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Sachin=GOD Newbie

Sachin=GOD

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that also done:(
if you are into Historical Fiction/Fantasy then try the "Cato" or "Gladiator" or "revolution" series' by Simon Scarrow. Also check out books by Terry Pratchett, Roger Zelazny (his "Chronicles of Amber" is an outstanding series), Fritz Leiber, Anne McCaffrey , Marion Zimmer Bradley etc.
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Sachin=GOD Newbie

Sachin=GOD

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What Anton Wants to Tell the World Rushdie’s autobiography in the third person crowns similar efforts by a bevy of literary giants. RAKESH BEDI

The captive idea of beauty strives at once to reject happiness and to assert it – Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia Sam Bacile, a Californian real estate developer who identifies himself as an Israeli Jew, recently made a pathetic two-hour film on Islam called Innocence of Muslims. His contemptuous film has fanned riots, but Bacile, who has since gone into hiding, is defiant and wretchedly defines “Islam a cancer”. Well, Bacile’s surely is an imbecilic act of horrendous magnitude, but Salman Rushdie, whose memoir of his long and dark suffering years in hiding comes out on September 18, did nothing of that sort in his book Satanic Verses. Still, once the book came out, he was handed a death sentence and hounded by shrieking mullahs, making him slowly and torturously exit the secular world and live a tormented life of seclusion, in daily and frightening company of his fears. “To skulk and hide,” Rushdie writes ruefully in third person in Joseph Anton , “was to lead a dishonourable life. He felt, very often in those years, profoundly ashamed. Both shamed and ashamed.” Rushdie, after many years of distress and isolation, emerged out of his dungeon of seclusion with his mental faculties intact and launched upon a fierce writing spree. A grave personal crisis has brought forth many excellent works of autobiography; some clothed as fictional narratives because the writer's wound is too raw and too big for the writer to thread together, in first person or otherwise, his agonising account of emotional deprivation and mental decrepitude. HORRORS OF APARTHEID In My Traitor’s Heart, Rian Malan, the South African writer, describes a tortured youth, “yawing” between blacks and whites, in a life propelled by drugs, sex and booze. From Jo’burg to Soweto, where he has to go daily as a crime beat reporter to ferret out stories, he narrates a journey that’s as fraught as one through a creepy, dangerous jungle. Riddled with paradoxes and unable to cope, Malan takes flight and goes to the US and dissipates for years, but unable to empty his land out of his hallucinating, alcohol-filled head. He returns to write his memoir, faces his paradoxes squarely. His family history is linked to apartheid, but Malan, in prose described by Naipaul as “extraordinary”, deals with the horrible side of it and tries to salvage his conscience. “The river was growing turbulent, roaring louder and louder...the last wave was coming, and we were about to be obliterated,” Malan writes metaphorically. But obliteration doesn’t come about, and what comes is “love tested by its own defeat”. Reviewing the book, Rushdie wrote: “Malan’s ability to comprehend his fellow South Africans as they dance their death-dances, which is full of bitterness, cynicism, anger and storms, is a triumphant instance of this type of defeated love.'' Another South African writer Andre Brink, whose first Afrikaans book was banned by South Africa, tells in his memoir, A Fork in the Road, how his rebellion from his starchy white tribe gave him the freedom and determination to be a steadfast witness to the horrors of apartheid. The ban he circumvents by self-translating the book into English and aptly calling it Looking on Darkness, and winning immediate approbation. “Many of the strangers who got in touch were black. As if the ban had suddenly broken down all traditional barriers. For every white who was peeved or offended, five blacks were interested.” Honest to a fault, Brink, at the end of his memoir, doesn’t hold back when he witnesses the “tsunami” of crime and horrific violence and tears into the present-day South Africa regime, driven, like its Indian counterpart, by corruption and crony capitalism. INDEPENDENT MINDS Rotten, militaristic societies where unbounded misery is distributed like largesse is where writers suffer daily ignominy. A national hero in Indonesia, Pramoedya Ananta Toer was detained by Suharto and eventually exiled to the penal island of Buru. But the imprisonment did not deter the writer. “I think of my limited reserves of energy and how they, too, have been diminished, sapped from me like the sweat that has fallen from my brow and dampened acres of Buru soil during my time of forced labour here,” he writes in his deeply affecting memoir The Mute’s Soliloquy. But Pramoedya found ample reserves of energy to write, producing his best work The Buru Quartet. His memoir, a passionate tribute to the power and independence of his unbending mind, details hardship and misery that the penal colony inflicted upon him, but is a glowing testament to his steely will to face down his travails. In North Africa, King Hassan II of Morocco held his political enemies in desert camps, and this is what Tahar Ben Jelloun recreates with remarkable precision in The Blinding Absence of Light, a fictional narrative of real-life stories of enormous suffering. Because the reality is so inhuman and appalling, Ben Jelloun uses a mix of Islamic mysticism and an almost Beckettian language. “I was prepared to abandon my body to our tormentors, as long as they did not seize hold of my soul, my breath, my will. Sometimes I thought about Muslim mystics who went into seclusion and renounced everything through the boundless love of God.” In this Guantanamo of Morocco, horror stories abound and prisoners are “living cadavers” who have shrunk a foot in height. What a man can inflict on a fellow man and how life can be utterly dehumanising and despondent in these desert hellholes form, as Coetzee said, “The extremes of human cruelty and suffering.” CRISIS OF THE SOUL Another crisis that spawns books is the crisis of the soul, and may writers from Kafka to Hemingway have been afflicted by its most manifest form: depression. Two very different and modern writers have tackled depression and its howling demons in their memoirs of this malady. Removed by geographies but united by pain, both William Styron of America and Les Murray of Australia have laid bare their miserable histories of suffering. Styron’s Darkness Visible is a searing study of how mental illness can make an exuberant life totally despondent and eventually brings it to a complete standstill. How existence dies a slow death encumbered by imaginary fears and how innocuous birdsong can be devastating for a troubled psyche is something the American writer describes brilliantly: “There were dreadful, pouncing seizures of anxiety. One bright day on a walk through the woods with my dog I heard a flock of Canada geese honking high above trees ablaze with foliage; ordinarily a sight and sound that would have exhilarated me, the flight of birds caused me to stop, riveted with fear, and I stood there stranded there, helpless, shivering...” Across oceans, in Australia, Les Murray, the bright and bulky poet, is too felled by mental illness. Calling his depression Black Dog, a melancholy phrase he borrows from Churchill, Murray battles his manic anxiety slowly through writing, which comes slowly and painfully, and by anchoring his shattered self to his family, which helps him maneuver the frightful ravages of his mental landscape. “ A coppery taste in my mouth, which I termed intense insipidity, heralded a session of helpless, bottomless misery in which I would lie curled in a fetal position on the sofa with tears leaking from my eyes, my brain boiling with a confusion of stuff not worth calling thought or imagery,’’ he describes his daily quota of dread in his memoir on depression Killing the Black Dog. LOVE & ITS MANY SHADES A mother’s suicide can mark a child forever, and this immense loss is what Amos Oz deals with courageously in his autobiography. Freighted with an odd-yetominous sense of bereavement and filled with deep longing, A Tale of Love and Darkness takes a look at love and its many shades of darkness alongside the turbulent birth of a nation. “To forsake is to betray. And mother had – both of us, father and me. I would never have left her like that...I would not have abandoned her forever. Never.” Oz, racked by the guilt of losing his mother at a young age, might as well be saying this for both his dead mother and still-alive nation. A breakup of a marriage, too, can actuate a crisis, as Townie , the edgy memoir of American writer Andre Dubus III, attests. With a nervous mother working the odd jobs, Andre, living with his three siblings, is preternaturally inclined to violence and revels in casual fights. “One day in the fall, when all the summer cottages next to ours were boarded up for the season, we found a box of shotgun shells...we poured gasoline over them, and lit them up just to watch them explode...the flames grew and leapt and in no time one of the cottages was on fire.” Dubus’ book, which Richard Russo described as a serious meditation on violence, is about his Big Fight with his extremely violent nature, and sublimating that raw, powerful, immoderate urge into a passionate craving to write good, muscular prose. Not all those who know their minds know their hearts as well, said Le Rochefoucauld. Rushdie, by indulging in the act of writing his long memoir, tries to know his heart, an arduous exercise all the above-mentioned writers have done by putting together their stories, narratives of deep pain and intense privation and extraordinary courage. For what better way of dealing with your potent demons than by wrestling them into submission on the pages of your fierce life. By writing about life, they try to embrace it; by applying their febrile minds, they try to unravel the deep secrets of their steady hearts. They reject happiness only to assert it.
Economic Times
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