This appeared in today's The Hindu.
While
experts and their theories were pooh-poohed, two books served as reminders that
hard-won knowhow shouldn’t be cavalierly dismissed. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene, a compelling history of
genetics that combined the personal with the biological, raised questions about
the future role of science in the interplay of nature and nurture. And Amitav
Ghosh’s The Great Derangement
astutely pointed out that climate change today is so urgent and unexpected
that, be it in mainstream literature or public discourse, we still have to come
to grips with its scale and effects.
At
a time of continuing and alarming instability in the Middle East, a foretaste
of one legacy that coming generations will have to contend with came in the
form of Hisham Matar’s The Return, an
unsentimental, haunting memoir in which Matar returned to Libya after three
decades to search for his father who was incarcerated by Qaddafi’s regime.
When
Europe seemed to be in danger of coming unstitched, David Szalay’s All That Man Is exhibited the day-to-day
existence of individual lives on the continent in a sequence of nine stories
about European males, from young to old, each one dealing with the costs of
giving in to impulses past and present. Another expression of dark disaffection,
this one from the Netherlands, appeared in English 70 years after it was first
published: Gerard Reve’s novel, The
Evenings, translated by Sam Garrett, a sharp detailing of the pointless
life of an office-worker during the course of ten December evenings.
Individual
voices were in danger of being drowned out by the roar of the crowd this year,
and a necessary corrective was Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, a combination of memoir with portraits of New York
City artists such as Warhol and Hopper. It was a book that made loneliness “a
populated place: a city in itself”.
Another
lonely voice arose in Garth Greenwell’s beautifully written debut novel, What Belongs to You, about an expatriate
teacher in Bulgaria and his gay relationship with a grifter. Yet another voice,
utterly solitary and distinct, emerged from the womb, that of the narrator of
Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, dealing with
the Hamletian dilemma of an unborn child when he realises that his mother and
uncle are plotting against his father.
Other
voices, quixotic and notable, were heard in novels by Ryan Lobo and Ratika
Kapur: the former’s Mr Iyer Goes to War
imagined a man of La Mancha in Benaras struggling to reconcile past glory with
present decrepitude; and the latter’s The
Private Life of Mrs Sharma featured a seemingly traditional Delhi housewife
navigating a thorny path between public modernity and private desire.
Another
word of the year was “post-truth”, and a chilling outline of a world in which
such concepts are embraced and pushed to extremes was in Anjan Sundaram’s Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship,
a report from Rwanda on the Orwellian lives of some of its brave journalists
and their battles for free speech.
Economic
and other philosophies were overturned this year; those on the right and the
left were driven to positions more extreme. Sarah Bakewell’s At The Existentialist Café was a throwback
to how thinkers reacted to earlier circumstances, a revivifying look at the
lives, convictions and milieu of those such as Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus and
Husserl.
Violence
in the name of ideology continued to dominate the planet, and Karan Mahajan’s
gripping novel, The Association of Small
Bombs, made this personal by examining the rippling aftershocks of a car
bomb explosion in a New Delhi market, and the changing internal and external
lives of families caught in its wake.
The
year also marked the 400th death anniversary of Shakespeare as well as
Cervantes, and a fine demonstration of how much other writers owe those two
luminaries – as Salman Rushdie underlined in his foreword -- was Lunatics, Lovers and Poets, an anthology
of new stories, both Shakespearean and Cervantean, by Kamila Shamsie, Ben Okri,
Valeria Luiselli, Juan Gabriel Vasquez and others. Other eclectic influences
swam into view with Kanishk Tharoor's striking debut, Swimmer Among the Stars, a story collection that eschewed
straightforward realism and reached back to Borges, Calvino and even the
Arabian Nights and Kathasaritsagar for
inspiration.
In
a year that was a precursor to a significant centenary, that of the Russian
Revolution, there was a trickle of books in anticipation of the 2017 flood. Notable
among them was Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The
Romanovs, an intimate account of three centuries of imperial triumphs and
tragedies from Tsar Michael to Tsar Nicholas II; and Catherine Merridale’s Lenin on the Train, a fascinating
reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding the Bolshevik leader’s arrival
at Petrograd’s Finland Station in 1917. Voices from Russia were also captured
in Svetlana Alexeivich’s Secondhand Time,
an immersive chronicle of the memories and observations of everyday citizens on
the fall of the Soviet empire and after.
The last months of the year were, of
course, noted for long lines before banks and ATMs as well as other such “small
inconveniences”. One takes what consolation one can from Egyptian writer Basma
Abdel Aziz’s novel, The Queue, translated
from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, a dystopian vision of life after the so-called Arab Spring,
when hapless citizens line up before departments of an authoritarian, prying
regime for permissions to engage in almost any activity. As for the pernicious
effects of wealth, or lack thereof, there was Vivek Shanbhag’s illuminating Ghachar Ghochar, translated from the
Kannada by Srinath Perur, on the physical and mental displacement of those from
a middle class Bengaluru family.
In
a year that many would like to forget, at least there was solace to be found in
some memorable books that mirrored and often provided a context for what we
went through.
While
experts and their theories were pooh-poohed, two books served as reminders that
hard-won knowhow shouldn’t be cavalierly dismissed. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene, a compelling history of
genetics that combined the personal with the biological, raised questions about
the future role of science in the interplay of nature and nurture. And Amitav
Ghosh’s The Great Derangement
astutely pointed out that climate change today is so urgent and unexpected
that, be it in mainstream literature or public discourse, we still have to come
to grips with its scale and effects.
At
a time of continuing and alarming instability in the Middle East, a foretaste
of one legacy that coming generations will have to contend with came in the
form of Hisham Matar’s The Return, an
unsentimental, haunting memoir in which Matar returned to Libya after three
decades to search for his father who was incarcerated by Qaddafi’s regime.
When
Europe seemed to be in danger of coming unstitched, David Szalay’s All That Man Is exhibited the day-to-day
existence of individual lives on the continent in a sequence of nine stories
about European males, from young to old, each one dealing with the costs of
giving in to impulses past and present. Another expression of dark disaffection,
this one from the Netherlands, appeared in English 70 years after it was first
published: Gerard Reve’s novel, The
Evenings, translated by Sam Garrett, a sharp detailing of the pointless
life of an office-worker during the course of ten December evenings.
Individual
voices were in danger of being drowned out by the roar of the crowd this year,
and a necessary corrective was Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, a combination of memoir with portraits of New York
City artists such as Warhol and Hopper. It was a book that made loneliness “a
populated place: a city in itself”.
Another
lonely voice arose in Garth Greenwell’s beautifully written debut novel, What Belongs to You, about an expatriate
teacher in Bulgaria and his gay relationship with a grifter. Yet another voice,
utterly solitary and distinct, emerged from the womb, that of the narrator of
Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, dealing with
the Hamletian dilemma of an unborn child when he realises that his mother and
uncle are plotting against his father.
Other
voices, quixotic and notable, were heard in novels by Ryan Lobo and Ratika
Kapur: the former’s Mr Iyer Goes to War
imagined a man of La Mancha in Benaras struggling to reconcile past glory with
present decrepitude; and the latter’s The
Private Life of Mrs Sharma featured a seemingly traditional Delhi housewife
navigating a thorny path between public modernity and private desire.
Appropriately
enough, “surreal” was Merriam Webster’s word of the year, looked up more
frequently in 2016 than in previous years. Han Kang’s powerful, unsettling The Vegetarian, translated by from the
Korean by Deborah Smith, captured this “intense irrational reality of a dream”,
in the dictionary’s definition, with a tale of a woman whose diet, and other
choices, make her set her face against the world and enter a realm of violence,
shame and desire.
Another
word of the year was “post-truth”, and a chilling outline of a world in which
such concepts are embraced and pushed to extremes was in Anjan Sundaram’s Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship,
a report from Rwanda on the Orwellian lives of some of its brave journalists
and their battles for free speech.
In
a year of America divided, Colson Whitehead’s unsentimental odyssey of
redemption, The Underground Railroad,
was a fantastical, richly-peopled saga that took a fresh look at slavery and
its consequences. And Paul Beatty’s The
Sellout was an invigorating Swiftean rant from a black narrator who
launches a political programme with the aim of bringing back segregation.
Economic
and other philosophies were overturned this year; those on the right and the
left were driven to positions more extreme. Sarah Bakewell’s At The Existentialist Café was a throwback
to how thinkers reacted to earlier circumstances, a revivifying look at the
lives, convictions and milieu of those such as Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus and
Husserl.
Violence
in the name of ideology continued to dominate the planet, and Karan Mahajan’s
gripping novel, The Association of Small
Bombs, made this personal by examining the rippling aftershocks of a car
bomb explosion in a New Delhi market, and the changing internal and external
lives of families caught in its wake.
When
dashed expectations and reversals of fortune were the norm, Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air was a
transcendent reminder to ask questions about the sort of life worth living.
Published posthumously, it dealt with his time before and after a cancer diagnosis,
and displayed the forging of a worldview that weaved strands of biology,
mortality, life and death.
The
year also marked the 400th death anniversary of Shakespeare as well as
Cervantes, and a fine demonstration of how much other writers owe those two
luminaries – as Salman Rushdie underlined in his foreword -- was Lunatics, Lovers and Poets, an anthology
of new stories, both Shakespearean and Cervantean, by Kamila Shamsie, Ben Okri,
Valeria Luiselli, Juan Gabriel Vasquez and others. Other eclectic influences
swam into view with Kanishk Tharoor's striking debut, Swimmer Among the Stars, a story collection that eschewed
straightforward realism and reached back to Borges, Calvino and even the
Arabian Nights and Kathasaritsagar for
inspiration.
In
a year that was a precursor to a significant centenary, that of the Russian
Revolution, there was a trickle of books in anticipation of the 2017 flood. Notable
among them was Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The
Romanovs, an intimate account of three centuries of imperial triumphs and
tragedies from Tsar Michael to Tsar Nicholas II; and Catherine Merridale’s Lenin on the Train, a fascinating
reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding the Bolshevik leader’s arrival
at Petrograd’s Finland Station in 1917. Voices from Russia were also captured
in Svetlana Alexeivich’s Secondhand Time,
an immersive chronicle of the memories and observations of everyday citizens on
the fall of the Soviet empire and after.
The last months of the year were, of
course, noted for long lines before banks and ATMs as well as other such “small
inconveniences”. One takes what consolation one can from Egyptian writer Basma
Abdel Aziz’s novel, The Queue, translated
from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, a dystopian vision of life after the so-called Arab Spring,
when hapless citizens line up before departments of an authoritarian, prying
regime for permissions to engage in almost any activity. As for the pernicious
effects of wealth, or lack thereof, there was Vivek Shanbhag’s illuminating Ghachar Ghochar, translated from the
Kannada by Srinath Perur, on the physical and mental displacement of those from
a middle class Bengaluru family.
Perhaps,
though, the most telling novel of 2016 was one published in 2010. Gary
Shteyngart’s poignant, satirical Super
Sad True Love Story was set in a post-literate future with a fractious
America, a dominant China, people consumed by shopping and messaging, and
governments keeping close digital tabs on citizens. Did someone mention Black Mirror?
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