Book Review

 

Title: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Author: J.K. Rowling

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the script of the movie of the same name,  written by JK Rowling. It was released on 18th November, 2016. Rowling’s style is distinctive, racy and clear. I enjoyed it while it lasted.

The book takes you on a journey to 1920s New York, where witch-hunts are still common. The dark wizard, Gellert Grindewald, is supposed to be on the loose and has wreaked havoc in Europe.

Newt Scamander, the protagonist of the story, is on a mission to free a magnificent thunderbird, an enormous magical creature somewhat like an albatross. He found it chained and wounded in an Egyptian black market. Being an animal lover, he rescued the magical creature and was trying to return it to its habitat in Arizona at the start of the story. He has a magical suitcase in which he conceals his astounding zoo with many wonderful magical creatures with the help of an extendable charm.

Scamander travels incognito to America and holds a muggle ( non-magical person), in MACUSA terminology, a no-maj, passport. MACUSA is an organization called the Magical Congress of the United States of America, which is more or less a parallel to Ministry of Magic in the UK. You have an interesting angle brought in with Salem witch hunters trying to hunt out witches and a new dark energy called obscurial found in children who are forced to repress their magical energy.

Grindewald, under the guise of a MACUSA official, tries to harness the energy of obscurials for his own intent. Scamander, with his kind heart, tries to help prevent the destruction of an obscurial. However, at the end the obscurial is destroyed and Grindewald is exposed. The MACUSA, which had put a ban on all magical creatures that Scamander carried with him in his case, viewed him as an offender initially. When Scamander helps expose Grindewald, they become very positively inclined towards him. He also uses the thunderbird to erase muggle memory off these events, thus helping the MACUSA continue it’s secret existence.

There is a romantic angle brought in by the Goldestein sisters, Tina and Queenie. They grew up in USA and studied in Ilvermorny, the counterpart of Hogwarts.

The story is interesting but too short. The script is exactly like the movie. However, It would have been nice to have a little more, both of the movie and the book. More could have been shown of the fantastic creatures created by JK Rowling. There is a whole lot available on Pottermore in the internet if you want to know. Perhaps, it would be nicer if some more of the Pottermore stories had been incorporated into the script.

You could have stories on how Scamander found each beast, on Tina and Queenie, on Grindewald and his ultimate battle with Voldemort, on how all this led to Harry Potter and his gang. You could do a whole series of books based on the lore started in The Fantastic Beasts and Where to find them.

Fantastic Beasts, is definitely a better read than The Cursed Child, but both these books have left readers thirsting for more books before and after the advent of Harry Potter. The book was fun. It would have been better as a proper book instead of a movie script. The earlier book, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them  Newt Scamander, published in 2001, has just got descriptions of magical creatures but not Scamander’s adventures. It would be good to have his adventures told.

Like The Cursed Child and unlike the earlier Harry Potter novels, one would have to be familiar with  Potter lore to appreciate this book fully.

I would like to look forward to a Harry Potter series that stretches out like the Star Wars adventures, making for a good read and written by JK Rowling herself…

 

 

Book of the Week

Title: The Wreck
Author: Rabindranath Tagore

The Wreck(1921) is a translation by the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore of his own Bengali novel, Naukadubi(1906). It has been made into a film in 2011. Though the movie does capture part of the essence of the story, it does not do full justice to the original novel.
The story revolves around shipwrecks( rather boat wrecks) caused by the sudden onset of a storm on Ganges. Two newly married couples get separated and the bride of one party mistakes the groom of the other one for her own. The story revolves around her being united with the real groom. The man she took as her groom lost his bride in the storm to death. In contrast to the surviving bride, Kamala, is her rescuers’s highly-educated and westernised girl friend, Hemnalini. The love and personality of Kamala is unique. She is strong and upright. When she discovers she is with the wrong groom, she leaves him. She doesnot want to live on charity and pity. She has self-respect. She starts working as a cook till she finds her true husband and love.
What I love most about this book is not just Tagore’s lucid writing but also the way in which he brings out the strength of an uneducated, mildly-lettered village girl. Despite having no western-education or formal schooling, Kamala emerges stronger, more courageous and more focussed than the western-educated Hemnalini. Kamala actually proves true what the philosopher Vivekananda had said that education is the manifestation of knowledge already existing in man(woman, in this case).
This book also gives a glimpse of the status of women in the nineteenth century Bengal society. Women were cherished and regarded with respect. They were not objectified or judged based on their appearance or level of schooling.
I love reading and re-reading this book. Each reading gives me inspiration and fresh food for thought.
The book is now available not just in paperback but as a free google download too.