Raymond Chandler: Biography review

 Raymond Chandler in the late 1930s, has been the one to use the ever rising POP music genre culture to evade and setup very interesting stories about murder mystery which went on to become not only best sellers but also epitomise the cynicism and world-weariness of a generation that had to survive two world wars.

Chandler himself was quite a colourful character in his own way, it is due these reason only that his biography by the British journalist Tom Hiney offers one a detailed portrait of his life.
The book devotes a third of itself to Chandler’s childhood and youth. Born to an Irish immigrant mother and an alcoholic father in Chicago during 1888, Chandler and his mother were  abandoned and made their way back to his native  country Ireland.

There he lived under the charity of his graceful uncle who continually reminded him  of their obligations and shortcomings.
Nonetheless, his uncle did not deny Chandler a good education and he joined  Dulwich College in 1900, the year that P G Wodehouse left the same school. Here he received an excellent grounding in Classical literature, a factor that was to raise his stories of street crime far above the writing of the average pulp hack writer.

He tried a  variety of professions, including journalist, poet and oil company executive, in both England and the United States, before he finally settled down to writing as a full-time profession. During his days as an amatuer writer his mother became ill and had to give his job away to take care of her.

Chandler actually taught himself to write, in a systematic way.
He read hundreds of pulp magazines, drew upon his own knowledge of the back streets of Los Angeles and the corruption within its police force,  his hand at analysing the source of Chandler’s writing and the factors that influenced it, and indeed, this biography is packed with detail, of the period as well as of the man in question, but the book might have benefited from a closer attention to the factual details of Chandler’s stories.

If you want to find out more make sure you the grab soon.

Flickr of candles

When the candle flame flickers on the wall during a spell of load-shedding, it may actually evoke your creative side,

It’s a much-awaited Saturday evening. You look forward to a nice, cozy curl-up on the sofa, with a racy book or a tingling detective video film to keep you company. But all of a sudden the lights go off. You grit your teeth hard for you know what’s in store - total darkness and no fan, no AC, sweating it out in a dark room in front of the forlorn glow of a candle. Watching a film is out and so is browsing. So think of what good you can do… think of something cheerful…
You see your shadow dancing on the wall, massive and dark, and you change postures to see how it varies. A whole lot of shadowy figures appear out of nowhere pervading your house - your mother, father, sister, brother all lost in that mystic world. Just at a time when you are beginning to feel bored, you discover a whole new world unfolding before your eyes.
Just one candlestick in a dark room can do wonders. Do you know that in the faint glow of a candle you can take some of the best black-and-white photographs of your loved ones? I know a couple who spent the dreadful hours of load shedding taking each other’s photos in candlelight. Sometimes darkness makes you feel more comfortable.
Remember how the couple confessed their guilt to each other, each time the current went off in Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “A Temporary Matter”? The white nights bathed in neon-tubes are too blatant, too insensitive to nuances - not only of light and shade but also of human feelings. The guilt and wrongdoings we are apt to hide in the blinding exposure of electricity, come out easily in darkness. Imagine yourself facing your mother, confessing about all the classes you bunked to hang out with your friends, all the bucks you spent on telephone calls. Isn’t it so much easier in the faint warm glow of a candle than when you are placed under the blaze of a harsh electric light?
A burning candle, flickering in the wind, attracting insects in hordes to jump into its intoxicating flame is in itself sufficient stuff to keep the philosopher in you thought-filled. Oh those delicate bodies poised on flimsy, transparent wings, circling round and round the flames, creating an odd, whirring noise in the absolute silence!
In load shedding you also take a refuge from noise, from the constant sounds of electric fan that are so inextricably linked with our urban life. We hear our neighbour’s voices, perhaps a child’s laughter or a baby’s cry or the melody of a sweet voice - not on the CD-player but from the next door house. In the sound of silence we feel the warmth of human company. We open the door of our house and stroll outside to catch some fresh air and suddenly we run into our next door neighbour. A conversation which begins with “How are you” that lasts almost a couple of hours or at least until the electricity comes back to throw us back into the fold of our busy urban life… Ma rushes into the kitchen to cook the dinner in haste, father once again becomes the bespectacled academician immersed in his studies, Didi starts completing her half-done homework.
I suddenly remember that it was also during another spell of load-shedding when we last had a conversation with this neighbour…
“For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles” (Tennessee Williams in The Glass Menagerie)

Paulo Coelho, Roll Call Again: Book Review

Paulo Coelho’s latest offering to be a piece of art, demonstrating the magic he is capable of creating with simple, ordinary language. “Zahir, in Arabic, means visible, present, incapable of going unnoticed. It is someone or something which, once we have come into contact with them or it, gradually occupies our every thought, until we can think of nothing else.” (From the foreword of the book.)
heartbroken novels about the presumably corrupt world of today and the jaded cynicism of most intellectual writers, The Zahir is like a fresh ray of hope, because it is essentially a very positive book. The concept of The Zahir is very important here, because it puts the entire plot into perspective, which is necessary to grasp the meta-plot of this multi-layered and wonderfully complex story. It is easy to relate to the narrator and protagonist, because it is just not about a rich writer who is obsessed with his disappeared wife, it is about the human experience of learning to follow dreams, realising them, and unleashing the powerful force of truth.
The book is about facing who you are and what you are afraid of, and erasing past histories in order to create more and more love every day. It is easy to sense that the protagonist is a broad-minded individual, who is brighter than the average person. As the book goes on to describe his journey it is easy to see how he grows more spiritually aware with every chapter.
The narrative is alive and vibrant and so insightful that it is sometimes overwhelming. The narrator’s view of life and society is very difficult from the conventional and commonsensical, and hence it provides new interpretations of even the most mundane things. The symbolism is very significant in the book once the reader has grasped the basic plot; within that outline the story progresses to reveal new dimensions into the writer’s search for his wife and his initially inadvertent stumbling into the truth about his own life.
As pointed out that school stories always have been and will be cherished by generations of students. Enid Blyton’s St Clare’s and Malory Towers stories will always find readers. What they have in common is that usually they are only representative of the students’ views. But in a school there is another body of important people, the teachers.