tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88374764296656563262024-03-14T08:34:15.943+05:30AntiblurbsYou can buy them. You can borrow them. You can download them. But are all those books out there really worth your while?
Herewith some brief assessments.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.comBlogger383125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-57807848436413735512019-01-17T13:08:00.000+05:302019-01-17T13:08:12.261+05:30What Can Fiction Deliver That Your Smartphone Can’t?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Starting again, after what feels like ages. Wrote this for</i> <a href="http://elle.in/index.php/culture/book-club-fiction-novel-trends/">Elle India</a>, <i>about some contemporary trends in fiction.</i><div>
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JUKfpiaI6ww/XEAwcZGFTYI/AAAAAAAAENo/M4j5LB-CLkAWHQdbbEIMncIv_KbPaYEHQCLcBGAs/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2019-01-17%2Bat%2B1.03.48%2Bpm.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="608" data-original-width="1508" height="257" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JUKfpiaI6ww/XEAwcZGFTYI/AAAAAAAAENo/M4j5LB-CLkAWHQdbbEIMncIv_KbPaYEHQCLcBGAs/s640/Screen%2BShot%2B2019-01-17%2Bat%2B1.03.48%2Bpm.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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In a recent cartoon, Tom Gauld, that irrepressible chronicler of literary life, depicts a customer asking a bookstore clerk: “Can you recommend a big, serious novel that I can carry around and ignore while I’m looking at my smartphone?” That would be funnier if it didn’t make one wince.<br /><br />What can fiction deliver that your smartphone, with its addictive hits of social media, news and trivia, can’t? To go simply by current statistics, not very much. According to a report in Publishers Weekly, sales of adult fiction fell 16 per cent between 2013 and 2017 in the US. Among the reasons: the decline of physical bookstores (making it harder for readers to discover new titles) and shrinking review space in mainstream media. The same trends, one is sure, apply to other countries too. </div>
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The rest is <a href="http://elle.in/index.php/culture/book-club-fiction-novel-trends/">here</a>.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-24855069668239656382017-06-27T15:47:00.003+05:302017-06-27T15:47:29.772+05:30Some pieces for the DailyO<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I've been writing a bit for <a href="http://www.dailyo.in/">the DailyO</a>; some of the pieces are linked to below:<br />
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Thoughts <a href="http://www.dailyo.in/arts/books-adaptations-films-hollywood-julian-barnes/story/1/18032.html">on book to film adaptations</a>, specifically <i>The Sense of an Ending</i> and <i>The French Lieutenant's Woman</i>.<br />
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The <a href="http://www.dailyo.in/arts/arundhati-roy-meena-kandasamy-prose-women-writers/story/1/17786.html">prose styles</a> of Arundhati Roy, Meena Kandasamy and others.<br />
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My weekend of <a href="http://www.dailyo.in/arts/books-readers-bookshelves-love-of-reading-buying-books/story/1/17476.html">clearing out the bookshelves</a>.<br />
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On the genre of <a href="http://www.dailyo.in/arts/letters-to-writers-literature-books/story/1/17221.html">letters to young writers</a>, featuring work by Colum McCann and Mario Vargas Llosa.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-18227080559359553662017-04-15T12:43:00.001+05:302017-04-15T12:43:29.763+05:30Whose Blues?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>This appeared in today's</i> <a href="http://indianexpress.com/">Indian Express</a>.<br />
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<a href="http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/544564/white-tears-by-hari-kunzru/9780451493699/">WHITE TEARS</a> Hari Kunzru<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Guglielmo
Marconi, inventor of the radio, believed that sound waves never completely die
away. As Hari Kunzru writes in his new novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">White Tears</i>: “They persist, fainter and fainter, masked by the
day-to-day noise of the world. Marconi thought that if he could only invent a
microphone powerful enough, he would be able to listen to the sound of ancient
times.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">White Tears</i> takes this
fascinating premise and links it to American blues music to explore modern-day
questions of authenticity and the suppression of marginalised voices.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">On
the face of it, this is the story of Seth, an out-of-place young man and
audiophile, whose life changes when he meets Carter, a wealthy, privileged fellow-student
in an East Coast liberal arts college: “Blond dreadlocks, intricate tattoos, a
trust fund he didn’t hesitate to use to further the cause of maximum good
times.” The two bond over an obsession with recording and reproducing music. An
early sign of the novel’s concerns is when Seth informs us that Carter
“listened exclusively to black music because, he said, it was more intense and
authentic than anything made by white people.” The misplaced quest for such fidelity
will prove to have unsettling consequences.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Seth
and Carter open a recording studio in Brooklyn, billing themselves as “artisans
of analog”, a facility that quickly becomes popular among singers and producers.
There’s a pleasing specificity to the prose here, with attention to
instruments, equipment and effects: “This organ. That handclap. Put the guitar
in a cave and the vocal raw and breathy, right up front. Add surface noise, a
hint of needles plowing through static, throw the whole thing back in time.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Carter,
though, becomes increasingly more eccentric and fixated on a blues lyric sung
by an elusive black youth whom Seth had once recorded, almost in passing,
during a perambulation in Washington Square Park. This obsession leads directly
to the book’s second half, where things turn nightmarish and even ghostly, thus
justifying the moments of foreshadowing from the start: “The present is dry,
but add reverb and you can hear time reverse its flow, slipping on into the
past, into echo and disaster.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Seth’s
path crosses and then starts to intersect with another blues enthusiast from an
earlier generation, one who also spent time with a mentor tracking down rare
recordings. This earlier-in-time tale, starting as a counterpoint, merges with
and takes over the narrative. The source of the magnetic blues lyric comes to
light, along with revelations of the brutal silencing of voices of the
powerless. As W.C. Handy, called the “Father of the Blues”, once wrote, in what
could well have been an epigraph for this novel, “Bad luck and trouble are
always present in the blues, and always the result of others, pressing upon
unfortunate and downtrodden poor souls, yearning to be free from life’s troubles.
Relentless rhythms repeat the chants of sorrow, and the pity of a lost soul
many times over.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It
must be said, though, that there are times, especially during the latter half,
when one feels Kunzru’s foot too firmly on the pedal of his theme. There is
deftness, however, in the way he combines the warp of the past with the weft of
the present to create an elegiac story of obsession and subjugation. One wonders
what the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton, to mention just two who owe so much
to the blues, would make of this contribution to our time’s passionate debate
over questions of cultural appropriation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-80285273451668788312017-02-11T09:17:00.001+05:302017-02-11T09:17:38.175+05:30A Long, Strange Trip<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>This appeared in today's</i> <a href="http://indianexpress.com/">Indian Express</a>.<br />
<br />
LINCOLN IN THE BARDO George Saunders<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yTXFC4oNWGU/WJ6JMNf97NI/AAAAAAAADPc/VI3DLGfsS1gI-BbHMoRf65VnxdXJk3E7QCLcB/s1600/lincoln.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yTXFC4oNWGU/WJ6JMNf97NI/AAAAAAAADPc/VI3DLGfsS1gI-BbHMoRf65VnxdXJk3E7QCLcB/s320/lincoln.jpg" width="214" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
the old witticism about the power of belief, scientists assert that according
to the laws of aerodynamics, the bumblebee’s body isn’t designed for flight. Being
unaware of this, the bumblebee goes ahead and flies anyway. Similarly, the
elements of George Saunders’s first novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lincoln
in the Bardo</i>, don’t appear to be designed for take-off -- but it goes ahead
and soars anyway.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It
was to be expected that the tone and manner of the novel would be as
distinctive and quirky as Saunders’s acclaimed short stories. However, the
strangeness quotient here is of a different order altogether. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
Lincoln of the title doesn’t refer to the 16<sup>th</sup> President of the
United States, but to his third son, William. And the bardo doesn’t refer to
the pronunciation of a French actress’s last name, but to the Tibetan Buddhist
concept of an intermediate state between two lives. It is in this purgatory-like
realm that the novel is set.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
seeds of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lincoln in the Bardo</i> are
historical, arising from the President’s prolonged grief at 11-year-old
William’s untimely death in 1862, even as American troops engage in a bloody
civil war. In Saunders’s telling, a disoriented William finds himself in the
bardo, surrounded by others who are similarly awaiting their ultimate end.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
narration largely consists of an idiosyncratic mélange of voices belonging to
Willie and his cohorts, as they journey towards an understanding of their state
and ponder on questions of leaving behind and letting go. Some bent double,
some horizontal, some on all fours, some nude, some etiolated, some mutilated,
in ways that mirror their lives and deaths, confined within their memories,
dreams and reflections, they speculate, gossip and chatter about the goings-on
in the eerie zone they inhabit. Every once in a while, they hear a “familiar,
yet always bonechilling, firesound associated with the matter-lightblooming
phenomenon” marking the departure of “sick-forms” from this limbo of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“serendipitous mass co-habitation”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">This
defiantly odd playscript-like pattern is interspersed by another collage of
voices drawn from historical records: letters, memoirs and reports, sometimes
in agreement and sometimes contradicting each other. These deal with associated
subjects such as Lincoln’s presidential ball while his son was ill, and the
state of the family after the child’s demise. Thus, in this string of 108
bead-like chapters, otherworldly voices are balanced by voices that are only
too human.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Given
that the backdrop is drawn from Tibetan Buddhism, there’s very little
philosophising, even though at one point some of the characters engage in a
brief discussion on destiny and free will, and, a little later, one is told
that “whatever way one took in this world, one must try and remember that all
were suffering”. Which is why, “though on the surface it seemed every person
was different, this was not true”. (He tells the truth, but tells it slant, as
the poet from Amherst put it.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--EndFragment--><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">All
of this may make <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lincoln in the Bardo</i>
sound forbidding, if not unmanageable; yet, one learns to navigate and relish this
long, strange trip of the grateful dead remarkably soon. There’s weirdness on
this journey, but there’s also wit, pathos and redemption.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-35294951530965419822017-02-11T09:13:00.003+05:302017-02-11T09:13:29.373+05:30On Tahmima Anam<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Wrote this for</i> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/HarpersBazaarIndia/">Harper's Bazaar India's</a> <i>Jan-Feb issue.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Gj5HwEe2-_c/WJ6IRtiV-yI/AAAAAAAADPU/nqq8Bv6gP507nvDjnZVQti1HIBJfqrPfACLcB/s1600/Tahmima.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Gj5HwEe2-_c/WJ6IRtiV-yI/AAAAAAAADPU/nqq8Bv6gP507nvDjnZVQti1HIBJfqrPfACLcB/s640/Tahmima.jpg" width="420" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-29043722287938855632017-01-01T08:40:00.000+05:302017-01-01T08:40:08.269+05:30What some memorable books of 2016 said about 2016<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>This appeared in today's</i> <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/">The Hindu</a>.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
a year that many would like to forget, at least there was solace to be found in
some memorable books that mirrored and often provided a context for what we
went through.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zqzH2DaoCwU/WGhv_4eSkoI/AAAAAAAADLE/6917KEx1jrI0zrlaqTm4-VsGYq5pYNgYgCLcB/s1600/derangement.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zqzH2DaoCwU/WGhv_4eSkoI/AAAAAAAADLE/6917KEx1jrI0zrlaqTm4-VsGYq5pYNgYgCLcB/s200/derangement.jpg" width="130" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">While
experts and their theories were pooh-poohed, two books served as reminders that
hard-won knowhow shouldn’t be cavalierly dismissed. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Gene</i>, a compelling history of
genetics that combined the personal with the biological, raised questions about
the future role of science in the interplay of nature and nurture. And Amitav
Ghosh’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Great Derangement</i>
astutely pointed out that climate change today is so urgent and unexpected
that, be it in mainstream literature or public discourse, we still have to come
to grips with its scale and effects.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lUeRejcbcJ4/WGhwKcaOpXI/AAAAAAAADLI/YtV9FQ204ZwknTSeJuxdCBQ1sDOeuvYhgCLcB/s1600/the%2Breturn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lUeRejcbcJ4/WGhwKcaOpXI/AAAAAAAADLI/YtV9FQ204ZwknTSeJuxdCBQ1sDOeuvYhgCLcB/s200/the%2Breturn.jpg" width="132" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">At
a time of continuing and alarming instability in the Middle East, a foretaste
of one legacy that coming generations will have to contend with came in the
form of Hisham Matar’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Return</i>, an
unsentimental, haunting memoir in which Matar returned to Libya after three
decades to search for his father who was incarcerated by Qaddafi’s regime.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-N9o3-h8SzEo/WGhwyYWKB1I/AAAAAAAADLM/C39mXeSRAqQ3GWxnxlWcwzbJEOLApjswACLcB/s1600/evenings.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-N9o3-h8SzEo/WGhwyYWKB1I/AAAAAAAADLM/C39mXeSRAqQ3GWxnxlWcwzbJEOLApjswACLcB/s200/evenings.jpg" width="130" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">When
Europe seemed to be in danger of coming unstitched, David Szalay’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">All That Man Is</i> exhibited the day-to-day
existence of individual lives on the continent in a sequence of nine stories
about European males, from young to old, each one dealing with the costs of
giving in to impulses past and present. Another expression of dark disaffection,
this one from the Netherlands, appeared in English 70 years after it was first
published: Gerard Reve’s novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Evenings</i>, translated by Sam Garrett, a sharp detailing of the pointless
life of an office-worker during the course of ten December evenings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-T9jtf8G8Lqg/WGhw88PNT0I/AAAAAAAADLQ/y1z6_rKQq-Ucph8vC7k9G_8IhDoh2Q3EQCLcB/s1600/lonely%2Bcity.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-T9jtf8G8Lqg/WGhw88PNT0I/AAAAAAAADLQ/y1z6_rKQq-Ucph8vC7k9G_8IhDoh2Q3EQCLcB/s200/lonely%2Bcity.jpg" width="131" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Individual
voices were in danger of being drowned out by the roar of the crowd this year,
and a necessary corrective was Olivia Laing’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Lonely City</i>, a combination of memoir with portraits of New York
City artists such as Warhol and Hopper. It was a book that made loneliness “a
populated place: a city in itself”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lEUCXWkiYBs/WGhy4797NhI/AAAAAAAADL4/kDD3p2H3mfE31VAYEeRmOHGO-gVOHy2QQCLcB/s1600/what%2Bbelongs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lEUCXWkiYBs/WGhy4797NhI/AAAAAAAADL4/kDD3p2H3mfE31VAYEeRmOHGO-gVOHy2QQCLcB/s200/what%2Bbelongs.jpg" width="133" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Another
lonely voice arose in Garth Greenwell’s beautifully written debut novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What Belongs to You</i>, about an expatriate
teacher in Bulgaria and his gay relationship with a grifter. Yet another voice,
utterly solitary and distinct, emerged from the womb, that of the narrator of
Ian McEwan’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nutshell</i>, dealing with
the Hamletian dilemma of an unborn child when he realises that his mother and
uncle are plotting against his father.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DfUGAbqLEf8/WGhxDyjPv-I/AAAAAAAADLU/N-AdL0jMJ1oSQPYJBA1gdYfjSJW1xsLnACLcB/s1600/mr%2Biyer.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DfUGAbqLEf8/WGhxDyjPv-I/AAAAAAAADLU/N-AdL0jMJ1oSQPYJBA1gdYfjSJW1xsLnACLcB/s200/mr%2Biyer.jpeg" width="125" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Other
voices, quixotic and notable, were heard in novels by Ryan Lobo and Ratika
Kapur: the former’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mr Iyer Goes to War</i>
imagined a man of La Mancha in Benaras struggling to reconcile past glory with
present decrepitude; and the latter’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Private Life of Mrs Sharma</i> featured a seemingly traditional Delhi housewife
navigating a thorny path between public modernity and private desire.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Appropriately
enough, “surreal” was Merriam Webster’s word of the year, looked up more
frequently in 2016 than in previous years. Han Kang’s powerful, unsettling <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Vegetarian</i>, translated by from the
Korean by Deborah Smith, captured this “intense irrational reality of a dream”,
in the dictionary’s definition, with a tale of a woman whose diet, and other
choices, make her set her face against the world and enter a realm of violence,
shame and desire.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HnMwkE9969k/WGhxMQr0c7I/AAAAAAAADLY/pJHDM8hGHKMzb6zzteCLc3-Zg38J_QPDwCLcB/s1600/bad%2Bnews.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HnMwkE9969k/WGhxMQr0c7I/AAAAAAAADLY/pJHDM8hGHKMzb6zzteCLc3-Zg38J_QPDwCLcB/s200/bad%2Bnews.jpg" width="133" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Another
word of the year was “post-truth”, and a chilling outline of a world in which
such concepts are embraced and pushed to extremes was in Anjan Sundaram’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship</i>,
a report from Rwanda on the Orwellian lives of some of its brave journalists
and their battles for free speech.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
a year of America divided, Colson Whitehead’s unsentimental odyssey of
redemption, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Underground Railroad</i>,
was a fantastical, richly-peopled saga that took a fresh look at slavery and
its consequences. And Paul Beatty’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Sellout</i> was an invigorating Swiftean rant from a black narrator who
launches a political programme with the aim of bringing back segregation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-C1Nt0jRwTTM/WGhxShPpGsI/AAAAAAAADLc/0IdTr54NVrg1GqM53y37UXeXLhRNkIFLgCLcB/s1600/existentialist.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-C1Nt0jRwTTM/WGhxShPpGsI/AAAAAAAADLc/0IdTr54NVrg1GqM53y37UXeXLhRNkIFLgCLcB/s200/existentialist.jpg" width="140" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Economic
and other philosophies were overturned this year; those on the right and the
left were driven to positions more extreme. Sarah Bakewell’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">At The Existentialist Café</i> was a throwback
to how thinkers reacted to earlier circumstances, a revivifying look at the
lives, convictions and milieu of those such as Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus and
Husserl.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EI6ayzoGbZQ/WGhyoRbFerI/AAAAAAAADL0/-0gzQZjQo14EXvOtERQQhQquU-wjlYniACLcB/s1600/bombs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EI6ayzoGbZQ/WGhyoRbFerI/AAAAAAAADL0/-0gzQZjQo14EXvOtERQQhQquU-wjlYniACLcB/s200/bombs.jpg" width="132" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Violence
in the name of ideology continued to dominate the planet, and Karan Mahajan’s
gripping novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Association of Small
Bombs</i>, made this personal by examining the rippling aftershocks of a car
bomb explosion in a New Delhi market, and the changing internal and external
lives of families caught in its wake.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">When
dashed expectations and reversals of fortune were the norm, Paul Kalanithi’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">When Breath Becomes Air</i> was a
transcendent reminder to ask questions about the sort of life worth living.
Published posthumously, it dealt with his time before and after a cancer diagnosis,
and displayed the forging of a worldview that weaved strands of biology,
mortality, life and death.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Vgpez6BG5oc/WGhxrTyc7mI/AAAAAAAADLk/JAsUcqQGLS0sZou3_HJrIJt5e4CRkr-kwCLcB/s1600/lunatics%2Blovers.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Vgpez6BG5oc/WGhxrTyc7mI/AAAAAAAADLk/JAsUcqQGLS0sZou3_HJrIJt5e4CRkr-kwCLcB/s200/lunatics%2Blovers.jpeg" width="130" /></a><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qbsU2O0KXck/WGhxkXdkDHI/AAAAAAAADLg/kGJr-oXfJGYRRIc6luyHEAk6TcZhyLQTgCLcB/s1600/swimmer.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qbsU2O0KXck/WGhxkXdkDHI/AAAAAAAADLg/kGJr-oXfJGYRRIc6luyHEAk6TcZhyLQTgCLcB/s200/swimmer.png" width="129" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
year also marked the 400th death anniversary of Shakespeare as well as
Cervantes, and a fine demonstration of how much other writers owe those two
luminaries – as Salman Rushdie underlined in his foreword -- was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lunatics, Lovers and Poets</i>, an anthology
of new stories, both Shakespearean and Cervantean, by Kamila Shamsie, Ben Okri,
Valeria Luiselli, Juan Gabriel Vasquez and others. Other eclectic influences
swam into view with Kanishk Tharoor's striking debut, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Swimmer Among the Stars</i>, a story collection that eschewed
straightforward realism and reached back to Borges, Calvino and even the
Arabian Nights and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kathasaritsagar </i>for
inspiration.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HIWXJHHyKsg/WGhxyKcWR3I/AAAAAAAADLo/Pj8ACxzivx0VYDM5EIv57KQO5eqJFn-8QCLcB/s1600/romanovs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HIWXJHHyKsg/WGhxyKcWR3I/AAAAAAAADLo/Pj8ACxzivx0VYDM5EIv57KQO5eqJFn-8QCLcB/s200/romanovs.jpg" width="130" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
a year that was a precursor to a significant centenary, that of the Russian
Revolution, there was a trickle of books in anticipation of the 2017 flood. Notable
among them was Simon Sebag Montefiore’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Romanovs</i>, an intimate account of three centuries of imperial triumphs and
tragedies from Tsar Michael to Tsar Nicholas II; and Catherine Merridale’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lenin on the Train</i>, a fascinating
reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding the Bolshevik leader’s arrival
at Petrograd’s Finland Station in 1917. Voices from Russia were also captured
in Svetlana Alexeivich’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Secondhand Time</i>,
an immersive chronicle of the memories and observations of everyday citizens on
the fall of the Soviet empire and after.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xzegIOTZb68/WGhx_rmTXsI/AAAAAAAADLw/LpnCQxQvYPE1BzB_RFEv9F5avIAA1rtrQCLcB/s1600/ghachar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xzegIOTZb68/WGhx_rmTXsI/AAAAAAAADLw/LpnCQxQvYPE1BzB_RFEv9F5avIAA1rtrQCLcB/s200/ghachar.jpg" width="126" /></a><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1L_imub8W5U/WGhx4z-FvWI/AAAAAAAADLs/mIgf_pRUY_4PsBKWeCkglSG2zJxhF8NTwCLcB/s1600/the%2Bqueue.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1L_imub8W5U/WGhx4z-FvWI/AAAAAAAADLs/mIgf_pRUY_4PsBKWeCkglSG2zJxhF8NTwCLcB/s200/the%2Bqueue.jpg" width="133" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The last months of the year were, of
course, noted for long lines before banks and ATMs as well as other such “small
inconveniences”. One takes what consolation one can from Egyptian writer Basma
Abdel Aziz’s novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Queue</i>, translated
from the Arabic by </span><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN;">Elisabeth Jaquette</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">, a dystopian vision of life after the so-called Arab Spring,
when hapless citizens line up before departments of an authoritarian, prying
regime for permissions to engage in almost any activity. As for the pernicious
effects of wealth, or lack thereof, there was Vivek Shanbhag’s illuminating <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ghachar Ghochar</i>, translated from the
Kannada by Srinath Perur, on the physical and mental displacement of those from
a middle class Bengaluru family.</span><span lang="EN-IN" style="color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-IN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="10" QFormat="true" Name="Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Closing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Default Paragraph Font"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Message Header"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="11" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Salutation"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Date"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Block Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Hyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="FollowedHyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="20" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Document Map"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Plain Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="E-mail Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Top of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Bottom of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal (Web)"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Acronym"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Address"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Cite"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Code"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Definition"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Keyboard"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Preformatted"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Sample"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Typewriter"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Variable"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal Table"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="annotation subject"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="No List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Contemporary"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Elegant"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Professional"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Balloon Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="Table Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Theme"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Placeholder Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Revision"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" QFormat="true"
Name="List Paragraph"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Bibliography"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="41" Name="Plain Table 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="42" Name="Plain Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="43" Name="Plain Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="44" Name="Plain Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="45" Name="Plain Table 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="40" Name="Grid Table Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="Grid Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="List Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="List Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="List Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
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<!--EndFragment--><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Perhaps,
though, the most telling novel of 2016 was one published in 2010. Gary
Shteyngart’s poignant, satirical <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Super
Sad True Love Story</i> was set in a post-literate future with a fractious
America, a dominant China, people consumed by shopping and messaging, and
governments keeping close digital tabs on citizens. Did someone mention <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Black Mirror</i>?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-3782160726280410502016-02-20T08:44:00.001+05:302016-02-20T08:44:36.888+05:30Language Of The Heart<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
IN OTHER WORDS Jhumpa Lahiri<br />
<br />
<i>This review appeared in today's</i> <a href="http://indianexpress.com/">The Indian Express</a>.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hSx4XU4Fo4c/VsfZ8g_hx2I/AAAAAAAACro/eSZ2_zdEZ3A/s1600/Jhumpa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hSx4XU4Fo4c/VsfZ8g_hx2I/AAAAAAAACro/eSZ2_zdEZ3A/s320/Jhumpa.jpg" width="197" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Language is a filter through
which we view the world, and, on a trip to Florence in 1994, Jhumpa Lahiri was
captivated by a glimpse of one such view. The Italian language, she felt, was
one “with which I have to have a relationship”. After studying it for close to
20 years, she moved to Rome with her family in 2012. Here, she wrote much of her
new book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In Other Words: </i>brief,
linked essays, most of which first appeared in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Internazionale</i>. The themes of exile and alienation that animate her
fiction are also present in this, her first work of non-fiction, marked by a
guileless prose style and a disarming frankness in examining shifting
identities and the need to write.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Writers such as Beckett,
Nabokov and Conrad have written in languages other than their mother tongue;
however, Beckett lived in France for years before writing in French, Nabokov learned
English as a child, and Conrad spent a long time absorbing English while at
sea. In contrast, Lahiri writes, “what I’m doing – daring to write in Italian
after living in Italy for barely a year – is different, out of the ordinary,
and so I feel an even more intense solitude”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">An over-abundance of metaphors
is one of the ways in which she conveys her experience of learning Italian. The
comparison with a love affair is an obvious one, but that apart, she speaks of
climbing a mountain, wading into a lake, filling a basket, trying on an
unfamiliar sweater, crossing a fragile bridge, and navigating a strange city. Strikingly,
“compared with [my newborn] Italian, my English is like a hairy, smelly
teenager”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">When it comes to her
newly-minted style and its self-perceived shortcomings, “one could say that my
writing in Italian is a type of unsalted bread”. “It works,” she continues, “but
the usual flavour is missing. On the other hand, I think it does have a style or
at least a character”. It does: there’s an affecting transparency to these
sentences, rendered into English by Ann Goldstein.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The first story that Lahiri
wrote in Italian (included here, along with another) begins with the sentence:
“There was a woman…who wanted to be another person”. This, as she points out,
with reference to her Indian parents and American upbringing, is no
co-incidence. “I think that studying Italian is a flight from the long clash in
my life between English and Bengali. A rejection of both the mother and the
stepmother. An independent path.” Writing in Italian, then, becomes a way to
chart an independent course for “my divided identity”; a means to bypass her “two
sides, neither well defined”. Evidently, such reflections also serve to
illumine the roots of her novels and short stories.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">She’s equally candid about what
made her take to writing in the first place. It was “to tolerate myself [and] get
closer to everything that is outside of me…Writing is my only way of absorbing
and organising life. Otherwise it would terrify me, it would upset me too
much”. This, come to think of it, is a more impassioned way of rendering Graham
Greene’s statement that he wrote out of “a desire to reduce a chaos of
experience into some sort of order, and a hungry curiosity”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">In
Other Words</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> comes across foremost as an act of self-exploration
by a writer without a specific homeland, a search for a location triangulated
by three languages. In Italian, she has “the freedom to be imperfect”, and this
limitation of words and life, along with strategies to overcome them, are what
she assiduously explores. Combining simplicity without shallowness and
sensitivity without self-indulgence, it is written in the language of the
heart.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-72893687079012788972015-10-31T08:29:00.000+05:302015-10-31T08:29:11.051+05:30Carrying A Mirror Down Istanbul's Roads<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://www.penguinbooksindia.com/en/book/strangeness-my-mind-0">A STRANGENESS IN MY MIND</a> Orhan Pamuk<br />
<br />
<i>This appeared in today's</i> <a href="http://indianexpress.com/">The Indian Express</a><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hLUabBjZivM/VjQty322ahI/AAAAAAAAChE/iOUp0feYmMc/s1600/Pamuk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hLUabBjZivM/VjQty322ahI/AAAAAAAAChE/iOUp0feYmMc/s320/Pamuk.jpg" width="215" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In a scene from Orhan
Pamuk’s 2008 novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Museum of
Innocence</i>, the narrator, in his Istanbul home on winter nights, hears a
boza seller ringing his bell as he passes the door and is overcome by an urge for
the vendor’s beverage, a fermented grain drink popular from the time of the
Ottomans. In Pamuk’s new novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A
Strangeness in My Mind</i>, it’s the boza seller who takes centrestage.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A Strangeness in My Mind</span></i><span lang="EN-IN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> – the title is from Wordsworth’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Prelude</i> -- is the saga of Mevlut
Karatas, who accompanies his father to Istanbul from the provinces and spends
the rest of his life there, coming to realise that his vocation lies in selling
boza to the city’s thirsty and sometimes nostalgic residents. In this way, the
book is yet another representation of Istanbul by Pamuk, this time describing
not the privileged of the city, as with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Museum of Innocence</i>, but its underclass, those who migrate in search of a
better life and find work as itinerant pedlars, waiters, maids, cooks,
mechanics and the like. The unemployed, the underskilled, and the poorly
educated, as sociologist Elijah Anderson has described them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Another way in which <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Strangeness in My Mind</i> complements <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Museum of Innocence</i> is that at the
heart of both is a long-lived love story. Mevlut’s wooing of, and subsequent
relationship with, his wife Rahiya <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>provide some of the book’s most touching as
well as light-hearted moments, from the case of mistaken identity with which
their wedlock commences to the deepening of ties over the years.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Pamuk has elsewhere
written of his admiration for Stendhal, of the latter’s brand of psychological
realism, and in this novel, that influence is in full flower. He carries a Stendhalian
mirror down Istanbul’s roads, allowing it to reflect the milieu, morals and
manners of Mevlut, his family and his friends. In keeping with the mischievous
modernist manner of his other works, Pamuk also makes this novel polyphonic: the
third person saga of Mevlut <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is shot
through with first-person voices from others in his ken. (One of these
characters even alludes puckishly to the writer’s own predicament: “I could
write a book about all the men I’ve known, and then I would also end up on
trial for insulting Turkishness.”)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The somewhat naïve
and always sincere Mevlut’s “strangeness” is referred to time and again.“Mevlut
wasn’t sure whether the strangeness was in his mind or in the world,” we’re
told at the beginning, and then again, referring to the perfect match between
Mevlut and Istanbul: “In a city, you can be alone in a crowd, and in fact what
makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in our mind
inside its teeming multitudes.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For over
four decades, from student to husband to father, and during various
occupations, he finds satisfaction as a seller of the emblematic boza on
Istanbul’s streets, with his cry “reminding us of centuries past, and the good
old days that have come and gone”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Overall, there’s an even-toned
quality to the narration, in Ekin Oklap’s English translation. Personal
triumphs and tragedies (births, deaths, employment, unemployment, friendships,
fallings-out, reunions) are rendered in the same register as urban progress and
setbacks (earthquakes, military coups, elections, slum razing, expansion), with
the whole bracketed by an index of characters, chronology and family tree. In
addition, because of the span of time covered, many sections inevitably contain
more summary than incident. At times, all of this can flatten the novel’s
landscape.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Kdb5zutsftA/VjQuLECtW6I/AAAAAAAAChM/GgxhRwRn8do/s1600/FullSizeRender.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Kdb5zutsftA/VjQuLECtW6I/AAAAAAAAChM/GgxhRwRn8do/s320/FullSizeRender.jpg" width="273" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One of its
considerable strengths, though, is the way it makes the universal aspects of
rural-urban migration spring to life. One member of a family leaves home for a
better life; others from his immediate family follow; shantytowns with informal,
collaborative networks of people spring up on the outskirts, and, in time, integrate
into the city’s fabric: to these bare bones, Pamuk adds flesh and blood, and
heart. (Migrant workers, casual bribery, overcrowded footpaths, land grabs, electricity
thefts, bloodshed over beliefs, packs of stray dogs, run-down movie theatres: change
some details and locations, and Pamuk could well be writing about an Indian
city.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-IN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">At one point years
after he’s come to Istanbul, Mevlut reflects that “it was sad to see the old
face of the city as he had come to know it disappear before his eyes, erased by
new roads, demolitions, buildings, billboards, shops, tunnel and flyovers, but
it was also gratifying to feel that someone out there was working to improve
the city for his benefit.” These changes and more, and the reactions of those
affected by them, are precisely and compendiously captured here, creating an
affectionate, nostalgic portrait of inner-city Istanbul by one who knows it
intimately.</span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-53031630903657747412015-08-15T08:59:00.000+05:302015-08-15T08:59:26.163+05:30New Lives In A New Country<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>This review of Sunjeev Sahota's Booker long-listed</i> The Year of the Runaways <i>appeared in today's </i><a href="http://indianexpress.com/">The Indian Express</a>.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ck3iKzH4dbY/Vc6v2nAyv_I/AAAAAAAACaA/vvRXbOPTOXc/s1600/runaways.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ck3iKzH4dbY/Vc6v2nAyv_I/AAAAAAAACaA/vvRXbOPTOXc/s320/runaways.jpg" width="212" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Asserting
the universality of immigrant fiction, Jhumpa Lahiri once said: “From the
beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on
crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the
familiar...The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a
basic theme.” It’s this theme that animates Sunjeev Sahota’s rich, rewarding
second novel, <i>The Year of the Runaways</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Sahota’s
debut, </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Ours are the Streets</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> – on the
basis of which he was anointed one of Granta’s best young British novelists –
was a sympathetic portrait of the radicalisation of a second-generation
Pakistani immigrant in Sheffield. In </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The
Year of the Runaways</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">, also largely based in the same city, he writes of
those who have fled their homes and countries to forge a better future not just
for themselves but also those close to them. As one of the characters puts it,
“It’s not work that makes us leave home and come here. It’s love. Love for our
families.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The
novel is structured around the interactions of three such young men and one
woman over the course of four seasons during which their dreams, physical
limits and faith are put to the test. There’s Tochi, from a so-called
untouchable caste in Bihar, embittered and alone when his attempts at making a
living by driving an auto go up in flames after an engineered riot; there’s
Avtar, a private bus conductor from Amritsar, who finds himself at a dead end
after he loses his job and finds a girlfriend; there’s Randeep, a college
student from Chandigarh who is forced to take over the reins of running the
household after his father’s stroke; and there’s Narinder, a staunch Sikh from
Britain who discovers that following the codes of her belief leads to an
ethical impasse.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">After
their arrival in England, Tochi, Avtar and Randeep share a squalid flat with
other migrants and work on a construction site until circumstances pull them
apart and then together again. Sahota describes their motivations and movements
in pacing and prose that’s pleasingly unhurried, so that the unfolding of the
plot takes on an air of inevitability. Attention is paid to minor characters,
be they a girlfriend, an erratic co-worker, a heartless employer or an ailing
family member, which creates an enviable verisimilitude. Details of everyday
adjustment to an unfamiliar environment – from clothes to food to cramped
living quarters—are also carefully and tellingly chosen: “Soon the house was a
whirl of voices and feet and toilet flushes and calls to get out of bed. They
filed down, rucksacks flung over sleepy shoulders, taking their lunchbox from
the kitchen counter; next a rushed prayer at the joss stick and out into the
cold morning dark in twos and threes, at ten-minute intervals.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Sahota
lets the predicament of his characters as they move through time and space speak
of the novel’s concerns: the injustice of treating people as higher or lower in
a pecking order based on circumstances of birth, the wretchedness of having to
scrounge for work, and the grimness of having no alternative but to carry on.
Large defeats and small triumphs are delineated in a manner that makes us care
deeply about them and in this way the novel tunnels through news headlines of
immigration and caste debates, one of its transcendent strengths.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">At
one point early on, when Tochi insists on plying his trade despite the warnings
of others, he realises that it’s “not just pride” that makes him do so: “It was
a desire to be allowed a say in his life. He wondered if this was selfish;
whether, in fact, they were right and he should simply recognise his place in
this world.” This story of Tochi and his compatriots is an empathetic
exploration of this question, with Sahota proving to be an able guide to the
migrant terrain of loyalty, loss and longing.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">(</span></span><i><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">My earlier </span><span style="line-height: 24px;">review</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> of Sunjeev Sahota's debut novel is</span></span></i><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></span><a href="http://antiblurbs.blogspot.in/2013/04/his-son-fanatic.html" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">here</a><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">.)</span></span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-44692664134319265552015-05-16T08:18:00.000+05:302015-05-16T11:25:26.701+05:30Colonising The Present<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>This review of Anuradha Roy's</i> <a href="http://www.hachetteindia.com/TitleDetails.aspx?titleId=45090">Sleeping on Jupiter</a> <i>appeared in today's</i> <a href="http://indianexpress.com/">Indian Express</a>.<br />
<br />
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<![endif]--><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jzLmJpKZcRs/VVavEy5obHI/AAAAAAAACPE/XjmayriTyqI/s1600/Jupiter.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jzLmJpKZcRs/VVavEy5obHI/AAAAAAAACPE/XjmayriTyqI/s1600/Jupiter.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The
past is a foreign country, L.P. Hartley famously wrote; they do things
differently there. The manner in which the past colonises the present, and the
ways in which we attempt to make peace with it can be said to be the subject of
all of Anuradha Roy’s fiction so far, including her new novel, the whimsically
titled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sleeping on Jupiter</i>.</span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">As
with her earlier <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An Atlas of Impossible
Longing</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Folded Earth</i>, this
one features a cast of well-outlined characters, with attention paid to
fleshing out their particularities and points of view. There is, to begin
with, the group of Vidya, Gauri and Latika, friends in their 60s – “three old
biddies from Calcutta”, as a hotel manager dismissively calls them – who embark
on a five-day trip to Jarmuli, a medieval temple town overlooking the Bay of Bengal.
Of this trio, Latika is efficient and gently mocking; Gauri is garrulous and
increasingly afflicted by forgetfulness; and Vidya takes pride in being
practical and sensible. Among the people they meet in Jarmuli is Badal, a
temple guide in his 20s, a graduate from the school of hard knocks whose
street-smart manner conceals an essential naivete. The narrative also circles
around Suraj, a liaison person for a TV production company, with his thwarted
film-making dreams, erratic, violent temper and controlling ways.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Above
all else, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sleeping on Jupiter</i> is the
story of the young Nomi – the well-travelled Nomita Frederiksen, born in India
but adopted by a foster-mother in Oslo, who has returned to Jarmuli in order to
shine a more powerful light upon the fragments of her past. Years ago, Nomi had
been wrenched from her family and fallen into the clutches of a predatory ashram,
witnessing violence and undergoing abuse almost too much for any young person
to withstand. She now faces the challenge of putting these shards together in a
form that will afford release and allow her to move on, depicted in the novel
by means of deft, occasional shifts from first person to third. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">With
most such novels written in a realistic mode, there’s a tussle between the
needs of the character and those of the plot. How far can such fictional
individuals be allowed to exist as entities in their own right, and how much do
they have to be manipulated to serve the unfolding narrative? Most of the time,
Roy walks this tightrope with ease, but there are wobbles: easy co-incidences
and neat encounters, however necessary they may be to deepen the plot, do at
times come in the way of the artific<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>e of reality. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">All
of Roy’s characters have had things taken away from them, sometimes through violence,
sometimes through time's passage. In some cases, innocence is what has been
waylaid; with others, an intimate relationship has come apart at the seams; with
yet others, it’s the coherent memory of the past that has vanished. The novel progresses
by means of these people engaging and disengaging with each other, and the after-effect
of these meetings and partings yields truths about the world and about
themselves that have so far been concealed or ignored.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The
experience of reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sleeping on Jupiter</i>
is, for the most part, rich and immersive. Roy’s delineation of Jarmuli is as
atmospheric as that of Ranikhet in her earlier <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Folded Earth</i>. In this town by the sea, incense mingles with the
stench of rotting fish, scorching afternoons give way to mellow twilights,
sunlight plays on water that carries ominous currents, cardamom and ginger are
crushed into tea leaves at a stall by the beach, and the stairways and
interiors of intricately carved temples witness a swarm of people, from
visitors to locals, from the devout to the irreligious. This precise
evocation of a sense of place, matched by an equally precise portrayal of interior
states, all in unhurried, unshowy prose, makes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sleeping on Jupiter</i> both accomplished and affecting. </span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-64498934795647483832015-04-11T07:56:00.000+05:302015-04-11T07:56:11.084+05:30Home And The World<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>This appeared in today's</i> <a href="http://indianexpress.com/india/">The Indian Express</a><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Tr9tT2SNT54/VSiF-FrYiKI/AAAAAAAACJU/PRDB3CW4YA0/s1600/upstairs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Tr9tT2SNT54/VSiF-FrYiKI/AAAAAAAACJU/PRDB3CW4YA0/s1600/upstairs.jpg" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">On
a December morning in 1986, the ten-year-old Rafia Zakaria’s Aunt Amina left
her husband to return to her parents’ house. This, to the young Zakaria, was
mystifying, until it was explained to her that Uncle Sohail had taken a second
wife. The reveberations of this episode and the context against which they play
out form the driving force behind Zakaria’s <i>The
Upstairs Wife</i>, a domestic memoir of Pakistan that's counter-balanced by
public events.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">In
<i>Shame</i>, the novel banned in Pakistan
almost immediately after it was published in 1983, Salman Rushdie writes: “I
had thought, before I began, that what I had on my hands was an almost
excessively masculine tale, a saga of sexual rivalry, ambition, power,
patronage, betrayal, death, revenge.” However, he continues, “the women seem to
have taken over; they marched in from the peripheries of the story to demand
the inclusion of their own tragedies, histories and comedies”. If <i>Shame</i> is set in Rushdie’s “looking-glass
Pakistan”, <i>The Upstairs Wife</i> is
Pakistan-as-jigsaw-puzzle, with many pieces – though not all -- portraying
women’s tragedies, histories and comedies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The
book moves backward and forward from 1986 in an ambitious attempt to capture
Pakistan’s “intimate history”.There are vignettes to do with the lives of
Zakaria’s grandparents in undivided India: Konkani Muslims living in the shadow
of Mumbai’s Jamia Milla Mosque, they stay on after Partition, changing their
minds and arriving in Karachi only in 1961. There’s the saga of Aunt Amina who
returns to her husband and his second wife: she lives on an upper floor, with
Uncle Sohail’s time equally divided between one and then the other. There are
mini-portrayals of other members of the family: the author’s mother, for
instance, who is determined to provide her children with an education.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Interwoven
with these are observations on historical events, notably, the assassination of
Benazir Bhutto, which forms the book's prologue. Other pieces of the jigsaw
that make up this portrait of Pakistan feature the Bangladesh War, the effects
of the Islamic policies of Zia ul-Haq, the struggles between the muhajirs and
other communities, and the fallout of happenings in Afghanistan over the years.
A lot for any place to endure.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">It’s
an approach that works well when there’s a resonance between the private and
public. The day of Benazir Bhutto’s killing, for example, is also the day that
Uncle Sohail is in hospital after suffering a stroke. As Zakaria writes: “For
one odd, brief, and singular moment, the catastrophes of my family and my
country had come together, showing me how they were woven together, knotted and
inextricable, inside and outside, male and female, no longer separate.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">At
times, though, the links seem forced: “One year after Uncle Sohail took a
second wife, another strange wedding took place in Karachi [that of Benazir
Bhutto with Ali Asaf Zardari]”. At yet other times, the connections are
tenuous, especially as many pieces of this jigsaw aren’t specifically about
women’s lives. This can give <i>The Upstairs
Wife</i>, deeply-felt and keenly-observed though it is, something of a fragmentary
character.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Journalistic
set pieces or otherwise, Zakaria’s slices of life in Pakistan are always
revealing. There is, for example, the delicious tale of how Hamida Bogra, wife
of Mohammad Ali Bogra, third Prime Minister of Pakistan, started a campaign for
women’s rights after her husband fell in love with his secretary, resulting in
the country’s Muslim Family Law Ordinance. Pages and years later, there’s the
moving account of Shaheeda Parveen, sentenced to be stoned to death because her
previous husband alleged that he had never really divorced her.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The
significance of <i>The Upstairs Wife</i>
also lies in its portrayal of the quotidian in the face of the uncertain.
“There was the outing to the beach disrupted by the kidnapping of a friend’s
father,” the author recollects, “the concert that concluded a half hour after
it began because of a bomb threat; the exams carefully prepared for again and
again and again only to be put off due to curfews and killings and strikes and
sit-ins”. Here, as elsewhere, Zakaria demonstrates how public events shape private
lives. Individuals may change history, but more often than not, it’s the other
way around.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-10978498582591457042015-04-11T07:52:00.000+05:302015-04-11T07:52:06.094+05:30Bihari Hamlets And Don Quixotes<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>This appeared in the March 9, 2015 issue of</i> <a href="http://indiatoday.intoday.in/">India Today</a>.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-507sraaLEIo/VSiE7qryNlI/AAAAAAAACJM/no44gNkUlR8/s1600/patnamanual.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-507sraaLEIo/VSiE7qryNlI/AAAAAAAACJM/no44gNkUlR8/s1600/patnamanual.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">In
one of the stories from Siddharth Chowdhury’s new collection, <i>The Patna Manual of Style</i>, the narrator
settles down for a train journey, looking forward to re-reading Turgenev’s <i>A Sportsman’s Sketches</i>: “a book which
always calms me down and makes me feel more generously disposed towards
humanity in general”. In a famous essay written in 1860, the Russian
writer mused on two types of characters in fiction, the Hamlets and the Don Quixotes.
The first is eaten away by self-reflection, while the second is purposeful and
full of belief in reaching his self-proclaimed aims. Both types of characters
can be found in Chowdhury’s <i>The Patna
Manual of Style</i>; the former comes across as a fictional stand-in for the
author himself, while the striking figures he encounters represent the latter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Readers of Chowdhury’s earlier work will find these interlinked tales
comfortingly familiar. Many characters and concerns from <i>Patna Roughcut</i> and <i>Day Scholar</i>
appear here too, making <i>The Patna Manual
of Style</i> an organic extension. This collection, then, largely deals with
the continuing fortunes of the twenty-something Hriday Thakur as he navigates
jobs and writing projects in New Delhi. Along the way, he charts a course
through a loose network of friends, family and acquaintances of varying castes
and affiliations, almost all of them with a Bihar connection.<br />
<br />
Among the more pleasing aspects of <i>The
Patna Manual of Style </i>is its distinctive tone of voice. This, for the large
part, is a mixture of the knowing and the naïve, of the sardonic and the
nostalgic, of Bihari comportment and new-wave cinema – all of which sounds like
it can’t possibly hang together, but somehow does. (In the first few pages, for
example, Hriday strikes a <i>noir</i> pose
in Connaught Place by buttoning up his ancient herringbone, “patched up at the
elbows and cuffs with scuffed tan leather” and lighting “a fresh Gold Flake
from the dwindling embers of the previous one”; after a visit to the barber, he
thinks that “with the beard now gone and a thick moustache in place I looked
more grown-up and purposeful, which I felt was a good thing”; thus fortified,
he looks forward to devouring a <i>thali</i>
called the Patna Large at Yadavji Litti Centre in one of the bylanes leading to
the train station.)<br />
<br />
Many stories involve Hriday coming across, or hearing news of, a character from
his past – Quixotes to his Hamlet – with the narrative filling in the blanks
between then and now. Thus, Jishnu-da, a former university associate, tells him
about how he’s now transformed into an “importer of blondes”, by which he means
a supplier of Russian dancers for shows, weddings and the like, and of the
dangers of mixing heart and head. At the start of another detail-laden and
character-filled story, Hriday attends the funeral of one Samuel Aldington
Macaulay Crown, “the best proofreader in all of Ansari Road”, and we’re then
supplied with details of Hriday’s initial encounters with him, as well as his
potted career. Yet another story deals with Hriday’s wife telling him of the
suspected affair of one of his old flames, a lever for Hriday to recall past
times.<br />
<br />
Perhaps the most satisfying story here is told from the point of view of
Hriday’s wife, Chitrangada, a rumination that dwells on her gradual acceptance
into his circle of friends. More specifically, it deals with the consequences
of a drunken lunch with them, during which she first meets the beauteous
Charulata Roy, whom Hriday was ealier almost married to. The shift in focus
from Hriday to Chitrangada is pulled off efficiently and provides a welcome and
needed shift in perspective.<br />
<br />
Many other stories, however, are no more than slight character sketches.
There’s the gently self-mocking tale of writer named Siddharth Chowdhury, who
has “published a novel no one has actually read”: a postmodern pirouette that
sits a trifle uneasily with the rest, especially since this story is little
more than a vignette. Another such vignette brings us the first-person
musings of another writer, the daughter of an eminent littérateur, who
riffs on people "getting her goat" as an euphemism for sex (that's
more corny than horny, if you'll pardon the expression).<br />
<br />
To return to Turgenev, it was of his <i>A
Sportsman’s Sketches</i> itself that he somewhat self-deprecatingly wrote:
“Much has come out pale and scrappy, much is only just hinted at, some of it's
not right, oversalted or undercooked – but there are other notes pitched
exactly right and not out of tune, and it is these notes that will save the
whole book.” One could say much the same of Siddharth Chowdhury’s <i>The Patna Manual of Style</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-12960682337410543432014-12-19T17:10:00.000+05:302014-12-19T17:10:33.371+05:30Speak, Memory<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>This review of</i> <i>Janice Pariat's</i> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10153306719507729">Seahorse</a> <i>appeared in the current issue of</i> <a href="http://indiatoday.intoday.in/">India Today</a>.<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-m_0zu7pdFIo/VJQOXWI9ubI/AAAAAAAAB4I/IWVYZwpJ0v0/s1600/seahorse.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-m_0zu7pdFIo/VJQOXWI9ubI/AAAAAAAAB4I/IWVYZwpJ0v0/s1600/seahorse.jpeg" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Written
in a folkloric style best described by the epigraph that referenced Alejo
Carpentier’s "marvellous real", Janice Pariat’s collection of short
stories, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Boats on Land</i>, was notable
for its evocation of lives past and present in Shillong and its environs. With <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Seahorse</i>, her debut novel, Pariat
extends her range to come up with a filigreed tale of disquiet and discontent,
of longing and loss, based on the Greek myth of sea-god Poseidon and his young
acolyte and lover, Pelops.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">This
is the story of Nem, and of the ways he deals with the end of his affair with
Nicholas, a charismatic and enigmatic art historian whom he meets when studying
literature in Delhi. Arriving in the city from a town in the north-east, Nem
finds himself somewhat of an outsider at first; it is Nicholas who opens up for
him worlds of art and music he is enthralled by. The role of Ananda to
Nicholas’s Buddha ends with the latter’s sudden disappearance. Nicholas had once
remarked to Nem that he was struck by the manner in which works of art change
in meaning and significance according to shifts in the world outside;
similarly, Nem – a blank slate, who empathises with Svevo’s men without
qualities -- has to now remake and be re-made.Years later, while on a literary
fellowship in London, he is finally offered the chance to piece together and
decipher incidents from the past.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Much
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Seahorse</i>, then, is about the
inscription of desire on the slate of memory. “We are shaped by absence,”
thinks Nem. “The places that escape our travels, the things we choose not to
do, the people we’ve lost.” (A sentence that brings to mind the words of the
recently-deceased Mark Strand: “In a field/I am the absence/of field. /This is/always
the case. /Wherever I am/I am what is missing”.) This sentiment is matched by a
mode of narration that, for the most part, shows incidents broken up into
separate sequences of action and aftermath; a wholeness comprised of fragments,
a mosaic of remembrance and yearning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">It
is also the case, however, that the novel sags slightly in the middle, during
the long episodes of Nem’s life in London — despite the attempt to provide a
harmonic resonance via the loops of longing and variations of sexual attraction
that Nem’s friends experience. Then, there are occasions when the poetic
threatens to tip over to the portentous (“Prophecies are the most scientific of
supernatural phenomena, for they, like science, invest in a single outcome. The
one truth.”) In addition, the accident in the English countryside at the end,
though it continues the mythic parallelism, does come across as a trifle staged
and out of place with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Seahorse’s</i>
otherwise wistful, gentle tone.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Leaving
all of that aside, Pariat’s prose is beguiling: take, for instance, her pithy
descriptions of interiors and exteriors. It’s a pleasure of read of the “pale
fury” of the Red Fort; of rooms “as desolate as churches”; of the wings of a
building “spread long and low, like a bird in flight”; of London being “filled
with old light”; and of a “big-bellied sky” pressing against the tops of
buildings. Appropriately enough, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Seahorse</i>
is also shot through by images of water, be they in aquariums, swimming pools
or the seaside.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The
paradox of memory, writes Pariat, “is that it gives you back what you had on
condition that you know it has been lost”. To regain it, she continues, “you
must remember it has gone; to remake the world, you need to first understand
that it has ended”. </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Seahorse</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">, then,
is a fine and estimable account of the refashioning of an interior world
suffused by a pining for what has been lost.</span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-41504948195848975952014-11-29T09:22:00.000+05:302014-11-29T09:22:07.051+05:30The History Man<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>This review of Aatish Taseer's</i> <a href="http://www.panmacmillan.com/book/aatishtaseer/thewaythingswere">The Way Things Were</a> <i>appeared in today's</i> <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Section/Leisure/lounge">Mint Lounge</a>.<br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Given
the recent kerfuffle over the HRD ministry’s decision to replace German with
Sanskrit in the Kendriya Vidyalayas, the release of Aatish Taseer’s new novel is
fortuitously well-timed. <i>The Way Things
Were is</i> an exploration of the ways in which India’s past influences its
present and the attitudes of those who make history serve their own ends, with
Sanskrit being a key symbol of the process. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hBDPG6c60AI/VHlCGSY1zQI/AAAAAAAAB14/7dzE8DxI2Ds/s1600/taseer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hBDPG6c60AI/VHlCGSY1zQI/AAAAAAAAB14/7dzE8DxI2Ds/s1600/taseer.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">In
an essay </span><span style="line-height: 150%;">written </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">a little over two years ago, Taseer dwelt on what his own study of Sanskrit revealed to him: his wish for a “historical sense” was, to his
surprise, answered with linguistic roots. He goes on to unpack this: “In India,
where history had heaped confusion upon confusion, where everything was shoddy
and haphazard and unplanned, the structure of Sanskrit, with its exquisite
planning, was proof that it had not always been that way”. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">This
is a quest that is, at its heart, personal: “My problem was that I had next to
nothing in my bones. Nothing but a handful of English novels, some Indian
writing in English, and a few verses of Urdu poetry. That was all. And it was
too little; it left the bones weak; I had no way to thread the world together”.
Clearly, then, <i>The Way Things Were</i> is
another step in Taseer’s continuing writerly attempt to find a <i>weltanschauung</i> he can live with. The
problem, however, is that in fictional terms, the novel emerges as far too
didactic, with its themes and concerns always on the surface rather than
dextrously woven into the narrative. Its moral sense is appealing; its more
than occasional ingenuousness isn’t.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The
characters who form the twin poles of the novel are Toby, otherwise known as His
Highness the Maharaja of Kalasuryaketu, and his son Skanda. Toby, a reserved
and sometimes pusillanimous Sanskrit scholar, ironically finds himself out of
place in a country whose past he has striven so hard to understand, and he
finally leaves India for good in 1992. The novel opens in the present, with
Skanda – also a student of Sanskrit, now based in Manhattan and working on a
translation of <i>Kumarasambhava</i> – being
informed that his father is on his deathbed. He leaves for Geneva and then
arrives in India, carrying his father’s ashes with him. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The
book progresses through an admixture of past and present, detailing Toby and
Skanda’s lives, respectively. An abundance of other characters fills the
novel’s pages, from Uma, Toby’s first wife and Skanda’s mother, to their
extended family of cousins, uncles and aunts, to Maniraja, Uma’s second husband.
This profusion of individuals apart, Taseer’s clearly conceived of his novel in
epic terms, for it deals with or touches upon several incidents from India’s
recent and remote history, from the Hampi invasions to the treatment of the
Mughal princes after 1857 to the Emergency to Bhopal to Indira Gandhi’s
assassination to Babri Masjid.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">This,
in a sense, is a key weakness because, apart from episodes such as the
treatment of Skanda’s uncle during the 1984 riots, many of the other incidents
are treated by way of drawing-room discussions, with Skanda, Toby and their kin
making oracular pronouncements on the subject. (As a contrast, take a very
different novel, Rohinton Mistry’s <i>A Fine
Balance</i>, and see how it gets down to the roots of how people suffered
during the Emergency years.) Added to this are frequent authorial interjections
on the same lines, as in: “The violence of a civilised society, though men may
dress it up as anger or grief, has the quality of a celebration”, or: “They
spoke rapturously of India, but dreamed of the West. Of European cities, shops
and duty-free goods…in their hearts, they were hungry materialists, who wanted
nothing so much from life as a Japanese washing machine or a German toaster.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Those
familiar with Taseer’s earlier work will discover common patterns, from an
estranged father to a mother’s next relationship with a pushy business magnate
to a protagonist making his way through their disparate worlds. Such true-to-life
resemblances continue with other characters based on real people, such as
Gayatri Mann, who “lived abroad with her husband, the publisher Zubin Mann…She
made documentary films on Bangladesh, on secret India, on the timelessness of
Hinduism…In the West, she traded on India; and in India, starved for news of
the West, she carried back stories of the latest fashions…”. There’s also the
writer Vijaipal Sooprasaat, with his strong views on Hampi, among other things,
and whose ideas are sought to be appropriated by those seeking an Indian
resurgence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Though
it certainly takes skill to delineate changes in such a vast cast of characters
over the years, the key dialectic of <i>The
Way Things Were</i> -- understanding the past as a shaping force on the present
versus shaping the past in the light of the present – is spelt out time and
again, almost essayistically, which is the hallmark of underdeveloped polemical
fiction. Take Gayatri Mann’s outburst, for example: “This new order [will use] the
epics, the poets, Manu, Ayodhya, whatever – and they will hollow them out of
meaning. They will make slogans of them. That is what they want them for, as
symbols of their rise, nothing more.” One can appreciate such sentiments
without necessarily agreeing with the way that Taseer has worked – or not worked
– them into his novel.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">“The
big relationships are like the big novels, messy, chaotic, imperfect,” says
Skanda, towards the end of the book. “They operate by emotional logic.” </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The Way Things Were </i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">is both an emotional
and messy novel, but not a very compelling one.</span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-40420517077423216672014-09-07T08:43:00.000+05:302014-09-07T08:43:18.235+05:30If On A Winter's Night A Professor<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Today's <i><a href="http://www.sunday-guardian.com/">Sunday Guardian</a></i> column.<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xeuOtKPn_YM/VAvMuk_WNwI/AAAAAAAABvg/FfgPfv2TfmE/s1600/andersen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xeuOtKPn_YM/VAvMuk_WNwI/AAAAAAAABvg/FfgPfv2TfmE/s1600/andersen.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Beset
by thoughts of a mysterious incident, an alienated individual walks alone down
city streets facing an unnamed crisis and re-evaluating his existence. Readers
of Haruki Murakami will find such a premise familiar, and as it happens, these
are the elements of his next project, too. Only, they aren’t from a novel he’s
writing but one that he’s translating into Japanese, according to a recent
tweet by Harvill Secker. The work in question: </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Professor Andersen’s Night</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">, by acclaimed Norwegian author Dag
Solstad.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The
novel, longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, was first
published in 1996 and translated into English by Agnes Scott Langeland in 2011.
It’s of the type that people call an existential mystery (and the sort of thing
they have in mind when they say that Paul Auster is an American writer of
European novels). As such, it’s qualitatively different from other dark-hued
Scandinavian works that have captured the popular imagination of late, be they
novels by Steig Larsson and Jo Nesbo or TV shows such as <i>Forbrydelsen</i> and <i>Broen</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Solstad’s
style is marked by a sonorous, repetitive rhythm that, Bernhard-like, mirrors
the mind of a man going around in circles. This is a divorced,
fifty-five-year-old professor of literature who, when the novel starts, is
settling down in his Oslo apartment for a solitary meal on Christmas Eve, more
to observe traditional customs than anything else. Now comes a taste of what’s
to follow: “the customs he observed and the celebration he thereby took part
in, in his own way and without any feeling of obligation to his family or
others, beyond the feeling of duty he felt to himself, and that actually came
from within, pointed to a meaning of some kind which for him was meaningless”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Gazing
out at the windows opposite his apartment, the professor suddenly witnesses
what he thinks is a murder taking place. So far, so <i>Rear Window</i>, but what happens next is quite un-Hitchcockian. He’s
thrown into a frenzy of inaction, afflicted by analysis paralysis. He considers
calling the police and the ramifications thereof; finally, he realises, “I know
I should have done it, but I can’t. That is how it is, I simply cannot do it”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">As
he’s been invited to a friend’s house for dinner the following night, the
professor decides to ask him for advice but this, too, he cannot bring himself
to do. While depicting the dinner itself, Solstag makes clear that the
professor’s predicament is but a metaphor for his generation. Former radicals,
now a part of established society whose fires have cooled, their attitudes “had
perhaps only been a chance expression of the spirit of modernity, which was
their one great fascination”. Now, with increasing affluence, they eat and
drink well, own holiday homes and cars and boats. Their state is further spelt
out: “intellectuals in a commercial age, and deeply influenced by what stirs
the hearts of the masses. What stirs the hearts of the masses are the
consequences of our own inadequacy”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Still
nursing his secret, the professor visits Trondheim for a short break, where he
mets another associate with whom he engages in dispiriting conversations that
reflect his inner crisis. He reflects on the sputtering out of modernity in the
twentieth century, affirming our historical inadequacy and meagre cultural
inheritance: “…it isn’t Ibsen’s work we perform, it’s Ibsen’s reputation”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">And
so poor Professor Andersen returns home, still having told no-one about what he
has witnessed, when he suddenly bumps into the man he believes to be the
murderer. Those looking for thrilling denouements ought to have realised by now
that they’re not to be found here. The professor’s crisis is not one that
affords an easy resolution. “Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality
to be faced,” as Kierkegaard, the philosopher from Solstad’s part of the world,
once said, reminding us that it’s our crisis, too.</span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-65948720514270517462014-08-24T09:45:00.002+05:302014-08-24T09:45:38.609+05:30Murakami's Book Of Sand<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>This review appeared in the latest issue o</i>f <a href="http://indiatoday.intoday.in/">India Today</a>.<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FOsm8aySQZw/U_lmqQU5NiI/AAAAAAAABt4/WiLy-4A6a2o/s1600/trukuru.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FOsm8aySQZw/U_lmqQU5NiI/AAAAAAAABt4/WiLy-4A6a2o/s1600/trukuru.jpg" height="320" width="207" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Haruki
Murakami’s new novel is quite unlike the baggy mess that was his earlier <i>1Q84</i>. Here, there are no Little People,
towns of cats and skies with two moons. It does bear the usual Murakami
trademarks – alienated characters roaming Tokyo, references to jazz and
classical music, the leaking of the past into the present and a collapsed distance
between fantasy and reality – but it is closer to his “quieter” works such as <i>Norwegian</i> <i>Wood</i> and <i>Sputnik Sweetheart</i>.
Yet, there’s an odd insubstantiality to the novel which makes it less than
satisfying, an unintentional colourlessness that seems to have leaked into the
text from the character of the protagonist.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The
eponymous Tsukuru Tazaki, when the novel opens, has fallen “like Jonah in the
belly of the whale…into the bowels of death, one untold day after another, lost
in a dark, stagnant void.” This suicidal mood arises because he has suddenly
and inexplicably been excluded from a charmed circle of four high school
friends, all of whom have names related to colours: Miss White, Miss Black, Mr
Red and Mr Blue. Tsukuru alone is a colourless and lacklustre Mr Average, but
there’s also “something about him that wasn’t exactly normal, something that
set him apart”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Tsukuru
changes a great deal after his friends summarily announce that “they did not
want to see him, or talk to him, ever again”, thus banishing him from a
fraternal Eden that once was an “orderly and harmonious community”. Now in his
mid-thirties, a solitary creature of habit, almost an automaton, he lives in Tokyo
working for a company that constructs railway stations (Tsukuru, you see, means
“to make” or “to build”). Into his life comes a girlfriend who, wanting a more
meaningful relationship, urges him to finally investigate the cause of his
rejection, something he has turned his back on all these years. “You need to
come face to face with the past,” she tells him, “not as some naive, easily
wounded boy, but as a grown-up, independent professional.” And so the man who
builds stations that enable people to converge and connect embarks on a journey
to meet his former friends and find the reason behind his own uncoupling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">There
is much exposition, especially in the early sections, to do with the characters
of the friends, their togetherness and their meetings, and this has the effect
of robbing the narrative of a certain granularity. Then again, this being
Murakami, the narrative is intertwined with tales and occurrences that can best
be described as otherworldly, especially when it comes to another solitary
character whom Tsukuru befriends in Tokyo. Death tokens, auras, six-fingered
individuals and intense sexual dreams put in appearances, among other things,
and characters openly engage in ruminations on philosophy, free will, the
nature of evil, the unfolding of talent and the qualities of solitude. We’re
thus encouraged to look upon reality as we know it in a new light. In the words
of one of the characters: “One thing I can say, though, is that once you see
that true sight with your own eyes, the world you've lived in till now will
look flat and insipid. There's no logic or illogic in that scene. No good or
evil. Everything is merged into one.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Tsukuru
comes across his friends again without too much trouble; they’re in infrequent
contact with one another now, and his pilgrim’s progress even takes him to
Finland to meet one of them who has settled there. The reason that they turned
against him all those years ago comes as a surprise to him, containing as it does
shades of the Marabar Caves episode in Forster’s <i>A Passage to India</i>. This provides Murakami with more opportunities
to cogitate on the space between emotional and rational reality, with Tsukuru
wondering whether he has just one self belonging to just one world, and whether
the actions of one impinge upon the other. In his valiant attempt to bridge
these divergences, he learns, among other lessons, that “there is no silence
without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without
a passage through acute loss.” Deep.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">At
times, Murakami delineates with grace and tenderness moments of connection
between individuals, as well as the opposite, agonising periods of sorrow and
solitude. As with his earlier work, the effect of music on characters is
movingly shown, in this case notably Liszt’s <i>Le mal du pays,</i> part of a suite titled Years of Pilgrimage. “Our
lives are like a complex musical score,” Tsukuru thinks. "Filled with all
sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange
signs. It's next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you
could, and then could transpose them into the correct sounds, there's no
guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning
therein.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The
conclusion is characteristically open-ended, and though this fits in with the
unresolved aspects of reality that Murakami has explored in almost all of his
work, in this case it comes across as more functional than whimsical, a
consequence of a certain tossed-off quality. Towards the end of the novel, one
of Tsukuru’s friends tells him that “the truth sometimes reminds me of a city
buried in sand. As time passes, the sand piles up even thicker, and
occasionally it’s blown away and what's below is revealed.” That explains it:
with <i>Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His
Years of Pilgrimage</i>, there’s too much sand and too little city.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-27118688636524343202014-08-24T09:41:00.000+05:302014-08-24T20:48:53.019+05:30Turning Books Into Art<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Today's</i> <a href="http://www.sunday-guardian.com/">Sunday Guardian</a> <i>column</i>.<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SW-FSVqIJgs/U_llh3kcC5I/AAAAAAAABtw/dtEUGmTtO2w/s1600/read.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SW-FSVqIJgs/U_llh3kcC5I/AAAAAAAABtw/dtEUGmTtO2w/s1600/read.jpg" height="223" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>'A Bit Of Paper Art' </i>/ Etsy.com</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Earlier
this month, a Mumbai gallery showcased a book collection featuring volumes
designed not to be picked up and read, but to be viewed as works of art. Here,
there were “book sculptures”, pages with gold leaf illustrations, books
embedded with bullet casings, pages folded into shapes of waves, butterflies
and more. Ironically, if inexactly, the show was entitled </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Reading Room</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Artists
have been using books as material for a while; last year, hurrying through an
overseas mall, I was brought up short by a large installation in the foyer
featuring the work of Los Angeles-based Mike Stilkey, who paints surreal
figures of horses, dogs, cats and people, among others, on the spines of
discarded books stacked together. (The highest of these is 24 feet tall and made
up of 3,000 volumes.) “Books don't hold the same amount of power that they used
to, because of the Internet and whatnot,” says Stilkey, “and [people] throw
them away at an alarming rate”. With the
rise of the e-book, it’s the physicality of the printed book that has become
its defining characteristic.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">This
is also reflected in the increasing attention paid to book covers: look at the
ingenious and impressive designs of Chip Kidd, for instance. The apotheosis of
such efforts so far could well be graphic novelist Chris Ware’s acclaimed <i>Building Stories</i>, comprising 14 separate
printed works -- broadsheets, magazines, pamphlets and more – enclosed in a
box.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; text-indent: 0.5in;">The case of Haruki Murakami’s latest
novel, however, shows that such attention to presentation can go too far. In
addition to the striking cover, there’s also a sheet of stickers designed by
Japanese illustrators pasted within, supposed to represent Murakami’s characters
and their concerns. (My copy’s sticker sheet remains within; I haven’t bothered
to remove or inspect it, before or after reading the novel.)</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Interior
designers and fashionistas have been quick to capitalise on the nature of the
book-as-object. The website of one design firm affirms that there’s “nothing
like a well styled bookcase filled with books, accessories, collectibles, and
photos that add warmth, intrigue, and uniqueness to a space…They can make a
bare wall go from blah-to-beautiful”.
Coffee table books have long been seen as elegant decor accessories, and
one can only avert one’s eyes from bookshelves where volumes have been arranged
according to the colour of their spines. More evidence of form over content
comes in a recent <i>New York Times</i>
article which mentions that NYC’s Strand bookstore is one of the places you can
order books by color or spine size; further, on Etsy, the online crafts
marketplace, retailers offer “instant libraries”, colour-co-ordinated books in
“ocean hues” or “custard to cream colored.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Elsewhere,
there are people who choose books as fashion accessories; presumably, if you’re
in a nostalgic mood you can venture outdoors with a copy of a Victorian
bestseller -- after ensuring that the shade of the jacket matches your own
jacket, of course. (Authors, too, aren’t immune: an online men’s clothing store
recently held up Samuel Beckett as a style icon, pointing out that “Gauloises,
Jameson and tweeds make the Nobel Prize winner a paragon of geezer cool”. One
can’t go on, one goes on.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Leaving
such fashion-forward folk aside, artists are, of course, entitled to choose
whatever objects they think best suit their purposes. One can’t, however, help but feel a sense of
unease at treating a printed book purely as raw material. Such volumes are
manufactured objects, yes, but certainly not in the same category as, say, the urinal
that Marcel Duchamp famously employed for his own artistic ends. Such is the
minefield of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. You know things have
gone too far when you hear of German artist Dieter Roth’s installation, </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Work in 20
Volumes</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">. Roth ground up the philosopher’s complete works and used the
results to stuff sausages, creating what’s been called </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">literawurst</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">. Cheeky, but hard to swallow.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-54187293761475896262014-07-27T08:22:00.001+05:302014-07-27T08:37:02.782+05:30Papa's Wives<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Today's </i><a href="http://www.sunday-guardian.com/">Sunday Guardian</a> <i>column</i>.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The
pair is the primary creative unit, wrote Joshua Wolf Shenk recently in the <i>New York Times</i>. “At its heart, the
creative process itself is about a push and pull between two entities, two
cultures or traditions, or two people, or even a single pe<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>rson
and the voice inside her head.” Many times, one half of the pair goes unacknowledged,
especially in the case of writers and their wives. The obvious examples are
those of Vera Nabokov, Nora Joyce and Zelda Fitzgerald; it’s only of late that their
contributions have been paid attention to, with biographies and fictionalised
accounts of their lives. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gF5ntl0OcH4/U9Ro7Ggp51I/AAAAAAAABr4/8fbos9vt8UM/s1600/ParisW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gF5ntl0OcH4/U9Ro7Ggp51I/AAAAAAAABr4/8fbos9vt8UM/s1600/ParisW.jpg" height="200" width="133" /></a><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VT0q_-yNr_g/U9Ro7OOYwCI/AAAAAAAABr8/dZzLF7aKlJ0/s1600/MrsHem.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VT0q_-yNr_g/U9Ro7OOYwCI/AAAAAAAABr8/dZzLF7aKlJ0/s1600/MrsHem.jpg" height="200" width="130" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Two
recent novels continue such revivification, both dealing with Ernest Hemingway’s
better halves. Paula McLain’s <i>The Paris
Wife </i>revolves around Hemingway’s first, Hadley Richardson, and their time
in Paris, while Naomi Wood’s <i>Mrs
Hemingway </i>encompasses all four of the writer’s wives. The former is more
focused on the ways in which Hadley helped her husband flower as a writer, while
the latter, with its decades-long span, also shows how the significant women in
his life shaped him (and vice versa).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Much
of the charm of <i>The Paris Wife</i> comes
from its evocation of the city in which the 21-year-old Ernest and the
28-year-old Hadley lived during the 1920s: “filthy and gorgeous, full of rats
and horse chestnut blossoms and poetry…The cafés of Montparnasse breathed them
in and out, French painters and Russian dancers and American writers.” Here,
Hemingway was to meet others who influenced him (notably Gertrude Stein), drink
copiously, travel over Europe as a journalist and, of course, start work on the
pared-down short stories and novels he was acclaimed for.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Hadley,
meanwhile, “closer to a Victorian holdout than a flapper”, spent her days
practising the piano, attempting French cooking and occasionally accompanying
him on his jaunts. She’s clear about her role: “It was shockingly unmodern—and
likely naïve, too—but I did believe any sacrifices and difficulties in our life
were worth it for Ernest’s career.” By 1927, however, it all came to an end;
they were divorced after Hemingway’s affair with <i>Vogue</i> journalist Pauline Pfieffer, who became his second wife. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">McLain
does provide emotional depth to historical facts, but overall, <i>The Paris Wife</i> could have done with less
sentimentality and overstatement. Naomi Wood’s <i>Mrs Hemingway </i>is more ingenious and artful, both in structure and
in telling. Set in the last weeks of each marriage, it circles back to first
meetings and memories, like a hand of overlapping queens in a deck of cards,
each one coming to terms with loss. Wood’s Hadley has more spirit, as do the
other wives, especially Martha Gellhorn, war reporter and novelist, who at one
point feels that Hemingway “is not so much greedy for women as blind to what he
thinks he needs and so he grabs at everything. Wives and wives and wives…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Hemingway’s
small apartment above a sawmill in Paris is an important setting in both
novels, and <i>Mrs Hemingway</i> also brings
to life the other locations where his wives nourished and inspired him: the
house in Key West, Florida; the one in FincaVigia, Cuba; and his final home in
Sun Valley, Idaho. Here, Mary Welsh, his last wife, came to grips with his
suicide and later, gathered together his posthumous papers. Among these was the
manuscript for <i>A Moveable Feast</i>, his nostalgic
account of 1920s Paris, thus bringing the saga full circle.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 150%;">Reviewing
two early biographies of Hemingway, Raymond Carver wrote that one grew weary of
and ultimately saddened by Hemingway’s actions: “one display after another of mean-spiritedness
and spite, of vulgar and shabby behavior”. That reaction, not unmixed with some
sympathy, remains after reading these novels. The antidote, as Carver went on
to suggest, is to re-read his fiction itself: “How clear, serene and solid the
best work still seems”. </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 150%;">The Paris Wife</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 150%;">
and </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 150%;">Mrs Hemingway</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 150%;"> are necessary reminders
of the women who enabled him to produce such work.</span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-321120954732383922014-07-19T11:29:00.000+05:302014-07-19T12:23:54.209+05:30Voices From The City<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<i>This review appeared in today's</i> <a href="http://indianexpress.com/">Indian Express</a>.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: left;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Engglishhh<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Altaf Tyrewala<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<i style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Fourth Estate/Harper Collins</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: left;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ptLMyJHLfB0/U8oI4zWkhGI/AAAAAAAABrQ/F9NfZepsREM/s1600/tyrewala.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ptLMyJHLfB0/U8oI4zWkhGI/AAAAAAAABrQ/F9NfZepsREM/s1600/tyrewala.jpg" /></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">We
bemoan the crumbling infrastructure of Indian cities, but there’s another
substructure that we all depend upon, one that’s essential for us to go about
our day-to-day lives with a semblance of normality. These are the cooks,
drivers, security guards, maids and others who do their work behind the scenes
so that we can do ours. Often, it’s only in their absence that we sense their
worth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Unsurprisingly,
one doesn’t come across too many such characters in fiction from India written
in English -- even though there are exceptions, such as those who populate
Murzban Shroff’s story collection, <i>Breathless
in Mumbai</i> and Balram, narrator of Aravind Adiga’s<i>The White Tiger</i>. Now, as if to redress the balance, there are a
great deal of them who crop up in Altaf Tyrewala’s short story collection,<i>Engglishhh</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Many
of these stories have previously appeared over the last few years in
periodicals such as <i>Caravan</i> and <i>Tehelka</i>, but what holds most of them
together – apart from a Mumbai setting -- is this attention to a class of
people whose inner lives are often ignored, a trait that was evident in
Tyrewala's debut novel as well. Here, for example, we track a harried maidservant
during the course of a day in which nothing is more precious to her than a
bottle of mineral water; eavesdrop on the thoughts of a building security guard
obsessed with premonitions of death; and, in a maneuver similar to <i>No God in Sight</i>, come across linked
vignettes of dashed hopes from the lives of a liftman, a security guard and
other service staff in a large office building.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">This
is not to say that Tyrewala offers up turgid slabs of social realism that are
hard to digest. There’s an undercurrent of light heartedness, almost
cheekiness, in most that make them a pleasure to read, a large part of which is
because of the use of demotic Mumbai rhythms. There is a satirical edge, too,
chiefly to do with the behaviour of the middle class as well as others in
thrall to their own hypocrisy, such as in the tale of the director of Indian
porn. Similarly, the title story hilariously sends up a blind belief in
numerology and its assumed advantages by creating a new form of English, one
that’s “the most fortune-fetching and life-altering language in the history of
the world”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">However,
the longest story here, the extended saga of a multinational fast food
company’s clown mascot who comes to life, is less than satisfying, not only
because of the over-determined nature of the narrative but also because of its
uneasy mix of broad-brush burlesque, realism and mockery. Constrictive plotting
is to be found in other stories too, such as the tragicomic saga of a man who
steals a cellphone to discover unpleasant truths close to home, but it works
better here because of a more focused narrative zest. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 150%;">In
one of the stories in the collection, a son accompanying his father’s body in a
hearse muses on “the advantage of living in an overpopulated nation: the
individual experience could be made pedestrian in an instant by setting it
against the collective.” In the acts of ventriloquism in </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 150%;">Engglishhh</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 150%;"> -- “fictional dispatches from a hyperreal nation”, as
the subtitle has it -- Tyrewala does the opposite: he plucks out pedestrian and
not-so-pedestrian experiences from the collective and renders them unique.</span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-20487757348359602912014-07-13T08:46:00.001+05:302014-07-13T08:48:33.036+05:30The Short Story's Lonely Voice<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>My</i> <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&sqi=2&ved=0CBwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sunday-guardian.com%2F&ei=b_nBU_CPGJKgugTxp4L4BA&usg=AFQjCNEyrDaDBLraPzbe3v93VJXp8YD2jw&sig2=pRB0LC04VyuQS6Bpey_PrQ&bvm=bv.70810081,d.c2E">Sunday Guardian</a> <i>column</i>.<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-rH27YClR3AE/U8H5rYe12xI/AAAAAAAABqg/l8EkDFHRd6Y/s1600/lonelyvoice.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-rH27YClR3AE/U8H5rYe12xI/AAAAAAAABqg/l8EkDFHRd6Y/s1600/lonelyvoice.jpg" height="320" width="214" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">We’re
all aware that the novel is dead. People have been making pronouncements about
its demise for ages, even as new novels continue to appear and thrive. When it
comes to the state of the short story, though, the word used to describe it is
“renaissance”: apparently, the form has been undergoing one for decades. Clearly,
though, there’s been more of resurgence of late. As Paul McVeigh, director of
the London Short Story Festival, points out, it’s the short story that has won against
the novel in the recent International Man Booker, the Nobel, the Folio
Prize and even the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. This also shows the short
story’s flowering in terms of style: it’s not just the quiet realism of Alice
Munro that’s lauded, but also the telling vignettes of Lydia Davis and the satirical
observations of George Saunders, among others.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">What
is it, then, that makes for a good short story? Though there have been many
theories of the novel over the years – from Bakhtin to Forster to Lukács --
there have been fewer assessments of the short story. Most of them are to be
found in essay collections, introductions to anthologies and writers’ own musings.One
of the most well-regarded remains Frank O’Connor’s <i>The Lonely Voice</i>, based on a series of lectures the Irish writer
delivered at Stanford in 1961. As Russell Banks writes in the introduction to
the Melville House edition, this arose out of “a need perhaps to sum up a
lifetime’s ruminations and writings on the subject—theories and beliefs
hammered out and tested in lectures, arguments, essays, debates, and
discussions for over forty years”. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The
short story, says O’Connor, has never had a hero: “What it has instead is a
submerged population group—a bad phrase which I have had to use for want of a
better.” It’s this “submerged population group” that, to his mind, is the key
to unlocking the short story’s secrets. This “Little Man”, as he goes on to
explain, is omnipresent: “Gogol’s officials, Turgenev’s serfs, Maupassant’s
prostitutes, Chekhov’s doctors and teachers, Sherwood Anderson’s provincials,
always dreaming of escape”. These aren’t just voices of those from underground but
also of those standing against convention, marching to their own drummer and
illuminating uncomfortable truths about the way we live.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">This,
to O’Connor, is also the essential difference between the novel and the short
story. In the former, he writes, at least one character must represent the
reader in some manner— “as the Wild Boy, the Rebel, the Dreamer, the
Misunderstood Idealist” – and such identification leads to some concept of
normality and relationship with society as a whole. Not so in the short story,
with its “sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society”.
It’s evident that there’s as much to debate on as chew upon in the author’s
pronouncements, which often veer towards the oracular. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">O’Connor
goes on to apply this thinking to the work of some of his favourite authors,
and also explores other aspects of what, to him, makes for a good short story
-- primarily a moral dimension and a realistic, non-experimental approach, all
of which leads to “applied”, organic, as opposed to “pure”, storytelling. One
could disagree with his conclusions, and many will, but what is fascinating is
the way he draws parallels between writers to bring out their strengths and
weaknesses: Hemingway and Joyce; Browning and Turgenev; Kipling and Poe; Maupassant
and Chekhov (in passing, he claims that ‘The Lady with the Lapdog’ may “well be
the most beautiful short story in the world”).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Parts
of </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">The Lonely Voice</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> do come across as
dated (he lauds Lawrence) or downright cussed (he’s less than charitable about
Katherine Mansfield). One-size-fits-all theories can be Procrustean beds,
especially for a form as protean as the short story, but there’s no denying
that O’Connor provides a stimulating and always impassioned argument in favour
of his own informed views. </span></div>
</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-45238481198771110872014-06-15T12:10:00.000+05:302014-06-15T12:10:14.870+05:30We Need To Talk About Jerry<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Today's </i><a href="http://www.sunday-guardian.com/">Sunday Guardian</a> <i>column</i>.<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vRK8ZQKK0Y0/U50_oeOycQI/AAAAAAAABoc/WL9KVSSlSxY/s1600/salyear.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vRK8ZQKK0Y0/U50_oeOycQI/AAAAAAAABoc/WL9KVSSlSxY/s1600/salyear.jpg" height="320" width="196" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The
spirit of J.D. Salinger still haunts us. Years after his death, there’s
continuing speculation over his reclusive life and writing. Recently, there was
David Shields and Shane Salerno’s <i>Salinger</i>,
filled with scraps of information gleaned from those who knew him, not least of
which was the revelation that the writer’s estate intends to release more of
his work. Last month, there was the slim <i>J.D.
Salinger: The Escape Artist </i>by nove<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>list Thomas Beller,
an account of Salinger’s life and relationships through the prism of Beller’s
own sensibilities; one life refracted through another, so to speak. Now,
there’s the intriguingly titled <i>My
Salinger Year</i>, by poet and writer Joanna Rakoff.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">This
isn’t a tell-all account of a hushed relationship, as with Joyce Maynard’s <i>At Home in the World</i>. In 1996, Rakoffworked
as an assistant at </span><span style="background: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Harold Ober Associates, </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">the venerable
New York literary agency that represented Salinger, and this is a report of her
time there, including her handling of the many fan letters addressed to the
author. <i>My Salinger Year</i> is most of
all a <i>bildungsroman</i>: Rakoff’s
education at the agency is matched by a corresponding coming-of-age saga out of
it. Slices of a vanished New York; a young woman making her way in the world; and
reflections on the ways of the literati: the same ingredients are to be most
recently found – albeit treated less skillfully – in Janet Groth’s 2012 memoir,
<i>The Receptionist: An Education at the New
Yorker</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Rakoff’s
prose is precise and evocative, revisiting and conveying the feelings
experienced by her twenty-three-year-old self when adapting to the strangeness
of a new job and archaic environment. It’s with the same sensitivity that she
handles her after-work life: her fraught relationship with a domineering boyfriend
who has socialist leanings, their efforts to rent an affordable apartment in
New York, her shifting relationship with her parents, and her meetings with
friends who have moved on (some of which unintentionally come across as an
earlier generation’s version of Lena Dunham’s <i>Girls)</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">When
it came to Salinger, Rakoff’s instructions were clear from day one. After a
terse “we need to talk about Jerry,” she’s told to “never, never, never give
out his address or phone number….Don’t answer their questions. Just get off the
phone as quickly as possible….Our job is not to bother him. We take care of his
business so he doesn’t have to be bothered with it.” Fan mail was to be
answered by a form letter drafted in 1963. Such missives were many: from old
acquaintances, war veterans, editors and, of course, rabid fans, mainly
teenagers expressing a sentiment that could be summed up as “Holden Caulfield
is the only character in literature who is truly like me. And you, Mr.
Salinger, are surely the same person as Holden Caulfield. Thus, you and I
should be friends.” Rakoff dutifully sends off the form letters, but at times
she’s unable to stop herself from sending out letters of her own, words of
advice to those whose personal circumstances are oppressive. (The irony is
delicious and evident.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Rakoff
also manages to speak to Salinger on the occasions he calls for his agent,
during which he commends her efforts to be a poet and, being hard of hearing, refers
to her as Suzanne. Their one meeting is disappointingly anticlimactic,
consisting of little more than a handshake, despite “a strong and bizarre—and
inexplicable—urge to hug him”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">“What
really knocks me out,” Holden famously says in Salinger’s </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Catcher</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">, “is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish
the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him
up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” Salinger evidently evoked the same
feeling in his readers because of his distinctive, intimate writing voice. Rakoff,
a late convert, comes to realize just this -- “I loved him. I loved it all” -- and
her memoir is an intimate, engaging account of finding her own voice. </span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-52346333181029062052014-06-01T09:14:00.003+05:302014-06-01T09:15:52.043+05:30Literary Potshots<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Today's </i><a href="http://www.sunday-guardian.com/">Sunday Guardian</a> <i>column</i>.<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-m73QpUsrI0U/U4qgpfmkEsI/AAAAAAAABnA/7sPV2T0t_3g/s1600/lostwords.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-m73QpUsrI0U/U4qgpfmkEsI/AAAAAAAABnA/7sPV2T0t_3g/s1600/lostwords.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">We
need more satires and parodies. Everyone nowadays is far too ponderous,
thin-skinned, ready to take offence: such attitudes should be skewered. When it
comes to novels and novelists, too, talk is largely of the Purpose of Art, the
Bold New Direction and the End of Reading, accompanied by knitted brows and
weighty self-expr<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>ession. The Swifts and the Waughs are
consigned to the past. Into this breach steps Edward St Aubyn with his new
novel, <i>Lost for Words</i>. This isn’t a bittersweet,
semi-autobiographical saga, as with his Patrick Melrose novels, but a sharp send-up
of contemporary writing and writing prizes. When it was awarded the Bollinger
Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction last week, the news was greeted with
the inevitable headline: “Novel mocking literary prizes wins literary prize.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">It’s
not that the subject hasn’t been handled in fiction before: just last year,
there was Howard Jacobson’s <i>Zoo Time</i>,
a rant on the state of publishing and the bestseller list, as well as Filippo
Bologna’s sardonic <i>The Parrots</i>, dealing
with three writers vying and conniving for a prestigious literary award. Now, St
Aubyn’s <i>Lost for Words </i>comes as
another reminder that a prize can be a flawed yardstick with which to judge a
book. The one in question in this novel is the Elysian Prize, clearly modelled
on the Man Booker. (St Aubyn’s own <i>Mother’s
Milk</i> narrowly failed to win in 2006, losing to Kiran Desai’s <i>The Inheritance of Loss</i>.) The group
behind this fictional prize, dealing in genetically modified crops, is keen on
a good public image; earlier, they had to face “some regrettable suicides among
Indian farmers, whose crops had failed when they were sold Cod wheat, designed
to withstand the icy rigours of Canada and Norway rather than the glowing anvil
of the Indian Plain”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Lost for Word’s</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">
chapters alternate between various authors, publishers and agents hoping for a
favourable outcome on the night of the awards, as well as the judges and the
pressures on them. One among the latter group is Penny Feathers, formerly of
the Foreign Office and writer of breathless thrillers -- any resemblance to
Stella Rimington, erstwhile Director General of MI5, writer of novels featuring
female intelligence officers and chair of the judges for the 2011 Man Booker
Prize, is not entirely coincidental. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">There’s
also the lordly Sonny, six hundred and fifty-third maharaja of the former
Indian princely state of Badanpur, who hopes to win with his huge novel, <i>The Mulberry Elephant</i>. However, it’s not
this book but his aunt’s palace cookbook, entered by mistake, which makes the
shortlist (“fiction artfully disguised as culinary fact”) and this causes Sonny
and others much heartburn. As this and other such incidents show, St Aubyn’s
novel is rich in farce. His barbs are pointed and aimed at the pretentiousness
of the establishment. One of the judges is all for “relevance”; another is interested
in “good writing”; yet another lauds a novel by asserting that “it creates a
participatory reality”.A Beckett-inspired novelist rues “art based on impact,
rather than process, structure or insight” and another enjoys reading
historical fiction because “one met so many famous people…like reading a very
old copy of <i>Hello!</i> Magazine”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Throughout,
St Aubyn provides lengthy extracts from the titles on the Elysian longlist,
adding to his novel’s pleasures. It can thus also be read as a handbook of pastiches,
most enjoyable of which are sections from an Irvine Walsh-influenced work, “a
harsh but ultimately uplifting account of life on a Glasgow housing estate”,
entitled <i>wot u starin at</i>: “ ‘I told
yuz nivirivir to talk to uz when aymtrackin a vein,’ snarled Death Boy.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Clearly,
St Aubyn has had great fun in writing <i>Lost
for Words</i>, which shows even in the names of agents and publishing houses
(John Elton; Page and Turner). More mischievous than mean-spirited, it should
be read with the same roguish spirit it displays when bayonetting its targets. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-66115203954358338552014-05-18T09:17:00.000+05:302014-05-18T10:02:30.593+05:30The Pleasures Of Being A Pedestrian<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Today's </i><a href="http://www.sunday-guardian.com/">Sunday Guardian</a> <i>column</i>.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aB7qnw5r8-M/U3gtIlaPguI/AAAAAAAABl0/-RFZxu2xSrc/s1600/Philosophy_of_Walking.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aB7qnw5r8-M/U3gtIlaPguI/AAAAAAAABl0/-RFZxu2xSrc/s1600/Philosophy_of_Walking.jpg" height="320" width="221" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">To
take a walk in an average Indian city is to embark upon a dispiriting exercise.
Broken footpaths, enthusiastic hawkers and illegal encroachments accost one at
every step. Much is spent on creating new roads and flyovers to benefit those
who drive, but the simple needs of those who walk, by choice or necessity, go
unmet. What we lose in the process is once again brought out by Frederic Gros’s
new book, <i>A Philosophy of Walking</i>,
translated from the French by John Howe. Gros, a professor in Paris, walks in
the footsteps of others who have written about pedestrianism over the years,
and brings to the subject a metaphysical tone. His book deals with aspects of
walking such as freedom, slowness, renewal and solitude, and touches upon its
effects on noted practitioners, from Wordsworth to Thoreau, from Rousseau to
Nietzsche, from Dickens to Rimbaud.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Walking
is one of those capacious subjects that has always attracted writers, and has
often been compared to the act of writing itself. As Robert MacFarlane has put
it, “The paths are sentences, the shod feet of the travellers the scratch of
the pen-nib or the press of the type." Though many books on ambulation
have a common core, they go on fascinating rambles, depending on the
inclinations of the writer. Rebecca Solnit’s <i>Wanderlust:
A History of Walking</i>, for example, an individual and sometimes dizzyingly dense
look at the topic, informs us of the layout of gardens, the nature of literary
criticism, the pursuit of mountaineering, the development of American suburbs,
the origins of streetwalking, and the perceptions of women in public spaces.
Others pursue different paths: in Geoff
Nicholson’s <i>The Lost Art of Walking</i>, there’s
an entire chapter on walking in music and movies, referencing an episode of Bob
Dylan’s radio show, medieval troubadours’ <i>chansons
d’aventure</i>, Robert Johnson’s ‘Walkin’ Blues’, Charlie Chaplin’s signature shuffle
and John Travolta’s <i>Saturday Night Fever </i>strut.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Gros,
however, keeps to the straight and narrow for the most part. Walking is not a
sport, he asserts, not subject to the competitive fervor that pervades so much
of how we spend our time today. “It’s a process of self-liberation,” he writes;
while ambling, “you feel free, because whenever you remember the former signs
of your commitments in hell – name, age, profession, CV – it all seems
absolutely derisory, minuscule, insubstantial”. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Much
of <i>A Philosophy of Walking</i> deals with
walking in the countryside, although the particular charms of walking in the
city are also considered. It’s here, of course, that one comes across the figure
of the <i>flâneur</i>, the solitary urban
walker and lounger, much analysed, written about and used as a subject for fiction,
from Charles Baudelaire to Walker Benjamin, from W.G. Sebald to Teju Cole.
“City, crowd, and capitalism” are the conditions that give rise to such a
person, writes Gros. The <i>flâneur’s </i>solitude,
anonymity and slowness, the fact that he’s not caught in a “web of exchanges”, contrasts with
the city’s capitalistic hustle and bustle; thus, “he subverts the crowd, the
merchandise and the town, along with their values”. (No wonder it’s difficult
to take a walk here.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Gandhi
is another famous walker whom Gros devotes time to, in particular the former’s Dandi
March as well as his trips on foot to riot-ravaged areas before Partition.
“Walking with Gandhi,” he writes, “nurtured the slow energies of endurance”,
something else that we don’t seem to have time for nowadays. Elsewhere, Gros
comments on supplicants on their way to Pandharpur chanting Sant Tukaram’s songs,
underlining yet another role of walking, that of being an essential activity on
pilgrimages. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">Gros
can sometimes be a bit precious in his pronouncements, such as when he says: “even
when I am alone, there is always this dialogue between the body and the soul”.
Overall, though, </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">A Philosophy of Walking</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">
is knowledgeable and bracing. One feels like thrusting a copy upon our urban
planners to make them realise that the activity is more than pedestrian.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-91771447996003580792014-05-04T19:02:00.001+05:302014-06-13T15:04:28.100+05:30Dictators And Memories<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Today's <i><a href="http://www.sunday-guardian.com/">Sunday Guardian</a> </i>column.<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ceqni6xhrTs/U2ZBQp_-T_I/AAAAAAAABj4/uL7544HofJc/s1600/Pron.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ceqni6xhrTs/U2ZBQp_-T_I/AAAAAAAABj4/uL7544HofJc/s1600/Pron.JPG" height="320" width="200" /></a><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Dictators hate memories. History can be rewritten, dissent can be
suppressed, but remembrance cannot be so easily eliminated. Many such memories,
collective and individual, have provided fodder for novelists. In Latin
America, there’s a long tradition of what’s called “the dictator novel”, in
which real and fictional leaders are scrutinised, criticised or lampooned –
notable among them Augusto Roa Bastos's <i>I,
the Supreme</i>, Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s <i>Tyrant
Banderas</i>, Alejo Carpentier’s <i>Reasons
of State</i>, not to mention work by those such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and
Mario Vargas Llosa.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">This tradition of looking back at a troubled past lives
on, with contemporary novelists trying to understand the role of their
countries’ previous generation. Last year alone, there was Juan Carlos
Vasquez’s <i>The Sound of Things Falling</i>,
examining the recent drug-addled history of Colombia. There was Alejandro
Zambra's <i>Ways of Going Home</i>, looking
back at Pinochet’s Chile. And there was Patricio Pron’s <i>My Fathers’ Ghost is Climbing in the Rain</i>, which explores the
lasting effects of Argentina’s last military dictatorship.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Pron’s novel is unconventional and memorable because
of its style and structure. “Children are detectives of their parents, who cast
them out into the world so that one day the children will return and tell them
their story so that they themselves can understand it,” he writes, summing up
this tale of a young Argentinian writer returning home. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The narrator, in Germany when the novel starts,
travels back to Argentina upon hearing of his father’s sudden illness. He is a
blocked and depressed writer, irresponsible, addicted to pills, besieged by
dreams and distractions. Thus, the novel proceeds in very short chapters, with
-- in the translation by Mara Faye Lethem -- long, looping sentences that carry
the weight of thoughts as they take shape.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Once home, the writer spends much of his time visiting
the hospital, watching movies on TV with his siblings, making lists of his
parents’ books and, of course, taking his pills. His journey from numbness to
awareness begins when he comes across a folder on his father’s desk containing
several newspaper clippings as well as other details related to the recent murder
of one Alberto Burdisso, “a Faulknerian simpleton” employed by a local club. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">A section is now almost entirely given over to the
reports in the folder, with people, places and proceedings laid out in
meticulous detail, after which the narrator pieces together the reasons for his
father’s interest in the case, as well as its connection with an earlier murder
in his country’s history: “Nobody had fought, we had all lost and barely anyone
had stayed true to what they believed, whatever that was, I thought; my
father’s generation had been different, but, once again, there was something in
that difference that was also as meeting point, a thread that went through the
years and brought us together in spite of everything and was horrifically
Argentine: the feeling of parents and children being united in defeat.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">It is towards the end that Pron reveals the reason
for the novel’s mode of enquiry: the events of the book, he writes, are “mostly
true”, although “some are the result of the demands of fiction, whose rules are
different from the rules of such genres as testimony or autobiography”. Which
of course leads one to ask, why not write it as testimony or autobiography
instead? The answer is that by writing it as a novel, Pron can combine an
individual sensibility, an interior life, with a larger historical context, and
give the whole a shape that has a greater heft. The result is a narrative in which “I would
have to be both author and reader, discovering as I narrated”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 150%;">One of the writer’s tasks is to bear witness – to his
or her own stories, to the stories of those close to them – and to record
testimonies in the best way possible. In </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 150%;">My
Fathers’ Ghost is Climbing in the Rain</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 150%;">, that is what Patricio Pron has admirably
done.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8837476429665656326.post-58356773839583063322014-04-20T08:38:00.000+05:302014-04-20T08:38:31.731+05:30Best Served Cold<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Today's </i><a href="http://www.sunday-guardian.com/">Sunday Guardian</a> <i>column</i>.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DkjZ7wXWOsc/U1M59ouEMvI/AAAAAAAABh8/Q01xXQjj_Cs/s1600/revenge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DkjZ7wXWOsc/U1M59ouEMvI/AAAAAAAABh8/Q01xXQjj_Cs/s1600/revenge.jpg" height="320" width="216" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">One
of the more commented-on aspects of Roman Polanski’s <i>Rosemary’s Baby</i> was the decision to never show the face of the said
baby. Rightly so, for dread, when left to the imagination, is more palpable
than when every detail is depicted. This is what comes to mind when reading
Yoko Ogawa’s <i>Revenge</i>, a collection of
11 dark tales, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder. Ogawa’s stories
don’t depend on the satanic, but on the malevolent forces that lurk in the
heart of the everyday.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Revenge</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">
is one of the six titles on the recently-announced Independent Foreign Fiction
Prize Shortlist, an award that recognizes the author as well as "the
importance of the translator in their ability to bridge the gap between
languages and cultures". For the
first time, two female writers from Japan appear on the list, the other being Hiromi
Kawakami for <i>Strange Weather in Tokyo </i>(which
appears to be a Murakami-style meditation on love and loneliness).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The
particular eeriness of Ogawa’s interlinked tales comes from the contrasts
between the subject, her quiet language and the unhurried release of
information. Her characters are people whom life has pushed to the margins: an unassuming
student whose mother is dying of cancer; an unfairly jilted beautician; a wife
separated from her family and trying to be a writer; a mother who’s dealing
with the loss of her young son. In many cases, the stories have a similar
structure, first person narratives that start with a period of waiting – on a
train journey, in a bakery, in a hospital – which is then intercut by
distressing memories from the past. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The
linkages between them are ingenious and carefully structured. In one story, we
read of an abandoned post office filled with kiwifruit, an oddity explained by
the actions of a character in the next. In another, a character throws a dead
hamster into the trash, spotted by another in the tale that follows. Sometimes,
characters are linked by location, as when one of them speaks to her boyfriend
of a murder in the flat above, an incident that forms the submerged climax of
another story. In yet other cases, a story is revealed to be one that’s written
by an earlier character. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Ogawa’s
metaphors go a long way in adding to the oddness. Most of them are drawn from routine
objects and sounds: a mis-struck violin is “like the cry of a small bird”; a
carrot is “in the shape of a hand”; a laundry cart rolls down a corridor “as
though pushed by an invisible hand”; a dried-up plum emerging from a pocket
“looks like a testicle”. (Ouch.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">A
passage in one of the stories, during which a bag-maker muses on her profession,
could well be a metaphor for <i>Revenge’s</i>
act of creation. When she makes a bag, she says, she first pictures how it will
look when it’s finished. Then, she sketches each imagined detail, “from the
shiny clasp to the finest stitches in the seams”. Next, “I transfer the design to pattern paper
and cut out the pieces from the raw material, and then finally I sew them
together”. As the bag takes shape, “my heart beats uncontrollably and I feel as
though my hands wield all the powers of the universe”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">The
bag-maker’s story, arguably the most chilling of the lot, moves away from the
quotidian and exists at an angle to reality. She’s depicted as obsessed by one
of her customers, a nightclub crooner who, because of a congenital defect, has
her heart outside her chest. Another such story portrays the curator of a
domestic museum of implements used for torture, who cares for a Bengal tiger in
his garden.These are exceptions that veer towards the fantastical, but what is
common to the collection lies in the words of a character who, when conversing
with another, notices the “icy current running under her words”. The iciness of
Ogawa’s vision reinforces the old saying that revenge is a dish best served
cold. <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09675638336834274440noreply@blogger.com0