The Naming Conundrum

  

How many people with similar names can you tolerate in a story??

Well, I get totally lost whenever I pick this book "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Every time a character is mentioned, I have to stop for a minute to figure out who exactly he is and why he is doing whatever he is doing. Do you, my dear reader (if there's any), wonder why?? Because they all have same names. 
Its a story of many generations of the strangest of families living in a town called Macondo in "the world that was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point." So this family got hold of just two names Arcadio and Aureliano and let them suffice for generations to come. And the children came from so many various sources that it becomes really hard to keep track. Likewise, so many events keep occurring in such abrupt fashion in it that its mind-boggling to remember the sequence.

About the story: it is interesting and funny and strange. It's my first encounter with Magic Realism, a genre where magic elements are a natural part in an otherwise mundane, realistic environment. Things are just going the normal way, well as normal as this strange family can manage, and then suddenly things start flying, people come back from death, at one time, the whole town suffers from insomnia and when they have been awake for months or may be years and have started losing their memory, suddenly they come back to normal.

So I am still reading it, rather slowly. But honestly, I cannot make any sense of events and cannot tell whether the Arcadio and Aureliano being mentioned are son or grandson or great-grandson of the original Arcadio.

The Spell Has Broken..

The Casual Vacancy by J K Rowling:

I finally managed to complete it!!!

My opinion of this novel is a blend of like and dislike or more appropriately annoyance, although I am less annoyed now than a few days ago. It took me almost two months to complete it or to be more accurate, it took me two months to read its first half. It is because of this novel that I have 5 books on my currently-reading list. In just could not stick to it and kept on finding something else to read. More than half of it is dull and tiresome. It falls into that category of books that I usually leave unfinished, but I just could not do it with Rowling. In the second half, however, things start to speed up and it moves towards such a disastrous and dramatic end that it changes every single character's life and to a large extent, my opinion as well.

The story is about a small town Pagford and its local politics. It is about petty problems of everyday  which do not sound a great deal to us but they actually define some people's entire life. It shows the result of prejudices and social negligence and of failing to understand the depth of the problems that remain eclipsed by seemingly more important ones.

The most interesting that I found in this book is the way that Rowling has gradually built her different characters that belong to common families from the same small town but are so different in their attitudes. It relates the events that follow the local Councillor Barry Fairbrother's sudden death and now at the end I realize that this death was the cause of so much change and that so much depended on one person.

The Mollisons whose entire life is gossip. They enjoy nothing more that pulling other people's legs. They are materialistic, jealous and prejudiced and feel so self-important that they are not even affected by the graveness of death. Rather they are just happy that it served their prejudice well. Their reaction to Fairbrother's death was that they had a news to tell people and to boast that they knew about it and others did not. They even enjoyed shocking the deceased friend with the news. They considered their dislike of Fields (which was another small town attached to Pagford for which Pagford council had to provide funds) more important than the many problems people would suffer if the two towns' association was broken. And this dislike was something based on a stupid history which really did not involve people who are living in the present. Even after the head of family and notoriously obese Howard Mollison experiences heart attack and is bed-ridden, his wife actually enjoys that she is getting all the attention.

Their first reaction to Fairbrother's death was to celebrate the fact that now they would be able to get rid of Fields, after Howard's son Miles Mollison will take the seat of the Councillor, something his wife is not happy about and they end up place their married life in jeopardy.

Then there are the Jawanda family and Wall family, who were friends and allies with Barry Fairbrother and intend to carry on his good work. Collin Wall, who is also the Headmaster of the local school, decides to participate in the election against Miles Mollison. But Collin Wall has a weak personality and he does not get along well with his adopted son Stuart Wall, who is literally the wild teenager who annoys his parents just for the fun of it.

It feels like half of the novel comprises of parents versus teenagers shouting match, that is painfully customary in Pagford and Fields.

The Jawanda family also have some difficult relationships at home. their youngest daughter Sukhvinder is constantly being compared to her overachieving siblings and she ends up having a habit of hurting herself. Though at last she manages to get the attention of her parents but the account of her life tells the consequences of the parent-children communication gap.

At this point I am realizing that Rowling somehow made it sound so funny. It did not feel like I was reading something that addressed some very serious issues.

Then there are Weedons. They are mostly treated as social outcasts. They are involved in drugs and are living an unruly life. They represent a class of people who are shunned by the society, which fails to understand the causes that shaped their lives and refuses to help them to recover. This family ends up in a catastrophic situation.

The life of the Price family is also interesting in another way. They include a short-tempered, abusing father, a frightened , indecisive mother and two boys with confidence problems.

Its great how Rowling has portrayed simple, common people to be so different for one another and how they cultivate a new generation with the traits that are a consequence of their own.

To sum up: character building was great, writing was good, some things like teenagers' unruly activities and adults' gossip habits were overdone and its end leaves an impact. So in short, worth reading (but don't expect to find any thrill).

Actually I now realize that there are so few books I have ever read talk about society in general. They are mostly about a few characters. They very rarely address different kinds of people and their lives in a social setup. So for me, it was a different type of book. And as I successfully completed it at last, I just want to believe that "All is well that ends well".

I hope J K Rowling keeps writing (children stuff I mean)!

Insurgent (Divergent # 2) by Veronica Roth

Once again a great demonstration of different people standing by a specific set of values. The subject fascinated me greatly in Divergent, in which the mostly described faction was Dauntless and probably Abnegation. It was even more interesting to meet with Candor and Amity and Erudite and the Factionless.

The book begins right where Divergent ended. Tris, Four and a couple of others running for their lives after having ended the simulation and finally put an end to the horrifying manslaughter masterminded by Erudite. They seek refuge in Amity headquarters. Amity, being the Peaceful offer them safe home. Meanwhile, Tris is having difficulty living with herself and Four with his father. At this point, Beatrice Prior of Insurgent sounds more and more like Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games. That is accounted for by the similarities in situations, not the similarities in the two stories, as some people point out. Tris had to kill one of her best friend from Dauntless in order to save herself so she could put an end to simulation, she being the only one 'awake' (not under simulation). Personally I think that idea of man-controlling is great. I don't know if its new or not but it fits perfectly in the story.

The book is slow and a little dragging in the beginning, for almost 100 pages but later it picks up pace.

Nobody but Erudite and only one living Abnegation leader Marcus, Four's father, knows the reason that drove Erudite to kill a whole faction. The Dauntless, after waking from simulation, the Attack Simulation as they call it, and finding themselves to having been used for murder, are divided into two groups now. Some have joined hands with Erudite, thus called Dauntless Traitors and others have sought refuge in Amity and Candor headquarters.

Its just fascinating how Amity places the need to keep peace above everything. They even mix a calming serum in their bread. They avoid fighting at all costs, even if it betrays reason.

The Amity headquarters are raided by Erudite and dauntless Traitors to find Tris and Four and once again they have to run for their lives. This time they end up with Candor.Here we find ourselves with the most straight-forward people, who cannot stay quiet about a single thing. Like Amity's calming drought,they have Truth Serum to get the truth out of anybody. Turns out that being the most open-mouthed does not make them useful at all and they are supposedly the expendable faction, because they do not produce anything that is required for sustenance. So now Erudite threatens Candor, which does the trick. The Candor Leader, being utterly unable to 'keep the truth caged' immediately declares that they are no longer supporting the refugees.

So now Tris and Four finds themselves with the Factionless and their crude life style.

The Dauntless return to their own headquarters to plan a strategy against Erudite, but Erudite are already a step ahead, as they had already injected most of them with a long-lasting simulation serum, which they now use to stage forced suicides of young Dauntless and unless they hand themselves the Divergent for experimenting, it would continue. Divergents are now commonly known, thanks to Truth Serum of Candor. So Beatrice hands herself to Erudite and was just about to be executed when she is rescued in a most astonishing way.

Tris realizes that she still wants to live, which she seemed to have forgotten due to her depression over being a murderer and having witnessed her parents deaths. She was being pretty reckless before that.

Now they join hands with the Factionless to destroy all the data that is Erudite's power and together they attack the Erudite. At this time, however, Tris works separately to recover a file that was left with Erudite leader. This file is supposed to be the reason for all the disaster and for Tris's parents' death.

Why the Divergent are so threatening to Erudite remains a mystery till the very end.

It continues to reveal how people holding for different values will make different choices. Erudite, who believe in cold logic see no reason for them to be forced to leave their well-established system of living. Abnegation, on the other hand, do not place their own system above anybody's life.
I have recounted a lot from the book, but by no means this tells the complete story. There is yet a lot to be discovered and it ends in such a way that makes you want to grab the next book right away. But we cannot get everything we want. We have to wait for months for the sequel to be released. I hope its publication is not delayed even further than that.