My Excuse

I know, I know. But here's what I've done in the past week when I haven't been updating this blog:

1. Reading
- The First Wives' Club by Olivia Goldsmith - decent 
- The City of Joy by Dominic Lapierre - more later 
- The Return of Depression Economics by Paul Krugman - excellent 
- The Commodore by Patrick O Brien (still at it) - so far, so interesting  
- A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth (still at it) - awesome

2. Watching
- Sex and the City, Season 1 and 3 - decent 
- The Adventures of Sindbad - better than expected 
- Fight Club - insane 
- Fahrenheit 9/11 - does Michael Moore think we're that dumb?

3. Cooking 
- part of dinner at Kavitha and Suba's on Saturday - decent 
- lunch at Divya's on Sunday - edible

4. Not Showing Up For Work One Day And Nearly Getting Fired

5. Writing
- Harry Potter fanfic involving my fav characters - WIP, but kewl, even if I say so myself
- Limericks - none worth putting up here
- Autobiography - about time I started, what?

6. Starting Conflagrations And Making Attempts To Put Them Out
- Announced to parents that am off to USA (am I a closet pyromaniac or what?)

7. Staying Up Nights In Changi To Pick Random People Up From Airport
- Especially people ungrateful enough to make me and Kav wait *three hours* after their flight landed because they were foolish enough to pack bags which the airport would manage to lose.

8. Shifting Rooms

9. Attempting To Orient Utterly Boring Juniors In  A Thoroughly Uninspired Fashion

This, surely, is excuse enough to quit blogging for a bit?

But on to what I promised I'd do: review City of Joy. Because I'm in a sucky mood, I've picked the worst (well, second only to nearly getting fired and starting fires) experience of the week.

City of Joy is a piece of trash that should have been kept safely guarded in Dominic Lapierre's snooty old head. Unfortunately, it's broken out, and is now running amok in the world of literature and writers of reviews, posing as good writing but secretly rubbishing up readers' heads. Everything about it screams white supremacy. Lapierre claims to have "researched this book for two years", but this shoddy work is replete with silly, irritating mistakes - 'Bhagvan' is apparently 'the most powerful God in Hinduism'; a charpoy is something you drink from. But that is the least of it.

I can overlook the inaccurate research (or lack thereof), I can forgive the racism and the advertisement for imperialism that the book is. After all, one of my favourite books - Gone With The Wind - succumbs to similar failures. What I cannot condone are the writing and the message of this book.

It's a novel 'based on true stories', it claims. Why, then, is there no plot, no flow of events, no climax, no ending, no discernible anything to differentiate it from a painstaking chronicle of everyday events in a not-so-everyday place that starts and ends for no reason? The characters are discussed and revealed very well, true, but there is absolutely no development. The people in City of Joy are static: no one, not even the two foreigners, undergo any process of meaningful change. Superficially, they're disgusted by the way the people in the slum live, they admire the slum dwellers' capacity for love and joy - these are things they learn and find out as they live in Anand Nagar... but that's prosaic to the point where you want to start ripping pages from the book for sheer want of some fresh happening.

And then there's the message. The book claims to be about love and joy thriving in the worst possible conditions, but whereas it explores these 'worst possible conditions' in loving variety and detail (lepers' colonies, children drowning in open drains, starvation, filth, maggot-infested internal organs of the slum-dwelling sick, typhoid and tuberculosis, the privations suffered by rickshaw pullers, the 'human horses'...), all that Lapierre says about the survival of life and joy in these conditions is... that it has survived. On and on he goes about men keeling over and dying as they pull rickshaws, only to be kicked aside and eagerly replaced by other men desperate for work, and at the end of a 10-page chapter, there's a line that goes - he was happy to be alive. Well, one sentence repeated over and over at the end of different incidents does not a message make.

And of course, I hate the way the book grosses you out for the sake of effect. I'm all for having my heart wrung and made to shed tears of blood, but at least don't do it this blatantly, without even a pretence of plot to cover it up! Even Passion of the Christ was better in this respect, and that's saying something.

So. I'm giving the book away. First commented, first served.

But don't say I didn't warn you.