✔ Kerala, south India ✔ Childhood memories and struggle of a broken family ✔ Tradition and expectations
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★★ Knowing you are loved less, jealously, love, taboo, nothingness, coldness, honesty - through these feelings and environment the life slowly falls apart. Haunting, emotional and beautiful.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
A friend of mine recommended this book, so I started reading it without knowing anything about it - what a glorious and emotional surprise.
It is difficult to read. First of all because it's not chronological, chapters and plot jump around and second of all, if you don't know much about Indian culture, ideas and terms, you feel left behind. So, I ended up googling a lot while reading, but it was definitely worth it.
You don't really understand what happened in earlier chapters until the end. It reminds us of the way our minds work, when you are traumatised you first feel the strong sense of fear of the moment, and slowly you establish the surroundings, it's never like, A happened thus B happened, followed by C.
The meaning and significance of the fact that it was written by an Indian woman living in India. The emotions, perspective, way of descriptions that she has as an Indian or Asian woman cannot shine through fully if she was brought up in the West. Physically living a life where you have the Caste, as a mother, as a woman, as an obstacle. The acknowledgement that you are loved less as a child, jealously, love, taboo, nothingness, coldness, honesty - through these feelings and environment the life slowly falls apart.
The best part of reading this book is to try to follow these small things. Of course it won Booker Award.
Also after reading the book I really wanted to see Kathakali, and yes I managed it, I did go to Kerala and saw it.
✔ Life in Kalimpong, India, historical fiction
✔ Class struggle and love story
✔ Gurkha movement and immigration
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★★+♥ One person is so small and can be crashed in a second, so is there any hope? In spring the Himalaya brings fragile hope, but with the rain it makes everything rotten. We live at the mercy of something we cannot control. Powerful.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
Recommended by a friend so I realised only later that it was in Kalimpong.
Through eyes of a well to do orphan girl, it looks at Gurkhaland movement in a non-romantic way; how we live in our own imagination - and how the reality bites back in nonchalant tone.
The orphan girl starts to live with her grandfather, who eats Indian food with a knife and fork, in a big house with his cook/servant.
She falls in love with a young man amid the violent Gurkha movement, and at the same time on the other side of the world the cook's son is fed up with his life in NY that's going nowhere.
One person is so small and can be crashed in a second, so in the end, is there any equality, understanding, or hope?
Everything changes, except for one thing; the Himalayas.
In spring it brings fragile hope, but the rain makes everything rotten, and we all live at the mercy of something we cannot control.
It's a feeling you get when you are in India, you physically feel some superior power, something much bigger than life.
It is comical at times but tragic in a subtle and unkind way. Powerful.
🔽 log 🔽 Beauty is a wound Cantik Itu Luka Eka Kurniawan, 2002 480 pages Read in 2024.4 check price on amazon.com
✔ Violent history and society in Indonesia ✔ Mother and daughters strong female ✔ Spirits, ghost and customs
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★★ The mixture of history and race, religions and politics and power, and living among men abusing all above. Mother's only hope is the ugly, blessed daughter. An epic drama of strong beautiful women.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
It IS a book full of violence, love and curse of the beauty. A great storytelling, of drama, an epic, of strong beautiful women who are, as it always happens, cursed by their men.
One day the town's dead prostitute comes back to life see her daughters. She cannot leave this life until she sees them, especially the ugly one, who is leading a happy life, because the outer beauty is nothing but a wound, wound that cannot be healed.
Survived the colonial past and the invasions, their story and history are so unique that this book could have only emerged from Indonesia. The mixture of history and race, religions and politics and power, and abuse of all above. Full of stories, my first Indonesian novel, and an epic.
✔ Song offerings to god ✔ First Asian Nobel prize winner ✔ Warm and spiritual
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★☆ “Song offerings” to god by Indian poet Tagore. It opens your mind and heart to another layer of the world, away from the everyday rush life.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
The famous Gitanjali.
It’s a poem so inevitably it loses the beauty when it’s translated. I also looked a bit at the Japanese translation but it was better than the English version.
“Song offerings” to god, so I’m unfortunately not familiar with the sentiment as I don’t know much, but it is nice and beautiful to read. It opens your mind and heart to another layer of the world, away from the everyday rush life.
First Asian to receive a Nobel Prize. He had a warm relationship with Japan and Japanese artists, but he was very critical of the Japanese nationalism in the 1920s and eventually stopped visiting Japan.
✔ Novel based on the life of the author
✔ Struggle as a white Indian
✔ Friendship and coming of age
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★★ His adolescence, friendship and first love, like any stories of this kind, but the sense of not belonging was too real and obvious, he really did not belong. A bittersweet love for his home, India.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
First long novel I read of Ruskin Bond, and his first novel when he was still a teenager.
It talks of his own youth, of being a white English boy raised in India and not belonging anywhere.
His adolescence, friendship and first love, like any stories of this kind, but the sense of not belonging was too real and obvious, he really did not belong.
Bittersweet, under the Indian sun the boy is undeniably in love with India, his home.
✔ Collection of short stories ✔ Nepali living in different places in the world ✔ Disaspora
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★☆ Nepal and Diaspora, sense of not belonging where they live. Far from home people's tradition and customs are distant memories while the feelings for home gets stronger.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 A collection of short stories of people who have different ties to Nepal.
It's about lives of people living in diaspora, sense of not belonging where they live. To begin with, Nepalese people in Darjeeling area have a different sense of home, and not necessarily uniformed. And how about Nepalese in Bhutan who got kicked out to Nepal? Or Muslim from Bihar in Kalimpong? A guy from Darjeeling in New York who's never been to Nepal?
The stories are subtly harsh and sad but not exaggeratingly dramatic, just like real lives of real people, they carry their own inevitable drama and the longing, between tradition and practice and sense of home. Nice short stories.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida Shehan Karunatilaka, 2022 368 pages Read in 2024.09 check price on amazon.com
✔ Magical realism ✔ Society and struggles in Sri Lanka ✔ Life after death and the world of ghosts and monsters
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★★ Provocative and rock and roll. It’s a fantasy, a magical realism that really tells the reality of Sri Lanka, through the eyes of this dead unreliable photographer/lover/gambler. It’s a loud music in a book.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
The book I’ve been looking forward to read, though I tried not to know the plot in advance. So if you don’t want to know anything else, just know that you will love it, and don’t read further, even if you do, it’ll be beyond your imagination anyway though.
So, first you are dead, and you need to find out why and who did it. There are ghosts and monsters, it’s a mystery, in modern Sri Lanka, in a messy war – you can have these key words and still it’s way over what you might expect.
It’s difficult to get into the story without some knowledge of Sri Lanka but it slowly takes you to its world.
It addresses the protagonist as “you” so it feels like you’re discovering it all with him. Him being a lousy war photographer, gambler and a unfaithful lover who’s gay; he is an anti-hero who is rather hateful, but, somehow becomes not so hateful after you spend 7 moons with him.
It’s provocative, anything can happen here. It’s a fantasy as much as it’s the reality in Sri Lanka. Non stop greatness that you can’t pigeon hole it, a reading experience that’s similar to being in a room with loud rock music, or whatever your favourite music is.
Selected Stories of Rabindranath Tagore Rabindranath Tagore, 1886- India 372 pages Read in 2023.04 check price on amazon.com
✔ From India’s greatest poet ✔ Short stories ✔ Various theme from love to ghost
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★★ These stories vary in the theme or genre, might be a love story, or a ghost story, or about family or friendship. It shows how expansive his talent is, but more significantly his stories are about honest, humble, and poor people.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
I have read about how great Tagore’s works are, but until you read them, experience them, you don’t really know, of course.
There are many of “selected works of” kind of books, this one is from Fingerprint in India.
These stories vary in the theme or genre, might be a love story, or a ghost story, or about family or friendship. It shows how expansive his talent is, but more significantly his stories are about honest, humble, and poor people. That is why after more than 100 years they do not get old and continue to touch people all over Bengal, India, Asia and beyond.
Some stories stand out more than others to me, like “The river stairs”, “The Cabuliwalla”, “The son of Rashimani”, “The master Mashai” “Living or Dead”, “Fair neighbour”
My grandmother's tweets
Geeta Gopalakrishnan, 2018
India
340 pages
Read in 2023.07
Check price on Amazon.com
✔ Teaching of grandmothers from South India
✔ Tamil traditions
✔ Warm wisdom
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★☆ Collection of stories associated with wise words passed down from Avvaiyar (a female poet from Tamil), female to female. Wisdom and warmth of the ancient India.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
Another book gift when I was in India.
It tells little stories associated with wise words passed down from Avvaiyar (a female poet from Tamil, southern India, from 12th century), female to female.
It's not something to read like a story, something to open time to time to enjoy the nice little stories,
It's a collection of little famous or historical, or legendary quick stories, so not really something to read all in one go, but something to go back to time to time.
Wisdom and warmth of the ancient India.
✔ White Indian author
✔ Short love stories
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★☆ Selection of short stories from India's great author. Most of them are bittersweet; like it's almost a love story but not quite, it ends before it begins, so brief that it's almost a dream.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
Compilation of short stories, of love from one of the most important Indian writers, he turned 89. (now in 2025 he's 91)
They are written in different stages of the author's life, and his stories seem very personal.
Many of the main characters' names are Ruskin, or Rusky, and they are based in Himachal, so it's not difficult to imagine that they are based on his childhood or youth.
Most of them are bittersweet, like it's almost a love story but not quite.
It ends before it begins, or it's so brief that it's almost a dream.
Some stories are in the train, maybe on the same line, or one of his beloved, Sushila, reappears in another story, many of his girls simply disappear - yes, just like a dream.
🔽 Related pages 🔽
Ruskin Bond A room on the roof
✔ Pride and Prejudice ✔ Girls and young society of Pakistan ✔ Uplifting
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★☆ What it says on the tin. Refreshing to read the comic side of Pakistani girls, the real Pakistan written by a woman born in Pakistan an it's lovely.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
Pakistani Pride and Prejudice. It's what it says in the tin.
I haven't read Pride and Prejudice (at this point), so can't judge on the similarities or references but even so it's entertaining.
It talks about the culture and of course the food of Pakistan, so purely for that it's fun. It could look too caricaturistic, so it sounds too much like it's written for the West, but still it's refreshing to read the comic side of Pakistani girls, and this is the real Pakistan written by a woman born in Pakistan an it's lovely, no doubt it's a pleasant read.
The chatty girls are definitely a homage to the original.
The Bangalore Detective Club Harini Nagendra, 2022 India 292 pages Read in 2022.12 check price on amazon.com
✔ Mystery from an Indian author ✔ Housewife detective ✔ Life in Bangalore in 1920
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★☆ Set in 1920 Bangalore, a freshly married housewife goes around the city to solve mysteries. Nice locations and food – a nice little crime novel for India lovers.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
Set in 1920 Bangalore, Kaveri only recently married to a doctor and was expecting a quiet life, instead she goes around the city to solve a murder. A bit of tension with British is always a good pinch of spice. There are some treats, of famous locations in Bangalore and food – a nice little crime novel for anyone who’s interested in India.
What’s a bit unusual is that the author is an ecologist, so with her background like that I’m more looking forward to reading her other books.
The White Tiger Aravind Adiga, 2008 India 336 pages Read in 2021.04 check on amazon.com
✔ Booker Prize ✔ Entrepreneurship of India ✔ Violence and power struggles
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★★ Exciting as I expected. So raw, so angry, seem so nonchalant but has full of energy, just like today’s India and their youths. It’s so easy to dismiss India merely as a place to get enlightenment and exotic etc, but this is also the reality.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
Netflix was starting the film, so I had to get the book first.
This was as exciting as I expected. So raw, so angry, seem so nonchalant but has full of energy, just like today’s India the world imagine. It’s so easy to dismiss India merely as a place to get enlightenment and exotic, but this is also the reality, it’s where people live and try to go further than what their parents achieved, just like any other place in the world.
While it’s raw and its people all tangled up, they know their places, like caste, it’s in their skin. It’s similar to Japan in a sense that this is Asia, just that Japan doesn’t have that big proportion of poor or extremely poor which makes this story more exciting and energetic.
As our protagonist predicts here, in his lifetime all white men die out and brown and yellow men rule the world – might not be that far from truth.
The Netflix film was also good, with Priyanka Chopra, as great as ever, of course it doesn’t have the Bollywood dance or music but it has the energy, power and the different music to pump up the story.
✔ Indian classic ✔ Strong female characters ✔ Strange friendship between the wife and the lover
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★☆ A beautiful widow. She cannot give up her pursuit for happiness. Chokher Bali, the sand in the eye, she disturbs everything she touches and disappears. A strong sense of un-happiness.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
My first Tagore. This is actually popular that it’s made into film and TV series in India. The sentiment is close to what they have in Japan: husband-wife relation, mother-son, or even mother-in-law and wife, it’s something many in Asia can easily understand, and cannot avoid.
Then comes the beautiful widow. Despote “her place” as a widow, she cannot give up her pursuit for affection and happiness. Chokher Bali, the sand in the eye, the annoying thing, she arrives and disturbs everything she touches. And like an eyesore, before you know it it goes away and the life is back to normal, the witch is punished.
Her happiness was taken away because she’s a widow, she brings bad things. Could they ever blame her? A strong sense of un-happiness.
✔ Korean zainichi in Japan ✔ Historical fiction World War Two ✔ Mother and daughter relationship
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★★ Life of a Korean woman who survived all the difficulties the life threw at her. And about her beloved ones, Korean or Japanese. Life is a Pachinko. It’s not fair. You’re bound to lose. But you keep playing. An epic.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
Life of a Korean woman who survived all the difficulties the life threw at her. And about her beloved ones, Korean or Japanese.
By narrowing down the novel to one woman’s life, it tells about real struggles, somehow making it universal. The history of Japan and Korea, or Japanese and Koreans, is not an easy one to fully grasp – because it’s still alive. The war is partly to be blamed but it’s not that simple. The book is rich, depicts how little luck or timing could change your life, it is probably difficult to understand if you’re not Asian beyond it being “fascinating”.
Again Koreans do better in storytelling. It’s dramatic, but that’s how it was in Japan up to the early 90s.
Life is a party, Fellini says. But here this novel tells you, life is a Pachinko. It’s not fair. You’re bound to lose, but you keep playing.
✔ A gripping trilogy from an Indian author ✔ Strong, inter-cultural friendship on a slave ship ✔ Historical fiction
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★★ In India, under British, Opium farming leading up to the Opium War. You meet some interesting strong characters. It’s gripping, a grand storytelling.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
I'd heard of it for a while and finally, finally started and instantly it was obvious, this is one if those great books.
In India, under British, Opium farming leading up to the Opium War. That's already enough for me to like the book even without even opening it.
And immediately you meet some interesting strong characters. Deeti who had a miserable married life, Paulette and Jodu and their unique friendship, a delicate Raja, Zachary who leads us into the mesmerising journeys. They all meet on Ibis the slaving ship, all carrying their own destinies - it's as intense as it sounds. Some of detailed descriptions of ship and sailing are hard for me to follow but that doesn't stop me from getting excited at every page.
It's a trilogy so there are 2 more books to go to give the full view on the story but so far, it's gripping, grand storytelling. Need to read 2 and 3 soon.
Sea of Poppies
赤パンの本棚 akapan's bookshelf 