Less Graphic, More Novel

This appeared in yesterday's DNA.

KARI Amruta Patil

One of the things that can be said about graphic novels as opposed to their all-prose counterparts is that, by supplying images to the words, they leave the reader’s imagination with less work to do. Those who recognize this make it into a strength by inventive metaphors and devices – such as Art Spiegelman’s anthropomorphism in Maus, or Marjane Satrapi’s reinvention of the miniaturist’s art in Persepolis.

In her debut, Kari, Amruta Patil employs no such stylistic bravura, relying instead on well-chosen words, low-key images and ironic observations to make her point. This is the story of Kari, whose lover, Ruth, leaves her to settle overseas. Kari, who arrives in Mumbai to take up employment as a copywriter in an advertising agency, acutely feels the stings and arrows of the outrageous city, which is a palpable presence in the book. It is “smog city”, a place of overflowing sewers, where “everyone guards their sanity against the grief of strangers”.

Patil effectively delineates Kari’s heartbreak, the shallowness of work and the loneliness of being lost in a crowd. She bonds as well as distances herself from her flatmates, and has some allies to lean upon: Angel, a cancer-stricken former agency client and Lazarus, her art director partner at the agency. She faces long commutes and water-logged auto-rickshaw rides, has ruminative seafood dinners at Soul Fry as well as an erotic encounter at Café Mondegar and endures advertising award shows. The action isn’t strictly linear: these are fragments, memories and slices of life that progress towards an increasing disillusionment with her present situation.

Patil’s writing style is appealing piquant, though her illustrations are, on the whole, more muted than striking. There are pleasing touches though, such as tips of the hat to Munch’s Scream and da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Overall, however, there’s clearly more of a reliance on the written word: the impact is less graphic and more novel.

The to-be-continued ending is inconclusive and hence unsatisfying, and the ongoing solipsism can be trying. Despite these inconsistencies, it must be said that Kari is an interesting and heart-felt debut and, one trusts, a harbinger of better things to come.

The Write Stuff

This appeared in today's Hindustan Times. As it turns out, in the gap between writing and publication, I actually managed to read -- and even review -- some of the books mentioned below.

Some decades ago, Alvin Toffler coined the expression “information overload” to refer to the state of having too much data to go through in order to remain up-to-date. Well, given the line-up of new book releases over the next month, I’m suffering from the literary equivalent

The problem is that so many of the releases belong to the you-must-read-this category. In fiction, there’s Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (despite the suspicion that this is another attempt at mining an exhausted seam of immigrant alienation); Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence; Hanif Kureishi’s Something to Tell You; and short story collections such as Tobias Wolff’s Our Story Begins and debuts such as Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. In non-fiction, there’s Julian Barnes’ Nothing to Be Frightened Of and Sathnam Sangera’s If You Don’t Know Me by Now.

What makes it worse is that all these follow on the heels of so many books acquired but yet lying unread, glaring accusingly from the bookshelves: among them Charles Allen’s Kipling Sahib; Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases. All of them hugged to one’s bosom the moment they were spotted, as books to be read right away. And don’t even remind me of the piles of books purchased much, much earlier, with spines still uncracked.

Such logorrhea is most unfair on the part of the authors concerned. Their respective Muses may well be perched on their shoulders urging them on, but surely all of them ought to get together to ration their offerings? “Sorry Salman, you had a book out two years ago, it’s my turn now.” “But Hanif, this is topical, it can’t wait.” “Both of you get in line, my debut is the fresh new voice the world is waiting for!” “Shut up Aravind, my tale of growing up in a dysfunctional family is the one that will bring succour to millions.”

Lest such exchanges degenerate into hair-pulling and ear-biting, I propose an organisation that follows the OPEC model of laying down quotas for oil supply – call it the Organisation of Literature Writing Countries -- which could allocate the number of titles published every quarter. Publishers and literary agents attempting to break the embargo could be blacklisted and exiled to the Polynesian Islands, a place where no-one has been spotted putting pen to paper since recorded history.

Of course, it’ll be a while before the literary authorities take note of this suggestion and even longer before they act on it. Meanwhile, the only recourse for the hapless is to pick up French professor Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read and follow his instructions. In case any of you out there do this, could you tell me what the book contains? Of course, I haven’t read it yet.

Epic Illusion

A slightly edited version of this appeared in Sunday's DNA.

THE PALACE OF ILLUSIONS Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

In The Palace of Illusions, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni sets aside her usual brand of exotic realism and attempts to show us the world of the Mahabharata though Draupadi’s eyes. Which brings to mind other feminist retellings of mythological epics, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, which narrated Arthurian legends from the point of view of Morgan Le Fay, Guinevere and others and, more recently, Margaret Atwood’s slim The Penelopiad, which retold The Odyssey from the point of view of the distressed Penelope. The success or otherwise of such attempts is clearly to be measured in terms of how they make us re-evaluate the previous work.

Here, the mode of expression is in the first person -- the challenge, then, is to work with the limitations of such a viewpoint to recast the omniscience of the original. Unfortunately, Banerjee side-steps this by having her Draupadi become the recipient of the stories of others, be they the Pandavas, her nursemaid, sundry bards, her brother Dhrishtadyumna and more. This seems like a cop-out: the uniqueness of a woman’s point of view is diluted and what remains is another potted version of the epic. In addition, many of the characters appear unchanged: Duryodhan is always vengeful and wicked, Krishna is always playfully divine, and so on.

Banerjee does introduce touches of her own, principally Draupadi’s unconsummated yearning for Karna, which she uses as a device to set some of the events in motion (although anthropologist Irawati Karve points out that this notion is to be found in some later Jain puranas). Banerjee also has Draupadi in an adversarial relationship with mother-in-law Kunti, and setting up courts after the Kurukshetra War to hear bereaved women’s issues. Her account of Draupadi’s outrage and subsequent acceptance when told that she is to marry all five Pandavas, as well as her implacable determination that her husbands fight the Kauravas to the finish are occasionally insightful -- but equally, there are parts that are unconvincing, such as the Freudian analysis of her husbands: “Your childhood hunger is the one that never leaves you. No matter how famous or powerful they became, my husbands would always long to be cherished”.

If it’s stimulating insights into the Mahabharata you need, there’s still nothing better than Iravati Karve’s Yuganta; if it’s a clear-cut encapsulation you’re looking for, brush the dust off the Rajagopalachari version.

Fangalore

This appeared in the May 16 issue of TimeOut Mumbai.

THE WHITE TIGER Aravind Adiga

In the title story of Lavanya Sankaran’s The Red Carpet, a Bangalore-based chauffeur is bemused by, then comes to terms with, his mistress’ Westernised ways. Aravind Adiga’s debut novel, The White Tiger, can be read as that story’s evil twin. Here, we have the character of Balram Halwai who, brought up in a woebegone Indian village, works his way up to become a chauffeur in Gurgaon and then, following an act of premeditated, brutal violence against his employer, emerges as a successful Bangalore entrepreneur.

The novel is in the form of seven letters written by Balram to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, on the eve of the latter’s trip to Bangalore. These letters – the voice alternates between the cocksure and the breathless -- are both confession and life-story. Balram dwells on the circumstances that have fashioned him as well as holds forth on the state of the country. Satire is the dominant mode, and sacred cows are pilloried with irreverence. Much of this is extremely readable; for the most past, Adiga doesn’t let polemic come in the way of plot.

However, full-on satire is a two-edged sword: when used to show up systemic ills, it can also expose the lack of a solution on the part of the satirist. (That's why it's most effective in shorter works, or in sections of longer ones – ask Jonathan Swift.) The White Tiger is certainly a timely counterpoint to those glowing reports touting India's incipient superpower status, but has few antidotes to offer apart from the bromide of bringing the marginalised into the mainstream. It’s further weakened by taking on too many targets: politicians, elections, the police, city planners, the foibles of the wealthy, pollution, and more. Many satires suffer from being toothless; The White Tiger has too many fangs.

New Grub Street

ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN Keith Gessen

Early on in Keith Gessen’s debut novel, one of the characters visits his ex-girlfriend being treated for depression in a sanatorium. The institution, he thinks, would be better off being called a “slackertorium”: “a place for overworked urbanites to feel pleasantly melancholic”. That isn’t a bad way to describe the world of All the Sad Young Literary Men, even though the main characters display a marked aversion to overwork.

Here, Gessen – one of the editors of the literary journal n+1 -- tells the intertwined tales of three young men from America’s east coast: Sam, Mark and Keith, all with literary aspirations. The period is primarily the late Nineties, and when they aren’t busy expressing alarm over Bush’s re-election, they’re working as temps, obsessing over girlfriends past and present, Googling themselves, getting close to intellectuals they hero-worship and working on dissertations involving, variously, Abraham Lincoln and minor facets of the Russian Revolution. (Startlingly, one of them even visits the occupied West Bank.)

All of which is pleasant enough and not without a certain whimsical appeal. However, the occasional inclusion of photographs, charts and bullet-pointed prose make it too twee and, after a while, the goings-on of a bunch of guys who don’t seem to want anything in particular become lacklustre.

Worth your while? A bit too self-indulgent to be satisfying. Try the other n+1 editor Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision instead.

Too Much To Tell

This appeared in today's The Sunday Express.

SOMETHING TO TELL YOU Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi’s sixth novel is a long, sometimes engaging and more than occasionally satirical work that explores London life in the era of Thatcher, refracted through the prism of the present. Here, Kureishi returns to the territory of his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, and his first script, My Beautiful Launderette, as well as explores the effect of ageing on the passions (found in some of his later work such as The Body). As such, Something to Tell You embraces, in the author’s words, “psychoanalysis, pop, race, Islamic fundamentalism, love, the vagaries of middle-age desire and regret”.

The story is told by Jamal Khan, middle-aged psychoanalyst and unabashed Freudian, who ranges freely over his present and past. The characters in Jamal’s orbit include his friend Henry, a film and theatre director of some repute; his sister Miriam, with whom Henry starts a liaison; his estranged wife Josephine, who lives with their son, Rafi; his boyhood companions Valentin and Wolf; and the love of his life, Ajita, whom he meets as a philosophy student in a London university.

Kureishi’s manner of presenting these characters reminds one of Virginia Woolf’s diary entries while composing Mrs Dalloway. She writes of trying to dig out “beautiful caves behind my characters”, caves that “shall connect and come to daylight at the present moment”. Though Kureishi’s ambitions are obviously dissimilar, he digs deep caves behind his characters too, and makes sure that we see far back into each one. Unfortunately, this frequently makes the novel a criss-crossing web of desires without a central presence. It’s far more taut and interesting when Jamal takes centre-stage, such as in the account of his trip to Pakistan with Miriam.

Kureishi is, of course, too skilled a raconteur to simply present us with great slabs of character interaction. The engine of the plot is a hot-headed escapade involving Jamal, Valentin and Wolf, with unfortunate consequences for Ajita’s family. How this is resolved is the climax that Something to Tell You moves towards.

The novel teems with activity and incident, most of them drawn from the swinging London of the Seventies: Rolling Stones concerts, soirees attended by Angela Carter and visits to Derek Jarman’s place after nights at the Groucho Club. Such is the territory that Kureishi finds most resonant, and it is effectively mined here, much of it for comic effect. Here’s a Soho party in the London of the present, for example: “Expensive dogs sniffed the guests’ crotches….Be-ringed queens from the East End mingled with upper class young men in priceless suits, pop stars, painters, Labour Party researchers and…a couple of black Premiership footballers – one in a white fur coat – who stirred more excitement than the pop stars.” Fans of Kureishi’s earlier work will be quick to spot another character that turns up in this party -- Omar, from My Beautiful Launderette, now transformed into the somewhat unpleasant Lord Ali, a media magnate with strong opinions.

Towards the end, the novel’s farcical side becomes broader, with Kureishi focusing on the metropolis’ seamier attractions: expensive hookers and underground clubs catering to every perversion, for instance. The 7/7 bombings also feature, with characters offering opinions on how this will affect lives. These attempts to be all-embracing make the going a trifle tedious. Had this cocktail been composed of fewer ingredients, it would have been more potent.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet

This review, and the one that follows, appeared in the April 18 issue of TimeOut Mumbai.

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH Jhumpa Lahiri

Michael Frayn once said, tongue somewhere near his cheek, that his advice to writers would be “to write the same thing over and over again, changing things very slightly and going on delivering it until people accept it.”

With the publication of her third book, Unaccustomed Earth, the time has come to ask the question: is Jhumpa Lahiri simply writing the same thing over and over again?

The elements of this meta-story, simply put, would be: academically-oriented Bengali parents who have immigrated from Kolkata to the northeastern United States, caught up in the unfamiliar ways of the new world, yet unwilling to renounce their earlier lives; their offspring, more confident and Americanised, yet, as their relationships show, more confused; and a pervasive strain of melancholy because of relinquishing old ties and coming to terms with new ones.

Lahiri herself defined her concerns as a writer in an article for Newsweek magazine two years ago, stating that “the immigrant's journey, no matter how ultimately rewarding, is founded on departure and deprivation, but it secures for the subsequent generation a sense of arrival and advantage.”

Most of the eight stories of her new collection adhere to this template. Yet, all of them, to varying degrees, convey a richness of experience, a universality of sentiment and an investigation of emotion that makes reading them a pleasure.

Here, among others, a 38-year-old daughter apprehensive about how the death of her mother will affect her relationship with her father learns truths about her needs and wants; another daughter unravels the story of how her mother fell in love with a family friend; a sister finds out the hard way about the limits of responsibility and discipline when it comes to her alcoholic brother; and a married couple’s mis-steps while attending a wedding give them another chance at togetherness.

If the ground is familiar, what, then, accounts for the impact of the narratives? Consider, to begin with, Lahiri’s mastery of the well-chosen detail. Henry James famously informed us that a writer ought to be one on whom “nothing is lost”, and Lahiri unearths dime-sized maroon bindis, useful safety pins attached to bangles, hotel room wallpaper with squiggly grey lines, biscuits with the faint taste of coconut, Tiffany candlesticks as wedding presents, a professor looking like a smaller version of Ringo Starr, a chain link fence matted with forsythia and the figure of a man spotted swimming in a lake during a grey drizzle. All of these and more are worked seamlessly into the narrative, and such verisimilitude is to be prized.

Contrasts in food, too, are always present and nicely judged as competing markers of identity: creamy pasta and plates of prime rib with asparagus and potatoes vie with curried mackerel, chorchori and homemade mishti.

Lahiri’s prose, as before, is sensitive and nuanced, progressing for the most part in a fine-tuned series of minor chords. Emotions creep up unannounced and the word “evocative”, so often bandied about to describe pieces of fiction, is singularly apt here. Relationships are largely pastel-shaded – as one of the characters, musing on her parents’ life together, thinks: “It was neither happy nor unhappy, and the lack of emotion in either extreme was what upset Sudha most. She would have understood quarrels, she believed. She would even have understood divorce. She always hoped some sign of love would manifest itself…” One of Raymond Carver’s later poems was titled “No Heroics, Please” and this is the expression that comes to mind. No heroics, but as Lahiri so amply demonstrates, merely the quiet heroism of dealing with life’s vicissitudes.

Interestingly, however, it is when the author narrates a story from a different point of view that the results are not as impressive – as in the one which speaks of the fascination of Paul, a American doctoral student, with the bewitching Sangeeta, one of his roommates, who is in the snares of a tempestuous relationship with Farouk, a caddish Egyptian.

The three concluding stories all deal with the fates of Hema and Kaushik, who meet as children because their parents are family friends, going on to trace their separate lives until, approaching middle age, they bump into each other in Italy. The denouement is something of a let-down, with its uncustomary strain of melodrama and dire coincidence, but the first two stories are compelling, imbued with the grief that the loss of a parent brings about. In fact, the ageing of, and distance from, one’s parents is another recurring theme in this volume.

Faulkner had his Yoknapatawpha county; Narayan his Malgudi town; Cheever his suburb of Westchester. With Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri lays claim again to her own metaphorical patch of ground, and shows us the treasures buried within.

Utterly Monkey

GORILLA Shobasakti

Playful and sardonic aren’t words that you’d use to describe depictions of the bloody ethnic unrest that has characterized Sri Lanka in recent times. Yet, that’s the overarching mood of this slim novel by Shobasakthi, a former LTTE child soldier and currently a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee in France.

The structure itself is unusually inventive. Gorilla starts out with a long petition written by one Anthony Thasan seeking asylum in France, detailing the travails he’s undergone as one suspected of having terrorist links and throwing himself at the mercy of the French authorities. Then follows a long middle section dealing with the exploits of the young Rocky Raj: his fractious relationship with his father, the thuggish Gorilla, and his induction into “the Movement” as a child soldier. (The chilling footnotes here describing the deaths of the characters we encounter are an ingenious device.) Finally, there’s a concluding first-person section told by a Tamil refugee in France which re-introduces us to Anthony’s life. Clearing up confusion over the identities of the characters in the novel, this section, ending in an act of shocking violence, asks disturbing questions about whether one is capable of entirely shedding one’s past. All of which is thrown into sharp relief when you realise that Sobasakthi’s real name is, in fact, Anthony Jesuthasan.

Originally written in Tamil and felicitously translated by Anushiya Sivanarayanan (who also provides an informative, context-setting introduction), Gorilla has an impact greater than the sum of its parts and is far removed from the genteel alienation of a Romesh Gunasekhara or Shyam Selvadurai. How much of it is made-up, and how much real-life is for the author to know; all one can do is to call it mock fictional – with equal stress on both of those words.

How To Write About Authors In The Indian Media

Worried that a lack of knowledge or an unbiased attitude will get you nowhere in the exciting world of journalism? Don't fret. Follow these simple steps and you, too, could get your byline in respected weekly magazines, making the rich and famous quiver at your approach. Let us take as our model, Sanjay Suri's piece in the latest issue of Outlook, "Sir Talk-A-Lot", which purports to be an analysis of the literary status of Salman Rushdie on the publication of his The Enchantress of Florence. (All the extracts that follow are from this piece.)

# 1. Ignore facts. They only get in the way.

Trumpet this ignorance right at the start, by proclaiming that the title is "Salman Rushdie's ninth book...." In fact, it's his tenth novel and 14th book, but don't let that bother you.

# 2. Fire over someone else's shoulder.

Say there's one specific publication that's published a bad review of the book. Use this to inform your entire argument that of "all the novels he has written, there isn't another whose readability has been challenged quite as rigorously as this one." In Suri's case, he lavishly quotes from Peter Kemp's review in The Times: "...by a long chalk, the worst thing he has ever written." (In passing: Kemp is certainly entitled to his opinion, more so because he's actually read and quoted from the book -- something that you, following Suri, should give no indication of.)

In order to appear even-handed, you should also quote from other reviews that are more favourable, such as the one in The Guardian -- but indicate for no reason that this isn't because of the book's content, but because it "will have takers for the subject alone". (In such ways, you can also cast aspersions on the Guardian's rave review, by one Ms Ursula Le Guin. Ursula who? Calm down, it doesn't matter if you haven't heard of her.)

To show you've done your homework, throw in some more phrases from other reviews, stressing the negative and grudgingly acknowledging the favourable points the reviewers have made. See, you're nothing if not fair. In fact, speak to people who share your views and quote them -- it helps if one such person (Alok Rai) also reviews regularly for Outlook. Also throw in a (suspiciously-unnamed) "fellow Indian writer" who says, "Rushdie's recent books have been long and awful and this new novel doesn't sound any good." (See this chap hasn't read the book, too. You're on the right track, after all.)

# 3. If you can't impress, baffle.

This is when you really come into your own. Throw in words such as "style" and then proceed to demonstrate your point of view in ornate sentences. Such as: "...more than the subject the style is intended for, it's come to say only that this is a place that Rushdie wants for himself, a place where the signboard he has put up announces universality of reach, oneness of civilisations, and the power of the narrator to remind you of it." (When talking of matters such as style, don't get into quicksand by being specific. Far better to be vague.) Be generous with generalisations: "[Rushdie] thrives now on the loyalty of a band with a sense of the progressive, almost a brand now of intellectual acceptance than a great read....For too long now, a declared admiration of Rushdie has been our forged passport to literary standing."

# 4. End with an ungrammatical outburst.

"The Rushdie talk is now into its new round. And between this book and the next we will have no doubt another Rushdie affair to keep us going." See? How knowledgeable and world-weary and impressive that sounds. Simple, when you know how.

Self Help

This is from the latest issue of TimeOut Mumbai.

HIS ILLEGAL SELF Peter Carey

Shape-shifters, continent-crossers and murky identities are only to be expected in Peter Carey’s novels, and so it is with his latest, His Illegal Self. Set in the early Seventies, it deals with the fate of the seven-year-old Che Selkirk, living with his grandmother on privileged Park Avenue when the novel opens.

It turns out that Che’s parents – whom he’s never lived with -- are radical Ivy Leaguers, wanted by the authorities for their violent socialist protests. Che’s imagination is fuelled by thought of a parental reunion, so when a woman calling herself Dial (short for “dialectic”) arrives to accompany them on an outing, he immediately jumps to the conclusion that she’s his mother.

Circumstances lead Dial to abscond with Che, and after some nights in strangers’ houses and flea-bag motels, they fly to a commune in Queensland, Australia. As his relationship with Dial flourishes and deepens, Che comes to understand the truth about his parents and Dial’s involvement in the affair.

The novel is written in short, interlocking chapters, occasionally alternating between Che and Dial’s points of view. When this works, it works very well, making the narrative proceed in a two-steps-forward, one-step-back manner. The prose is jagged, with the excess wrung from it, yet enlivened by the occasional appropriate metaphor.

It’s also clear that Carey writes with first-hand knowledge of the Australian interior, dwelling on the nature of vegetation, the properties of lumber and the difficulties of agriculture.

Though the novel is very good when it comes to capturing the mystifications of childhood and the relationship between Dial and Che, it’s let down by some narrative inconsistencies: the flight to Australia, for a start, and Dial’s continuing motivation, for another. His Illegal Self is certainly not a mis-step, but neither is it as sure-footed as some of Carey’s other novels.