A Novel Set in Australia

The Spare Room, by Helen Garner, is a slim volume, more a novella than a full length novel. Just finished it yesterday, after a quick reading. I carried it wherever I went, ran through pages when I was waiting, or resting after a long walk in the Rose Garden in front of the Santa Barbara Mission.

With the garden full of blooming colourful roses, in different stages of flowering, and vivid and various colours, reading this book there was an irony in itself. The story about two friends, Nicola and Helen, where Nicola comes to Helen's house for 3 weeks to get alternative treatment for her terminal stage cancer, is full of phrases and problems of disease, doctors, medicine and prognosis or lack of it.

But to Nicola, this visit came as the time when she realized the nearness of death, the certainty of it, and the futility of treatments when everything failed. She learnt to accept her situation and its inevitability. With acceptance came the wisdom of seeing the real situation, and to make the best of it.

Maybe Las Vegas

Some time ago, I wrote about our major dilemma about where to go for the year end celebrations. There should be a way to bid adieu to 2009 and welcome 2010. The next year, everyone is saying, will bring in major changes, and these changes would be good ones. So, there is a need to doubly make the new year feel welcome amidst us.

Always I feel weird when an old year comes to an end. Especially the last few hours, when I feel sad that one stretch of my life has come to an end, but I am also waiting for the new year to begin. I'm sure everyone feels similar emotions, when waiting becomes a torture. We just want old things to end, although we feel sad, but we want new things to begin.

These cycles of years, seasons, days, months, weeks have a beginning and an end. Everything earthly has a start and a finish, I would say, and all of you would agree on that, I feel. This is what marks our life. This is what differentiates us from inanimate things. Life – that is what it is all about.

And at the end of one year, when a new year is on the horizon, wanting to celebrate it in a big way is not a bad idea at all. These are not things that do not come again and again. The moments come, and then go away. They go for ever.

It is about catching hold of the moment, even if for a moment only. Then then go back to it later in the mind, repeatedly. Moments live only in our memories. But for it to be in the memory, it has to be lived and experienced at least once. Life is all about living the moments, then reliving them in our minds again and again. As long as we have memory, we are alive. That is why diseases like Alzheimer's is so dreaded. If we don't have memory, it is like death.

To have an enriched memory, to have great moments, we've thought of making a trip to Las Vegas. We'd welcome the new year, 2010, in Las Vegas, in all probability (that is, if we get hotel reservation). That would be a different place from our residence, and a different memory. Hope we're making the right decision.

Laws of Inheritance

Finished reading the novel Esther's Inheritance by Hungarian author Sandor Marai a few minutes ago, and I'm still in a daze. It was a page turner. I couldn't stop reading. Of course I shouldn't have taken two days, considering it is slim. But I've been doing my own stuff, so finishing it means a lot.

There are very few books that say so much in so few pages. And all great writings are about love. And also about life, death, intrigue. It was so deep, had to stop and re-read occasionally, either to grasp the meaning, or to let the idea sink in.

As if I had a long talk with the writer. As if he was telling his story only to me. It was absorbing. Please don't be surprised by my gushing his praise. I'd love to read all the other novels that he has written. Including Embers, Casanova in Bolzano, and The Rebels.