Day: February 18, 2011

Great courtroom drama. Archer never disappoints.

Brilliantly crafted fictionalized accounts of the last days of some of history’s greatest writers. Oates is superb, as always, in inventing and reinventing people and events that demand your attention even as they disturb you.

If you wish to retain any lofty and grandiose views of these famous writers – Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway – at least with respect to their personal lives, and in particular, to their end times, well then, this book isn’t for you. If you are willing however, to entertain, nay, perhaps even accept the view that greatness is not immune to feet of clay, well, then, pick it up, and prepare to be amazed by how brilliantly these short stories are executed, one by one.

I couldn’t get into this… although I’ve read other Jhabvala works in the past that were a lot more gripping…

Maybe it is sometimes the time, place and mood at a given point in time that makes one feel more into a certain type of story or setting… I’ll admit I wasn’t in the best frame of mind to find this as fascinating as I thought I might.

A nice variety of short-stories– entertaining even if you’re not a fan of Russian literature.

The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt is a story that attempts to capture and catalog the days and ways of the legendary Indian mathematician, S. Ramanujan in the early part of the twentieth century in England, at Cambridge, in particular. Ramanujan’s mathematical genius is the stuff legends are made of, and the stories that circulate in India to this day attest to that fact, not to mention the many books about him that continue to be published on his work and persona to this day.

Therefore, it was with much interest that I embarked on this book, and for the most part it is indeed a well-written story; yet, it seems at times too tedious a literary journey to undertake what with the almost endless portrayal of Ramanujan as the eccentric from the East who is dysfunctional in his social relationships with all and sundry in England even as he seems equally dysfunctional in his personal relationships with his wife and mother across the oceans. One wonders if this is indeed the price of genius: the loss of self and the lack of love–to give or receive. This characterization of his “freak factor” is juxtaposed alongside his seemingly supernatural ability with numbers and his obsession with solving the Reimann hypothesis (what is that, anyway?).

This is a story in the broadest sense about unrequited love, dreams and hopes. Ramanujan and Alice Neville are unable to break the proverbial glass ceiling in expressing their feelings for each other (although it is hazily clear that Ramanujan is as besotted with her as she is with him– why and how else would he have memorized and remembered all those songs she had taught him and sing them with her many years later?). Littlewood’s desire to make Mrs. Chase his own wife remains unrequited to the end even though she ends up bearing him not one but two children. Hardy’s past with Gaye bears a foreshadowing of what may be to come with Ramanujan, yet even those feelings remain unrequited to the very end. Finally, the piece de resistance that tops the list of unrequited items is Ramanujan’s inability to solve that most sought after theorem even though he is hailed repeatedly as the most important mathematician of the “last five hundred years”.

And so we arrive at the conclusion: death comes early–too early–at the impossible age of 33 to Ramanujan. It is senseless, mindless and meaningless, and is owing in large part of his own doing. Religious dietary restrictions be damned, my man– you should have kept that cake down instead of going into a tizzy about the fact that it was made with eggs!

So pick up this 500-page tome if you wish to catch a glimpse of this tenuous collaboration of East and West during colonial times that presents questions of the mysterious nature of human relationships, sexual identity and questions of genius.