Love by Toni Morrison

An utterly brilliant book of love and hate sitting inseparably, two sides of an indivisible coin.

The story of Christine and Heed two childhood friends, who had a stake driven through their friendship by strangest of twists of fate and adults too consumed with their own desires and hurts to care for anything else. It is the story of the stamina that hate can develop once it is allowed to enter our beings. And how its slow fire always goes on consuming everything around it, the hater more than anything else. It is also about the power of love - no matter how dormant - to douse that smoldering hate, just as a bucketful of sugar can 'caramelize' a slow fire.

As in The Bluest Eye, Morrison invades several souls with consummate mastery and rides feelings and emotions with complete ownership. And as she goes on chiseling her characters - the rapacious Junior, the honorable Ronnen, the lustful Mr Cosey who owns the hotel (and the centre of this story), the mysterious L and, of course the duo of Heed and Christine.

It is a story that teases one truth after out after another till the entire suspense is unraveled in the end. The imagery is evocative and powerful, each comparison a delight.

A powerful book indeed.      

Levels of Life by Julian Barnes

I must admit that initially I did not entirely get this book. “You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed” begins this short novel. And more than two things are put together in the story, indeed more than two stories that do not intersect, except in the passing. What does develop is a theme; of longing and the perennial ache of the aftermath of loss. And to carve this tale of love and loss The Levels of Life relies on stories from the early days of ballooning and aerial photography. In the very end, Barnes moves into a most luminous terrain, the one inside him, and unfolds a devastating landscape of grief.

The depth of the feeling of loss, the stark relief in which it is etched, the universality of emotion it evokes even in someone who has not experienced it firsthand, the bottomless pain that must alternate between a dull throb and sharp infliction – both equally unbearable – are so obviously autobiographical. Indeed the inside cover informs us of the early passing away of Barnes’ wife Pat Kavanagh who married him in 1979 and died in 2008.

Unlike Barnes' The Sense of an Ending, the story here is not linear. Indeed, it is largely bereft of a plot but still flows like a silent stream.

It is clearly a work of deep and abiding love. Such is the heartfelt-ness of the contours of pain that one feels envious of the love that must have been shared in its wake. The accolades from critics are fulsome and surely well-deserved. And even though I could not get the point of the story early on, I came away deeply moved in the end.