These gray gray days require uplifting reading material. I initially picked up Mediterranean Summer by David Shalleck and Erol Munuz from my shelves because its bright yellow cover stuck out invitingly. And I love my copy with its beautiful cover containing scenes of the French and Italian Riviera. It was with a sense of snuggling down for a light read that I started the book. I have to say it exceeded my expectations in the most wonderful way.

Essentially it distills David’s experiences while working as a chef on board a luxury sailing yacht owned by one of Italy’s most prominent couples. In the book Il Dottore and La Signora as he calls them, hire him to for the summer as they cruise their way from the French Cote D’Azur all the way to Italy’s Emerald Coast and then back again for the summer season ending Regatta Cup at St. Tropez. And lest you think these are regular folks who want regular meals, they are not. As instructed, David is to prepare three to four course lunches and dinners, taking care not to repeat a single dish for the entire duration of the vacation and using only the freshest local ingredients to make traditional cucina italiana. No mean feat. And let me tell you, as someone who can barely plan a week’s menu, I can fully understand David’s reservations about being able to fulfill the stringent requirements. But fulfill them he does and he passes with flying colors.

This is a book to get deliciously lost into. It is not merely a travelogue detailing the various places they visit, neither is it merely a book on food. It is that wonderful blend of travel and food, that captures with an accurate eye the essence of the places and people that he encountered. It helps enormously that David is a more than an able writer. He writes with genuine flair and even honesty. There is no disguising the fact that his sojourn was mostly work with barely enough time for rest or recreation but through his writing you get a sense of the real love that he has for his work. And if you love to read up on food, this one is full of mouthwatering dishes that make you dream. As an added bonus, he includes recipes of the most memorable dishes at the end of his book.

I closed the book with a sigh, sad that I finished it too quickly. I went to bed dreaming of Positano and red tomatoes ripening in the sun.

Fashion, Lagerfeld and St. Laurent

If you are an avid student of fashion history or if you are simply a fashionista, the one book you must absolutely read is The Beautiful Fall (Fashion, Genius and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris) by Alicia Drake. Certainly, it is one of the most controversial books ever written on Yves St. Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld. In fact, Lagerfeld tried to stop the publication of this book, and failing that, tried to prevent bookstores from carrying this book. Controversial beginning aside, this is one of the most fascinating books I’ve had the pleasure of reading in recent memory.
The book takes as its focal point the parallel lives of Lagerfeld and St. Laurent who are arguably two of the most influential designers in fashion. It paints in vivid and rich details their respective careers, from their auspicious beginnings, to their full blown unrelenting rivalry against the backdrop of 70s Paris and all the way until the emergence of Lagerfeld at the head of Chanel. In Drake’s hands, Paris, as it emerges from the restrained post war years to a more exuberant and reckless mood is the crucial third character to the duo of Lagerfeld and St. Laurent who certainly used the city as the staging ground of their artistic aspirations and their more personal undertakings. There is no shortage of controversial details in the book. But such controversial facts never distract from what is clearly a well researched portrait of two figures that couldn’t be more different from the other. Drake paints in careful brushstrokes the heady parties, the excessive relationships and the simmering jealousies that surrounded Lagerfeld and St. Laurent and you come away with a sense of being immersed in a completely different world, one that is normally off limits to mortals like you and I. More importantly we come away with a much greater understanding of these two gigantic personalities. Whatever else we might think of them, this book allows us to have a much greater appreciation of their enormous talent, their verve and yes, survival skills. Equally intriguing are the stories behind seemingly well known facts about various famous personages. Just one example would be what we learn about Pierre Bergé who emerges as a much more sympathetic figure. This book contains a veritable who’s who in the fashion world.
Lest you think that this book is all glitter and gossip, it must be pointed out that it is also an invaluable resource for appreciating in far greater detail the giant steps taken by fashion at the hand of these two masters. Women now take for granted the ease of the trouser suit but this was a highly daring and innovative move when St. Laurent first debuted the “le smoking” in the late 60s. Nor should we underestimate how much Lagerfeld changed the way people viewed fashion by nimbly adapting trends even before people knew what they wanted. More importantly, he was the first to realize the almost global impact that fashion could have. As a master of endless reinvention, Lagerfeld is the best and Madonna is not fit to holds candle to him.
So the next time you have the urge to read a good biography, a fashion book, or one set in Paris, I suggest you go with The Beautiful Fall. You won’t regret it.

When two favorite authors meet

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending a conference with Alberto Manguel. He is one of my favorite writers and it was such a thrill to see him and to listen to him lecture. I spent many happy enraptured hours perusing his Dictionary of Imaginary Beings and being engrossed in his monumental History of Reading. His writing is never too highbrow to detract from the clarity and vividness of the thoughts behind. And how can one not love a dictionary on imaginary beings? Naturally with the conference, I found myself looking though RWB’s shelves to discover something that I hadn’t read before. Of course, I discovered a pearl I hadn’t discovered before.
When he was 16 years old, while working at Buenos Aires’ Pygmalion bookstore, Manguel was asked by Borges if he would like to be his reader. Borges had already gone blind by the time he asked, and in fact had gotten into the habit of asking any and everyone. And so for four years, Manguel would visit three or four times a week to read to him. His book, With Borges, distills those years.
While his sessions with Borges were reading sessions, it was enough for an astute observer like Manguel to capture Borges’ essence as a writer. For fans of Borges, myself included, this is an invaluable addition to his writings. There is no doubt that Borges was a prolific and more importantly, a beautiful writer but short of having access to academic works or his biography, it is rare to find a volume that discusses his philosophy of writing in such a succinct yet elegant manner. We can never underestimate Borges influence on writing or other writers and even on his country. As Manguel points out, “Borges renewed the Spanish language…that his generous reading methods, allowed him to bring into Spanish felicities from other tongues: English turns of phrase or the German ability to hold until the end of a sentence its subject.” But more than refreshing the Spanish language, Borges’ writings have fixed Argentina permanently into the collective consciousness. “When Borges began writing, Buenos Aires (so far from Europe, the perceived center of culture), felt vague and indistinct, and seemed to require a literary imagination to impose it upon reality. Now Buenos Aires feels more real because it exists in Borges’ pages.” That’s quite a feat if you think about it.
My favorite passage, is that which talks about books. “For Borges, the core of reality lay in books, reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end. Books restored the past.” As someone who lives and breathes books on a daily basis, this is one credo to live by.

When luxury loses its luster

Deluxe: How Luxury has Lost its Lustre by Dana Thomas has just come out in paperback! That's great news as I think its one of the most interesting books to come out on the fashion industry.
Deluxe gets off to a running start with the evolution of the luxury industry. It traces its beginnings from the nobility period when craftsmen were proud to make and present the best of their wares to royalty. At that time luxury had noble aspirations. However, the inevitable rise of the middle class gave birth to a new phenomenon whereby the newly rich could now afford the very things that used only to be within the reach of the very rich. And this fact was very cleverly seized by businessmen and launched the new era of luxury where it was made available and indeed, accessible to everyone.
From there, the book goes on to detail the activities of several high fashion groups and the way they run their empires. It is especially interesting to learn about the designer, who we normally know only by their name, or by their bag, shoes or clothes, as an actual person. For instance, Miuccia Prada is described as “a woman who had been raised in haute bourgeois society, with servants and grandeur and politesse. Unlike her competitor, Donatella Versace, who came from nothing, Prada’s airs are not airs at all: her snobbery is in her bones.” Flattering or unflattering, such descriptions gives a sense of the person behind the label and how such personality reflects on the house designs.
The author likewise takes pains to detail how luxury shopping has encircled and continues to encircle the globe. And it’s very funny to read detailed chapters on the spending habits of several different countries. One realizes just why people are limited to a specific number of items when shopping and why when walking down Champs Elysee, you could get asked to buy a bag for someone. It seems that shopping habits have been studied with as much intensity as global warming, if not more so.
Reading this book, one is lead to ask whether there is anything wrong with making luxury as accessible to everyone, as much as possible. What is wrong with the democratization of luxury and the derivation of profit? As Thomas points out, Bernard Arnault and other luxury group stockholders certainly can’t and indeed don’t complain. And the ever expanding prosperous middle class and newly minted millionaires of developing countries are among the first to welcome such development. Certainly there is nothing wrong if we don’t consider that we are losing a more genteel, rarefied way of life. And even more certainly, there is nothing wrong with thinking that we are all entitled to luxury. And does it really matter that the proliferation of so-called luxury products in our every day life has all but erased the distinction between what real luxury is and the mere appearance of it. What is wrong with buying into the dream? Nothing except if you consider the fact that it is now a business and a multi-billion dollar one at that. The very antithesis of what it used to be. Luxury is no longer the experience of having something produced out of genuine passion and waiting to be able to acquire such a thing; where the waiting enhances the experience and becomes as delicious a moment as having the actual object in one’s hands. It is about having something of beauty that lasts more than its allotted shelf life and getting a glimpse of eternity. That is what we are all entitled to but paradoxically in today’s world is now as rare as real luxury. It is in losing such experience that luxury has lost its luster.


Question: What's your take on the fashion industry and the way it impacts our society now?

A Writer's Paris: A Guided Journey to the Creative Soul

As can be gleaned from the title, this book is designed as a guide to writers with Paris as the creative inspiration. Why Paris you might ask? As Maisel points out, Paris has long served as the symbolic home for creative people everywhere, serving as inspiration to countless artists and writers.
This is not however a cheesy self help guide, instead it is a practical and encouraging guide to anyone who’s ever dreamt of being a writer. It is written in the form of 50 essays with witty sayings and interspersed with clever vignettes and anecdotes. It is designed to be an inspirational guide to writers, and is written with a deft and affirmative hand. Maisel doesn’t bludgeon his readers over the head with his lessons, but instead leads, or should I say write by example. Inspirational writing aside however, he has included practical details in planning a trip to Paris. It is all very well and good to dream about writing in Paris, but without the practical details like finding tickets and lodging, a trip to Paris wouldn’t be possible.
Aside from the art of writing itself, Paris is very much in the spotlight (as the title suggests). There are beautiful little chapters on Place des Vosges and the Musee d’Orsay and even the little church of St. Julien le Pauvre, all with the end view of making these places inspire the creative spirit. Who after all, wouldn’t be inspired when you are sitting there and absorbing the ambiance of these wonderful places? And if these places are not enough, Maisel suggests learning the art of the strolling about while soaking up everything. For this reason alone, Paris is the perfect place to stroll as every street corner and building is enough to inspire creativity.
A consistent theme of this book is that every writer must put in the necessary work inorder for the writing to succeed. More than being inspired to write, the would be writer must be prepared for long hours of sitting alone and writing. Just like with every other endeavor, consistency is key to writing, especially if it is not going well. This is a worthy message that sadly doesn’t get emphasized often enough in our culture of immediate gratification.
For anybody with writing aspirations or lovers of the City of Lights, this is the perfect little book to read.

A monument to love

I must admit that it was the title and the beautiful cover that accompanied it was what first attracted me to this book. I thought to myself that it must surely be a good book. And this proved to be true enough. Written jointly by Diana and Michael Preston, A teardrop on the cheek of time is about the story of the Taj Mahal, the world’s most famous monument to love. But while it is about the Taj Mahal, it delves a lot deeper and gives an astute, learned and complete historical and cultural background of the epoch. The book introduces an impressive cast of characters that made up the powerful Moghul Empire from the founding patriarch Babur all the way to the Aurangzeb who deposed his grieving father Shah Jahan. More importantly we meet the beautiful and enigmatic Mumtaz Mahal, the woman who inspired such a wondrous monument. In writing this book the way they have, the authors have succeeded in fleshing out these characters so that they jump out of the page with intense immediacy. The extensive research is certainly appreciable and does justice to the subject matter.
While this is a historical book, it is nonetheless written in a highly compelling style. Within the story of the Moghul Empire is a story with Shakespearean elements and these were very skillfully brought out by the authors. They were able to weave together all the disparate strands of history, romance, political strife and family conflict together into a compulsively readable tome. At the end of the book, one sees the Taj Mahal in an altogether different light.

The Shock Doctrine

Only a crisis, actual or perceived can produce real change. That in a capsule defines the Shock Doctrine. As conceived by its primary proponent Milton Friedman, the shock doctrine allows the imposition of otherwise unpalatable economic conditions on an unsuspecting populace through the haze that follows a catastrophic event. By taking advantage of a crisis or disaster (natural and increasingly man made) the three primary tenets of the doctrine, namely deregulation/free trade, privatization and severe cutbacks on social spending could be imposed with impunity and without regard for what is considered as nationalist safeguards. As envisioned by Friedman and his disciples (whose economic policy is forever known as the Chicago school of thought), the objective is to strip away all regulations until all distortions are removed and the markets are free to regulate themselves. The idea being that the free regulation of the market would allow all people to benefit from the wealth that is subsequently created. But in Milton’s hands and as practiced by his fervent disciples, it has evolved to pure corporatism coupled with a disaster capitalism. The basic doctrine thus put in place, Naomi Klein’s excellent book the Shock Doctrine sets out to challenge the basic assumptions and tenets of the Doctrine by showing that its unfettered application all over the world has brought about the grossest violations of human rights and created and in numerous instances broadened and increased a hundredfold the inequality between the rich and poor. It has brought about the very opposite of what it purports to bring about.
Given such a highly controversial and potentially contentious subject, Klein has undertaken in depth research and from the wealth of information contained, has put in a significant amount of time to gather all the facts and to ensure that the facts speak for themselves. And the facts are damning indeed.
The first half of the book is devoted to studying the cases of the countries where the doctrine was first applied. From Latin America, to South Africa, Poland, Russia, China, Korea and Indonesia, the book shows us how the application of the doctrine has necessitated the most brutal repressions (i.e. Chile’s Pinochet and Argentina’s generals) and wide application of torture. Indeed the stringent economic measures required that torture be applied. It was the means of ensuring compliance of the people and to remake the society in accordance with the vision of its creators. As such it was carried out systematically and clinically both on individuals and on whole societies. And the result of such experiment was the almost complete privatization of its national industries, the lay-off of thousands of state employees, huge national debts to the IMF and World Bank, and the enrichment of a very tiny segment of society. It does not even begin to describe the misery, exploitation and deprivation that was endured and in some cases, still being endured today by the ordinary people of these countries. And because the interests of big multinational companies are involved, it comes almost as no surprise to learn that the US backed several coups which subsequently put governments in place that supported the Chicago School.
The second and third parts of the book deals with the application of the doctrine to the country of its birth-the US. And we see how the evolution of the doctrine and its accompanying disaster capitalism has led to the Iraq war and even more disastrously, the privatization of all but the most basic government functions. What has happened is the logical next step in the process. Where the national industries of other countries were once the target, it only makes sense that the target now is what may be the richest prize of them all, the US Government. From the findings of the book, it appears that any and everything that could be contracted out has been contracted out, reducing and stripping away functions that have traditionally belonged to the State. Thus, we see how the reconstruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina has lead to rich gated communities (built by private contractors) and huge blocks of poor areas that are still without water or electricity. In the words of the book, what has evolved is the hollow state. If the previous chapters have already been already sickening in its detail of torture, murder and poverty, this chapter is perhaps the most sickening as it enumerates in painful detail the huge amounts of public money that have gone to line the pockets of very select corporations (in many cases owned by very prominent individuals). It is cronyism and corruption at the highest levels and banana dictators have apparently nothing on them when it comes to amassing enormous amounts of money.
Klein concludes the book by showing that at the moment there is a growing move to reject the policies of the Chicago school and this is by no means an easy task. Despite the experience of countries under the shock doctrine, there are ominous signs of its continuing power. A quick look around us confirms the existence of rich gated communities while increasingly large segments of society remain disenfranchised and down trodden. And should the shock doctrine continue, these gated communities could become fiercely armed and read to fight to the death to maintain its stranglehold. But as with everything else, there is hope. Latin America is now on its first attempts to bring back a democratic socialism, which attempt was brutally cut short in the 70s. They have before them a few models, namely Scandinavia, but it remains to be seen whether it can be applied everywhere else. An important insight to take away from reading the book is the idea that we owe it to our collective existence to fight against the continuing hold of this insidious doctrine whether or not we are from countries that have been under shock. As pointed out by the author, disasters have traditionally united humans; it cuts across religious, cultural and political ties and alliances. We must learn to do so again and we must learn to rebuild our society into a more just version of what we have thus far created.

Note: The Shock Doctrine is now available at RWB for 15 Euros