You can buy them. You can borrow them. You can download them. But are all those books out there really worth your while?
Herewith some brief assessments.
From an essay inPicked Up Pieces(1975), John Updike's rules for book reviewing:
1. Try to understand what the author wishes to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
2. Give enough direct quotation — at least one extended passage — of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.
5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?
Update: Do also read Joseph O'Neill's wonderful appreciation in Granta: "The example of Updike is intimidating to the writer in the matter of sentences, in the matter of output, in the matter of aptitude – until, that is, one remembers that Updike himself was a stranger to intimidation, and that the Updike precedent ultimately authorizes, indeed obligates, the writer to give the task at hand his or her best shot."
“I am an American, Chicago-born,” said Bellow’s Augie March in his novel’s memorable opening sentence. Well, Alaa Al Aswany’s new novel is peopled by Egyptians, Chicago-bred, most of whom are enrolled in the University of Illinois’ medical department. The large cast of characters allows the author to create a microcosm of Egyptian society, much as in his earlier The Yacoubian Building. Of course, the postcolonial difference here is that these are Egyptians alternately embracing and fighting off the influence of America.
There’s the conservative Shymaa, conflicted between the desires of the body and the strictures of her upbringing; the brilliant but repressed Tariq; the radical Nazi; and the hypocritical Ahmed, among other students and professors, all of whom, in classic fashion, face conflicts that have the potential to change them forever. Most of the tales end on a pessimistic note, though the last section, dealing with the fallout of the Egyptian president’s visit to the US, skirts close to burlesque.
The narration is lordly and omniscient in standard 19th century style – barring one first-person tale -- and despite slabs of Chicago history being offered up every now and again, the city doesn’t really come alive as a backdrop to the characters. The dialogue is frequently stilted (as are the scenes of sex) and these, coupled with the author’s penchant of closing chapters on neat little suspenseful highs, make Chicago an uneven read.
What tips the scales in thenovel’s favour, however, is that the varied backgrounds and attitudes of the characters, and their reactions to the predicaments they face, do evoke a sense of the travails of the post-Nasser generation. This, along with storytelling vigour and critique of authoritarianism, make Chicago rise above its weaknesses.
Consider, first, this description of the state of a man on the morning after: “His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.” That’s Kingsley Amis, writing about the hangover of his most well-known character in Lucky Jim.
This is an author who knows what it’s like to imbibe one too many on one too many occasions. As he writes in his memoirs: “Now and then I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time”. But his liking for the stuff wasn’t merely brutish: Amis was ferociously well-informed about all aspects of all sorts of liquor, from their tastes to their origins to their combinations to their after-effects.
Which is why dipping into his Everyday Drinking is such a bracing exercise. The book brings together three out-of-print volumes: On Drink (1972), a manifesto of his bibulous views; Every Day Drinking (1983), a collection of journalistic pieces; and. How's Your Glass? (1984), comprising quizzes on the drinking life.
The tone throughout is very dry, and occasionally acidic, much like the wines he advises us to stay away from. Here, one comes across large pegs of information concerning the well-stocked liquor cabinet, getting value for money and, most delightfully, notes on “boozemanship” and the “mean sod’s guide” to serving guests. He pooh-poohs most traditional hangover remedies, from the hair of the dog to Prairie Oysters. Instead, he advocates rest, a warm bath and perhaps a little bread and honey. As for avoiding getting drunk, “the only absolute method is drinking less”.
There are cocktail recipes aplenty, including oddities such as the Falkland Island Warmer, the Hot Rum Cow, Serbian Tea – and the Lucky Jim, which involves vodka, cucumber juice, cucumber slices, vermouth and ice. Some of the recipes and attitudes sound a little dated; had he been here, one would have welcomed Amis’ views on, for example, flavoured breezers, fruit spritzers, microbrews and single malt snobs. Nevertheless, many pieces have aged well and go down smoothly, enlivened by the occasional aperitif such as, “Food is the curse of the drinking classes”.
Though it appears that he’s sampled and appreciated beverages from virtually every corner of the world, Amis points out that he himself is a malt whisky man: “The sign of what I call a serious spirit is that it’s profitably or even preferably drinkable neat, or with a little water.” He takes a refreshingly unpretentious view when it comes to wine. Though he appreciates the beverage, his views are moulded by thrift: “An under-regarded but surely powerful argument against wine is that very few of us can afford to drink quality wine with any regularity, whereas a fair number can actually afford reasonable amounts of the best beer most nights of the week”. He is severe, too, on snobs: “When I find someone I respect writing about an edgy, nervous wine that dithered in the glass, I cringe”, adding elsewhere a sardonic Wine Resenter’s Short Handy Guide.
In his preface, Amis stresses the role of drink as a social lubricant, something Hemingway puts more bluntly: “An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with fools”. Christopher Hitchens echoes this in his introduction: “The plain fact is that it makes other people, and indeed life itself, less boring”. Sadly, he continues, “the booze got to [Amis] in the end and robbed him of his wit and charm as well as his health”. Even so, there’s plenty of effervescence and high spirits to be found in this cocktail, leaving you with the overpowering urge to sample the distiller’s art forthwith.
Singing the Booze
Ten novels in which alcohol plays a starring role.
Devdas, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay (1917).
Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy meets bottle
Appointment in Samarra, John O’Hara. (1931)
The decline and fall of a cocktail-tossing Cadillac dealer in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania.
Hangover Square, Patrick Hamilton. (1941)
Borderline alcoholic with a split personality fights fascism in 1930s Britain, only to bring about his own defeat.
The Lost Weekend, Charles Jackson (1944)
Failed writer goes on a five-day bender in the bars and streets of 1930s Manhattan. According to Amis, “…the best fictional account of alcoholism I have read”.
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry (1947)
The last day in the life of an alcoholic ex-consul in Mexico. Should’ve heeded Amis’ words on mescal: “[T]he nastiest drink I’ve ever drunk in my life…”
The Alcoholics, Jim Thompson (1953)
Raw thriller in which a doctor treating alcoholism presides over a rogue’s gallery of twisted nurses and patients.
A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley (1968)
Thinly-disguised memoir of a promising athlete who veers off track, changing from drifter to drunkard.
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene (1969)
A ‘whisky priest’ stumbles across Mexico hoping for salvation, aided by some unholy spirit.
Post Office, Charles Bukowski (1971)
Misanthropic postman with an eye for women and horse-racing stays alive so he can stay drunk
Paradise, A.L. Kennedy (2004)
Alcoholic woman meets alcoholic dentist. Enough to set your teeth on edge.
“The following day, no one died”. That is the sentence with which Jose Saramago begins and ends his new novel, Death at Intervals, which in form and content is of a piece with much of his earlier work. That is to say, he poses a philosophical question in terms of an allegorical event; then, step by step, works out its effects on the citizens of an unspecified country. In the process leaving himself with plenty of room to show up the nature of vested interests, be they conservative, religious or bureaucratic.
In this slender novel (felicitously translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa ) Saramago speculates on what would happen if, for a period of time, no-one was to die. In what can be read as a witty turning-on-its-head of the religious Doctrine of Eternal Life, he shows us the consequences of this deathless state on the country’s population – which grows from baffled to desperate – and how the church, government officials, undertakers and even the underworld react to and then try to cash in on the situation.
The trick to making fables even more resonant is, of course, to treat events with utmost seriousness, and Saramago does this here by going into details of how hospitals and old-age homes, among other institutions, deal with the predicament. Patriotic fervour plays a role too, with people ferrying the aged and unfit across the border, where the laws of death remain unaltered.
This is where the novel takes a turn. After seven months, death makes a sudden reappearance – initially personified as a shrouded female skeleton with a rusted scythe in a chilly room full of filing cabinets – and begins to send out letters in violet stationery to those who have a week to live. The reactions, naturally, range from shock to relief to avoidance.
Death’s plans, however, are thwarted by an ordinary cellist, and the rest of the novel deals with her preoccupation with this unwittingly defiant creature. It must be said, though, that this second half, marked by its playing out of ars longa vita brevis, is weaker than the first, but at least it does supply a narrative impulse without which the novel would have floundered.
Saramago’s trademark writing style much in evidence here: the long paragraphs drenched in irony, the run-on dialogue separated only by commas and the third-person narration with its omniscience undercut by self-deprecation.
In this idiosyncratic manner, he creates an enclosed world that floats free of mortal laws and, in doing so, reveals much about the vanities and petty obsessions of the rest of us. Confirming our suspicions that, as the philosopher said, there is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
To begin with, Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow (the writer who once said his subject was men now takes a look at feminism) and Robert Harris’ Conspirata (the third in his Roman trilogy) both of which were to be released in late 2008, but were inexplicably delayed.
Also among the heavy hitters are Philip Roth’s The Humbling (like Ol’ Man River, he jes’ keeps rollin’ on); Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, in which a private eye creeps “out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the LA fog.”; Margaret Atwood’s God’s Gardeners, another one of her dystopian epics; and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, a “story cycle” dealing with love, music and death
One hopes that Monica Ali is over her sophomore slump with her third novel, In The Kitchen – a tale of events in a London hotel, which may well turn out to have forebears as unlikely as Sankar’s Chowringhee, Robert Altman’s Gosford Park and Henry Green’s Loving.
Closer to the subcontinent, there’s Daniyal Mueenuddin's much-heralded debut, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, with some already likening him to no less a personage than Turgenev (the title story is here); William Dalrymple’s non-fiction account of the remnants of pre-codified religious practices in India (an interview on the subject is here); Amit Chaudhuri’s The Immortals, a tale of the criss-crossing paths of three Indian musicians; and Abraham Verghese’s first novel, Cutting for Stone, spanning decades and set in India, Ethiopia and New York.
Then, there’s Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger, a ghost story set in rural Warwickshire in the late 1940s, and Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, which takes place a few years later, with a young immigrant from Ireland trying to forge a new life for herself in New York.
Finally, here’s hoping that the publishing industry finds a way to get back on its feet in the coming year, and that Landmark’s Mumbai branch re-opens so that the city can once again have at least one decent bookstore in which the above titles will be available.
“I’m not afraid of dying,” Woody Allen once remarked, “I just don’t want to be there when it happens”. It’s a sentiment that would arouse a wry smile from the 62-year-old Julian Barnes, whose non-fiction narrative, Nothing to be Frightened Of, is a fine-tuned meditation on mortality and confronting the Grim Reaper.
“I don’t believe in God, but I miss him,” is how he begins, going on to clarify that at a time when Christianity in Europe has largely been reduced to ritual, he misses “the underlying sense of purpose and belief when confronted with religious art” – be it Mozart’s Requiem, Giotto’s paintings or Donatello’s sculptures.
The bulk of the book, though, is a series of deliberations on death and the human response to it. What saves this from terminal grimness or sentiment is that Barnes is never less than clear-sighted, his prose is skillfully elegant, and that there’s more than a touch of puckishness to the proceedings. Defining himself as one who fears death and has no faith, he speaks of his inexplicable night-terrors, with his motivation, quoting Shostakovich, being that “we have to make the fear [of death] familiar, and one way is to write about it”.
Though he clarifies that this is not his autobiography, there’s much here about his childhood, his parents, and of his reactions to their inevitable ageing and demise. His brother, the philosopher Jonathan Barnes, is also a continual presence, with the author spending much time recreating run-ins and debating finer points of philosophical musings on death. Clearly, there’s more than a bit of sibling rivalry that’s continued over the years.
Barnes quotes incessantly from others on the subject, invoking the words of writers and musicians from Stravinsky to Stendhal. In particular, he derives inspiration from 19th century French writer Jules Renard, who once wrote, “I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for his reputation if He didn’t”.
Renard’s mode of writing was “compression, annotation, pointillism”, and this is something that Barnes has clearly taken to heart, for his writing is epigrammatic and quotable. “Religion tends to authoritarianism as capitalism tends to monopoly,” he writes in context of his loss of faith; and then, speaking of his craft, he asserts, “Doctors, priests and novelists conspire to present human life as a story progressing towards a meaningful conclusion”. Towards the end, he muses on memory, imagination and truth and his relationship to them as a novelist, coming up with another bon mot: “A novelist is something who remembers nothing yet records and manipulates different versions of what he doesn’t remember”.
Structurally, Nothing to be Frightened Of progresses by means of circularity and repetition and it must be admitted that there are times when this approach becomes much too discursive. Overall, though, the words that Barnes uses to describe the writing of Alphonse Daudet could well be applied to his book, too: “The exact glance, the exact word, the refusal either to aggrandize or to trivialize death – exhilarating”.
Ziauddin Sardar has tirelessly advocated the need to reinvent the ways we look at Islam. In Balti Britain, he takes “a journey through the British Asian experience”, uncovering layers of identity connected to history, geography and family. A worthwhile endeavour at a time when there’s a hardening of attitudes towards multiculturalism, even among supposed liberals from Andrew Anthony to Martin Amis. Unfortunately, despite the debunking of historical myths and heartfelt asides, Balti Britain is narrower in scope than it should have been.
Sardar asserts that the histories of Britain and India are more tangled than commonly understood and therefore, British Asians are an integral part of Britain. He visits, among other places, Leicester, poster city of multiculturalism; is caught up in a race riot in Oldham; and in Birmingham’s ‘Balti triangle’ – where restaurants lay claim to have invented the karahi-style cuisine -- discovers a metaphor for tradition repackaged to fit the West.
However, Sardar largely speaks to his own kind: Muslim academics and writers. Their voices need to be heard, but they’re hardly representative of British Asians. Mentions of bhangra and Goodness Gracious Me notwithstanding, the second-generation from Pakistan dominates. This is justified by Sardar’s stating that his report could not be “an objective exercise”. Thus, he writes – at times movingly -- about his Hackney schooldays, his arranged marriage, the birth of his children and the discovery that his grandfather fought in the British Army.
Sardar also demystifies various versions of Islam, reminding us not to tar all those of the faith with the same brush. There is much polemic, too, on the need to re-engage with multiculturalism, especially on the part of the “dominant culture”. But given its limited focus, the addition of the word ‘My’ before Balti Britain would have helped.
Birds do it, bees do it; even educated fleas do it. Let’s do it: let’s talk of the best books of 2008.
First, a moment to fight once more the temptation to include novels published in 2007 that I read only this year. (Top of the list being Junot Diaz’s not-so-brief but oh-so-wondrous Great American-Dominican Novel, and also including those by J.M. Coetzee, Michael Chabon, Hari Kunzru, Nathan Englander – as well the uncommonly charming Alan Bennett.)
In the interests of full disclosure one ought to also point out that Roberto Bolano’s 2666 does not feature here – not because of any anti-Latin American sentiment or the feeling that Bolanomania has got out of hand, but because of the prosaic reason that I haven’t read it as yet.
So. Now vee may perhaps to begin, as Alexander Portnoy was advised.
In fiction, Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole, a manic and charged tale of an eccentric father’s relationship with his no-less eccentric son was marvellously subversive and comic. At the opposite pole in terms of effect, but as irresistible, was Joseph O’Neill’s elegant Netherland, which tells, in wonderfully-etched sentences, a post 9/11 story of, among other things, immigrants playing cricket in New York.
At least two collections of short stories stood out: Jhumpa Lahiri’s melancholic tales in Unaccustomed Earth, which explored once again the lives of Bengalis in America with uncommon grace and feeling; and Nalini Jones’ debut collection, What You Call Winter, nuanced yet precise stories dealing with the residents of a Mumbai suburb coming to terms with time’s passage.
It was, yet again, a strong year for non-fiction. (When isn’t it?) Alice Albinia’s Empires of the Indus, part-history and part-travel, was a heartfelt and enlightening journey to the source of the river from which India takes its name. Patrick French’s The World is What It Is showed us a warts-and-all V.S. Naipaul with an admirable evenness of tone. Julian Barnes told us of how he, as a sometime atheist and current agnostic, deals with death in the graceful and aphoristic Nothing to be Frightened Of. And British Asian journalist Sathnam Sanghera’s touching If You Don’t Know Me By Know delved into a family history of schizophrenia with self-deprecating humour and compassion without ever being overwrought.
Rounding off this selection is the short How Fiction Works, another informed broadside by critic James Wood on the ways in which the realistic mode continues to be pre-eminent among novelists: even those who disagree can’t deny the closeness of Wood's reading, the connections he teases out or the ardour of his prose.
Bringing up the rear is a book published in 1961, but back in the limelight because of the just-released film version. Focus your attention once again on Richard Yates’ carefully-crafted Revolutionary Road, that affecting and troubling novel of marital discord symbolising the souring of the American Dream.
He spent his last years with stray cats in a seedy lane in Mumbai, a stone’s throw from Nariman House and the Taj. Had he witnessed the recent terrorist attacks, he would have shaken his head and spoken sorrowfully about his Jewish upbringing in Germany and the depredations of the Nazis.
However, Hugo Baumgartner walked the byways of Colaba only in our imagination. He is, of course, the protagonist of Anita Desai’s 1988 Baumgartner’s Bombay, just one of the works of fiction in English in which the city plays a role.
Of the authors who have written about Mumbai, it’s Salman Rushdie who’s the most lyrical. Saleem Sinai of Midnight’s Children grows up in the privileged enclave of Breach Candy, and characters from The Ground Beneath HerFeet and The Moor’s Last Sigh share similar backgrounds. The author once remarked that the Bombay of the late Fifties and early Sixties felt “like a kind of enchanted zone…a wonderful, exciting, vibrant city to grow up in. And I fell in love with it then and forever.
Much water has flowed down the Mithi River since then, and Catherine of Braganza’s bequest has changed irrevocably There’s been a corresponding fictional shift, from a south Mumbai existence to the middle-class centre and the suburbs, notwithstanding Shobha De’s frequent forays into the lives of the cocktail-sipping class.
The hero of Ardashir Vakil’s nostalgia-filled 1998 Beach Boy, for example, though equally privileged, indulges in his adolescent passions from his parents’ Juhu bungalow. Rohinton Mistry’s characters live in crumbling apartment blocks in central Mumbai, afflicted by fatalism while national events from the 1971 Pakistan War to the Emergency cast long shadows. Manil Suri’s mythological-themed though dreary The Death of Vishnu and his later The Age of Shiva depict a middle-class milieu in which people trapped in the pettiness of the present dream of a better future. Further down the scale, Kiran Nagarkar’s boisterous Ravan and Eddie spring from the teeming chawls.
Notwithstanding the preferences of Vakil’s hero, tinsel town glitter doesn’t feature too often in Mumbai fiction. Two contrived early-Nineties novels, I. Allan Sealy’s Hero and Shashi Tharoor’s Show Business, tried valiantly to marry Bollywood and politics. More recently, the protagonist of Amitava Kumar’s Home Products arrives in Mumbai with the aim of writing a film script, an unfulfilled ambition.
The city’s other visible symbol, its slums, plays a major part in Vikas Swarup’s Q&A -- inventive, though with a whiff of the potboiler about it -- and in Gregory David Roberts’ swaggering Shantaram.The latter dwells on that popular Mumbai pastime, engaging in underworld activities, and this is also at the core of Vikram Chandra’s mammoth Sacred Games, which can lay claim to being The Great Mumbai Novel. It encompasses not just the underworld but the city’s distinctive patois, cuisine, neighbourhoods and more while narrating the cat-and-mouse game between don Ganesh Gaitonde and Inspector Sartaj Singh, a character from Chandra’s earlier, heartfelt Love and Longing in Bombay.
It turns out that one doesn’t need first-hand knowledge of the city to successfully write about it. (Which may come as a surprise to Amit Chaudhuri, whose essays often dwell on his Mumbai childhood, and to Suketu Mehta, whose MaximumCity is a non-fiction counterpart to Sacred Games.) Take the case of H.R.F. Keating, whose A Perfect Murder, the first of a series of detective novels featuring intrepid Mumbai police inspector Ganesh Ghote, appeared in 1964. Keating himself appeared in Mumbai for the first time a full decade after he made the city the backdrop to his novels.
With the new crop of writers, the city again assumes different forms. Murzban Shroff’s Breathless in Bombay revolves around those perched on the lower rungs of the social ladder: washermen, horse-and-carriage drivers, pimps and others. Nalini Jones’ nuanced yet precise stories in What You Call Winter delineate people coming to grips with time’s passage in the suburb of “Santa Clara”, a stand-in for Bandra. And Altaf Tyrewala’s No God in Sight ingeniously links the tales of those affected by an earlier Mumbai tragedy, the blasts and subsequent riots of 1992-93.
The recent onslaught on the city has been ineptly referred to as “India’s 9/11”. Well, one of the fallouts of the attack on the TwinTowers was the spate of “9/11 novels”, from the unexceptional (Updike’s Terrorist) to the overwrought (Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) to the elegant (O’Neill’s Netherland). It remains to be seen whether November 26th will yield such fruit, but a pointer can be found in a post on India Uncut by blogger and debutant novelist Amit Varma: “This book was written in a Bombay before these attacks; it will come out in a Bombay after these attacks, and it somehow feels… that it will be inadequate.” Ironically, Rushdie found himself in the same corner when he chronicled the life of New York, his adopted city, in the below-par Fury. The publication date of that book: one week before September 11, 2001.
The nationalistic fervour that preceded India’s partition isn’t a subject that one encounters often in English Indian fiction. R.K. Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma is, in fact, about the only title that comes readily to mind -- Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan dwelled more on the trauma of Partition itself. Now, there’s Bangalore-based Usha K.R.’s third novel, A Girl and a River, mainly set in a town in the princely state of Mysore in the 1930s, in which the actions and principles of Gandhi and Subhash Chandra Bose have a central influence on her characters.
This is a twin-track narrative that moves back and forth between the past and the near-present, in which the events of half a century ago and their impact on a single family are sought to be unravelled and understood. The girl of the title, and the river after which she is named, is Kaveri, daughter of Mylariah, the town’s lawyer, landowner and municipal councillor. Others who are a part of Kaveri’s growing years include her brother Setu and mother Rukmini.
The national cross-currents of that era as reflected in Kaveri’s town -- heady nationalism, incipient rebellion and conservative Anglophilia -- are brought to life through period detail, with an accent on the music, movies and books of the time. However, the author falls into the standard trap when it comes to historical fiction: there are excessive amounts of dialogue and exposition simply to establish context.
In time, Kaveri comes under the spell of Shyam, a well-meaning but reckless young rabble-rouser, and it is this attachment, along with the reactions of those close to the couple, that will lead to tragic consequences. The reverberations will be felt by Setu’s daughter, the unnamed narrator of the second tale set in the late 1980s, who attempts to find reasons for her parents’ joylessness and occasionally curious behaviour.
Though the prose throughout is more efficient than evocative, the author does ample justice to Kaveri’s character as she transforms from a bookish and impressionable young girl to a headstrong teenager. Also effective is the portrayal of the restrictions faced and courage displayed by the other two main female characters, Kaveri’s mother Rukmini, and the narrator in the present time. The men, however, fare less well; in particular, Setu’s animosity to Shyam isn’t ever fully explained.
More problematic is the switching between the 1930s and the 1980s, a device resorted to in order to show how past actions create ripples that spread through the decades. Quite simply, the predicament of Setu’s daughter, however well-portrayed, has much less impact than the events of Kaveri’s life. It thus emerges as no more than a frame, one that ought to have been more slender and less decorative.
Despite these weaknesses, A Girl and a River is a novel of scope and vitality. Its treatment of a fractious time in India’s past and the effects of the period on the central characters display a sensitivity and seriousness that’s more than occasionally pleasing.
