Laskar Pelangi by Andrea Hirata. Making my way through the tetralogy again. So far the first one is the best. Somehow his writing lost his charm when the first book was successful. Anyway, anything from Andrea Hirata better than nothing, beggars can’t be choosers.

Was planning to read Laskar Pelangi earlier but was distracted by two Arthur C. Clarke books: Rendezvous With Rama and Childhood’s End. Rendezvous was written after he did 2001: A Space Odyssey; his most famous work. I find it interesting and full with wonder. It’s only weakness is the dialogue. Somehow stilted and seems added upon the story, to somehow make a connection with the reader. So as not too lose the humanness of the people in the story.

I find Childhood’s End the better of the two even though it’s was written in the late fifties much more earlier than Rendezvous With Rama. The people in it seems much more human, they have frailties,they are sad, happy, curious. The late Sir Clarke seems to succeed making these characters human without trying to. Though who can tell what the rough drafts read like?

The story does have a weakness too though. I find the ending a bit underwhelming and there were some parts that seems disconnected to the whole. Though understandably the story is divided into parts of different time scopes so as to make it clear to the reader that the story is going on a much longer timeframe, much longer than that which is usually understood as a lifetime. several lifetimes in fact.

The point I’m getting at is that, there seems to be a lack of cohesion between the parts. The same plot, some recurring characters but when reflected upon, it feels that Sir Clarke combined a few stories together to make the whole. As a whole the book feels like a multiple storied building that have a different architectural style for each floor. The first floor a modernist reminder of the cold war, the second floor art deco, the third classical chinese and so on.

The ending and the view of the whole one would get after finishing the story, with it’s diversions into the ideas of utopia and the prediction that some of humanity would reject this utopia with a counter utopia; mentions of Jung’s racial memory; and the idea of a transcendent post humanity that would be unrecognisable to a normal human is a bit hope crushing.

Next, after the Laskar Pelangi tetralogy, I would be diving again into Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. WW2, psychedelics, Pavlovian conditioning, sexual pervesrsion, rockets and a dude killed while wearing a pig suit. Hell yeah!