99 Posts In...

We're about to complete two years with this blog in May, though we only partnered up a little less than a year ago. Good thing too because can you imagine how much longer it would have taken a lazy, albeit creative Afsha to touch 100 posts all by herself?

As we enter this week, we're looking forward to Post # 100 which we think you, our readers, will find quite engaging. Won't say no more here. You're just going to have to wait and see. All we can say is make sure you have your iPods handy.

In this, our 99th Post, we'd like to leave with with a little flashback featuring the five most popular posts on The Caterpillar Cafe to date. They have the highest all time hits on our blog. But if you have a personal favourite that isn't featured in this list, do link us to it in the comments section. Do it. Do it!

Anyway, here goes in descending order:

#5: We introduced guest posts last year with this review by Firdaus Variava and we're really proud to announce that it ranked fifth on The Caterpillar Cafe. Thanks for contributing Fido! Our readers love you just as much as we do. Review | The Emperor of all Maladies

#4: This isn't quite related to books or literature per say but our blog does make an exception sometimes to make way for the voices in our heads. At number four we have Afsha Khan's misadventure in Germany with Flight of the SatNav Lady

#3: She surged ahead with shrewd confidence in the cut-throat world of investment banking. But who knew that beneath all those layers of numbers, figures and other stuff these bankers do that us normal folk don't understand, there lay a shy, sensitive poet? The first ever poem published on The Caterpillar Cafe by Reshma Krishnan, who hasn't looked back since, was well received by our readers. A Poem for No one

#2: "This is a honeycomb world. It hides a hollow heart." Need we say more? Author Spotlight | John Connolly

#1: Both Reshma and Afsha attempted this book and couldn't go beyond a certain point because of how disturbing they found the mother-daughter duo in The Piano Teacher. Curse their perfectly sweet, doting mothers, who left them unable to relate to Erika's deep-rooted insecurities, irrational attachments and psychologically manipulative mother! A Soul Burning Read | The Piano Teacher

Finally, before moving forward, we would really like to thank all our readers who have kept us going these past two years with their comments, encouragement and sometimes, by just lurking for a post or two before moving on to other reads. It doesn't hurt to say 'hi' but it's quite all right if you're still too shy. Keep reading.

A soul burning read | The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

I will always associate this painting
with the feelings stirred within me
by The Piano Teacher.
Anne Wischin's The Cat Kiss
Adapted from Gustav Klimt's The Kiss

Some literature just isn’t human. It’s depraved, disgusting and leaves you screaming your lungs out until you realise that you're trapped in a nightmare and no one can hear you.

Three pages into The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelink, my co-blogger, Reshma Krishnan claimed to be reaching for an oxygen mask.

Writers and their drama, I thought, glad to have her writing and drama on board. “Let’s read it together,” she exclaimed some time later, prompting me to order the book off Flipkart. As fate would have it, the book arrived less than 24 hours later. A sign. Maybe I'll use my Anne Wischin bookmark from Vienna!

Erika, a 30-something piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory is a prisoner to her loving mother. She is allowed to share her musical genius with the world, but not her life and most definitely not her body. Even Erika doesn’t have access to those parts of herself. Mother guards her jealously from anything that might corrupt her, stopping at nothing – shame, mental torture, emotional blackmail – to keep her daughter pure, “a well-nourished fish in her mother’s amniotic fluid.”

I, of course, thoroughly enjoyed the first 50 pages of the book. Having lived, breathed and devoured a range of Freudian classics, this one seemed like coming home after a long time. But as I approached the end of Part I, I realised that this isn’t the type of book you read alone, just like The Exorcist isn’t the kind of move you watch by yourself.

Some writers burn a part of your soul which heals soon enough, but not without scars. Elfriede Jelinek is totally going to do that to me. If I were smart, I’d keep it beyond reach on the highest shelf of the tallest book case. But I just can’t. I've crossed the threshold with so much difficulty and giving up now, when the plot's about to reach it's peak, would be plain stupidity.

It’s like I’m itching to see how Erika makes a break for it. Will she, like Rapunsel, get rescued by a handsome stranger? Or will poetic injustice lead her to self-destruction like Nina Sayers, from The Black Swan, never knowing anything outside the tower in which her mother stashes her away?

The Piano Teacher : Elfriede Jelinek

At the outset, would like to thank the beautiful and generous Afsha Khan for allowing me to wax lyrical on her blog. Truly flattered.

Someone once said,"All good literature should make you feel uncomfortable". I am inclined to agree, read enough Stephen King and you will be craving for the uncomfortable that even a good hot chocolate and a bright light cannot cure. Within the first 3 pages of reading this nobel prize winning book, I am reaching for an oxygen mask. Anyway, the reason I am writing this so early in my reading day, is the uncanny resemblance between the first three pages and the mother-daughter relationship in the movie Black Swan. For those of you who haven't seen the movie, the relationship is central to the ensuing psychosis of the ballerina.

If you watch the movie and then read the first few pages of the book, you appreciate the power of the book versus a visual representation of the same situation in a movie. While the scenario was visibly unbearable for the ballerina in the film, it hardly made you twitch in your seat. The novel, on the other hand, has you, as I mentioned earlier, gasping for air. You want a break from the claustrophobic environment created by the almost feudatory mother. In three pages, Jelinek has hooked me by the navel and sucked me into a time machine. I am like that ditzy heroine in a horror movie who ventures into the basement alone while throats are being slashed and ears become charm bracelets.

And this is just three pages in!