Greatly Reviewed!

Saratchandra Chattopadyay’s Devdas is a culturally weighted love story. With its broken hearted, sullen, distressed male protagonist, it’s so strong as a love story—well, what captivates us readers more than our hero’s suffering. With its prearranged marriage with someone the female protagonist doesn’t know initially but honors later, Devdas can be seen as a strongly cultural story. Yeah, it might be quite strange for you who live in Euro-american countries to find how some woman who initially marries some man without knowing even his face turns into a very loyal wife who would serve her husband. Yeah, unimaginable for you, right? In fact, it is NOT for Asian people.

Beginning from the second third part of the novel, you’ll find how the male protagonist, Devdas, gets rejected by the female protagonist’s, Parvati’s, parents just because he is a caste lower than them. Along with this rejection, you’ll “enjoy” the intense exploration of pain, sadness, and tears. Continue reading »

The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy really digs out what is there in the relation of a man and a woman, especially in a flawed matrimonial one. Tolstoy frankly shows, through his protagonist, that in the flawed matrimonial relationship, the wife can no longer respect the husband because of his past—in the past, he’s the kind of men who always had fun with women, even the married ones, and always avoided serious relationship. The wife can easily be attracted to a handsome man and the husband is too jealous.

One time, the husband invites the man to whom his wife is attracted to play music at his home with his wife, to play “The Kreutzer Sonata”. Unexpectedly, the wife and the protagonist’s wife played very well and it even made the man thinks that they internalized the music too much that the music itself sounds lustful. Later, when the husband’s out of town, Continue reading »

As an Umberto Eco’s novel, Baudolino is quite different. It’s different in the way that it’s somewhat light. It is full of actions, and relaxed and grin-making narratives. It shows us about, still, Medieval Age, but not in terms of its thoughts and other cerebral discussions. It relates the “Umbertonian” realities, events, people, and issues in the Medieval Age with … well … as usual … a sense of thriller–this time is a closed-room murder of German Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa.

Baudolino is all about a person named Baudolino who admits to have been made a fostered son of Frederick I Barbarossa. It is told (by Baudolino himself) that he can speak any language in the world after listening to people talking with the language a couple of minutes. Continue reading »

The Other Side of Me by Sidney Sheldon is a cool kind of memoir. First, because it’s about the other side, the not-known-by-all-people side of a famous figure, that is, Sidney Sheldon himself. Yeah, it’s true, bro. It does not tell about Sidney Sheldon’s life as a writer, I mean as the author of around twenty something thriller novels some of which has been made movies and miniseries. Instead, it tells about Sidney Sheldon’s life—and almost death—as a scriptwriter, directors, Hollywood motion picture studio readers, and that sort of things. He wrote the stories of I Dream of Jeannie. Hart to Hart is HIS TV series. He worked once in MGM—the roaring lion movie studio, :D.

Second, because you can learn a lot of lessons from his life. If you’re a writer, you’ll learn about being stubborn with you ideals, that is, being a great writer. Or, you’ll also learn to use opportunities at hand as good as possible, not to let it go, even a bit, Continue reading »

When Ben Okri published his Booker Prize winning novel The Famished Road for the first time, readers in the UK and the world was shocked to know how a person can see spirits, how a person can slide into the realm of spirits. For most people raised in Euro-american settings, such realm as the realm of spirit is a news. However, through The Famished Road, Ben Okri “campaign” the existence of such realm, at least, in the eyes of African people—well, actually not only African, but also Asian people, or more exactly, Southeast Asian people.

In The Famished Road, Okri tells about a boy named Azaro who finally realized how actually he is an ‘abiku’. In Nigerian belief, an abiku is a ‘childish’ spirit who likes being born to a mother only to die while still very young and later chooses to be born again, still to the same mother, and only to die while still very young. Continue reading »