BOOK REVIEWS by NAVAL LANGA

State Library of New South Wales,
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

THESE REVIEWS ARE DONE BY AN INDIAN WRITER, NAVAL LANGA. 

 

A TALE OF TWO CITIES  

A Novel by Charles Dickens It is quite difficult to write about the novels written by Charles Dickens, as you have to be one among the thousands of those writers and reviewers who have done the job earlier. But I am so fascinated by the charm and attraction I had felt while reading ‘A Tale Of Two Cities’ that I could not do without putting my efforts to show how I felt while reading this masterpiece.

The love relationship of two unusual characters, Lucy Manette and Charles Darney passed through the time narrated by Dickens as ‘It was the best of the times, it was the worst of the times’. The couple made their way through strange circumstances. They were caught in a storm of the revolutionary atmosphere of late eighteenth-century France. And they would have hardly passed through it without offering abnormal responses to the situations they were forced to face. 

DISGRACE

Image by ChatGPT With the novel ‘Disgrace,’ J. M. COETZEE has become the first novelist to pocket the Man Booker Prize twice. In ‘Disgrace’ he tries painting the landscape of a country, South Africa, where the regime trading apartheid has just closed its shutters and people are yet to be adjusted to climate change. They have a multitude of newly formed rules and the wings of the changed perception of their own.  It is a story of a professor David Lurie

 

SLOW MAN    -by J M Coetzee

The novel SLOW MAN starts with a great fall and then turns into a river, taking us over to the distant regions. In this highly symbolic novel, the subject matter flows like a wide waterway. J M Coetzee tries to define the region wherein both fiction and reality lives in the neighbourhood, having a common entrance and exit doors.

 

MY NAME IS RED - A Novel by ORHAN PAMUK

In 'MY NAME IS RED' there is a number of point of views, and the several storytellers. But that has barely affected the flow of the narrative in the novel: Orhan Pamuk is such a master of keeping continuity.  Primarily the novel walks around the life of the miniature artists living in Istanbul of the late sixteenth century. But it depicts all types of human follies and demonstrates how the negative forces sway over the positive ones.

SLOW MAN --by J M COETZEE : REVIEWED by NAVAL LANGA

The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law. -- J. M. COETZEE

The winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in the year 2003, J. M. Coetzee is a man of his own kind, an engineer with his own tools. His novels were wedded with the real world until he wrote ‘Disgrace.’ With ‘Disgrace,’ he became the first writer to pocket the Booker Prize twice. 

Then came his novels Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005), the neat fiction. ‘Slow Man’ tries to draw a line between fiction and reality. In ‘Slow Man’ the subject matter flows like a wide waterway. Here Coetzee tries defining the region wherein both fiction and reality live side-by-side, having common entrance and exit doors.

The story starts with a great fall and then turns into a river, taking us over to the distant regions. A man, Paul Rayment, age 60, alone after divorce, childless, and an Australian, is not a man of peaceful temper. Nor is he a man of satiated desires. 

After an accident that has made him fly in the air, he is bedridden with one leg amputated. But the accident, the flying from his bicycle seat, and the subsequent fall have not made him dreamless. He thinks about his life to come, though not with the same speed as before. He conjures up a new life. 

J. M. Coetzee signing at the
Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial
booth at the Buenos Aires Book Fair.

Keeping his middle-aged nurse, Marijana Jokic, in the center, he conjures up a family with her and her young son, Drago.  Paul craves living with Marijana and her good-shaped calves and even desires his extension through the Drago. 

Though in order to remain alive after his death, he has another contingent plan, too. He wants to donate a collection of his old and rare photographs to a library and remain alive through those photographs.

COETZEE’S MAGICAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THE READERS

THEME: SHAPE OUT THE LATER YEARS OF YOUR LIFE, MEN!

Such a spell of emptiness is agonizing, especially in the later phase of our life journey. The traveller finds the road ahead darkening. Literature provides us with some light in the darkness. 

The great thinkers, and their writings, have upgraded the literature to the level of religion in the secularized section of people. 

Keeping pace with this movement for providing primal education, Coetzee has carved out a striking statement in Slow Man. He has scripted a message, the message about the art of living. 

Circumstances do not allow him to do what he likes. Everything changes in a strange way when a stranger’s finger rings his doorbell. 

Here enters Elizabeth Costello, a fictional character from Coetzee’s previous novel of the same name. She wants to make out a character from the material on the bed, Paul’s reduced life. His life is ending in installments, the amputation of the leg being the first one. 

Unusual dialogues are bartered between Paul and Elizabeth. You occurred to me—a man with a bad leg and an unsuitable passion: that is what Elizabeth says to him. He neglects Costello in every possible way. But he keeps on pursuing Marijana, offering a scholarship to Drago for the study he is dreaming to undergo.

Marijana and her husband, Mr. Jokic, a Croatian refugee, turn down the offer. Whereas they reject Paul’s advancement for being Drago’s foster father, they avoid being thankless people. 

Drago, with active help from all of his family members, repairs Paul’s devastated bicycle. He turns the bicycle into a Paul Rayment, an amputee, friendly vehicle.

The satiric sentences, the unusual response by Paul to have no prosthesis, and Marijana’s caring presence are sufficient materials to make us turn two hundred and odd pages weightlessly. 

But J. M. Coetzee, seemingly a writer of the straight-lined stories, till the day surprises us when a character from his earlier novel forcefully enters Paul Rayment, the Slow Man’s life. Elizabeth Costello, a fictional entity, is not a simple woman. Nor has she come to behave sophisticatedly with Paul, a patient by orthopedic definition.

On knowing that the Costello woman would be making a story out of his sorry state, Paul wants to drive her out of his home. 

He unequivocally tells her his mind, too: "You treat me like a puppet... You treat everyone like a puppet. You make up stories and bully us into playing them out for you." 

He considers himself an ordinary man and is quite reluctant to become the center of a story. Here Coetzee’s narration is so pictorial that a reader would feel like they were sitting in the middle of the room where these characters run into each other.

Growing under the apartheid regime of South Africa and addicted to writing in allegorical ways, Coetzee always deals with the subject matter in non-traditional ways. 

The manner in which he transacts with our hearts is in no way a conventional one. He acts like a wild cat sitting on the chest of its prey. And many a time, the cat leaves us spilling blood. 

However, when the ‘Barbarians Are Coming’ or the shadows of ‘Disgrace’ are hovering over the characters, he endeavors to search for a possible way out.

In Slow Man, the writer-character Costello tries hard to connect herself with ‘the character’ Paul Rayment, but she fails on several occasions. 

The scuffle due to the gap between a writer’s demand from the character and the character’s denial to obey generates bitter conversations. The stage set for the ongoing wrestle entertains us on the first count. 

Secondly, the situation in which both the movers of the story are put into compels us to think on several unattended subjects. It induces us to think about the exact relationship between literature and mankind.

Writers who have insight into human minds and who hold immense sympathy for mankind would hardly resist the urge for choosing one or another set of ethics. 

Though in his unique pattern, Coetzee, too, does so in Slow Man. Paul Rayment is a retired photographer who should lead a comfortable old age, a life without astonishing events. 

But even after being reduced to a one-legged life, this man of aging flesh, Paul, thinks about his nurses’ soft skin and shapely calves. The art of growing older is, perhaps, missing from us, the humans.

We tally our bank balances; we pay our bills in time, more or less; but we fail to address the issues of vital importance to our life, especially life after retirement—a period that could be the most beautiful spell in one’s life. 

At this stage, one must have a clear-cut account of what has been achieved and what remains yet to be achieved. Here the question crops up of ‘what’ should really be done. Coetzee winks at that area.

The protagonist of Slow Man tries to find meaning in his life. He thinks about becoming the foster father of her nurse’s son, Drago. 

He loves to love Marijana’s children; he is even ready to accommodate her husband in his life. Marijana’s imposing presence, and her occasional non-attendance, exposes him to his inner emptiness. 

He yearns for filling the gaps in his life.

THE END

Image courtesy Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl/, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Frodar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

DISGRACE -- BY J. M. COETZEE: REVIEWED by NAVAL LANGA

                                  --REVIEWED By NAVAL LANGA

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction. -- J. M. Coetzee

A Novel Narrating Painful Social Changes

If you have a deep love for extra beautiful literature, and if you have enough room for reading a novel twice, at least, then J.M. Coetzee has a lot of things to offer. The winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in the year 2003, J M Coetzee, is a man of his own class, an engineer with his own set of tools. 

His novels are thick with real-world and human miseries. He based his writings on the events happening in his surroundings. He did so at least up to the date he had written his very famous novel ‘Disgrace’. He had tried a novel technique of blending facts and fiction in his next novel, Slow Man.  

When Disgrace was awarded the prize, J. M. Coetzee became the first novelist to pocket the Man Booker Prize twice. In ‘Disgrace’, he tries painting the landscape of a country, South Africa.

It is a tale of the time when the regime trading apartheid has just closed its shutters and people are yet to be adjusted to the change of climate. They are free in any respect; they have wings of the changed perception of their own. They have a multitude of newly formed rules to follow.

Keeping the contemporary South African stage setting before his eyes, J M Coetzee writes symbolically about the altered atmosphere. In order to create a visual metaphor for what Coetzee perceives, he uses the story of David Lurie. The protagonist is a professor in literature, and his daughter Lucy has transformed herself into a countrywoman. He superbly narrates how this countrywoman responds to the new challenges of her life in a distorted atmosphere.

Image by ChatGPT

The country is virtually lawless in rural sides where David and his daughter reside. They face a spell of legal emptiness which is agonizing; especially for a man like David. Coetzee narrates David as: ‘His temperament is not going to change; he is too old for that.’ In South Africa of David, there is a mass violation of the laws. Under such circumstances, one would find the future dark.

His daughter is made of different soil. After going through the life of a vagabond and leaving the company of a lesbian friend behind, Lucy tries to settle herself in the new environment. The changed scenario of the country has put a strange situation before her. She tailors a novel solution for surviving in the new world. She rears dogs for sale; she produces vegetables and flowers on her Eastern Cape farm.

THE PLOT: A STORY OF NATIONAL DISGRACE

Disgrace - A Novel With a Strange Plot by J. M. Coetzee

The Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee became the first writer to get the Man Booker Prize twice when he got it for his novel ‘Disgrace’. The novel has a simple and linear plot. It essentially starts when David Lurie, the protagonist of the novel, engages in a corporeal act with one of his students.

Caught in a fix, the student registers a complaint about sexual harassment against him. Despite strong suggestions by his colleagues to deny and defend the allegations of having sex with the girl, Professor David Lurie accepts the allegations. 

Thus, in becoming honest in his acts, he invites the obvious ouster from the job. The life of disgrace starts from this point.

Image by ChatGPT

He goes to live with his daughter, Lucy. After being disgraced, and while living at the farm owned by Lucy, he wakes up into another world. 

He encounters a world where people have to sacrifice most of their legitimate rights. He met the people who have to compromise on seemingly odd issues.

South Africa of David and Lucy is newly liberated from the clutches of apartheid. The old trees are razed out, but the plants of the new order are yet to be rooted in. During this turmoil, he meets Bev, a friend of Lucy who runs a veterinary hospital. 

Before he knows more about why the lives of terminally ill dogs are ended by a fatal but pain-relieving injection given by Bev, some miscreants attack the farm of Lucy. She is gang-raped and her dogs are shot dead. The house is looted, and David’s car is stolen.

He lodges complain about his car, but Lucy denies registering a complaint against those who have raped her. It is the cost of living on the land: that is what she believes. When her father tells her to “Sell up”, she refuses. Here, David learns a chapter in parenthood. There comes a date when children start living without the help of their biological cord, parental assistance.

Lucy is more stable in her life, remaining attached to her own piece of land. In a way, she responds more logically to the challenges of life, in comparison to her desperate father, who has frequented prostitutes searching for the meaning of life. He strangely accepts reality. She decides to bear the child of the neo-oppressor, the therapists. It reveals how a woman can adjust to a changing environment. Those who are unaware of South Africa's present may not be able to swallow the tough pill.

Disgrace - A Novel Narrating Characters Facing Strange Situations in Life

Nobel prize-winning writer J. M. Coetzee presently lives in Australia. But he is born in South Africa. He lived there most of the years of his life. This has helped him know the social setup in South Africa very closely. His novel ‘Disgrace’ is the story of a professor of literature. But it is an allegory of the present social situation in the country.

In ‘Disgrace’, the novelist puts forward a question about when the disgrace starts. The protagonist enters into an unethical act with one of his students; it is not rape per se. She is not a minor; she is not abducted; she is not subjected to any force. But the girl remains muted during the process, where David, the protagonist, enjoys himself. Here, the same thing is not perceived in the same sense. 

A man and a woman are required to see the ‘same thing’ in the ‘same sense’, especially in sexual matters. If the weaker partner, here the woman, feels cheated, the period of grace is over and the ‘disgrace’ starts.

Apart from this, Coetzee narrates another type of ‘disgrace’, too. Living under the apartheid-infected air of South Africa, he is addicted to writing in allegorical style. He has always looked at modern subject matters through non-traditional glasses. The manner in which he transacts with our hearts is in no way a comfortable one. Nor it is conventional, too. 

He acts like a wild cat sitting on the chest of its prey. And every time, the cat leaves us spilling blood. However when the ‘Barbarians Are coming’ or the shadows of ‘Age of Iron’ are hovering over the characters of his novels, he honesty searches for a possible way-out for them. In ‘Disgrace’ he paints a picture of a different life; the life that the ‘whites’ of South Africa have to pull on.

After the fall of the apartheid rules, the thinking of local people has changed. The natives start disliking the ‘holding of the land’ by ‘white’ people. Lucy has a servant, Petrus. He is a native. He now puts forward a strange proposal. He believes that her holdings would remain safe if Lucy became his second wife. 

A locally influential leader and his men visit her house with a clear-cut design. They gang-rape her. The lesson rapists want to convey is simple: hand over our land; bear our children, and remain alive. They hate Lucy’s unencumbered ownership of a ploughable piece of land.

This is the disgrace, Coetzee wants to narrate.

J M COETZEE'S STYLE AND NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE

Literature provides us with some light in the darkness. The great thinkers and their writings have upgraded literature to the level of religion in the secularized section of people. Keeping pace with this movement for providing primal education, J. M. Coetzee, a Nobel Prize-winning writer, has carved out a striking example in his novel ‘Disgrace’. 

This novel has won the Man Booker Prize. By winning this Prize, Coetzee has become the only writer winning this prize twice.

While reading Coetzee, humour would hardly fail in easing our strains. It would make our minds lighter by the passages loaded with visible and hidden meanings. Had Coetzee not been a humorist as he is, he would have been branded as a rebel for selecting the subjects of his writings. He might have found his place just beside Nelson Mandela. 

But he happens to be a writer. The writer is a warrior fighting with the arsenal of his words, the words flowing through his mighty pen. It is the strongest part of the story woven in his novel ‘Disgrace’ that he does not allow the protagonist to run away. 

Under the given circumstances, he had the option to get away with the inquiry set up against him. Instead, he accepts responsibility for what he has done.

The visual metaphors used in narrating the scenes carry us to the place and in time where the characters of the novel are struggling to live. Nowhere does the narration seem very dramatic. 

Lucy’s rape, an act of the highest insult a man can do to a woman is narrated in a few lines. These lines are emphatically convincing. The challenges the characters in ‘Disgrace’ face is just like other common people. But their responses to these challenges are quite different. 

That is how the literature in general and a writer, in particular, provide us with light in the darkness. Coetzee narrates this darkness in a very impressive manner. J M Coetzee is a master of the art of telling stories. He makes the readers feeling immediately identify with the characters. 

In ‘Disgrace’, the writer puts us in the midst of an environment in which events are happening. The vivid description of college activities and the way in which students behave with their studies make us believe the scenes. They all look like parts of our day-to-day life.

Novels written by Coetzee are filled with irony and satire. His writings entertain the readers according to their intellectual heights. In the case of ‘Disgrace’, the thematic compulsions and perpetual happenings of sad events restrained him from becoming an outright humorist. But he has counterbalanced it by putting lightweight words in the blank spaces lying between two sentences.

[Images courtesy 

Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons     

Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl/, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

A TALE OF TWO CITIES - Reviewed by Naval Langa

To write a review of Charles Dickens’s novel is easy. It is as easy as selling the ice on Mt. Everest. Yes, it is so because a great number of the master writers and reviewers have already done it. Let me try it in a somewhat novel way.

Let me take A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Why this novel? It is because, when I read the book first, I could not believe that the writer of Hard Times (1854) and Oliver Twist (1838) would choose such a historical subject. Here, the master novelist pens a romantic story along with opening the social folios of the two cities: London and Paris. It was the best of times for London: the fruits of the industrial revolution were visible on the streets of London. It was the worst of the times for Paris: the French Revolution was at its highest boil.  

The Plot: A Story of Turmoil

Dr Manette and Lucie
 with Charles Darnay

The love relationship of two unusual characters, Lucy Manette and Charles Darnay passed through the time narrated by Dickens as 'It was the best of the times; it was the worst of the times'. 

The couple made their way through strange circumstances. They were caught in a storm of the revolutionary atmosphere of late eighteenth-century France. And they would have hardly passed through it without offering abnormal responses to the situation they were forced to face.

The story is painted on a torn canvas of turbulent London where mockery of the law had replaced justice, the guns were necessary articles for travellers, and the fresh graves were excavated for selling the parts of dead bodies. The warehouse of France in general and the theatre of Paris, in particular, were worse than London.

The Storming of the Bastille 

The last phase of feudalism and the haunted conscience of French peasants had outrun all the notions of civility and human behaviour. 

The movement of peasants to remove the tyrant rulers partially ended with the fall of the prison of the Bastille. All the prisoners were freed from the Bastille jail. Dr Manette, the father of Lucy Manette, was one of them.

Lucy helped her father to come out of the obsession of his jail phase. She took charge of the boat and sailed through the demanding process of curing his father and developing her relationship with Charles. 

A migrant from France and language teacher in a London school, Charles Darney had an aristocratic lineage that he kept undisclosed until the day of his marriage to Lucy. But his aristocratic virtue of protecting one of his former loyalists drove him into the storm of France. He was caught; he was convicted for merely having the aristocratic lineage, and he was to be executed.

Sydney Carton

Dr Manet freed him once. Again he was jailed. However, he was ultimately freed through unexpected assistance from a former lover of Lucy, Sydney Carton. His face was similar to the face of Charles. 

Sydney Carton replaced himself in Charles' place in the jail, sacrificing his life for saving the life of the husband of the woman whom he loved. 

For the other characters, we can say that each one has his or her own uniqueness. We take the name and we brand each one of them with a particular characteristic: Mr Jarvis Lorry (a man of business), Mr Defarge (loyal servant, a level-headed revolutionist), Mrs Defarge (diehard revolutionary, no space for mercy), Mrs Pross (a loyal, motherly figure), and Jerry Cruncher (very difficult to describe, but an obedient servant). They all walked with the story, making its flow lucid and the contents rich.

How to Create Believable Characters - Learning From Charles Dickens

If you want to know how the characters in novels are created, if you want to experience how they are made lively, the reading of A Tale of Two Cities would be a good guide.

Dickens’s characterisation of the men and women in A Tale of Two Cities is vividly realistic. Some of them act a little bit dramatic, as and when the plot of the novel demands so. Jarvis Lorry, a simple-minded banker and Madame Defarge, a diehard revolutionary, never depart from the strict necessities attached to their occupations. 

Dr Manette turns himself into an advocate and takes the tools of a saviour in his hands. He had a mission to save his son-in-law from a certain death penalty.

Charles Dickens was the master of the craft of writing. He used symbols as effective tools for helping the larger picture of his novel, to make the story easily explained. Unlike a well-sculptured use of powerful symbols in his other novels, in A Tale Of Two Cities, he used sharp adjectives and salient humour. While caricaturing the host of characters, he displayed his masterly art of telling about the aspects of contemporary society. 

Mme Defarge confronts Miss Pross. 

As a historical novelist, he narrates the pros and cons of the ongoing revolution in France. The description of the characters is such that if by chance any one of them passes by us, we would immediately tell that ‘this is Jerry Cruncher (from his unique style of walking) or this is Lucy (by seeing her serene beauty), or this is Madame Defarge (from the frozen lava of her anger)’.

The dialogues go with the characters. Mr Lorry and Dr Manette are professionals. They represented the cultured face of the time. Madame Defarge is the firebrand lady representing the wrath of the revolutionaries of contemporary France. 

As the novel was to be published as a serial in a newspaper, the beginning and the end of each chapter tend to be loaded with gunshot sentences. And when a writer like Dickens fires a shot, it is heard up to far pavilions. He did not give us characters; he gave us the models of people. 

In real life, you would find a replica of every man and woman Dickens depicted in his novels. Becoming the mother of children with impressive looks, Dickens created a crowd of characters. They are proud; they are feeble. They are generous; they are greedy. 

They are cowardly; they are bold. Dickens read the life before his eyes and used it for his creations. For 180 years, the readers have loved these characters to read and remember.

How to Write Humorously - Learning From Charles Dickens

In A Tale Of Two Cities, Dickens had distributed the humour among various pockets. We can summarise how he created humour:

• the way he described the characters, 
• the pretentious mannerism that the lords of the land followed in France, 
• and the narrative technique in which he had no competitor. 

While describing the human tragedies and follies of common men, he had endeavoured to infuse humour through the comedy of manners. However, he had not tried to soften the bitterness of the truth that the ongoing revolution was supposed to hold.

Charles Dickens dared to be an innovator. Standing against all the contemporary writers, he had chosen the subject of poverty in Oliver Twist. He obeyed his inner voice—his sincere service to the world in which he lived. Again, even though he was the writer of neat fiction, he chose history as the background for his novel A Tale of Two Cities. 

The writer of Domby and Sons and Martin Chuzzlewit preferred to narrate the rigid truth of history without reservations, without making compromises. He chose the theme of history because it contained the hardest challenges the people had faced; he chose it because a larger portion of the people had at last responded to the wildest behaviour shown to them for a long period. 

Every drop of blood spilt on the streets of Paris, every drop of sweat fallen on the farms of feudal France, melted into each other and became the blade of the Guillotine. And then everything flew from the power of that Guillotine. Dickens picked up that theme, honoured it in its right perspective, and dealt with it using his masterly skill.

While reading Dickens, humour would not fail in helping our strains to disappear. It would make our minds lighter. Had Dickens not been a writer and the humorist that he was, he would have become a social activist. Such were the subjects he chose for his writings. 

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun,
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A Tale of Two Cities, a novel that is overloaded with the hard facts of an ongoing revolution, contains the salient stock of wit and irony. Though the thematic compulsions restrained Dickens from becoming an outright humorist, he fully counterbalanced it while caricaturing some of the characters.

If we look at the novel from a different angle, then war or a revolution is the greatest satire itself. Mankind has never learnt a lesson from the past. We go on slaughtering each other without realising the futility of our actions. Perhaps that was the biggest message this novel should have delivered. 

A Tale of Two Cities is a masterpiece novel. It had always sparkled like a gem on a bookshelf. 

[Images courtesy Charles Dickens enwiki,  Charles Edmund Brock, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons  - The Storming of the Bastille Jean-Pierre Houël 1789 Watercolour    National Library of France, Paris - Internet Archive Book Images, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons -  Fred Barnard, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons ]