Antiblurbs

Posters For #flashreads

2012-02-11T18:31:00.000+05:30

Some rough-and-ready posters for use on February 14: e-mail, display, put up on your blog or print and wrap fish in them. For the initiative itself, see this.

(Update: Have added two new posters. These are the last ones, I promise.)

Ravan And Eddie Redux

2012-02-06T10:47:00.000+05:30

This appeared in the current issue of Tehelka.

THE EXTRAS Kiran Nagarkar

Like the city in which it is set, Kiran Nagarkar’s The Extras is bursting at the seams, with a crumbling infrastructure. This is a high-spirited follow-up to his 1975 Ravan and Eddie, and features the eponymous duo bobbing and tumbling like corks in the slipstream of Mumbai in the 1960s.

The narrative follows the two, now young men, as they set out to make something of their lives. As before, there are descriptions of lives across communities in the Central Works Department chawl in Mazgaon, segueing into a series of rambunctious episodes in which they encounter policemen, film folk, underworld dons and more.

From working in a speakeasy – a so-called ‘Aunty’s Bar’ -- to playing in wedding bands to driving taxis and ultimately hoping for success as extras in Bollywood, Nagarkar intertwines their lives, even though they begin to interact only in the book’s latter half. As Eddie’s girlfriend puts it: “You seem to know each other's moves and you play off each other. There's some kind of rivalry and edge, and yet there's respect and you never cross the line”. We learn of Ravan and Eddie’s varying passions for physical fitness, music and acting – all of which will come to their aid towards the end – and the women in their lives. In this manner, the tale moves all over Mumbai and its environs, from Bhendi Bazar to Bandra, from Karjat to Colaba.

As with Ravan and Eddie, the narrative is interspersed with mini-essays on Mumbai life, this time on subjects such as the “brass bandwallahs”, taxi-drivers, Prohibition and a modest proposal to replace the system of education with private coaching classes. For the most part, these are entertaining little riffs, although in some cases, such as when Nagarkar dwells on the rise of Mumtaz and Rajnikanth, the facts are so well-known that one wonders what the point is. (Perhaps one ought to heed the advice offered at the start of one of these ruminations: “No extra charge if you jump to the main story a few pages later”.) A little later in The Extras, the narrative is also interspersed by lengthy song lyrics and letters, making it more self-indulgent than necessary.

With trademark irreverence, Nagarkar also takes potshots at established pieties. There’s a Maiboli Sangh, for example, trying to whip up Maharashtrian passions; elsewhere, Ravan muses that national integration can be truly seen on Falkland Road, the city’s red light district, as there were women from all states to be found there.

With its surfeit of highs and lows and occasionally too-convenient succession of entrances and exits, the continuing adventures of Ravan Pawar and Edward Coutinho turn out to be sometimes bawdy, sometimes implausible and almost always engaging. As with a series of dishes on a long buffet table, it’s enjoyable to make your way through, but can also leave you too sated for comfort.

15 Literary Predictions For 2012

2012-01-01T10:06:00.001+05:30

This appeared in today's DNA.

The jury's out on whether the Mayan prophecy of the world ending in 2012 will come to pass. If we're still standing this time next year, here are fifteen predictions related to books and publishing that we’ll have to endure.

1 Passions will run high with the discovery of a manuscript in Steig Larsson's study entitled The Girl Who Served My Coffee Cold. It will later be discovered that this is not an unpublished novel, but a long rant against a tardy waitress at a nearby cafe.

2 Shops known as "bookstores" will start to stock seasonal vegetables, readymade garments and sports goods, apart from DVDs, CDs, video games, watches, jewellery and stationery. As this will leave no space for books, they will be available by special request only.

3 The spate of books and articles on Steve Jobs will cease once people realise that many of those writing about him were simply repeating the same thing. Matters will come to a head once it is discovered that a much-linked-to blog post titled "My Recollections of Jobs" simply consists of the words "Stay hungry, stay foolish" typed over and over again.

4 After the furore over the proscribing of A.K. Ramanujan's essay on the Ramayana by Delhi University, members of the varsity's Physics Department will seek to stop the study of quantum physics, claiming that "some German fellow called Heisenberg" was out to promote uncertainty across the nation.

5 Shah Rukh Khan's 37-kg "opus" will cause bookshelves and coffee tables across the nation to splinter and collapse under its weight. The MNS will subsequently stage a series of protests in front of furniture showrooms, claiming that this has offended the sensibilities of those carpenters who are not SRK fans.

6 Adam Mansbach, author of the sleeper hit, Go The F*ck to Sleep, will repeat his success with Who Gives A Sh*t, a potty-training manual.

7 Salman Rushdie's memoir of the fatwa years will attract controversy, as detractors will claim that there's nothing whatsoever in the book to cause offence to any community, and the author is thus depriving people of a chance to protest. Rushdie will claim that this is untrue and as proof, he will protest against Pankaj Mishra's review in Outlook.

8 Amitav Ghosh will ridicule reports claiming that the third volume of his Ibis trilogy, after Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke, will be titled Stream of Consciousness.

9 Zombie and vampire mash-ups will gain popularity in India too, with works such as A Suitable Werewolf and The Three Banshees of My Life. However, V.S. Naipaul will haughtily turn down requests to publish A House For Mr Nosferatu and India: A Million Monsters Now. Subsequently, Paul Theroux will write another memoir accusing Naipaul of racism towards the undead.

10 The Man Booker judges will cause consternation when they include Rujuta Dawekar's Women and the Weight Loss Tamasha on their longlist. The title will subsequently be withdrawn when it's pointed out that it's not a work of fiction. "But it was so readable!" one of the judges will be heard to comment.

11 Chetan Bhagat will once again feature on bestseller lists with his non-fiction work, The Grammatical Mistakes of My Life. Here, he will claim that he's never written in English, but a local Indian dialect instead; therefore, criticism of his poor handling of the language is misplaced. Translators will be summoned to render all his previous work into English.

12 Street food vendors will stay off Indian roads to protest against the declining sales of newspapers and magazines. When lauded for their attempts to promote reading, the president of the vendors' association will say: "Reading-shmeading. We only want to make sure there's no shortage of plates and wrappers."

13 Amazon will introduce a sleeker version of the Kindle Fire, to be named the Kindle Lighter. After disappointing sales, this will unkindly be dubbed, "the Dwindle".

14 Literary festivals will be organised every weekend, with the latest addition being that of the Nallasopara Panchayat's Write Stuff Carnival. ("Books! Celebrities! Candy Floss!") Organisers of such festivals will soon run out of authors, and will therefore introduce public readings from shopping lists, classroom notes and telephone directories. The number of such soirees will decline once the government, waking up to their popularity, imposes a 55% tax on all literary activity.

15 British betting agent Ladbrokes will claim that one Hans Castorp from Hamburg is the frontrunner for the literature Nobel. Wikileaks will reveal that Castorp is actually a fictional character from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and in an attempt to salvage its reputation, a Ladbrokes spokesperson will scoff, "You mean the other laureates were real people?"

Lost In The Middle Kingdom

2012-01-01T09:47:00.000+05:30

This appeared in yesterday's The Hindustan Times

THE YELLOW EMPEROR'S CURE Kunal Basu

Novels, like human beings, sag in the middle. Between the set-up and the denouement falls the shadow, as Eliot would have phrased it. Some novels, in fact, never quite recover from this tapering off of tension as they progress. It is into this category, alas, that one must place Kunal Basu’s The Yellow Emperor’s Cure.

Earlier this year, both David Mitchell and Amitav Ghosh published novels based in earlier centuries where characters are changed by coming in contact with a walled-off Orient. In Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, a young Dutch book-keeper falls in love in 18^th century Japan; in Ghosh’s River of Smoke, the second in his Ibis trilogy, a bevy of characters, primarily an opium trader from Bombay, confront their destinies in 19^th century Canton. Basu’s new novel, too, charts the fate of an European in late 19^th century China – although it must be said that the author, better known for his moving short story, The Japanese Wife, has dealt with similar subjects almost from the start of his writing career, as evidenced by 2001’s The Opium Clerk.

The Yellow Emperor’s Cure deals with the travails of young Portuguese surgeon Dr Antonio Maria, possessed of “the most precious pair of hands in Lisbon”. In the words of his friends, he’s “rock steady with the scalpel, but a prize idiot when it comes to women”. The good doctor is shaken out of carousing at the Lisbon festa with the news that his beloved father has been stricken by the then-untreatable syphilis. He resolves to travel to China to find a cure for the “French Disease, Spanish Itch, German Rash or Polish Pox -- it was the same old curse Dom Columbus had brought home from Hispaniola along with gold and talking parrots”.

After a brief stint in Macau, Antonio ensconces himself at the summer palace of the Dowager Empress, adjacent to Peking. Here, he learns of the yin and yang of traditional Chinese medicine under the tutelage of the mysterious Dr Xu in a period when, as his friend tells him, "The grand libraries of Florence and Paris, London and Heidelberg, contain all that's known to mankind. We Europeans know as much as there is to know about the yellow race, more than they know about themselves!" Soon enough, in the time-honoured manner of Europeans before and after him, Antonio is quickly entranced by the enigmatic Fumi, Dr Xu’s assistant, a woman with a chequered past.

The doctor from the west has the misfortune to be in China at the time of the so-called Boxer Rebellion, the incipient nationalist uprising opposed to foreign influence. The Boxers, one of the characters breathlessly asserts, are "...spirit soldiers, a ragtag bunch of bumpkins passing themselves off as god-sent saviours of China. There are eight million of them, or so they say, each capable of flying in air and spitting fire, immune to bullets and bombs”. The uprising will bring secrets to light and have defining consequences for Antonio and his compatriots.

Basu is adept in conveying locale, background and customs, be they of Lisbon’s bustling streets, the hubbub of Macau or the imperial courtyards and crowded marketplaces of Peking. There’s also a gallery of engaging, eccentric characters: Jesuit scholars, a pair of eunuchs, doctors, diplomats and merchants. After the novel’s brisk beginning, however, plot and character development become mired in thickets of cultural and historical detail (something that Mitchell and Ghosh also fell prey to). Moreover, especially when it comes to the Boxers, much is told and little is shown, rendering many episodes bloodless.

“A book is like a garden carried in your pocket”, goes the apocryphal Chinese proverb. The garden of The Yellow Emperor’s Cure is well-landscaped, with a defined entrance and exit; it’s the walkways within that are nebulous.

2011's 11

2011-12-29T12:33:00.000+05:30

To summarise one’s favourite fiction of 2011 this late in the year is to write about books that have been written about many times already -- especially in other best-of lists. Despite varying tastes, by a curious process of osmosis, there will always be some titles common to most year-end round-ups. There’s also the problem of not having read widely enough, and – to point out the obvious – any such list therefore is always tentative and incomplete. Having got that off my chest, here, in no particular order, are the fiction titles of 2011 that I found noteworthy.

SPURIOUS Lars Iyer

Is this a novel? A series of linked meditations on mediocrity and ambition in so-called end times? A collection of hyper-intelligent blog posts? All of the above. Danish-Indian Lars Iyer’s puckish, incisive series of vignettes recording the conversation between two philosopher friends – both self-confessed Max Brods with no Kafka in sight – is both funny and gloomy. (Also worth reading are Iyer’s thoughts on the future of the novel: A literary manifesto after the end of literature and manifestos.)

Excerpt: What are the signs of the End?, I ask W. - 'You. You are a sign of the End', says W. 'Actually, we both are. The fact that we have careers or flourish at all is a sign of the End. Of course, the fact that we won't have them for much longer is a sign that the End is coming closer'.

SEVEN YEARS Peter Stamm (Trans. Michael Hoffman)

Those in the market for likeable characters in fiction should stay away. This Swiss author’s cool, clear-sighted account of a self-centred man with a charming wife, but obsessed by a plain mistress, is an acute meditation on longing, passion and the inability to remain content with what one has. Ably and fluently translated by Michael Hoffman, down to the comma splices.

Excerpt: All I know is that I got to be more and more dependent on Ivona, and that while I continued to think I had power over her, her power over me became ever greater. She never demanded anything from me, was never hurt when I stayed away for days on end because I was busy in the office or didn't feel like visiting her. Sometimes I'd tell Ivona about other women to get her upset, but she took it, and listened, expressionless, while I raved about the beauty, the wit, and the intelligence of other women. Perhaps she didn't know she had power over me. Perhaps she mistook my submissiveness for love.

THESENSE OF AN ENDING Julian Barnes

Too much has been written about this Booker winner already for me to add to the torrent. Suffice to say that more authors in our ultra-kinetic times should borrow a leaf from Barnes and create well-shaped magnetic novellas rather than coming up with page after page of bloat.

Excerpt: We live in time – it holds us and moulds us – but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing – until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

OPEN CITY Teju Cole / MY TWO WORLDS Sergio Chejfec (Trans. Margaret Carson)

The first by a Nigerian-American, the second by an Argentinian; both delightfully complementary. Owing more than a little to W.G. Sebald, both feature narrators who embark on long walks – the first, around Manhattan, and the second, around a park in an unnamed Brazilian city. In both, the external becomes a symbol that reveals the internal. Rambling, revealing and refreshing, like the best walks should be.

Excerpt, Open City: At first, I encountered the streets as an incessant loudness, a shock after the day’s focus and relative tranquillity, as though someone had shattered the calm of a silent private chapel with the blare of a TV set. I wove my way through crowds of shoppers and workers, through road constructions and the horns of taxicabs. Walking through busy parts of town meant I laid eyes on more people, hundreds more, thousands even, than I was accustomed to seeing in the course of a day, but the impress of these countless faces did nothing to assuage my feelings of isolation; if anything, it intensified them.

Excerpt, My Two Worlds: When I walk, my impression is that a digital sensibility overtakes me, one governed by overlapping windows. I say this not with pride but with annoyance: nothing worse could happen to me, because it affects my intuitive side and feels like a prison sentence. The places or circumstances that have drawn my attention take the form of Internet links, and this isn’t only true for the objects themselves, which are generally urban, part of the life of the city as a whole, shaped precisely and distinguished from their surroundings, but also the associations they call to mind, the recollection of what is observed, which may be related, kindred, or quite distinct, depending on whichever way these links are formed.

THE TIGER’S WIFE Tea Obreht / EAST OF THE WEST: A COUNTRY IN STORIES Miroslav Penkof

Two debuts by authors from the Balkans, both redolent of the history of the region, but quite different in tone and style. Obreht’s novel is magical in the manner of a piece of folklore and features a picaresque cast, touching upon faded Ottoman glory, Nazi depredations and later religious strife. In East of the West, a spectrum of characters from Bulgaria – old, young, communist, Westernised -- reflect on that country’s past and how it’s affected their present. The upheavals that the area has witnessed may have redrawn the map, but, as Obreht and Penkof’s tales illustrate, myth and memory have their own contours.

Excerpt, The Tiger’s Wife: Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of my life – of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and tyrant of the university. One, which I learnt after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.

Excerpt, East of the West (from the story, ‘Makedonija’): I was born just twenty years after we got rid of the Turks. 1898. So yes, this makes me seventy-one. And yes, I’m grumpy. I’m mean. I smell like all old men do. I am a walking pain, hips, shoulders, knees and elbows. I lie awake at night. I call my daughter by my grandson’s name and I remember the day I met my wife much better than yesterday, or today. August 2, I think. 1969. Last night I pissed my bed and who knows what joy tonight will bring?

LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION Ben Lerner

Recently raved about in terms that made me immediately want to procure a copy – and I’m glad I did. A delight to read, this is a series of witty, insightful episodes from the life of an acutely self-aware narrator, a pot-smoking American poet, while in Madrid on a fellowship. The question that hovers above his account of tangled relationships, attempts to write poetry and to speak in Spanish is: how does one ever fully express oneself, and is it even possible to do so?

Excerpt: As we entered the party I reminded myself to breathe....I was acutely aware of not being attractive enough for my surroundings; luckily, I had a strategy for such situations, one I had developed over many visits to New York with the dim kids of the stars: I opened my eyes a little more widely than normal, opening them to a very specific point, raising my eyebrows and also allowing my mouth to curl up into the implication of a smile. I held this look steady once it had obtained, a look that communicated incredulity cut with familiarity, a boredom arrested only by a vaguely anthropological interest in my surroundings...

LAZARUS IS DEAD Richard Beard

The story of the man famous for being brought back from the dead – told in a manner that weaves together Biblical scholarship, fictional episodes and literary references. Sounds like an unlikely amalgam, but it works wonderfully. Wholly inventive, completely new and very satisfying: you could say that Beard takes the form of the novel and, well, resurrects it.

Excerpt: For Lazarus, in the last hour before his death, there is no miracle, no secret sign. The story as told by John abandons him, and a sequence he doesn’t understand is left, for him, unfinished: this is how death feels, and not just for Lazarus. Too soon; incomplete.

SUICIDE Edouard Leve (Trans. Jan Steyn)

This epigrammatic novella comprises two linked stories: in the first, the narrator reflects on the suicide of a friend; and in the other, an author commits suicide after writing a novel, the subject of which is a reflection on the suicide of a friend. Haunting and disturbing, more so because Leve himself took his own life days after submitting the manuscript.

Excerpt: A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent series of actions but a constellation of things perceived. It is looked at, unrelated things congregate, and geographic proximity gives them meaning. If events follow each other, they are believed to be a story. But in a dictionary, time doesn’t exist: ABC is neither more nor less chronological than BCA. To portray your life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random. My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag.

THE TUNNEL Ernesto Sabato (Trans. Maragaret Sayers Penden)

First published in 1948, Sabato’s hypnotic novella takes us into the dark, deranged mind of a Buenos Aires artist, and comprises his prison-cell justification for murdering his mistress. The author died earlier this year, and thus, the 2011 Penguin Classics re-issue of Margaret Sayers Penden’s 1988 translation is an unintended homage. In any description of this work, there’s no choice but to use the word “existential”. (Colm Toibin’s preface to the new edition is to be found here.)

Excerpt: More than any other, however, I detest groups of painters. Partly, of course, because painting is what I know best, and we all know that we have a greater reason to detest the things we know well. But I have still another reason: THE CRITICS. They are a plague I have never understood. If I were a great surgeon, and some fellow who had never held a scalpel in his hand, who was not a doctor, and who had never so much as put a splint on a cat's paw, tried to point out where I had gone wrong with my operation, what would people think? It is the same with painting.

Flabby Fantasy

2011-12-03T11:06:00.000+05:30

This appeared in today's The Indian Express.

1Q84 Haruki Murakami

A female assassin wielding an ice-pick. Shadowy members of an underground, quasi-religious sect. A group of so-called Little People from a parallel dimension. Eerie doppelgangers emerging from an “air chrysalis”. A tale of a town of cats. And a sky with two moons. Wrapped together in cool, affectless prose with references to jazz, classical music, Hollywood and George Orwell. Who else but Haruki Murakami could have the chutzpah to combine all of these into a three-part saga totalling almost a thousand pages? Halfway through 1Q84, however, another question arises: has his reach exceeded his grasp?

This brick of a book tells the intertwined stories of Tengo, putative writer and teacher of mathematics, another one of Murakami’s confused loners, and Aomame, massage therapist and avenging angel. The two met briefly in school and now, years later in 1984, events are set in motion that have them circling around each other in Tokyo and its environs, wondering if they will re-unite.

Aomame, stuck in traffic in the back seat of a taxi on Tokyo’s Metropolitan Expressway, decides to take a short cut by walking through an abandoned turn-off. The taxi driver prophetically cautions her: “Things are not what they seem... But don't let appearances fool you. There is always only one reality”. From here on, she’s plunged into an alternative existence, one that she calls 1Q84 -- with the “q”, in English translation, standing for a question mark: “a world that bears a question”.

Tengo, meanwhile, has his own problems to grapple with. He’s tasked by an editor to rewrite Air Chrysalis, the manuscript of a 17-year-old named Fuka Eri with storytelling skills but a raw, unfinished style. Drawn to this enigmatic, other-worldly teenager, Tengo completes the rewrite and the book goes on to become a bestseller. The ghost writer now finds that he’s opened a Pandora’s Box, as Air Chrysalis may not entirely be a work of fiction, after all.

Twin-track plotlines, alternative realities, sundered sweethearts and the loneliness of those who find themselves unable to fit in: Murakami has used all of these devices and themes before, though 1Q84 is probably his most detailed exegesis yet. It’s clear from the start that he intends this to be 'bigger' than his earlier work. The characters' backgrounds, clothes, diet, cultural and sexual appetites are dwelt upon in some detail, and then, there are creaky efforts to incorporate facets of contemporary Japanese history. Tengo's father for example, flees to Tokyo from Manchuria after the Soviet invasion in 1945 and there are references to the student movement to protest against US-Japan security treaty in the Seventies. All of this, combined with repetition and overwriting, means that the book is much larger – though ‘flabbier’ is a more apt word -- than it ought to be.

Though there’s an engaging flow to most of 1Q84, with a patterned criss-crossing of action and reaction, there are also several examples of clichés and lazy writing. For example, on just a single page chosen at random, one finds Aomame musing that “what she needed...was to be held by someone, anyone”. A little later: “The gun had almost become a part of her body”. More troublingly, did we really need to be plunged into so much detail in the scene of intercourse with a pre-pubescent? (Bad Sex Award alert.)

The resonances with Orwell’s dystopia, too, seem alternately forced and underdeveloped. The virus-like Little People – a counterpoint to Big Brother, a malevolent version of the shoemaker’s elves – sometimes come across as more risible than menacing, especially when emerging from the mouth of a dead goat, uttering clunky dialogue.

It turns out that at the heart of this bloated fantasy is a tender love story: “Tengo could hardly believe it -- that in this frantic, labyrinth-like world, two people's hearts -- a boy's and a girl's -- could be connected, unchanged, even though they hadn't seen each other for twenty years”. This, come to think of it, is an aspect that should appeal to those yearning for the Murakami of Norwegian Wood.

Perhaps if it had been published in three separate parts -- as was the case with the Japanese original -- the repetitions and recapitulations would not have grated as much. Murakami takes pains to point out on more than one occasion that Air Chrysalis, the manuscript that Tengo rewrites, is a mesmerising, vivid and taut novella. A pity, then, that 1Q84 doesn't quite share the same qualities.

Lady Sings The Blues

2011-12-03T11:03:00.000+05:30

This appeared in last Sunday's DNA.

OUR LADY OF ALICE BHATTI Mohammed Hanif

Often, it’s an author’s signature tone of voice that’s the most effective part of his or her work. It’s a pleasure to come across a distinctive voice that animates characters and themes, throwing into sharp relief a particular view of the world. If one looks at authors from Pakistan, for example, this is amply illustrated by H.M. Naqvi’s suave, jitterbugging style in Home Boy as well as his compatriot Mohammed Hanif’s sardonic, off-kilter take on General Zia’s death in A Case of Exploding Mangoes. In Hanif’s follow up, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, one finds the same sardonic insights, and this is what makes the book gratifying.

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti revolves around the travails of its eponymous heroine, a senior nurse at Karachi’s Sacred Heart Hospital. A mixture of the tough-spirited and soft-hearted, Alice is from the country’s Dalit Christian community, and Hanif manages to fit in several swipes against religious belief of all stripes -- as well as against egregious caste segregation -- in the course of the book.

Alice is pursued by an unlikely swain, a former bodybuilder and unofficial police factotum named Teddy Butt. That they’re opposites is clear from the start; Teddy’s wooing of Alice is, as a character puts it, like “a cheetah falling for a squirrel or bats trying to chat up butterflies”. The cheetah and the squirrel quickly get together after a credulity-straining sequence inside a submarine off the city’s coast. Hanif doesn’t spend much time on explaining the hows and whys: that these two dissimilar individuals enter into an alliance is the motor of the plot, and he makes it happen without too much fuss, and with the occasional veering into tenderness.

Along the way, one is introduced to a gallery of other characters in Alice and Teddy’s ken, from those who work at the hospital to police officers to patients, with their pomposities and perversions being skewered one by one. Tribute to Saadat Hasan Manto is also paid, among other things, in the form of describing the goings-on in the hospital’s “charya ward”, the so-called Centre for Mental and Psychological Diseases where daily doses of lithium appear to be the only medication on offer.

Every once in a while, Hanif throws in a reminder that, satire apart, he’s skilled in evocative observation, too. At one point, for example, we’re told that Alice Bhatti “carries her handcuffs lightly, as if she is wearing glass bangles”.

However, his sparring mockery extends to cover many sections of life in Pakistan, and because of this, the novel tends to comes across as a series of linked set pieces rather than a fully-integrated whole. It does hold together, but only just, helped by an unexpected structural twist at the end, one that’s satisfying without seeming contrived. Overall, though, it’s the healthy doses of irreverence, sometimes almost Rabelaisian, that make Our Lady of Alice Bhatti rewarding to read.

In Search Of Love And Beauty

2011-11-12T10:33:00.000+05:30

This appeared in today's Mint Lounge

A LOVESONG FOR INDIA Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Comparisons have often been drawn between the work of Anita Desai and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. A gentle melancholia pervades most of their tales, whether set in India or elsewhere, with characters being drawn into relationships and predicaments that, more often than not, leave them more alienated than before. In their quests for rootedness, many such characters, one imagines, would echo the words Nehru so famously wrote in his autobiography: “I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West...out of place everywhere, at home nowhere”.

Desai’s latest collection of short stories, An Artist of Disappearance, was released earlier this year; now, as a handy counterpoint, we have Jhabvala’s own collection, A Lovesong For India. Translators, civil servants and others ill at ease with the ways of the world find a place in both volumes. To read both is to find that Desai is the better craftsperson, at the level of sentence and structure, while Jhabvala, less delicate but no less evocative, is more accomplished in creating the sweep of a life in just a few pages.

In A Lovesong For India, one finds the same preoccupations that have concerned Jhabvala from almost the start of her writing career. The search for redemption in the form of allegiance to spiritual figures; unequal relationships between disparate characters; and the faint Jamesian pulse of the seductive charms of an older civilization for those from newer cultures: all these can also be found in earlier stories such as the well-known ‘How I Became a Holy Mother’ or ‘Two More Under the Indian Sun’.

The stories here are largely divided between those set in India and those set elsewhere – primarily New York City’s Upper East Side – as was the case with Jhabvala’s earlier East Into Upper East. A last section comprises what could be said to be a combination of the two. Given the number of stories that feature variations on the theme of unequal alliances, the collection could well have been titled Odd Couples. An Oriental scholar from America comes to Delhi to be drawn into the muddled private life of a charismatic, ageing poetess. A lonely talent agent in New York takes under her wing a strange, waif-like aspiring singer. An influential film critic is drawn to a conniving actress. A fifty-something widow of a Hollywood studio head takes up with a young Indian writer-director in LA. An ageing Bollywood star starts to rely more and more upon his daughter-in-law. (Interestingly enough, though many of the characters are drawn from the worlds of film and entertainment, Jhabvala, as before, manages to keep her scriptwriting and fiction writing in separate compartments. The stories here are anything but cinematic in the telling, being more concerned with interiors than exteriors.)

Other stories bring to mind yet other aspects of Jhabvala’s work. There’s a whisper of Three Continents, for example, in the story of the secretary who moves to London to work with a charismatic director, only to find him becoming besotted by her brother. With the title story, though, there’s evidence of a newer, brasher India edging out the old in the contrast between the actions of an upright civil servant and his more business-minded son. Another trope, that of the differences between ‘real’ and ‘translated’ versions of India is touched upon in the tale where the American narrator translates the work of an author who was her former flatmate in New Delhi.

The story with which the collection ends is an odd, ethereal tale of an unlikely courtship between two wraith-like individuals, with much more being implied than said. The spectre of AIDS, the contrasting ties of blood and of marriage and the enervating effects of time are all encompassed in a somewhat eccentric mix. It’s deftly done, but undoubtedly strange in its wide ranging arc.

As with Desai’s stories, here, too, there are no pat endings. Rather, one is left with the plight of those who find themselves in scenarios not of their choosing, with a sense of life going on after the printed stories come to a close. It’s been said of Chekhov that, at the end of his stories, he returned his characters to life, and he himself once wrote that “obligatory for the artist is not solving a problem, but stating a problem correctly”. Bearing the burden of their problems, Jhabvala’s characters continue onwards – as one of her titles puts it – in search of love and beauty.

Occupy Poetry

2011-10-30T19:29:00.001+05:30

All of the words in this poem are drawn, in chronological order, from the quotes in Lizzie Widdicombe's Talk of the Town piece on the Occupy Wall Street protestors in The New Yorker of October 24, 2011

Something good will come out of it

Don’t get me wrong

But it’s not good for business.

(We would like to find

A sign language interpreter

Available in the here and now.)

Honestly, it’s great here

We’re well-fed

Warm at night.

I’ve made more friends here

Than I did in college.

Here we are in Liberty Plaza

And we’re trying to keep liberty going on this planet

And, actually,

This planet is in dire jeopardy.

(Think of all the reasons
you didn’t want to be doing this!)

You have a right to protest

Brookfield, they have some rights too.

Fuck that.

I’m excited to be defending this space

We never knew

How publicly accessible

This kind of park would be

And now we’re testing it

It’s kind of fun.

Lovers' Discourse

2011-10-22T11:48:00.000+05:30

This appeared in today's The Indian Express.

THE MARRIAGE PLOT Jeffrey Eugenides

One doesn’t expect the conventional from a writer whose debut novel was a first-person plural account of teenage boys’ fascination with the suicides of five virgin sisters, and whose second was a coming-of-age chronicle of a hermaphrodite of Greek descent. Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, however, turns out to be a tender love story that draws inspiration from the novelists of the 19^th century. Earlier evidence that matters of the heart were on his mind came in 2008, with his anthology, My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead: Great love stories from Chekhov to Munro.

There’s no denying that Victorian sagas of men and women heading towards marriage -- with concomitant courtship rituals -- have had far-reaching influence. (Where, for example, would the Bollywood movie be without it?) Here, Eugenides seems to be making the point that most contemporary fiction that aims at modernity misses a trick or two when it comes to fulfilling the pleasures of reading. As one of the character’s professors asserts, “the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance”.

The Marriage Plot concerns itself with the lives of three individuals: the caring, bibliophilic Madeleine; the charismatic, bipolar Leonard; and the sensitive, confused Mitchell. It is the early Eighties, and, to begin with, all of them are students at Brown University. The first part of the book is virtually a campus novel, charting Madeleine’s interest in Victorian romance plots, Leonard’s firecracker brilliance and Mitchell’s obsession with theological questions, as well as their interactions with each other. An infatuated Madeleine begins an affair with Leonard while Mitchell, who’s in a “long, aspirational, sporadically promising, yet frustrating relationship” with her, decides to remove himself from the scene by travelling to India.

A love triangle, then. How quaint. It must be said, though, that much of The Marriage Plot is gratifying to read, given its immersion in the lives of its characters, notably the heroine. She’s a modern-day combination of Isabel Archer and Dorothea Brooke, whose ambivalence towards those close to her is metaphorically represented by the scratched, ill-fitting glasses she periodically dons.

Eugenides brings alive the dilemmas of Madeleine as she careens between a committed relationship and independence, as well as the travails of Mitchell as he journeys to Calcutta to volunteer at Mother Teresa’s home for the destitute and dying in Kalighat. (This being a time without text or e-mail, both also write letters to each other: a reminder of the importance of such epistles in 19^th century novels.)

As for Leonard, his tobacco-chewing and bandanna-wearing habits, not to mention depressive tendencies, are pointers that, in part at least, he’s drawn from David Foster Wallace. A trifle cheeky, given that Wallace’s own fiction relentlessly veered towards the hyper-modern.

The novel can also be said to be about another sort of love affair, that with books and reading. More specifically, it involves itself with the influence of books upon malleable minds. Almost from the start, there’s a spate of titles mentioned, from Madeleine’s beloved Eliot and Austen, to Mitchell’s search for succour in texts such as James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. Elsewhere, Eugenides is droll about American academe’s initial obsession with structuralism, when you weren't cool if you weren't carrying around a copy of Derrida's On Grammatology. Later on, Madeleine also finds unexpected comfort in the pages of Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse.

There are many well-done passages, such as the accounts of Leonard’s bouts of mania and depression, “his laziness, his over-achieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism”. Such interiority is matched by attention to detail, for example during Leonard’s lab work with paired and unpaired yeast chromosomes, or Mitchell’s stint at the Calcutta hospice. (One wishes, though, that the tendency to “explain” India had been toned down: at one point, the “real” India is described as “the ancient country of Rajputs, nawabs and Mughals”. Fancy that.)

At a time when the novel is in search of new models and forms, making a point of returning to its traditional verities signals a disappointing retreat from this necessary quest. Despite its many virtues, that’s the niggling thought The Marriage Plot leaves one with.

The Shipping News

2011-10-22T11:44:00.002+05:30

This appeared in today's The Hindustan Times.

THE CAT'S TABLE Michael Ondaatje

An 11-year-old boy named Michael, “green as he could be about the world“, climbs aboard “the first and only ship of his life”. Michael Ondaatje’s lyrical The Cat’s Table starts with this embarkation, and though one is tempted to think of the novel as a personal account, the author takes pains to point out in an afterword that though it “sometimes uses the colouring and location of memoir and autobiography”, it is indeed a work of fiction. (Bear in mind, though, that the narrator’s nickname is Mynah: “an unofficial bird, and unreliable, its voice not fully trustworthy in spite of the range”.)

It’s a 21-day journey, from Colombo to London in the 1950s, undertaken by the protagonist to meet his mother. The cat’s table of the title is the least privileged place on board – as opposed to the captain’s table – and it is here that Michael strikes up a relationship with two other boys, the quiet Ramadhin and the studious Cassius.

As the vessel embarks upon a “slow waltz” to its destination, Ondaatje gives us pen portraits of the others on board, seen through the eyes of the fascinated, wide-eyed Michael: gentle bridge players, intense musicians, energetic roller-skating Australians, knowledgeable botanists, rich entrepreneurs and suave thieves, among others. As we’re told: “...we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.”

There’s also a prisoner on board, and his actions and relationships – echoing into later years -- provide a skein of plot to a novel that is otherwise an evocatory record of a voyage that leaves an indelible mark on Michael’s mind.

The three boys get to know every inch of the ship, “bursting all over the place like freed mercury”. Much of the novel progresses via effective set pieces, such as the passengers’ attempts to watch a movie on board as the storm progresses, or Michael and his cohorts lashing themselves onto the deck to face the onslaught of the storm itself, or a vivid account of a night journey through the Suez Canal. Ondaatje frequently makes use of telling detail, especially when it comes to the differences in social class or living conditions of those on board; this both tempers his lyricism and prevents the nostalgic journey from foundering on the reefs of the maudlin.

Some of Ondaatje’s earlier works, poetic though they may have been, have been marred by obliqueness and too-frequent spatial and temporal shifts. In The Cat’s Table, too, there are detours into the lives of the protagonists in later years: in particular, describing the fate of the weak-hearted Ramadhin and his life as a tutor in London, as well as the narrator's relationship with his sister. However, the overall tone of wistful remembrance and clear focus on the antics of those on board, holds the novel together, giving the whole an elegiac glow.

Towards the end, however, Ondaatje delves into fragments of other lives, such as that of a mysterious circus girl, detailing her background and relationship with the ship’s prisoner. This weakens the narrative, for what makes the book magical -- the boy's mediating consciousness -- is lost.

At one point in the novel, the narrator, as a grown-up, visits an art exhibition by Cassius, who has gone on to become a well-regarded artist. Here, he sees a painterly record of Cassius’s memories of that earlier journey along the Suez Canal. The Cat’s Table is the novelistic equivalent of those canvases, a sequence of impressionistic vignettes of a voyage enlivened by a capacity for wonder.

Not Child's Play

2011-10-16T14:41:00.001+05:30

This appeared in today's DNA.

PIGEON ENGLISH Stephen Kelman

What is it about child narrators that Man Booker Prize judges can’t resist? Off the top of one’s head, one can recall Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (winner, 1993), DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little (winner, 2003), Emma Donoghue’s Room (shortlisted, 2010) David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (longlisted, 2006) and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (longlisted, 2003). Now, there’s Stephen Kelman’s debut novel, Pigeon English, on this year’s shortlist at the time of writing.

The 11-year-old protagonist of this novel is portrayed as endearingly innocent; indeed, there’s little that is arch and precocious in his utterances. An example of the sort of style that Kelman adopts for his narrator’s consciousness comes early on: "My jumper's blue. My uniform's better. The only bad thing about it is the tie, it's too scratchy. I hate it when they're scratchy like that”. This is the sort of thing it’s very easy to like; equally, it can annoy with its faux-naif posturing. And there’s a lot of this in Pigeon English.

It’s the voice of Harrison Okupu, recently re-located from Ghana with his mother and elder sister to one of London’s poorer housing estates. (His father and infant sister remain in Africa, planning to join the rest of the family as soon as they can.) Harrison is a quick study, picking up the ways and language of his schoolmates easily enough. We hear much of their schoolyard games – in a sign of the times, one of their pastimes is called “suicide bomber”. Casual delinquencies, with knives, gang initiations and petty theft, are very much a part of the daily routines of some of those in his ken.

With wide-eyed naiveté, Harrison also conveys his impressions of new experiences such as travelling on the tube. When he isn’t obsessing over whether he’s wearing the right kind of sneakers, he muses on the differences between his homeland and England, from the way barbers behave to the way traffic does. His Ghanaian backdrop, then, serves the important function of establishing him as a stranger in a strange land. This is a report from the inner city by an insider with an outsider’s point of view.

When a boy is stabbed to death outside a fast-food restaurant, Harrison, with some of his mates, decides to play amateur detective to bring the miscreant to book. With this as the plot device, Kelman has him keeping tabs on other boys, as well as sparring with his sister and her mates, acquiring a girlfriend of sorts and gradually becoming more attuned to the ways of the world in which he finds himself. Death and dying are very much on his mind, serving both as a foreshadowing of the future as well as a reflection of his environment.

Harrison’s predicament is one that elicits affection, not to mention compassion. However, the tone of voice employed has many repetitive simplicities and overstated pieties, and these can grate after a while. “I saw a bird nest in the tree,” he informs us. “It was very sad. The birds all fell out when the tree came down.” Then again: “Do you know what's a superhero? They're special people who protect you. They have magic powers. They use them to fight the bad men. They're very great”. The use of schoolboy argot, too, is overdone, with words such as “hutious”, “bo-styles” and “dope-fine” appearing on almost every page.

Curiously enough, there’s also the voice of a pigeon that butts in from time to time. This winged creature, roosting on the balcony of Harrison’s house, is given to gnomic, mock-prophetic pronouncements such as “I do know the shape of a mother's grief”. As a device to incorporate another minority voice, this comes across as unnecessary.

Immersing oneself in a child’s point of view can be a rewarding experience for the way in which it brings to life the gap between what is seen and what is understood. Despite being affecting in parts, and revelatory of the lives of children in violence-prone neighbourhoods, Pigeon English is only partially successful in this regard.

Diners' Club

2011-09-18T09:35:00.000+05:30

This appeared in today's DNA.

THERE BUT FOR THE Ali Smith

What if a stranger comes to dinner and turns the lives of the hosts upside down? That was the premise of Ali Smith’s last novel, The Accidental. What if an acquaintance comes to dinner and refuses to leave? That’s the premise of her new novel, There But For The.

The plot, such as it is, is pithily summed up right at the start: “There was once a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party.” It’s a sentence that encompasses as well as sets off the events of book, in somewhat the same manner as the first page of Toni Morrisson’s Jazz provides the plot in a nutshell, leaving the author free to riff on it thereafter.

The setting is a tony neighbourhood in Greenwich, and Smith makes use of all the metaphorical associations of the area, from the implications of time’s passage to the underground foot tunnel. The novel comprise discrete episodes that range over past and present, delving into the lives and thoughts of those known to Miles, the intractable guest. There’s Anna, who met him during a European holiday many years ago; Mark, the acquaintance who brought Miles to the dinner in the first place; May, the elderly relative; and most of all the precocious ten-year-old Brooke, daughter of the neighbours (reminiscent of the intelligent 12-year-old in The Accidental). As the days pass and Miles refuses to emerge or communicate, barring through handwritten slips of paper pushed under the door, he becomes a minor celebrity in the area, with people believing that his actions mirror their individual concerns.

Smith’s style, as with her previous work, resembles nothing so much as an intelligent, loquacious conversationalist, albeit one who looks at you sideways. Truman Capote’s early novels were recently termed “the literature of the backward glance”; Smith’s writing can be said to deal with the glance that is oblique. The indirectness can prove to be a frustration on occasion, but there’s a probing intelligence and questioning of established verities that rise off almost every page. There is also much wordplay and punning, as well as some execrable ‘knock-knock’ jokes. All of this, however, indicates a concern with the way language is used to communicate as well as obfuscate. As one character says: “I only joke about really serious things”.

Smith’s targets range from the way technology shapes experience to the way we fetishize the actions of those who, in however small a way, stand out or go against the grain. A comment on Brooke’s report card, in fact, could well be a summing up of the author’s particular talents: “Her verbal dexterity is notable and she is wonderfully imaginative and of course we do not have a problem with that or with either of these things. But sometimes her infectious imagination can be vertiginous for her peers”.

Misspeak, Memory

2011-09-17T11:32:00.000+05:30

This appeared in today's The Indian Express

THE SENSE OF AN ENDING Julian Barnes

The nature and length of the novella as a form compel writers to pay close attention to matters of prose and craft. This is why the best of them have a hand-cut, gem-like quality, with ruminative — although patterned — first-person musings on a given theme. Such, certainly, is the case with Julian Barnes’ elegant, incisive The Sense of an Ending.

On the first page itself, the narrator affirms that “...what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed”. This, then, is an impressionistic record, one that's hedged by constant -- and sometimes overdone -- reminders that what we're reading is the narrator's self-serving memories of earlier times. It’s not just that he’s unreliable: he’s also all too aware of his unreliability.

This is a story is told by Tony Webster, now in his sixties. He recollects, first of all, his time in school and friendship with the charismatic, precocious new boy, Adrian Finn. Almost from the start, Tony and his circle seek out Adrian’s attention and approval, and then keep in touch after they go their separate ways. Inevitably, Tony’s pronouncements on the people in his life tell us more about him than about them. Time and again, he reminds us that this record of the past isn't what it appears to be on the surface: “You can infer past actions from current mental states”.

Tony continues with his account of his life: education in Bristol, his wooing of and short-lived relationship with girlfriend Veronica; and then, in brisk, economical paragraphs, his marriage, job in “arts administration”, children, divorce, and retirement. In sum, “some achievements and some disappointments”.

This is when, pulling off an audacious structural move, Barnes segues into another section, dealing with the narrator’s days in the evening of his life. Circumstances bring him together again with Veronica, who had taken up with Adrian after their break-up, and he’s compelled to examine and re-examine his past assumptions, step by step. He now has to make sense of an almost Wittgensteinian fragment from Adrian’s diary, as well as mull over his interactions with the older Veronica, to solve a mystery springing from his past. As she tells him more than once, he is someone who just “doesn’t get it.”

Tony’s self-deluded, emotionally repressed ways bring to mind other fictional characters with the same traits, notably John Dowell from Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier, as well as Stevens from Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. It's also not by coincidence that one of the characters is portrayed as reading a work by Viennese author Stefan Zweig, for this, too, is a book about a person who obsesses over yesterday’s actions and omissions, often rewriting events in his mind.

There’s an aphoristic, crafted quality to much of the book. At one point, for example, the narrator quotes Adrian in a phrase reflective of its theme: “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation”. Elsewhere, in a passage reminiscent of Nothing to be Frightened of, Barnes’ earlier non-fiction deliberation on death and dying, Tony says, “…the longer life goes on, the fewer are those to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life”.

At barely 150 pages, The Sense of an Ending is a resonant reminder that one can be succinct, not sprawling, when it comes to creating a compelling fictional world. As a tightly wound meditation on the unreliability of memory and the ways in which we mislead ourselves, Barnes’ work shows that in the right hands, brevity is still a virtue.

Back To The Navel

2011-09-10T10:27:00.001+05:30

This appeared in the latest issue of Tehelka.

NOON Aatish Taseer

The great Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, “In all my writing, I tell the story of my life over and over again”. It’s a statement that comes to mind when reading AatishTaseer’s third book, Noon. Following on the heels of a travelogue and a debut novel, this is another tale in which clear autobiographical currents can be discerned, many of them already covered in his two earlier books.

Planned as an episodic sequence rather than a conventional narrative, Noon plunges us from the start into the world of its protagonist Rehan Tabassum, son of an intrepid Delhi journalist and a businessman-politician from a neighbouring land, evidently Pakistan. (Although the country is referred to in the book by the names of two cities, the first, Port bin Qasim and the second – oddly and obviously enough – La Mirage.) The forlorn Rehan strikes alliances with both families: as a child, with his devout grandmother in Delhi, and later, with his step-brother, Isphandiyar, from across the border.

The novel also delves into the lives of others in Rehan’s orbit: notably, his mother, who re-starts her life in New Delhi after her return from London at the end of her association with Rehan’s father; and Amit Sethia, a rapacious industrialist with whom she subsequently has a long-lived liaison. The account of the latter’s motivations and rise to wealth seems to have been included as a way of making the novel encompass and understand recent changes in India and Indians, and this Naipaulian device doesn’t quite work, as the account lacks the personal texture of the rest of the book. Naipaul is a presence in other ways, too: sometimes stylistically, sometimes as a direct quotation from An Area of Darkness, and sometimes as unprocessed attempts to make sense of the plight of the individual against a historical backdrop.

In one lengthy chapter, Taseer employs an interesting and apt device to explore contrasting attitudes and beliefs between higher and lower social strata, namely, a theft at the Delhi farmhouse where Rehan is ensconced after his return from a US college. Domestic help – some new, some of long standing – is suspected, and varieties of police officials are called in. Unfortunately, the ramifications of this drag on for far too long; after a while, no new perspectives emerge.

The next section, describing Rehan’s time in his father’s land, is more evocative and insightful. He travels here, wanting “to enjoy my strange patrimony, with its many players and new country, to feel it more as an opportunity than an obligation”, and Taseer is candid about his protagonist’s need for parental approval as well as his life’s many absences. The register changes with the introduction of political machinations and blackmail, with some of it being reminiscent of Invitation, Shahryar Fazli’s recent Karachi-based novel.

Noon, then, emerges as a bit of a hodge-podge: a little insight and sensitivity blended with a lot of solipsism and self-indulgence. At one point, the narrator asserts, "The gaps in my life were too many, the threads too few". It shows.

Desert Of Forking Paths

2011-08-27T10:38:00.000+05:30

This appeared in today's The Indian Express.

GODS WITHOUT MEN Hari Kunzru

As with Vikram Seth, so with Hari Kunzru: it’s difficult to pigeonhole their work. Kunzru’s novels so far have dealt with subjects as various as the different selves of a Zelig-like creature over the years; the life of a Sixties activist looking back on his revolutionary activities; and the intersection between the creator of a computer virus and a Bollywood star. In all of them, one finds the ambition to not merely portray an aspect of our world but to encompass it, and this is also the case with his latest, Gods Without Men.

The novel features several interwoven storylines set against the backdrop of California’s Mojave Desert. Kunzru’s splintered narrative ranges over the centuries as he delves into the lives of those who find themselves in and around this sparsely populated, majestic region, particularly in the vicinity of the mysterious natural formation known as the Pinnacles.

There’s the grizzled WWII veteran constructing equipment to send out messages of love and brotherhood to the galaxy, trying to “connect the mysteries of technology with those of the spirit”; there are reports from 18^th century Spanish missionaries; there’s the misadventures of an ethnologist studying the region’s Indian tribes; there’s the disaffected London rock star fleeing an LA producer; there’s the ups-and-downs of the members of a hippy cult who preach that life-altering extraterrestrial contact is imminent. Connecting all of them is the story of a couple – Jewish-American wife, Punjabi-American husband – with an autistic child who find their lives turned upside down after a mysterious abduction.

Intersecting tales spread over the centuries with a science-fiction flavour: this inevitably reminds one of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. The difference, however, is that the connections in Gods Without Men are explicitly spelt out, unlike the thematic hall-of-mirrors of Mitchell’s work. Kunzru carries off the voices necessary to pull off his overweening narrative arc, from the sardonic to the schmaltzy, from the tough to the tender, from the archaic to the current. While this is admirable, as is his re-creation of disparate worlds, a concern is that not all of the stories are as compelling. For example, the rock star’s escapades have a distinct whiff of the been-there-done-that.

After a while, it becomes clear that it’s the narrative of the couple with the child that is at the centre of this garden of forking paths. Fittingly, this tale is the one that’s the most well-rendered, with echoes of the cases of Madeleine McCann, JonBenet Ramsey and, closer home, the Talwars from Noida. In this manner, though the novel isn’t quite the contrapuntal symphony it sets out to be, it remains absorbing.

As the book progresses, there’s a sense of surfeit, of ever more dishes being laden on a groaning buffet table. Especially so in the latter half, when more characters are delved into – for example, the Iranian immigrants to America who find themselves participating in war games in the desert. While this may be well-done, one can’t help wondering whether it’s also overdone. The mechanics of the plot threaten to turn awry towards the end, with eeriness and doppelgangers thrown into the mix.

A piece of dialogue from Gods Without Men, uttered by the creator of a revolutionary stock-tracking software programme, sums up Kunzru’s overall intent: “There’s a tradition that says the world has shattered, that what was once whole and beautiful is now just scattered fragments. Much is irreparable but a few of these fragments contains faint traces of the former state of things, and if you find them and uncover the sparks hidden inside, perhaps at last you’ll piece together the fallen world. This is just a glass case of wreckage. But it has presence. It’s redemptive. It is a part of something larger than itself”. Whether Gods Without Men emerges as greater than the sum of its parts is, however, a moot point.

The Past Is A Foreign Country

2011-08-06T10:05:00.000+05:30

This appeared in today's Mint Lounge

THE ARTIST OF DISAPPEARANCE Anita Desai

The ancient Chinese believed time is not a ladder one ascends into the future but a ladder one descends into the past. That was the intriguing epigraph to Anita Desai’s last novel, The Zigzag Way, and it’s a dictum many of her characters would subscribe to. The ones in her latest book, The Artist of Disappearance, are no exception. This comprises a series of three novellas featuring people who find themselves cut off from the mainstream of everyday life, brooding over former actions and inactions.

With characteristic delicacy and the incremental accumulation of small effects, Desai takes us into their hearts and minds. To begin with, there’s the reserved bureaucrat of The Museum of Final Journeys who, when posted in a remote, tedious outpost at the start of his career, chances upon a series of rooms in a mansion resembling a ramshackle version of Kolkata’s Mullick Palace. Here, he marvels at artifact after artifact sent from overseas, an experience that haunts him even many years later. In Translator Translated, an introverted college professor with a knowledge and love of Oriya proficiently translates a volume of a favourite author’s short stories, only to confuse notions of creator and translator when it comes to the same author’s new novel. (Language and its context: it’s a theme reminiscent of the author’s earlier In Custody.) Finally, in the title story, a reclusive young man lives in the burnt shell of his family mansion near Mussoorie, finding solace in nature, only to have his idyll interrupted by strangers from the city.

These are stories of lives half-lived, of the disappointment of destinations and of the ever-receding possibility of transformation. The causes, more often than not, turn out to be remote parental figures matched by a native irresolution bordering on timidity. Looking back on the years gone by, the bureaucrat realizes that “while others dreamt dreams and lived lives of imagination and adventure, my role was only to take care of the mess left by them”. And the translator could be speaking for all of the others as she muses while taking a bus journey: “We are all in this together, this world of loss and defeat. All of us, every one of us, had had a moment when a window opened, when we caught a glimpse of the open, sunlit world beyond, but all of us…have had that window close and remain closed”.

There are no finessed, artificial climaxes to these narratives; rather, Desai’s technique is to place her characters in situations that take them out of their workaday milieu and then follow them and their actions with her pen, in a manner of speaking. The simplicity with which the tales unfold belies the artisanship that has gone into their crafting. The interweaving of the present and the past apart, there are other exercises in craft, such as the shifts between first and third person as well as between past and present tense in Translator Translated. (Here, and elsewhere, Desai also gives rein to the understated humour that is her other trademark. Of the atmosphere at a publishing conference, for example, she writes: “Terms proliferate that indicate the large number of academics in the audience: Subaltern. Discourse. Reify. Validate….Wasn’t ‘subaltern’ a military term?”)

The title story, however, the one that’s the most fleshed-out, suffers on account of being curiously bifurcated by the amount of time Desai spends on the activities of the intruders who encroach upon the central character’s Eden. The actions of this three-member film crew from Delhi who travel to Mussoorie in order to shoot a documentary on environmental degradation draw attention away from the titular character’s predicament and weaken the spine of the story -- even though it is because of this disturbance that he discovers a new, albeit more private way in which to express his inventive urges.

The Artist of Disappearance doesn’t exactly extend or deepen Desai’s concerns as a writer: the India she writes about, for example, is the same India she’s always written about. Yet, it is a filigreed and nuanced work, once again demonstrating her moving powers of description, of both inner and outer states. The past may be a foreign country, as L.P. Hartley famously wrote, but in Desai’s hands, it’s capable of many domestic disturbances.

It's The End Of The Book As We Know It, And I Feel Fine

2011-07-30T09:04:00.000+05:30

A lightly edited version of this appeared in today's The Hindustan Times.

THIS IS NOT THE END OF THE BOOK Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere

THE LATE AMERICAN NOVEL: Writers on the Future of Books

If you read books on a Kindle, British novelist Penelope Lively recently said, you’re nothing but “a bloodless nerd”. Many of those devoted to the printed word share the same sentiment. For them, the impending demise of the book as we know it is cause for alarm, if not lamentation. What’s often ignored is the distinction between form and content: while we’re attached to the shape, size, feel and aroma of books, what we read are words. The medium, of course, alters the message as well as our experience of receiving it, and this, then, should really be at the heart of any such discussion.

Among the many elegies to Gutenberg, we now have two more volumes: the first, a curated conversation between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere; and the second, a medley of contemporary American writers offering views on their future. The verbose and opinionated Eco and Carriere, however, prove to be somewhat backward looking. Much of the content of This is Not the End of the Book turns out to be ruminations on the books they own, the joys of collecting, the pains of the accelerating speed of change and digressive anecdotes on reading and bibliomania drawn from the world of European letters.

Their pontifications – and ‘pontifications’ is the exact word – can be tedious, sometimes even nonsensical, such as when Eco declaims that “the computer cannot be read in the bath or even lying on your side in bed”. There’s much anachronistic tut-tutting over the changing pace of data storage and accessibility, with a holier-than-thou tone throughout: “The book is like the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be bettered”. Again, the same confusion between form and content.

In the preface, moderator Jean-Philippe de Tonnac at least asks the right questions: “What is a book? And what will change if we read onscreen rather than by turning the pages of a physical object?” He goes on to muse: is it a sense of the sacred? An intimacy between reader and author? The feeling of existing in a self-contained world? Such subjects, indeed, are what the Italian semiologist and French screenwriter ought to have spent more time discussing. At one point, Eco even derides the photocopier, and later, Carriere makes awkward philosophical generalisations such as: “Every Hindu has his personal deities. And yet Hindus share a community of belief.” If this is how “two great men discuss our digital future”, as the volume’s subtitle has it, one feels sorry for the digital future.

In comparison, The Late American Novel is a breath of fresh air. This comprises several short pieces by contemporary American authors on their current predicament: some insightful, some uneasily tongue-in-cheek and some simply unsure. Editors Jeff Martin and T. Max Magee point out in their introduction that “the written word’s last big format change turned out to be a pretty big deal, fomenting revolutions and laying the groundwork for modern civil society, the scientific revolution, and modernity itself”. Now, therefore, “we wanted to hear from some of today’s most promising literary voices, to find out if they are optimistic, apathetic, or just scared shitless.” As Rivka Galchen ironically points out in her piece, if people just aren’t reading anymore, there’s a pretty big noise being made about the book’s impending demise.

There’s much ground covered here, from nostalgic memoirs dealing with the pleasures of the book’s physical form to the changing modes of consumption, creation and distribution of narratives. In one of the most insightful pieces, Benjamin Kunkel – founder-editor of the literary magazine n+1– updates Regis Debray’s theory of society moving through the stages of the “logosphere, graphosphere and videosphere” -- that is, the spoken and heard, the written and read and the audio-visual. Kunkel ponders on the coming “digitosphere” and whether the always-on stream of bits and bytes will make literature a subculture, “or, even better, a counter-culture”. (Publishers, of course, share this concern: a recent session at the World E-Reading Congress in London sought to answer the question: Can e-reading win the war against Angry Birds?)

In another piece, though Joe Meno confesses to “moments of wonder” while reading printed books, he asserts, rightly, that “…throughout the history of narrative arts, storytelling has always adapted to changing forms and technologies, and has managed to not only survive but begin anew each time, introducing a whole other generation to the possibilities of reading.” Kyle Beachy makes much the same point: “Clearly, the novel is built around the mechanics of the book. But to conflate the two is a mistake both easy and terrible”.

Anders Morton, too, offers a nuanced, hopeful view. We all desire narratives and create stories, he says (“as opposed to the actual lived experience of unsatisfying fragments, random encounters, and passing glances” ) even it’s just on Twitter. And “if this means we need to redefine the definition of ‘writer’, that’s okay with me”. In a similar vein, there’s a probing, open-minded exchange of e-mails between Jonathan Lethem and David Gates on the appeal of fiction in the age of Facebook.

Nevertheless, one can empathise with Nancy Jo Sales when she points out: “Would my life in books have been the same if they had been coming to me via Kindle or iPad? I don’t think so. There’s something about the physicality of a book, the way it looks and feels and even smells…that makes it a living, breathing companion.” The printed book is a living thing, echoes Joshua Gaylord: “It has a spine”. For those who fetishize the book as object, Victor LaValle has the right words: “The greatest gift the electronic age could bestow upon the novel is to keep it sacred, not sacrosanct.”

It’s Sonya Chung, though, who strives to look at the present in just the right manner. The pendulum will swing back one day, she writes, but meanwhile, “…whether you are optimistic or pessimistic, hopeful or dispirited, it is clear that our needs, desires, fears, and values are at stake; and what could be more exciting for literature?” A new age of Modernism could be around the corner, in other words. As that quartet from Athens, Georgia, might well have sung: It’s the end of the book as we know it, and I feel fine.

Amazon Grace

2011-07-24T09:22:00.001+05:30

This appeared in yesterday's The Indian Express.

STATE OF WONDER Ann Patchett

“If I want a plot,” American litterateur Elizabeth Hardwick once sneered, “I’ll watch Dallas”. Her disdain is shared by many novelists, especially of the so-called literary variety, who feel that novels have a higher purpose than that of the mere narration of events. There’s merit in such an argument; yet, all one needs to turn it on its head is to come across a writer who uses plot to reveal character and not subsume it; to illustrate theme, not be diverted from it. Take the case of Ann Patchett, who demonstrated this most notably in her Orange Prize-winning Bel Canto – and now does it again with State of Wonder.

This plunges us from the start into the predicament of the 42-year-old pharmacologist Marina Singh, half-Indian and half-American researcher with a pharmaceutical company in Minnesota. Her colleague has been sent to report on the progress of the company’s fertility treatment research in a remote location off Brazil’s Rio Negro, an Amazonian tributary. Now comes the shocking news that he’s died of a mysterious fever, something mentioned almost off-handedly in a letter from Dr Annick Swenson, who’s been heading the study and from whom there’s been no proper information or progress report for ages. It now falls to Marina to travel to Brazil and find Dr Swenson, report on her progress as well as try and discover the circumstances surrounding her colleague’s death.

Unsure of exactly how to proceed and beset by sweat-drenched nightmares of being parted from her father in Calcutta – a side-effect of an anti-malarial drug – Marina flies to Manaus, a city on the Rio Negro, from where she must travel upriver to confront Dr Swenson and the little-known Lakashi tribe. This, of course, has all the hallmarks of a distaff Heart of Darkness, with Dr Swenson making for a compelling Kurtz. (Another resonance is that of the fable of Eurydice and Orpheus, specifically mentioned during an episode when some of the characters attend an operatic performance based on this myth.) The intelligent but pliant Marina must fight demons within and without to achieve her objectives, and while the format may be Conrad’s, the updated concerns here are to do with the ways of pharmaceutical companies, the ways of ‘modern’ and ‘unspoiled’ worlds, and the ways in which we uncover what matters to us.

Compelling characters apart, one of the many charms of this novel is the way Patchett creates a sense of place for them to inhabit. The icy-cold, open spaces of Minnesota; the tropical dilapidation of Manaus; and the lush, unpredictable rainforest: such are the contrasting backdrops of State of Wonder that come alive through telling detail.

It must be admitted that it’s not smooth sailing all the way. There are stretches in the middle where the narrative tends to turn sluggish, like the Rio Negro itself, and some incidents towards the end do strain credulity. Overall, though, Patchett’s pacing serves her well as she stretches the elastic tension between action and revelation without letting it snap.

State of Wonder, then, is a highly readable as well as unusual work. If this is what paying close attention of the mechanics of plot can produce, by all means let us have more of it.

Readable, Not Towering

2011-07-11T08:50:00.001+05:30

This appeared in today's The Sunday Guardian.

LAST MAN IN TOWER Aravind Adiga

Avarice runs through the pages of Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower the way local trains criss-cross the city of Mumbai. In a plot that’s drawn from local headlines, the novel deals with the rapaciousness of realtors and the amorality of the self-interested middle class. The eponymous last man is one Yogesh Murthy, known to all as Masterji, an upright former teacher now in his 60s whose moralistic stance is the motor that drives the action to a gruesome finish.

Last Man in Tower’s events are largely set in one Vishram Society, comprising the dilapidated Tower A, built in the 1950s, and the smarter, relatively newer Tower B. This corner of an eastern suburb of Mumbai, surrounded by slums and next to the domestic airport, is, we’re ironically informed from the start, very “pucca”, being “middle class to the core”. Comprising retirees, cyber-cafe owners, real estate brokers and more, “the men have modest paunches, wear checked polyester shirts over white baniyans, and keep their hair oiled and short. The older women wear saris, salwaar kameez or skirts, and the younger ones wear jeans. All of them pay taxes, support charities, and vote in local and general elections”.

Adiga spends time and effort in delineating the lives and circumstances of the residents of this building; unfortunately, however, there’s little that’s unusual in this portrayal. The husbands and wives are uni-dimensional in their desire to keep up with the Jains, protect and care for their offspring and desire to forge better lives. All of these seem to be within their grasp when self-made real-estate mogul Dharmen Shah makes them a takeover offer that’s several times more than the market rate, in order for him to demolish Vishram Society and erect a multi-storeyed monstrosity in its stead.

Though the rest are won over by Mammon, it’s Masterji, indulging in memories of his deceased wife and daughter, who alone puts his foot down and refuses to vacate. Unmoved by the entreaties of his neighbours, pleas of his son and hostilities of Shah’s henchmen, Masterji believes he can find refuge in the police, the law and the media. Events, however, spin out of control, leading to a denouement hinted at early on when Adiga specifically mentions an Agatha Christie title on Masterji’s bookshelf, the one dealing with dark deeds on the Orient Express.

While the other characters are somewhat predictable in their actions and stilted dialogue, it’s interesting that Masterji isn’t painted in Mahatma-like shades. His intransigence over the years and habit of “controlling appetites and sorrows” is shown to estrange his former students as well as his son, and one can understand why his upright, rigid stance creates vituperation among others. His novelistic opposite, the gutka-chewing Dharmen Shah, is at least unabashed about his desires and motives, ignoring diseased lungs in his efforts to make his company, and his buildings, soar higher.

Throughout, Adiga deftly contrasts the city’s intersecting ways of life. Slum-dwellers, construction workers and the homeless appear as a counterpoint to the more privileged, oblivious few. At times, though, the broad-brush satire – the dominant mode of Adiga’s earlier The White Tiger – is too heavy-handed. For example, while Shah is at a construction site, we’re told that “a worker’s family was spending the nights on the unfinished fourth floor, which one day a technology executive or businessman would occupy…[their] washing…hung in the alcoves where Versace would soon hang; their little bars of soap and detergent did the work that expensive perfumes would do. And they probably did it better”. Later on, in another pointed comment, random acts of violence are planned on no less an occasion than Gandhi Jayanti. To further belabour the point, every now and again stray dogs chase puppies, cats slash at butterflies, moths get caught in ceiling fans and crows’ nests are demolished

Not for Adiga, then, the more nuanced approach revealed in, for instance, Anjali Joseph’s Saraswati Park or Nalini Jones’ What You Call Winter, two other works of fiction centered on Mumbai suburbs. This take-no-prisoners style serves the author well on the occasions that he employs Dickensian exaggeration bordering on the farcical – notably, when describing the antics of the legal firm that Masterji seeks out.

The prose, though proficient for most of the book, occasionally descends into spiky, strange patches. At one point, describing a dizzy-headed Masterji, we’re told that “explosions of glucose – comets and supernovae – lit up his private darkness; a bacchanalia had begun in his hyper-metabolizing cells”. Quite an affliction. For all that, Adiga does keep the action moving, cutting between disparate characters’ actions and motives with a degree of skill. There’s a compelling quality to the second half, when events move with a quality of grim predetermination. Vivid scenes build to a climax, giving way to a coda in which hypocrisy and conscience are well blended.

One needs voices that run counter to the grand business-page narrative of India’s burgeoning, shining middle class, and Adiga’s book is a necessary one in this context. It’s not exactly towering, but Last Man in Tower does possess the virtues of being readable as well as discomfiting in all the right places.

My reviews of some other books set in Mumbai: Nalini Jones' What You Call Winter; Anjali Joseph's Saraswati Park; Sonia Faleiro's Beautiful Thing; Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva; Murzban Shroff's Breathless in Bombay; and a round-up of 'Mumbai fiction' from 2008.

The Wild West Bank

2011-07-08T21:14:00.001+05:30

THE ASCENT OF ELI ISRAEL AND OTHER STORIES Jonathan Papernick

Beyond the headlines of flotillas, occupied territories and militant attacks are the everyday lives of those in Israel, people living in the cross-hairs of history. Jonathan Papernick’s short story collection, The Ascent of Eli Israel, delves into some of these lives with candour and tough-mindedness, an approach that belies sensitivity towards their predicament.

Each of the seven stories in this volume -- published in 2001 and re-issued early this year – is a stained-glass window offering a view of the shifting locus between identity, insecurity and a search for grace in troubled times. It opens with the dreamlike Makchyk, set at time of Israel's creation, in which a boy coming of age ventures into no-man’s land and then into Jerusalem’s Old City in search of his father, meeting holy fools, strangers and Arab youth on his expedition. In many ways, this prefigures the stories that follow.

In the Malamud-like An Unwelcome Guest, a newlywed awakes in the middle of the night to find an Arab stranger in his house, laying claim to the property. The Art of Correcting combines theology with comedy; The King of the King of Falafel relies more on broad humour for its effects; and the “six million stars” that twinkle at the close of For as Long as the Lamp is Burning up-end the unsentimental tone of the rest of the volume.

The two stories which have the most impact are, first, the one of the title, in which a formerly successful TV show producer walks a solitary and sometimes unhinged path towards personal redemption among the hills of the West Bank; and Lucky Eighteen, in which two friends, one a provocative photographer, goad those around them at a time when provocations aren’t easily understood or tolerated. (Come to think of it, Papernick himself shares something of the spirit of this photographer.)

Throughout, easy stereotypes are eschewed and craft deftly employed to arrive at unexpected endings. With its astringent humour, barbed tone, and compelling sense of place, The Ascent of Eli Israel is a significant debut. As one of Papernick’s characters tells another, “Welcome to the wild, wild West Bank”.

Navigating The Opium Trade

2011-06-26T09:05:00.001+05:30

This appeared in today's DNA

RIVER OF SMOKE Amitav Ghosh

Set in 18^th century Japan, David Mitchell’s recent The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet dealt with how officials of the Dutch East India Company tried to re-invent themselves by making their fortunes in a trading outpost off Nagasaki. The same subject matter, that of the fall-out of interactions between an insular civilisation and traders from the West, also animates Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke.

The second novel in a proposed trilogy that focuses attention on the venal traffic in opium in the 19^th century, this re-introduces us to some of the characters from the first, Sea of Poppies, as well as adds new ones. Here, Ghosh turns his ethnographer’s eye to the effects of such trade in Guangzhou, the Chinese city then known as Canton. As with Mitchell’s novel, River of Smoke floods its banks with period detail; this, though often absorbing, comes in the way of narrative flow.

The virtuoso opening set piece fills us in on the life of Deeti, the impoverished widow from Sea of Poppies who, following her husband’s death in an opium factory, had fled her home in Bihar to set sail on the Ibis. That worthy vessel, after weathering a storm, lands in Mauritius with Deeti and other refugees on board. Years later, as the matriarch of her family, the doughty Deeti presides over their frequent visits to a cliff-side shrine, with memories of her flight always prevalent.

Returning to the 1830s, the narrative acquaints us with the person who holds centre-stage for much of what follows: Behram, a canny, middle-aged Parsi trader from Bombay, who’s set sail for Canton on the Anahita with a large cargo of opium. This shipment represents his one chance to decisively break free from the clutches of his wealthy, grasping in-laws back home.

Apparently, the Anahita faces the same storm as the Ibis. Crates of opium burst open in the hold and Behram inadvertently falls into the gluey substance – a rather obvious foreshadowing of events to come. However, it’s when the Anahita reaches its destination that the novel hits its stride. The people, surroundings and ways of life of ‘Fanqui-town’, the foreign traders’ quarter of Canton, are captured with precision and verisimilitude. Be it food, clothes, leisure activities, business pursuits, gossip and more, Ghosh presents scene after vivid scene set in the district’s streets, clubs, markets and factories, where characters swing between the laws of free trade and those of conscience.

Caught in a whirlpool of circumstance, Behram tries his best to profitably dispose of his cargo. Meanwhile, there are other narrative cross-currents, such as those of Neel, the dispossessed potentate first encountered in Sea of Poppies, who now becomes Behram’s munshi. The novel also traces the relationship between Fitcher, English horticulturalist, and Paulette, orphan and budding botanist, another character from the trilogy’s first volume. In addition, the antics of Paulette’s friend Robin, who arrives in Canton on an artistic and botanical pursuit, are recorded in the form of his long, gossipy letters to her about his time there.

The inclusion of these letters is a less-than-successful attempt to vary the novel’s structure as well as sneak in background information on “this crowded, noisy, noisome, voluptuous place we call Canton”. Written in a breathless, exclamatory style, they’re suffused by historical arcana, making the narrative run aground. This is heightened by the inclusion of even more missives towards the end, such as the actual document written by Canton’s zealous, newly-appointed High Commissioner to Queen Victoria.

The patois with which Ghosh packed his earlier novel is in evidence here too; however, it is more controlled and efficient this time around. The characters’ distinctive, disparate speaking styles serve to illustrate both the polyglot nature of the novel’s universe as well as their individual backgrounds. It’s through their dialects that the “sepoys, serangs, lascars, shroffs, mootsuddies, gomustas, munshis” and more are brought to life.

With the avidity of an explorer chancing upon uncharted trails, Ghosh takes the novel off into numerous digressions, some of which are more absorbing than others. These even include a chance meeting between two of the characters with an exiled Napoleon in St Helena: the conversation with the erstwhile emperor serves to bring us up to date with the context of the period, one that was to end, as the novel does, with the imminent outbreak of the so-called First Opium War between Britain and China.

River of Smoke, then, is a novel of some import for its delineation of how the trade in opium served to fuel colonial ambitions – the view from the other side, as it were. Its eddies and swirls are for the most part satisfying to navigate, even though its many tributaries do tend to drain it of energy. As one of Ghosh’s Cantonese characters would have said, this is a book with plenty-big cargo-la.

My earlier review of Sea of Poppies is here. And that of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is here.

The Decline And Fall Of Handwriting

2011-06-24T13:07:00.002+05:30

Languishing in remote corners of publishers' warehouses must be piles of mildewed books that claim to understand human beings through their handwriting. Yellowing pages devoted to the way you dot your 'i's and cross your 't's, with each characteristic loop, slant and curlicue identifying you as introverted, sociable, pathological or a unique combination of the three. ("Lines sloping downward? Looks you need some Prozac at once!") Graphology, it's called, from graphos, writing, and logos, word. If I'm not mistaken, there was even one such volume that claimed to make you change your lifesimply by changing your handwriting.

Whether such analysis is science or mumbo-jumbo, handwriting itself is in irreversible decline. Most prefer nowadays to strike or touch keyboards, with the result that the knowledge of an art we spent years painstakingly perfecting now lies gathering dust in our synapses. Heidi Harralson, a Tucson graphologist, was recently quoted in the New York Times as saying, "I'm seeing an increase in inconstancy in the handwriting and poor form level — sloppy, semi-legible script that's inconsistent." I feel your pain, Heidi: I used to be proud of my cursive style, now lying in tatters. Once, doctors were famously derided for illegible handwriting; now all of our scribbled notes look like medical prescriptions. The rest of my Yahoo India column continues here.

Reading Yoga

2011-06-10T12:19:00.002+05:30

Practitioners of yoga have been much in the news these days — sadly, not because of the practice of yoga. Such a practice, as we should all know by now, has been firmly established as a discipline that's Good For You. Another such activity, clearly, is reading. (Remember reading? Making sense of a page filled with letters organized into words and sentences?)

Given our frantic urban lifestyle — with little room for life, leave alone style — finding the time to pursue both disciplines for a sustained period has always been difficult. No longer. It's time to take heart: in a dazzling breakthrough, this column presents a series of poses that combines yoga with reading. The rest of my Yahoo India column continues here.

The Broken Wishbone Of Bangladesh

2011-06-05T12:49:00.003+05:30

This appeared in today's The Sunday Guardian

THE GOOD MUSLIM Tahmima Anam

Independence and its discontents are at the heart of Tahmima Anam’s new novel, The Good Muslim, the follow-up to her A Golden Age. That earlier novel dealt with the tempestuous period of Bangladesh’s formation; this one deals with the aftermath. That one revolved around a mother’s efforts to make sure her daughter and son came to no harm; this one is more concerned with the relationship between brother and sister.

Set primarily in Dhaka, The Good Muslim is a look at how revolutionary ideals give way to pragmatic adjustments, and the circumstances that make people switch from one path to another. It’s as true of countries as it is of individuals.

The time is the mid-Eighties, and Maya, a doctor who’s spent the last seven years at a village clinic, returns home to her brother Sohail and mother Rehana in Dhaka. She finds that Rehana is “no longer the panicky, protective mother she had once been”, and as for Sohail, he’s now a devout man of the faith, preferring to sequester himself with those who share his beliefs. As a secular, independent woman, Maya is dismayed at this and further disheartened when she finds that Zaid, Sohail’s young son with whom she tries to strike a bond, is to be sent to a madrasa for religious instruction.

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth also featured ideologically divided siblings – the irony there was that the one who’s sent to Bangladesh becomes an atheist, while the one who stays behind in the UK embraces Islam. In contrast, there is little irony in The Good Muslim, if at all; the author chooses instead to delineate incidents and feelings with sincerity and fluid grace. (Book-burning features in both books, too, being more incendiary and politically-motivated in Smith’s novel.)

Much of The Good Muslim is given over to the playing out of present-day consequences born out of past events . Anam tries to strike a balance between action and reaction by inserting episodes set in the early Seventies, soon after the country’s birth, but the need to maintain tension and then defuse it means that the book’s later sections suffer from an over-abundance of explanation and incident.

The balance between the personal and the political, too, is skewed towards the former, more so than in A Golden Age. However, Anam captures with skill and insight the changes in Bangladesh in the decades after its formation. Some are physical, such as when Maya returns to Dhaka and finds that “everything was loud and crude, as though someone had reached over and raised the volume. It smelled of people and garbage and soot.” Buildings are taller, traffic more dense, and there are “signs of the Dictator everywhere, graffiti on the walls declaring him the ‘General of our Hearts’ and the ‘Saviour of Bangladesh’, posters of him ten, twenty feet tall, with his high forehead, his thin, satisfied moustache”.

The more important change, though, would be the slow seeping of religion into the public sphere, captured here not just by Sohail and those in his ken, but also by depicting the man on the street’s acceptance of an almost fatalistic belief. The state of the nation could be said to be symbolized by the family’s house, with its grey streaks, sinking foundations and “a collection of shacks” that makes up the first floor, inhabited by Sohail and his religious cohorts.

Overall, in one memorable passage that sums up the “broken wishbone” of a country, Anam writes that it “had rolled and unrolled tanks from its streets. It had leaders elected and ordained. It had murdered two presidents. In its infancy, it had started cannibalising itself, killing the tribals in the south, drowning villages for dams, razing the ancient trees...A fast-acting country: quick to anger, quick to self-destruct.”

In such a place, Maya finds herself out of place. There is little comfort to be found in the way Zaid is being brought up and in the attitudes of former comrades who now prefer to chase riches and ostentation. She starts to writes incendiary newspaper columns (with ramifications that become apparent at the book’s close), attends meetings of those who seek restitution after the war, and spends time with Joy, an old associate who has started to harbour feelings for her. Most of all, though, she seeks to understand and live with Sohail’s disconcerting conversion.

When he first turns to “the Book” to find comfort from the memory of his actions during the war, Maya, despite reservations, sees that he is sincere in his feeling. It “suddenly become clear to her that religion, its open fragrance and cloudless stretches of infinity, may in fact be what he is claiming it is, an essential human need, hers as much as his, and because she feels the twinge of his yearning, turning like a leaf in her heart, she decides, at that moment, that it cannot be. She will not become one of those people who buckle under the force of a great event and allow it to change the metre of who they are”.

As for Sohail, “he longs for her to know, to know something of what it was like, longs for her to have a heart as heavy as his, a heart that needs to wrap itself around a certainty, a path”. This is one of the occasions in the book where we see him from within. Too often, he is a cipher-like presence –all too apparent, for example, when Maya confronts him with suspicions of dark deeds in the madrasa where Zaid has been cocooned. Though Sohail’s back story contains reason enough for him to turn to religion, the workings of his mind once he’s done so aren’t exactly dwelt upon.

For all that, The Good Muslim is a deeply-felt and fleshed-out account of committed individuals dealing with unfulfilled hopes in a country they have made many sacrifices for. In late 18^th century France, those watching the accused being led to the gallows used to mutter that revolutions devour their young; in Anam’s depiction of Bangladesh, the revolution swallows idealism, leaving behind disillusionment and the seeking of ways to fit into a changed landscape.

Reader, Interrupted

2011-05-28T12:11:00.000+05:30

One of the aims of the novelist, writes John Gardner in his The Art of Fiction, is to create for the reader “a vivid and continuous dream”. Well, these days, I find that dream to be full of interruptions.

I’m not referring to doorbells, phone calls and mysterious thumps from next door. Rather, it’s the distraction caused by having access to the Internet. The lurking sense that there are e-mails to be checked, tweets to be followed, status updates to be noted, headlines to be scanned or new videos of Rebecca Black to be made fun of.

The rest of my Yahoo column continues here.

Ganesh's Book

2011-05-22T09:34:00.000+05:30

This appeared in yesterday's The Indian Express

LEELA'S BOOK Alice Albinia

In The Great Indian Novel, Shashi Tharoor came up with the sterling premise of grafting The Mahabharata onto the post-1947 Indian political scenario. Though it suffered somewhat in execution, it remains his best work. While it’s a pity that more Indian authors writing in English haven’t examined the possibilities of re-imagining and subverting the country’s epics and myths, there’s consolation to be found in Alice Albinia’s first novel, Leela’s Book.

This, too, takes as its starting point the interweaving of some of The Mahabharata’s tales with contemporary India – specifically the epic’s origin and mode of transmission -- and it does so with skill and verve. Albinia’s first book, a work of non-fiction about following the Indus to its source, was notable for its empathy, insight and linking of past and present. One finds the same qualities in her novel.

It features a bustling cast, comprising members of various families brought together on the occasion of a wedding. Each one is impelled by his or her particular desires, and many episodes are handled with a touch of Austenesque mischievousness that occasionally brings to mind Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy.

The Leela of the title, when we first meet her, is returning to India with her husband after two decades in New York to attend the nuptials of Sunita and Ash in New Delhi. The former is her husband’s niece, betrothed to the son of Shiva Prasad, senior functionary of a right-wing party and a “guardian of the national identity, saviour of pure India”. The oily Shiva is at loggerheads with the crafty Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi, Ash’s father, a louche Sanskrit scholar, for the way in which he interprets Indian mythology. Leela is connected to Vyasa, too: she’s the adopted sister of his wife, killed in a road accident years ago, and there are deeper secrets that they share.

Some of the others who clack against each other like billiard balls against the city’s shifting surface include Aisha, a demure maidservant; Humayun, a chauffeur driven by impulse; the bohemian, London-returned Bharati, Vyasa’s daughter; Pablo, a journalist attracted by Bharati who uncovers a generation-old concealment; and Ram, Bharati’s brother, who has a fling with Ash. As though these weren’t enough, there’s also Linda, young British academic and friend of Bharati’s, whose role, it must be said, comes across as a tad contrived.

Given all of these people and their separate arcs, it would have been wise to include a list of characters at the beginning of the novel; fortunately, Albinia is deft in plotting their appearances and re-appearances.

Over and above all this is the benign presence of Lord Ganesh, who, as he himself reveals to the reader, has created and then set all these characters in motion to rectify his centuries-old dispute with Vyasa over the manner in which the latter composed his saga. (There’s even a section featuring Leela’s varying avatars over different periods of Indian history.) The elephant-headed one now attempts to write his way back into the epic and discredit the “Vyasa Propaganda Machine”.

As such, references to The Mahabharata are everywhere, some explicit, others to be inferred. Leela, like Ganga, refuses to tell her husband anything about her past. She and her sister are compared to Amba and Ambalika, and at one point, Bharati declares that she wouldn’t mind having five boyfriends at the same time. There’s also a parallel to Ganesh and Vyasa when Shiva Prasad narrates his memoirs to a scribe.

Characters aren’t the only thing Leela’s Book is teeming with. In these pages are to be found rape, fire, police brutality, elopement, surprise revelations and furtive coupling underneath a food-laden table at a wedding venue. In the midst of all this, it also records the changes in New Delhi, be it of attitudes of rich and poor or the composition of its neighbourhoods. Though the capital is clearly the backdrop against which the characters’ stories unspool, the book also segues into London, New York, Mumbai, Kolkata and Santiniketan

Ultimately, as Ganesh informs us, he succeeds in his efforts to “reunite siblings, to bring together mothers and daughters – to remove from my characters’ lives the obstacles that impinge on their happiness – and to expose Vyasa’s wrongdoing”. It’s been said often enough that what is not in The Mahabharata does not exist elsewhere. By imagining and then bringing to life aspects that are not in the epic as we know it, Albinia has created a charming and capacious work of fiction.

Walk Of Life

2011-05-15T09:21:00.001+05:30

A slightly different version of this appeared in today's DNA.

OPEN CITY Teju Cole

A young man walks the streets of New York City. He talks to strangers, meets friends, gets mugged and muses on incidents from his childhood. He visits Brussels and returns to New York, where he resumes his rambles, observing changes and drawing associations.

Those don’t sound like ingredients for an especially remarkable novel. Yet, debutant Teju Cole’s digressive Open City is noteworthy for its portrayal of pauses in life’s frenetic rhythms and for the links it forges in the midst of disparity. Opportunely, it also takes forward the form of the novel in the manner of W.G. Sebald.

The narrator, working in a hospital on a psychiatry fellowship, is not as much self-aware as he is aware of the people and places around him. His rambles across the city, from Wall Street to Harlem, from the 92^nd Street Y to Tower Records, are matched by rambles within, and the connections he makes give the novel its unique flavour. This is a narrator whose mind is more well-stocked than most. He spots a woman wearing black on the subway, and this puts him in mind of paintings by Velasquez; later, the architecture of another subway station in lower Manhattan evokes the interior of Winchester Cathedral.

He’s also fascinated by the living city as a palimpsest, recording forgotten aspects of its Dutch heritage as well as the rise and fall of small and big businesses. He ponders on subjects as diverse as changes in the way we read to icons from Vito Corleone and Cannonball Adderley. At other times, he obsesses over the quotidian, be it the persistence of bedbugs or forgotten ATM pin codes.

Cole’s sentences are graceful and lucid, with loping rhythms that match the flâneur-like mood. Of his meditative sojourns, he writes: “…I was one of those people, the overinterpreters. This was part of my suspicion that there was a mood in the society that pushed people more towards snap judgments and unexamined opinions, an antiscientific mood; to the old problem of mass innumeracy, it seemed to me, was being added a more general inability to assess evidence.”

As the narrative progresses, a central concern becomes apparent: that of assimilation and the differences that remain when one immigrates. The narrator, born of a Nigerian father and German mother – like the author himself -- comes across others from Africa, Haiti and the Caribbean: illegal immigrants, cab drivers, museum attendants, bootblacks. Some of their stories merge into the narrative through the expedient of doing away with quotation marks. This concern with the Other, with blurred identities, is also brought out in a long novelistic detour, when the narrator visits Brussels as a counterpoint to New York. Here, among other things, he engages in theoretical yet fascinating conversations with an autodidactic Internet café manager with a “seething intelligence”.

We learn a little about the narrator’s upbringing in Lagos, in particular his stint at a military training school and relationship with his parents. Despite mentioning an estranged girlfriend, picnics with friends in Central Park and visits to an ailing former professor, he remains something of an enigma. The reason for this is made clear towards the end, when a disturbing revelation disturbs the book’s languid surface. This makes one reassess all that has come before: his obsessive wandering, musings on the mind’s blind spots or even the choice of psychiatry as a profession.

The form of Cole’s novel emerges organically from its content; it would be a mistake to look for conventional structure and incident here. These observations are held together by an incisive, mediating consciousness, and much of the pleasure of reading Open City arises from simply following it in operation.

When Authors Borrow Characters

2011-05-14T08:41:00.000+05:30

Daniel Defoe died three centuries ago. Yet, in December 2003, at a Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm, the world listened to him musing on Robinson Crusoe's later career. The voice and imagination were those of J.M. Coetzee, who co-opted the earlier author and his creation for his enigmatic acceptance speech. Read the rest of my Yahoo column here.

Tweedledee, Tedium

2011-05-10T12:34:00.000+05:30

This appeared in the latest issue of Tehelka.

THE PALE KING David Foster Wallace

Towards the middle of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous, unfinished The Pale King, a character identified as “David Wallace” pops up to assure the reader that he’s the author of the novel, asserting that it’s a true story, a “vocation-based memoir” about “negotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes”. If his earlier Infinite Jest, then, was about the ways we distract ourselves with entertainment, this one was planned as a counterweight, the ability to deal with tedium.

It’s evident that this is a work in progress; Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch, points out in his introduction that he sifted through a morass of material to assemble “the best version” he could find, despite there being no “outline or other indication of what order David intended for these chapters”. As such, fully realized pieces co-exist with fragments, repetitions and narrative strands that aren’t fleshed out.

Despite this, there is ample evidence of Wallace’s trademark, prodigious talent. That means plenty of hyperkinetic sentences, arcane knowledge, meditations on the changing shape of American culture, sly, occasionally bawdy, humour, sections with footnotes and acute visual observations. (A paperback has “a bookmark's tongue”, car seat headrests possess “the dull shine of unwashed hair”, and the knot of a man's tie is “as tight as a knuckle”.)

The plot, such as it is, comprises the coming together of a disparate set of characters at the American revenue services’ Regional Examination Centre in Peoria, Illinois, and reactions to the monotony of life there. As such, there is much taxation jargon – surely intended to make the reader work though some of the boredom himself – such as, “RA ’78 revised the expansionist tendencies of the ’76 provisions by removing both long-term capital gains deduction and excess itemized deductions from the index of relevant preferences”. Phew.

Of note are evocative set pieces, some of which have been published earlier. There’s an account of the growing years of David Wallace before he came to join “the Service”, for example, as well as the tale of a boy whose aim was “to press his lips to every square inch of his own body”.

Overall, the novel works towards the merits of transcending boredom and Sisyphean tasks, “to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex”. As he’s mentioned in one of his notes: “Central Deal: Realism, monotony. Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens.” That, intentionally or not, is what The Pale King in its current form lives up to.

Those new to David Foster Wallace may wonder what the fuss is all about. For the devotee, there’s much to mull over here. Yet, the best way to remember the man would be to return to his earlier essays, short stories and novels -- the ones he finished, that is.

Border Ballads

2011-05-07T09:26:00.000+05:30

This appeared in today's Mint Lounge.

THE WANDERING FALCON Jamil Ahmad

It was Kipling who was largely responsible for the myth-making about the clans of what was known as the North-west Frontier. His tales and poems of men who would be kings, Pashtun traders and barrack-room ballads spread the legend of time-trapped tribes who were noble and fierce, enmeshed in a matrix of honour that they were prepared to defend to the bitter end.

Echoes of this are to be found in 78-year-old Jamil Ahmad’s debut novel, The Wandering Falcon. The setting of his book, identified on the first page, is largely the “tangle of crumbling, weather-beaten and broken hills, where the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan meet”. The novel comprises a series of episodes dealing with the tribulations of nomadic tribes who inhabit this inhospitable terrain, covering a period after the departure of colonial powers and before the rise of the Taliban.

Nominally, this is the story of the coming of age of Tor Baz, the wandering falcon of the title. He appears, sometimes in little more than a walk-on part, in almost every one of these nine tales: first, as abandoned infant, then as a boy passing from tribe to tribe, as a witness and observer, and finally as an informer and guide to the region.

The circumstances of his birth are narrated in the brutal, somewhat over-determined events of the first story. The child of an alliance brutally torn apart by an honour killing, he is almost left to the mercy of the elements. As he comes to manhood, however, he adapts and thrives in a hostile environment. He’s something of a cipher, though; there’s little, barring revelations of shrewdness and cheerful amorality towards the end, of Tor Baz’s own feelings. His character, then, is something of a peg to hold the individual episodes together.

The other characters who inhabit The Wandering Falcon range from cataract-afflicted tribal leaders to peripatetic, tricky mullahs to women losing control over their fates in an environment in which they are little more than chattel. The author’s aim is not to vilify or to defend, but simply to portray, although there is clear sympathy in his depiction of tribes forced to abandon their grazing grounds because of passport controls and border checkposts. The old, however settled, gives way to the new and Ahmad contrasts “settled life as opposed to nomadic life, and the writ of the state as opposed to nomadic discipline”.

The prose is bleached-bone clean, sometimes rising to the level of stark poetry: “Where the fields end, the convolutions and whorls of bare, cruel rock once again resume their march across the land – occasionally throwing up spires and lances of granite into the sky”. (Some of these passages, in fact, make the book sound like a blanched, distant cousin of Cormac McCarthy’s novels of ranchers and cowboys adrift on American borders, grimly facing bleak landscapes and changing times.) The dialogue, though, can sometimes be arch and folksy: “Wailing in a man is like honey in a pot. As honey attracts flies, so does wailing attract trouble”. More echoes of Kipling to be discerned there.

Clearly, Ahmad has spent time in close quarters with the people he writes about. There are knowledgeable details of daily life, customs and terrain, in all their cruel as well as hospitable aspects. Once in a while, there’s bitterness at an acknowledgement of the outside world: “No politician risked imprisonment: they would continue to talk of the rights of the individual, the dignity of man, the exploitation of the poor, but they would not expose the wrong being done outside their front door”. That sounds familiar.

“To live outside the law,” Bob Dylan famously sang in Absolutely Sweet Marie, “you must be honest”. The Wandering Falcon relates, with honesty and grace, chronicles of those who live outside national laws, gazing upon the twilight of their anachronistic codes of conduct.

Up In The Air

2011-05-07T08:14:00.000+05:30

This appeared in today's Hindustan Times.

THE CLOUD MESSENGER Aamer Hussein

At one point in Aamer Hussein’s The Cloud Messenger, the central character writes a letter mentioning “Kalidasa's poem about the cloud messenger, carrying love messages back from a man in exile to the city he'd left behind...letters of infinite longing." A little later, he realises that “one day he would have to be a messenger to himself, carrying stories from the places of his past to his present place, and back again from present to past”. This, then, is the shape of the novel: a mélange of memories held together by a elegiac sensibility.

The Cloud Messenger tells of the peripatetic life and longings of the bookish, sensitive Mehran, whose story switches between first and third person in the telling. We follow Mehran from youth to middle age: he’s brought up in Karachi, spends long sojourns with maternal relatives in Indore, studies and works in London and travels often to Italy, among other places.

Specifically, the novel revolves around Mehran’s interactions with the three people who most affect his life: Marco, his flighty fellow-student; Riccarda, the magnetic older woman with whom he has a short-lived affair; and the damaged, charismatic Marvi, with whom he embarks upon a choppy romance. Mehran’s life segues between meetings with these three in different parts of the world, and the novel details the ups and downs of their relationships with the passage of time.

Mehran and others are deeply influenced by Urdu and Persian language and poetry, often discussing and introspecting on its practitioners, especially the Sufi mystic Shah Abdul Latif as well as others such as Khusro and Faiz. The treatment of the novel, thus, is suffused by an intense, almost pained, romanticism and though there are evocative moments, this distilled sensitivity occasionally comes close to effete posturing.

There’s often a touch of haziness, too, as we skim along the events of Mehran’s life. Some passages appear overly diaristic, and at other times, he appears a distant, indolent figure. "If there was any excess at all, it was not of verbiage but of emotion,” he writes at one point, and the danger of drawing a map of the emotions is that the topography can become quite indistinct.

There’s no question, though, that it’s a deeply-felt piece of work. In particular, some moments between Mehran and Marvi are moving, and at other times, the mood of melancholia is deftly handled. Hussein has produced notable short fiction in the past, and from the evidence of such episodes in The Cloud Messenger, that appears to be where his particular strengths lie.

Where Have All The Myths Gone?

2011-04-29T15:00:00.000+05:30

Abandoned children, scorned suitors, valiant women and men struggling against fate, shape-shifting tricksters, Pyrrhic victories and rites of passage. All this and more, one would imagine, is rich fodder for the novelist. However, mythology and its tropes -- "public dreams", as Joseph Campbell once called them -- seem to be all but absent from the contemporary novel. The rest of my Yahoo India column is here.

Balkan Beast

2011-04-23T08:34:00.001+05:30

This appeared in today's The Indian Express.

THE TIGER'S WIFE Tea Obreht

You can erase national boundaries, but memories and myths will always prevail. Such recollections and legends run “like secret rivers” through Tea Obreht’s debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, set in the villages and cities of the Balkans. The upheavals that the area has witnessed may have redrawn the map, but, as this book exuberantly illustrates, storytelling has its own contours.

For a contemporary novel, Obreht’s tone of voice is both unusual and apt, being a blend of the real and the folkloric. On occasion, she draws from the well of magic realism that others such as Rushdie and Marquez have dipped into. The warp and weft of this sprawling tapestry comprise two interlinked narratives, the first concerning the narrator’s present circumstances, and the other, fables from her grandfather’s coming-of-age years. As such, it features a picaresque cast, also managing to touch upon faded Ottoman glory, Nazi depredations and later religious strife.

The Tiger’s Wife opens with Natalia, a 20-something clinician, travelling with a feisty colleague to deliver inoculations and other medication to an orphanage across the border. She learns of the death of her grandfather, a doctor and cancer patient, under somewhat mysterious circumstances; soon, she gets involved with an itinerant crew trying to find the buried corpse of a relative, convinced that it is responsible for their ill-fortune. The story proceeds by alternating between Natalia’s actions and reconstructions from her grandfather’s youth.

The centerpiece of the grandfather’s story is of his meetings with a “deathless man” and the wager he makes with him involving his favourite novel, Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Death, in fact, is a concern that shadows the book: characters fight it, overcome it, are haunted by it, make Faust-like pacts with it, rely on superstition to banish it, and, of course, succumb to it.

This is not to say that the book suffers from a surfeit of sorrow: there’s an undercurrent of humour, often black. At one point, a person who protests against the bombing of a cotton factory bears aloft a placard that reads: I Now Have No Clean Underwear.

Colour and incident aren’t qualities this novel is short of. The tiger of the title is one that has escaped from a city zoo after a bombardment and goes on to inhabit a forest at the outskirts of a remote village, creating panic amongst its occupants. Obreht takes us into the consciousness of this creature as he prowls in search of food and shelter, finding an ally in the battered deaf-mute wife of the village butcher. The tale of the butcher – once a sensitive, musically-inclined youth – is also revealed, as well as those of others, including a valiant blacksmith, an peripatetic bear-vanquisher and the local apothecary.

All of this is grounded by Obreht’s attention to detail, often rendered in the form of lists. The tiger, at one point, scents “the thick, woolly smell of sheep and goats; the smell of fire, tar, wax; the interesting reek of the outhouses; paper, iron, the individual smells of people; the savoury smells of stew and goulash, the grease of baking pies". A pasha’s palace-turned-museum comprises “portraiture halls with ornate hangings and brass lamps, court tapestries depicting feasts and battles, a small library annex where the young ladies could read, and a tearoom where the pasha's china and cookbooks and coffee cups were on display.”

The war and strife that have bedevilled the region are often referred to in terms of their effects: the shortages, the petty black marketeering, the implications and sense of nearby hostilities. As the narrator says at one point, "Conflict we didn't necessarily understand -- conflict we had raged over, regurgitated opinions on, seized as the reason for why we couldn't go anywhere, do anything, be anyone -- had been at the centre of everything." A little later there’s another reflection: “The war had altered everything. Once separate, the pieces that made up our old country no longer carried the same characteristics that had formerly represented parts of the whole. Previously shared things -- landmarks, writers, scientists, histories -- had to be doled out according to their new owners.” Putting the pieces together is one of the things that Obreht’s work sets out to do.

There’s a lot, then, that’s crammed into this novel, and certainly, there are times when one feels adrift on a sea of stories, with the links between them being tenuously articulated. However, it’s Obreht’s assured storytelling instincts that come to the rescue, making The Tiger’s Wife a saga that burns bright.

Unfinished, Not Unpublished

2011-04-15T16:13:00.000+05:30

After what Amit Varma calls "the longest drinks break in history", the Yahoo India columns are back. And my piece on unfinished manuscripts that go on to become published novels -- by those such as Dickens, Scott Fitzgerald, Nabokov, Foster Wallace and more -- is here. Should be easy for you to finish reading it.

Hollywood's Bombay

2011-04-11T11:13:00.000+05:30

This appeared in Saturday's The Indian Express

NIGHT IN BOMBAY Louis Bromfield

Louis Bromfield’s Night in Bombay isn’t a novel with a real city as its backdrop. It’s a novel that exaggerates and magnifies those aspects of the city that fit into Hollywood’s perceptions of it in the Thirties and Forties. Published in 1940 and now re-issued by Penguin, it’s the second of Bromfield’s novels to be set in India. The first, The Rains Came, was made into a film in 1939 starring Tyrone Powers and Myrna Loy, achieving a degree of success as well as an Academy Award for special effects. No doubt the author hoped that Night in Bombay would be filmed too, which accounts for the novel’s melodrama, exoticisation of locale and cast of colourful if one-dimensional characters.

The book, then, is anything but a precursor to what we’ve come to think of as the “Mumbai novel”. Titles in that category ought to reflect a quality of lived experience, a characteristic shared by novels as disparate as Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay, Rohinton Mistry’s Such A Long Journey, parts of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Vikram Chandra’s mammoth cat-and-mouse saga, Sacred Games, among others.

There’s no such quality in Night in Bombay, whose flavour can be summed up in the musing of one of its characters early on. Gazing upon the city, he recalls "memories of parties, of drinking, of easy seductions, of extraordinary nights beneath a sky of blue velvet in which skies glittered like diamonds, of rides in gharries, down from some garden suspended on the side of Malabar Hill, to the Hotel Taj Mahal”. Casablanca, anyone? Later, another character looking around the race course thinks: “Nowhere but in Bombay did you find Maharajas and millionaires, Ranis and British governors, rich Americans and Arab horse dealers, visiting French and beautiful Indian women".

This, then, is the meretricious background against which Bromfield’s American characters collide like billiard balls. There’s Bill Wainwright, on an Asian tour to oversee his father’s business; Homer Merrill, a saintly social worker who toils for the uplift of India’s villages; and Carol Halma, a former Miss Minnesota and Bill’s divorced wife, who cavorts with princelings, but whose soul harbours hidden depths. Circling around these are some dissolute Europeans, each one with secrets and weaknesses to hide. They spend days and nights betting at the races, attending parties in royal mansions and drinking gin at the hotel bar. (The hotel itself is described as “having the air of a vast and dreary county jail”.) It’s when Bill and Homer both begin to nurse feelings for Carol that the actual plot kicks in. The Indians are primarily hotel staff, apart from one Mr Botlivala, a greasy social climber, and the implausibly-named and very upright Colonel Moti, head of an institute of tropical diseases.

All of this could well have been interesting to read in the present time, in the manner of a museum piece revelatory of the attitudes of an earlier era. However, Bromfield’s occasional attempts to “explain” India give rise to generalities that range from the lazy to the comic. For example: "He knew suddenly why the Indian got beneath the skin of the stolid Englishmen, why it was that always the Indian won out. You could beat him or shout him down or even shoot him but still he knew all the answers and had a jump on you. That was the secret of Gandhi”. At other times, he makes you shift uncomfortably in your seat: “The automobile, it seemed, always produced an astounding effect upon coolies in the East; it intoxicated their downtrodden, starved beaten souls to feel beneath their bare souls an engine of great power, capable of immense speed, over which they held absolute power."

It’s also strange is that, given that this is the India of the late Thirties, there’s no mention of the turbulent political scenario, or even of the reactions of the British. Instead, Night in Bombay presents us with an insular hothouse environment in which the motivations and musings of the central characters are spelt out time and again. Even if it had been made into a movie, one suspects it would have been snubbed at the Academy Awards.

Hill Station Blues

2011-03-19T09:04:00.001+05:30

This appeared in today's Mint Lounge.

THE FOLDED EARTH Anuradha Roy

A sense of place is “one of the lesser angels that watch over the racing hand of fiction”, Eudora Welty wrote in a famous 1956 essay. “Location is the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course”. It’s just such an angel that presides over Anuradha Roy’s second novel, The Folded Earth.

The hill station of Ranikhet is the backdrop against which she sets her characters, and it is one that defines and determines their actions. On almost every page, there are descriptions of the area’s seasons, wildlife, views, habitations, history, customs, architecture and more. This is done with a delicacy and empathy that belie the understanding and skill necessary to achieve them. One is reminded of Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain, similarly set in Kasauli.

As with Roy’s first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, themes of loss, yearning and changing ties suffuse the book. It’s narrated by Maya, a young woman from Hyderabad, who arrives in Ranikhet to take up a position as schoolteacher and get over a tragic bereavement. The years pass, and “though I cannot know precisely when it happened, a time had come when I became a hill-person who was only at peace when the earth rose and fell in waves like the sea”. She strikes up close relationships with Diwan Sahib, erstwhile minister of a royal family and now presiding over a decaying estate; Veer, the Diwan’s mysterious long-lost relative; and Charu, a young village girl.

The descriptions of the locale apart, another of the novel’s strengths is in its depiction of minor characters, be it the diwan’s factotum, Charu’s canny grandmother, her witless uncle, the school principal, the owner of a local garage and more. The portrait of the local administrator, though, is touched with caricature in his far-right tendencies and cartoonish attempts at writing and painting slogans for the good of the community (“Walk in Nature Zone, It is Health Prone”, for example.)

While not at school or helping the students make jams and jellies, Maya tries to assist the Diwan in completing a biography of Jim Corbett, speculating on occasion about his alleged possession of letters between Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten. Meanwhile, Veer appears and disappears, busy with setting up a trekking agency, and Charu enters into a liaison with a cook at a new hotel. The deepening and shifting of intimacies, and the consequences that result, take place under the implacable gaze of the high Himalaya.

Other changes, too, affect everyday lives. Elections are nigh, and politicians of varying degrees of shiftiness seek to enforce their agendas. In addition, deforestation and construction leave scars on the idyllic landscape.

Roy’s sentences are graceful and unhurried, matching the pace of the novel. Some of the symbolism, though, is a tad overdone. Long-awaited showers put out a simmering forest fire as a couple finally consummate their relationship. Later on, a giant tree falls after a patriarch’s demise. Puzzlingly, the point of view strays away from the first-person on occasion, at times to detail Charu’s blossoming, pastoral love affair, at others to delve into the life of the buffoonish administrator.

Unfortunately, as the novel progresses, many of its narrative strands peter out. Be it Charu’s future, the threats against the missionary school or the outcome of the polls, they’re resolved in a matter-of-fact manner that robs the plot of vitality. Again, Maya’s relationships with the Diwan Sahib and with Veer are realigned in the finale through the abrupt tumbling out of hidden secrets, something that smacks of contrivance. Figuratively speaking, it isn’t Maya’s hand that brings about a resolution, but the author’s.

In its evocation of the permanent black of loneliness, and its rendition of the rhythms of life in a small town in the hills, The Folded Earth offers many rewards. It’s a pity that an organic unfurling of plot isn’t one of the novel’s strong suits.

(My review of Anuradha Roy's first novel is here.)

Laughing At Big Brother In The Middle East

2011-03-12T08:09:00.000+05:30

This appeared in today's The Indian Express

THE JOKERS Albert Cossery

With the cries from Tahrir Square still being heard all over the world, Albert Cossery’s The Jokers is a tart reminder that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Written in French in 1964, and now translated by Anna Moschovakis, this slim, elegant work deals with challenging a repressive regime through the weapons of derision and mockery. As such, it is suffused with irony and gleeful malice.

The Cairo-born Cossery moved to Paris after World War II, where he lived till his death in 2008. The Jokers, the fifth novel of the author who was referred to as the Voltaire of the Nile, is set in an unnamed Middle Eastern city, although James Buchan’s introduction specifically states that the setting is Alexandria.

In this city, a group of people come together to oppose the bug-eyed governor, a symbol of the administration, whose latest decree is that beggars be removed from the streets. For this new breed of revolutionaries, the governor and his ilk are “nothing but puppets pulled by strings, their words and gestures nothing but the grotesque convulsions of a buffoon”.

The four of them – a charismatic landowner, a louche man-about-town, a self-made businessman and a schoolteacher – come up with a plan to paste posters all over the city that praise the governor to such an extent that laughter would be the only possible response. Later, they write to the newspapers calling upon the public to donate money to be able to erect a large statue of the governor. This, then, is revolution via ridicule: a refusal to take corruption and venality seriously, to laugh in the face of Big Brother.

As a counterpoint, Cossery also depicts a more typical, violence-prone revolutionary, mocking his misplaced sense of pride and determination to engage with the authorities at all costs. The ringleader of the jokers, on the other hand, claims that he wants to let “tyrants lead the way and [be] even stupider than they are…they’ll have to prove themselves the greatest buffoons of all”. It’s a statement that brings to mind the actions of Jaroslav Hasek’s good soldier Švejk.

It’s not wonderfully entertaining all the way, though. At one point, the interiors of a casino are described as being reminiscent of “a Hindu tomb”. Indeed. While this may be a fault of the translation, a larger issue is the casual misogyny with which Cossery treats his female characters, and the fact that one of them, a daughter of the governor’s powerful ally, is shown to be a seductress manqué when she is merely “almost seventeen”.

For all that, The Jokers is memorable for its subversive satire that masks a deep-seated contempt for oppression and human vanity. It’s said of one of the book’s characters that “he delighted in the endless spectacle of man’s folly and, like a child at a circus, never failed to find life wildly entertaining”. Throw in a dash of disdain, and it’s a statement that could well be applied to the author himself.

Call Diverted

2011-02-27T09:02:00.000+05:30

This appeared in the latest issue of Tehelka

INDIA CALLING Anand Giridharadas

You know a nation’s economic prowess is on the ascendant when the non-fiction sections of bookstores groan under the weight of titles that claim to explain how and why. Anand Giridharadas’ India Calling is the latest addition, another “intimate” look at how India has changed. At times a family chronicle, at others, a collection of journalistic sketches, it’s a book that’s disappointingly limited in scope.

Giridharadas writes about how his parents moved to America in the Seventies and his upbringing there. On trips back to India, he found scarcity, bureaucracy and frozen beliefs about one’s place in the world: “India, in my limited and impressionistic view, seemed a land of replicated lives, where most people grew up to be exactly like their parents…” There’s much here that reads like one of those commonplace novels by second-generation South Asian-Americans. However, borne on winds of change, the author, at 21, finds himself on a flight to India for a stint with McKinsey, later becoming Mumbai correspondent for the New York Times and its allied publication, The International Herald Tribune.

Most of the book appears to be a survey of the country from the confines of south Mumbai. Giridharadas does travel, of course, and there are accounts of trips to a hamlet near Nagpur, to Ludhiana and to Hyderabad. He tells us the stories of a migrant in Mumbai, his city of dreams; of a small-town young man on the make; of a Naxalite ideologue and his disdain for globalisation; and of a Punjabi joint family facing a rupture between its traditional and modern factions. There’s also an unremarkable interview with Mukesh Ambani, as well as a potted account of their family’s rise. Though Giridharadas demonstrates a fluent prose style, there’s much use of often-heard words such as “revolution from below”, “new regime” and “flowering of self confidence”.

In every case, the author draws parallels from his own family, not only from his parents’ lives but also the differing attitudes of his maternal and paternal grandparents. In conclusion, Giridharadas asserts that globalisation and economic growth have made Indians achieve “an independence of the soul” by growing into roles beyond those laid down by their caste, parents or society. Of course, he hastens to add, the country still has to lift itself out of “the family relations of guilt, the never-questioned rituals, the intricate taxonomy of castes and sub-subcastes, the rural cruelty, the poverty…”

Issues such as what it means to be modern without reference to the West, the perils of runaway consumerism or venal politics are glancingly touched upon, if not ignored. The vexing outcome: half-memoir, half narrow-prism portrait.

Karachi Noir

2011-02-20T11:35:00.000+05:30

This appeared in today's DNA.

INVITATION Shehryar Fazli

Some say there are only a limited number of basic plots and subjects, and writers of fiction have to constantly re-invent these to suit their needs. One such template is that of a stranger coming to town, and one such theme is that of loss of innocence. In his debut novel, Pakistani author Shehryar Fazli employs just these models.

Invitation is based in the Karachi of 1970, a setting that also animated Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography. It’s a place and time where almost all conversations revolve around Bhutto, Yahya, Mujib, the role of the army, and the elections in what was then known as East Pakistan. As such, Fazli joins company with the current crop of writers from Pakistan – with the notable exception of Daniyal Mueennuddin – whose work stresses upon linking the personal with the political.

Into this milieu arrives Shahbaz, Invitation’s narrator, returning after 19 years in Paris. We soon learn that Shahbaz’s father fled Pakistan because of his involvement in the infamous Rawalpindi Conspiracy of 1951, and has now sent his son back to resolve a dispute with his aunt over shared family property, a 36-acre mango orchard.

Shahbaz, unschooled in the ways of his native city, has to negotiate class differences and an inadequate knowledge of Urdu to achieve his aim. As the days pass, he listens to the stories of the people he meets while trying to construct one of his own. One of the novel’s clear strengths is its evocation of the personalities he gets close to, from Ghulam Hussain, his Bengali chauffeur, to Mona Phuppi, his aunt, to Brigadier Alamgir, an old contact of his father’s who now runs the Agra Hotel, to Malika, a cabaret dancer from Cairo who performs nightly at the Agra. The character of Shahbaz himself is a curious mix: on the one hand, a self-questioning innocent who’s far from worldly-wise, and on the other, one who seeks out drugs and whores with equal avidity.

The Agra Hotel, one of the novel’s main settings, can be seen as a microcosm of the nation’s corridors of power – a place frequented by diplomats, police officers, fundamentalists and politicians – just as the dispute over the mango orchard mirrors the quarrel over the future of an incipient Bangladesh.

When he isn’t visiting the orchard and wondering how to win over his aunt as well as evict the squatters there, Shahbaz dallies with prostitutes and lies about in a drug-induced haze. After becoming the brigadier’s guest at the Agra, he enters into a liaison with Malika, and then compromises himself by paying petty bribes to a local police officer and, more importantly, by meeting members of the Jamaat-i-Islami who also engage in mysterious closed-door discussions with the brigadier.

The loss of innocence and betrayal that transpires applies equally to Shahbaz as well as Pakistan. Late in the novel, the brigadier remonstrates: "You don't realise, you don't see the bigger picture. You think shifts in power are brought about by ballots and polls and primaries and what-have-you. Here, they're not. It's still the twelfth century. Birth, death, marriages, wars, they're the things that move politics”.

As ought to be clear by now, Invitation isn’t short of colour and incident. Fazli’s prose is stylishly confident, detailing actions and interactions with verve, be it an opium-soaked qawwali performance or the animated conversations at the shack of Ghulam Hussain. As the novel progresses, the connections between the personal and the political do become belaboured, but the overall narrative energy makes Invitation, for the most part, an assured and readable debut.

Just So-so Story

2011-02-19T09:29:00.001+05:30

A lightly-edited version of this appeared in today's The Hindustan Times

THE URBAN JUNGLE Samrat

A classic 1920s postcard featured an illustration of a bespectacled youth with a cloth-bound volume in his hand asking a simpering young woman whether she liked Kipling. Her reply: “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled”. When it comes to The Jungle Book, among those who’ve kippled are Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book) as well as the writers at Disney. Now, there’s Samrat’s The Urban Jungle which, as the title indicates, transposes Kipling’s characters to a metropolitan setting. An interesting premise, but one that’s let down by fuzzy execution.

Prepare, then, to meet Jimmy Mowgli, grandson of the original feral child. This naïve lad leaves his family in Haripur, next to the Seeonee jungle, to arrive in New Delhi for a job with an environmental NGO. Being an alienated, sensitive sort of fellow, he finds it hard at first to blend in, and this leads to moments of gentle satire on the ways of those in the metropolis.

Soon enough, Jimmy makes both friends and foes. Among them, the panther-like Heera, head of a security services firm; the affable Balu, photographer and man about town; the lone inspector A. Kala; and the menacing Shamsher Khan, poacher and arms trafficker. Jimmy’s allies also include a local faction of the Bandar-log, with whom he has the ability to communicate, and whose president lives in Rashtrapati Bhavan, no less.

The prose, and the telling, is pleasant enough, barring the occasional sentence such as “His hormones started shaking and his heart started quaking”. Jimmy, alternating between innocence and violence, sometimes comes across as a bit of a prig, especially when he utters lines such as: "The people of Haripur are not junglis. They are not beasts. They have manners, they have morals, they are in touch with our culture and nature, and they are not forever in a race to show off their money or earn more of it."

Along the way, the focus on the urban jungle dissipates, and the location shifts to an actual jungle. The narrative strand of Jimmy’s being a “star spy in the employ of the monkey republic” peters out, and there are other blind alleys, such as devoting time to his flailing attempts at wooing women.

It all comes down to a drawn-out dénouement: a character introduced almost at the last minute, the sleek Kaushal Acharya, a hypnotic yoga guru-cum-intelligence analyst known as KA, sets out with Heera and others to rescue an abducted Jimmy. The original Mowgli, too, gets into the act with a little help from a band of primates, to make the bad guys stop their monkey business. Taking another cue from Kipling, one could say it’s a Just So-so Story.

Spare, Disquieting Power

2011-02-14T11:03:00.000+05:30

This appeared in yesterday's edition of New Delhi's The Sunday Guardian

NEMESIS Philip Roth

As of now, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria are the four countries in the world where the polio virus is still endemic. Should the ongoing immunisation campaigns be successful, polio could well go the way of smallpox in being completely eradicated. Although fear of the affliction is on the wane, this, of course, wasn’t always the case. In mid-20th century America, for example, there was a series of polio epidemics that left thousands crippled, notably President Roosevelt. Such an epidemic, and the tragedy and fear that follow in its wake, forms the backdrop of Philip Roth's 31^st book, Nemesis.

The moment a novelist uses an infectious outbreak as a subject, one is on guard for allegorical resonances. In Albert Camus’ The Plague, a city in Algiers is ravaged by a pestilence because of the citizens’ initial reluctance to act, the obvious parallel being with the Nazi occupation of France. Closer home, Kalpish Ratna’s The Quarantine Papers contrasts an outbreak of plague in 19^th century Mumbai with the fear over the city after the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992.

Nemesis revolves around the travails of the idealistic Bucky Cantor, 22-year-old physical education instructor in Newark, New Jersey. It is a sweltering summer in 1944, and Bucky has escaped the draft because of poor eyesight. (As it turns out, he proves to be myopic in more ways than one.) Roth’s evocative descriptions of Newark’s Jewish neighbourhood puts one in mind of his first published pieces of work, such as Goodbye Columbus: “…most of the stores were closed except for Tabatchnick’s, catering to the Sunday morning smoked-fish trade, the corner candy stores that were selling the Sunday papers, and the bakery, selling coffee cake and bagels for Sunday breakfast.”

It’s when boys from the playground that Bucky oversees start to fall ill with polio that the people of the neighbourhood start to worry, taking what precautions they can to prevent the epidemic from spreading. There was no polio vaccine at the time – it was at least a decade away – and more boys get infected, causing the uneasy Bucky to finally listen to his fiancée’s advice to join her at a summer camp where she is working as a counsellor. Though Bucky does this, he remains guilt-ridden over leaving the polio-stricken town. All too soon, however, boys in the camp start to get polio, too.

Without giving too much away, the rest of this slim novel details Bucky’s fate, outlining a theme that Roth has explored in his past few novels such as Everyman and Indignation: the role of capricious chance in our lives. As the father of one of the afflicted boys says, “You do only the right thing, the right thing and the right thing and the right thing, going back all the way. You try to be a thoughtful person, a reasonable person, an accommodating person, and then this happens. Where is the sense in life?” Later, Bucky is “struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance.” This sentiment is summed up at the novel’s finale by a character who was a boy at Bucky’s playground: “Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance – the tyranny of contingency – is everything”. Nemesis lies in wait for each one of us.

Given today’s terror-stricken times, another reading of this outbreak could well be the climate of fear and suspicion capable of infecting us all. Take the town’s reactions to Howard, a mentally-challenged neighbourhood youth, whose personal hygiene is suspect and who is pilloried as being a carrier of the virus. At another time, Bucky’s doctor says: “I’m against the frightening of Jewish kids. I’m against the frightening of Jews, period. That was Europe, that’s why Jews fled. This is America. The less fear the better. Fear unmans us. Fear degrades us.” Such instances apart, Roth keeps his narrative literal and on-the-surface; such a reading is only peripherally supported by the text.

As with his other late-stage novels, Roth’s prose tries to make up in bluntness what it lacks in sinuousness. What is of note here is the care taken with structure. The ending packs a punch because of a shift in point of view, and the final scene, a re-enactment of Bucky’s prowess in his prime, is all the more poignant because of its placement. Nemesis, then, may not be as capacious as the work of Roth’s prime, but does possess a spare, disquieting power.

Novel Musings

2011-02-12T08:31:00.000+05:30

This appeared in today's Mint Lounge

THE NAIVE AND THE SENTIMENTAL NOVELIST Orhan Pamuk

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur. That these disparate works can be classified under the common heading of a novel speaks volumes of the form’s chameleon-like nature. This is one of the reasons that, as Orhan Pamuk points out in The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist, it has become our dominant literary form: “Now, in every corner of the world, the vast majority of those who want to express themselves though literature write novels”.

It would take a brave soul, then, to “explore the effect that novels have on their readers, how novelists work, and how novels are written”. This is what Pamuk attempts in the six essays that make up this volume, the text of the Charles Eliot Norton lectures that he delivered in Harvard in 2009. The title is derived from an 18^th century essay by German litterateur Friedrich Schiller, “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry”.

As Pamuk points out, Schiller’s use of the words “naïve” and “sentimental” differ from the ways in which we use them. “Naïve poets are one with nature….They write poetry spontaneously… [and] have no doubt that they will adequately and thoroughly describe and reveal the meaning of the world”. In contrast, the sentimental writer is emotional and reflective: “he is unsure whether his words will encompass reality….So he is extremely aware of the poem he writes, the methods and techniques he uses, and the artifice involved in his endeavour”. After more than three decades of being a novelist, Pamuk writes, he’s managed to find equilibrium between his naïve and sentimental sides. (Certainly, it’s instructive to re-read his The Museum of Innocence keeping this in mind.)

Things become woolly, however, when he elaborates on his conception of a novel’s “centre”: “a profound opinion of insight about life, a deeply embedded point of mystery, whether real or imagined”. Every novel, he says, has such a centre: the act of writing becomes a way to crystallize it, and that of reading, a way to uncover it. How this centre is different from what’s referred to as a novel’s theme or subject is not touched upon, and such musings leave one more mystified than enlightened.

Pamuk is more sure-footed when he updates E.M. Forster’s classic definition of flat and round characters in fiction. “People do not actually have as much character as we find portrayed in novels,” he says. “Furthermore, human character is not nearly as important in the shaping of our lives as it is made out to be in the novels and literary criticism of the West”. This is one of the few instances where Pamuk moves away from the verities of the novel in its 19^th century realist avatar, one we are in thrall to till today.

With numerous references and allusions peppered through these lectures, what shines through is the dedication and passion of Pamuk, the reader. The excitement and insight with which he speaks of some of his favourite authors – Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, among others – is palpable. There is the additional pleasure of tracing how his reading informed his own journey as a novelist, from the traditional template of Cevdet Bey to the more experimental My Name is Red to an alliance of the two in The Museum of Innocence. Other personal reflections find a place too, some of which he’s touched upon earlier in his Istanbul and in his Nobel lecture. His decision to give up painting for writing in his early 20s, for instance, and how this led him to conceive of the novelist’s art as a form of painting with words.

Art, Picasso once said, is a lie that tells the truth. The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist is a pleasant and informed excursion into the lies and truth of the novelist’s art.

Less Novel, More Social Document

2011-01-30T10:40:00.000+05:30

This appeared in today's DNA.

THE COLLABORATOR Mirza Waheed

There are two ways to read Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator. The first, as a social document throwing light on the tribulations of those in Kashmir from the early 1990s; and the second, as a novel based on the same material. The first reading yields a moving account of the brutal uprooting of a way of life with the coming of suspicion and atrocity, reminiscent of Basharat Peer’s compelling Curfewed Night. Read as a novel, however, The Collaborator is much less fulfilling.

Waheed’s debut takes us into the mind and world of a 19-year old Kashmiri narrator, son of the headman of his village on the Indian side of the Line of Control. His friends, along with most young men of the area, have fled across the border, and he continually speculates on whether they will return, whether they’re in a training camp, and whether their love of music and cricket will have been subsumed by militant activity.

The narrative circles between the narrator’s “then and now”, starting with his taking up an assignment by Captain Kadian, the area’s army officer. He’s told to venture into disputed territory, count the bodies of those shot while crossing over, and recover ID cards, arms and ammunition. Though horrified by this task, he carries it out with regularity, and Waheed provides nightmarish descriptions of the slaughter encountered as the narrator wonders who he has become: “The armed caretaker of the unknown dead, the chowkidar of my own dead ilk, the sole witness to a machine of carnage or a shameless forager of friends’ remains, a petty ID-card thief, or the grim reaper?”

The contrast between an Edenic time spent with friends and the hellish present is brought out time and again; this is a novel painted in Manichean black-and-white. As a result, characterisation suffers -- Captain Kadian, in particular, is a caricature of a hard-drinking, abuse-spewing army man. Then, there’s the all-too-common problem of the Sagging Middle: between the set-up and the drawn-out denouement, there are many passages that impede momentum. There’s even an unconvincing, half-hearted love interest. Waheed’s prose is charged and urgent, but often becomes overwrought, sometimes stressing the obvious: “Among other things, the Line of Control also curtailed bonding of the blood, prevented contact between brothers and sisters, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, as if it were a sin.”

Where The Collaborator scores, however, is in its descriptions of the village’s daily activities that are so rudely sundered by searches, interrogations and curfews. In Waheed’s hands, many such scenes are made resonant. Take this one, for example: “What the papers said was entirely different from the evening Doordarshan news that Baba and I watched on our wood-encased, shuttered Weston TV, so I always waited for the papers, which sometimes took all day to get to us, or just tuned in, with Baba again, to the crackling BBC news on his leather-bound Philips Jai Jawan transistor.” There are other well-rendered episodes too, such as the traumatic account of the torture and subsequent fate of the elder brother of one of the village youths who has gone missing.

A challenging, but necessary, task when composing a novel based on incidents that one is close to is to step back and disengage in order to successfully reshape and fictionalise the material. Especially so if the incidents happen to be harrowing. This is a hurdle that The Collector doesn’t quite overcome; yet, it deserves to be read as an on-ground account of what the people of Kashmir have gone through.

A Sterling Testimonial

2011-01-22T11:24:00.000+05:30

This appeared in today's The Indian Express

PEREIRA MAINTAINS Antonio Tabucchi

It’s been said that a book’s style and its content are two sides of the same coin. It’s a pleasure, then, to come across a work that so completely exemplifies this. Pereira Maintains, written by Antonio Tabucchi in 1994, translated by Patrick Creagh in 1995 and now re-issued by Canongate, is a novella that owes much of its haunting power to its form: that of a testimony. But who is narrating this testimony, and to whom? This ambiguity, never fully resolved, pervades the book, especially its ending. Indeed, the word “maintains” – earlier translated as “declares” – tolls throughout the work like a bell.

Pereira Maintains is set in Lisbon in the summer of 1938, when the spectre of fascism is stalking the continent. The city is tense because of the death of a labourer, a member of the Socialist Party, at the hands of the police. As we’re told, “the country was gagged, it had no choice, and meanwhile people were dying and the police had things all their own way”. The eponymous Pereira, a portly, middle-aged widower, editor of the culture page of Lisboa, a faint-hearted evening paper, muses: “This City reeks of death, the whole of Europe reeks of death”.

Pereira, feasting on omelettes washed down by sweet lemonade, seems content to fill pages with translations of 19^th century French authors until he meets Monteiro Rossi, a radical youth, and his girlfriend Marta. Almost against his will, he begins to support them by commissioning articles as well as with small sums of money. Monteiro and Marta, engaged in anti-authoritarian activity, continue to cast their spell on Pereira, making him wonder whether his life until now has had any meaning. Bit by bit, his conscience stirs until he is compelled to act; the dramatic ending unspools like the finale of a Costa Gavras film.

The book is rife with ironies and dualities. At one point, to justify Lisboa’s turning a blind eye to the country’s condition, Pereira says, “We are a free and independent paper and do not wish to meddle in politics”. Tabucchi also takes care to work in oppositions: between the resigned Pereira and the radical Monteiro; between Pereira’s priest and his doctor; between those who write romances and those more socially engaged. Most importantly, Tabucchi asks us to dwell on the many intersections between art and politics, on whether the former should exist separate from the latter.

At one point, Pereira recalls his uncle saying, “Philosophy appears to concern itself only with the truth, but perhaps expresses only fantasies, while literature appears to concern itself with only fantasies, but perhaps it expresses the truth”. Pereira Maintains expresses the truth, as Mohsin Hamid writes in his introduction, by conjuring “out of its small hat a vast and touching sense of the humane”. Remarkably, it does all this in less than 200 pages.

It's The Economy, Stupid: Musings On The Rise Of Asian Literary Prizes And Festivals

2010-12-31T09:50:00.000+05:30

This appeared in the latest edition of The Caravan

Cherchez la femme goes the pulp fiction cliché: look for the woman, and you’ll discover the cause. When it comes to the novel as a genre, one could as well say, cherchez l’argent: look for the money. To know where the novel is headed, move away from the fiction section of the bookstore and look instead at the business books. The number of titles with ‘Asia’, ‘India’ and ‘China’ in them confirms once again the little secret at the heart of novel’s rise. Like the football star in Jerry Maguire, it’s always been hollering, “Show me the money!”

After all, the novel’s recognition as a distinct genre came about in 18^th century England with the pecuniary rise of the middle class, becoming a mirror to reflect a society’s growing and secure awareness of itself. (Wealth gives rise to leisure as well as education; both of these give rise to the urge to read fiction.) It’s no coincidence too that the so-called boom in Latin American writing in the early seventies came at time when Latin American economies were themselves going through a boom. (Their debt crisis was still some years away.) And now that the economies of Asia are set to outstrip the rest, it’s the literature of this continent that being given legitimacy. Something one can see in the Asian Man Booker, the inaugural DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the rising number of Western authors at the DSC Jaipur Festival and the recent Hay Festival in Kerala, for example.

A look at the business operations of the sponsors of such activities is instructive. The DSC website proclaims that it is “one of the fastest growing infrastructure developers in India”, and the Man site announces itself to be “a world-leading alternative investment management business”. Infrastructure, investment: as the sign that appeared in Bill Clinton’s campaign headquarters during his 1992 campaign so pithily put it, “It’s the economy, stupid”. No wonder they’re keen to seek cultural legitimacy in Asia.

By no means, however, is such patronage to be frowned upon: the arts have always depended on wealthy backers in order to flourish, as Michelangelo, among other Renaissance masters, well knew. Besides, any activity that brings the attention of the public to the written word has to come under the heading of A Good Thing.

Which brings us to another knotty issue: how is “Asian” defined when it comes to such awards? Clearly, there’s no homogeneity in the continent in the way there is in, say, the United States. Given also that knowledge of and writing in English is widespread largely only in the Indian subcontinent coupled with a lack of good translations – and the means to make such translations happen – how representative can such awards be? There are no easy answers to this and it’s certainly something that must have exercised the minds of the organisers a great deal. The Man Asian rules simply specify that the author be a citizen of an Asian country, but it’s the DSC Prize that’s come up with an ingenious workaround: their award is open to any book by “an author of any ethnicity from any country which predominantly features themes based on South Asian culture, politics, history, or people”. Had it been published last year, then, Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music, revolving around Western classical music and based in London, Venice and Vienna, would not have been eligible. Perhaps that’s a petty cavil and an exception, but it does highlight one of the issues that such awards will increasingly face.

Take the recent charges leveled by some at the International Prize for Arabic Fiction supported by the Booker Prize Foundation and thus known as the Arabic Booker. It’s not really representative, say some. There’s a quota system favouring some countries, others assert. Inevitably, there are harsher voices accusing the prize of pandering to the West, ignoring women and – but of course -- “corrupting culture”. Fortunately, the Asian Man Booker and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature have stayed above such allegations.

The question worth asking, though, is whether such legitimisation of Asian literature – however you categorise it -- will in the long term lead to changes in our conception of the novel as we recognize it today. Will European linearity and causality give way to circular serpent-eating-its-tail narratives? Will realism and the plight of the individual yield to a flatter, multi-layered perspective as in a Mughal miniature?

This will form an increasingly visible part of a re-forging of Asian identity in the decades to come. As Patrick Smith points out in his Someone Else’s Century, one of the things that Asia will have to now grapple with is the question of how to be modern without reference to the West. It’s an especially pertinent query as, even in the West, there are signs of exhaustion with the novel as we know it. David Shield’s Reality Hunger is the most recent megaphone for such concerns, and recent novels by Damon Galgut, Jennifer Egan and Geoff Dyer – to take just three disparate and random examples – represent a branching out from convention. Will an ‘Asian way of thinking’ lead to more re-evaluation? Happily, of all art forms, it’s the novel that’s most suited to such malleability, being from the start a protean genre. Somewhere out there at this very minute there’s an unpublished author grappling with these very questions, and his or her novel will probably show up in a future Asian shortlist. If the economy doesn’t tank, of course.

12 For 2010: My Books Of The Year

2010-12-30T13:18:00.001+05:30

I read more in 2010, but I didn’t read enough. Emma Donaghue’s Room, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, to take but three examples, still await perusal. (I did plough through the Franzen, however; my review is here.) With that caveat in mind, here’s a selection of books worthy of mention, in no especial order.

I. VOICES IN MY HEAD

Skippy Dies, Paul Murray. Shenanigans at an all-boys’ school in Dublin involving students, teachers, swimming coaches and priests. Written in an exuberant high-five style that threatens to – but never does – go off the rails.Very funny, very moving.

The Ask, Sam Lipsyte. A satire on America today, and by implication the rest of the world. Follows the fortunes of a character collecting donations for Mediocre University and what transpires when he runs into a wealthy former classmate. Obscene, outrageous and hilarious.

Home Boy, H.M. Naqvi. The travails of Shehzad, a ‘metrostani’ lad from Pakistan caught in the cross-currents of post-9/11 New York. Distinguished by great chutzpah in prose style – yet not so flashy that one doesn’t feel empathy for the predicament of his main character.

II. THE LIVES OF OTHERS

Teach Us to Sit Still, Tim Parks: A memoir of prostate trouble and how Vipassana meditation showed a way out of it. Frank, forthright and revealing, especially when it comes to sojourns in Italian meditation retreats and how chronic pain affects daily life.

Beautiful Thing, Sonia Faleiro. Ripping aside the sequined curtain that separates Mumbai’s bar dancers from the rest, this exploration of their seamy subculture is brave and compelling, expertly walking the line between the hard-bitten and the wide-eyed.

Following Fish, Samanth Subramanian. Informative, droll essays of travels along the Indian coast while sampling and otherwise immersing oneself in fish and the people who depend on it. Covering better-known destinations (Kerala, Goa) and those that remain anonymous (a secret destination called Xanadu). Delicious.

Gold Boy Emerald Girl, Yiyun Li. Short stories of an older generation of stoic Chinese men and women reflecting on the changes in their country and their lives. Those wearying of realism would do well to immerse themselves in the quiet voice and telling details of the first and longest story, ‘Kindness’.

Saraswati Park, Anjali Joseph. A counter to all those grand Mumbai novels, this inward-looking narrative moves in low gear, with more than a few echoes of Amit Chaudhuri. The well-chosen details make the familiar unfamiliar and the wry musing keeps you immersed in her characters’ lives.

III. FRACTURED REALITIES

Ilustrado, Miguel Syjuco. A kaleidoscopic debut that attempts nothing less than an audacious retelling of Filipino history. Made up of straightforward narrative, blog posts (and comments), essay extracts, e-mails and more. That all of this hangs together to create a very readable unity is testament to Syjuco’s skill.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Zachary Mason. Puzzles, inversions and reversals on the tales that comprise Homer’s epic of the return to Ithaca. Sometimes inventive, sometimes playful and always haunted by the spirit of Borges.

In a Strange Room, Damon Galgut Fiction? Memoir? Travelogue? At times it reads like a hybrid, but this novel of encounters in Greece, Africa and India is always haunting in its precision and effect – especially the last section dealing with travails in Goa. The alienated man’s Eat Pray Love.

IV. WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

A Reader on Reading, Alberto Manguel. Essays from one of the foremost readers of our times, touching upon writers from Lewis Carrol to Borges, mixing the personal and the critical. Encompassing times, places, moods, identities and associations that his act of reading conjures up, it’s a reminder of how there are “a few safe places as real as paper and as bracing as ink”.

Bollywood Ending

2010-12-22T20:32:00.000+05:30

This appeared in the latest issue of TimeOut Mumbai

LOST AND FOUND C.P. Surendran

Alejandro Inarritu’s influential 2000 film, Amores Perros, depicted unconnected lives in Mexico City coping with the aftermath of a crippling traffic accident. It’s a film with which poet C.P. Surendran’s second novel, Lost and Found, has structural affinities, even though, by the end, his characters discover that they are connected by ties that are stronger than that of mere co-incidence.

Here, the city is Mumbai, the incident is a hostage situation in the wake of a terrorist attack and the characters range from a washed-up journalist to a reckless auto rickshaw driver to a porn website content provider to an urchin-turned-actor to a rampaging cow. .As well as a young terrorist from Pakistan, part of a larger group, whose actions bring the rest together. From 26/11 to Slumdog Millionaire, Surendran’s aim is clearly to produce a work that resonates with the city’s contemporary ethos.

In this, he is only partially successful. The novel doesn’t fully cohere as, apart from its improbabilities, many passages dealing with characters’ individual lives remain fragmentary, not adding heft to the whole. The inclusion of the reveries of the terrorist group’s handler, ensconced in Pakistan, exacerbate this. (Altaf Tyrewala’s No God in Sight was a much more successful Mumbai-mosaic novel.)

Surendran’s prose is proficient, skating on the edges of the poetic, even though it hits the occasional purple patch – such as the time when one of his characters “rams his oaken oar” into another; both are then subject to “eddies of endorphins” and “a swamp of pheromones”, after which, “gaily, they sail the sea of senses”. Quite a voyage.

What’s most worrisome about the novel, however, is the denouement, which involves the coming together of twins separated at birth and the discovery that their real mother as well as suspected father are in the vicinity. One can only hope that some dark irony was behind this faux-Bollywood finale, even though the narrative suggests nothing to support this premise. Perhaps Danny Boyle can make something of it.

Fate Slipping The Lead Into The Boxing Glove

2010-12-21T09:48:00.000+05:30

THE UPRIGHT PIANO PLAYER David Abbott

One of the most revered copywriters in advertising, winner of a Clio lifetime award, a One Club Hall of Fame inductee and creator of memorable work for Volkswagen, Sainsbury’s, The Economist and Volvo. That’s David Abbot, who retired as chairman from the company that bears his name over a decade ago. Turns out he had one more trick up his sleeve: a novel.

Those expecting a fictionalised behind-the-scenes account of the goings-on at Abbott Mead Vickers will be disappointed by The Upright Piano Player. To be sure, Henry Cage, the central character, is a lot like Abbot in that he’s recently retired from a communications company, would rather read a book in a café than mingle with colleagues and is known for a gentlemanly, forthright attitude to work. It’s unavoidable that some of the sentiments attributed to Cage will be viewed as autobiographical, such as a refusal to work on cigarette brands, or statements such as: “He had always been wary of business books and their familiar lexicon of warrior virtues”.

That apart, the novel is more of an exploration of the workings of a malign kismet and how this impacts the emotionally-reticent Cage. It begins in 2004, with him losing his grandson in a horrifyingly gratuitous and violent accident. We segue back to 1999 and Cage’s life at 58, just after premature retirement. He lives alone in London, with memories of an estranged son and a divorced wife in Florida. Cage is confronted and then stalked by Colin, a loutish ne’er do well, has a casual affair and learns of two life-changing events: that Nessa, his wife, is ravaged by cancer, and that he is a grandfather of Hal, a four-year-old. Not quite the right way to start one’s sunset years.

In proficient, occasionally evocative, prose, the narrative moves between London, Norfolk and Palm Springs as Cage comes to terms with what Wodehouse would have called Fate quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove. This grim tale is undercut by intermittent, understated humour, much of it in the form of social commentary: from observations on trendy yet inefficient coffee-shops to management jargon masking a lack of original thought.

There are some finely-observed passages, such as a description of the goings-on at the lobby of the Ritz Carlton. Other episodes, though interesting by themselves, are at odds with the narrative – such as a lengthy recounting of the transcript of Orson Welles’ attempt to provide the voice-over of a radio commercial.

Bravely, Abbott delves into the consciousness of not just Cage but others in his ken, such as the brutish Colin, the valiant Nessa and even the growing Hal. This, unfortunately, doesn’t work as well as it should, as there’s an overall reserve to the writing style that comes in the way of veracity. (At one point, Abbott describes a London policeman by saying that his suit wasn’t the only thing buttoned-up about him; that applies equally well to many of the book’s passages.)

The larger issue is that the plot depends heavily on co-incidence – chance encounters in cafes, streets and brasseries – for it to be entirely convincing. It’s as though Abbott doesn’t trust his characters enough to let them off the tight leash of plot. The Upright Piano Player, then, is well-written and even moving, but suffers from an over-determined flow of events to make its point.

The other advertising luminary who retired to take up novel-writing is, of course, Indra Sinha: you'll find my review of his Animal's People here.

Tandoori Moose Nights

2010-12-13T09:15:00.000+05:30

This appeared in yesterday's The Sunday Guardian

ONCE UPON A TIME IN SCANDINAVISTAN Zac O'Yeah

The Mediterranean is dry. Sand dunes cover most of central Europe. Tropical monsoon winds, having deserted Asia, now sweep over Nordic countries. And Sweden, along with most of the continent, has joined the Asiatic Union after the Chutney Referendum.

This is the landscape of Zac O’Yeah’s curry-drenched dystopian thriller, Once Upon A Time in Scandinavistan. On the face of it, this conceit set in the near future seems to rest on the notion of colonization in reverse; however, as the book progresses, it becomes clear that environmental depredations, and what they can do to our ways of life, are equally important.

Skip past the awful cover art, then, and meet Herman Barsk, a Swedish official working with “a professional core unit for the detection of anti-social activity” in Gautampuri, formerly known as Gothenberg. The world he inhabits is one of a “native” Europe over-run by a resurgent Asia. The streets are decrepit, beedi-smokers are everywhere, chaat and mithai shops dot the city, roads have names such as Tagore Chowk and Ambedkar Avenue, the rupee is the official currency, and the bureaucracy is in the hands of the Indian Administrative Service. Presumably, too, there are paan stains everywhere.

The grizzled, stressed-out Barsk comes across four dismembered, unidentified bodies in the tandoor of a greasy spoon known as the Tandoori Moose. His investigations into this grisly incident lead him, in ever-widening circles, to unravel the truth behind a mysterious ashram, an escorts club, the actions of a British expatriate known, not very subtly, as McGuffin and the personal lives of his colleagues – one of whom is called Salman Kitabwalla.

Along the way, Barsk has also to manage his amorous feelings for Kumkum, former Miss Bihar and current Swedish postal worker, which he does by, among other things, reading The Kama Sutra and trying to track the whereabouts of her husband. The action, as well as writing style, is suitably manic as a battered Barsk lurches from one imbroglio to another in pursuit of a woman who’s called “a blonde cannibalistic bloodsucking vampire”. Ultimately, it all comes down to a nefarious terrorist plot – with a neat inversion on our notions of contemporary terrorism.

O’Yeah creates this world painstakingly: time and again he reminds us of Barsk’s reality by piling detail upon detail. Some references are sharp, such as Ingmar Bergman being referred to as “an old native cinema director” and Thor “a long-forgotten native God”. There are others that are painful, such as a mention of Madonna becoming the UN General Secretary and Halle Berry the first woman president of the United States. (What next, Sarah Palin as best-selling author? Oh, wait, that’s already happened.) Equally, for every joke that works in the novel -- such as Kumkum referring to the poet Browning and Barsk thinking of a machine-gun -- there are others that are sophomoric, such as Maoists demanding that the India-colonised planet of Mars be renamed Maors.

While much of it is fun to read, this is a novel that clearly needed a restraining hand, the absence of which is apparent on every page. Take O’Yeah’s similes, which tend towards the bizarre. A car's engine protests “like a frog being eaten by a Frenchman”; rain falls like “hard-boiled ostrich eggs crashing out of space”; and a man threatened by a pistol makes a sound “like a lapdog falling into a cement blender”. Ouch.

When, for no apparent reason, we’re treated to a long drawn out scene of Barsk’s meeting with a film director, one C.D. Dhoti, and matinee idol Phillumappa Ishtarjee, we know that the author – in the manner of Michael Chabon in his The Yiddish Policeman’s Union – has fallen too much in love with his fictional universe to relinquish it.

Though likely to be compared with Nordic noir such as the work of Steig Larsson and Henning Mankell, this is closer in its antic spirit to the environmental thrillers of Carl Hiaasen, with his deranged characters running amok over Florida swamplands. Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan, then, is audacious in conception and has much brio in narration. It falls, unfortunately, into the trap of believing that too much of a good thing is even better.