Reading's Serious Pleasure

Today's Sunday Guardian column.

Now that Jaipur's "largest free literary festival on earth” has come to a close, it’s time to return to the quiet, private activity that makes all such festivals possible. Reading. As Anna Quindlen observes in How Reading Changed My Life, “Of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung.”

Her own love of reading is what Wendy Lesser, founding editor of the Threepenny Review, unpacks in her new book, Why I Read. Why does she read? “To pass the time. To savor the existence of time.To escape from myself into someone else’s world.To find myself in someone else’s words.To exercise my critical capacities. To flee from the need for rational explanations.” In short, as the book’s subtitle has it, reading yields serious pleasure.

Lesser goes on make clear where she finds such pleasure, and in this, she reveals herself to be more conservative than catholic. Nineteenth century literary realism is her touchstone, and Henry James her exemplar. Authors bare their prejudices and partialities in the books they write; readers do so with the ones they read.

Many of Lesser’s opinions – and some can be incisive – arise from a dissection of her favoured tradition. On plot and character, for example, she writes, “it doesn’t make sense to think in terms of plot versus character: plot modifies character and character modifies plot…we know what people are only by seeing what they do when confronted with what happens to them”.

It’s not that Lesser only focuses on so-called literary fiction: happily, murder mysteries and detective stories come in for praise, too. “A novel like A Coffin for Dimitrios or Ripley Under Ground is as good as almost any book written during that time, and I venture to say we will be reading these novels for as long as people read John Updike or Toni Morrison.”

She is acerbic, however, when it comes to those who fall outside her preferred purview: “There is a certain kind of writer who seems to feel that unless he is breaking apart everything that came before him, composing something that in his own view is astonishingly new, he is not writing great literature.” She makes the point that style and structure should be at the service of overall intent and not merely ornamental, but strangely, scorns those who have done so. Franz Kafka’s “strongest works are almost unbearable because of the airlessness of their self-enclosure” and Joyce’s Ulysses “is a novel that has always gotten on my nerves”. The past, as always, has the answers, with Cervantes and Swift held up as successful innovators. (To be fair, there's also praise for Murakami and Bolano as well as -- oddly enough -- Norman Mailer.)

Other Modernists are hardly mentioned, and she also disdains the unreliable narrator, “that foolish, pathetic guy who thinks he’s telling us the whole story when we and the author are obviously meant, at least eventually, to see around him”. Anyone who’s read Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, to take just one example, would find that hard to digest.

Lesser’s slightly more accommodating of e-books. Preferring the physical object for its spatial orientation, among other things, she nonetheless is a fan of Project Gutenberg and rightly points out that those "who have grown up reading bound books will miss them if they disappear, not because printed books are objectively preferable, but because we will feel deprived of something we care about".

Such devotion to reading in an age of electronic distraction is admirable, but Lesser's insistence on preferred texts makes her book overly prescriptive. Then again, her title does have a personal pronoun. For a different point of view, one has to turn to another logophile, Alberto Manguel, who, echoing Kafka, once wrote: “I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place?"

To Be Read In Bed

A slightly condensed version of this appeared in today's Sunday Guardian.

I spent most of last weekend in a horizontal position, something I can heartily recommend to anyone seeking a break from the city’s hustle and bustle. One’s needs become simple: a comfortable bed, some food and, of course, wi-fi access. My bed, however, pales in comparison to the one designed for Maharaja Sadiq Muhammad Khan Abbasi IV of Bahawalpur in the 1880s. Built in Paris, it weighed more than a ton, including 290 kilograms of silver, and featured statues of buxom females at each corner. When the Maharaja stretched out, music began to play and the arms of the figures moved, creating a soothing breeze at the head of the bed and keeping flies away from the royal feet. History does not record whether this was conducive to sleep.

The story of the kingly bedstead is among the many recounted in The Art of Lying Down, a delightful little volume by Bernd Brunner, recently translated from German by Lori Lantz. Brunner defines himself as working at “the intersections of cultural history and the history of science” and has, in the past, written about subjects as diverse as the history of Christmas trees, aquariums and the moon. In his “guide to horizontal living”, Brunner makes a persuasive case that choosing to lie down can be “a calculated move to escape the ever-present pressure to be fast and efficient”. Such surrender to gravity is not an act of laziness but one of resistance: to turn one’s back on the modern world, one keeps the back in bed. It’s a move that doesn’t call for defensiveness; as G.K. Chesterton wrote, “If a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it without a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy man.” Tellingly, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt have also pointed out that the “three great acts of life” are “birth, coitus, and death,” all of which usually involve lying down.

Brunner then branches out into other aspects of his subject. He’s no votary of lying down in the great outdoors for prolonged periods, but Turkish hamams meet with his approval, as do divans. He also notes that the Greeks and Romans were known to eat and drink while lying down. This, of course, calls to mind traditional Indian habits of reclining during music and dance performances, as well as such representations of Ganesha, Vishnu and Buddha, among others, not to mention Mughal miniatures of lounging lords.

The Art of Lying Down also goes into details of how mattresses and recliners have evolved (Brunner waxes eloquent over the invention of the coiled spring) as well as the ways and poistions in which people have wooed sleep. Examples of the latter include the classic Spoon, the Tandem Cyclists, the Zipper and the extreme Bread and Spread, “in which one partner lies directly on top of the other (who somehow manages to avoid being crushed or suffocated)”.

Writers are among those who have long known the worth of lying down; it’s almost a professional perk. Mark Twain and Proust are perennial examples. Edith Wharton, according to Brunner, celebrated her eightieth birthday in bed with a candle-covered cake that caught on fire. (A nice anecdote, but one wonders at its veracity because Wharton died when she was 75.) As for Flaubert, it’s said of him that he “would have liked to travel, if he could, stretched out on a sofa and not stirring, watching cities, ruins, and landscapes pass before him like the screen of a panorama.”  And Truman Capote was characteristically unambiguous: “I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch.”

Lying down can also be a form of activism and Brunner mentions John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s famous 1969 bed-in to protest the Vietnam War. He could have also cast his eye on the numerous horizontal demonstrations over the years – there was one just two months ago, when thousands of cyclists lay across a London street to agitate against dangerous traffic conditions. A case of lying down to take a stand.

Clearly, the art of lying down doesn’t exist just for its own sake. Brunner affirms that “it is inextricably linked to other art forms: the art of doing nothing, of being content with little, of enjoyment and relaxation and, of course, the proverbial art of love”. He even suggests that “human culture can be viewed as a side effect of our ancestors’ efforts to get a good night’s sleep”. Such efforts continue; meanwhile, one takes solace from the epigraph by Groucho Marx: “A thing that can’t be done in bed isn’t worth doing at all”.

My Favourite Unread Books Of The Year

This appeared in today's Sunday Guardian.

What a year it's been for not reading. From translated novels to Indian debuts to American bestsellers to British award-winners, they skulk on my Kindle and lurk on my shelves, each one a priceless memory of time spent doing anything other than reading. Few pleasures come close. Here, then, are my favourite unread books of the year, in no particular order of merit.

To begin with, there were the big novels -- big in terms of size, big in terms of accolades. The sheer heft of these volumes, containing intricate interactions between characters spread all over the globe, was so impressive that I had to spend a whole morning squeezing out space on the shelves to accommodate them. This is why, alas, I only had time to read the just the first few pages of one of them before being pulled away to save the brave explorer in a new version of Temple Run. (Priorities, people, priorities. Not to mention marauding monkeys.)

Then, there were the works of non-fiction that spoke of the rise of India, the decline of the West, the resurgence of China and the diversity of Bora-Bora. What insights, what analyses, what weaving together of personal anecdotes and public observations! I put one of them down for a minute to ponder over the writer’s interpretations, only to find a little later that as I had lightly dozed off, I was unable to pick it up again. I will soon, of course.

From Europe came the novellas, little existential depth charges that spoke of mankind’s helplessness in the face of a malign universe as well as in the plate of stale croissants for breakfast. These were beautifully translated and packaged; I could look at the cover art for hours. In fact, that’s exactly what I’ve done so far. Each one is etched into my brain.

Next, the novel from America that everyone was talking about, the one that was ecstatically seized upon by the cognoscenti, the one that you simply had to have an opinion on if you were to be Among Those Who Count, the one that spoke of high philosophical ideas in the guise of an unvarnished tale about the pleasures of obtaining fresh croissants for breakfast. Immediately after purchasing this, I came across so many perceptive Facebook posts touting its charms that I felt I knew it intimately without having to read a word of it.

History and biography, too, played a large role in my year of not reading. After all, who wouldn’t want to enrich one’s knowledge of the present by learning about the long shadow of past events and the deeds of men who define our age? I do need a few uninterrupted hours to really get into these books, however: I wouldn’t want to do the authors’ labours a disservice by simply skimming. Until I find such time, though, I’ll just have to make do with checking out the Wikipedia entries on their subjects. They’re quite informative, too.

As always, Indian writers didn’t disappoint this year. In particular, there was the much-heralded debut about love in a small town that was called “lyrical”, “incisive” and even “luminous” by the reviewers. I must confess that I read so many of the reviews that all the details of plot and characters were revealed to me. I spent time sending congratulatory tweets to all the critics instead, and am now eagerly awaiting the author’s follow-up.

Books aside, there was also the joy of collecting the year-end issues of magazines, with their lyrical, incisive and luminous articles on the highlights of the year gone by, not to mention the lists of the year’s favourites. I have a shiny stack of them next to my bed, which I’m going to turn to as soon as I clear the backlog of other such issues. Right now, I’ve reached 1977, and Saturday Night Fever is sweeping the nation. I can’t wait to find out whether they made a sequel.

In Defence Of Eloquence

This appeared in today's Sunday Guardian.

Apart from the larger issues that have come to the fore during the Tehelka imbroglio, the many e-mails in public have thrown light on our reactions to the way words are used. Tejpal's style in these exchanges – “penance that lacerates”, “adamantine feminist-principle insistence”, “light-hearted banter” -- has been much mocked and seen as an attempt to obfuscate, not illuminate. In contrast, the woman journalist's responses have been clear and consistent, not to mention courageous.

Such suspicion of high-flown language isn't new. Plato was famously skeptical of sophistry and rhetoric, with Aristotle defining the latter as a set of skills that would enable one to persuade people of a given argument. From the Puritans on, the land of the free and home of the brave has favoured a plain style with succinct, declarative sentences, something upheld and championed by the influential Strunk and White. In England, George Orwell was one of many over the years who called for short words and unadorned diction; as he put it, “good prose is like a window pane”. Many contemporary writers, from Naipaul to Hemingway to Carver have followed suit, though in their own distinctive manner. (This is not to suggest that writing clear prose is a simple matter; arranging words to make them mean exactly what you want them to mean can be fiendishly difficult, whatever the style.)

In e-mails, official correspondence and other such communication, it's unarguable that the simpler the better, without the pollution of jargon and unnecessary legalese. With other forms of writing -- fiction and verse, for example -- it's not as obvious. While one clearly isn't advocating mendacity, if we all switch to such straightforwardness, we lose much of the beauty that language is capable of.

In his recent The Elements of Eloquence, Mark Forsyth joins those who have pointed out how Shakespeare used the art of rhetoric to give his plays so much of their power. Calling him “the master of the memorable line” Forsyth goes on to demonstrate this by many examples. To mention just a few, there’s alliteration (“Full fathom five thy father lies”), pleonasm (“To be or not to be, that is the question”) and aposiopesis ("No, you unnatural hags/I will have such revenge on you both/That all the world shall…”).

Forsyth also illustrates how “the techniques for making a single phrase striking and memorable just by altering the wording” have helped many other writers (not to mention songwriters and copywriters). Oscar Wilde was a master of antitheses, for example: “The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves”. P.G. Wodehouse was known for his transferred epithets: “His eyes widened and an astonished piece of toast fell from his grasp”. T.S. Eliot did the same thing: “In a mere three lines of ‘Prufrock’ retreats mutter, nights are restless, hotels are one-night”. Moreover, “in Dickens' strange mind, mists were lazy, houses crazy, and snowflakes went into mourning and wore black".

Forsyth’s engaging examples to do with rhetoric apart, the firmament of contemporary fiction -- as I've written earlier -- is studded with literary stars for whom plain and simple just wasn’t enough. Nabokov is one of the more distinctive prose stylists, and his heirs are many, from Martin Amis to Will Self. Most Irish writers are possessed of the same sensibility: John Banville for one. Another John, John Updike, once described his style as "an attempt to give the mundane its beautiful due".

 As Forsyth says towards the end of his book, by using more than one rhetorical figure: “I hope I have dispelled the bleak and imbecilic idea that the aim of writing is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible. This is a fiction, a fib, a fallacy, a fantasy and a falsehood. To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility.” That may be carrying things too far, but the writers who view the elements of language as musical notes that make sentences dance are well worth paying attention to. On that point, I'm adamantine.

A Portuguese Sends A Postcard Home

My Sunday Guardian column.

Those who continually claim that the novel is dead are simply those who have closed their eyes to its potential. It remains unmatched as a form to, among other things, ask questions that have no neat answers and explore how we react to changes. Importantly it’s also a vessel for linguistic experiment. Alas, too few novelists nowadays attempt to take advantage of these possibilities.

The Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares isn't among them, as his four-novel Kingdom cycle amply reveals. These novels are loosely linked by overlapping characters, themes and a prose style that depends on defamiliarisation – almost as though a Martian was sending a postcard home from Earth, to borrow from Craig Raine. Such boldness and versatility has earned the young writer a clutch of awards as well as encomiums from other novelists. After he won the Jose Saramago Prize for writers under 35, the author after whom the prize is named commented, “In thirty years’ time, if not before, Tavares will win the Nobel Prize, and I’m sure my prediction will come true... Tavares has no right to be writing so well at the age of 35. One feels like punching him.”

The punch delivered by one of the novels in the Kingdom series, Joseph Walser’s Machine, is a good example of Tavares’s style, which has been called that of "alienated recognition" by one critic. Set in an unnamed European city, the novel follows the fortunes of Joseph Walser, an unassuming factory worker. Tavares delves into the symbiotic relationship between Walser and his shopfloor machine, riffing on the differences between the human and the mechanical and “the swiftness with which [machines] transform causes and necessities into beneficial effects”. Chaplin’s Modern Times was a comment on the mechanization of labour; Tavares takes this a step further to expose our double-edged dependence on means of production, making a distinction between things crafted by the hand and those created by the mind.

The novel now starts to fill in more details of its protagonist’s life and world. His wife is having an affair with his philosophical and garrulous factory overseer, and this personal invasion is matched by an invasion of the city itself: a war is underway and citizens live under occupation. These events too, as translator Rhett McNeill points out in his introduction, are described “as if they were occurring for the first time, divorced from both their historical resonances and their usual linguistic milieus”. This leads to several penetrating observations. “To be a patriot in peacetime is to be a coward, because it’s too easy,” writes Tavares, and then again, in a statement that echoes the rhythms of his prose: “Every man in time of war, individually, on his own, founded, as it were, a Ministry of Normality, which established, essentially, repetitions. Because only repetitions…allowed each individual to wake up to find themselves human the next day.” People make history, but history also makes people.

For a novel that’s so short, there’s a lot that Tavares manages to pack in, and this without making the whole appear inordinately rushed.  Allied to the Janus-faced nature of machines and the citizen’s experience in times of war is the role and nature of unpredictability and choice. This is brought out in scenes where Walser engages in games of dice with his friends who are later to rage against the war machine. “There were six numbers stuck to the die and they weren’t going anywhere,” Walser thinks. “It was this precision that excited him, this precision that was well-defined by immutable limits that, nonetheless, allowed room for his peculiar decisions.”

 History and morality, unpredictability and determinism, people and objects: these, then, are the axes around which Joseph Walser’s Machine swiftly rotates. Large themes indeed, but Tavares demonstrates the skill and insight to do justice to them. One of his earlier novels is entitled Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique – and that’s not a bad way to think of this one, too.

Novels, Screens And Reality

This fortnight's Sunday Guardian column.

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In an interview some years ago, Zadie Smith remarked that one of the challenges facing a novelist today was that of how to capture the reality of a person’s life at a time when he or she spent hours daily gazing into computer or phone screens and communicating via e-mail and text messages. In a hard-hitting piece in Slate this week, Daniel Sarewitz called this dependence “a problem we are powerless to resolve”; it’s time to acknowledge that “the moment you and your date finish ordering dinner you pull out your smartphones and start texting so you don’t have to face the possibility of silence; that you have come to believe that you more-or-less actually have read War and Peace because you read the plot summary on Wikipedia; that you find out what your kid is up to not by talking to her but by monitoring her Facebook page; that at work you simply cannot go more than 10 minutes without surreptitiously checking email no matter how much else you have to do”. Quite so.

Given that fiction is supposed to have the advantage of being able to create and map interiority -- our mental lives -- how does it do so convincingly at a time when so much of this interiority is informed and shaped by digital communication?

Some writers, mirroring the epistolary novels of the past, have simply incorporated e-mails wholesale – such as Matthew Beaumont’s e. Others have inserted e-mail messages into their narratives, as with David Gilbert’s recent & Sons. Such efforts seem forced – too obvious attempts to mirror new ways of communication. The problem is that such forms are so rooted in their own contexts that it’s hard, if not impossible, to knit them seamlessly into longer narratives. This is especially marked when you look at instances when text messages appear in novels – Gilbert’s & Sons again being one such. Then again, a new story by Jeffrey Eugenides in the latest New Yorker has a character playing Words with Friends on his phone, and this is more efficiently done, possibly because describing it is like recounting a game of Scrabble.  

One way out would be to take a leaf from the way we write reported speech – to write, for example, that a text message informed a character that he would be late, or that her Facebook status indicated that she was depressed -- instead of actually replicating content. But this, obviously, would create distance and lack the immediacy of direct dialogue.  Perhaps someone needs to come up with the equivalent of quotation marks for all digital communication.

It's an issue that can't be side-stepped, because it's going to come across as increasingly quaint to have novels of contemporary life peopled by characters who aren't engaged in periodic bouts of exchanging notes and gleaning information via screens. (Those writing historical novels must be heaving sighs of relief.) Movies, of course, face the same issue, and they're also going to have to deal with it in ways that fit into that medium -- one can't have, for example, a modern-day romantic comedy in which the protagonists don't exchange text messages or check Facebook pages obsessively. The next Richard Curtis film could well be titled Four Weddings, a Funeral and Several Tweets.

As for an allied issue, that of being unable to sustain attention because of digital distraction, there seems to be a mystifying rearguard action by novelists of simply writing longer works. After Richard House’s The Kills, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, to mention just three, comes the news that Knopf has paid close to $2 million for City on Fire, a debut novel by Garth Risk Hallberg that’s 900 pages long. One hopes it’s a worthwhile investment. As for me, I’ve found succour from such distractions in the pages of crime novels. So if you’ll excuse me, I need to return to the squares of Venice and the continuing exploits of the valiant Commissario Brunetti.

Meditation And Narration

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

In a blog post for the New York Review of Books last week, Tim Parks voiced a concern that many, in various ways, have recently expressed. Speaking of conventional, character-driven novels, he asks whether “the whole exercise has become largely irrelevant”.  “More and more,” he goes on, “I wonder if it is possible for a novel not to give me the immediate impression of being manipulated toward goals that are predictable and unquestioned”, referring to the typical structure and intent of such works, with their dilemmas, crises and portrayals of overcoming suffering. Despite digital distractions however, as he writes, such novels are clearly still preferred by many, perhaps because they create the illusion that life can be given a definite and reassuring shape.

Dissatisfied with such “reinforcement of a fictional selfhood”, he holds up the work of Bernhard, Beckett and even Lydia Davis as an astringent counterpoint. For his own part, he’s tried to express a different vision of self and narrative in his new novel, Sex is Forbidden. (That, at least is the title of the paperback; originally, it was the rather more sedate and appropriate The Server.) So, how well does Parks succeed in his aim?

The novel, written in the first person, deals with ten days in the life of Beth Marriot, a young woman at the Dasgupta Institute, a mindfulness meditation centre. (Much of the observed detail seems to be drawn from Parks’s own experiences, written about earlier in his memoir, Teach Us to Sit Still.) “Most people’s worries are about the future,” feels Beth, “but the longer I stay at the Dasgupta Institute the less certain I am about what happened before.” Parks makes her feel this way because, of course, the point of such vipassana practice is to stay focused on and aware of the present moment’s thoughts, sensations and emotions. And because human beings are story-telling machines – our minds join the dots and create causation – to lift ourselves out of such habituated ways is easier said than done. (One could almost say that the Buddha taught that one must transcend stories by becoming aware of them.)

This, then, is a disingenuous stream of consciousness narrative in which the present is continually being interrupted by the past and future. Beth has spent close to ten months at the retreat as “a server”, one who attends to cooking, cleaning and other chores, trying to forget her past life as a singer in a band, her devoted band-mate and her affair with an older painter, ending in a tragic accident. As she puts it, “I gave up everything for the band and I gave up the band for nothing”. Such thoughts continue to intrude no matter how much she tries to stay present: “The breath crossing the lip. The in-breath. The out-breath. Right effort. Right concentration. Right understanding.”

She finds further distraction when she appropriates and reads the diary of a fellow meditator; both of them are bending the rules, which do not allow reading and writing during the retreat. (“One thing leads to another when you think and write your thoughts down. False empty fantasies, painful formations of the mind, sankharas.”) The diarist, a publisher with a troubled personal and professional life, sometimes seems to echo Parks’s own thoughts: “What do stories do but glamorize pain?...all the pretentious sagas…They glamorize suffering.”  

In various ways, we see how Beth’s relationships with those at the institute mirror those that she’s left behind. She hasn’t escaped her stories, just changed the context. Parks’s narrative, then, doesn’t become an anti-novel or anything like it, being constrained by the strictures of the form. This is something he himself ruefully confesses in his NYRB piece: “the tale’s literary nature, its very presentation of itself as a novel…inevitably dragged it back toward the old familiar ploys, the little climaxes, the obligatory ironies.” For a novel that resists narrative, we’ll have to turn again to Beckett and a different sort of meditation, that of Murphy in his armchair.

Father, Sons And Everything In Between

My Sunday Guardian column.

“Fathers start as gods and end as myths and in between whatever human form they take can be calamitous for their sons.” That’s a sentiment explored in many works of fiction, from Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons to Hemingway’s short story of the same title down to Siddhartha Deb’s The Point of Return – to mention just a handful from an ocean of stories. This is the theme that David Gilbert also takes up in & Sons, his ingenious new novel from which the quotation at the start of this paragraph is taken.

The father in question is A.N. Dyer, a Salinger-like novelist who, now that he’s approaching 80, calls his sons home for a reunion. There’s Richard, a drug counsellor and aspiring scriptwriter in Los Angeles; Jamie, a maverick filmmaker in Vermont; and Andy, who’s much the youngest at 17, being born when his father was in his early sixties. A.N. Dyer’s first novel, Ampersand (yes, Gilbert’s title is very clever), was a critical and commercial success: “It seems to me,” a character says,  “you have Catcher in the Rye people and you have Ampersand people…To me Salinger is a stray dog you want to adopt, but A.N. Dyer is a different beast altogether”. The beast in question went on to write more than a dozen other novels, the last published ten years ago; now, shaken by the death of his childhood friend Charles Henry Topping, he tells his sons: “You should know my goal as a father – and I swear this is true – my goal was positively Hippocratic, to do no harm, and look where that got me. You could sue for malpractice. I am a reckless scalpel.”

This makes the novel sound like a study of writing and the family – but it’s a lot more. Too much more, in fact.  It begins and ends with a funeral, and is narrated by one of Topping’s sons, a character who, we soon realise, is making up much of the actions and thoughts of the rest. Throughout, first person swoops into third and then back again, in a wily feat of legerdemain. Gilbert's capacious act of imagination, then, is itself structured as an act of imagination. "I have always had an unfortunate tendency to spin myself into alternate universes," the narrator says, later spelling it out: “Maybe I was imagining myself as a ghost, invisible in this world, trying to understand the family I would haunt for the rest of my life.”

Then, there’s much space devoted to sending up different cultures – aspiring moviemakers on the West Coast and the shenanigans of high society in NYC's Upper East Side, for example, or the glittering set piece revolving around a high-profile book launch party, peppered with metaphors drawn from the solar system. (There’s an abundance of metaphors in the book, some delightfully apt, others stretched too far.) Further, Dyer’s revelation about the birth of his youngest son halfway through the novel is quite at odds with the rest: “How could anyone believe this nonsense?” the narrator confesses. “It seemed something concocted by Pynchon doing his best impersonation of Barthelme.”

To further gild the lily, Gilbert includes text messages, extracts from novels, e-mails and letters. Various tonalities blend together, sometimes uneasily, to create a work that sprawls more than it should.

Fortunately, there are rewards for persevering with & Sons. Gilbert’s prose is, for the most part, a worthy handmaid of his ambition, and can be supple and sinuous, mimicking the registers of thought. It can also sometimes capture characters in a sentence; here, for example, is Topping on his father: "He grew up shy, then aloof, then distant, his feelings best relinquished from the palm of his hand – a firm grope, a pat on the back, a semi-ironic salute."

Inside every fat person, it's nastily been said, is a thin one struggling to get out. You could say the same of many novels, and Gilbert's & Sons, with all its meretricious charms, would have been the better for being slimmer.

Maps Of Nepal

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

Read some of the more acclaimed short story collections of recent times, and you’d be tempted to think that the influence of Chekhov is on the wane, despite Alice Munro’s recent Nobel win.The gothic, comic sagas of Karen Russell, the revealing bravado of Junot Diaz, the black humour of Sam Lipsyte and the sardonic vision of George Saunders, to name a few: none of them can be described as belonging to the camp of quiet realism. Others such as Deborah Levy stray even further, with surreal vignettes and ice-cold prose. Even the recently-announced winner of the BBC National Short Story Award, Sarah Hall, tells the story of a woman who turns into a fox during a woodland walk with her husband.

Perhaps a reason for this is that the world they write about has already been mapped so closely by those who came before that a startling new vision is necessary. Other parts of the world, though, remain comparatively undescribed, and it is here that the lessons of the Russian writer make themselves apparent.

It’s in this context that Prajwal Parajuly’s The Gurkha’s Daughter ought to be seen. This collection of eight stories was earlier long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award (along with Janice Pariat’s Boats on Land) – and was also shortlisted this week for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the titles on which were described by Peter Stead, chair of the prize, as “young writers going for the big themes”.

Almost all of these stories are set in Nepal and its environs, and are marked by character-driven, open-ended plots delineated in simple but never simplistic prose. This is not to say that Parajuly doesn’t display ambition. To begin with, he explores the consciousness of a wide variety of people, from a Kathmandu servant girl to an unemployed Darjeeling graduate to a Bhutanese refugee to an IT professional in New York and more. (Chekhov: "It's easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.") There’s ambition also to be found in stories such as ‘A Father’s Journey’, which sums up the shifting, decades-long relationship between father and daughter. Further, there’s deft use of craft in ‘The Cleft’, with intercuts between past promises made to a set-upon domestic worker and her present predicament. Clearly, then, these aren’t tales of the aroma of Darjeeling tea or glimpses of Mount Everest – as one of the New York-based characters wryly states, these are the things that people ask him about when he tells them where he’s from.

Many of the stories deal with the gulf between the disadvantaged and the better-off, contrasting the dreams of the underprivileged with those “uncomfortable with the vast gulf separating one’s silver-spoon upbringing from another’s fast-improving but modest existence.” It’s a gulf of both class and wealth. An unemployed, impoverished engineer resents having to put up more well-to-do members of his extended family; a Muslim grocer holds his tongue rather than complain about shoplifting by the daughter of a well-heeled customer; and Bhutanese refugees in Nepal scheme to find a better life overseas. Politics enters some stories as an influence on private lives, be it the cause of economic hardship because of demands for a separate state or ambitions of making a living as a politician representing those without a voice.

The later stories are among the more moving, whether exploring the day-to-day existence of an ageing couple whose children have settled overseas, or the plight of a Gurkha family after the British have left. ‘The Immigrants’, set in New York, has a pleasing, gradual inversion of roles between an employer and his maid but is alas a bit too predictable, employing familiar tropes in the telling.

In an essay titled 'Learning from Chekhov', Francine Prose writes: “Read Chekhov, read the stories straight through. Admit that you understand nothing of life, nothing of what you see. Then go out and look at the world.” Parajuly, who has a debut novel out soon, seems to be doing just that.

Love (And Murder) In Tokyo

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

I’d heard much about Keigo Higashino’s murder mystery, The Devotion of Suspect X, but I read it only last week, my interest being piqued by the news that Sujoy Ghosh was to direct a Bollywood version. The Japanese film based on the book had earlier done well in its home country but is little known outside it; there’s a Korean remake too, as well as reports that Hollywood has evinced interest.  Inevitable, I suppose that Bollywood would raise its hand, too. To be fair, it’s exactly the sort of plot that would appeal to the person who’s made Kahaani.

The 2005 novel was published in an English translation by Alexander O. Smith in 2011 after it went on to sell a staggering 2 million copies in Japan. It’s the third of Higashino’s “Detective Galileo” books, the detective in question being one Manabu Yukawa, a brilliant, eccentric physics professor who aids the Tokyo police force and whose character traits clearly owe a little something to Sherlock Holmes. He isn’t centrestage during the entire book, however. The plot concerns itself with the predicament of Yasuko, a divorced single mother, and her neighbour and not-so-secret admirer, Tetsuya Ishigami. In a heated moment during an altercation with her bullying former husband, Yasuko finds that she’s strangled him with an electrical cord; the ever-watchful Ishigami then steps in and asks mother and daughter to let him handle the fall-out. No, that isn’t a spoiler: this occurs near the start of the book, with the rest being given over to the intricate web that Ishigami spins to keep the truth from coming out.

The police identify the mutilated body found on a riverbank as that of Yasuko’s husband, and the two detectives on the case piece together evidence that seems to point the needle of suspicion to Yasuko. One of the detectives contacts Yukawa, known as Detective Galileo, who takes a keen interest in the case because he finds that the neighbour, Ishigami, was a former classmate of his with the reputation of being an ingenious mathematician. (“It was odd to hear Yukawa talk about someone even more brilliant than himself.”) Now begins a cat and mouse game between the physicist and the mathematician -- and this, with its twists, turns and mathematical analogies, is one of the chief pleasures of reading the book. There are scarlet herrings, contested alibis and a surprising and innovative twist as Galileo uncovers the lengths to which Ishigami will go to protect those he cares about.

A poster for a 1966
 Bollywood film

Higashino’s prose – or the English version of it – is crisp and clear, gliding along effortlessly from event to event. There’s a great deal of attention paid to pacing and revelation of information in the form of well-structured scenes, and he also shows us the differing points of view of the main characters. (An exception to this is Yasuko’s daughter, who remains something of an enigma.) As such, it’s easy to see why a film-maker would be interested in the material. The transposition of locale is another matter, however. Higashino doesn’t exactly fill his novel with atmospheric Tokyo detail, but there are still several references to low kotatsu tables, bento-box lunches, bars and squatters along the Sumida River, to take just a few examples, and part of the fun of reading the novel is the evocation of Japanese life. (You can't take the Swedish out of Swedish noir, for example, which is why David Fincher set the Hollywood version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Stockholm.) Still, the plot of Higashino's novel isn't culture-specific, which means a change of mise-en-scene isn't unsurmountable. Other details that will probably be changed for Bollywood include Yasuko working as a waitress in a takeaway lunchbox restaurant to which she bicycles daily.

Ingenious and absorbing as The Devotion of Suspect X is, it does dip into sentiment at the very end, to do with unrequited love and sacrifice. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Hindi version was titled Balidaan.