Inconsequential

Maybe it’s something very simple
Perhaps all that I need
is really what the doctor ordered
antidepressants.

Death
is not always undesirable
the great liberator
death
never seemed more beautiful
than today.

Poem – The Siege

The Siege

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I watched as the flower was crushed,

Under the stone wheel of the cannon,

I stared as blood flowed and seeped into the earth,

I screamed when my eyes would cry no more,

And my throat was hoarse.

I bled and the land bled with me,

The hands that stole our lives, stole our memories too.

We are lost and homeless,

Our fields cut up and given to our enemies,

But we will return and snatch them back,

The green fields whose souls are tied to ours,

We will return,

When the blood of the dead shall rise with the earth

The red earth will fly on the wind,

It will touch the fields and the land where it once ran.

The voices of the earth will cry one by one,

“I am here, I am here,

I exist, I love, and I dance,

I am free.”

(krystalMage)

Poem

The horizon will stretch forward and blot out the sun,

The rain of arrows will swallow the beating heart on the battlefield.

Spears will thrust, swords will slice

And blood will fall like water from the sky.

Book Review: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins,

My sin, my soul.

 

‘Lolita’ has long ruled the imagination of intellectuals the world over. Vladimir Nabokov faced a multitude of hurdles to get the book published, as no American firm would even touch the manuscript, calling it a sinister and veiled attempt at publicising pornography. Nabokov’s fortunes changed in 1955 when a Paris firm offered to publish the book But it was little consolation to Nabokov, since the firm was also the honorary publisher of undisguised, uninhibited pornographic works such as “White Thighs”, “With Open Mouth”, and “The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe”.

The uproar that greeted the publication of the book surprisingly originated in Europe. In America, the seeds of the Sexual Revolution had already been sown, issues such as sexuality and teen sex were gaining dominance in University circles and also the Sunday Times.

Parents were more concerned about the editorial in The Sunday Times that advocated greater sexual liberties for the young rather than an obscure book written by an obscure Russian who had settled in America. Things in Europe were not so calm however. England banned the book and pressurised France to do the same.

The book remained banned for close to two years in most European nations where critics and readers alike raged against the book. However, despite the uproar and the controversy surrounding the book, “Lolita” remains one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is the story of a self-professed paedophile, Hubert Humbert, and the unfortunate object of his lust, Dolores Haze. Humbert delights in the charms that a prepubescent girl-child, the “nymphet” can give to a man. His detailed description of the physicality of a nymphet often has him breaking into ecstasy. Humbert describes himself as helpless in the face of a nymphet’s power, relegating his sexual aggression and lust to the seductive power that a nymphet possesses.

“You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your spine (oh how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs – the slightly feline outline of the cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate – the little deadly demon amongst wholesome children; she stands unrecognised by them and unconscious of her own fantastic power.” (Lolita, Chapter 2, Nabokov)

His speech is refined and smooth, and he is something of a poet however his sophisticated tastes only serve to make the reader squirm as the realisation of what this man is about sinks in. Humbert wastes no time in trying to ingratiate himself to Mrs. Haze and her daughter, Dolores, “Lo”. He skulks around the house trying to locates every opportunity where he can catch Dolores alone. During the course of the novel, Humbert marries Charlotte Haze, Lo’s mother while she is away at camp.

Humbert and his passion for Lo is discovered by Charlottle soon after their marriage and she runs across the street in a state of distraction only to be mowed down by a motorcar. Humbert decides to take Lo from the camp and disappear. For the next two years he drags the girl-child he has become obsessed with across the United States. Humbert continues to sexually abuse her till the day she escapes from him.

Lolita is a sometimes humorous, sometimes bittersweet tract of the obsessive fascination and lust that Humbert has for Dolores, whom he names Lolita. He writes her as his Lolita, an object of his creation. Her identity and self is extinguished in the falme of his passion. Dolores is caged inside Lolita, Humbert’s Lolita.

From the vivid and painstakingly detailed descriptions of her mannerisms, her frequent attempts at getting away from Humbert, her “coy” submission to his will for a rare treat of freedom such as a soda in front of a gas pump, Lolita’s childhood is perverted in a lifestyle forced upon her by a man who wants to have her carnally yet denies her the basic right to live her childhood. Humbert wants a childlike nymphet to slake his lust yet does not want to let Lolita go to truly be a child. He is forever on the lookout for persons and individuals who might take her away from him. He blackmails Lolita into keeping their “arrangement” a secret lest the law take her away and put her in a juvenile corrective school.

The claustrophic control that Humbert wields over Lolita reminds me of the various mental prisons that we sometimes build for ourselves.  ‘Lolita’ is not a book about smut. The most priggish prude can read through the book without encountering a single that would make him recoil with disgust but the disgust is encountered in the thoughts of Humbert, in his cloying apetite and his act that robs Lolita of her life. In the raving corridors of Humbert’s mind, his sexual fixation with a child is taken apart bit by bit as his insidious influence darkens the sunny streets where we first encounter Dolores.

Read this book.

Mist, murk, magic realism

The sight of the sun breaking through the cloud of mist hanging in the air cheered me up and strangely reminded me of the day Jose Arcadio Buendia took Aureliano to see ice.

Easily one of the greatest books ever written in the 20th century, One Hundred years of Solitude, is a magical tale that weaves the effects of political, historical and social turmoil throught the lives of one incredible family – the Buendias.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez won a Noble Prize for this novel, but this is not the reason why I am writing this review. The novel is written in a fashion that is all his own, devotees of Rushdie often claim that he writes in the same manner, but that’s hogwash. Marquez’s words naturally flow in an insane, boisterous ride of passion, feeling, and mad adventure while Rushdie’s often feel like a stuck record.

The novel starts with the scene of an execution and a memory that plunges the reader into the past, and the beginning of Macondo, the town where the novel is played out. From a child’s first vision of ice in a tropical land, to a community in exile due to a duel gone horribly wrong, to a Spanish galleon stuck in the middle of desert, One Hundred Years of Solitude binds the mundane with the fantastical.

The book winds through four generations of Buendias, who are the ounders of Macondo. Every generation brings a different set of values and all these values clash against each other even as the country plunges into civil war. The novel also holds a mirror to real events that happened in Columbia during the 1970’s. A workers strike and the subsequent massacre that took place and then was wiped clean off public memory. Memory and remembrance play a huge role in the novel as characterswho have died are remembered through memory and suffer a second death when those that remember them have also died. The novel is a thrilling adventure, from the first page till the last. It’s a mystery, a thriller, a epic romance, and a political critique.