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Beguiling Myanmar

IT IS very early, the sun just a pale yellow glow peeping from behind the glowering purple mountains, but already several of the distinctive foot-rowing fishermen are paddling their narrow open flatboats across the liquid-silver water of Inle Lake in Myanmar’s Shan province.
Once in their chosen spot they begin the agile dance-like process of casting their enormous semi-rigid cone nets while using their feet to keep the canoe in place.
Occasionally they beat on the top of the lake with their oar to chase the fish from the dense clumps of water hyacinth towards their nets.
It’s a scene that has changed little in centuries although today the fishermen find themselves battling with the wake of the larger, noisier, motorised longboats that transport locals, move bulk goods and exhilarate tourists. Life here exists entirely on, and from, the beautiful expansive freshwater lake, the second largest in Myanmar. There are whole villages on stilts, houses ranging from small, rather ramshackle bamboo affairs to large double-storey timber structures. Large restaurants and artisans’ workshops are alongside family homes.
The lake is the means of transport, communication, washing and other household amenities, and food production and transportation. Huge floating beds of tomatoes ripen in the brilliant sunshine.

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

“A wit, a charmer, a trouble-maker, and a dear devoted friend … a man of insatiable appetities – for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation.”

 This is the portrait of Christopher Hitchens as sketched by his close friend, Graydon Carter, in the Forword to Hitchens’ last book, Mortality, It goes part of the way to articulating why the essayist, author and orator, became one of the most popular, if contentious, literary figures of our modern times. And why a lucky few so cherished invitations to one of his legendary dinners “at a table crammed with ambassadors, hacks, political dissidents, university students…when he would rise to give a toast that could go on for a stirring, spellbinding, hysterically funny 20 minutes of poetry and limerick reciting, a call to arms for a cause and joke: ‘How good it is to be us’.”

Mortality is a collection of seven essays Hitchens wrote in the period between he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and his death in December 2011. They are an eloquent, wry, shrewd observation about the process of death and the “inevitable awkwardness in diplomatic relations between Tumortown and it neighbours.” 

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

It has been a long time since I read a book in which there is such a splendid array of thoroughly unsympathetic characters. It is hard to find one with whom you would share a coffee and a chat.  Yet Gillian Flynn’s latest book Gone Girl, is a compulsive read. Part psychological thriller, part who-dunnit, it is a racy mix of mystery and knowledge of the terrible event you just know is going to happenbut can’t be avoided.

Amy and Nick are a fairly typical young couple both slightly surprised they have found each other but happy in their idyllic New York brownstone. It is present from her parents paid for with the proceeds of a wildly successful children’s book Amazing Amy, where the protagonist Amy is always right.

Then Nick loses his job and Amy’s parents, once doting benefactors stumble into financial woe and the house is sold. Suddenly Nick and Amy are back on his home turf in a rented house that “screams nouveau riche” in small-town Missouri right alongside the Mississippi. Borrowing from the last of Amy’s savings, Nick opens a slightly seedy bar with his sister Go (perhaps the only really likeable person in the book). They muddle along. Then one day Amy disappears.

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