytime their
incinerated corpses littered the floor and windowsills, and until Kochu
Maria swept them away in her plastic dustpan the air smelled of Something
Burning."
The wetness of the June Rain in Ayemenem is amplified and exemplified.
"Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant
old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea- coloured
puddles the way Memory bombs still tea-coloured minds. The grass looked
wetgreen and pleased. Happy earthworms frolicked purple in the slush. Green
nettles nodded. Trees bent."
The Ornamental Garden
After enduring more than half a century of pernickety attention, it
had been abandoned. Left to its own devices, it had grown knotted and wild,
"like a circus whose animals had forgotten their tricks". Only
the vines kept growing, "like toe nails on a corpse".
Though you couldn't see the river from the house anymore, "like
a seashell always has a sea-sense, the Ayemenem house had a river sense.
A rushing, rolling fishswimming sense."
The Ayemenem House
Filth "had laid siege" to it "like a medieval army advancing
on an enemy castle. It clotted every crevice and clung to the windowpanes.
The only things that shone were the giant cockroaches that scurried around
like varnished gofers on a film set. Raindrops slid across the bottom of
the rusted gutter on the edge of the roof, like shining beads on an abacus".
The Ayemenem House was "like an old man with rheumy eyes watching
children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their
whole-hearted commitment to life".
This is a great feast of English laid out by a new Indian writer who
has been described as a "literary sensation".
The pain, the shock
'Sacrilege' Published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry
of Buddha Sasana and the Ministry of Cultural and Religious Affairs.
By Roshan Peiris
This book with vivid photo- graphs and graphics
accompanied by a well written text records one of the most traumatic experiences
in the history of Sri Lanka. The Dalada Maligawa one of the most sacred
shrines and a UNESCO designated World heritage site was bombed on January
25 this year by the LTTE .
Eight people were killed including a two year old infant and other peaceful
citizens who had come to worship at the shrine were injured.
'Sacrilege', a publication by the Foreign Ministry, Buddha Sasana
Ministry and Cultural and Religious Affairs Ministry has aptly captured
in words and pictures for the first time in contemporary history how a
sacred shrine was deliberately targeted by a terrorist group. A most vicious
way of earning a place in modern history.
'Sacrilege' aptly quotes from Prince Charles' speech which he
made when he came to participate in the 50th anniversary celebrations .."
"It was a brutal and malignant act, and one which we all join in
condemning.
The Temple of the Tooth is part of the world's heritage.
It is not just Sri Lanka or just Buddhist. So all you foreign guests
should help in the task of restoring the Temple to its original splendour."
'Sacrilege' records the deep shock expressed by many, such as
the Secretary General of the U.N General Kofi Annan who stated that he
had learnt with outrage of the news of the bomb attack of a major Buddhist
shrine in Kandy.
This booklet has expressed all the poignant feelings of a people who
have felt deprived at the desecration of the Dalada Maligawa in Kandy which
is to Buddhists what St. Peter's in the Vatican is to Catholics or the
Kaaba in Makkah is to Muslims.
There was extensive damage by the blast to the Vishnu Natha and Pathini
Devales and St Paul's Church, one of the oldest in the country and still
used in regular worship, as are the Devales venerated by Buddhists and
Hindus alike.
The Temple built centuries ago, embodies some of the finest architecture.
It will, says the text, take a long time to restore it to its pristine
glory.
The grand entrance to the Maligawa contains important sculptures and
took the main impact of the blast thereby saving the Temple complex from
extensive damage.'Sacrilege' in descriptive excellence and sensitiveness
captures the pathos of this deed which will go down in our history as one
of the most degrading acts indulged in by terrorists to whom nothing is
sacred.
In capsule form the booklet gives one that intensity of emotion such
an act provokes in all right minded people with cherished religious values.
The photographs and graphics are courtesy of AFP, Reuters, the Department
of Information and The Sunday Times.
Muthurajawela
Close to the city –yet so far
Romantic Muthurajawela, an eyeful of bounteous nature.-Henry
P Abeysekera, Foreword by Arthur C Clarke. Book to be released this
week.
By Rajpal Abeynayake
The Muturajawela saga, described in preface by
the author is introduced quietly as a work on sustainable development,
and the means of achieving a happy balance between nature and ma'n, survival
instinct. But, the subject matter is of more import than the preamble suggests.
It hits at fundamentals that have become almost the core of the discourse
in the whole Asian economic phenomenon.
Ask Mahatir Mohammed of Malaysia, or any Indonesian choked by smog about
the issue of sustainable development, and they'd probably tell you that
they do not want to hear of it any more. That's because the core issue
is so loaded. There are no ready answers. Develop we must, but not by killing
nature. On the other hand, mankind is painfully aware that nature usually
has the last word.
"Romantic Muthurajawela" by a veteran whose life's work lay
in these swamps, is, as the title suggests a quiet work which does not
do any earthshaking analysis on the issues of ecology and man. But, its
case study approach, in a different way, is more important to this debate
than any macro level analysis that has come out of the research mills in
recent times.
In this way, Henry P Abeysekera retraces the vanished trails that were
traversed by the Spittels and the Woolf's, all aliens albeit. Abeysekera,
a former Divisional Revenue Officer from a more spacious time when the
learned had more time for these vocations , is equipped to handle the subject
matter more comprehensively than an alien in love with this land, though
his manner is more academic than fictional.
But what's interesting, at least from reviewer's point of view, is that
Abeysekera blends the romance and rigorous research on Muthurajawela with
a vision. His vision is like an urban developer's dream, mankind's dream
to co- exist with his environment without always being branded nature's
most destructive creation. A landfill for Muthurajawela, encompassing a
concept for a golf course and a nature reserve is part of the romantic
Muthurajawela world view- er, swamp vision. That's more than romantic –
its sustainably romantic, no mean achievement in an era of short lived
flings.
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