Iranian President claims that the (Jewish) Holocaust was a staged production, or a trick myth that has been perpetuated on the gullible ‘us’ in order to grab land in the Middle East by the evil Zionists. Elsewhere Kafka dreams up Mr. Samsa, who in turn dreams that he has become a bug. And somewhere else, self was playing hooky by indulging in aimless reading after a few months of reading diet restricted to mainly business and financial press.

This is not to say that the financial press can’t be fascinating in a morbid anthropological/ sociological fashion. A case in point is an article last week in the Wall Street Journal on the growth of cosmetic surgery that deals with re-virgin-izing (by reattaching hymens) and vagina tightening in these United States (also a subject that was covered with great wit, from an Iranian context by Marjane Strapi in her “Embroideries”; a quote from memory: the penis is visually, in a manner of speaking, not a very aesthetic), or from today’s WSJ issue, an article on the shopping habits of the natives ($600 Louis Vitton purses or bags for teenage girls anybody?). But I shouldn’t digress too much from my unstated aim of summarizing a few recent wanderings in the labyrinths of books.

Let me begin with Primo Levi’s memoir ‘The Reawakening’, a book that I have successfully managed to prosecute till the end; a task that seems to be harder with the advent of this PADD (print attention deficit disorder) I seemed to have picked up somewhere. In this book Primo Levi traces his journey back to Italy from the lagers of Auschwitz with great humor and style. There is great joy in this book – one can feel Primo Levi reawakening to the world from the Nazi nightmares to which he had been consigned, and from which he was just liberated from. I discovered Primo Levi when I accidentally stumbled upon his ‘The Monkey’s Wrench’ in a second hand bookstore, and have since with great delight consumed his other work. Also if they are not banned in Iran, I would suggest that someone give Mr. Ahmadinejad, Levi’s ‘Survival in Auschwitz’ for edification.

Passing on to other books, Alison Wearing’s ‘Honeymoon in Purdah’ was a half good half bad travelogue, recounting her adventures with her gay roommate in Iran. She is good when is she deals with the comedy of manners that arise in the course of her interactions with crazy Iranians (who seem to have an overwhelming tendency to force feed guests as they take them on serendipitous wild goose chases), as well as her attempts to impose her will on the hejab and the chador (the regulation clothing for women) as they seem to develop minds of their own. However, she is off the mark (i.e., I committed violence on the book) when she waxes self-indulgently, in half New Age-ish monologues like this one:

“My hands run against the sun cracked walls, grainy and thirsty for the oils of living skin. My tongue glides along the curves of the doorways, arches that chrunch against my lips and let me taste sand seeped in centuries. My eyes sink into the color of these ruins and become terra cotta beads, smooth and hard against my eyelids when I blink.”

I am now lazy, so here is a list of other books which are in the chewing pipeline (i.e., books I have begun, and which may be finished tomorrow, next week, next year or never) for the holidays:

Jorge Luis Borges – “Seven Nights” & “Labyrinths” & “In Praise of Darkness” Eva Hoffman – “Lost in Translation” Robin Wright – ‘The Last Great Revolution – Turmoil & Transformation In Iran’ Carlos Drummond de Andrade – ‘Traveling in the Family – Selected Poems’ Jose Saramago – ‘The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis’ Abraham Eraly – ‘The Mughal Throne’

Pehw! Have I opened so many cans! I think it is best not to even open the box of twenty or so volumes I had hauled in over this weekend from a book sale!