Hill Station Blues

This appeared in today's Mint Lounge.

THE FOLDED EARTH Anuradha Roy

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laughing At Big Brother In The Middle East

This appeared in today's The Indian Express

THE JOKERS Albert Cossery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call Diverted

This appeared in the latest issue of Tehelka

INDIA CALLING Anand Giridharadas

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

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

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

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

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

Karachi Noir

This appeared in today's DNA.

INVITATION Shehryar Fazli

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just So-so Story

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

THE URBAN JUNGLE Samrat

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spare, Disquieting Power

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

NEMESIS Philip Roth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Novel Musings

This appeared in today's Mint Lounge

THE NAIVE AND THE SENTIMENTAL NOVELIST Orhan Pamuk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Less Novel, More Social Document

This appeared in today's DNA.

THE COLLABORATOR Mirza Waheed

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Sterling Testimonial

This appeared in today's The Indian Express

PEREIRA MAINTAINS Antonio Tabucchi

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

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

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

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

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

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

This appeared in the latest edition of The Caravan 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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