BOOKWORM
UNMASKED!
Home page image of Jim Carrey is from his 1994 film The Mask.
By TAPAS EASWAR
Memoirs and Misinformation by Jim Carrey, Random House, $32. It absolutely hurts my heart to write this, but this might be one of the few books I will never finish. Memoirs & Misinformation, as the title suggests, is a highly surreal-fictional-real-person-fanfiction account of the life of Jim Carrey. I’ve always been a huge fan of Jim Carey’s acting range ( I watched The Mask more times as a child than my parents care to remember), and I can certainly appreciate the satire and snarky comments on current politics and the obvious shallowness that is Hollywood, but beyond that, I’m not entirely sure what I read.
The difference between Carey’s acting and his writing is that his acting is entirely comprehensible.
This book, however, was incredibly weird, even for Jim Carrey.
It has hints of existential crisis, which is something I’m normally into, but the flood of celebrity cameos and it being a random jumble of scenes and events without any specific story or theme to tie it all together left me utterly confused.
I’m a fan of the weird and surreal, but this was too much. It’s a meandering and at times utterly pointless story that tries too hard to be odd for the sake of being odd, and made me wonder if this book would have even been published it if Jim Carey’s name wasn’t attached to it.
FANNING THE FLAMES
A Burning by Megha Majumdar, McClelland & Stewart, $32. Jivan, a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, posts a careless comment on Facebook, setting off a train of events that no one could have foreseen.
Accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train, she is hauled off and imprisoned, awaiting trial.
PT Sir is a gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right wing political party. But his ascent depends on Jivan’s fall.
Lovely, a hijra whose dreams of Bollywood appear to be within her grasp, has the alibi that can set Jivan free.
In prison, as she watches daily soaps with the other inmates, Jivan holds on to images of the life she knew. More than the show, it is the world I watch. A traffic light, an umbrella, rain on a windowsill. The simple freedom of crossing a street.
She entrusts her fate to these two key witnesses. Who will come to her aid and who will desert her?
My one quibble is the way Lovely speaks throughout the book. In this life, everybody is knowing how to give me shame. So I am learning how to reflect shame back on them also.
Granted, that someone who makes a living going door-to-door and asking for money in exchange for blessing a newborn child or a newly-wed couple is unlikely to communicate in “proper” English, but then she’s unlikely to speak in English at all. So why bother with tortured sentence construction in the name of authenticity?
That apart, Majumdar displays a clear understanding of complex themes of class, fate, corruption, justice. And of politics in which education strategies focus on syllabi – “altering syllabi to tell the histories that serve the ruling party”.
Writing at breakneck speed, she brings to life three unforgettable characters.
The past tense of hang is hung. Unless what is being hung is a person, in which case, the word is “hanged”.
Hugely topical, against the backdrop of the election drama in West Bengal that climaxed early this month.
BETWEEN THE LINES
Serena Singh Flips The Script by Sonia Lalli, Berkley, $22. Friendships ran their course all the time, muses Serena Singh towards the end of the book,
We changed schools, cities, or jobs, and the people who at one point populated so many waking hours of our lives often disappeared forever. There was never a breakup or a talk. An acknowledgement that we didn’t have anything in common any more or were too busy or simply didn’t care enough to make the effort to stay in touch.
But this is not the Serena we meet at the start of the book. That Serena is insecure, feeling lost and anchorless without her friends who, busy with their lives, have less and less time for her.
Even her kid sister, Natasha, recently-married, is now pregnant, and 36-year-old Serena is wondering if a lonely, friendless future awaits her. She is clear in that she doesn’t want kids, she breaks off relationships that veer into dangerous commitment territory. And yet, she wants more from life.
Grow up! one is tempted to say. Until one realizes that this is less about age and more about the stages of life. And about her not wanting to lead a life that mirrors her mother’s. Who often “felt like she was in the backseat on a long, winding car journey entirely unclear of the destination. Veer steering. The two girls in the passenger seat.”
She breaks the rules, moves out to live on her own, gets a tattoo – a very visible one, on her neck – and achieves success in her career. When someone calls her brave for the choices she makes, she thinks, only for a woman, an Indian woman in particular, would just being herself be considered brave.
She is tired of everyone telling her what she should want – and she is ready to prove to her mother, her sister, and the aunties in the community that a woman does not need domestic bliss to have a happy life.
Until love comes calling. And a new friend questions her long-held beliefs about the importance of self-reliance.
A family portrait that is fun and true to generational (and desi) nuances.
EVERYTHING IS PERSONAL
City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert, Riverhead Books, $37. As a 19-year-old, Vivian Morris had been kicked out of college for under-performing.
Sent by her parents to live with her aunt in Manhattan, she meets a cosmos of unconventional and charismatic characters. She makes a personal mistake that results in a scandal – all this, back in the 1940s.
Now eighty-nine-years old, she looks back and shares a lesson. “At some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.”
Best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert writes like there are two of her – one that wrote Eat, Pray, Love, and the other, who wrote The Signature of All things. Fans of both will find something in City of Girls.
HIDE AND SEEK
The Hidden Half of Nature by David R. Montgomery and Anne Bikle, Norton, $34.95. It started with a realizable enough dream – or so it appeared on surface. David R. Montgomery and Anne Bikle set out to turn their barren yard into a garden.
They feed the dead dirt a rich diet of organic matter and the results are impressive as they learn beneficial microbes and plant roots continuously exchange essential compounds. When Bikle is diagnosed with cancer, they discover the startling similarities between plant roots and human gut.
Merging the knowledge of an ecologist with the care of a gardener and the skill of a physician, The Hidden Half of Nature tells the story of our tangled relationship with microbes and their potential to revolutionize medicine and agriculture. Good health – for people and for plants – depends on earth’s smallest creatures.
FINDING PEACE
Peace Is Possible by Prem Rawat, Penguin Life, $27.99. This slim volume contains “thoughts on happiness, success and relationships for a deeper understanding of life”, according to the line on the cover.
Lofty as those claims may be, it does contain simple pointers that give one pause for thought.
The first step to world peace is a simple one: we must find peace within ourselves.
There are short – very short – exchanges, that appear funny at first glance, but are really a way to apply a different lens to things around us.
Patient: Doctor I am in pain.
Doctor: Where does it hurt?
Patient: It hurts everywhere. When I touch my head it hurts. When I touch my jaw, it hurts. My ear, my leg – everywhere it hurts.
Doctor: I see. I think your finger is broken.
The nature-related analogies appealed to me. Each of us comes into this life with a seed of kindness and a seed of anger. Depending on which seed we sow in the earth of this life, will be those trees we see in our garden.
BEYOND WRINKLES
Grandparents by Chema Heras, illustrated by Rosa Osuna, Greystone Kids, $22.95. Grandfather wants to take Grandmother to the village dance but she comes up with reasons to avoid going.
Grandfather counters her every excuse with an evermore loving reply. A tender and sweet tale about a love that sees beyond faded eyes and wrinkles.
TEEN REVIEW
By YASLEEN MULTANI
Dracula by Bram Stoker, Random House, Audiobook (CD) $29. Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Bram Stoker with excitement, bone-chilling scares, suspense, and fascinating characters.
Jonathan Harker, a young English lawyer, travels to the Eastern European country of Transylvania to conclude a real estate transaction with a nobleman named Count Dracula. The Count sees a photo of Harker’s fiancée, Mina, and it reminds him of his dead wife. So he imprisons Harker and sets off for London to track her down.
I do not get scared easily, but reading this novel scared me, and I liked this new sensation. There were also a lot of controversial issues within the novel, such as how women were treated, and people’s beliefs about the supernatural. This helped me realize how different the world used to be, and how far along humanity and society have come. One of my favourite parts of the book is when Jonathan Harker is shaving, and he nicks himself. As blood gushes out, he sees the Count standing behind him with a sinister look. That made me feel terrified for Harker. When the crew members slowly started disappearing, I got scared thinking about the cause of their disappearances.
• Yasleen Multani is a youth volunteer at Brampton Library.