Gitanjali Nagpal is suffering from fear psychosis. Maybe it’s rubbing on to few of us as well. My strong mind which could not identify the emotion of fear suddenly shook. I felt spooked in the nights. I’d stare at my room windows and shudder suppressing a silent scream. The first few days of reading The Blind Assassin (by Margaret Atwood), a Booker prize winning novel, I was deeply disturbed by the bipolarity of it. As ever, I took up to reading another book simultaneously, The Silent Witness (by Richard North Patterson) - a la Grisham – in a sleazy way I must say. The state of my mind in the initial days of reading these two books together was vulgarly in deep fear. I recall, Mike Atherton’s (Ex-captain of England cricket team) father once said that to know what his son was thinking like, at a given moment, one had to find what book he is presently reading. Now about the books:
The Blind Assassin is a beautifully woven story into another. This brocade of two female protagonists Laura Chase and Iris Chase-Griffen sounds autobiographical to a reader. The climax of the story is unraveled so subtly that even the obvious seems astonishing. The ingenuity of a neatly told sub story within a larger saga of a woman who is betrayed by her husband who in turns betrays him and her sister with whose lover she has an affair sounds clichéd. But the circumstances under which each of these incidents occur leaves you breathing slowly dragging in the brilliance of the writer. Margaret Atwood is no doubt a great story teller but I must confess that it didn’t strike me as much as the complex simplicity of Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. My way of reviewing a book is simple. No matter how the story is, where it takes you, in the end I need to feel an inner pleasure and a lingering happiness of reading a good book. The one that makes me ponder and smile at the thought of it, no matter how dark the tale appears. I am pleased to read such a book after a fairly long time. Blind Assassin is a must read for every book lover. I can’t thank enough to the one who gave me such a lovely gift. J
I started The Silent Witness after The Blind Assassin but ended it much before. It is a typical fast paced thriller with too much verbiage. It sure is gripping as a story and certainly as well told as possible for the given subject. But here, the subject itself is questionable. Is it just another American sex selling semi-porn plot? Not exactly. The talent of the writer gets lost the way he finds it necessary to detail out sexual exploits of a high school teacher whose selfishness costs him his reputation and hence his life. The biggest guffaw of this novel is that the wife practically lives with a murderer husband and yet he never harms her in the entire trial of a complicated murder case or the life they lived together. That seems a little funny and appears deliberate to make the victim look innocent. In my review, this one left a sour taste in the mouth. No great shake drama or climax!
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