Psst. Sar! You Are Wanting Book To Read?

Confessions of an Indian book pirate: the next instalment of my Yahoo India column.

Pak Pack

This appeared in today's The Indian Express

GRANTA 112: PAKISTAN

Taken as a whole, Granta’s Pakistan-themed issue has  a packaged, carefully-assembled tone to it. Feudal attitudes? Check. Kashmir? Check. The wild NWFP? Check. Karachi cosmopolitanism? Check. Fundamentalism? Check. This imparts to it something of a neat, sanitized air. Taken individually, however, there is much to savour because of the considerable strengths of contemporary Pakistani writing in English. 


Two of the fiction narratives that stand out are Mohsin Hamid’s short, chilling A Beheading – possibly inspired by Daniel Pearl, and which could be said to complement Hanif Kureishi’s earlier Weddings and Beheadings – and Mohammed Hanif’s Butt and Bhatti, a sardonic, dark account of the love that a pistol-packing policeman feels for a more grounded medical assistant. Also haunting, if a tad over-determined, is an extract from 79-year-old Jamil Ahmad’s forthcoming debut novel, The Wandering Falcon, about forbidden love and its consequences that’s set on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In passing, it’s a pity there’s nothing here by H.M. Naqvi, author of the excellent Home Boy. (And the disappointment one feels upon realizing that Daniyal Mueennuddin has contributed not a short story but a poem is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the poem itself reveals its linkages and emotional affect upon a few readings.)

What gives the collection its necessary spine are the pieces of non-fiction. Intezar Hussain speaks of negotiating an atmosphere of heightened religiosity and “unthinking nationalism” during the Zia regime, putting one in mind of Salman Rushdie’s personal recollections in Shame. Another fascinating piece that overlaps the same period is Kamila Shamsie’s Pop Idols, on Pakistani pop music, the emergence of the country’s Sufi rock, the experience of listening to bands such as Vital Signs and Junoon, and what Islamisation has done to some of the country’s most promising musicians.

Two Western journalists also have pieces here, one dealing with the past, the other with the present, each one again serving as a counterweight. Pulitzer Prize-winning Jane Perlez of The New York Times writes on Mohammed Ali Jinnah, mixing facts that are well-known with others that aren’t, bringing his secular credentials to the fore. And Guardian correspondent Declan Walsh travels among the Pashtun in north-west Pakistan to find “roasting hospitality, smouldering pride, cold and clinical revenge”. Then, there’s Basharat Peer’s piece on Kashmir which, like his Curfewed Night, is passionate, informed and mixes the personal and the political to telling effect.

A delightful change of tone comes in the form of Sarfraz Manzoor’s White Girls, detailing his hopeless infatuations over the years, his parents' admonitions to stay away from 'white girls' and of how he finally met the woman he was to marry. Clearly, the author of Greetings from Bury Park hasn’t lost his touch.

In his brief introduction to the pieces of art curated by Green Cardamom and featured in this volume, Hari Kunzru writes of “a particular urgency that exists as much in the desire to trace small, personal actions…as in overtly political gestures…” It is just such an urgency that animates the best pieces in this collection.

Novels At Work

My Yahoo India column on fiction that deals with, in Alain de Botton's words, "the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty, and horror of the workplace".

A Gentle Madness

This appeared in Sunday's DNA.

THE GROANING SHELF Pradeep Sebastian

There are debates aplenty over the talents of authors, the superiority of one genre over another and the worth of awards. But when it comes to actual books themselves, all bibliophiles have the same issues. Among them, the problems of storage, the unread piles, the frustration of not getting the title one wants and the sheer joy in the tactile sensation of holding a book in one’s hands. As Louis Szathmary once said, “You want to possess the books, you want to own them, you want to hold them. Perhaps you even hope that you will read them”.

Pradeep Sebastian has been writing about these subjects and more for years; his The Groaning Shelf is a collection of journalistic sketches that have earlier appeared in The Hindu, The Deccan Herald and elsewhere. These trace, as he puts it, a lapsed reader’s journey from “bibliophile to bibliojournalist to bibliographer”.

This, then, is a book about books. It’s about shelves, libraries, borrowing and lending, first editions, and the pleasures of browsing and collecting. Clearly, Sebastian is walking in the footsteps of others who have touched upon similar themes over the years, from Walter Benjamin to Borges to Manguel to Fadiman and more, some of whom he aptly quotes to buttress his views.

Some of the best pieces here are those that deal with Indian themes, such as the meditation on Amar Chitra Katha or the decline of the hole-in-the-wall lending library. Another noteworthy piece is on how books and bookstores have featured in Hollywood over the years. There are delightful personal accounts, such as his obsessive quest to track down Ira Levin in New York, or the time he spends in antiquarian bookstores. It’s also not without a pang that one reads about his impressions of Lotus House Books, the Bandra bookshop that is still missed.

Another section deals with writers who have afforded him pleasure, such as Pico Iyer, Michael Dirda and Jasper fforde. On occasion, he quotes from his correspondence with them, nowhere more tellingly than when he mentions a letter sent to him by Nicholas Basbanes: “Because books still matter regardless of where the technology is taking us, it is worthwhile, I think, to have as many champions for them as we can muster”. However, Sebastian is no neo-Luddite: there are also well-judged pieces on the e-book versus the printed word, as well as his experiences in tracking down rare editions online.

At times, though, one feels that the volume, like an overcrowded bookshelf, suffers from excess. Some pieces deal with books and writing only tangentially, such as the one on celebrities and their privacy, For all that, Sebastian wears his learning lightly: these riffs are written in a style that is affectless but never artless. When it comes to charting the gentle madness of bibliomania, he is always entertaining, well-informed company.

Reading America

This appeared in today's DNA.

DRIVING HOME Jonathan Raban

Though Jonathan Raban had been writing literary criticism and travelogues since the late Sixties, it was with Hunting Mister Heartbreak in 1991 that he really came into his own. This was his personal discovery of America, coinciding with his move from London to Seattle in 1990 at the not-so-young age of 47. As he writes, he moved for “casual and disreputable reasons”: “I met someone…the usual story”.

It was a move that had the felicitous side-effect of making him find subjects that re-animated his writing, mainly the lives and landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. Since then, he’s produced many more impressive works, notably the travelogues Bad Land and Passage to Juneau; and the novels Waxwings and Surveillance.

His Driving Home is a scrapbook of an Englishman in America, a collection of journalism from 1993 to 2009 that earlier appeared in Granta, Vogue,The New Republic, The Independent, among many other British and American publications. It’s arranged in strict chronological order, which immediately poses a problem to the reader going through it from front to back – book assessments follow travel pieces that follow author profiles that follow meditations on the state of America. (More than once, this reviewer was tempted by the heretical notion of ripping out all the pages from the volume and re-arranging them thematically.) It’s a ragbag then, albeit one loosely held together by the theme of displacement.

In his marvelous introduction Raban talks of the time he first learned to read as a child, and years later, reading on the job as an apprentice bus conductor. Here, he writes of his discovery of literary critic William Empson and his determination to model his style on the man best-known for Seven Types of Ambiguity. Indeed, piece after piece in Driving Home is testament to the hard work that Raban puts into his writing, from Empsonian close analysis to teasing out biographical details and their implications. Of Driving Home, he says: “The pieces that follow are readings – most of them readings of American landscape, literature and politics, along with some backward glances to England that may betray a lurking nostalgia for a society more settled in shape, more instinctively known, than the one I live in now,”

Many of the pieces are analyses of others who have lived in or explored the Pacific Northwest – among them the travelers Lewis and Clarke, novelist Bernard Malamud and poet Theodore Roethke. Another influence, Robert Lowell, is mentioned often. There is much, too, on the nature of travel, especially by sea: “I love the subtlety and richness of all the variations on the theme of society and solitude that can be experienced when travelling by sea”

Inevitably, American politics creeps in, too, with reportage on Obama’s presidential campaign, election night and his inaugural speech. One of the pieces on the theme of how a government uses technology to monitor the words and deeds of its citizens is clearly the inspiration for his novel, Surveillance. Along the way, there are gems such as: “One might see Guantanamo as the Bush administration’s most audacious attempt at nation-building: a tiny offshore state, run, like any totalitarian regime, by an all-powerful president, the military, and the intelligence services”

Of his initial move to Seattle, he writes, “I was a newcomer in a city of newcomers, where the corner grocer came from Seoul, the landlord from Horta in the Azores, the woman at the supermarket checkout from Los Angeles, the neighbor from Kansas City, the mailman from South Dakota”. This ability to think of oneself as a stranger in a strange land, and depict the familiarity and contradictions that result, has served Raban well through his writing career.

Among The Believers

This appeared in today's Mint Lounge

THE MASQUE OF AFRICA V.S. Naipaul

“Africa has no future”. That is how V.S. Naipaul ended a 1979 interview with Elizabeth Hardwick in the New York Times Book Review. This was just after the appearance of A Bend in the River, his novel set in Africa -- a continent to which he wasn’t a stranger, living in Uganda as writer-in-residence at Makarere University in 1966. Then again, he visited the Ivory Coast in the early eighties, fruit of which was the non-fiction account, The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro. It’s here that one finds the first glimmer of the theme that runs through his new work, The Masque of Africa. Despite his bleak pronouncements on the continent, Naipaul clearly feels impelled to return every so often; this journey may well be his last.

He revisits Uganda and the Ivory Coast, and travels to Ghana, Nigeria, Gabon and South Africa, seeking what remains of primordial African belief: “the older world of magic”, and how it has changed, or not, with the advent of Christianity, Islam and the “modern” way of doing things. He seeks out the grass-thatched palaces of Africa’s original rulers, visits shrines and other reliquaries, meets soothsayers, shamans and witch-doctors, and speaks to those whose lives have been altered by initiation rites. He finds common themes: “Doubles, astral journeys, the fragility and yet the enduringness of ritual, the idea of energy, the wonder of the forest”.

For Naipaul, clear-sightedness has always been the writer’s supreme virtue. Here, however, his view of things is coloured by the past. At the book’s start, he recalls visiting a British-laid botanical garden at the edge of Lake Victoria and adds: “Sometimes (a reminder of the wildness by which we were surrounded, but from which we were protected) the ground of the Garden was flooded in parts by water from the Lake seeping through”. This, then, could be a metaphor for what follows: fear of intrinsic chaos overcoming external order.

He sees dirt and garbage everywhere. On a single page, describing his arrival at Kano, a city to the north of Nigeria, one comes across the words ‘dust’ and ‘dirt’ twice, and ‘garbage’ thrice. The word ‘garbage’ appears thrice on the very next page itself. In addition, he makes much of the supposed African tendency to eat dogs and cats, as well as much of their wildlife. That some of the heartless methods of disposing of felines appear to be the merest hearsay doesn’t seem to bother him. Time and again he obsesses over the amount of money he will have to spend on guides, interpreters, witchdoctors and the like -- although this obsession does yield a fresh insight on one occasion: “…it is strange that rituals which would once have seemed necessary and vital, serving what was divine, beyond money, have to be disregarded when there is no money.”

There are powerful passages, such as the description of an initiation at Libreville, and his marshalling of detail is as acute. Not everyone, for example, would be able to describe a soothsayer’s attire as a “white gown that came out grey in a wash from the local water”. Equally, though, there are other times when his precision and command of the language seem to falter, such as when the local legend of an Ivory Coast chieftain’s rise to power is repeated twice for no reason, or when Unilever is quaintly referred to as “the multinational firm of Lever's” and then, just a few pages later, as “the international firm of Lever's”.

In the closing section, on South Africa, he says, “I expected that a big struggle would have created bigger people, people whose magical practices might point the way ahead to something profounder”. As before, he’s disappointed. Here, “race ran as deep as religion elsewhere”: hardly a new observation. Here, too, he segues into a brief account of Gandhi’s doings in South Africa, which seem out of place as they have no connection to the stated theme of the book.

Throughout, Naipaul is frank about his limitations because of the age at which he is travelling. (At one time, his legs give way while venturing to a witch-doctor’s village; a wheelbarrow appears as a vehicle, and this, understandably, does not suffice.) While one can admire such intrepidity, there are other statements that shock: “It was hard to arrive at a human understanding of the pigmies, to see them as individuals. Perhaps they weren't”. Pronouncements like these remind one of Vivian Gornick’s observation that though much of his writing is strong and original, “the lack of tenderness wears on the nerves”. It is this absence of empathy, in the end, that creates a distance between him and his material.

It's A Rich Man's World

This appeared in the latest issue of Time Out Mumbai

UNION ATLANTIC Adam Haslett

The fall of Lehman Brothers, the fraudulence of Enron, the subprime crisis: these and more have dominated recent headlines as well as our imaginations. Perhaps in no other time has so much notional wealth in the hands of so few meant downturns in the lives of so many. It’s this that Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic takes as its subject.

Set in the early years of this decade, this is the tale of the Blackberry-wielding Doug, mid-thirties banker with Boston’s Union Atlantic Bank. A defalcation by a trader in Hong Kong, and Doug’s part in the ensuing scenario, leads to an unraveling of his carefully created life. The bank’s wily chairman apart, Doug also has to battle with Charlotte, retired teacher and campaigner against the large mansion Doug has erected.

The shadow of The Great Gatsby hangs heavy over the novel, and not just because of narcissism and casual amorality. There’s the lavish party – fireworks included – thrown by the bank’s chairman and his wife; at another point, a to-be lover creeps into Doug’s bedroom and is entranced by a wardrobe-full of shirts, suits and shoes.

Charlotte’s mental instability – she imagines her pet dogs talking to her, one Puritan, the other Black – reminds one of the troubled characters in Haslett’s earlier collection, You Are Not A Stranger Here. There is empathy in her portrayal as well as in those of other characters such as the Doug-besotted Nate and his stoner friends.

Haslett’s prose is both efficient and evocative, and he’s particularly good in capturing the alchemical properties of the world of finance: “… his churning mind turned lucid and through it power flowed as frictionless as money down a fibre-optic line, the resistance of the physical world reduced to the vanishing point.”

 Because of these strengths, one tends to overlook the plot contrivance of Charlotte’s brother being head of the Federal Reserve and thus having to deal with Doug, too. This nuanced novel, then, is a worthy companion piece to recent non-fiction such as Michael Lewis’ The Big Short or Joseph Stieglitz’s Freefall.

Tasted Any Good Books Lately?

One could say of Roth's Portnoy's Complaint that it's “cheeky and bold, with a distinctly tart aftertaste". Of Roth's more recent novels such as Everyman, one could affirm that they're "late-harvest, yet not past their prime, with an acidic finish”. An extract from my Yahoo India column on why we ought to talk about books as though they were wine.

Love And Longing In Mumbai

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

SARASWATI PARK Anjali Joseph

A letter-writer in his fifties rekindles his desire to write short stories. His wife leaves him to stay with her relatives and then is reconciled to his ways. And their nephew, studying in the last year of college, gains a measure of self-confidence after two gay relationships. That, more or less, is what happens in Anjali Joseph’s Saraswati Park.

Not the stuff of stirring drama then; yet the novel is, in its own way, a moving and finely-observed account of the lives of those who find themselves on the margins of Mumbai. Joseph’s eye for the minutiae of everyday life is unerring – details are not so much observed as they are massaged. In her hands, the quotidian is a many-splendoured thing, and this is what gives the book a rare quality of intimacy.

All three characters, living together in a house in “a new colony in a part of the city they hadn't really known existed”, are defined by dissatisfaction. The first, Mohan, the letter-writer who sits outside the GPO, buys second-hand books, symbolically scribbling on their margins. In his own way, he tries to weave the events of his present and past (his father’s own fledgling writing career, the streetwalker who comes to him to draft a letter) into short works of fiction. He is a person who, like Lambert Strether, should be told to “live all you can; it’s a mistake not to”.

His wife, Lakshmi, ekes out days of quiet desperation, frustrated by her husband’s hermetic habits. She acquires a taste for regressive TV serials; visits the neighbourhood temple; and mourns her elder brother. Ashish, their nephew, staying with them for a year while he finishes college, feels incomplete without a relationship to depend upon. At first, he falls for a “rich, thoughtless, overprivileged” classmate, then for an older, more urbane professor. All three characters, by the novel’s end, will gain a degree of fulfillment brought about by increasing self-knowledge. This is, one supposes, the point of naming their colony after the goddess of learning.

There is much in Joseph’s prose that is reminiscent of the work of Amit Chaudhuri. Yet, it is through employing a wry outsider’s gaze that she creates a style of her own. One of the pleasures of such defamiliarisation is that it shows us the things we take for granted in a new light. A long-distance bus is “an air-conditioned Hindi-film-music-playing torture chamber”; the Gateway of India is “a sort of three-dimensional gift tag…stuck on the city”; and street urchins playing football seem “to be engaged in a strange dance whose purpose was to cover every inch of the lane with the ball, which slipped between them as though attached to their feet by lengths of elastic”.

Such observations could be said to weaken the novel's fabric as they move away from the character's worlds and introduce, however unobtrusively, an author's viewpoint. Nonetheless, the dissonance between this outsider’s way of looking at things and an insider’s portrayal of objects and emotions give rise to Saraswati Park’s particular charms.

Sometimes, there is puckish, almost Narayanesque humour in the way the characters think of themselves. When Ashish’s friend reminds him of Gandhi’s saying that we have to be the change we want to see in the world, he thinks: “In that case, I’d have to be a very good-looking boy who’d sleep with anyone and make no fuss about it”.

Because of the novel’s meditative, unhurried procession of sentences, often supported by semi-colons, there are no overt highs and lows. Instead, life’s upsets, lover's quarrels, partings, and even a death are marked by a polite knocking on the doors of inwardness.

This can at times give Saraswati Park an overlong Sunday afternoon languidness. Yet, there are vivid images too, some involving pigeons and owls, others reminiscent of Imagist poetry. Gulmohar flowers, to offer one example, are “pasted like frail paper toys against the glistening wet macadam”. (Another unwitting echo of Amit Choudhuri; in The Immortals, he describes a Bandra lane filled with “precise carpets of bright red” gulmohur flowers.)

Saraswati Park, then, is a delicate and filigreed piece of work that can be read as a counter to the romanticism and grand narratives that populate so much of Indian writing in English these days.  At one point, Ashish thinks of his uncle as “…someone for whom each detail of life had its own significance, revelatory as though it had been a clue in a cosmic detective story”. That statement could well apply to the novel as a whole.

Absurdistan

Or, why more novelists ought to embrace mischievousness, black humour, invented lands and implausible metaphors: My next Yahoo! India column