For Whom The Bell Tolls

Image Courtesy Onion Reads

So I've been stuck in a hotel for two days for a workshop for my job but the good news is that I had 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' by Ernest Hemingway with me!

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' is perhaps the most profound piece of literature that I've ever read. I mean... f**k. I you're an aspiring writer, here's a warning, reading this could make you never want to pick up a pen and paper again. Because whatever you write it will never be as perfect, s.what's the point? But on the same note, he can make love the craft so much that you can't help but try...

My favourite chapter is chapter 13, let's talk about it. The protagonist, Robert Jordan talks about love. A lot. He loves Maria and will love her for the rest of his life which measures up to be, oh, about 48 hours give or take a little.

Here's my favorite line from Robert Jordon on Maria "sweetheart, Cherie, prenda, schatz. He would trade them all for Maria. There was a name." So you live all your and the fairytales, odes, sonnets, telenovelas and tales of epic love are forced down your throat and then all of a sudden you meet someone and you have a name, a face. A new understanding of this thing that has driven the work of so many of the great thinkers of our time.

I love it, I'm all over it and before you roll your eyes let me just tell you that I hate all of that stuff the silly movies, the roses, that God awful Valentines Day. The stuff is just a concept and it's not what we should be looking for, that ideal exists on its own without us. What Hemingway is saying is that we need to find the person that enables us to understand what everyone was so wild about. To interpret the concept in our own way, to make it our own. That's the real goal.

God I love this book. I borrowed it from the library but I think I need to go buy it now.

Never Let Me Go (The Novel)

Photo Courtesy Wordpress.com

I didn't forget. I just needed to get around to it.

So I've read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and it was great. It wasn't earth shattering but it was definitely a good solid read. The book presents itself as a study of relationships but the ethical questions typical to discussions on cloning are still there. If I could ask a question of the author I'd like to know "Why did the clones never get the urge to fight? Why did they just accept their fate to live a brief limited life and die a long painful death?"

These questions left a nagging feeling at the pit of my stomach for a few days after completing the book. The only problem is that now that the book was good I'm afraid that the movie might suck. Ironic isn't it? I read the book to better appreciate the movie and now I'm worried that the movie won't live up to the book.

Hollywood tends to make things suck. Hope that doesn't happen here.

Closure of Upper West Side Barnes & Noble

Photo Courtesy LA Times

You know I never thought the day would come when I'd be sad to see a Barnes & Noble go. But I really did like this Upper West Side location. I strated going there as a freshman at NYU, I'd stop by on my way to volunteer at a nearby homeless shelter. After I graduated from NYU, I'd take long walks up to the Upper West Side and mill around the bookstore to clear my head from my job search woes. Plus everyone knows that Barnes & Noble is the best place to read magazines for free. According to this article, I'm not the only one that feels dissapointed by the closure.

But I'm not too devastated, as the article points out, there are still a gazillion other locations that can entertain me on my next visit to New York. In any case my attachment to this Barnes & Noble is connected to a time of my life that I hold dear, it really has very little to do with the actual store. Many of the people interviewed for the article admitted that they'd never bought books at the store and used it as a browsing spot instead. While I've purchased stationary there, I too never bought a book from this location. I guess when it comes to actually purchasing books, I'd pick a mom & pop store over a big chain anyday.

zzzzzzzz

Ugh. I'm really tired. I've been working on blog for hours. Putting up posts that I'd written on notepads and trying to come up with new ideas. So now I can't think of anything for today's post. To make it worse I have to be up really early tomorrow to pick up a package containing the remnants of my New York life... blah I want to go to bed.

I think I'm going to curl up with my new book, Darjeeling, written by Bharti Kirchner. it's one of those books that I just pulled of the shelf at the library without knowing a thing about the story or whether the critics hated it or not. But I do know that darjeeling is my favorite type of tea, I figure that's good enough. It seems like an easy enough read, I need it after Kundera and Sartre. I'll post about what I think when I'm done.

Ciao!

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Photo Courtesy The Unrehearsed Reader

So this is my second try at reading and enjoying Milan Kundera's work. I think he's an amazing brilliant writer but i don't think his stuff is for me. I much prefer the simple, uncomplicated brilliance of Hemingway to Kundera's in your face brilliance. I also can't help but feel that I'm reading different versions of the same book and if that's the case with all of his work I'd prefer to just re-read 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'.

That said, it was a good read, one of those books that tempt you take to notes because you never want to forget the words that you're reading.

Imagining Argentina

(Photo: Longitude Books)

I recently finished reading Imagining Argentina by Lawrence Thornton. This was a really, really good book. Even though we had a power outage, I couldn't put it down. I read it by candlelight and finished in one night. The novel is set in 1970's Argentina under the military rule of President Videla. It details the kidnapping, rape and torture of tens of thousands of victims that took place during the "Dirty War". The twist comes when Carlos discovers his psychic abilities after his wife is violently kidnapped and held by prisoner by agents of the state.

Apparently it was made into a movie in 2003. I'm going to try to find the movie, I'm quite curious to see how Cecilia, the novel's main heroine, is portrayed by the very British Emma Thompson. Great respect for Emma and her work but I can't see it working very well.

Oh Happy Day !!!!

One of the greatest drawbacks of moving back home to Trinidad from New York is the relatively high cost of magazines in Trinidad. Magazines are already pretty expensive but here they can cost up to twice as much before taxes! For a magazine nerd like myself the idea of paying US$12 for a copy of the New Yorker was pretty devastating and over the last couple of weeks I resigned to make do with the dreaded online version. Just as I started to exhibit withdrawal symptoms from living without the touch/smell/look of a real life glossy, I discovered the new and improved magazine section in our local library! Four years ago when I left for college there was at least a six month gap between the current date and the most recent issue of ANY of the mags on the shelves. But now, although the fashion mags are still shamefully out of date, my babies The New Yorker and Time are pretty damn current. It truly was a moment for tears and I captured it with this really crappy pic taken with my phone.


If they keep this up I might just have to forget about the fact that they closed the ENTIRE hardcover section for a month. Really, who does that?

Never Let Me Go

I recently posted about my eagerness to see Farewell, the French spy thriller staring Guillame Canet. I'm also looking forward to seeing Never Let Me Go, a sci-fi movie based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. I can't wait to the novel, I'm currently speed reading through a book of Hemingway's short stories (love Hemingway but not a fan of short stories) so that I can get to it. I'm not usually into sci-fi but the trailer looks promising and I love the costuming already. I'm definitely a judge-a-book-by-its-cover kind of person. I'm ashamed to say that I've bought several books just because the cover looked interesting and I will most certainly sit through an awful movie if the wardrobe is good. This isn't always a bad thing. I watched The Brothers Bloom because of Rachel Weisz's pretty orange umbrella and it was one of my favorite movies of 2009. I also read The Prophet by Khalil Gibran because of his beautiful illustrations and that novel has had a firm place on my top ten list for the last five years.

The only grey cloud on my movie going horizon is that there's a strong chance that these films will never be released in my country. Our local cinemas tend to favour the big blockbusters, so while Step Up 3-D and Resident Evil Afterlife are already on the list of coming attractions, Farewell and Never Let Me Go are nowhere to be found. Le sigh .... we desperately need an art house cinema in Trinidad. In the meantime I'm praying to the movie gods and keeping my fingers crossed.

Riverside Pholourie

Spent the day with my Granny and later went with my mumz to buy Pholourie at a nearby shop. Pholourie is one of my favourite treats, it's made of fried balls of pea dough and served with a mango or tamarind sauce (today I had mango.) While my mum was busy chatting with the shopkeeper I took some pics of the stream that winds around our neighbourhood.

Our stream actually used to be a beautiful river but it's slowly disappearing due to the deforestation of our surrounding hillsides and the corresponding erosion of exposed soil. Because of soil erosion the river bed is now extremely shallow and each year during the heavy rain season our neighbourhood is hit with devastating floods. Sadly, the stream that my sister and I know is nothing like the river my mother swam in as a child and by the time we have kids of our own it may not exist at all.

I'm Taking the Challenge !

The NALIS reading challenge that is !!

Our National Library is hosting a reading challenge. All I have to do is read ten books within the next month or so, submit a short review for each (which is what I do here anywayz) and huzzah! A super special NALIS eco-tote bag will be placed in my eager hands. My sister is doing it too because I BEGGED her. She doesn't get the excitement over the flimsy tote bag. I can't explain it either but the excitement is almost overshadowing my 'Farewell' fever. Almost.

Lolita

I have a pretty sweet crush on Russian Literature. It started with a little Tolstoy and then it got more intense when I started exploring Dostoyevsky. For the last couple of years I've been prompted by one person or another to read Lolita by Vladimir Nabkov. For why? According to the friends, acquaintances and complete strangers who've tried to turn me into a little Lolita lover, my thing for the Russians meant that I absolutelypositivelymust LOVE Lolita. This hyper enthusiasm is of course the main reason that I've been avoiding it for all of these years.

I started to give in after it was recommended to me by Sarah D. I call Sarah D. my lit twin we like the same books and we share the same weird habits like reading two books at once and judging books by the attractiveness of their covers. Anyway I respect her opinion immensely so I brought Lolita home but continued to avoid reading it. I caved a few weeks ago and finally read Lolita, not my fault, we can blame Virginia Woolf for that. We're "frenemies" Woolf and I. I've been trying to love her work for years, I want to love her work SO BAD but... I just can't focus on it. I fought my way through To The Lighthouse a year ago and I've been reading Jacob's Room but I had to put it down because I just couldn't. So I picked up Lolita instead.

The truth is that I really did enjoy Lolita but not for the reasons touted by my Lolita lover friends. I did not love it for its "Russian-ness". It does not depict Russia, it is not written about Russia and it does not feature Russians. Correct me if I'm wrong but the only thing Russian about Lolita is its author and so i would NEVER compare this particular Nabkov work to that of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or anyone in that vein. That said, I DID enjoy Nabkov's alliteration obsession and his frightening command of the English language. I've been speaking English all my life and I will NEVER be half as good as he is.

I'd recommend Lolita to anyone, it's hilarious and Nabkov's beautiful use language protects his perverse masterpiece from being misunderstood as sordid or pornographic literature. My only regret is that I waited this long!

The Last Station

My sister and I watched The Last Station yesterday. It wasn't exactly what I expected but I enjoyed it. I'm a HUGE Tolstoy fan and I was a little disappointed because I expected the movie to be more literary and less rom-com-ish. Helen Mirren was amazing so for me this movie was more about Sofya, the charming prima donna, and less about Tolstoy. I'm currently reading Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf but since watching the Last Station I'm itching to pick up Anna Karenina.

Nightlight

I started my summer reading a few weeks ago with Nightlight, a parody of the Twilight series. I have not and most likely will not read the Twilight books but I did enjoy Nightlight. It was a quick funny read, I definitely laughed out loud a couple of times.