This is, by no measure, a foolish book. It is, as the title so blatantly confesses, a misanthropic read. It’s sincere and grim. And it gets better as the story deepens and reveals its philosophy organically. Even better was its effect after having read Cioran’s The Trouble With Being Born. If there’s one constant...
Books like Azadi, swelling with soul and spirit, can be read in a single breath. And if you happen to read it, bit by bit, musing over her choice of words and her literary coordinates that point you to this human-made “doomsday machine,” you’ll begin to view the world differently. Arundhati Roy truly translates...
There is no other writer so gifted to have diagnosed Time as Eternity’s disease and to have endured it as a means to verify Existence as Emil Cioran. Existence, according to Cioran, would be very impractical were we to discard all our illusions. For even a single illusion of time, history, or life is...
To be human among humans one has to constantly prove one’s humanity. The value of which, in the minds of others, is somehow directly juxtaposed with the value of what the society lacks or has too much of. Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot showcases the psychological blindsided-ness of the ‘others’ and of ‘society’. Simply put, the...
One of the things books gave me, back when I had started to read, was the ability to surrender myself to the openness of experience. The kind of experiences that did not include me in them… experiences that were never supposed to. Reading Ernest Hemingway became synonymous with rediscovering myself, as if for the...