Gornick On Naipaul

While awaiting The Masque of Africa, I dipped into Vivian Gornick's The Men in my Life, and was struck by how this passage captures perfectly the experience of reading V.S. Naipaul over time:

"To read Naipaul steadily is to experience something of the dilemma of an attraction that does not generate love. Three or four hundred pages of strong and original writing applied to a social critique that uniformly withholds sympathy leaves the reader both stimulated and unsatisfied. Inevitably, as the years pass, the experience grows less exciting; the lack of tenderness wears on the nerves."

Re-inventing Filipino History

This appeared in the last issue of New Delhi's The Sunday Guardian. (I'm told the website should be operational soon.)


ILUSTRADO Miguel Syjuco

In his recent Reality Hunger, a manifesto for a new form of art and writing, David Shields applauds “the anti-novel, built from scraps”, going on to quote John Berger: “Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one”. Although Shields’ interest is in the blurring of boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, between allusion and invention – indeed between all sorts of genres themselves – it’s those sentences that are important in assessing Miguel Syjuco’s debut novel, Ilustrado.

In the prologue to the action itself, we’re told that “the facts, shattered, are gathered, for your deliberation, like a broken mirror whose final piece has been forced into place”. And at another time in the novel, a character debates the merits of literary bricolage as a narrative structure. Backing up these assertions is an extraordinary range of styles and allusions in the narrative -- from referencing actual periodicals such as The Paris Review to extracts from essays, short stories and works-in-progress as well as e-mails and blog posts. That all of this hangs together to create some sort of unity is testament to Syjuco’s skill.

Ilustrado begins with the discovery of the body of Crispin Salvador, expatriate Filipino novelist, floating in the Hudson. Tales are rife of the masterwork that Salvador has been working on for the last two decades, a capacious, corrosive work entitled The Bridges Ablaze or, more puckishly, TBA. This manuscript promises to unknot and unravel “the generations-long ties of the Filipino elite to illegal logging, gambling, corruption along with their related component sins”.

Salvador’s acolyte in New York, and a member of his writing class – called Miguel, like the author – resolves to track down this manuscript. This, among other things, entails a visit to his hometown of Manila to locate Salvador’s sister and then long unheard-of daughter. In the process, we’re made aware of Miguel’s own childhood in Vancouver and Manila, his fractious relationship with his grandparents, his failed affair, his current life in Manila and his increasing desperation as he, like Captain Ahab, attempts to get closer to the whale.

Along the way, Syjuco deftly manages to weave in mention of the last century and a half of Filipino history, including the Spanish and American periods, political infighting, martial law and more, including of course references to the Aquinos and the Marcoses.

In its ambition and its exposition, Ilustrado is a self-consciously literary work. The style ranges from intimate first-person to close third to pastiche of other modes of writing. Along the way, there are several digs at the authenticity – or otherwise – of current Filipino writing in English that ought to strike a chord with those who question the aims of Indian authors writing in a language not of their country.

All of this is leavened with doses of wit, such as when Syjuco follows the life of a Filipino worker through a series of ongoing jokes, or when he makes observations about flying cattle-class: “I bet anyone who is still a Marxist has never had an economy-class middle seat on a packed long-haul flight like this one”. Then again, some remarks are more trenchant, such as when the narrator muses on the character of the Philippines seen from abroad, in words that again could be applied to India: “Our industriousness, our inexpensiveness, two sides of our great national image”.

The book, then, progresses via a series of ingenious coincidences, nesting dolls, parallels and, ultimately, a circularity that brings us back again to the beginning. There is much bravura display of craft, even though some analogies seem a bit forced, such as when we realise that though Miguel is searching for Crispin’s daughter, he himself has a daughter whom he has forsaken years ago. It must also be said that there are times when the constant interruption of the straightforward narrative dealing with the travails of Miguel gets wearying. Thus, though this is a book that throws off several incandescent sparks, there are too many occasions when the sparks themselves become brighter than the core. Perhaps Syjuco ought to have heeded the words of his literary namesake when he muses on the best way of writing: “That’s the trick: no trickery”.

At one point in Ilustrado, the character of Crispin quotes Simon Leys on D.H. Lawrence to the effect that our imagination often cannot fully absorb the truth of a city or of a land unless a poet -- or writer -- first invents it for us. The re-invention of Filipino history through the medium of a dizzying, dazzling tale could well be the foremost achievement of this Man Asian prize-winning novel.

Putting The Coo In Coorg

This appeared in today's The Indian Express

TIGER HILLS Sarita Mandanna

Rubies flash fire, chills run down spines, soothsayers predict losses, missionaries have eyes the colour of the afternoon sky, amulets attached to fraying cords bring good fortune, fireflies glitter in darkening courtyards and a strong-willed woman chooses between a dimple-flashing tiger hunter and a sensitive childhood playmate.

If such over-ripe romanticism is your cup of filter coffee, Sarita Mandanna’s Tiger Hills will have you enthralled. This is prose as luxuriant as the land it describes, charting the lives of characters whose fortunes undergo as many ups and downs as a playground see-saw.

Prepare, then, to meet Devi, pampered daughter of an established Coorg family; Devanna, a tragically orphaned boy who grows up with her; and Machu, who achieves early fame as a killer of tigers, but soon has to choose between duty and love.

The novel follows these three characters and then their offspring, beginning in the Coorg of 1878 and moving on to the glimmerings of Indian independence, with a detour to Jazz Age Berlin. We also enter into The Far Pavilions territory when Machu sets off to fight in an Anglo-Afghan Wars, an episode romanticized out of all proportion.

Along the way, Devanna spirals into despair and desperation following an unfortunate incident of ragging at a medical college; Devi becomes a headstrong Scarlett O’Hara-type managing a coffee plantation; and Machu continues to oscillate between the love of his life and his actual life. As most of novel is given over to the travails of these three, the later sections describing the fortunes of their children come across as an extended coda more than anything else, down to an unfortunately contrived ending.

Much of Mandanna’s writing demonstrates that she has immersed herself in the rhythm and ritual of the Karnataka hills. We learn of the food, customs, apparel and ways of life of a variety of people, from the indigent to the well-heeled who retire to their club every evening. Throughout, the descriptions of such lore are marked by extravagance.

Every so often, the dialogue begins to quiver: with rage, indignation, despair and, of course, passion. On one occasion Machu asks Devi: “What rice does your mother feed you that you are so wilful?” This is a man whose laughter is “a low, easy sound” that glides over Devi’s skin “like sun-warmed glass”. A little later, his voice sounds like “lush, full-bodied moss”. How alarming.

Such examples, however, pale in front of the occasion when Machu, musing on his relationship with Devi, suddenly has a Debbie Boone moment: “It cannot be wrong when it feels so right”. Whether Tiger Hills feels wrong or right depends on how much of a stomach you have for this sort of sentiment.

Not Much Of A Stranglehold

This appeared in today's The Hindustan Times

THE THING ABOUT THUGS Tabish Khair

Thug. In mid-19^th century Britain, that word was enough to send delicious shivers down the spine of the novel-reading public, conjuring up tales of Oriental deceivers with knotted handkerchiefs waylaying innocent passersby and then performing rites to the Goddess Kali. Much of this was because of the popularity of Confessions of a Thug by Philip Meadows Taylor, dealing with the revelations of one Amir Ali, master strangler. This tale, clearly inspired by William Sleeman’s own account of stamping out the cult, was allegedly one of Queen Victoria’s favourite novels.

Nowadays, it’s understood that Sleeman’s account was either exaggerated or simply a case of reading too much into the stories behind the mass graves he unearthed. In his new novel, The Thing About Thugs, Tabish Khair is keen to turn the tables on such Occidental fancies. This is a postcolonial fable of another young man named Amir Ali who flees to Victorian London in 1839 – the year of Queen Victoria’s coronation -- and is thought of by his benefactor, Captain William Meadowes, as a thug with a nefarious past. Meadowes, in fact, is writing a book, modeled on Sleeman’s account, at the heart of which is this supposed thug’s confession.

As is made clear soon enough in a letter to his beloved, Amir Ali’s murderous background is entirely a fabrication. We begin to learn of his actual past while also being plunged into skullduggery in the dark heart of the British Empire involving a supply of skulls to a phrenologist anxious to prove his theories right.

The narrator – who may or may not be Khair himself – conjures up this tale from the library of a whitewashed house in present-day Bihar, surrounded by the work of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, among others. Khair is adept in showing us how the narrator dreams of this work through a clever juxtaposing of the books he’s read and the people he’s met. The atmosphere of foggy London town is also ably evoked, although it must be said that a surfeit of adjectives are pressed into service to perform this task.

From Amir’s adored Jenny, a charwoman, to high-born lords to vicious workingmen, The Thing About Thugs flits in and out of characters’ minds and motivations with ease. It’s also because of this, however, that the centre of gravity slips away from the novel on more than one occasion. Many fragments remain parts not cohering into a whole.

Khair also flings his net too wide in his attempt to write back to the centre, with allusions to Jane Austen as well as a misguided investigator whose sidekick, inevitably, goes by the name of Watson. It is this, as well as only a slight contemporary resonance, that prevents The Thing About Thugs from establishing a firm stranglehold on the reader.

Pollyanna Doesn't Live here Anymore

Or, why misery makes for good fiction. The next installment of my Yahoo! India column.

The A-Z Of Christopher Hitchens

This is the first version of a review I did for DNA, the more 'conventional' form of which you can read here.

HITCH-22 Christopher Hitchens

As the index to this journalist, author and polemicist’s memoirs is crammed with people and places from recent times, here’s a return of favour.

Amis, Martin. One of Hitchens’ closest friends, whom he met while at Oxford. In Amis’ memoir, Experience, there’s an account of the trip both of them undertook to visit Saul Bellow; here, Hitchens’ provides his own version, filling out the details.

Balliol College, Oxford. Where Hitchens first flirted with and then committed to the Trotskyite Left. There are thus many passages of meetings with and activities of the International Socialists. Oh, and he also recalls homosexual dalliances with, among others, unnamed future members of Thatcher’s cabinet

Citizenship. After living with a US green card for over two decades, Hitchens finally received full American citizenship. This, it would appear, only strengthened his zeal to defend most of that country’s overseas incursions. With a new convert’s enthusiasm, he takes a few paragraphs to describe his passport.  

Doubles.  Hitch-22 refers to the author’s ability to lead two lives: for example his initial commitment to workers’ causes combined with long, drunken lunches in Notting Hill. As he writes: “What I hope to do now is give some idea of what it is like to fight on two fronts at once, to try and keep opposing ideas alive in the same mind, even occasionally to show two faces at the same time”

Elsinore Vacillation, The. What Rushdie came up with in place of Hamlet when asked to devise Ludlum-like titles for Shakespeare’s plays.

Friday lunches. Hitchens recreates the goings-on at these now legendary 80s sessions, weekly gatherings of, among others, Amis, James Fenton, McEwan, Rushdie and Clive James. Not all come across as engaging: as he says, you had to be there.

God is Not Great. His earlier book supporting atheism, mentioned here to affirm that he hasn’t changed his mind.

Habits. He may give the impression that his life is all alcohol, friends and travel, but he’s a very hard worker: “On average I produce at least a thousand words of printable copy every day, and sometimes more. I have never missed a deadline. I give a class or a lecture or a seminar perhaps four times a month and have never been late for an engagement”.

Iraq. His visit here made him conclude that Saddam Hussein was a menace -- to put it mildly -- and he charts his final break with the Left over his support for the second Gulf War.

Jewishness. Hitchens records the revelation that his mother was of Jewish descent, and his researches into his family tree. Though he supports Israel’s right to exist, he’s critical of its expansionism.

Knowledge. With a skilled journalist’s legerdemain, Hitchens leaps from literary associations to eras, people and events throughout.

Left Movement. In his early years, Hitchens was a firm believer. The events of 9/11 caused a turnaround; he went from, as one critic puts it, “British Trotskyite to American neo-con sidekick”.

Mawkishness. Something Hitchens comes very close to when describing the life of an American soldier killed in Iraq.

Name-dropping. Hitchens seems keen to claim acquaintance with practically everyone who matters; indeed the expression “my dear friend” appears too many times to count.

Outspokenness. Bluntness has always been a part of the Hitchens persona, and he doesn’t disappoint: the Nobel Prize is “a huge bore and fraud”; “I neither know nor care anything about sports”; Cuban socialism “was too much like a boarding school in one way and too much like a church in another”.

Ps and Qs. Hitchens is not one to mind them, taking potshots, sometimes peevishly, at those such as Gore Vidal whom he once lionized then fell out with.

Rushdie, Salman. Another of Hitchens’ close friends, to whose defense he sprang after the fatwa. His reactions to this edict: “In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual, and the defense of free expression.”

Self-esteem. Not something that’s in short supply; he even refers to himself as “not all that bad-looking” when in school.

Travels. Beirut, Greece, Portugal, Algeria, Cyprus, Argentina, Cuba, Poland and more:

Hitchens has visited all of these countries, learning, debating, and arguing along the way.

United States of America. In his words, a “celebrity-making machine”, and his adopted country.

Voluminous. His style can be prolix, not to mention allusive, as though the pen is hurrying to put onto paper all that his mind teems with.

Words. When dealing with a schoolyard bully, Hitchens discovered that these can be weapons; moreover, “if you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the podium, then you need never dine or sleep alone.”

X ray. He has a strong urge to dissect and get to the bottom of issues, not willing to be led by popular sentiment.

Yvonne. The author’s mother, who tragically committed suicide and who said, “If there is an upper class in this country, Christopher is going to be in it”. Some of the warmest passages of the book revolve around her: “She was the cream in the Campari, the offer of wine or champagne instead of beer, the laugh in the face of bores or purse-mouths and skinflints, the insurance against bigots and prudes”

Zeal. Whatever else you may say about him, there’s no denying that he pours himself into anything he likes, and marshals all arguments possible against what he doesn't.

The Thousand Details Of David Mitchell

This appeared in today's The Indian Express

THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET David Mitchell

The human brain, it’s believed, processes only a fraction of what’s out there in the ‘real’ world. With his fifth novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, David Mitchell demands that we widen the frame and absorb as much as possible about the period and place the book is set in – a corner of Japan towards the end of the Edo era in the 18^th century.

It’s clear from the first few pages itself that a vast amount of research has gone into the novel, revealing itself in details of clothes, interiors, patterns of speech, food and, of course, the shifting political compulsions of the time. That, however, can be a two-edged Bushido blade. While this saga of administrators of the Dutch East India Company and their dealings with a walled-off Japan has more than enough thrilling incident to keep one reading, the forest of narrative does at times get obscured by the trees of detail.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet concerns itself with the travails of its eponymous hero, a Dutch clerk who arrives on Dejima, an island linked to Nagasaki. This is where the Dutch East India Company has been allowed to establish a trading post, contact with the mainland being forbidden. The green-eyed, red-haired pastor’s son hopes to make his fortune in order to return to Holland and win the hand of his beloved there.

The book moves at a cracking pace from the start. Dutch officials – some corrupt, some upright – walk through its pages, each one as garrulous as the other. They’re matched by Japanese interpreters, magistrates and abbots, some valiant, some seduced by power.

Almost at first sight, Joseph loses his heart to Orita Aibagawa, midwife and assistant to a Dutch doctor, and much comedy accompanies the course of his hesitant wooing, including the unexpected administration of an enema. The things men do to pursue matters of the heart.

When not having his extremities assaulted, Jacob pores over ledgers of those before him, who have been busy swindling the company in order to sell the excess for tidy sums. No surprises there: the esteemed officers of the East India Company were not above the same feat.

In these and other actions, Jacob reveals himself to be both clever and upright, although unaware of the effects his actions have on others. As the chief resident puts it, he’s “an honest soul in a human swamp of back-stabbers, a sharp quill amongst blunt nibs...”

The mood of the book becomes grimmer in the next section, where the setting moves to a monastery in Japan that is beset by sinister goings-on involving young women, largely due to a nefarious abbot. Orita finds herself sequestered within its walls and plans an escape while contemplating her sorry future if she doesn’t. Once more, the book segues away in its next section to display the consequences of the weakening of Dutch colonial power and the rise of the English. The island comes under siege, and Jacob and his compatriots deal with the outcome in this “land of a thousand autumns”.

The prose has an air of living immediacy because it unfurls in the present tense and -- in a first for Mitchell -- in the third person (which, as he’s put it, is the art of “He, She and They”). Paragraphs are often short, at times single sentences, which add pace and throw the occasional metaphor into relief: “The clock's pendulum scrapes at time like a sexton's shovel”.

At times, though, the twists and turns veer towards the lurid. This creates a dissonance with the texture of the narrative, crammed as it is with specifics and particulars. Take for example, a missive from the Shogun: we're told, in succeeding paragraphs, that it's a scroll in a cylinder emblazoned with hollyhock insignia on a lacquered tray, needs a clockwise twist to open, and the parchment within is wound tight around two dowels of cherry wood, with ornate columns of brush-stroked calligraphy. Some letter, that.

Those who seek the writer of Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas won’t find him here; neither is this novel akin to his last work, the semi-autobiographical Black Swan Green. Instead, the protean, gifted Mitchell explores the effects of the opening up of a hitherto-closed society to outsiders who may not always have its best interests at heart. Interpreters from both sides struggle to find the mot juste, and the Japanese grudgingly embrace the advantages of European medicine and science. Orita herself is a midwife – a word pregnant with meaning in this context – and much of the novel’s action takes place on the island of Dejima, quite literally a bridge between two cultures.

At one point in the novel, Orita equates narrative with other necessities: “The belly craves food, the tongue craves water, the heart craves love and the mind craves stories”. The exuberance of the storytelling on display here does more than satisfy that craving.

The Society For The Prevention Of Cruelty To Books

If there's one, could you let me know where to sign up? My new Yahoo column.

Choice Cuts

This appeared in today's DNA.

THE ART OF CHOOSING Sheena Iyengar

If you hold fast to the belief that everything is predestined, Sheena Iyengar's The Art of Choosing isn't for you. If, however, you've ever pondered over a career, rejected an arranged marriage or stood bewildered in front of crowded supermarket shelves, this book offers much to reflect upon.

Iyengar, a Columbia Business School professor, examines choice from different vantage points, backed by experiments devised by her and other social scientists over the years. Her book is grounded in psychology but draws upon other disciplines, from economics to medicine. It’s far from a dry-as-dust report: there are personal asides, such as details of her parents’ arranged marriage, and other cultural references from the novels of Don de Lillo and William Styron to scenes from The Matrix to the music of Wynton Marsalis.

In her hands, choice is the thread that, when tugged, unravels the skein of our personalities and the way we live. “When we speak of choice,” she writes, “what we mean is the ability to exercise control over ourselves and our environment”. Loss of control leads to stress, which in turns lowers immune systems. For those facing daily commutes, this means that being stuck in a traffic jam is bad for health.

Then again, the amount of control we’re happy with depends on where we live. Drawing an interesting parallel between Cinderella and Mumtaz Mahal, Iyengar demonstrates that ethnicity determines how we see the world. This is the much-talked-of difference between Asia and the West, the former placing society first, the latter driven by Enlightenment values. There are lessons for HR managers here: on one side, Emerson’s rugged individualism and on the other, F.W. Taylor’s “scientific management”.

Another opposition is between “freedom from” and “freedom to” You can be free from social restrictions, but what is it that you’re free to do? Iyengar draws upon interviews with those from former East Berlin to show how their disaffection with the current state can be traced to this duality.

Of course, it’s a truism to say that it’s our choices that make us who we are. But, as Iyengar points out, it’s not that simple. There are inbuilt biases: we seek information to support our prejudices; we delude ourselves of our uniqueness; and when it comes to expressing identity, we need others to see us as we see ourselves. Awareness is vital: “We are sculptors, finding ourselves in the evolution of choosing, not merely in the results of choice”.

The way people choose is, of course, also of interest to marketers. Here, Iyengar recounts the modus operandi of the famous “jam study” undertaken by her and fellow researchers wherein two sets of shoppers in a department store were asked to pick from different flavours of jam – 24 in one and 6 in the other. Those with fewer options ended up buying more than those confronted with a wide array. The human brain, as it turns out, isn’t wired to differentiate between so many: we like our bread and butter with only a bit of jam.

Iyengar feels that in such cases, it’s best to rely on the knowledge of experts. ( Zagat’s restaurant guides, anyone?) Knowledge is also important when brands such as bottled water, cigarettes or cosmetics offer an illusion of choice but, because most are owned by few corporations, the differences between them are extremely slight. As Socrates said in the marketplace: “What a lot of things I don’t need”.

Undeniably, though, Iyengar’s enthusiasm for citing studies as well as her thorough exploration of the ramifications can bog the book down. There are no easy solutions: she explores issues, points out corollaries and stops short of being prescriptive. As she says, given life’s uncertainties and contradictions, the act of choosing will always be more art than science. To beat the odds, choose to read this book.

The Risks Of Reading

Vodka: 'Life is calling. Where are you?' Me: 'Do go away, I'm reading' 

(My Yahoo! India column)