Tuck Everlasting (2002)

Winifred(Winnie)Foster lives with her parents and her grandmother in a large house,an almost palatial mansion.The Fosters are a name to reckon with in the town in which they live and Winifred’s father owns the woods,which are very close to their home,but Winnie has never been allowed to venture out alone.She has been taught to do what all “proper”girls do and maintains propriety by doing things such as playing the piano and wearing the corset.

However,this kind of life only stifles her and she craves for freedom and one day,she decides to venture out alone into the woods.There she finds a handsome boy who is drinking water from the spring.This boy is Jesse Tuck and he is immediately arrested by her beauty.Winnie craves for a drink of water,but Jesse stops her,saying that the water is poisoned. Suddenly,out of nowhere,Jesse’s brother,Miles appears and forcefully puts Winifred on a horse and takes her to the Tucks’ house.Winifred cannot understand why she has been “kidnapped”. Angus Tuck and his wife Mae are very kind to her but Miles is extremely suspicious of her and keeps reiterating that she cannot be “trusted”(with their secret).Jesse says she can and is called “a fool”by his brother. Slowly,as Winnie begins to live with the Tucks,she realises how wonderful life can be.The Tucks are warm,loving and spontaneous,none of the things that Winnie has ever experienced.Mae Tuck is especially fond of Winnie and Jesse and Winnie,are forever playful,frisking about like the deer that they play with.They prance about in the green fields,frolick in the morning sunshine and climb a heap of rocks that Jesse calls the “Eiffel Tower”. They bathe in the water of the waterfall and finally share their first kiss.This is when Miles decides to let her in on the family’s “big secret” The Tucks drank water from a spring which was the spring of youth and they achieved immortality. The concept of immortality is given a rather unique treatment because the Tucks want to die.As Angus Tuck tells Winnie later on,death is a natural process and meddling with the wheel of change would have its consequences.It would mean a life unlived. Miles also repents the death of his wife and his two little kids,Anna and Beau.He says with tears in his eyes that he is still alive,while his wife died in an insane asylum,old and alone.

The Tucks live far away from society and civilisation because they are afraid that if people find out where they are,they will be asked about the water from the spring. Angus believes that that is lethal,because what no one understands is the fact that immortality is not as glorious as it is made out to be. The meaning of life is its ever-changing nature and immortality brings with it stagnancy. The Tucks have been accused of practising witchcraft and black magic and a Man has been following the two Tuck Boys.Miles suspects that he knows about them and his suspicion is proved right when the Man comes to the woods on the pretext of saving Winnie and reveals that he had heard a tale from his grandmother about an old woman in an asylum who spoke of “Anna”and hummed a certain tune.This establishes the fact that the woman was none other than Miles’s dead wife.The Man tries to kill Jesse but fails(quite naturally)and Mae Tuck kills him from the back when he tries killing Winifred who is not immortal. Winifred’s father comes to the woods and takes his daughter back home.

Finally,the Tucks go away from the woods and Jesse begs him to come with her.Winnie says that it will only put them in danger.Jesse asks her to drink from the spring of youth and promises that he will come back to take her with him when the time is right.

When Jesse does come back,he sees Winnie’s gravestone.It reads “Winnie Foster Jackson”.It is quite obvious that years and years have passed and Winnie is dead. She had also moved on with her life,married and had children because her epitaph reads “dear wife and loving mother”

The narrative is beautiful and the story flows smoothly.The philosophy behind the story is deeply moving and stirs the soul.It reminded me of Keats’s theme of transience-that nothing really lasts forever.At the same time,this is a tale of everlasting love and a tale about making choices.It is not just about who you really are,but also about who you choose to be.

Alexis Bledel and Jonathan Jackson in ‘Tuck Everlasting’

New York Times Book Review of ‘Atonement’

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405E5D81231F933A25750C0A9649C8B63

Atonement(2007)

Keira Knightly and James Mcavoy in ‘Atonement’-a tale of enduring love.

I’ve just finished reading ‘Atonement’ by Ian Mcewan and these are my thoughts on the book.I’ll so be quoting from various places,writing about what fans have had to say,basically write everything I want to write about the book,no holds barred.For those of you who haven’t read the book(or watched the film),I suggest you skip this post and come back and read it later.This is one book that is totally worth a read.

If you haven’t yet read the book or watched the film,this is where you stop reading.Go on,take your eyes off the computer screen…if you’re still reading,don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.

‘Atonement’ was first published in 2001 in Great Britain by a publisher named Jonathan Cape.British Writer Ian Mcewan was nominated for the Booker prize for his book Atonement.By this time,he had already won a Booker Prize for his book Amsterdam in 1998.

“On the hottest day of the summer of 1935,thirteen year old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip of her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of her country house.Watching her is Robbie turner,her childhood friend,who,like Cecilia,has recently come down from Cambridge.

By the end of that day,the lives of all three will have been changed forever.Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start,and will have become victims of the younger girl’s imagination.Briony will have witnessed mysteries and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone”

That’s what the back cover of Atonement reads like.It is rather ambiguous if you ask me,but it does invoke in the reader some sort of curiosity.Why else would I pick up a book and read it?All right,before I lie through my teeth,I think James Macavoy(who plays Robbie Turner in the film) is really really hot.And his Scottish accent makes him even Hotter.To be honest,I didn’t even know that Atonement was a booker-prize winning book until very recently.

However,before I watched the film,I wanted to read the book putting special emphasis on Robbie Turner(James Mcavoy’s character) to see how Macavoy had essayed his role in the film.However,inspite of my bias towards Turner,I found myself drawn to all three characters in the book.And soon enough,I had forgotten about Mcavoy and Keira Knightly and I was drawn into the book-in a parallel universe.

Ever since I’ve been a child,I’ve always identified with one character or another-I was little Bets in the Five Find Outers by Enid Blyton, “Princess Ariel”in “the Little Mermaid”by Hans Christian Anderson and “Ronald Weasley”in the Harry Potter series.However,for the first time,I could relate to all three characters at once and all of them made me hate them and love them at the same time.For once in my life,I could see things in shades of grey.

In this case,the writer tells the tale as a narrator,he gives Robbie Turner a voice and he also gives Briony Tallis a voice.However,the three voices do not really speak “together”.

Briony Tallis is a precocious thirteen year old and thinks about oddities like love and writes about a play only in order to teach her brother Leon a thing about love or two.Leon is older than Cecilia(who is about ten years older than Briony),is sweet-natured and not particularly ambitious.He moves about in elite circles and when he comes home to his country house in summer, he brings home his friend, chocolate tycoon Paul Marshall.

Briony is the writer in the family- her imagination runs wild and Briony is absolutely obsessed with writing.She looks up the dictionary for words and uses phrases like ‘hyroglyphs of her imagination’.Her mother lauds her writing skills and when she reads out from her play,her mother thinks that it is “stupendous”. Her imagination runs wild and having read too many novels,she expects real-life to imitate everything that she has read about.Most of her judgements are based on assumptions and not on facts.The play written by Briony is enacted by her cousin Lola and her two younger brothers.

Robbie Turner,Cambridge Educated and articulate, intimidates Cecilia.It’s possibly only her attraction towards him that she misinterprets as arrogance. The Familiarity is also annoying for both of them.They have grown up together,almost as brother and sister,and yet there is a strong social divide between them.He is after all the son of a charwoman and he does a spot of gardening for Mr Tallis.He is exceptionally bright and there are a lot of Allusions to different texts in the book,mainly Clarissa and Northanger Abbey.Funnily enough,Catherine Morland,the protagonist of Northanger Abbey,is dispatched from Northanger Abbey because of his social position.Robbie’s social position is also one of the signifying factors in the novel. Cecilia and Robbie are shy of their previous selves… and their first and only sexual encounter helps in bringing them together and in shedding their inhibitions about each other,about their shared past and about the fact that they hadn’t even spoken to each other properly even though they had been studying together in Cambridge for three years.Briony sees them in the library and having had a bias against Robbie ever since she had seen her sister stripping off her clothes and jumping into the water fountain,she thinks he is a sex maniac. Earlier,Robbie gives Briony an Erotic letter to give to Cecilia.The letter is very Freudian and is not the letter he had meant to give to Cecilia.Before he can stop her and undo the damage,she reads the letter andforms an image of him in her head-she thinks he is a sick person who is after her sister and that it is her duty to protect her sister.

What she doesn’t know and cannot understand at thirteen is that her sister and her childhood friend Robbie,are slowly beginning to discover their love for each other and the apparently palpable hostility is nothing but sexual tension between them.

The two boys are living with their cousins because their mother has run away and the two boys are so miserable that they decide to run away.When everyone is out searching,Briony finds Lola lying down on the grass.It is quite obviously that she has been raped.

Noone else is around and Briony’s testimony puts Robbie into jail.Only Cecilia and Robbie’s mother are convinced of Robbie’s innocence.

Cecilia cuts off all ties with her parents and takes up nursing.Cecilia and Robbie exchange letters but they never meet again.Robbie dies of septicemia (he joins the army during World War II)and Cecilia dies shortly after.

Briony takes up nursing in order to atone her wrongs.But what is interesting is,Briony Tallis writes a novel called ‘Atonement’ where Cecilia Tallis and Robbie Turner are united in the end.By this time,Briony Tallis is a best-selling writer.

Her atonement is to give Cecilia and Robbie the life they deserved in her book because she was the reason that their lives were snatched away from them.

The Butterfly Effect

I must admit,I’ve never really been very good at physics.Not in school,anyway.My physics teacher kept telling me that I wasn’t “good enough”and that sort of shattered my self-belief.I mightn’t have been very good in school,but the older I grow,the more I can relate to physics.

This has partly to do with my friend Homer(a certain Mr Nabankur Deb who studies in IIT Delhi and will be very surprised if he finds out that I’ve mentioned him on my Blog),who once explained the “String Theory”to me.While I still can’t figure out most of the jargon,some concepts and ideas in physics fascinates me and one of these is The Butterfly Effect.

I mean,I could have Easily called my blog “The Cockroach Chronicles”or something.”The Cockroach Chronicles” would even have been alliterative.Actually,come to think of it,I’m GLAD I didn’t call it the Cockroach Chronicles.That would’ve been downright creepy,not to mention the fact that I abhor the sight of cockroaches.

So what is the Butterfly Effect?In purely technical terms,the butterfly effect is the propensity of a system to be sensitive to initial conditions.In other words,just like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can create a ripple effect and bring about changes,very simple things can lead to bigger and more complex things.That’s a line of thought that I really cater to and I also believe that complex things can be made simpler,if one tries hard enough.

The term “Butterfly Effect”in itself is related to the work of Edward Lorenz and is based on Chaos Theory.Now Chaos here doesn’t really mean confusion,it simply means an apparent lack of order in a system that nevertheless obeys certain systems and rules.

I mean,there have been so many times in my life,when I’ve made decisions and life-choices and sometimes,I’ve wondered what my life would be like if I’d picked Lady Sreeram College instead of Jadavpur University,Or an education in the United States of America instead of an Indian Education.What if I had been born a boy instead of a girl?What if I had been illiterate and I didn’t know how to read or write?How different would my life be,then?

That’s when I realised how pertinent the Butterfly Effect is,to my life.

Also,I’ve always loved Butterflies.They are gorgeous and graceful and I love the way they flap their wings in ecstacy.They’re also such free spirits-they seem to be floating about everywhere without a care in the world.These brightly-coloured beauties continue to enamour me everyday.

And I end with an excerpt from a song by Poet Laureate(kobi guru) Rabindranath Tagore:

“Projapoti,Projapoti,kothaye pele bhai emono rongino pakha”

“Tuktuke Lal Neel jheelmeel ankabanka

kothaye pele bhai emono rongino pakha”

(Butterfly,Butterfly,where did you get such colourful wings,

Bright Red and Yellow and squiggles in a zigzag pattern

Where did you get such colourful wings?)

Note:this is a very very rough translation.

Snippets

This article,here,is about me,even though I am most peeved about my name being spelt as “Ritee Roy”and not “Reeti Roy”

Here it is