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Last week, there was a double billing of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro and Antonioni's Blow-Up, organized by Supakino at the Close-Up Film Centre in London, UK. Now, I don't live in London. But I follow Supakino on Instagram and got major FOMO from the event's promos. Enough for me to pick up again the book where I had left it back in June. Of course, in the original Cortázar story, it is the photographer who gets murdered.

Bestiary felt quite different thematically from the stories preceding it. And then, The Gates of Heaven was way too depressing. It reminded me of certain scenes from Antonioni's La Notte and Fellini's La Dolce Vita, and the overwhelming alienation of those lives. (I haven't even gotten to Blow-Up yet, which is the next story.) As if existing in our current era isn't alienating enough as it is. :(

Re-reading Continuity of Parks after so long. Had forgotten how economical it is! Back then, I had preferred Heidi Julavits reworking of this story as "Judge Gladys Parks-Schultz" - but now find it too ironic. Now, I prefer the economy of Cortázar's original story.

Part One. Axolotl. House Taken Over. The Distances. The Idol of the Cyclades. Letter to a Young Lady in Paris. A Yellow Flower.

Enjoyable on the whole. Other authors I've read - Jorge Luis Borges, Tove Jansson, or Clarice Lispector - do it better, and I don't necessarily feel the same excitement and wonder reading Cortázar that I felt when I first read them. But still enjoyable.

It occurs to me that, being back in my childhood home, I am face-to-face with all my past and future selves. Every version of me that has been. Every version of me that will be. All present, simultaneously, unmoving, breathing, waiting for someone to make the first move and set things into action. Among them, the one that read Continuity of Parks at college, but didn't bother to read more of Cortazar. Idiot.

"I'm far too sensitive. Something will have to be done about such sensitivity."

"They were tough and delicate. They were winged like the seeds of sycamores. There were hundreds of them. Soon there would be thousands. They spread like mushrooms. They spread like spores. There would be no stopping them."

It's hard to share specific highlights from the final two chapters, "The Gentrification of Gay Politics" and "The Gentrification of Our Literature", but these are undoubtedly the most important. I will try and write more about these chapters in my final review.

This book is making me think about the gentrification of Mumbai. About the process by which the mill-workers' area of Lower Parel is being converted to the shopping complexes, the condominiums, and the Instagrammable cafes of "Upper Worli" for instance. Does anyone know of books where these ideas have been written about and discussed?

In 'Paradise Lost', Naipaul zooms in on the various iterations of Gandhian symbolisms and ideas of India, deployed in vain as a response to the political crisis of Indira Gandhi's Emergency.

"Synthesis and Mimicry" is perhaps the most damning chapter in Naipaul's account of India. It's painful to read, and to recognize that much of what he saw then remains true to this day. I will post quotes from this chapter because it's hard to summarize without losing the incisive quality of Naipaul's writing here.

The chapter on the Naxalite movement is chilling, not due to any gratuitous description of gore and violence, but because of the indictment of the organizing middle-class youth, immersed in borrowed revolutionary theory, but disconnected from the real needs of Indian peasants and lacking both information and analytic skills.

The chapter on Mumbai, describing Naipaul's visit to a chawl, talking about Shiv Sena, Shivaji, and Ambedkar, may be my favourite part in this book. None of that upper-middle class "Bombay is an emotion" narcissistic crap. Just truths that are there to see for anyone willing to look around with open, humane eyes.

This is a hard listen from the get-go. But so important for that very reason. Naipaul sees things with a terrible clarity; no bullshit. I'm listening to his account of Emergency-era India with the hope of understanding what's happening to India now, in the era of Moditva.