the rachel papers . the hungry tide. pinjra

when you are at home ill there is nothing much to do but catch up on reading and watching films that you have always meant to but never had the time to. between some bouts of heavy heaving cough and glasses of piping hot water, as the clogs play gorgeous monsoon atmospherics on the system in my room and it rains outside, i read martin amis’s ‘the rachel papers’ whose narrator is precociously self-aware in the seduction of an older woman. what came to close for comfort and made me laugh and cringe was the language adopted by the storyteller- arch, full of flourishes and self conscious attempts to make himself sound oh-so-clever to an intended audience. something like the way I feel I write this bloody blog. how come as soon as i start writing an overweening artifice takes over? great book. but not really one for the romance of monsoon gloom. ‘the hungry tide’ is better company with its hallucinogenic landscape of rivers and islands teeming with crocodiles and tigers. if ‘pinjra’ wasn’t so self righteous towards the tragic end regarding the destructive power of pleasure i might have liked it more. this, in spite of the fact that a large part of v. shantaram's energy seems to have been spent in composing item songs for his wife. the lavanis are sexier naughtier bitchier than anything bipasha basu might lip synch to. the dancing was terrible in spite of the hyper expressive eyebrows. ‘hichki’ with that shot of an exposed shoulder and upper breast close up; and ‘disala ga bai disala’ where burning torches light the stage from between her breasts were the highlights. shreeram lagu is terrific as the upright schoolteacher done it by music and dance.