A New Place, A New Book

First things first, check out the place where I am as per my profile! Yessirreebob, I have moved out of the town called Surat and am now located in the city called Hyderabad. I have announced my arrival to my new office in grand fashion as well. I've blown 4 fuses (not mine but my office's) and replaced an equal number of connectors to the comp provided to me! Talk about an arrival with a big bang...

I've gotten over the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. I don't think I managed to imbibe much of what Robin Sharma said. Now I've moved my life on to John Banville's novel titled 'The Sea'. This is not to be confused with Yashwant Kanetkar's epic series on the programming language C - all accompanied with wonderful cover pictures like those of a yacht navigating a, you guessed it, a sea. While studying the language, I couldn't quite help admire the cover and the amazing little pun the author thought of. Wonderful! Simply marvellous! So so clever.

But I digress. 'The Sea' is actually quite a beautifully written book and the author won the Man Booker Prize 2005 for the same novel. Normally, I quite despise authors who try to pass off verbose descriptions of everything and anything as wonderful literature. But John Banville manages to create extremely vivid descriptions of everything around him. The style of writing brings to life the thoughts of a person who is trying to cope with the loss of a dear one and is reliving a particular part of his life long lost.

Try thinking of a vacation which your family had taken when you were around 11 years old. Or try to think of some people you remember meeting as a kid, but just that one time. You possibly never met them again. The memories that would come to you would hardly be continuous. Little incidents here and there would come back to you and not necessarily in any particular order. And as you recall each of these incidents, there might be things which seem slightly out of place. Then you might wonder as to what exactly happened there. Then further bits of the same forgotten tale would come back to you till it finally forms a coherent picture. The narrative jumps along in pretty much the same fashion.

In conclusion, I've not yet concluded reading the book myself. The reason is that the book, though superbly authored, is fairly depressing because of its subject and I'd rather not read it for long stretches.