The most tangible of all visible mysteries

(Leigh Hunt)

A little experimentation today, as I found no inspiration at work!

It was a quiet day at work today, with not much happening; but this does mean that I got to finish the VERY strange book I am reading for my Postgraduate Gothic reading group. This book is called Fireproof by Raj Kamal Jha and is set in February 2002 in Ahmedabad in India.

The novel focuses on Mr Jay, whose wife gives birth to their child, a baby whose deformities are extreme, involving him only having a torso and the twenty four hours after the birth of the baby, whose name is Ithim. Ithim is so-called because it is a mixture of 'it' and 'him' - and this made me more uncomfortable than anything else in this odd novel about death, racial hatred and ghosts. I internally changed the babies name to E-dim, Ithkim, and finally decided to stress the 'th' sound, sort of like someone with a lisp saying iskim.

Pondering this, I have decided that I think this book is a nightmare for me as a parent. When I was pregnant with all my children, I would have nightmares about giving birth, and this novel reminds me of the nightmares I would have then, more than the racial hatred, more than the descriptions of the murders, more than the spirits of the undead and even more than the revealed bad guy.

I'm going to read something funny to make me feel better; maybe something like Justin Cronin's The Passage or The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch