Family Matters

This appeared in today's DNA.

FREEDOM Jonathan Franzen

In an essay for Harper’s magazine in 1996, Jonathan Franzen rued the contemporary novel’s inability to engage with culture in the manner in which, say, the 19^th century novel did, when  new instalments of work by writers such as Dickens were awaited, pored over and discussed. As he wrote, “The ambitious young fiction writer can’t help noting that, in a recent USA Today survey of twenty-four hours in the life of American culture, there were twenty-one references to television, eight to film, seven to popular music, four to radio, and one to fiction (The Bridges of Madison County)”.

Franzen’s much-commented-upon 2001 novel, The Corrections, exploring “the possibility of connecting the personal to the social”, was an impressive attempt to overcome this, being a study of an American family over the years. His new novel, Freedom, has been greeted by a blare of trumpets, and not just from the literary pages. He’s become the first novelist in ten years to make it to the cover of Time magazine; the book has been hailed by some quarters as “the best novel of the century”; and it’s climbed up and stayed on the bestseller lists from the moment of publication.

Freedom, then, arrives with numerous expectations, and though many are realized, it must be said that it doesn’t live up to all of them. Franzen’s subject is again the American family and, in exploring the vagaries of the lives of its members, he brings out the tenor of the Bush years in America.

It opens with a bravura first chapter introducing us to the Berglunds – Walter and Patty, and their children, Joey and Jessica – entirely through the eyes of their neighbours in St Paul, Minnesota. Walter is a born do-gooder, and Patty is serially conflicted; as their lives unravel, one observer unkindly calls them “the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven”.

From here, we move to a lengthy section comprising a journal that Patty has written of her formative years, at the suggestion of her therapist. This manuscript plays a key role later in the book when it is read by two other characters, provoking a sudden change in circumstances. (In this manner, Franzen tries to combine his brand of realism with more modern methods of telling.) The problem with this record of Patty’s school, college and wedded years it that the overall tone is too ironic and knowing for us to fully believe that it’s emerged from her pen.

The narrative moves on, with detailed and rich accounts of the characters’ inner and outer lives. We’re told of Patty’s increasing loneliness and despair, Walter’s search for meaningful work, Joey’s relationship with his parents, love interests and shady business deals, and of Walter’s old friend, Richard Katz, an indie musician who achieves a degree of fame he’s ambivalent about. Befittingly, the novel is also rife with cultural markers to indicate time’s passage, from books to music to movies. (It’s odd, however, that though all the characters’ lives are deeply delved into, it’s the daughter Jessica who’s comparatively ignored.)

The tangles and triangles in all of these people’s lives are explored in an unhurried manner that brings out all their rainbow-hued complexity, and this is Freedom’s greatest achievement. There is much bleakness and heartbreak to be found in these pages, more than occasionally leavened by sly humour -- Joey’s dislike of the acronym MILF, for example.

In keeping with the title, the novel also investigates what it means to be free, in various contexts: from that of a housewife seeking validation to the social ramifications of a nation flexing its muscles overseas. Sometimes, these notions appear a tad heavy-handed, almost as though Franzen is willing himself to insert such concepts into an already smooth narrative.

It’s in the second half that the experience of reading the novel flags: Franzen’s suave, knowing prose, so impressive to begin with, rolls on and on, sometimes unevenly, and one starts to harbour a feeling that he’s too much in thrall to his characters to let them go. In particular, the detailing of Walter’s efforts at ecological conservation tend to pall.

Freedom, then, is layered and ambitious in the way too few books are in today’s times. Alas, as Browning’s Andrea del Sarto would have said, its reach exceeds its grasp.

Books On Holiday

What books do you take with you when travelling? My next Yahoo India column.

Tusker Tale

This appeared in last Saturday's The Indian Express

THE ELEPHANT'S JOURNEY Jose Saramago

In the tale of the blind men and the elephant, each person describes the animal in a different manner, depending on the part that he feels. Something similar occurs in Jose Saramago’s last, posthumous novel, The Elephant’s Journey.

The novel is inspired by the true story of an Indian elephant and his master travelling from Lisbon to Vienna on foot in 1551. In Saramago’s telling, the pachyderm, named Solomon, is a gift from the king of Portugal to his cousin, the archduke of Austria. Solomon and Subhro, his mahout, travel by land across Portugal, by sea across the Mediterranean and finally traverse the Alps, in the manner of Hannibal’s army.

The officers who travel with them, and the people they encounter along the journey, react to the elephant in ways that reveal more about their self-importance and insecurity than the actual animal itself. The animal emerges as larger than life, open to interpretation:  “Some even say that man himself was made out of what was left over after the elephant had been created…”

Commanding officers and priests, in particular, show themselves to be equally susceptible to petty vanity, Saramago’s way of gently mocking different sections of of the state. In particular, he pokes sly fun at Christian theology, sometimes contrasting it with Hindu myths, especially that of the origin of Ganesha.

There’s much of the author’s trademark style in the way the novel is written. Paragraphs go on for pages and quotation marks are done away with in favour of run-on dialogue separated by commas. In addition, proper nouns are democratised by doing away with capitals. One gets used to all of this surprisingly quickly, and the cumulative effect is to add more than a degree of orality to the narrative, all aided by Margaret Jull Costa’s adept translation.

 This aspect is emphasised further by Saramago’s impishness. There are frequent asides to the reader, some of them self-referential: “Now, this story has not lacked for reflections, of varying degrees of acuity, on human nature, and we have recorded and commented on each one according to their relevance and the mood of the moment.” At other times, he gleefully skates over centuries: “It’s a shame that photography had not yet been invented in the sixteenth century, because…we would simply have included a few photo from the period, especially if taken from a helicopter, and readers would then have every reason to consider themselves amply rewarded and to recognize the extraordinarily informative nature of our enterprise.”

The book’s second half has something of a rushed air, especially when contrasted with the first; and Subhro the mahout does come across as a bit of a cipher, with one remaining unsure of his motivation. For all that, The Elephant’s Journey is a pleasure to read in the way that an updated parable for our times would be a pleasure to listen to. A folktale, then, but one told in the knowing, ironic tone of a person who has seen the world and its foibles more clearly than most.

For Laughter, Against Forgetting

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

ENCOUNTER: ESSAYS Milan Kundera

Two years ago, a Czech newsweekly announced that in 1950, a young Milan Kundera had informed the Communist authorities about the presence of a Western agent in the country, leading to the latter’s arrest and incarceration. Kundera, however, termed the report “an assassination attempt”, denying it completely. The incursion of the past into the present; of one identity into another; and of the political into the personal: the episode had some of the hallmarks of Kundera’s own fiction.

The nature of fiction, its role and development and the responsibility of the artist  have, as a matter of fact, been subjects that have pre-occupied the Czech émigré of late, evident from his non-fiction work such as The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed and Curtain.

With his latest, Encounter, he continues these speculations. This comprises a collection of pieces of varying lengths written over the years – some disappointingly short, some not; some revised, some not. Here, there are musings on modernity, on novelists close to his heart, and on artists and musicians that he feels ought to be better known. Those who are familiar with Kundera’s novels will find many of the same themes that are present there, such as the nature of nostalgia, questions of representation and selfhood, and the role of comedy at a time when humour is the last thing that one would expect.

A dominant and important strand of thought in Encounter is the view of the novel as “a completely necessary investigation” into society and the individual’s role within it. In particular, Kundera says, “the art of non-seriousness” is one of the unexplored alleyways of the novel, with Rabelais as one of its chief exemplars. He rues the drowning out of the 18^th century writer’s narrative voice – puckish, individual, and colloquial – by the more formal rhythms of the 19^th century novelist, a theme he had also written about in Testaments Betrayed.

When it comes to more recent changes in the novel’s form, Kundera says that it was after World War One that the sheer size and externality of events had the potential to transform human beings as much as, if not more than, changes from within – and it’s the novelist’s job to understand and reflect this.

There are many scraps, gleanings and observations on novels that have struck him over time, and he unlocks their art by using unconventional keyholes. For example, Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude has him musing on how most protagonists of great novels do not have children, or his riff on the role that nostalgia plays in Philip Roth’s Kepesh books. (As for the former observation, one could offer Roth’s own Swede Levov from American Pastoral as a rebuttal.)

Kundera is, of course, steeped in the European avant garde and there are several references throughout to writers and artists of that movement – some familiar, many not. He also shines a searchlight on novelists that he feels should have a wider audience. There are, for instance, two lengthy essays dealing with the 19^th century Frenchman of letters Anatole France and his The Gods Must Be Thirsty, and the 20^th century Italian writer Curzio Malaparte and his The Skin.

Music and art also feature in these pages, with Kundera analyzing the essence of Francis Bacon’s paintings – comparing him with Beckett in being modern in a world that is wearying of the modern. Then, there’s a meditation on the operatic works of Czech composer Leos Janacek and his status as a European anti-romantic standing against kitsch. Both of which once again remind one of Kundera’s own work.

Though for most of the time Kundera wears his learning and opinions lightly, there are also moments of despair, such as in a 1995 piece written to commemorate 100 years of cinema. Here, he says that film as technology nowadays is “the principal agent of stupidity…and of worldwide indiscretion.” He continues: “We have come to the era of post-art, in a world where art is dying because the need for art, the sensitivity and the love for it, is dying”. At least we still have those such as Milan Kundera to remind us that absolute fidelity to the novel and to art is not only important, but vital.

Psst. Sar! You Are Wanting Book To Read?

Confessions of an Indian book pirate: the next instalment of my Yahoo India column.

Pak Pack

This appeared in today's The Indian Express

GRANTA 112: PAKISTAN

Taken as a whole, Granta’s Pakistan-themed issue has  a packaged, carefully-assembled tone to it. Feudal attitudes? Check. Kashmir? Check. The wild NWFP? Check. Karachi cosmopolitanism? Check. Fundamentalism? Check. This imparts to it something of a neat, sanitized air. Taken individually, however, there is much to savour because of the considerable strengths of contemporary Pakistani writing in English. 


Two of the fiction narratives that stand out are Mohsin Hamid’s short, chilling A Beheading – possibly inspired by Daniel Pearl, and which could be said to complement Hanif Kureishi’s earlier Weddings and Beheadings – and Mohammed Hanif’s Butt and Bhatti, a sardonic, dark account of the love that a pistol-packing policeman feels for a more grounded medical assistant. Also haunting, if a tad over-determined, is an extract from 79-year-old Jamil Ahmad’s forthcoming debut novel, The Wandering Falcon, about forbidden love and its consequences that’s set on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In passing, it’s a pity there’s nothing here by H.M. Naqvi, author of the excellent Home Boy. (And the disappointment one feels upon realizing that Daniyal Mueennuddin has contributed not a short story but a poem is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the poem itself reveals its linkages and emotional affect upon a few readings.)

What gives the collection its necessary spine are the pieces of non-fiction. Intezar Hussain speaks of negotiating an atmosphere of heightened religiosity and “unthinking nationalism” during the Zia regime, putting one in mind of Salman Rushdie’s personal recollections in Shame. Another fascinating piece that overlaps the same period is Kamila Shamsie’s Pop Idols, on Pakistani pop music, the emergence of the country’s Sufi rock, the experience of listening to bands such as Vital Signs and Junoon, and what Islamisation has done to some of the country’s most promising musicians.

Two Western journalists also have pieces here, one dealing with the past, the other with the present, each one again serving as a counterweight. Pulitzer Prize-winning Jane Perlez of The New York Times writes on Mohammed Ali Jinnah, mixing facts that are well-known with others that aren’t, bringing his secular credentials to the fore. And Guardian correspondent Declan Walsh travels among the Pashtun in north-west Pakistan to find “roasting hospitality, smouldering pride, cold and clinical revenge”. Then, there’s Basharat Peer’s piece on Kashmir which, like his Curfewed Night, is passionate, informed and mixes the personal and the political to telling effect.

A delightful change of tone comes in the form of Sarfraz Manzoor’s White Girls, detailing his hopeless infatuations over the years, his parents' admonitions to stay away from 'white girls' and of how he finally met the woman he was to marry. Clearly, the author of Greetings from Bury Park hasn’t lost his touch.

In his brief introduction to the pieces of art curated by Green Cardamom and featured in this volume, Hari Kunzru writes of “a particular urgency that exists as much in the desire to trace small, personal actions…as in overtly political gestures…” It is just such an urgency that animates the best pieces in this collection.

Novels At Work

My Yahoo India column on fiction that deals with, in Alain de Botton's words, "the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty, and horror of the workplace".

A Gentle Madness

This appeared in Sunday's DNA.

THE GROANING SHELF Pradeep Sebastian

There are debates aplenty over the talents of authors, the superiority of one genre over another and the worth of awards. But when it comes to actual books themselves, all bibliophiles have the same issues. Among them, the problems of storage, the unread piles, the frustration of not getting the title one wants and the sheer joy in the tactile sensation of holding a book in one’s hands. As Louis Szathmary once said, “You want to possess the books, you want to own them, you want to hold them. Perhaps you even hope that you will read them”.

Pradeep Sebastian has been writing about these subjects and more for years; his The Groaning Shelf is a collection of journalistic sketches that have earlier appeared in The Hindu, The Deccan Herald and elsewhere. These trace, as he puts it, a lapsed reader’s journey from “bibliophile to bibliojournalist to bibliographer”.

This, then, is a book about books. It’s about shelves, libraries, borrowing and lending, first editions, and the pleasures of browsing and collecting. Clearly, Sebastian is walking in the footsteps of others who have touched upon similar themes over the years, from Walter Benjamin to Borges to Manguel to Fadiman and more, some of whom he aptly quotes to buttress his views.

Some of the best pieces here are those that deal with Indian themes, such as the meditation on Amar Chitra Katha or the decline of the hole-in-the-wall lending library. Another noteworthy piece is on how books and bookstores have featured in Hollywood over the years. There are delightful personal accounts, such as his obsessive quest to track down Ira Levin in New York, or the time he spends in antiquarian bookstores. It’s also not without a pang that one reads about his impressions of Lotus House Books, the Bandra bookshop that is still missed.

Another section deals with writers who have afforded him pleasure, such as Pico Iyer, Michael Dirda and Jasper fforde. On occasion, he quotes from his correspondence with them, nowhere more tellingly than when he mentions a letter sent to him by Nicholas Basbanes: “Because books still matter regardless of where the technology is taking us, it is worthwhile, I think, to have as many champions for them as we can muster”. However, Sebastian is no neo-Luddite: there are also well-judged pieces on the e-book versus the printed word, as well as his experiences in tracking down rare editions online.

At times, though, one feels that the volume, like an overcrowded bookshelf, suffers from excess. Some pieces deal with books and writing only tangentially, such as the one on celebrities and their privacy, For all that, Sebastian wears his learning lightly: these riffs are written in a style that is affectless but never artless. When it comes to charting the gentle madness of bibliomania, he is always entertaining, well-informed company.

Reading America

This appeared in today's DNA.

DRIVING HOME Jonathan Raban

Though Jonathan Raban had been writing literary criticism and travelogues since the late Sixties, it was with Hunting Mister Heartbreak in 1991 that he really came into his own. This was his personal discovery of America, coinciding with his move from London to Seattle in 1990 at the not-so-young age of 47. As he writes, he moved for “casual and disreputable reasons”: “I met someone…the usual story”.

It was a move that had the felicitous side-effect of making him find subjects that re-animated his writing, mainly the lives and landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. Since then, he’s produced many more impressive works, notably the travelogues Bad Land and Passage to Juneau; and the novels Waxwings and Surveillance.

His Driving Home is a scrapbook of an Englishman in America, a collection of journalism from 1993 to 2009 that earlier appeared in Granta, Vogue,The New Republic, The Independent, among many other British and American publications. It’s arranged in strict chronological order, which immediately poses a problem to the reader going through it from front to back – book assessments follow travel pieces that follow author profiles that follow meditations on the state of America. (More than once, this reviewer was tempted by the heretical notion of ripping out all the pages from the volume and re-arranging them thematically.) It’s a ragbag then, albeit one loosely held together by the theme of displacement.

In his marvelous introduction Raban talks of the time he first learned to read as a child, and years later, reading on the job as an apprentice bus conductor. Here, he writes of his discovery of literary critic William Empson and his determination to model his style on the man best-known for Seven Types of Ambiguity. Indeed, piece after piece in Driving Home is testament to the hard work that Raban puts into his writing, from Empsonian close analysis to teasing out biographical details and their implications. Of Driving Home, he says: “The pieces that follow are readings – most of them readings of American landscape, literature and politics, along with some backward glances to England that may betray a lurking nostalgia for a society more settled in shape, more instinctively known, than the one I live in now,”

Many of the pieces are analyses of others who have lived in or explored the Pacific Northwest – among them the travelers Lewis and Clarke, novelist Bernard Malamud and poet Theodore Roethke. Another influence, Robert Lowell, is mentioned often. There is much, too, on the nature of travel, especially by sea: “I love the subtlety and richness of all the variations on the theme of society and solitude that can be experienced when travelling by sea”

Inevitably, American politics creeps in, too, with reportage on Obama’s presidential campaign, election night and his inaugural speech. One of the pieces on the theme of how a government uses technology to monitor the words and deeds of its citizens is clearly the inspiration for his novel, Surveillance. Along the way, there are gems such as: “One might see Guantanamo as the Bush administration’s most audacious attempt at nation-building: a tiny offshore state, run, like any totalitarian regime, by an all-powerful president, the military, and the intelligence services”

Of his initial move to Seattle, he writes, “I was a newcomer in a city of newcomers, where the corner grocer came from Seoul, the landlord from Horta in the Azores, the woman at the supermarket checkout from Los Angeles, the neighbor from Kansas City, the mailman from South Dakota”. This ability to think of oneself as a stranger in a strange land, and depict the familiarity and contradictions that result, has served Raban well through his writing career.

Among The Believers

This appeared in today's Mint Lounge

THE MASQUE OF AFRICA V.S. Naipaul

“Africa has no future”. That is how V.S. Naipaul ended a 1979 interview with Elizabeth Hardwick in the New York Times Book Review. This was just after the appearance of A Bend in the River, his novel set in Africa -- a continent to which he wasn’t a stranger, living in Uganda as writer-in-residence at Makarere University in 1966. Then again, he visited the Ivory Coast in the early eighties, fruit of which was the non-fiction account, The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro. It’s here that one finds the first glimmer of the theme that runs through his new work, The Masque of Africa. Despite his bleak pronouncements on the continent, Naipaul clearly feels impelled to return every so often; this journey may well be his last.

He revisits Uganda and the Ivory Coast, and travels to Ghana, Nigeria, Gabon and South Africa, seeking what remains of primordial African belief: “the older world of magic”, and how it has changed, or not, with the advent of Christianity, Islam and the “modern” way of doing things. He seeks out the grass-thatched palaces of Africa’s original rulers, visits shrines and other reliquaries, meets soothsayers, shamans and witch-doctors, and speaks to those whose lives have been altered by initiation rites. He finds common themes: “Doubles, astral journeys, the fragility and yet the enduringness of ritual, the idea of energy, the wonder of the forest”.

For Naipaul, clear-sightedness has always been the writer’s supreme virtue. Here, however, his view of things is coloured by the past. At the book’s start, he recalls visiting a British-laid botanical garden at the edge of Lake Victoria and adds: “Sometimes (a reminder of the wildness by which we were surrounded, but from which we were protected) the ground of the Garden was flooded in parts by water from the Lake seeping through”. This, then, could be a metaphor for what follows: fear of intrinsic chaos overcoming external order.

He sees dirt and garbage everywhere. On a single page, describing his arrival at Kano, a city to the north of Nigeria, one comes across the words ‘dust’ and ‘dirt’ twice, and ‘garbage’ thrice. The word ‘garbage’ appears thrice on the very next page itself. In addition, he makes much of the supposed African tendency to eat dogs and cats, as well as much of their wildlife. That some of the heartless methods of disposing of felines appear to be the merest hearsay doesn’t seem to bother him. Time and again he obsesses over the amount of money he will have to spend on guides, interpreters, witchdoctors and the like -- although this obsession does yield a fresh insight on one occasion: “…it is strange that rituals which would once have seemed necessary and vital, serving what was divine, beyond money, have to be disregarded when there is no money.”

There are powerful passages, such as the description of an initiation at Libreville, and his marshalling of detail is as acute. Not everyone, for example, would be able to describe a soothsayer’s attire as a “white gown that came out grey in a wash from the local water”. Equally, though, there are other times when his precision and command of the language seem to falter, such as when the local legend of an Ivory Coast chieftain’s rise to power is repeated twice for no reason, or when Unilever is quaintly referred to as “the multinational firm of Lever's” and then, just a few pages later, as “the international firm of Lever's”.

In the closing section, on South Africa, he says, “I expected that a big struggle would have created bigger people, people whose magical practices might point the way ahead to something profounder”. As before, he’s disappointed. Here, “race ran as deep as religion elsewhere”: hardly a new observation. Here, too, he segues into a brief account of Gandhi’s doings in South Africa, which seem out of place as they have no connection to the stated theme of the book.

Throughout, Naipaul is frank about his limitations because of the age at which he is travelling. (At one time, his legs give way while venturing to a witch-doctor’s village; a wheelbarrow appears as a vehicle, and this, understandably, does not suffice.) While one can admire such intrepidity, there are other statements that shock: “It was hard to arrive at a human understanding of the pigmies, to see them as individuals. Perhaps they weren't”. Pronouncements like these remind one of Vivian Gornick’s observation that though much of his writing is strong and original, “the lack of tenderness wears on the nerves”. It is this absence of empathy, in the end, that creates a distance between him and his material.