Branches of Childhood

This appeared in the latest TimeOut Delhi

THE SKINNING TREE Srikumar Sen

It’s not easy to write about the experience of childhood. On one side, there’s the Scylla of being patronizing; on the other, the Charybdis of an adult sensibility colouring the proceedings. In his debut novel, the 81-year-old Srikumar Sen avoids the first and only occasionally strays into the second. His The Skinning Tree is marvellously evocative of the narrator’s childhood in 1940s Calcutta and in a Catholic boarding school in north India.

From its arresting opening that deals with a school matron’s tragic fall off a precipice, the novel submerges us in the mind of the 9-year-old Sabby and his privileged pre-Independence childhood.  He’s snatched from this Eden when his parents, fearing a Japanese invasion, send him away to school. Sabby’s Calcutta escapades, from watching a movie with a friend to making manja to fly kites, are portrayed in just the right tone of childlike wonder and thrill of discovery. The meals during a trip to Mussoorie are symbolic of his worldview: “variations of Windsor soup, Irish stew, Emperor pudding at dinner time and curry and rice and chutneys at lunch”. The effect is spoilt somewhat on the occasions that Sen spells this out in more literal terms.

When he faces the harshness of boarding school, the gentle Sabby begins to change. Sen captures his classmates’ Anglo-Indian patios – “I’m telling you, m’n! Yeah, m’n!” -- and challenges such as the making of a bed or the stealing of a chapatti. The school administrators, “distant disciplinarians in white habits”, keep the boys in line by whipping and caning, and this brutish treatment makes Sabby and his friends brutal too. For sport, they mutilate snakes and squirrels, throwing their carcasses onto a tree-entwined cactus on a nearby slope – the “skinning tree” of the title. Their predicament can again be read as symbolic, especially the fear of an English penny tied to a strap “to make it hurt more”.

Symbolic or otherwise, The Skinning Tree’s primary purpose is in the evocation of a lost time and its lingering effects. As such, the narrative drive can sometimes flag but Sen succeeds wonderfully in recreating sleepy afternoons, bridge-playing evenings, the strangeness of a new school and the in-between world of an Anglicised Indian upbringing.

1984 and 1948

My Sunday Guardian column

The new Penguin edition of George Orwell’s 1984 has a terrific cover that features the author’s name and title masked with black foil. Another reminder of how much Big Brother, Doublespeak and the Thought Police are a part of our lives nowadays. The novel, first published in 1948, was itself inspired by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian fantasy, We, with its brainwashed citizens of a totalitarian One State. Years later, Anthony Burgess riffed on Orwell’s book to come up with 1985, the first part of which was a critique of 1984, with the second part being a rather lacklustre novella that imagined a Britain of the future dominated by militant trade unions and large-scale immigration from the Middle East. (Thus, Burgess’s book, written in the 1970s, was more a reflection of its time than of the future.)

Now, there’s another take on 1984, this time titled 1948. This one doesn’t invent an imagined future; it creates an imaginary past. Its purpose isn’t to alarm or warn, but to entertain. And, unusually, it’s written in verse. In Pushkin sonnets, to be exact – and yes, there’s a sly reference made to a certain Vikram Seth who has done the same thing earlier.

Poet Andy Croft’s 1948 is set in an alternative Britain of, well, 1948. There’s a Labour-Communist alliance in power, Winston Churchill is fulminating from his hideout in Washington and as for the royal family, they’re in exile in Rhodesia along, one supposes, with their corgis. Against this background, on a bright, cold day in April, policeman Winston Smith (that name should sound familiar) comes across a body in a dockyard, and then finds his superior, O’Brien, behaving suspiciously. Dreaming of Julia, his ex-girlfriend, he bumps into an alluring Russian operative called Tamara Zaleshoff (named after an Eric Ambler character) and with a little help from her, manages to untangle the mystery, the climax of which occurs at the opening of London’s Olympic Games.

The fun of reading Croft’s book isn’t in keeping track of events – truth to tell, the plot is thin and underdeveloped, even for such a slim volume – but in the sheer joie de vivre of the verses. Keeping to the strictures of line and length for an extended period isn’t easy (as he writes, it is “in short a verse form that’s designed/for distance runners of the mind”) but Croft pulls it off with panache.

The illustrations by Martin Rowson emphasise the comic-noir feel, along with lines such as: “It doesn’t come cheap, this kind of writing/The dockland scene, the low key lighting/The morally ambiguous tone/That late night, smoky saxophone”. As for Croft’s tonal inspiration: “The shadows on my flickering screen/are shot in black and white and Greene; /Here, every mood’s subdued, crepuscular/Like Hammett, Cain and Hemingway/The only ink I’ve used is grey”. That’s a shade of grey one can approve of. At one point, Winston Smith even picks up a book by Eric Blair, an alternative version of Orwell, a volume that’s “weighed down by overweight prediction/And not buoyed-up by common sense/ It looks too much like heavy going/To get Smith’s mental juices flowing”.

Along the way, there are endless digressions, but after a short while these cease to be departures and add instead to the fun of the reading. Croft is constantly self-reflective: “Though you may say that I’m a dreamer/It seems to me that on the whole/This idiotic rhyming schema/Requires some quality control”.

Dreamer/schema isn’t the only amusingly inventive rhyme here; there’s also tea/ennui as well as this one which deserves to be quoted in full: “Though Pushkin stanzas tend to shuttle/Between High Tragedy and Farce/(It doesn’t do to be too subtle/Or you will end up on your arse)”. Croft certainly doesn’t end up on his arse or on any other part of his anatomy. After a diet of Serious Novels all aspiring to be The Next Big Thing, his little 1948 comes as a breath of fresh air. Orwell that ends well.

Alberto Manguel's Labyrinths

My Sunday Guardian column.

As a teenager in Buenos Aires, Alberto Manguel spent much time reading aloud to the by-then sightless Jorge Luis Borges, an experience he’s written about in the slim memoir, With Borges. Since then, Manguel has become arguably the planet’s most ardent bibliophile, recording his passion in volumes such as A History of Reading, A Reader on Reading and The Library at Night.

He’s made infrequent forays into fiction, too. His 2004 novel, Stevenson Under the Palm Trees, was a literary murder mystery set in Samoa and featuring Robert Louis Stevenson; his new novel, All Men Are Liars, translated from the Spanish by Miranda France, also has an author and a death at its heart. Given that this fictional character is an Argentine, one is tempted to think that he’s based on Borges himself. This proves to not be the case, although All Men Are Liars has more than a few Borgesian touches.

In a recent piece, Manguel wrote of his personal library of over 30,000 books that it was not “a single beast but a composite of many others”. All Men Are Liars is also a composite: not a unified entity but made up of the testimonies of various people from varying vantage points who speak about their memories of the fictional writer in question, one Alejandro Bevilacqua.

The first of the narrators, talking to a journalist hoping to piece together Bevilacqua’s life story, bears the name of Alberto Manguel. This version of Manguel dredges up his knowledge of the writer: childhood in Buenos Aires, later imprisonment by the junta, exile in Madrid, the circumstances leading up to the publication of his one celebrated novel, In Praise of Lies, and his tragic death shortly after, because of a fall from a balcony.

The next narrator starts bluntly: “Alberto Manguel is an asshole”. This is one of the women in Bevilacqua’s life, directly responsible for his novel’s publication. After more digs at Manguel’s reading habit (“All that fantasy, all that invention – it has to end up softening a person’s brain”) she presents a version of events at variance with what’s come before and raises further questions: how exactly did Bevilacqua die? How did he come to write his novel, if indeed it was his? Her account is followed by other narrators, including a Cuban émigré who shared the author’s cell in Argentina and finally, that of the journalist himself.

There is thus a teasing Rashomon-like interplay between the differing accounts. As one of Manguel’s characters says: “Take any number of events in the life of a man, distribute them as you see fit, and you will be left with a character who is unarguably real. Distribute them in a slightly different way and -- voilà! -- the character changes”. The boundary between truth and fiction is shown to be more porous than we think.

Along the way there are other puzzles to ponder -- “Bevilacqua made a distinction between true falsehood and false truth” --  and also riffs on the work of Enrique Vila-Matas as well as a fascinating little digression on the literature of his country, one that ends with: “Lying: that is the great theme of South American literature”.

The mystery of the writer’s death and the manuscript are effectively-handled plot devices that keep one reading, a wrapper for Manguel’s real intentions:  “From our tiny point in the world, how can we observe ourselves without false perceptions? How can we distinguish reality from desire?”  The journalist’s quest, then, to tell the one, coherent story of this multi-faceted character is doomed from the start. This is something that Manguel overstates, reminding us time and again of the protean nature of reality and its interpretation.  

Despite his attempts to make the novel both entertaining and haunting, it’s more of the former than the latter. Still, All Men Are Liars partakes of the spirit of the words of Borges himself: “We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.” 

Found In Translation: My Favourite Fiction of The Year

My Sunday Guardian column.

Most of the fiction I found noteworthy in 2012 was in translation. Here, there was all the inventiveness, ideas and engagement one looked for – often unsuccessfully – in fiction from the English-speaking world. In no particular order, here’s a selection of this year’s titles: a choice that’s both personal and random, given the ones I haven’t yet read (Laszlo Karsznahorkai, Robert Walser) and the ones I haven’t yet been able to get hold of (Bernardo Atxaga, Daniel Sada).

To begin with, Laurent Binet’s HHhH, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, about the British secret service plot to kill Reinhard Heydrich in 1941. (If you’ve seen Operation Daybreak, you already know the story.) HHhH is historical fiction that plays with the conventions of fiction by putting the author’s own misgivings about realism and recreation at its heart. Criticized for the occasionally clunky prose and being too clever by half – with some justification – it’s nevertheless wholly absorbing and engaging.

Also from France is Philippe Claudel’s The Investigation, translated by John Cullen, which tries to out-Kafka Kafka with the story of an unnamed investigator’s efforts to plumb the workings of an entity known as the Firm. As the Investigator spirals towards his nemesis, events become even more nightmarish; an effect balanced by the questions Claudel raises about facelessness and capitalism, among others.

Then, there’s Herman Koch’s The Dinner, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett, which has surface similarities with Polanski’s Carnage, but is wickeder and more startling than the movie. Skillfully paced, it depicts the manipulations beneath the surface when two couples meet to discuss their sons’ involvement in an unexpected act of violence, with a denouement that’s as unexpected.

The novel that lays claim to be the most ambitious and luminous of the lot goes to Andres Neuman’s Traveller of the Century, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, which begins with a stranger arriving at a fictional German town in the nineteenth century. It’s been called an example of a “total novel”, encompassing a love story, a murder mystery and debates on art, literature, politics and feminism. Sprawling and bulky but never dull: one of those long novels where the length doesn’t matter.

Also in Spanish, and translated by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean, is Enrique Vila-Matas’s Dublinesque. This consciously literary novel deals with a trip taken by a Barcelona publisher to Dublin to commemorate his own vision of Bloomsday, and is haunted by the spirit of Joyce – but also by others such as Beckett and Larkin. I hesitate to use the word “inimitable”, but that’s what Vila-Matas’s novels always turn out to be.

It’s long and digressive and stuffed with minor characters, but Grigor von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol, first published in 1958 and now translated from the German by Philip Boehm, is endlessly fascinating, with prose that alternates between the ironic and the nostalgic. Set in a small town of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire between the world wars – a place and era lost to time -- it deals with the tragicomic fate of a Quixote-like hussar, a humourless man in a place that values humour.

The Switzerland-based Peter Stamm’s Seven Years was one of my favourites of last year and he follows it up with a short story collection, We’re Flying, translated by Michael Hoffman. In a quiet, sparse, but by no means unaffecting manner, Stamm records the lives of ordinary folk who oscillate between memories of happiness and dealing with its loss, leaving them – as the man with the horn said – kind of blue.

Finally, from the other side of the globe is Fuminori Nakamura’s The Thief, translated from the Japanese by Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates. This tells of a Tokyo pickpocket who takes palpable pleasure in his solitary craft before being caught up in a web of events he’s unable to control. These cleverly delineated sequences of action and reaction create an atmosphere of brooding noir and raise questions that are more existential than criminal.

On The Stories Of Mercè Rodoreda

My Sunday Guardian column

Blurbs are often overblown; yet, when they’re by the right person and say the right things, they can be remarkably persuasive. Thus it was that on the last evening of a recent trip, I found myself handing over scarce foreign exchange for a translation of selected stories by Catalan author Mercè Rodoreda -- of whom, as the cover proclaimed, Gabriel Garcia Marquez said that she’s a writer “who still  knows how to name things”.

As I was subsequently to learn, it’s Rodoreda’s novels that are the full-blown expression of her craft and art. The stories, however, are the perfect introduction, containing all the expressive experiments with tone that mark her longer work.

Despite being championed by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, Rodoreda’s work never became as well-known as theirs in the English-speaking world. In her homeland, however, she’s feted as one of their most important writers, a Member of Honour of the Association of Catalan Language Writers, with a library and a respected annual literary prize named after her.

‘Blood’; ‘Happiness’; ‘Summer’; ‘Departure’; ‘Love’: the titles of her stories are simple, but the exposition – in the English translation by Martha Tennent – is rich and rewarding. Most of the central characters are women, depicted as see-sawing between traditional and modern roles. One of them, for example, is described as “a girl without troubles, without agitation, a girl unaware that she was tyrannically imprisoned within four walls and a ceiling of tenderness.” Elsewhere, a young wife suspects her husband of infidelity, a suspicion that grows to consume their relationship; a seamstress, alarmed by the depth of her feeling, waits for her rich relative to die so she can set up shop on her own; a young couple bumps into each other during the festa and forms a strange attachment. Often, these are people afflicted by a quiet grief, with desires unfulfilled, looking into mirrors to notice the wrinkles that have robbed them of youth.

Some of the early stories are no more than fragments, with people walking through Barcelona’s streets and inhabiting its cafes, workplaces and cinema halls -- yet they possess a quality of melancholy and impressionism that characterize her later work. They’re also grounded by precise observation, such as the description in one of the stories of the slaughter of hens in a poultry market.

These are tales of sudden infatuations and estrangements – vivid and short-lived, like the ephemeral flowers she mentions time and again -- where the need to make a living is at odds with the desire to live a life. At times, their emotional depth puts one in mind of work such as Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights or Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.

It’s the later stories that are more fleshed out, with an almost nightmarish stream-of-consciousness that her novels are known for. Rodoreda’s own years in Paris and Geneva as a Spanish Civil War exile, and living through the world war, find expression here. The effect of looking upon the ugly face of conflict is evident in ‘Orleans, Three Kilometers’ and ‘On A Dark Night’, for example. In ‘The Fate of Lisa Sperling’, she also tries out techniques such as a deft switching from third person to first person within the same paragraph. Many times, the mood is undercut by a weary cynicism, such as when she writes: “If all of us here could return to the womb, half would be trampled to death by those who fight to get in first”.

Of The Time of Doves, one of Rodoreda’s most famous novels, Natasha Wimmer -- best-known for her translations of Roberto Bolaño's work -- has written that she “plumbs a sadness that reaches beyond historic circumstances, a sadness born of helplessness, an almost voluptuous vulnerability”. A new translation of the novel by Peter Bush, this time titled In Diamond Square, is forthcoming in March next year: another opportunity for Rododera to gain the international readership she deserves.

A Grief History Of Time

This appeared in the latest edition of Mint Lounge

NOT ONLY THE THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED Mridula Koshy

The intimacy and focus that a short story can offer is often at odds with the all-encompassing sweep of a novel, which is why there aren’t many writers who are accomplished in both forms.  Mridula Koshy’s If it is Sweet was a notable collection of short stories featuring migrants, domestic workers and other lost souls seeking consolation as and where they could find it. Here, a raw sensibility meshed with craft to create a variety of tones, making for a striking début. In her first novel, she plays to these very strengths; the question, however, is whether it all adds up to a unitary work of satisfying heft.

Not Only the Things that Have Happened contains many lives and worlds. It starts with an aged Annakutty on her deathbed in a village in Kerala, still consumed by memories and dreams of her out-of-wedlock son who was adopted forty years ago. (“I gave you up,” she says, “but I never gave up loving you”.)  The novel spirals outward to encompass others in Anakutty’s ambit, from her stepsister working as a nurse in Dubai to her teenage niece to her stepmother, to mention only a few. The immersion in the lives of the people of this region is almost Faulknerian in its intensity, along with the milieu against which they have come of age: the influence of Catholicism, the grip of caste, trade union and Left movements and the distance between the impoverished village and the bustling city.

The novel’s second section is set a world away, in a small town in the American Midwest, and contains the same emotional weight but not as much fine-grained social observation. Here, we learn of the life of the lost boy and of those in his ken, including a wife from whom he has separated and a six-year-old daughter. This conflicted individual obsesses over what he can recall of his tangled childhood history; he returns time and again to “the meaning of me”, and his rootlessness causes him to indulge in chameleon-like role-playing: "I don't know who I am. I try on stories, to see if I can fool people into believing I am somebody. But maybe also to fool me."

Koshy’s primary interest is in the impact of past bereavement on present-day lives and she follows her characters’ befuddled journeys and their real and imagined histories with an empathetic eye. These are her novel’s primary colours, which are underlaid by the chronology of how they came to their current states. The passage of time in this novel, in fact, is handled with some skill: all the surface action takes place during 36 hours, but inserted into this are slices of personal history that create a lattice-like whole.

Two distinct sections and geographies, with the narrative delving deep into non-sequential, individual stories: clearly, Koshy can’t be faulted on grounds of ambition. The disconnected nature of each chapter, however, can militate against the novel’s unity as well as emotional impact; there are times when the branches obscure the central trunk. It’s in this sense that one can see a short story writer trying to break free from the past and yet retain the elements that made the earlier work so strong.

That apart, the tone of grim realism makes Not Only the Things that Have Happened rather heavy going -- unrelieved by the glimmer of redemption at the very end. Every character struggles with an unsatisfactory present, and some have to undergo unpleasant material deprivation, too. “The past is grief buried deep in the earth,” Koshy writes; it’s buried deep in this novel, too.

Lotus, Danai: Memories Of Mumbai's Bookshops

Today's Sunday Guardian column.

I miss a time when I didn't have to be informed that rents were too high for bookshops to survive.

I miss having an oasis to break journey in on the trek back home from work.

I miss the serendipity of discovering just the book I always wanted to read on the shelf without knowing that it ever existed.

I miss reading a glowing review of a new novel in the morning and finding it on the shelves that very evening.

I miss the manager running up to me and saying breathlessly: "You should check out these short stories by this writer called David Foster Wallace, he's really very good".

I miss scanning the new arrivals section to discover that the title I couldn't afford in hardback was now available in paperback.

I miss feeling deliciously guilty -- and broke -- when I went ahead and bought the unaffordable hardback.

I miss receiving a call to inform me that the book I'd enquired about is now in stock. And that the book felt all the more precious because of the long wait for the call.

I miss bumping into a friend and scanning the books he held in his hand while he examined the ones in mine.

I miss settling into the tattered sofa chair in the corner with a selected pile of books on my lap and wondering which ones to buy.

I miss deciding to buy all of them.

I miss the sales. (Not, however, the ones that announced: ‘Closing Down’.)

I miss the aroma.

I miss the bookmarks.

I miss the silence. (I miss glaring at those who persisted in conducting loud conversations on their cellphones or with each other.)

I miss the time there was an unexpected power cut that plunged the bookshop into darkness, upon which the person next to me pulled out a torch and coolly continued to examine the shelves.

I miss looking at the unopened pile of cartons containing new books in the corner and wondering whether I ought to ask the attendant to open them just so I could see what was in store.

I miss gingerly turning to the back jacket to see whether the price would give me a jolt. I miss not getting a jolt because of a sticker that said: 'Special Indian Price’.

I miss cradling the parcel of newly-purchased titles all the way home.

I miss adding the contents of the parcel to the tottering pile of unread books.

I miss rushing into the store five minutes before closing time and cursing the traffic.

I miss looking up to find I was the only person in the store apart from a long-suffering attendant who patiently informed me that it was past closing time but if I needed some minutes more, that was fine.

I miss returning to the bookshop after a year away to find the manager holding out a book to me and saying that I'd inadvertently left it behind on my last visit.

I miss the times I walked in without the need to or intention of buying anything, but just to spend some time in the company of books.

I miss being unable to make up my mind about buying a book and returning again and again to see it in the same place on the shelf and then kicking myself one day to find it gone.

I miss being so familiar with the arrangement of titles on a shelf that, with a quick scan, I could immediately tell if something had been added or re-arranged.

I miss living in a city that had space for books.

Glacial Love Story

This appeared in the latest edition of TimeOut Mumbai.

THINNER THAN SKIN Uzma Aslam Khan

In a time of unmanned drones, sudden explosions and military convoys, a couple travels to Pakistan’s far north to study, among other things, the habits of glaciers. A tragic incident involving a nomad’s child strains their relationship as well as illuminates the changing lives of those who inhabit a region suffused by reflections of jagged mountains on crystalline lakes.

That’s the scenario of Uzma Aslam Khan’s fourth novel, Thinner than Skin, marked by a quivering sensitivity of tone in the manner of fellow novelist Nadeem Aslam. The protagonist, for example, is given to musings such as: “I'd held the bitter taste of the glacier melt in my mouth as the silver disc eased deep into the river's skin”.

The novel’s main strand is the first person account by Nadir, a budding photographer, telling of his relationship with Farhana, of German-Pakistani ancestry, whom he meets in San Francisco. As their alliance deepens, they decide to visit their homeland and travel to the frontier along with two other friends. From the start, however, it’s a relationship marked by contrasts: “We loved each other for precisely opposite reasons. If I loved her because she did not remind me of my past, Farhana loved me because she believed I was her past”.

Nadir and Farhana’s odyssey is undercut by the story of a family of nomads, and of their lives’ ups-and-downs. The future of their children apart, they have to deal with the dismissive attitudes of forest officials, spies, soldiers and militants, among others. There’s a wealth of information in these sections, especially to do with the way people live and trade in one of the crossroads of the world.

The carefully-woven prose has many languorous descriptions of inner and outer states as well as a subterranean unfurling of plot. However, there’s a one-sidedness to the manner in which the love story is depicted, filtered as it is through Nadir’s solipsistic musings. As characters’ thoughts circle obsessively around their actions, the pace of the novel can sometimes become as sluggish as of one of the region’s glaciers that it describes.

Not My Books Of The Year

My column for the Sunday Guardian.

Any part of any trilogy in any shade.

Books on India that claim to sum up the country’s present state and future prospects by padding out accounts of limited interactions with its people.

Ungrammatical novels of finding first love in management institutes. Or in TV studios. Or in small-town India. Or in any-town India.

Diet and fitness secrets of Bollywood by the trainers to the stars, with heavily retouched cover photographs.

Ghostwritten celebrity memoirs in prose that's anything but haunting.

Novels without magic for grown-ups, by writers known for writing novels with magic for children.

Memoirs that claim to offer ringside views of political coteries and ruling dynasties, but which read instead like a gossipy settling of old scores.

Novels of wily old politicians with skeletons in closets spending socialite evenings and starry nights plotting to retain power.

Retellings of the Iliad from the point of view of one who was in love with Achilles and contain one too many passages gushing over his chiseled body.

Zombie mash-ups featuring Austen characters. Any other novels featuring Austen characters. Unless they’re actually written by Austen.

Anything entitled How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You. (It exists. Look it up.)

Inspiring sagas of white men setting up schools in Afghanistan.

Follow-ups by authors hoping that a film version by Ang Lee is sufficient to revive their careers.

Dramas of domestic discord delving into the deepest depths of daughters-in-law.

Books by those who promise to keep you abreast of the stock market, ahead of the curve and pushing the envelope while outside the box. Sometimes all at the same time.

Short story collections billed as ‘sensitive’ and ‘ethereal’ which start with the protagonist moodily staring out of a window and end with him making a weak cup of tea.

Thrillers featuring James Bond not written by Ian Fleming.

Mafia novels featuring the Corleone family not written by Mario Puzo.

The novel tipped as ‘the next big thing’ and ‘charting a bold new direction’, which turns out to be written in a high Modernist style that’s all but incomprehensible.

Long-delayed second novels by those with promising debuts, making you wonder whether writers’ block isn’t a good thing, after all.

Novels of dreary realism in the best tradition of creative writing programmes, wherein all boxes are ticked except that of keeping the reader engaged.

The Secret Letters of the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. (“A moving and fascinating journey from the Bosphorus in Turkey to a remote fishing community in India to the catacombs of Paris”.)

The one described as using “the easy conversational tones of contemporary youth, in their teens and twenties.” Or the one that follows “a very simple style of writing, one that’s easy-to-understand without compromising the story’s tone”.

Detailed analyses of Steve Jobs’s leadership style, presentation style, innovation style or interior decoration style.

Leadership secrets gleaned from the lives and work of those such as General Patton, Achilles or Attila the Hun.

Books that treat China as a gigantic money-making machine for the rest of the world’s companies.

Anything with an exclamation mark in the title…or an ellipsis.

The discovered-in-a-drawer and posthumously-published scribblings of beatniks.

The View From Julian Barnes's Window

Today's Sunday Guardian column.

One of the satisfactions of reading writers on other writers is their ability to generate insights based on shared familiarity with the art. This is what holds together Julian Barnes's new collection of essays, Through the Window -- otherwise a ragbag of reviews and pieces that have appeared in the Guardian and the NYRB, among others.

The volume is also a handy guide to some of Barnes’s pre-occupations: the French in general and Flaubert in particular; inventive modes of narration; and the ways in which we deal with the imminence of death. Much of this is rendered in an aphoristic style that Barnes -- unusually for a writer from England -- has strived to perfect. (As he says: "the idea of taking a social or moral observation, polishing it into literary form, and laying it out by itself on a white page as a jeweller lays a sparkler on black velvet -– this seems a bit suspicious to us.")

Not all of the pieces are laudatory, however: there's a takedown of George Orwell in which he raises questions about the veracity of the celebrated essays 'A Hanging’ and 'Shooting an Elephant’. In a dig at the reasons for Orwell's fame, Barnes writes: "He denounced the Empire, which pleases the left; he denounced communism, which pleases the right. He warned us against the corrupting effect on politics and public life of the misuse of language, which pleases almost everyone". That won’t please everyone.

As against this, there’s a generous, informed tribute to John Updike, written shortly after his death -- even though one disagrees with Barnes's judgment that Terrorist is one of Updike's novel’s that will stay the course. Nevertheless, it’s "impossible equally not to honour and thank him with a reader’s raised glass, full to the brim – though preferably not with water".

The essays on Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier and Parade’s End are probing analyses of their worth as well as the reasons for Ford's neglect. It’s also clear that Barnes’s unreliable, deluded narrator from his Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending learnt a trick or two from Ford's John Dowell.

Barnes's fussy side emerges in his exegesis of Lydia Davis’s translation of Madame Bovary. While praising its precision, he says, in typically Barnesian manner: "at its worst, it takes us too far away from English, and makes us less aware of Flaubert’s prose than of Davis being aware of Flaubert’s prose". A translation that gratifies everyone is probably impossible, given Flaubert’s well-documented struggle to polish every French sentence of his masterpiece.

Other essays include those on neglected writer-aphorist Nicolas-Sébastien Roch de Chamfort; on monument restorer Prosper Mérimée; and on neo-Impressionist art critic and dealer Félix Fénéon. (Yes, you have to be something of a Francophile to summon up the requisite enthusiasm.) There’s also a delightful piece on the unpublished French motoring diaries of Rudyard Kipling, revealing the writer to be a punctilious record-keeper of the state of Rolls-Royces, hotels and graveyards.

The short story, 'Homage to Hemingway’, is an apt companion to the rest, dealing as it does with ways of representation and the dangers of a writer's life overtaking his art. Patterned on Hemingway's short story, ‘Homage to Switzerland’, it features scenes from the classrooms of an author and writing professor, or versions of him. He tells his students that though Hemingway is supposed to be obsessed with male courage and machismo, "They didn’t see that often his real subject was failure and weakness".

What stands out is the introduction, in which Barnes writes with feeling of his life in books, from early forays into his parents’s collection to local libraries to his latter bibliophilia. It's also a passionate defence of print: "Books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information". The printed book, he says, is the perfect symbol to show that reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. The view through Barnes’s window is one that shows the intersections of his reading and of his life.