The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga's novel was already sitting on the shelf.  Which made it a convenient choice given that I was looking for something breezy to offset Pale Fire.  It's the thoroughly entertaining story of an Indian servant who escapes the "chicken coop" of poverty by breaking all the rules and offing his master.  Along the way it gives Adiga plenty of room to reflect on what perpetuates the dramatic corruption and inequality of India.  While I enjoyed the story and generally enjoyed the writing as well, I think the fact that it won the Man Booker prize has more to do with politics than art.  Perhaps that's true of all prizes though?  Adiga's most interesting literary device is setting the story in the form of a letter from the protagonist to Wen Jiaboa.  So technically, I guess it's an epistolary novel.  But of course this also allows him to slip in a question that the West considers truly subversive: what's so great about democracy?  And from that ironic distance, he's able to give us a classic suspense story in the sense of Hitchcock: the audience already knows what's going to happen, but they are as clueless as the characters about exactly when and how the ax will fall.  While it was enjoyable, you're not missing much by just watching the Netflix adaptation.

Zen Flesh Zen Bones

Since I so thoroughly enjoyed The Gateless Gate, I thought I'd investigate Zen literature a bit more.  This collection actually contains four different texts packages together.  

The first is a collection of 101 Zen stories that were originally published in the 13th century as the Collection of Stone and Sand.  While these are all entertaining and enlightening to some degree, the majority of them don't live up to the (extremely high) standards of thought-provoking-ness set by The Gateless Gate.  There are, however, a number of gems in here like Nan-In's cup of tea and Toyo's sound of one hand. 

The second is another translation of The Gateless Gate.  I prefer the version I read earlier because the Yamada Koun translation also provides a second layer of commentary specifically meant to take these koans more accessible to Westerners.  

The third is a reprint of the 10 Bulls or 10 Ox Herding Pictures that are meant to describe the stages of enlightenment.  The drawings reprinted here are those of Tokuriki Tomikichiro, with the verses from Kuòān Shīyuǎn, and commentary from who knows where.  I find this the most appealing of all the maps of enlightenment I've encountered so far, mainly for its simplicity and the sense of everyday mystery in those last few drawings.  Also, I have a solid intuitive sense that I'm working on stage 5 right now: Taming the Bull.

The final bit is a translation of a 7th century BCE Hindu scripture that bears a passing resemblance to the style of the later Zen writings.  However, this text is so old, so terse, and so severed from its context and tradition that it reads much like the fragments we have from the Presocratics.  It's not that you can't see the resemblance, it's just that you're given so little information that it's unclear whether you're drawing most of this connection from the context.   If you want to know more about this remarkably old bit of scripture, you can go down the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra wikipedia rabbit hole.  I mean, who even knew there was such a thing as Kashimir Shaivism?  That is, beyond the roughly 1.3b people for whom this question is not rhetorical.

Of Human Bondage

I picked up Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage because it was already on the shelf and because it was supposed to be a classic.  While it's not a bad novel, I just don't see how it's remarkable enough to warrant that description.  Maugham tells the story of the first 30 years of the sensitive young club-footed boy Philip Carey.  While Philip has a basically good heart, he's not really portrayed as that likeable a character, which is surprising since we are told in the author's preface that he is autobiographically inspired.  He's so overly sensitive, so filled with shame and rage, so fixated on class distinctions, so ... British, that he's just a hard kid to love.  Naturally, there's some drama in Philip's life.  He's an orphan.  He's differently-abled.  He falls in love with a whore.  He runs out of money.  All of these events and Philip's reactions to it are portrayed in fluid and mercifully spare prose that unfolds only gradually, growing up with its main character, as it were.  But in the end, it feels like the novel makes a 600 page mountain out of what is, at bottom, a molehill.  Growing up seems really dramatic while it happens, but in a sense it's one of the most boring and commonplace stories humans have to tell.  And despite all the drama, Philip Carey's childhood leads to the most pedestrian and bourgeois of destinations -- a small town doctor with a wife and kids.