Superkvlt Literockstar Worship

Before the few of you who read this space go further, you must know that this isn't as much a book review, as it is a lapse into familiar ranting territory, that found me as opposed to the usual rigours of looking for stuff to write about that my television-addled brain is used to. Before you go further you must..


"Know the Author:
Prithvin Rajendran has a fascination for adventure and fantasy. He is an avid traveller and his visits to the United Kingdom, continental Europe, South East Asia, West Asia and different parts of India have enabled him to interact with and understand the beauty of different cultures. His joy for travel is weaved into his style of thought and approach to fantasy. Prithvin is an engineer in electronics. He has excelled in academics, having been awarded over forty certificates of merit, gold and silver medals. He has also completed an economics course at the London School of Economics. Prithvin has been an out performer in leadership and quizzing. As Chair, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE), Prithvin organised the collection of funds for flood relief efforts in Orissa. He was also Secretary of the EEE English Club at college. Prithvin loves quizzing. Winning the all-India Image of France Quiz enabled Prithvin to undertake a prize trip to France. He also won the National Quiz on Japan twice. Prithvin currently works at Cognizant Technology Solutions and resides at Chennai, India."


I have no idea why anyone who has a resume like that would want to write a fantasy based-children's book. But that's not the point. 


The point is, Prithvin Rajendran wrote a book, and through strange new-age capitalism-inspired fate, it landed in my lap, more accurately on my office table, dressed in the immaculate off-white tinted paper that these delivery guys are so fond of, held close and firm by yarns of scotch tape strong enough to suggest a 3M-conspiracy. After struggling enough to look stupid to my colleagues, I finally removed the book from its confines, gazed at its unfathomably disturbing excuse for a cover, immediately recalling reading another hideous book adorned in a similarly hideous cover. The only difference was that I only read aforementioned hideousness because I had no other way of dealing with knowing that it was Grace's friend who authored it.

I've always threatened to review that one but didn't have the heart to. I believed what I held in my hand, in office, on a warmish winter afternoon was a divine peace offering for being a good friend's friend. I thanked BlogAdda for sending me a book that I would've never ever EVER even looked at, mostly because I don't frequent the children's page on Flipkart, and in part because of.. hey, didn't I say the cover was hideous?


So, allow me to be cliched beyond redemption and say - this time, it was personal. 


The story begins, in Goodabaiya, which should make you go seven colours of what the fuck, but if it doesn't, you move on to realize that there's going to be a pregnant girl in there somewhere because, you know, there's a prologue. I'm guessing the author wanted you to have to be patient for the story to set in before Chapter One begins with introduction of Dashter a land ruled by Dashtum and then Darum, a like father unlike son duo. Darum is as evil as his father was good, and his daughter, Princess Nova is the result of meditations on deep and repressed misogyny from the author. On the third page, the type goes: "Princess Nova was physical gifted, but she had one drawback: she was very proud.", discussing Princess Nova's features and characteristics as if it were an essay guided by the marketing copy on the box she must have come in. There's also the wizard type thing that Princess Nova likes to abuse, verbally. 


Cut to the kingdom of Greatix where lives our hero, Princix. He is kind and brave and the whole square of awesome. More hungry for glory than plastic Manchester United fans, Princix sets out on some totally random quest to recover the Iron Tooth, probably to fill his superhero cavities with, taking two more suspected American college football rejects along for an awesome male bonding experience. On this quest he has to dispel gory predictions about the fall of civilization, rescue a princess who clearly hasn't seen the smoke from the burning bras, battle Medusas and some other handily conjured up creatures... you know, stuff you do while you're on your way to being awesome times awesome. While there are too many characters in the book for you to keep track of without resorting to real-time memory tagging or at least an excel sheet, there is a certain retarded freshness in the attempted poetry, except for the fact that there's too much of it, some of it in a language that the author claims to have invented. Presumably, it's the language that the book is supposed to be read in to deeply and entirely appreciate the Iron Tooth. The rest of the book peters out in a to-and-fro between achieving said goals by the male protagonist, while the rest of the world watches him be awesome, in what is a storyline that feeds off too many Ekta Kapoor serials. Maybe he won a quiz about those too. 


This is a children's book inasmuch Juno was a children's movie. There's the occasional 'bastard', but that's not really why. The book is horrifying in its usage of the English as a language, and often reads like somebody's forgotten laboratory journals, replete with 'Aim', 'Apparatus' and a rather pointless 'Conclusion' all over its own belly. The only saving grace is that not enough children are reading these days, if you believe the research, and very few are actually going to read it because they found it overwhelmingly interesting. However, if you actually do find a child reading this book, consider yourself licensed to slap the living  daylights out of whoever's in-charge of them.

I have no idea if said book was a labour that resulted in a deep self-fulfillment, the kind that's supposed to take you closer to resolving some deep conflict that no one else cares about, as a writer. Or if it's a memoir to an unloved childhood; a playing out of fantasies unfulfilled and yearned for throughout adolescence or the substantiation of "Hey, I'm a writer!" as estrogen-bait. I'm sure it is all of those, in varying measures although whatever the case, it certainly is story-telling as a metaphor for having terrible, terrible collective taste. There is no one, anywhere, who should read this book, except to find out what really bad literature and total, absolute kvltness is. There's a review somewhere that wonders why this was published, but the reasons are clear to me - it is a demonstration of when not to think you're a writer fit to be published. Even if it is for a 'children's book'. 


(If you're someone who knows the author, don't feel all that bad. You can spout the same kitschy to the point of kitsching Chetan Bhagat nonsense about fulfilling the reading needs of people who live in some non-existent culture that holds reading his books as a signifier of achieving the greater things in life.

Also, the book has a favourable review here.)


The only real good thing about The Iron Tooth, by Prithvin Rajendran is his photograph on the inside leaf of the back cover, which, in a word, is resplendent, although there can be no excuse for the hair slicked back in what I'm assuming is a slightly delayed tribute to Andy Garcia. The ladies will surely love the red and it has definitely viral capabilities. Lay low, because after reading this, you will be right in believing the world owes you one, sir. 


____________________________________________________________________________This review is a part of the Book Reviews Program atBlogAdda.com. Participate now to get free books!