The best books that strike while the ‘irony’ is hot

I read my grandfather’s copy of this novel as a teenager. I perhaps lacked the emotional and intellectual maturity to appreciate its various nuances but I remember the story vividly almost 30 years on because I read it with a schoolgirl’s attentiveness rather than the jaded distraction that comes with age.

The intricate plot about the birth of children coinciding with the birth of the nation and the magic and the farce of what follows in their lives – as well as the nation’s – helped me develop an appetite for grand narratives where language is as much a character as the protagonist. I have, since then, grown to be a steadfast admirer of the author’s works.      

A fantastic work of a surefooted wordsmith takes an equally talented translator to carry it across the linguistic barrier in a way that makes it a literary treat in its own right.

I’m envious of Breon Mitchell’s limpid linguistic manoeuvering that has rendered the German modern classic very enjoyable in English. The narration set in Nazi times as told by a dwarf – who is rather unlikeable by all counts – is an ingenious technique of stripping bad politics to its bare bones and laying out the nonsense that remains.

It is political without being political. There are signs galore in the book for metaphor hunters, but I simply revelled in the language of this remarkable debut work.           

This book was my introduction to Kurt Vonnegut. I marvel at the author’s genius in bringing together science and religion, two of the most profound subjects known to mankind, in such a playful way.

The unsentimental objectivity of science (and scientists) and a ‘perfect’ religion, whose greatest act of faith is to look at itself with a rather jaundiced eye, join hands to expertly manoeuvre, explain and let chaos be. It is the kind of hilariousness that makes you gaze into space rather than fall out of your chair.

I have always thought that poetry is important to allow prose to not take itself too seriously. Vonnegut has demonstrated how to do this.

This book was a present from a friend and I dove into it with no information about the novel or the author.

Many histories come together in it in an unhurried pace, present dots, and let the characters join them. The various perspectives weave and interweave stories and the warps and wefts bring them closer and closer into forming a bigger whole – only to see the knitting is too late by very little.

There are unrecognised talents and relationships, and accidents and serendipity direct the needles. And when the revelation comes, it is to a person bent heavy under a lifetime of acceptance. It is not often that pathos is so poetic.

This book is as close to home for me as it gets. It won the Booker when I was in high school but I wouldn’t read it before college because I was told – wrongly – by someone who lacked an imagination that they found it opaque.

I was happy to find that it shone with beautiful clarity when I finally read it. I haven’t trusted random people’s book recommendations ever since. The extreme contradictions – the most progressive and the most regressive, revolution and complacency – and their uncanny coexistence in Kerala society and politics can only emerge in the mimesis of story.

And this autobiographically-inspired fiction about two fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, living with innocence the shambles and gambles of modern Malayaliness is a gripping work. It remains one of my favourite books by one of my favourite people.