Book Reviews

The Siege: By Ismail Kadare

What are the first thoughts that come to you when you think of War? Death? Bloodshed? Glory? Tyranny? Kings? Soldiers? Strategy? Peace Treaties? Have you ever asked the simple question, if you took an army of 30000 people to lay siege on another nation, and it took 3 months to do it, where would you ask them to pee during that time? Assuming that you didn't want to make your entire camp a huge s***hole, you would want to create sanitation facilities on the scale of a city itself, correct? What about food supplies for these soldiers, again assuming that you did not know how long the siege was going to last, you would want to ensure a constant flow of supplies to the camp from *somewhere* right?

This was the first book on I read on war, that was not steeped in the glory or the tragedy or even the suffering. Instead it intelligently approaches war from the perspective of an operational strategist, planning supplies and facilities for an operation. At the same time, there is an enormous human struggle in the background between the attackers and the defenders (who we learn to sympathize with), the war room decisions, the actual execution of grand strategies, their successes and failures, are all told with the tastefulness of a master storyteller that Ismail Kadre is, building up to a fantastic climax.

Palace Walk: By Naguib Mahfouz

This was an immersion experience, into a totally different world. The novel is the first of a trilogy based on contemporary life in Egypt. It revolves around a single family with a dominant patriarch, his submissive wife and their children. What makes the read absorbing is the author's inimitable style of walking through the story, casually, patiently from each character's perspective. There are no magnificent things happening most of the time, still, the plot and the characters are so interesting that it urges you to read on. It gave a glimpse of the life in Egyptian Islamic families in the pre-World war era. Putting down the book, one gets the feeling of having lived in those settings for a considerable length of time, knowing those characters intimately. Am planning to read the next two parts as soon as I get the time.