Fictional Forays #3
In a clamouring & noisy world, reading offers a soundless escape. The pages of well-written works of fiction provide temporary sanctuary — an unhurried passage untouched by the frictions of our daily lives.
I came to admire mariners’ quiet self-possession and their comfort with these long silences… over time, I also came to respect silence itself.
Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean
Fictional Forays is simply a grandiose title for occasional book reviews12 I plan to write. This is also a way to nudge myself to read at a pace that matches the rate at which I buy new books. And …. save my password.
Western Lane: Sorrow, Squash & Success
Chetna Maroo’s debut novel (short-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize) begins a few days after 11-year-old Gopi’s mother’s funeral, which leaves Gopi & her two older sisters in the care of their father. In anticipation of the difficult time he would have raising three daughters he is convinced that what the girls need is a disciplined & enduring surrogate — squash, as it turns out.
Gopi plays squash every day at Western Lane, a sports centre just outside London. With Pa, she spends hours ghosting which means playing with something crucial missing — the ball — in a practice that seems more significant than a rehearsal or drill. They stay up late to watch the same video of the great Pakistani squash champion Jahangir Khan over & over again. All these activities explore aspects of Gopi’s grief.
Maroo takes it for granted, as Gopi does, that squash matters. The book ends with her playing the final of the Durham & Cleveland tournament.
The story has all the elements of a Bollywood movie — tragedy, sporting trial, triumph. The tension is heightened by her squash-obsessed but emotionally uncommunicative Pa; a fearful (& traditional) Aunt Ranjan who is an obstacle that stands in Gopi’s way. There is a love interest, Ged, whose mother intervenes at just the right moment for the plot (& the wrong moment for Gopi).
Maroo leaves plenty unsaid — so the reader has to fill in the blanks — joint venture.
A Man Called Ove: Grumpy Man, Black Comedy
Fredrik Backman’s book was published in 2014 & subsequently made into a succesful 2016 movie. I heard of this book only recently — it was a fun read with the same laconic feel as Western Lane but with plenty of black humour sprinkled in. The book has more than 100k reviews on Goodreads, showing just how popular it has become.
A Man Called Ove is about, well, a man called Ove. He’s a Swedish middle aged man who is prickly & grumpy — but his terseness is a shell to protect him from the sorts of bad things that usually befall people in life. And some very bad things happened to him at the very outset — his wife of 40 odd years has recently died & he has just lost his job. He contemplates suicide as he feels he no longer has anything to live for. However, every time he tries to die he gets rudely interrupted by a neighbour or someone else who wants something from him.
In the end, will Ove come to see that he has an extended family of neighbours (along with a friendly feral cat that he ends up adopting) who like him just as he is? Will his heart turn to gold, revealing that he’s not too much of an old grump after all?
As hinted earlier, you can see things coming from a mile off in this novel, but that’s all a part of its charm — simply because Ove is so oblivious.
Backman made a brave choice in bringing to life a character who is, when we first meet him, a tad unlikeable. Ove is a little OCD — he has a rigid routine that he follows; his demeanor is rough and gruff, but once you understand why Ove is the way he is, the coarseness of his character moderates a bit.
This is a book that gets better & better as it goes along. As Ove realises, no matter how bad life gets, there are some things worth living for.
