LitPundit Home of all things literary

A well crafted book can hold your life hostage for at the least the duration of the read and if exquistely written, the characters and plot will haunt you in a sweet aching way, lingering in your mind like the last truly beautiful holiday you had. Diane Setterfield has spun, in her debut literary thriller "The Thirteenth Tale", such a beautiful tale of suspense, love, deceit and human emotions that the reader is lifted up and carried into the depths of the ageless art of storytelling. As the character Margaret Lea so rightly put it - "It was like falling into water."

The plot is set into motion with Margaret, a bookseller's daughter, receiving a handwritten letter from the famous yet elusive writer Vida Winter inviting her to come to Winter's home to listen to her secret life story. As the letter explains, Winter has, for the last forty years, spun one strange tale after the other every time someone asked her about her life. Margaret arrives at Winter's, apprehensive, half-expecting yet another fabricated tale, ready to walk away and she almost did until the words pulled her back - "Once upon a time there were twins ---"Continue reading

"A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian" has a title that is sure to raise a few eyebrows - I often read in trains, and fellow commuters who happened to glance at my book seemed to be in a dilemma about deciding whether I am an eccentric tractor historian or just a crazy nut. That's often followed by a look of satisfaction when they decide on the latter, as I invariably burst out laughing at some amusing line in this fabulously enjoyable book. This is a book worth braving the odd stares for - what do they know! This is definitely one of the most hilarious books I have read in a long time.

If you buy this book expecting 200 pages on tractors, you are bound to be disappointed. What you will find, though, is a fascinating tale of an old Ukrainian immigrant in London, and his misadventures with a young Russian gold digger, who would do anything for a passport in the West. Nikolai, an eighty-four year old eccentric engineer, hell bent on recording the history of Ukrainian tractors is full of crazy ideas,... Continue reading

"The Dead Fish Museum" is a collection of eight stories by Charles D'Ambrosio, six of which have appeared in The New Yorker earlier. The theme of human suffering and difficult (to the point of being depressing) situations they find themselves in runs as a common thread between the stories.

In "Screenwriter", which I consider to be the best story in the collection, a successful screenwriter fighting for his sanity in a depressing psych institution meets a ballerina who likes to burn herself.

Her arms floated away from her body as though she were trying to balance a feather on the tip of each finger. Then she jumped around, modern and spasmodic, as if the whole point of the dance were to leap free of your skin.

The story leaves us with a less than pleasant drug-fueled night of self torture by the ballerina while the writer looks on. For the sake of everyone's sanity, including mine, her torment didn't turn him on.

"Drummond & Son" tells the story of a typewriter repairman whose wife has left him, leaving behind a mentally unstable son. One of the central incident that transpires in the story is... Continue reading

What is a thought? Is it a pure figment of our imagination or does it actually play out in some parallel universe? Can a sustained belief in a form and concentrated thought will the form to take a physical form? These thoughts were far from Alvin Schwartz's mind and would have remained so had it not been for the day Thongden, a seven foot Buddhist monk, appears at his house, having cycled thirty-seven miles without breaking a sweat and claims to be Tibetan tulpa.

Thongden explains that he was willed into existence by an explorer Everett Nelson, as he was being taught the mystic way of life in a Buddhist monastery. Rather than dissolve the tulpa Nelson allows him to get away. Nelson is however dead and Thongden's existence is under threat since his life-giving though is no more. He seeks out Alvin Schwartz, the famous writer of Superman, Batman and several other comic book titles in the 40s and 50s, because he feels that Alvin with his own experience of creating Superman would be in a position to think about him with intensity enough to let him keep his physical form.

In return, Thongden helps... Continue reading

If you are a fan of Jorge Borges and would like to find out more about the great Argentine literary genius, you have found the right book in "With Borges" by Alberto Manguel. One may be hard pressed to call it a book - at 77 pages of rather large text, it is more like a long narrative or a booklet. Yet, despite its short length, the book succeeds wonderfully in painting a rich and colorful picture of the life and literary pursuits of Borges.

Manguel manages to write a personal account, inviting the reader to a journey few would have been privileged to make. Manguel was one of the several people who had read out to Borges, after he succumbed to blindness in his adulthood. Manguel does not consider himself unique, admitting that there exists a vast group of people like himself, "minor Boswells whose identities are rarely known to one another but who collectively hold the memory of one of the world's greatest readers". And it is a generous piece of this personal memory that he shares with us, in this intense and intimate account of the great man.

The author opens the window... Continue reading

I am not sure whether to sing praises for the moody exploration of a tortured human's character that forms the central theme of "Boot Tracks" or sigh at raw, sometimes bordering on incomprehensible style that the author Matthew F. Jones employs to create the atmosphere. I found myself ready to lay the book down for good at several places in the first part of the book only to continue because of the promising second part that I glanced through in despair. I can't say I was disappointed.

Boot Tracks follows the path of Charlie Rankin, recently released from prison, as he goes about repaying a jailbird lover through an assassination. The job goes horribly wrong, wrecking the moral fiber of Rankin, already stretched thin by his history as an abused kid. The only solace he finds is in the hands of Florence, an ex-porn star who strangely seems to be able to find a human dimension to Rankin's existence that he himself thinks had died a long time ago.

The book is no easy read since the author decides to inflict upon us the brooding feel through his style - absent punctuations, narratives cut short in mid-sentence,... Continue reading

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full
of weeping than you
can understand.

- W.B. Yeats

Keith Donohue draws inspiration from a Yeats poem to pen an imaginative albeit unconventional first novel. "The Stolen Child" is a fantasy book set in the early 20th century, and requires complete suspension of disbelief from page one. The reader who is willing to do that is rewarded with a rich narrative of the life of changelings, whom I had never heard of before, but later understood to be an ancient legend popular in the British Isles.

The Stolen Child tells the story of Henry Day, who runs away from home and hides in the hollow of a tree, where he is kidnapped by a changeling who switches lives with Henry. The book follows the life of the real Henry and the changeling Henry from that point on. The central theme of the book is the double life that the two protagonists lead - intertwined and complicated. Each lives with resentment, anger and fear until, eventually, they come to terms with their own lives. This... Continue reading

I leaned against the glass. I looked at the clouds. It was dark outside the window. It was bright.

Those are the closing words of Mark William Chamberlain, the protagonist of Chad Taylor's "Departure Lounge". A tinge of noir seeps through those words and gives you an idea what the rest of the novel would have read. Terse, brooding, contradictory on the surface and quotable.

Mark, whose name you will not get to until almost after half of the story, is a thief and like most thieves, breaks into houses, rumbling through peoples' belongings. Unlike other thieves though, his hands also love to trace their lives. A man with scars and dark memories, he is looking for someone, a girl named Caroline May who went missing more than two decades ago without a clue. More than two decades after the incident, people seem to be still looking for a closure. Mark is just one of them. There is Harry Bishop the detective in charge of the search, there is Varina Smuich, Mark's old sweetheart and who knows how many others. Missing Girl seems to have etched her figure in these people's lives. As Harry explains to Mark:

That's what therapists call a...

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When I carried Lori Lansens' "The Girls" around with me, friends asked, more than once, whether I was reading a chicklit on what it means to be a girl or why I possess a book, which the titled suggested, could be for men to understand girls? It didn't stop me from carrying around the book, refusing to put it down even when the pressures of daily routine demanded that I give it a rest. I patiently explained my constant companion of the past weeks to my friends, as the story of two conjoined girls, which almost always inspired a bored look, as if they could imagine what it would be all about. Maybe I was also guilty of having had a faint feeling of doubt when I first picked it up, whether this would be just another predictable book. Call it anything else, but predictable it is not.

"The Girls" is the story of Rose and Ruby Darlen, the world's oldest surviving craniopagus twins, starting from the tornado that they believe brought them to this world, through their first kiss, preparing for their milestone thirtieth birthday, dealing with loss and independence, and eventually "the end, which... Continue reading

"Letters to a Young Mathematician" by Ian Stewart is a delightful small book written in the form of a collection of letters from a fictitious mathematician to his equally fictitious mentee Meg, as she charts her career in mathematics. It is a fascinating look into what mathematics is, what it takes and means to be a mathematician and what (and how) they think. As stated by the author in the 'Preface':

Letters to a Young Mathematician is my attempt to bring some parts of "A Mathematician's Apology" up to date, namely, those parts that might influence the decisions of a young person contemplating a degree in mathematics and a possible career in the subject.

Though the book might be of best use to someone who is at the crossroads, deciding on his/her area of further studies, it does not prevent others, like me, from having a new found (or rekindled) insight into the world of mathematics. Starting with the first letter titled "Why Do Math", in which the writer explains how mathematics can be found all around us, he goes on to explain how high school students are disillusioned by the arithmetic in mathematics' clothing they... Continue reading