Marathon Man

This appeared in today's Hindustan Times.

WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING Haruki Murakami

He used to own a jazz bar in Tokyo. He competes in at least one marathon a year, and has completed more than a few triathlons, too. And his books, with their cool, surreal take on reality, have a passionate, devoted following.

Is Haruki Murakami, as The Times (UK) recently informed us, “the coolest writer in the world”?

The matter-of-fact, sometimes commonplace nature of his new memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, would seem to belie that observation. To be frank, this is really a long essay, padded out into book length by repetition and the inclusion of two earlier articles by Murakami.

Long-distance running, Murakami says, is one of the ideal pursuits for a novelist because of what it has is common with the nature of writing: the need for endurance, focus and sticking to a plan. Now in his late fifties, Murakami began running seriously when he was 33 in order to lose weight after giving up smoking. In a series of interlinked ruminations written in Hawaii, Tokyo and Cambridge, among other places, he takes us through his training schedule, his experience of running in the New York City marathon and the first time he ran 26.2 miles at a stretch, from Marathon to Athens in Greece. Because there are many observational overlaps, after a while you realize that though the scenery is different, the steps are the same.

What makes the book interesting – for Murakami fans, at least – are the insights he offers into his own compulsions. He’s fond of solitude and introspection, and uncomfortable with competition (and competitive sport). There are small nuggets of biographical detail, such as the exact moment when the wish to become a writer arose in him, what he liked and disliked about his experience of running a jazz bar, the mental preparations he has to make before delivering a speech in English and the sort of music he listens to when he runs – the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Daydream and Clapton’s Reptile, along with CCR, Beck and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, to mention a few.

Though what’s endearing is a tone of down-to-earth humility throughout, it’s let down, alas, by many banalities -- for example, “In the final analysis we're all the same”, and “I’m the type of person who has to totally commit to whatever I do”. (And you can’t blame the translation because Philip Gabriel has done a sterling job with Murakami’s novels in the past.)

Those looking for the surreal moments associated with Murakami’s fiction will find a few: the dead dogs and cats he spots while running, and his quasi-mystical experience when, in a particularly horrifying feat of endurance, he once ran “an ultramarathon” – that is, 62 miles -- from morning to evening in Hokkaido. As if that last accomplishment wasn’t enough to prove the depth of the writer’s love for long-distance running, he even at one point tells us what he’d like on his gravestone: “At Least He Never Walked”.

All of which is enough to make you sprawl back on the sofa, let the book fall from limp fingers and reach for a large bag of French fries.

Off The Beaten Path

This appeared in yesterday's The Sunday Express.

A BLUE HAND: THE BEATS IN INDIA Deborah Baker

In a recent interview, Amit Chaudhuri said that “for any cultural practice…the position of the outsider, the misfit, the daydreamer and even of failure are very important categories in the creation of a truly energetic and self-critical social and intellectual space….My anxiety is that in the last 20 years India, typically for a globalising country, hasn't theorized [such a] position.”

To find some of the best examples of such irresponsible misfits, you’d have to look at members of the so-called Beat Generation of the late Fifties and early Sixties in the United States, with their experiments with psychedelic substances, their stand against those in positions of power and their redefinition of what constitutes a literary work. Ironically in light of Chaudhuri’s statement, it was India that some of the most prominent Beats looked to for a degree of illumination and sustenance.

In Deborah Baker’s A Blue Hand, we find an account of Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky’s sojourn in India in 1962, interleaved with the travels and exploits of others such as Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger. In this detailed narrative, Baker draws heavily on not just the unexpurgated and unedited version of Ginsberg’s Indian Journals, but also the books, journals and correspondence of the rest. The logorrhea of the Beats was well-known, and Baker bravely dives into their sea of words for her reconstruction.

Though the sections dealing with India form the bulk of the book, Baker also dwells on the dovetailing effects of the actions of others, including those who never visited India, such as Gregory Corso. In particular, she dwells on Corso and Ginsberg’s fascination for Hope Savage, the charismatic and chimerical young American woman whom both attempted to influence and engage.

Baker is frank about the heroin abuse, psychosis and occasional mystical visions that affected these angel-headed hipsters. She recounts Ginsberg’s vision of a poetry recital by Blake: it was an attempt by the poet to recapture this sense of the ineffable that was in part responsible for his trips to Benares and Rishikesh, among other places.

Because there is so much detail, and because so much of it is interconnected, Baker’s prose can sometimes frustrate as much as it illumines. On occasion, the teasing out of a continuous narrative thread becomes an effort – especially with digressions such as details of Jackie Onassis’s trip to the country, to bolster the aim of examining the role of India in the American imagination.

Some of the most fascinating sections deal with Ginsberg and Orlovsky’s stay in Calcutta, where they were to befriend other poets such as Sunil Gangopadhyay and Shakti Chattopadhyay. Baker makes their visits to the College Street coffee house, the burning ghats and to literary soirees come alive and elucidates their East-meets-West interactions with perspicacity.

In conclusion, Baker quotes Ginsberg’s final despairing entry in his Indian journal: “Another day and I leave India/And I never crosslegged pierced heaven/With a thought or found bearded Guru/In Brindaban or levitated in Bodh Gaya…” She asserts, however, that what stayed with Ginsberg the rest of his life was “the sweetness and sympathy he found in the company of India’s sadhus, charlatans, poets and saints”. Something evident from even his last poem, ‘Things I’ll Not Do (Nostalgias)’ in which there are more than a few lines devoted to the time he spent with Orlovsky in search of his personal brand of salvation.

Crying Wolf

This appeared in the latest TimeOut Mumbai. In passing, it's interesting that wolves should figure so prominently in mythology and folktales. There are the so-called fairy tales (at least two), the legend of Romulus and Remus, the son of Loki in Norse mythology and Charon, the ferry man from Greek mythology who had the ears of a wolf.

WOLF TOTEM Jiang Rong

At one point in Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem, an elderly herdsman tells the protagonist: “There are so many things you Chinese don’t understand…Chinese write their books to advocate Chinese causes. The Mongols suffer because they can’t write books. If you turn into a Mongol and write books for us, that would be wonderful.” Wolf Totem, then, is that book. Based on the author’s own sojourn in Mongolia in the 1960s during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, it became a million-copy bestseller in Chinese, and is now available in Howard Goldblatt’s lucid translation.

Wolf Totem is about the exploits of Chen Zhen, a Beijing student, one of four classmates who travel to the Mongolian steppes. Here, Chen discovers that life moves to a primeval rhythm, dictated by extremes of weather and the necessity of hunting for survival. Above all, he is made aware of a “complex attitude of fear, reverence and infatuation” towards the wolf, which colours all activities. None other than Genghis Khan is held up as the prime exemplar of the virtues of lupine wiliness.

The novel progresses via episodes of hunting and herding, with a supporting cast of dogs and gazelles, not to mention a wolf cub. Though many of the episodes are fast-paced there’s no overall narrative flow, which can make for heavy going -- heightened by regrettable overstatement. Rong’s case is that the Chinese have much to learn from the Mongol’s fortitude and view of the environment as an intricate organism of cause and effect, something repeatedly affirmed.

The novel ends with a eulogy for a vanished land; the losers are the Chinese, thoughtlessly replacing older systems. Wolf Totem’s strengths are ethnographical: much of the novel is clearly the outcome of close observation. Would that it had been more succinct, though.

Cover Stories

This appeared in today's Hindustan Times.

The problem with satire is that people are apt to take it literally. Something you don’t need to point out to Barry Britt, creator of the by-now infamous New Yorker cover featuring Mr and Mrs Obama as radical Muslims. This, however, is only the latest in a series of provocative covers that American magazines have published over the years.

Some of Britt’s other recent covers for the New Yorker have mined the same vein of mordant irony – such as the one featuring occupants of the Oval Office drowning in post-Katrina waters, or another with Obama and Hillary Clinton in bed together, both reaching for a ringing red telephone.

More urbane covers for the magazine have been created by Saul Steinberg – notably, one that showed a map with “a view of the world from Ninth Avenue”, portraying the average New Yorker’s limited view of the universe beyond the Hudson. An update appeared on the 1 December 2001 issue featuring “New Yorkistan”, comprising areas such as Fuhgeddabouditstan and Bronxistan.

Unsurprisingly, President Bush has often been on the receiving end. A cover for the Canadian Maclean’s drew a moustache on him to make him look like Saddam Hussein; and one by The Nation likened him to Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman. The resemblance is uncanny.

Some of the best examples of suggestive covers are to be found in the Esquire of the Sixties. There was the April1968 issue featuring a shirtless Mohammed Ali pierced by six arrows, mimicking St Sebastian, a comment on the pugilist’s prosecution for draft evasion. There was the May 1969 issue showing Andy Warhol drowning in a can of his own Campbell’s Soup, for a story on the decline of the avant-garde. There was the March 1965 photograph of a Marilyn Monroe-lookalike shaving, to accompany a piece on “the masculinisation of the American woman”.

Most of Esquire’s iconic covers were the output of advertising man George Lois, who said of his work, "The statements inside are useless unless there is a statement on the outside.” As a definitive statement on his creations, 32 of his most famous covers are at present on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Others have used cover pictures effectively, too. Annie Liebowitz’s striking photograph of a naked John Lennon curled up against Yoko Ono, taken just a few hours before the ex-Beatle was shot, appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone on 22 January 1981. Another photograph by Ms Liebowitz that stirred debate was that of a naked and visibly pregnant Demi Moore on Vanity Fair’s August 1991 issue. A year later in the same publication, Ms Moore appeared in nothing but a painted-on power suit – something Movie magazine attempted to replicate with Pooja Bhatt. Thank goodness the Nineties are over.

Of course, it’s not just photographs or illustrations that have the power to provoke. One of Time magazine’s most controversial covers appeared in April 1966, comprising just three words: “Is God Dead?” Another striking one appeared in April 1997 featuring TV show host Ellen DeGeneres with the headline: “Yep, I’m Gay.” You could say that more than just the magazine came out that day.

Even paragons of rectitude will occasionally cause comment with their choice of cover. The Economist, for example, chose to accompany a September 1994 story on “the trouble with mergers” with a photograph of two camels mating. That’s one hump too many.

In India, alas, such ‘concept covers’ don’t seem to have caught on. Exposure is the order of the day, be it of politicians or starlets. Making one speculate whether the best ones on the stands are the descriptive, typographical covers for the venerable Economic and Political Weekly.

A Well-thumbed Thesaurus

Just in case you were too busy to read Shashi Tharoor's short encomium in today's Times of India on Rushdie's Midnight's Children being voted 'the best of Bookers', these adjectives from the 180-word piece should give you the gist of it:

- Astonishing
- New
- Teeming
- Myth-infused
- Exuberant
- Restless
- Breathtaking
- Risk-ridden
- Imaginative
- Rare
- Intellectual
- Polyglot
- Multi-ethnic
- Post-colonial
- Extravagant

The Plane Truth

A CASE OF EXPLODING MANGOES Mohammed Hanif

After coming out of the shadows of magic realism, it looks like we’ve returned to the penumbra of those talented Latin American writers. Dark political satires and fables are the order of the day: there was Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist; there was Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger; and now, there’s Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes.

This one owes as much to Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold as it does to Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat -- something acknowledged in the book by having one character read the Marquez novel, and many characters feast on the aforesaid animal.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes tells of the time before and immediately after 17 August 1988, the day General Zia-ul-haq perished in a plane crash along with senior generals and the US ambassador to Pakistan, among others. The truth behind that incident has never been plausibly revealed, and it is this ambiguity that Hanif takes as the subject of his debut.

The first strand of the novel tells of the fate of Junior Under Officer Ali Shigri of the Pakistan Airforce Academy, who lands in hot water because of what he’s concealing – or not – when it comes to the disappearance of a fellow cadet. The other strand presents us with the last days in the life of General Zia who, in Hanif’s hands, emerges as a vain, blundering, occasionally cuckolded, fearful and Koran-consulting despot -- a man who, among other things, is troubled by an infestation of tapeworms in his gut.

It emerges that Ali Shigri may well have his own reasons to do away with the Chief Martial Law Administrator, but this isn’t the only threat to the General’s life. There are also conniving generals and curse-carrying crows, apart from the fleshy fruit of the title. Thus we shift from scene to scene, from air force training camp to the Presidential palace to prisons under Lahore Fort to the American embassy.

Much of this is great fun to read, even though you occasionally wince at Hanif’s barbed satire. As with the protagonist of Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Shigri’s voice is likeable and effectively maintained throughout: it is cynical, scoffing and baffled by turn. Quite a few aspects of life under military rule come under Hanif’s scanner and he treats each one sardonically, occasionally reminding one of Heller’s Catch 22. Few targets are spared: a brigadier thinks that Jinnah looks like “a tortured eighteenth-century chemist on the verge of a new discovery” and a bearded character named “OBL” turns up to hobnob with Pakistani and American top brass at a Fourth of July party.

However, Hanif’s penchant for overarching satire means that the work falters somewhat as a novel. The identifying and skewering of targets takes precedence over sustenance of pace and depth of character. (Much the same can be said of that other recent satirical work, Adiga’s The White Tiger.)

Be that as it may, the prime merit of A Case of Exploding Mangoes could well be to remind us once more that one of the functions of artists and their work, from the time of Juvenal, is to mock the petty pomposities of those in power. On that score, this is a novel to relish.

Not Entirely Smooth Sailing

This appeared in today's Hindustan Times.

SEA OF POPPIES Amitav Ghosh

The alkaloid that seduced Baudelaire and a subsequent generation of Romantic poets was also the dirty little secret at the heart of Britain’s Indian empire. Profits accruing from the trade in opium derived from Indian poppy fields gave rise to powerful dynasties, glittering palaces and unjust wars, and it is this that animates Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, the first novel in a proposed trilogy.

As is his wont, Ghosh weaves together the separate destinies of disparate characters; from these interactions arise the pressure points of plot. There’s Zachary, a principled mulatto freedman from Baltimore; Deeti, an impecunious widow fleeing the depredations that follow her husband’s death in an opium factory; Neel Rattan, a fastidious Bengal potentate convicted of forgery; Paulette, a recently-orphaned and headstrong young European; and Baboo Nob Kissin, an agent for indentured labourers, in the midst of a transformation wrought by a relative-turned-goddess.

It is 1838; the Opium Wars are about to begin; and all of these, with a colourful supporting cast of lascars, labourers and overlords, find themselves on board the Ibis, a “topsail schooner” that sets sail from Calcutta across the kala pani to Mauritius.

The novel isn’t just a seafaring yarn from first to last. Ghosh takes his time in building up the characters, filling in their backgrounds and the circumstances leading to their current predicament. In characteristically limpid prose and with the eye of a social anthropologist – a discipline in which he’s well-versed – he details the customs, diet, clothes and social restrictions of these individuals who are to be thrown together on the Ibis to become “jahaj-bhais”.

As is the case with other novels of the sea by Conrad, Melville, and more recently Unsworth, there is much nautical terminology. We’re introduced to tween decks, foretopmen and ratlines, with sailors eating hardtack and playing ablewhackets while – heaven forbid – the jib and the martingale run afoul of the dolphin-striker. Most of this builds verisimilitude (along with other striking passages that tell of the intricacies of poppy cultivation and the inner workings of an opium factory) but it is Ghosh’s use of polyglot dialogue that takes us into choppy waters. The tower of Babel he attempts to construct teeters under its own weight. Among other volumes, he’s obviously studied his Hobson Jobson obsessively for characters such as Mr Doughty, the ship’s pilot, spout Anglo-Indian dialect to the point of absurdity: “Where’s the mate? Has he been given the kubber that my bunder-boat has lagowed...Hop to it before I give your ganders a taste of my lattee.” (You just know that before too long, this man is going to ask for a “brandy-pawnee”.) The lascars on board the Ibis, too, have their own argot: “Catchi too muchi shamshoo. More better go sleep chop-chop.” And the turn of phrase employed by Baboo Nob Kissen puts one in mind of Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, Billy Bunter’s schoolmate.

Not to sound tendentious, but when so much patois is stuffed into so few sentences, it makes characters teeter dangerously close to caricature. Elsewhere, when characters speak in their non-English native tongue (such as Bhojpuri) Ghosh uses the more agreeable expedient of reporting their dialogue in English, without the use of quotation marks and with the occasional vernacular expression thrown in for good measure.

Unfortunately, the streak of latter-day Romanticism prevalent in Ghosh’s The Glass Palace and The Hungry Tide resurfaces again here, leading him to imbue some of the characters with an exaggerated sense of idealism and occasional naiveté. This is the case especially with Paulette, and with others such as Jodu, her childhood friend. Allied to this are moments tinged with melodrama involving those on the other side of the fence -- principally sadistic or insensitive Englishmen such as Mr Burnham, the Ibis’ owner, whose pastimes include filching property and being spanked. Such juxtapositions at times approach the level of the simplistic.

Despite this, the novel never comes across as slick or pat, a testimony to Ghosh’s way with narrative. He doesn’t let scholarship come in the way of storytelling, and his fascination for describing lives uprooted by history is evident. It’s not all smooth sailing, then, on this Sea of Poppies, but it’s a voyage of many charms.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

This is from the latest TimeOut Mumbai.

GUARDIAN OF THE DAWN Richard Zimler

A novel set against the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa in the 16^th century? Sounds fascinating. Alas, in Guardian of the Dawn, Richard Zimler takes this premise and turns it into an overly solemn and often portentous work.

The novel narrates the fate of Tiago, brought up by his Portuguese-Jewish father in the princely state of Bijapur, his Indian mother having died in his infancy. Others in Tiago’s orbit include his high-strung sister Sofia, his loving cook Nupi, his enigmatic adopted cousin Wadi and his gentle wife Tejal. Tiago is imprisoned and tortured by zealous officials of the Inquisition and the story moves from present to past as he recalls his childhood and the circumstances that have led him to his current predicament.

Years later when he is finally free, Tiago makes plans to identify the shadowy individual who incriminated him, and take his revenge. This is when, all of a sudden, the novel’s tone and pace shifts to become a tale of behind-the-scenes machinations and bloody murder, a la Othello (Tiago, Iago, get it?).

Notwithstanding some scenes of great vividness – such as the sentencing and punishment of alleged heretics – Zimler’s prose is often florid, and we never get an accurate sense of the main character’s identity as half-Indian, half-Portuguese. The gravity with which Catholic excesses are delineated is excessive, with innocents too obviously pitched against zealots, and the underlining of common ties between religions could have been more subtle. Despite the research and seriousness of intent – or perhaps because of it -- Guardian of the Dawn is too ponderous by half.

Shelved

A bookstore at the new airport in Bangalore doesn't appear to think too highly of recent work by Messrs Mukherjee, Rushdie, Banker and Hosseini.

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.