Gone Girl – Book Review

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl…

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This quote and the recent Ben Affleck starrer movie trailer made me pick up and read Gone Girl . If you click on the linked text it will re-direct you to the wiki page and the plot will be given away. So don’t. Quite tempting it is I know, so don’t.

Gone Girl is a fast read. It is a New York Times Bestseller (2012). It is Gillian Flynn’s third book. And it is just so damn insanely smartly creepy.

It is a love story and to borrow Flynn’s words – it is a nuclear love story. The plot is fast, racy and saucy when it needs to be. The timing of the turns and twists mostly unpredictable with very strongly predictable characters is more than impeccable, it is honestly a bit insulting. There are shades of Sheldon like narration and just when you think you know where this is going she gets to you right just like that and you are like – ok, what just happened there.

The characters are very real. They can be easily identified with. The first person narration-putting the characters voice in your head, something (probably the only thing) which has worked in great favour for The Fifty Shades and Twilight series – once again works, it makes the reading easy and it makes the reader feel so involved, especially when Flynn chooses to mock the social norms prevalent in Amy’s intelligent disapproving voice.

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The social commentary is simply crazy, insane, nuclear. She comments on marriages, love, infidelity, parents, cops, rich people, poor people, New York people, small town people, diseased people, the press, the paparazzi, the judicial system, lawyers, siblings – all of us have been mocked, all the norms have been cut,dissected and put on a display for all us, to see the error of our ways.

Amy’s observations of this less than perfect world are loaded with frank factual conclusions. Amy mocks everyone. And then I guess Flynn has mocked Amy by painting her the way she has – in this crazy nuclear way making her say all those nasty true things. Meta-mockery.

The book is easy to read – alternate he-she narration, almost linear parallel time line, complete characters, a well-researched plot – basically it had all the right ingredients for David Fincher ( yes, yes Fight Club !) to make a movie out of it.

I could tell you all about the book and the plot but I think it would make for a different reading experience. Do read it.

Youth – J M Coetzee

To detail the plot very simply Youth tells the story of a white man from South Africa who escapes to London thinking hoping  like one usually does when one moves to a fancy town, of great adventures but ends up becoming one of the many soul less faces of the newly booming IT industry.

But then, no one reads a Coetzee for the plot. Though, it is credible how he weaves the plot through so many voices. Youth has two voices – the youth’s and the narrator’s. And it becomes difficult sometimes to tell the two apart.

So many issues are touched upon, questioned and dissected through the introspectively curious nature of the protagonist – writers and writing, poetry and prose, music and musicians, how difficult it is to write sometimes, how lonely do we become in cities full of people, fantasies and expectations of the youth vs reality of the modern world, how the grass is always greener on the other side, sex between strangers and of course the obvious ones against whose back drop the entire book is painted – family, South Africa, London, war and politics.

The play with the tenses and grammar, the play with the shifting voices in a single sentence, the dreamy tone flowing through many sentences, the words, his words seem to have a life of their own and now and then they intoxicate the reader and sometimes they spill over from the mind of the youth in to the plot.

The absence of any form of dialogue, inverted commas in this work does not take away the authenticity of the existence of the characters. The reader is aware of the progression of the plot – how in his misery he could dream so much and now that he is in comfort he can hardly create. Anguish, pain and the misery of the artist aside I like how Coetzee has chosen his words, or have the words chosen themselves, for the  journey of the artist both inward and outward, how in the end when his existence becomes a slave of corporatism the words for him are bland, colourless.

Reading the book for me was intense, it was an assault on my mind, it over whelmed my being and the words, his words, they toyed with me and they played with me and I liked it very much.

 

 

Love, that shit – Chandru Bhojwani

Only love can break your heart, sang Neil Young once. And in societies where the idea of love is prevalent nothing makes you feel alive like being in love or being out of it. In his book, Love, that Shit, Chandru Bhojwani touches upon the many behavioural aspects of human interactions which are results – direct and otherwise, of the notion of love. He speaks about the need of love and the things it makes us do. With a lot of contemporary cultural references sprinkled in the book here and there he maps out the evolving practices and mind-sets widespread in the city-societies today.

The book is written in third person narrative and is a typical example of the catchy chapter titles which appeal to that section of the society facing first world problems of breaking up and moving on. All chapters are interconnected while at the same time they can be read independently. From finding someone to breaking up to moving on to dealing with the family, relatives, societal pressures and norms to drunk calling and texting, the author has covered almost all of today’s love practises.

Is this a book on the philosophy of love? It might as well be, as the author questions often throughout the book why is it that we do what we do? Why do men get attracted to inked bodies? Who is this ‘they’ that we often refer to in our everyday life? Why do we love the way we do? Why do we fear arranged marriage? And why are we so stuck up on the idea of the perfect mate?

This book will make you laugh, it will inadvertently make you nostalgic and more often than not it will make you think.  As you read the stories and quotes of the famous people of our times you will be remember the journey of your past and you will also be shown a glimpse of the future. This book will raise your awareness of modern love dynamics and perhaps it might help you find that perfect someone and give you, your happily ever after.

This book is written is by Chandru Bhojwani. Know the author more here. You can connect to him on facebook – his FB page.