"If you loved The Beach you'll love Losing Gemma," announces the front cover of this new paperback, quoting Elle magazine. And it's true the two have a lot in common. Both are tales of young people, just out of college, coming to grief while doing drugs and traveling in Asia.
All in all, however, this novel probably has more going for it, though there doesn't seem at first sight to be a role for Leonardo di Caprio in any filmed version, unless it's a cameo of a Western would-be guru called Zak.
Esther and Gemma, best friends since the age of five, set off together for India. Esther is the attractive one, cool, neat and hard-headed, while Gemma is overweight, prone to prickly heat rashes and liable to be found poring over classic novels under the sweat-soaked sheet in their sticky backpackers's bedroom.
You don't have to read far before a crucial piece of background information is revealed. Before they left the UK, Esther began a secret relationship with Gemma's boyfriend. Such conquests come easy to Esther, but this was all set to be the big thing for Gemma. Esther feels guilty, but then reckons that Gemma doesn't know anything about it and with any luck never will.
On their second day in the sub-continent Gemma loses a bag containing her passport and all her money. It is retrieved, however, by an Australian woman called Coral, someone who has been on the road for many a month, and has found her way round most of India's more characteristic problems.
Esther, the more dominant of the two innocents, has decided to head somewhere off the beaten tourist trail, and to this end throws their copy of the Lonely Planet guide in the air, promising to go wherever is described on the page it lands on.
As a result they head off to a remote Muslim shrine in Orissa Province. Mysteriously, Coral shows up soon afterwards at the same unlikely location. Here the plot thickens. After they have fought their way through the jungle to the shrine itself, sheets of flame and a charred body manifest themselves to the formerly skeptical Esther, though not to the increasingly chummy Gemma and Coral.
Has she been smoking too much of the sacred temple weed Coral brought along with her? Esther wonders. And why are Gemma and Coral getting so close? Is it really a joint pursuit of spiritual enlightenment or something markedly less selfless? And is Esther really as incapable of transcending her domineering instincts and her sense of her own worth, as the other two suggest? Meanwhile Coral, exasperatingly to Esther, shrugs her shoulders and insists it's all meant, intended, part of the plan.
Drug-fueled fantasies and paranoias characterize Losing Gemma just as they did The Beach. Who's really in charge? Who's plotting against me? What is the search for transcendence and spiritual transformation really a cover for? Things predictably go from bad to worse. Esther strikes off on her own, though her options are cut short when she has all her belongings stolen (Could the supposedly other-worldly Coral have been responsible?).
The novel could have been enlarged at this point, with more pen-portraits of self-deluding and posturing spiritual seekers encountered by Esther on her solo journey to Goa. To tell more of what actually transpires would spoil what is in many ways not a bad story.
Nevertheless, the conclusion, which takes place close to the Indian Himalayan town of Manali, is strongly plotted.
Reality reasserts itself, the delusions and paranoias of the backpackers's trail, and perhaps of the subcontinent itself, are disposed of.
Whether it's a happy ending or not is for the reader to decide, but it does constitute a genuine and mature resolution of the story's ingredients and effectively ties up all the material in this competent and sometimes skillful, first novel.
This is an attractive and readable book that will appeal more widely than just to the younger generation it's aimed at.
The same can't in all honesty be said about Kurt Cobain's Journals, which has also launched by Penguin with much the same market in mind.
Cobain may have been the leader of what his fans consider one of the greatest bands of all time, but these jottings don't show him to great advantage and certainly not as a wizard with the fine-line uni-ball.
Yet the publishers have seen fit to bring out the private diaries and notebooks in a sumptuous, de luxe edition. The torn and tattered pages have been religiously rendered in a loving facsimile, complete with food stains and crossings-out -- only the burn-holes from falling cannabis seeds are strangely missing.
Nirvana's music has many dedicated and serious followers, but these notebooks, here dignified as "Journals," at best tell an ambiguous story. To those for whom Cobain was a latter-day messiah they will be gold indeed. But how are the rest of us to judge them? There are song lyrics, draft letters to friends, even a recipe -- just the kind of thing more or less any teenager searching for a direction in life might pen.
In a proposed "Letter to the Editor," Cobain writes how much he wants everyone to know that he loves them, how "a very large proportion of this world's art sucks beyond description."
He concludes the letter, ominously and, as it turns out, presciently. "On second thought maybe I just tried to let the world know how much I love myself. Like a hypocrite in a hippie crypt.
"I hate myself and I want to die. Leave me alone. Love Kurt."
This anticipates his eventual suicide in a way that can only add fuel to the efforts of the anti-drug lobby. Both these books illustrate the endlessly paradoxical world of drugs -- genuine insights mixed, in ways that are hard, perhaps impossible, to disentangle, with profound delusions.
The texts tend to rebound off each other in many places, sometimes creatively but more often disturbingly.
Perhaps Penguin know what they're doing after all.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and