A suitable book

"No one ever talks to anyone in our family, we just exchange brilliances."

A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth, is a terrific book, with sympathetic characters and set during a fascinating historical period. At about 2000 pages, it took me a little less than six months to read (while life went on, and yes, I've been reading other books during that whole time).

She was used to rereading her letters a dozen times, examining for days from every possible angle some remark that someone had made to someone else about something that someone had though that someone had almost done.

Mostly it's a story about Lata, and her family's attempts to find her a suitable boy to marry. Much of the rest of the time it's about her extended family and their acquaintances. And all these domestic scenes — romantic troubles, and financial worries, and career choices — are interspersed with chronicles of the legal and procedural difficulties of recently independent, post-Partition India.

In this way it's similar in structure to War and Peace. And yes, I did skim through some of the technicalities regarding land ownwership, just as I'd skimmed through some of Tolstoy's battlefield descriptions. Not because they're not interesting. But at some point it's too much, it becomes numbing.

But, never mind. This is a minor quibble. Because mostly, until it's too much, it's very interesting.

The physical and emotional centre of War and Peace, I always felt, is Natasha's dance, where she assumes her Russianness. Also the hunt scene, the connection to the land on which Russia is built. I find it interesting that similar scenes should occur in A Suitable Boy. There is a dance, only it's a tango; Lata throws off some of her Indianness to embrace modernity. Arguably she remains of a traditional mindset, but I think this scenes sees her come into her own, be in herself. The wolf hunt has none of Tolstoy's majesty; it's pathetic, but also significant in terms of the people's relationship to the land.

Seth's writing is simply lovely.

Mrs. Rupa Mehra was confirmed in her opinion that Meenakshi was extremely odd. To steel yourself against mangoes showed a degree of iciness that was almost inhuman.

It's funny and emotional. There's music and Shakespeare, love and death, shoe factories and Hindu festivals.

It's as if he didn't exist, thought Maan — as if he's in purdah. I've heard of him but I've never seen Him — like the women of the family. I suppose they exist as well. Or perhaps they don't. Perhaps all women are just a rumour.

Jo Walton wrote a great review on Tor.com, and made this interesting observation:

Seth is writing for an anglophone audience but he doesn't hold your hand and explain everything. Nor does he throw you in at the deep end to sink. There's a very well done structure of explanation that will feel very familiar to a science fiction reader. He sometimes explains things, but he doesn't keep on doing it, and he sometimes just gives enough context that you can work it out. The whole way he uses exposition and incluing is very smooth and very much like what we're used to in genre. India in 1950 isn't as unfamiliar a world as Arrakis or Annares, except where it's weirder and even less familiar.

Also cricket and literature ("He's just a writer, he knows nothing at all about literature."). And tragedy, personal and national. The political campaign trail. Family secrets. Near-murder.

It has a lot.

Along one wall of the bus, the following message was painted in a murderous scarlet" Do not travel when drunk or with a loaded gun. But it said nothing about goats, and there were several in the bus.

Several actual historical events are woven into the narrative, for example, the 1954 Kumbh Mela stampede as well as religious riots and various political goings-on.

Mahesh Kapoor did not know either the Hindi or the English names of the birds and flowers that surrounded him, but perhaps in his present state of mind he enjoyed the garden more truly for that. It was his only refuge, and a nameless, wordless one, with birdsong its only sound — and it was dominated, when he closed his eyes, by the least intellectualizable sense — that of scent.

I'm glad to have read it. Yet, I couldn't help wishing it was a little bit shorter. (I might've preferred to read in one intensely immersive burst, rather than pace it over an extended period for the sake of a readalong with others.) Still, I miss it, and I'll be looking for the sequel. Publication of A Suitable Girl is currently slated for 2016.

Everything is magic

And it was the landscape that formed us, that made us who we were as we grew in it, that affected everything. We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one. In ignorance, we played our way through what the elves and giants had left us, taking the fairies' possession for ownership. I named the dramroads after places in The Lord of the Rings when I should have recognised that they were from The Chrysalids.

Among Others, by Jo Walton, was not what I expected it to be. And it's completely wonderful.

It's described as a story of a young woman struggling to escape a troubled childhood. Well, yes, but that makes it sound like the kind of book I'm not at all interested in reading. Mori is a messed-up teenager, in a mostly normal and self-aware kind of way. We don't relive her childhood with her — we see only fragments, are told a few memories — but it's mostly basic stuff: single mom with control issues, twin sister with whom Mori created or discovered a secret world. Yes, there's a tragic accident, but "troubled childhood" sounds like abuses and traumas that it's not. So, teenage girl, can't stand her mom, bad leg after the accident, sent to a boarding school, depressed maybe, lonely, a bit of a nerd, trying to make friends.

The book description also says she's sent to "a place all but devoid of true magic," which made me think the novel was set in some alternate fantasy land. But no, it's very firmly set in our actual world, 1980.

Mori is an utterly charming bookworm. She loves science fiction, but she reads mysteries and Thomas Hardy and Plato too. This is what makes the book for me, how she talks about the books she's excited to read, what she ordered at the library, what she unearthed at the bookstore, there's so much joy in it; but she really talks about the books, the ideas, she's developing tastes and reading attentively, and synthesizing what she's read, connecting the books, and considering alternate worlds, gender politics, social structures. She's totally growing up through these books. And then she joins the book club at the library and it's marvelous.

It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.

Here's a list of all the books Mori references. I've read barely a handful of them — makes me wonder what the heck I was reading at that age. (Douglas Adams, Thomas Hardy, Michael Moorcock, Ayn Rand, Joephine Tey, Dalton Trumbo, Margaret Atwood, Orwell, Huxley, Calvino, Somerset Maugham, Heinlein; Piers Anthony and Katherine Kurtz came later; Asimov and Lem and Doris Lessing much later still.)

(I must read Alan Garner's Red Shift.)

One thing that puzzles me is that Mori reads sci-fi, but the world she lives in has fairies, magic, witches. And that seems even odder to me if you consider the possibility that this world may be a psychological construct.

Check out the Q&A on Jo Walton's website, where there are links aplenty to great reviews.

See also the review at Tor.com: Is it magic or is it mimetic?

I thought, sitting there, that everything is magic. Using things connects them to you, being in the world connects you to the world, the sun streams down magic and people and animals and plants grow from sunlight and the world turns and everything is magic.

I would like to write something

I sat on the bench by the willows and ate my honey bun and read Triton. There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there are also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn't all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I'd like to write like Delany or Heinlein or le Guin.

— from Among Others, by Jo Walton.

Jo Walton may have achieved her character's wish.

Bibliotropic

We went down the hill to the bookshop, sort of automatically, as if that's the way all our feet wanted to turn. I said that to them.

"Bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop."

— from Among Others, by Jo Walton.