Novella November: Ghachar Ghochar + Aura

Consider me embarrassed as Ghachar Ghochar is my first introduction to South Asian/Indian literature. It shouldn't have been. It won't be my last for sure, but I do kind of wish I had read something a bit more...profound. 

Vivek Shanbhag is a good writer. That above statement isn't a slight to his talent. His sentences are crisp, clean, with no frills, but are plentiful in meaning. Srinath Perura is also a great translator as the translated prose goes down smooth and easy...but that's this book's exact problem: It's too easy. 

There isn't much...here. A family was once poor and then they become rich and the money ruins them --- everything becomes ghachar ghochar: a tangled mess. Money can't buy it. Money's too tight to mention. Money changes everything. Mo' money mo' problems. I have heard all the songs, thus there isn't anything enlightening, or arresting about this family's downfall, it was just the inevitable.

"It's true what they say--it's not we who control money, it's the money that controls us. When there's only a little, it behaves meekly; when it grows, it becomes brash and has its way with us. Money had swept us up and flung us in the midst of a whirlwind."

Interest lies in the narration, this done by the loafer son. He's neither hero or voice of reason, and it's a quiet, bold choice for Shanbhag as this unnamed manchild (what is with me reading books with nameless characters this year?) isn't likeable in the slightest, and yes, that must be the point. He is observant in how his family has devolved, but nonchalant and self-victimizing in the tell. He wanders and lays about, has a "job" in the family's spice business but it's only a baseless title, as he never works for the hefty paycheck he receives like clockwork in his bank account. His sister is a selfish temperamental snob. His mother a blind loyalist to the shift of dynamics, with fears she'll be encroached upon by whatever woman her son or brother-in-law bring into the home. His father morphs from a hard-working provider to a standby mute. As they become shells of themselves, they all orbit around the ambitious, borderline autocratic uncle whose questionable business practices have gifted them this lush life --- and they dare not question it for fear of losing their newfound wealth. <--- The characters are there, but they don't evolve beyond this and feel predictable. Happy and supportive when poor, apathetic and amoral when rich. No shading, no surprises. Honestly, the family didn't seem that wholesome and devoted even while poor, so the impact of their greed wasn't jarring to me. 

There's an additional whiff of sexism that wafts in the text that didn't sit right with me. The intrusion of our narrator's wife, Anita, a liberated woman disrupts the family dynamic with her "quaint" middle-class ideals, and headstrong, yet empathetic personality. While she's painted as an disagreeable outsider by our narrator, she's actually the character I agreed with the most (#nastywomenunite). Not sure if Shanbhag is flexing realism within the fictitious or making himself a stand-in for his narrator (I always expect the latter when the character is mysteriously ~unnamed~), but there are some cringing dialogue that volleys between the family that is quite chauvinistic and bizarre, especially a really weird conversation about justifying men murdering their wives. Yeah... I'm not well-versed on the treatment of women in Indian culture, but since shitty men come in all colors, creeds and nationalities, I can deduce within the book's world, women are considered second class and a nuisance, especially to our pissbaby narrator.

Flipping that argument is how Shanbhag ascribes a double standard when it comes to our narrator's marriage to Anita. First it's a little...funny our narrator disparages strong women, this while he chooses Anita for a wife, this as she seems to be of independent mind and purpose, traits and drive he lacks. His interest in marriage is also...funny, as he's much more eager to get married to Anita than she is to him, which is quite the switch of gender dynamics. In a way, our narrator is emasculated from both sides, by his 'feminist' wife and by his moneyed uncle, and that's why this book is almost a lengthy complaint of this realization. <---Fascinating sketch there, but for how slim this book is, it doesn't feel satisfying or harbors much depth. And that ending? Oof. So unfulfilled.

All while reading I kept thinking that there was something missing, and that maybe this would be one of the few times I felt a novella needed more pages, more subplots, more depth. This book just lacks a point, or rather a unique outlook. Sure money corrupts, sure money is the root of all evil, sure mo' money breeds mo' problems...and what? This book is too flimsy to be a morality tale, as it ends up being no more than an elaborate synopsis. Disappointing.

////

"What is Aura expecting of you? What does she want, what does she want?"

I'm wondering that still after reading. What is Aura, Carlos Fuentes' most well-known, celebrated story expecting of me? What does it want? --- and maybe the questions lingering is the point. 1962 knocked back this quick drink of Gothic horror that broke ground for its warped magical realist imagery and just plain weirdness. Some decades and even weirder horror stories and films later, it has lost its luster a touch. Just a touch...

For Fuentes' aromatic and engaging writing, Aura is disjointed --- appropriately so. It has the feel of entering an opaque, congested nightmare, where it strips the fear to its naked core and breeds doubt and confusion. Told in the second person --- to where I got the nostalgic feels of it being a Choose Your Own Adventure tale --- but "we" are supposed to be Felipe Montero, a young historian who is lured by an job advertisement that seems destined for him. The advertisement leads him to the doorstep of Consuelo Llorente, a spectral, aging widow who wants Montero to organize, transcribe, and publish the memoirs of her deceased husband, General Llorente, this before she dies. Montero has some apprehension about the job till his eyes meet the magnetic green ones of Aura, Consuelo's niece, whom becomes Montero's focus of desire as much as the catalyst for his destiny. To say more would ruin the twisted trip this short novel draws one into. 

If I could go back, I'd have carved out time in my insomniac hours to read this straight through, as this story demands that you're about as delirious and woozy as the prose itself. Reading a chapter daily, I suppressed a lot of dread and suspense, leading me to feel a bit lukewarm about the whole ordeal. Still there was a lot of weirdness to go around to unmoor me during my readings: There is a red-eyed rabbit named Saga, scuttling rats and screeching unseen cats, thick, heady foliage that shrouds the perception and senses --- you have no exact grounding of where you're at that is unsettling. 

Consuelo has a Miss Havisham vibe about her, her lounging in her bed, drifting around her home, and dancing with her dead husband's military uniform was some chilling character imagery. The collision course of the past intruding into the present, blurring the distinction of the two is a special kind of terror that I particular enjoy. For all its talks of it being 'magic realism', Aura has more in common with the crumbling mansions by the moors in 19th Century Gothic romances and Lovecraftian grotesque theater, than the usual surrealistic pillows Latin literature offers, but that's just me.

Still, for me, there was *too much* going on. Cats, goats, rodents, a Voodoo doll even shows up under a dinner plate...its a exhaustive mosaic of people, animals, plants, hallways, rooms, lights, colors, objects --- of course all colliding together to stoke the eeriness --- but it lent things to become too abstract in a way that left me questioning where Fuentes was going with this and if he had made an oops by overstuffing his narrative with every horror trope known.

...then again (and once again) that's probably the point, to be unsettled, disoriented and confined in this batshit macabre nightmare, and nothing more. Not sure if I really enjoyed the journey Aura took me on, but the writing and the weirdness made this still a worthwhile read.

Novella November: Plague Of Hollywood Locusts

"I'm going to be a star some day," she announced as though daring him to contradict her. "It's my life. It's the only thing in the whole world that I want. If I'm not, I'll commit suicide.”

At one point in my life I wanted to be an actress.

Yeah, when have you not heard that line? But seriously, I wanted to be one because of what I naively thought it represented --- you know --- fame, wealth, glamour, prestige, insta-acceptance, the chance to act with Benicio Del Toro (sorry, I love me some Benicio Del Toro). I even did theater for three years in high school just to see if I had what it takes to become a true thespian. Within a few years of being an understudy-turned-sound-director-turned-make-up-artist, I realized that just because my mother calls me a "drama queen" doesn’t make me an actress cause the fact stands that I'm a terrible actress. Truly terrible. Trust me, I'm someone who thrives better behind the scenes, not front and center.

For this, to some extent, I envied the stage kids, the kids who could cry on cue and who sung show tunes with colorful gusto at the drop of a fedora. These kids, my classmates, were going to be ACTORS, maybe not famous ones, but they were excelling at my girlhood fantasy to be a bronze Meryl Streep. Still, I think I admired them more for how they had the same teeth-grinding spirit I now have about writing. No matter what happened, they were never going to stop acting, never going to extinguish their dreams no matter how many bit parts, failed auditions, and false hopes they encountered. They held out hope that one day all the struggle and sweat would be worth it.

But what happens when reality sets in? When those bit parts never transpire? When your dream is deferred and denied over and over again into a webbed net of jaded insanity?

You get The Day of the Locust.

Novella November: The Love Child

"A love-child, the phrase had surged up from her inner consciousness, and she spoke it without realizing what it implied. It just did express what Clarissa truly was to her---the creation of the love of all her being. It was the truth, and in face of the truth she knew that no one could take the child away. She had saved her."

Being an only child led me to manifest Jasmine. She was a bit older than me, smarter, cooler, owned a pink Corvette, and had luxurious glitter dusted hair that she dragged across the floor. I told anyone who'd listen that Jasmine (yes, she was named after Aladdin's main squeeze) was my sister. My parents played along. They poured extra Kool-Aid for her, set a placemat at our table for her, made sure she was buckled up in the backseat --- for my benefit they entertained this second "daughter".

After some time Jasmine started to become an issue, this when I began to talk about her outside of the comforts of home. Jasmine never went to school with me (she was older and cooler remember?), but I blabbed about her enough to where she became known to my teacher. Little did I know that I had successfully convinced her of Jasmine's existence so much so that when my parents came to a PTA meeting (yes, my parents actually went to those) my teacher asked about Jasmine's whereabouts and was greeted with my parents' quizzical stares.

Jasmine is no more, as all the "imaginary friends" I have now are characters in stories that I have hibernating in unfinished word docs, but it's a little funny that what made Jasmine more "alive" was not me just believing in her existence, but that I kept her in the confides of home, and once she became realized outside of that, poof! she was gone. Gone because she wasn't just exclusive to me anymore. I had messed up giving her away. Reality had intruded the fantasy. In short, I grew up.

To create a person out of thin air, give them shape and identity and then be able to convince others of such a creation requires an intimacy that is challenging to explain. Of course psychoanalysts, child experts whathaveyou have tried to link the appearance of an imaginary friend to a child having a social "problem", and since only children are sheltered little monsters who bray at the moon at midnight every third Thursday, we are classified as having such a "problem." (I'm kidding) True, I created Jasmine's existence due to a desire to have siblings, but it also was an inkling of the storytelling life I would quasi-live one day, and the wild imagination that I continue to have all so I can keep a little fantasy in my reality.

Maybe that's why I was drawn to this odd little novella as The Love Child actually delves into that weird, sorta Frankenstein-equse way we 'create' individuals in our adolescent, and how they somehow translate towards our adulthood. The Love Child delves a little further as it asks the question: what would happen if you conjured up your imaginary friend as an adult? If you're Agatha Bodenham, you'd play along, that is, till such a creation begins to consume you greatly...

Novella November: Seasons Change

"Things come in three major degrees in the human experience, I think. There's good, bad, and terrible. And as you go down into progressive darkness toward terrible, it gets harder and harder to make subdivisions."

"An ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic" is how Stephen King described the novella in the afterword of this collection, and of course he of all authors would say that.

King laughs in the face of the 'slim novel' as even his leaner efforts seem to feel wide, and wander around in their labyrinths longer than the norm. It's why I wondered if placing this book among the miscellany of novellas I read and revisited for this monthly series was a bit fair. Different Seasons is a whopper at 600+ pages, as it contains not one little novel, but four B-I-G novels. The stories pack a punch, and have in a way, outgrown the spines they've been sewn in as three of the four novels have all gone on to become feature films, two of them  (Rita Hayworth & The Shawshank Redemption and The Body) now considered to be classics and some of King's best adaptations set to celluloid.

Different Seasons itself is also considered to be his best collected work of shorts and novellas for this reason, and I concur. For a time I thought Night Shift had that title on lock, but nah, Different Seasons yanks that crown off of its head, as he doles out some of his finest writing and introduces us to some of his most enduring characters in this collection.

Released in 1982, Different Seasons was considered "un-publishable" at the time due the four tales detouring away from the horror genre that made King serious coin, and it's true, this collection is devoid of supernatural elements, but there are things present that are tangible to terrify and evoke shivers. King excels at putting a lens on humanity (and inhumanity), making humans being as monstrous as we are capable to be, and this collection knows no different. The "monsters" in Different Seasons, whether it be the occupants in a looming maximum penitentiary, a former Nazi war criminal and his psychopathic adolescent tormentor, or four young boys who come face to face with death, do roam, and roam a range that only King himself could concoct.

Novella November: The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie

"Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life"

Dead Poets Society. To Sir with Love. Lean On Me. Stand & Deliver. Mona Lisa Smile --- Miss Jean Brodie tosses a floral scarf across her shoulders and scoffs at those narratives about teachers who inspire and want their students to succeed. Inspire students? Pish posh. Urge students to succeed? Sure you jest!

Jean Brodie uses the classroom as her own stage. She is the star of a show called "Miss Jean Brodie in Her Prime" and she wants everybody to understand that being in one’s prime is the "crème de la crème".

Miss Brodie is a teacher at a Scottish girls' school during the 1930s. She is charming, self-assured, well-read, well-traveled, and an arresting storyteller with a swell of opinions on just about, well, everything.

She's also full of shit. So full of it.

Sure, she's got wit and sass. Sure, she's a raconteur of an unconventional sort, but she's also manipulative and a narcissist. She's also a Fascist. Truly. She stans for Mussolini and Francisco Franco. If she was around today she’d follow them on Twitter, write annoying think pieces on her Tumblr, and set up a GoFundMe in order to gather donations to help Mussolini 'improve' Italy. Aside from her love of Fascist dictators, her self-absorbed foolishness makes her quite dangerous, unfit to even be an orator of any kind, but there she is, her Roman nose held high in the air, teaching at a girls' school, "putting old heads on young shoulders".

It's also a shame that she has her admirers. Six impressionable students named Sandy, Mary, Eunice, Rose, Monica, and Jenny who are dubbed "the Brodie set". The girls hang onto Brodie's every word, idolizing her to points of extreme influence. They eat, sleep, and live Brodie. Two of them even write fan fiction about Miss Brodie (and as a bonus Spark provides every cringing word of it!).

In the book we follow the girls as they age and Miss Brodie being ever present in their lives and never wavering in encouraging a cult of personality between her 'set'. Brodie is so invested in these girls that she goes so far as to spin fantasy lives for them, "predicting" how they will end up (one girl is to be known for her "sex", though at 13 she’s giggling about sex) Yet, Miss Brodie doesn't realize that her idea to put "old heads on young shoulders" is soon to backfire, because as the girls mature and become more fully-formed individuals, the glow around Brodie begins to dull, with one member of the Brodie brood falling into disdain for her once beloved mentor, betraying her in the end.

Novella November: Breakfast Of Fancy Fakery With Holly Golighty

"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell", Holly advised him. "You can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get."

I must be in the minority, but as much as I adore me some Audrey Hepburn, I never warmed to her role as Holly Golightly in Blake Edwards' 1961 cinema classic, Breakfast at Tiffany's. I truly disliked the movie when I first saw it, and when I tried watching it again about a year ago, I still felt cold towards it. The iconic and stylish fashions Audrey sported throughout was the only thing that kept my eyes on it, and can we just say that Mickey Rooney in "yellow face" is about the most offensive on-screen performance next to well… Flex Alexander slapping chalk and wet baby powder on his face to portray Michael Jackson? (Yes, that was an actual thing that some people spent money on, recorded, and foisted upon human eyes…welcome to your future nightmares...)

So why read the source material for a film I have such an aversion too? Because books are always often better than the movie (duh) and Truman Capote is one hell of a writer (double duh). He is. He's a natural born storyteller who during his reign possessed the sassiest tongue from the South, and if he was alive today would have the shadiest Twitter log ever. His prose is so delightful and dagger-sharp, and tinged with just the right balance of purple. It's more so lavender and plum --- the relatives of purple --- to where you're whisked into word wonderment while reading, but never do you feel like you're suffocating on adjectives the whole time. He’s also a master at autopsying his characters right down to the atom. Holly Golightly would just be some insufferable white girl in someone’s inexperienced hands, but in Capote's she’s a "wild thing", untamable and feral, with dimensions that rival the facets on the diamonds she longs for from Tiffany's window displays.

Most consider In Cold Blood as Capote's masterpiece, but I don't know, as much as it is the godfather of true crime novels, I enjoyed reading Breakfast At Tiffany's a lot more and found it lingering in my mind longer. Of course, these two tales are incomparable. One is written as fiction, the other as fact; one is set in the rural Midwest, the other in the bustle of New York City. Night and day these stories are, but both books are about desperate, lost people who make poor choices over and over, because they don’t know another way and don’t care to find the exit sign, even when its glowing red in their face.

Novella November: The Shape of Mrs. Caliban

"You are too frightened. It spoils your enjoyment." / "Larry, you're all I've got"

Let's get this out of the way...

Mrs. Caliban was The Shape of Water before The Shape of Water. And yes, it too is about a woman who gets her freak on with a sea creature.

Oh, and you thought Guillermo Del Toro's Academy Award-winning film (and it's book accompaniment) was wholly original?* Surely you jest...

Now whether Del Toro was inspired by Rachel Ingalls' slim novel from 1982 is up for debate (Del Toro has stated that he was inspired by the romantic undertones in the creature feature classic Creature From The Black Lagoon), but it's not hard to detect that something was cribbed, as both posses strikingly similar threads of DNA whereas a lonely woman, stifled silent by her oppressive environment finds solace and personal freedom through loving an equally misunderstood sea monster. Both too also blur the lines of normal and abnormal (or how we define such...), but Mrs. Caliban, for me, detours into something deeper. Much deeper.