read and watch-ed

As I did not leave the house again for all of the weekend (except to get canned tuna I could open without a can opener...) nothing happened worth telling ... not even my new things lists get miraculously done by themselves... but need to finally tell you about a GREAT book I read in SF ... and about a movie I saw on Friday night because of course I still hit every BW-movies that makes it to the big screen here and thanks Ganesha-ji there are a lot more here than in Vienna...
So the book is Madras on Rainy Days by a new literary voice: Samina Ali. One of the very few books that not only made me halt for especially beautiful sentences or intense scenes but almost even made me choke on suppressed tears - and for those of you who don't know me - I hardly ever cry in movies or literature (few noticable exceptions: almost tears at the end of Kal Ho Na Ho, real tears / sobbing / choking at the end of the first viewing of Waqt and the end of Francis Itani's novel Deafening)
The story itself is fascinating (yes I am back on Ali's debut novel) as it is about a traditionally brought up Muslim Southern Indian Girl - though brought up in the USA and in India - never feeling to really belong and suffering from her father's betrayal of her mother (=divorce and remarriage). After some resistance the heroine enters an arranged marriage (but bleeding from a self-effected and not totally successful abortion) - and starts for the first time feeling welcome and belonging in a family. That, of course, is not to last, but the emotional outpours and twists of the story are fascinating to read along, the shaping of the protagonist's opinions and especially the language. After a long time again a book I found hard to put away ... and my brief plot outline here does not even faintly approach doing justice to the text! Sorry for that, broken down to 3 lines it sounds sensationalist and bland - it is not! And even the exoticization in it is not insufferable...
And, last Friday at Potsdamer Platz I watched Chandni Chowk to China. Of course, a rather silly action film, but very much playing with this silliness and thus it really did work for me. Not a must see again, but a nice time pass and the way some critics slaughtered the film is just not justified, as they did not take the metatextual elements into consideration and intertextual play at work. And I find myself increasingly taken by Akshay Kumar's performances. So I will have to get my old hard-disk to work again as it would hold many of his old gems like the Khiladi movies...
Oh and I called my family this morning who inquired whether I still blog - meaning they still never looked at it - and also ignored me for about a third of the phone call for other discussions amongst themselves ... should I feel as if not cared for??? But as I was calling them already, I also got asked - in the usual by the way fashion - whether I would like to be the godmother for the confirmation of my beloved and already godchild Anna - which I am delighted to do ... although I am not sure whether the Catholic Church will be just as delighted ...