More Books

Brief note on some new books I bought this week, all from the bargain section at the Barnes and Noble. The first book is a mystery novel called Who Killed Palomino Molero? by the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. I haven't read any genre book in a long while (not that I read a lot), but this looks very interesting. Vargas Llosa is one of my favourites among the contemporary writers. His books not only evoke a great sense of place and culture but also are politically engaged with the complex realities of contemporary Latin America. Politically engaged, that is, without losing sight on the essential human nature on which he always manages to cast a deft eye in all his novels, as all consummate artists do. What is most remarkable in his political views is his scepticism about the utopian and revolutionary solutions to the problems plaguing Latin America. He views them as nothing more than dangerous millenarian delusions. These rather despairing political views are delineated in most of his novels with deftly sketched detail, but in none more successfully than in The War of the End of the World, which is possibly the greatest Latin American novel ever along with Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Vargas Llosa is also a very fine comic writer and a great writer of erotica (of high-brow kind). Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and In Praise of Stepmother have few parallels in contemporary literature.

The second book is a kind of self-help manual, but with a vengeance. It is not about how to live but about how to die. Darwin's Worms written by well known British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips is a meditation on what it means to live amid the continuous presence of unexplainable suffering, loss and death. The author uses ideas from two of the most important thinkers of modern era, Darwin and Freud, to shed light on some of the grave issues plaguing human kind. This looks like a very interesting book, I will write about it in detail later.

The third book is a short critical study of Hamlet by Harold Bloom. I am expecting some more thought provoking ideas on love, life and death from the book. All these books are very short, so should be able to finish them off very soon.