Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from March, 2016

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: A Review

Salman Rushdie is a brilliant writer. The only writer to be awarded the Booker prize twice. I enjoy his witticism and his breathtaking style of writing. He can take the most ordinary of the stories and infuse it with such life that the reader is left spellbound. His writing is rich with allegory, symbolism, and incisive remarks about the current happenings in this fascinatingly bizarre world of ours. This is the third book by Rushdie I've read. My journey with Rushdie started with 'Satanic Verses'- A novel which is fascinating, scandalous, funny, bitter, all at the same time. I moved on to Midnight's Children, which I'm still to finish, not because it's boring but because it can be exhausting for someone who has stayed away from dense readings all his life. I do intend to finish it sometime and hopefully publish a review. Last year when I came across the news that Salman Rushdie is coming up with a new novel, a book about Jinn's, people with magical su...

The Big Sleep: A review

Noir, in french, means black. When applied to movies, film-noir means a movie with black shades. The stories are gritty, the characters are amoral or downright evil, the protagonist is slick, street-trained and a cynic. Strictly speaking, Film-noir does not only refer to a genre of movies, it also refers to movies of a certain era. So a proper definition of film-noir would be movies with darker shades released in 1940s and 50s. Noir has been a popular genre and The Big Sleep occupies a special place in the genre. Perhaps, the movie itself is more popular than the book. I love mystery thrillers and this book was always on my to-read list. When the perfect opportunity arrived, I didn't blink twice and read the first chapter. And I was hooked. The big sleep is about Phillip Marlowe. Marlowe is a private detective who is hired by General Sternwood who wants to shake off someone who is trying to blackmail him. As he goes about trying to complete the task assigned to him, A murder ...