The Montalbano Confusion

 I picked up the detective novel The Wings of the Sphinx by the Italian writer Andrea Camilleri due to a misunderstanding. Some time back, I happened to read a delightful Spanish novel called Murder in the Central Committee by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. Featuring the gastronome-detective Pepe Carvalho, it also was a strong political commentary of the times. Carvalho used to be a Communist in his youth and also a CIA agent. This gave his character the unique perspective of an insider who is also an outsider at the same time. Then there are a lot of culinary descriptions, as he enjoyed food and was also an expert cook.

After reading it, I wanted to read more books in the series. But as I failed to find one, I never had the opportunity to read another entry from it. Once, when I was browsing a stack of used books in a store, I found The Wings of the Sphinx with the subtitle An Inspector Montalbano Mystery. When I read the name Montalbano, I thought I had finally been able to find a book in the series. After purchasing the book, I came to know that Andrea Camilleri, the writer, was influenced by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. So he kept his detective's name as Montalbano.

There are some similarities between two characters—Pepe Carvalho and Inspector Montalbano—that I could feel after reading one novel each of both protagonists. I am not sure how all these observations pan out when every book in both series is considered. The most obvious is their love for food. A lot of pages are dedicated to descriptions of food—of eating and preparing it. Both characters have an inherent sense of humour that is wicked at times. Both are loose cannons who are not afraid to offend someone to get their way.

But, while Carvalho has a certain assuredness about him, Montalbano seems to bumble sometimes and provides enough opportunities to laugh at him. While The Murder at the Central Committee is a sharp political satire about investigating a dead comrade while a Communist party meeting progresses, The Wings of the Sphinx is more of a social satire that exposes rampant corruption in the bureaucracy, class differences, and the overall rotten tendencies of society. It is about the murder of an unidentified young girl with the tattoo of a butterfly on her shoulders. The former has its pulse firmly on history, while the latter is more of a comedic ride with a pretty good puzzle to solve and a lot of colourful characters inhabiting it to make it more palatable.

Now I have to hunt down the books in two series!

Book Review: Turning Pages by John Sargent

 Lessons learned:  Books matter, but only if everyone is free to speak through them. Good intent matters; that is where kindness starts.  It is messy.

 

The book reader in me generally considers publishers to be the middlemen who spoil my reading experience by tampering with the direct connection with the writer. At the same time, I realised that it is impossible for an individual writer to connect with the reader without the support of a publisher. So for me, publishers were the necessary evil, exploiting their status as the bridge that connects me with the writer and manipulating my reading experience in a way that is beneficial for them, all the while considering creative writers as just money spinning equipment.

I am sure that it still works that way in many parts of the world. But reading a book from the former publisher John Sargent, titled Turning Pages, has made me cut some slack. John Sargent, the ex-CEO of Macmillan, is not a familiar name to me, though I have read books from their publishing group for years. The book, subtitled The Adventures and Misadventures of a Publisher, never tries to deep dive into the intricacies of the creative, logistical, or economic sides of book publishing.

The book consists of a series of anecdotes from the writer's professional and personal life, and mostly recounts his associations with personalities, establishments, and historic events. The narration is rather sober, refusing to overplay or sensationalise the events, and possesses an overall warmth and a humorous inclination. I have noted that the author tries to be fair and empathetic to all, and always looks at things from differing viewpoints. I could also detect a person who always ensured the best for his authors on these pages (though this observation is solely based on what I read on these pages, and I have no inkling about what actually transpired).

The only moments where the book sheds this tone and offers passionate story telling are when he finds himself in a legal tussle against the US Government and Amazon and when Trump tried to cease and desist the publication of Fire and Fury, a book about the first days of the Trump government. It is in these two incidents that we realise the fighting spirit of a man who wants to do the right thing. He refused to hold back, even when all other publishers settled with Amazon, and fought the battle alone, due to the realisation that Amazon's model of pricing ebooks would severely hamper the prospects of writers along with those of his corporation. We find the same striving for fairness when he refuses to let go of employees during COVID time, even when it results in his being shown the way out of Macmillan.

Other interesting instances in the book are his hobnobbing with British aristocracy, getting abused by Sir Jeffrey Archer, his childhood spent in Wyoming, candid photos being shot by paparazzi while he was teaching Britney Spears to operate an iPod inside a gym, his office space in the legendary though cramped Flatiron building, and Jimmy Carter catching him red handed while trying to loot wood. I admire the self-deprecating humour and the immense respect for others that he exhibits throughout the book, even when he is bumbling, like when he high fived Obama and did a 'Hey man!'

I also happened to watch a TedX talk that he gave in which he explained decision making by giving the example of surfing, an activity that he took up when he was forty seven. While researching him online, I came across certain controversies about him that he never mentioned in the book. Once, Macmillan refused to provide digital copies of new books to libraries until a certain period. Libraries had cried foul, and Sargent was made to look like a corporate tyrant bent on destroying public institutions. But as per him, libraries were eating 60% of his firm's revenue from ebook sales. I believe he only had the best interests of his authors and his employees in mind.

Book Review: The Universal Time Keepers by David J. Helfand

 I read this incredibly interesting and insightful book about dating. No, no, no, it's not about the romantic kind of dating, but the carbon dating kind. This book is about the methods that can put a precise date on past events. I would absolutely love to try it with some ancient artefacts in my refrigerator. Now, that's one way to put technology to a practically useful and potentially lifesaving purpose.

The Universal Time Keepers is an upcoming popular science book by David J. Helfand that describes how atoms, who are witnesses and even participants in every event played out in every place and time of our universe, can be put to use for tracking these events and finding out when and how they happened. I received this ebook from Netgalley and its publisher, Columbia University Press, in exchange for honest feedback.

Carbon dating is a popular concept that is pushed through movies, books, media, and social media so much that a layman's concept of it is that of something magical. You take a piece of stone, keep it in front of a chunk of carbon, like a piece of charcoal or something, chant abracadabra, and the antiquity of the stone magically gets written on it. Pseudoarcheologists and pseudohistorians have played a good part in abusing carbon dating by making wrong and misrepresented attributions to the technology, just like they do with genome mapping.

This book describes the workings of several dating technologies, like carbon dating, that utilise the atomic properties of materials to decipher the age and other details of an event. Though the subject matter is very technical and requires a basic understanding of chemistry, physics, and a bit of biology to fully comprehend its nitty-gritty, Helfand makes sure that the layman reader is not too confused or bogged down while reading the book. His description is elementary enough to sustain the reader's interest, though he never succumbs to the temptation to dump it down to a level that trivialises its implications.

Atoms are infinitesimally minute particles that constitute matter, just next to nothingness as far as our ability to detect them is concerned. They are made up of even smaller subatomic particles like protons, electrons, neutrons, and a lot more of them. Each element in the universe possesses an atom that is unique to it, though there are different flavours available among the atoms of a single element, called isotopes. Many of these isotopes tend to be unstable, with lifespans ranging from fractions of a second to billions of years.

Their instability is due to a phenomenon called radioactivity, which is essentially a tendency to achieve stability by transforming itself into other elements by ejecting subatomic particles and energy. This radioactive decay of atoms is measured in half lives—half the measure of a radioactive material decays into its daughter in a prescribed, exact amount of time. It is this property that is used for dating an event as recent as the last day to minutes before the Big Bang, the event that started our universe.

The first six chapters of the book explain the chemistry of the procedures. These chapters take you to your high school classrooms and make you relive the horrors of the periodic table, atomic numbers, and chemical reactions. The difference is that this time the explanations are more intelligible and crystal clear. Once this formality is over, the remaining chapters discuss the practical implementation of using isotopes of different elements like Carbon, Uranium, and lead for the determination of age.

The first one is about detecting art forgeries by ionising the atoms inside a painting and determining if the components used in it are consistent with the ones that the artist used in his time. The subsequent chapters progressively deliberate the procedures used to determine several events in history after and before humanity managed to civilise. It starts with the inspections done on a parchment of the Quran and ends in a moment one microsecond after the formation of the universe. It elucidates how comparing the numbers of radioactive father and daughter elements in a sample of rock, a dead body, or a piece of ice can solve perplexing puzzles and provide unique insights into the workings of the world that we live in.

Reading Inside Trains

There used to be a time when everyone read something after entering a train. Persons who literally hate to find some words joined together to form anything meaningful also boarded trains with a magazine in their hands. One magazine or newspaper that entered the compartment ended up grazing the hands of everyone in it. I used to board trains with a book or two or three literary magazines. I remember adding books to my TBR list after finding someone reading them on trains. Those were the best of times.

Then came the era when everyone ditched book/magazines/newspapers and started staring at screens. People dreamed while hearing songs on headphones, gazed while watching movies/series/YouTube or just scrolled and scrolled for the entire journey. I cannot forget all the shocked looks and stares that I received and still receive when I open an actual book, a physical entity with actual weight, a thick cover, and a lot of pages that could be flipped physically.

One of the co-passengers invariably plays songs or a movie loudly. The entire world called them assholes. But they prevailed. Probably because of their sheer numbers. In the usual seating arrangement of a general compartment, on average, there will be ten people sitting together. Out of ten, one will play something loudly. Mathematically, on average, that makes one out of ten passengers in a train an asshole. If you try to superimpose this statistic on the entire humanity, of which train passengers are a very minor subset, purely based on my experience, the data holds pretty well.

Coming back into the train compartment, from where we took a detour, hearing loud sounds is evidently a major deterrent to reading. I even believe the train compartments of the Indian Railways are specially manufactured and tested for incredible acoustic abilities that facilitate the penetration of sound into all the ears present in them, even if pretty lousy speaker systems are used.

But nothing could prevent a persistent reader like me. Whatever song, movie/series/YouTube soundbite, or friendly banter of office-going colleagues, which, believe me, is as pervasive as the others listed before it, I managed to read. After a while, I was able to relegate these nuisances to the attic of my mind and steer ahead with my book.

Not the last day. Not with Instagram reels. Not with two people playing them continuously, sitting on my left and right. Not with the highly statistical impossibility of two gentlemen of the kind mentioned above sitting on either side and watching reels with blaring sounds.

To my credit, I tried. I tried hard to push it out of my mind. To pack it and shove it into the basement. But I realised the impossibility of the situation. I realised that this was a different beast. The cacophony of diverse sound clips, songs, and commentary, which abruptly changes into something completely different in seconds, makes it impossible to concentrate. I laid my arms down and completely surrendered, accepting my defeat.

I had almost stopped recounting this anecdote. But then, like the team that failed miserably in the semifinal, pulling up all the weapons in its arsenal to fight a loser's final match with another loser, I had a chance during the return journey to save a small part of my lost face.

On the return journey, I was determined to catch up on my missed reading. I sat near a family of three—parents and a kid. The kid did everything that kids usually do and then some more. He howled, cried, shouted, shrieked, jumped, ran around, and made himself an overall nuisance.

In normal times, I could tolerate all these and then some more and go ahead with my reading. But probably because of the taste of defeat and the resultant pressure, I was unable. I closed the book and looked at the parents, who were pretty satisfied with the performance of their little devil and the general wretchedness it caused for all.

"Did you know", I started, making sure that the rug rat picked up every word, "about the new scheme of the Indian Railways? You could send your kids through their parcel service. Just put a stamp of twenty rupees on their forehead, apply a bandage to their lips, and hand them over to the parcel department. They will put them in the parcel compartment of the train, and you can collect them at your destination. If there is no space in it, they will ship the kids on the next goods train, and they assure delivery in twenty-four hours. You can collect them the next day."

Such peace, such calm, such serenity! I read my book and heard the sound of good old times returning.

അസുരവിത്ത്: എംടിയുടെ ദേവാസുരം

 എംടിയുടെ ഇതുവരെ വായിക്കാൻ സാധിക്കാത്ത പുസ്തകങ്ങൾ വായിക്കാനായി ശ്രമിച്ചപ്പോൾ, കാലം എന്ന കൃതിക്ക് ശേഷം കൈയിൽ കിട്ടിയത് അസുരവിത്ത് ആണ്. 1962ൽ പ്രസിദ്ധീകരിച്ച നോവൽ ഇന്നും എംടിയുടെ മികച്ച കൃതിയായിട്ടാണ് വിലയിരുത്തപ്പെടുന്നത്. സാഹിത്യ നിരൂപകയായ എം. ലീലാവതി, അവരുടെ ലേഖനത്തിൽ അഭിപ്രായപ്പെടുന്നത് മലയാള സാഹിത്യത്തിലെ ഏറ്റവും മികച്ച നോവലായി അവർ ഈ നോവലിനെയാണ് തെരഞ്ഞെടുക്കുക എന്നാണ്. അങ്ങനെ ഒരു അഭിപ്രായം എനിക്കില്ലെങ്കിലും, ഞാൻ വായിച്ച എംടിയുടെ നോവലുകളിൽ എനിക്ക് ഏറ്റവും ഇഷ്ടപ്പെട്ടത് അസുരവിത്ത് തന്നെയാണ്. 

എഴുത്തുകാരൻ നാലുകെട്ടിൽ സൃഷ്ടിച്ച്, കാലത്തിൽ പരിപാലിച്ച പ്രപഞ്ചത്തിന്റെ പൂർണ്ണതയാണ് അസുരവിത്ത് എന്നാണ് എനിക്ക് തോന്നിയത്. നായർ തറവാടുകളുടെ ജീർണ്ണിച്ച ചിത്രം നാലുകെട്ടിൽ ആവിഷ്കരിച്ച എംടി, കാലത്തിൽ അതിന്റെ ഫലമായി വ്യക്തിത്വം നശിച്ച ഒരു നായകനെ വരച്ചുകാട്ടുന്നു. അസുരവിത്തിൽ ആകട്ടെ, നാം കാണുന്ന നായകൻ തന്റെ തകർച്ചക്ക് ശേഷം സ്വയം പുനഃസൃഷ്ടിക്കുന്നവനാണ്. എന്നെ സംബന്ധിച്ചിടത്തോളം, നാലുകെട്ടിന്റെയും കാലത്തിന്റെയും ശുഭകരമായ പര്യവസാനമാണ് അസുരവിത്ത്. 

ഇങ്ങനെയാണെങ്കിലും, സമയക്രമത്തിൽ പരിഗണിക്കുകയാണെങ്കിൽ കാലത്തിന് മുന്നെയാണ് അസുരവിത്ത് എഴുതപ്പെട്ടിട്ടുള്ളത്. നാലുകെട്ടിന് മുന്നെയാണ് അസുരവിത്തിൽ പറഞ്ഞിട്ടുള്ള സംഭവങ്ങൾ നടക്കുന്നതും. അതിനാൽ എഴുത്തുകാരൻ ബോധപൂർവം ഇങ്ങനെ ഒരു ആഖ്യാനം രൂപപ്പെടുത്തിയതാവില്ല എന്നു തോന്നുന്നു. അസുരവിത്തിന്റെ ചരിത്ര പശ്ചാത്തലം, കേരളത്തിൽ ആയിരത്തി തൊള്ളായിരത്തി നാൽപ്പതുകളിൽ പടർന്നു പിടിച്ച കോളറക്കാലമാണ്. പകർച്ചവ്യാധികൾ ദേവതകൾ മനുഷ്യരെ ശിക്ഷിക്കാനായി എറിയുന്ന വിത്തുകളാണ് എന്ന വിശ്വാസവുമായി ചേർത്തു വായിക്കുമ്പോൾ അസുരവിത്ത് എന്ന പേരിന്റെ സാംഗത്യം കൂടൂതൽ മറ നീക്കുന്നു.

 എംടിയുടെ രചനകൾ കൂടുതലും വളരെ വ്യക്തിനിഷ്ഠമായ കഥാഖ്യാനങ്ങളാണ്. ഒരു മുഖ്യ കഥാപാത്രത്തിന്റെ മാനസിക വ്യാപാരത്തിലൂടെയായിരിക്കും വായനക്കാരന്റെ സഞ്ചാരം. സമൂഹം എന്നും അയാൾക്ക് ഗതി മാറ്റാൻ ഉതകുന്ന പ്ലോട്ട് ഡിവൈസ് മാത്രം. അസുരവിത്ത് ഈ രീതി മാറ്റിപ്പിടിക്കുന്നു. സമൂഹവും, അയാൾക്ക് സമൂഹവുമായുള്ള ബന്ധവും, അങ്ങനെ ഉണ്ടാകുന്ന നന്മതിന്മകളുടെ തുടർച്ചയായ ആദാനപ്രദാനവും ഈ നോവലിനെ മറ്റ് എംടിയുടെ കൃതികളിൽ നിന്നും വേർതിരിച്ചു നിർത്തുന്നു. 

നാലുകെട്ടിന്റെ ജീർണ്ണതയിൽ നിന്നും പുറന്തള്ളപ്പെടുന്ന ഗോവിന്ദൻ കുട്ടി വന്നെത്തുന്നത് സമൂഹത്തിന്റെ ദൂഷിതവലയത്തിലേക്ക്. തങ്ങളുടെ ആവശ്യത്തിനു മാത്രം അയാളെ കൂടെ നിർത്തി, അതിനു ശേഷം വഞ്ചിക്കുന്ന സമൂഹത്തിനോട് അയാൾ പ്രതികാരം ചെയ്യുന്നു. ഇവിടെയാണ് അയാൾ എല്ലാം ഒതുക്കിൽ കഴിക്കുന്ന, പ്രതികാരം പോലും ഒച്ചയുണ്ടാക്കാതെ നടത്തുന്ന, തന്റെ മനസ്സിനുള്ളിൽ മാത്രം വാഴുന്ന മറ്റ് എംടി നായകരിൽ നിന്ന് വ്യത്യസ്തനാകുന്നത്. എന്നാൽ പ്രതികാരം പോലും അയാളെ ദുഷിച്ച സംസ്കൃതിയുടെ അടിത്തട്ടിലേക്ക് ആഴ്ത്തുകയാണെന്ന തിരിച്ചറിവാണ് അയാളെ ഒടുക്കം മാറ്റിമറിക്കുന്നത്. 

അസുരവിത്ത് മനുഷ്യമനസ്സിൽ നടക്കുന്ന ദേവാസുരയുദ്ധത്തിന്റെ കഥയായി വായിക്കാം. ഉള്ളിലെ ദേവാംശത്തെ നിർദ്ദാക്ഷിണ്യം തല്ലിക്കെടുത്തുന്ന ബാഹ്യ ലോകം, ആസുരവീര്യത്തിന്റെ ബഹിർഗമനത്തോടെ, അയാളെ ആരവങ്ങളോടെ അസുരരാജാവാക്കാൻ ആഗ്രഹിക്കുന്നു. എന്നാൽ മനസ്സിലെ അവസാനത്തെ നന്മയുടെ കണം, അയാളിലെ ദേവനെ തന്റെ സാമ്രാജ്യം തിരിച്ചു പിടിക്കാൻ പ്രാപ്തനാക്കുന്നു. ഇതാണ് എന്റെ വായന.