My Brilliant Friend

It has been over a fortnight now since I read this book by Elena Ferrante. I read it through quickly, but then couldn't get it out of my head.  Still understanding how I feel about the book. Do I like it? Too raw, too close, too much ruffling of guarded emotions, yet, yet, yet, I knew I felt like I needed the next one, immediately.  However, other things came up, and I haven’t got around to getting hold of the second book, and now, the distance of time has dulled my love-hate emotions for the book. Yet, there is this delightful feeling of expectancy, of knowing that there are a couple of books out there which I can dip in when I want to and dial into that engaging roller-coaster of a reading experience.

I am a late arrival to the Neapolitan novels. Everyone seems to have read them. And of course, there is the show. It is the story of two girls, two friends growing up in Italy in 1950s. The first book in the series deals with early life and adolescent years leaving us at a point where one of the friends get married.

It is a different world. A different life. It is one of the points of view that one doesn’t read about much because people living those lives perhaps don’t get the time to write it down, or are not people of letters. Their lives are full, intense. Even David Copperfield’s life seems a far cry from the daily lives of these folks in Naples. The story is from the point of view of someone who has not had a privileged life, or privileged upbringing, or even exposure to privilege (the way DC has), and yet, they grow up and write this account.

It is not just that the material means are little. It is the dichotomy. The struggles of life would perhaps resonate with so many of the girls growing up in developing countries even now, 70 years down the line, who traverse two different worlds in their early lives. The age-old, traditional, paternal world of home, where family, women’s roles, women’s opportunities are still rooted in ancient ages, and then the other world of modern education exposing them to ideas, books, thoughts, and people and exposing them to lifestyle, culture, of what they return to every night. It is interesting, to grow up like that.

In a sense, it reminds me of the autobiographical writings of Simone De Beauvoir and Doris Lessing (the two writings I read last year, the first books of each of their memoirs) where the authors are growing through the same years as Lila and Elena. Girls growing up in different parts of the world, last century, going to school, living at home, relating with their families, siblings and friends, relating with others’ expectations and their own expectations of themselves.

I am touching upon the book’s characters, but the book is not about Lila or about Elena, it is about their friendship, their lives together. And it is enjoyable. But perhaps where my thoughts linger most after reading are always on the lives lived by those characters where my mind imagines itself in their shoes living their lives.

I enjoy reading about the books other people read, about things they are learning, and about the hardwork they are putting in. It warms my heart to see honest effort. It might sound strange, but the best loved passages in the book are where Elena balances her work at school with her home, and with discipline and will decides to work early in the morning and late at night to ensure that she stays on course for next classes. Things like these make me wonder that perhaps people who have less are the most driven and motivated. And perhaps having less is a blessing in disguise.

Then there is the brilliant Lila. After brilliantly pursuing excellence in whatever she does, she goes on to read and master what she reads. One can almost understand and identify with Elena's fascination with Lila. What it perhaps refers to is the unattainable, the slightly out of reach, the out of bounds, but just enough to fascinate, to be desired, knowing that you fall short, like someone in a Zeno's paradox, you'll never reach the desired, just keep getting closer, and left with that feeling of incompleteness to that extent.

Oh the vulnerabilities of being human, of growing up, of caring, of feeling, of knowing too well. Of having what you wish to be always in sight, and yet, knowing that you can not be that. The cruelty of knowing, of seeing more than what can keep you blissful, ignorance is bliss and all that. Of seeing everything in its raw shape, and then sitting, heartbroken.

Another reason why this touches so is growing up where I grew up, I have witnessed some of the heartbreak. Not personally, but so many instances around me. Where I grew up was more privileged than the girls from Naples, but still, middle class, the social construct, of taking care of home (people and times were not rich enough for modern luxuries of gadgets or money-bought luxuries of external help), and the general question of how much do you need to study given that one is a female.  After a point, what's the point? Personally, I and a few of my friends have been fortunate, but we come from changing times. We were some of the more fortunate ones, while people around me and families around me still believed in the way things used to be - the traditional, the way society had existed for ages and ages. Then there's this thing about not knowing. When one does not know, one doesn't struggle. It is only when one sees or thinks that there is another way that discontent arises. And with it, the struggle. When you grow up a particular way, the other way is always going to create battles inside you.

That explains some of my love-hate relationship with such fiction. Also the reason I do not enjoy fiction set in India. It is too close for comfort, guess too confrontational. It is a reminder to so much more, of unfairness. It calls to mind things forgotten and may be, forgotten for the better. Gets unpleasant.

So much for the ranting post. I am quite fascinated by the book. I know I’ll seek out the next one at the earliest opportunity, so more, then.

The Salmon Of Doubt

Talking about Science Fiction, I felt like revisiting this post sitting in my drafts for a while now.  I picked up Douglas Adam's The Salmon of Doubt earlier in the year. I didn't get to finish reading it, and I don't have with me any more so I doubt I'll close this one. But I do have a collection of quotes, which I intend to put up here.

There are certain authors who delight you with the lightness of their touch. There is Douglas Adams, and there is Bill Bryson. For both, their love or joy of their pursuits shines through in their writing, passing on to you in form of good cheer and joie de vivre. 

The Salmon of Doubt is a posthumous collection of writings by Douglas Adams, classified under the heads of Life, Universe and Everything. It has autobiographical sketches, essays, interviews and notes on books, and a partly completed Dirk Gently novel. The book is interspersed with brilliant morsels from his writing. I read most of it except the unfinished Dirk Gently novel. I do not know whether I wish to read it (the novel). Not what the author wanted to share perhaps.

Here, perhaps, it is worth quoting what Douglas Adams says of PG Wodehouse. It will pretty much convey what one can say of him,

"Shakespeare? Milton? Keats? How can I possibly mention the author of Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkins and Pigs Have Wings in the same breath as these men? He's just not serious!

He doesn't need to be serious. He's better than that. He's up in the stratosphere of what the human mind can do, above tragedy and strenuous thought, where you will find Bach, Mozart, Einstein, Feynman and Louis Armstrong, in the reams of pure, creative playfulness."

I think 'creative playfulness' is what defines his work too.

This is him introducing himself:

"I just want to mention one thing, which is completely meaningless, but I am terribly proud of - I was born in Cambridge in 1952 and my initials are DNA!"

His thoughts on perspective and the way we see the world. He is writing in late 90s, when the world was very different. But like some of the uncanny sci-fi writers (read Arthur Clarke), he is spot on stuff  - the way cloud computing, the way internet has changed, about online advertising.

Here's him talking about Online Magazines (note, this is in 1995). After discussing an advertiser paid online magazine method,

"That's one model of how online magazine work, and it is, of course, absolutely free to readers. There's another that will probably arrive as soon as it becomes possible to move virtual cash around the Internet, and that will involve readers being billed tiny amounts of money for the opportunity to read popular Webpages. Much less than you would, for instance regularly spend on your regular newspapers and magazines because you wouldn't be paying for all the trees that have to be pulped, the vans that have to be fueled, and the marketing people whose job it is to tell you how brilliant they are. The reader's money goes straight to the writer, with a proportion to the publisher of the Web site, and all the wood can stay in the forests, the oil can stay in the ground, and all the marketing people can stay out of the Groucho Club and let decent folk get to the bar.

Why doesn't all the money go to the writer, I hear you (and indeed myself) asking. Well, maybe it will if he's happy just to drop his words into the digital ocean in the hope that someone out there will find them. But like any ocean, the digital ones has streams and eddies and currents, and publishers will quickly have a role finding good material to draw into those currents where readers will naturally be streaming through looking for stuff, which is more or less what they do at the moment. The difference will lie in the responsiveness of the market, the speed with which those streams will shift and surge, and the way in which power and control will shift to those who are actually contributing something useful rather than just having lunch.

The thing we leave out of the model is, essentially just a lot of dead wood."

- Wired, 1995

The joy is in  his way of looking at things. The conclusions he draws, what he takes away.

About Comedy, and a way the world has changed:

"The thing that hit be like a thunderbolt... was that comedy was a medium in which extremely intelligent people could express things that simply couldn't be expressed any other way... 

Creative excitement has gone elsewhere - to science and technology: new ways of seeing things, new understandings of the universe, continual new revelations about how life works, how we think, how we perceive, how we communicate.

Where, thirty years ago, we used to start up rock-bands, we now start up start-ups and experiment with new ways of communicating with each other and playing with the information we exchange. And one idea fails, there is another, better one right behind it, and another and another, cascading fast as rock albums used to in the sixties." 

On coding:

"Whatever complexities a computer produces - modeling wind turbulence, modeling economies or the way light dances in the eye of an imaginary dinosaur - it all grows out of simple lines of code that start with adding one and one, testing the result, and then doing it again. Being able to watch complexity blossom out of this primitive simplicity is one of the great marvels of our age, greater even than watching man walk on the moon."

And on how to see the world. The macroscopic, and the microscopic.

"There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away, and think this to be normal, is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspectives tend to be. "

"The other thing that comes out of that vision of the universe is that it turns out to be composed almost entirely, and rather worryingly, of nothing.  Wherever you look there is nothing, with occasional tiny, tiny little specks of rock or light.  But nevertheless, by watching the way these tiny little specks behave in the vast nothingness, we begin to divine certain principles, certain laws, like gravity and so forth.  So that was, if you like, the macroscopic view of the universe, which came from the first age of sand. " 

"The next age of sand is the microscopic one.  We put glass lenses into microscopes and started to look down at the microscopic view of the universe.  Then we began to understand that when we get down to the subatomic level, the solid world we live in also consists, again rather worryingly, of almost nothing and that wherever we do find something it turns out not to be actually something, but only the probability that there may be something there." 

From "Is there an Artificial God?" Complete text of this here. 

This, above is one of my favorite bits. About infinities within and infinities without.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I read this one by Philip K. Dick yesterday. Short book. Over in a few hours. Have found science fiction after a while. Although there are days when I really crave sci-fi, at times just to get a perspective and distance from things and thoughts at hand.

I enjoy sci-fi by Arthur C. Clarke. And for his lightness, brightness and joy - Douglas Adams. Happy to re-read Space Odyssey and Hitchhiker any day. And of what I've read from Isaac Asimov, I've mostly enjoyed. I haven't read Ursula K. Le Guin's fiction, just a bit of non-fiction, keen to read Left Hand of Darkness. I haven't read a lot by Philip K. Dick. I tried Ubik, but couldn't get far in. I'll try reading The Man in High Castle at some point.

'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' is a 1968 novel by Philip K. Dick. Short book. Quick read.  The internet tells me that the book inspired Blade Runner, the 1982 movie. It is set in a future where Earth has become quite inhospitable, has much fewer people after World War Terminus, most having emigrated away from Earth, and there is a lot of dust, abandoned, unoccupied dwellings, and kipple. What is kipple? The un-ordered, the mess, the disintegration of everything organised, the chaos, the entropy. Eventually kipple is meant to push out everything which is non-kipple and take over what remains of Earth. Many animals are extinct, it is a world without birds, and to keep up with the Joneses, people are expected to take care of real animals - the animals you own become the signifier of your wealth/ place in society. And hence, there is a thriving industry of fake, electric animals. In this set up, there are androids (hard to distinguish from humans, and often not aware themselves that they are androids) and the perpetual question of how good AI can get, and then there is the protagonist whose job is to retire/kill rogue Androids.

So far, so good. The story then unfolds over two days, with a thriller like chase sequence.

With sci-fi, the joy is in the construct, the imagination, the new set-up and how thoroughly authors can think and thrash out a new reality. Beyond that, how the story unfolds and how well the author can hold you varies from book to book and author to author. This one, I read it through for the story, but not a fan.

The way I see it, there are perhaps two kinds of science fiction. One is the fast-paced novel, where a lot goes in to set it up, the imaginary world with its own problems, but then the way the protagonists behave reads like thriller. And then there are the more ironic, satiric, or questioning the absurd by putting the sci-fi construct on them - where authors choose to comment on and examine the modern realities and social questions through this new lens or framework offered by imaginary fiction. Such examination reveals new angles and throws light on aspects not commonly perceived - take 1984, or Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Handmaid's Tale or some of Doris Lessing's fiction, or for that matter, The Glass Bead Game. Both kind of sci-fi take the same path initially - the detailed set up, the displacement of the reader from the current existing realities before the road forks, and one path goes down the thriller route, and the other, literature.

The book at hand I feel goes down the thriller path. Though I must say that it held me better than the other cold book I am reading (The Unconsoled) where the real is perhaps more alien than a world with humans who wonder whether they are androids.