Suzy Wong Doesn't Live Here Anymore

This appeared in the Sept-Oct issue of Biblio.

EVENESCENT ISLES: FROM MY CITY VILLAGE Xu Xi

Hong Kong is an outcome of the law of unintended consequences. This once-humble trading port fell into the hands of the British in 1842 as one of the fallouts of the First Opium War, and then served as an entrepot of their empire in the east before, of course, being handed back to the Chinese People’s Republic in 1997.

Commerce and commingling, then, have been part of this settlement on the Pearl River delta from the start, and continue to shape its growth. The mash-up of mainland Chinese, Caucasian, South-east Asian and “Hong Kong Chinese” cultures lends to the city a distinctive, frenetic sensibility. You can see it on the faces of passengers on the Star Ferry criss-crossing the harbour; in the meretricious neon signs on Nathan Road; in the gyrations of Canto-pop stars on music channels; on the flashy boutiques in Causeway Bay; and in the packed skyscraper elevators carrying employees towards their offices in Central.

It’s Hong Kong’s film-makers who have been the most visibly inspired by this feverish ethos of one of the world’s most thickly-populated places – with John Woo and Wong Kar Wai being two obvious examples. Local writers have had a harder time of it: their thunder has been stolen by writers from mainland China, either in English or in translation, with those such as Ha Jin and Gao Xingjian, for example, gaining readers across the world.

The character of the city itself seems ill-suited to the creation of literature, with financial indices being more willingly pored over than novels. In addition, the multi-ethnic nature of the region, with its diverse languages, makes it daunting for one voice to represent the particolored jigsaw city of the present. Long gone are the comfortable certainties that gave Dickens, Proust and Joyce the confidence to create fictional and complete versions of London, Paris and Dublin, respectively.

As the peripatetic Indonesian-Chinese author Xu Xi, who claims kinship with the community of Hongkongers, wrote in an introduction to an anthology of Hong Kong writing, “We in Hong Kong exist in such a perpetually tense present of frenzy that the idea of ‘racing’ to tell any kind of Hong Kong story, especially in English, seems like an unnecessary effort. It isn’t profitable, which our culture instinctively abhors, and does not seem to suit the international buyer’s market that prefers the musings of those who write ‘real’ English, an added burden indeed for the hapless writer.”

It is to the conundrum of a writer’s existence in Hong Kong that Xu Xi returns in Evanescent Isles: from my City Village, a slim volume of loosely-linked essays that speaks of her growing years, her struggles to be a writer and her perception of the city’s volatile character. In this context, however, the use of the word ‘evanescent’ is perplexing, with its associations of being fleeting and not always perceptible. As Xu Xi’s essays show, the reality is that the city is an all-too-solid though chameleonic jumble.

Of the origins of these musings, she writes: “…I began wandering through my life in this, my birth city. It seemed at first an aimless journey though memory, supplemented by present-day conversations about Hong Kong, provoked by the stimuli offered by the city’s writing, art, performances, photography, films, as well as by the minutiae of day-to-day living.” The rest of the book is true to this observation, with passages inspired by her walks and journeys through the city and the memories they provoke, her meetings with friends and relatives and her eavesdropping on strangers’ conversations on board buses and trams.

It’s clearly a city that is close to her heart; in one passage, she reflects on its inevitable “glocalisation”: “[A]s I meander from Sai Wan Ho at the eastern side of Hong Kong island to Mei Foo Sun Cheun in northwest Kowloon peninsula, or from Siu Hong in the far west of the New Territories, [I find] there is a 7-11 or K-Mart convenience store in every district, a Giordano or Bossini clothing retail outlet in every shopping mall, a Wing Wah or St Honore cake shop in every MTR or KCR station. You need never leave your district to experience a Hong Kong that is much like the one an hour’s journey away, even on the small outlying islands of Peng Chau, Lamma or Cheung Chau.”

With a structure like that, chronology is the first thing to be tossed out of the way, and in these pages, she ranges from past to present to near-present with sometimes-confusing agility. For this writer, “chronological exactitude is an unnecessary hobgoblin in the telling of tales”. Thus, she ranges over her family background, from rich to shabby-genteel, her relationship with parents, her teen obsession with American culture, one she never entirely grew out of, her memories of the teacher who awoke in her a love for literature, her first forays into writing, her two divorces, her experiences staying alone in Hong Kong, and more.

Though there is much sincerity in the depiction of this struggle to come to terms with what the city of Hong Kong means to her, there are also many occasions when a generalizing naiveté comes to the fore. “All we humans can do is touch each other a moment and move on, across this strange globe of ours, trusting in dreams and desire, placing faith in the fiction that shapes our lives,” she says at one point, and then in another: “Literature is a passion that must somehow find a voice”. No argument there.

In one of the more light-hearted essays, she attempts to provide a glossary of Hong Kong English, in the manner of Ambrose Bierce’s dictionary for 19^th century America. Unfortunately, Xu Xi’s version is less funny, if as acerbic. “Freedom of speech” is defined here, for example, as “What the local media claims it has”, and “Tiananmen” is “a large public square in Beijing where the Olympic torch will blaze and which was the site of some historical incidents, we forget what”.

She is also scathing about questions of identity, with the contrasting pulls of the colonial past and the “one-country-two-systems” of the present day. In an unwitting echo of Amartya Sen’s more polished line of reasoning in The Argumentative Indian, she writes: “How hypocritical, this nationalized concern over identity! There is an archaic definition of the word to mean an ‘individual or real existence’. How refreshing to think that identity could be linked instead to the idea of existence. I exist in this space called Hong Kong from which I consequently derive an identity. Of course, if I happen to be Cantonese or Shanghainese or some other kind of Chinese, or perhaps not even ethnically Chinese at all, but if I happen to exist here, this space will certainly lay some claim on me. To limit identity to a political or national construct, or to demand that it be a choice certifying loyalty to the nation seems unbearably sad. Identity emerges from who we feel we are, who we have evolved to become over time, and is larger than mere nationality or political bias.”

It was of first century Rome that Juvenal famously commented that “everything now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses”. All these centuries later, Xu Xi’s comments on her city’s “Disney democracy” remind us of just how little has changed: “[It] was good enough because even when the economy tanked, bird flu invaded, S.A.R.S. terrorized and little changes insinuated their way into the world…life was and still is about fun, fun, fun.”

This, of course, can also be read as a reprise of her earlier observations on the comparative lack of works of literary merit. In another essay, Xu Xi cites three reasons for the absence of a thriving literary culture: it doesn’t pay the bills; it won’t change anything; and, importantly, “our parents won’t let us”. Asian values, anyone?

Though her criticism is clearly born out of affection, there does seem to be grounds for hope. Such seeds are to be found in literary magazines such as The Asia Literary Review, in the efforts of local publishing houses, in seminars, classes and publications by the Hong Kong academy, and, of course, in events such as the prestigious Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival that seems to attract more writers from across the world every year.

It could well be, on the other hand, that the future of writing in Hong Kong lies more in the newsroom than in the ivory tower. On the horizon could appear an Eastern version of Tom Wolfe’s brand of new journalism, an exuberant, vivid style of social realism capturing voices and attitudes across the archipelago and demonstrating that the city is no longer is the world of Suzy Wongs, noble houses and honourable schoolboys, and never quite was.

Travel Travail

The is from today's The Sunday Express.

GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux doesn’t think highly of travel writers. Their occupation is “one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time…an elaborate bumming evasion.” They’re fond of “jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous.” He’s even more scathing about those who retrace the footsteps of other writers: “opportunistic punks” indulging in a “glib debunking effort for a shallower, younger, impressionable writer”.

Having got that off his chest, he justifies his return to the terrain he wrote about in The Great Railway Bazaar. “Curiosity” and “dreams” are among his compelling reasons. And so, 33 years after he embarked on that expedition at the age of 33, Theroux boards the 12.09 to Paris from Waterloo to find out what’s changed and what hasn’t.

The actions of politicians and warlords meant that returning to Iran and Afghanistan was out; instead, he travels through Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. City squares, streets and bylanes, bars, massage parlours and other dives are the places that he primarily talks about, apart of course from his train journeys, the stations, food and passengers.

Serendipity and the ability to not too take oneself too seriously, those essential companions of the interesting traveller, are largely absent here. Even though it’s clear he hasn’t planned every detail, most of his accounts have the same ring to them. He likes places that haven’t changed all that much, among them Amritsar and Myanmar (the country not the government). He’s scornful about Singapore, heaping pages of criticism on its authoritarianism. He’s illuminating about how the totalitarian regimes of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have turned the lives of citizens into a low farce. And his Vietnam sojourn – among the most moving in the book – reveals that the spirited Vietnamese bear no ill-will towards America; they just want to get on with their lives.

Theroux, of course, has many novels to his credit, and seeks out other writers too. He dines with Orhan Pamuk in enchanting Istanbul, modestly confessing that “he reminded me of myself"; finds Elif Shafak “so beautiful [that] writing seemed irrelevant”; visits an absent-minded Arthur C. Clarke in Colombo; strolls around Tokyo and visits a porn emporium with Haruki Murakami; and gossips about writing, the strangeness of Japan and V.S. Naipaul with Pico Iyer in Kyoto and Nara.

In India, he discovers fresh confidence and optimism – nothing unusual in that – and finds that “everyone talked about the new India but the old India was never very far away”. Nothing revelatory in that either. His trip to the country is full of the contrasts between growth and grime, from the slums of Dharavi to the BPOs of Bangalore. Though he doesn’t break new ground, one sympathises with his reason to move on: an aversion to the “colossal agglomeration of elbowing and contending Indians.”

Towards the end, he experiences an epiphany. “What’s the big difference between then and now? …The greatest difference was in me”. In contrast to his younger self, the 66-year-old Theroux is more comfortable in his own skin, at ease with writing and traveling, with a home he looks forward to returning to. Alas, his conclusion is that the world is shrinking into “a ball of bungled desolation” and if there is hope, it is only to be found in the kindness of strangers. They say travel broadens the mind; perhaps too much travel simply makes it tetchy.

A Situation In New Delhi

This appeared in the latest TimeOut Mumbai.

DREAMS OF RIVERS AND SEAS Tim Parks

With Dreams of Rivers and Seas, Tim Parks takes his novelistic gaze away from decadent Europe and brings us a story of overseas visitors in India. Fortunately, it’s one that’s far more nuanced and complex than Paul Theroux’s recent The Elephanta Suite.

The central -- though absent -- presence here is that of Albert James, a discipline-crossing anthropologist, loosely based on Gregory Bateson. Albert dies of prostate cancer while in New Delhi and, following a phone call from his wife, Helen, their son John arrives from London for the funeral. Also in the mix is journalist Paul Roberts, long-time admirer of Albert, who hopes to persuade Helen to assent to his plan of writing a biography of her late husband. The pas de troix that now ensues is complicated a while later with the arrival of John’s girlfriend, Elaine.

The plot arises organically out of John’s tortured thoughts, Helen’s helpless bravado and Paul’s self-serving curiosity. Parks has a keen eye for Delhi’s crowds, traffic and chaos, efficiently delineating his characters’ complex responses to them. He spins a spider’s web of ideas to do with the commonalities and differences in the ways which we interact and, as such, the novel also deals with more modern modes of communication such as text messages and e-mail.

Grace, despair, patterns of relationships, the inability to recognise one’s ambitions and the strength to endure are what fill these pages. Dreams of Rivers and Seas is at times dense, at times unnecessarily drawn out, at times unnerving – and always absorbing.

Rat Race

This appeared in yesterday's DNA.

BANDICOOTS IN THE MOONLIGHT Avijit Ghosh

It was the 18^th century philosopher Joseph Priestley who once said, “Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.” Well, anyone observing the teenagers of mofussil Bihar in the Seventies would know exactly what sort of society they were a part of: hidebound, repressed, anarchic and casually violent. This, then, is the subject of Avijit Ghosh’s debut novel, Bandicoots in the Moonlight.

The book tells of the exploits of young teenager Anirban Das, who appears to be a thinly-disguised stand-in for the author himself. Anirban’s father, a police officer in charge of containing the Naxalites in the area, is transferred from Wilsonganj to Ganeshnagar and it is in this latter town that Anirban attends the ironically-named Holy Child School. Here, we encounter Anirban’s friends: landlord’s sons, school bullies, overage pupils, incipient politicians and more. Others introduced into the narrative are his father’s driver as well as some colourful neighbourhood characters.

The structure of the novel is episodic, with each chapter describing a separate incident. And though the town of Ganeshnagar is fictional, the milieu is all too real. Ghosh speaks of the pleasures and passions of street cricket; of listening to Binaca Geet Mala on the radio; of surreptitiously scanning outré film magazines; of discovering and devouring pornographic publications; of attending ramshackle movie halls to watch the latest releases; of devising ingenious ways to cheat during school exams; and of finding willing and unwilling prospects to expend one’s libido on. On a more sombre note, he writes of the teenagers’ awakening to caste affiliations, of honour killings, of female infanticide and of the palpable presence of the Naxalites and their depredations.

The prose style is breezy, unassuming and cheerfully amoral, with the unfortunate inclusion of solecisms such as “booby” in place of “busty” and “lusty” instead of “lustful”. One would think that much of the material would lend itself to a satirical or even a trenchant tone; instead, Ghosh indulges in nostalgic asides as well as banal generalisations such as: “What you don’t know, you don’t crave,” and “Sometimes, we enjoy overestimating dread”. The author’s attempt, then, is simply to impose a structure on and relive Anirban’s wonder years.

The ending seems to be not of a piece with the rest, unexpectedly detailing Anirban’s present circumstances and introducing a character or two at the very last minute for inexplicable reasons. As such, the novel on many occasions resembles nothing more than a collection of diary entries, making the whole unpretentious and pleasant, but also unremarkable.

Enter Ghost

This is from the latest issue of Tehelka

INDIGNATION Philip Roth

The central characters of Everyman and Exit Ghost, Philip Roth’s two previous books, were both in their seventies and all too aware of their waning mortality. Those yearning for the feisty Roth of old may well perk up to find that the protagonist of his new novel, Indignation, is a 19-year-old college student. However, Roth reveals soon enough that the narrator has died an untimely death; this, then, is a recollection from the afterlife. He could well have called it Enter Ghost.

Indignation – the emotion, not the book – has of course fuelled Roth’s 29-novel career, with most of his work railing against sanctimony, hypocrisy and the smugness of the established order. Indeed, echoes of earlier books resound in the pages of this one: from the condition of the young narrator of Goodbye Columbus to the masturbatory high jinks of Portnoy’s Complaint to the Celine-like rants of Sabbath’s Theatre to the self-serving claustrophobia of campus life in The Human Stain -- among others. If Indignation, despite its strengths, isn’t as stirring a work, it’s because the writing comes across as whimsical and even odd in places. Not to mention the structure, which tends to totter.

The novel is set in the early Fifties, the time of America’s Korean War. This isn’t an alternative-history scenario as in The Plot Against America, but rooted in the reality of the time. It relates the tale of Marcus Messner, who escapes from his overprotective father’s butcher shop in Newark, New Jersey, to study at a college in Winesburg, Ohio. (Winesburg, that site of stunted American emotion in Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 novel.) Marcus is, as he modestly puts it, a “prudent, responsible, diligent, hardworking A student,” and soon finds himself standing out because of his Jewishness and being at odds with the “constricting rectitude”, compulsory chapel attendance and arrogance of his room-mates.

Marcus’ indignation at the state of affairs peaks during an interview with the college dean, during which he’s moved to quote from large sections of Russell’s ‘Why I Am Not A Christian’. Matters reach a head with the insurrection of a section of the male students who conduct an enthusiastic ‘panty raid’ during a snowstorm, creating an atmosphere that will lead to Marcus’ expulsion. (As should be clear by now, the book has more light-hearted moments than the grim Everyman and elegiac Exit Ghost.)

“All that is solid melts into air” was how the Communist manifesto described the contradictions of capitalism; in Indignation, all that is solid melts into liquid. The novel is full of human stains: the blood in a butcher’s shop as well as in the trenches of war; the vomit spewed by the queasy protagonist as a stand-in for bile when interrogated by the college dean; and, of course, the semen swallowed by Olivia, Marcus’ neurotic almost-girlfriend and fellow student, as well as ejaculated by the high-spirited undergraduates.

Those who look for it will probably find a connection between America’s war then and America’s war now, although Indignation doesn’t belabour the issue. The point driven home instead is that Marcus’ controlling father was right all along: in life, “the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences”. Leaving poor Marcus “replete with frustration, buffeted by the merciless encounter between the no-longers and the not-yets,” as Roth wrote of Nathan Zuckerman in his alter ego’s swan song.

There’s no gainsaying, however, that Indignation doesn’t feel complete as a novel; there’s a definite sketchiness about some parts, while others seem forced. Despite this, there are powerful passages: the descriptions of working in a butcher’s shop and bartending in a local inn, or the college president’s holier-than-thou oration, for example. It’s these, coupled with Roth’s intermittently vigorous sentences, that see the book through to the finish line.

Mapping Desire

This is from today's Hindustan Times.

AN ATLAS OF IMPOSSIBLE LONGING Anuradha Roy

Is writing a form of archaeology? The metaphor is a seductive one, bringing to mind the excavation of buried moments, the enshrining of past activity and the assigning of a structure to the movement of memory. Such activities do, in fact, play an important role in Anuradha Roy’s debut novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing. There are other fitting tropes in the book, too: the mining of the earth’s seams and the reclaiming of ancestral houses, for instance.

The novel is a triple-decker, with the first part introducing us to Amulya and his wife Kananbala who move to the hamlet of Sonagarh near Calcutta at the turn of the last century. As the years pass, their mansion is witness to family tragedies, from Kananbala’s mental deterioration to the collapse of their son Nirmal’s marriage. The action of the second part, based in the same location, takes place 11 years later. We learn of Nirmal’s fate and of his daughter Bakul’s association with orphaned tribal Mukunda, in the context of relationships with other family members. Part three segues into a first-person narration by Mukunda, speaking of his life in Calcutta and elsewhere, of his struggle to make something of himself, and of his meeting Bakul once again so that both can reclaim their lives.

Clearly, one thing the author isn’t short of is ambition: the chronological and point of view shifts apart, the novel covers roughly the first fifty years of the 20th century (historical events resound offstage like muffled echoes) and there are quite a few characters and locales whose development she pays close attention to.

Roy’s prose is atmospheric and attuned to nuance, and while there’s always the danger of such writing becoming nothing more than a warm bath of generalisations, she steers clear of this by her attention to detail and by making the action progress through powerful scenes. Thus, river water seeps into the crevices of an old mansion, the feeling of a sari on a mannequin is both unusual and tempting; Bakul rips apart some of Nirmal’s books in frenzy; a building contractor’s hands are studded with rings; and Mukunda struggles with the chaos of Calcutta’s streets.

In its delineation of flowers, skies, rain and their emotionally-charged effect on human beings, the prose is almost Lawrentian. There are other literary resonances to be found here, two obvious examples being the Mrs Rochester-like state of Kananbala and the Miss Havisham-like battiness of the family’s Anglo-Indian neighbour.

Though much of the plot satisfyingly emerges from the interactions between characters, the childhood ties between Mukunda and Bakul come across as insubstantial, which robs their later relationship of impact. In addition, events speed up towards the end through some all-too convenient coincidences. Such reservations apart, An Atlas of Impossible Longing is a well-etched map of a world in which the past has to be dealt with before the present can be set free.

Burton's Nights

This is from today's DNA.

THE COLLECTOR OF WORLDS Iliya Troyanov

The Victorian era’s reputation for conservatism and Puritanism may be well-deserved, but the other side of the coin is that it was an era of much scientific and geographical enquiry, one that spawned a league of extraordinary gentlemen passionate about their pursuits.

Among these was Sir Richard Francis Burton, who undertook a pilgrimage to Mecca in disguise, ‘discovered’ the source of the Nile along with John Speke, fought in the Crimean War, traveled across the United States, studied the tribes of the Cameroon, undertook a gold-mining expedition in Egypt and explored Brazil and Damascus. No doubt having much free time on his hands, he also wrote books on travel and ethnography as well as translated the Kama Sutra and the Arabian Nights into English.

It is this formidable figure that Iliya Troyanov takes as the subject of his novel Der Weltensammler, now translated into English by William Hobson as The Collector of Worlds.

Troyanov makes it clear from the start that his character of Burton is more of a fictional exploration than an accurate historical reconstruction. The Collector of Worlds comprises three sections, each one dealing with one aspect of Burton’s colourful career. The first tells of his arrival in India as an officer of the East India Company, his dalliances in Bombay and his later intrigues in Sind. The second is an account of Burton’s trip to Mecca, disguised as Sheikh Abdullah, and of his pilgrimage to Islam’s holy places. Finally, we see Burton in east Africa, accompanied by John Speke, on a grim and arduous journey to trace the Nile’s origins.

What’s unusual and appealing about the novel is the manner in which Troyanov builds his recreation. He intersperses a straightforward third person narration with accounts of Burton refracted through the eyes of others. His manservant relates his exploits to a letter-writer, testimonies of those who accompanied him to Mecca are presented, and other letters and official reports fill in the gaps. This may sound like postcolonial decentring – which was probably the aim – but Troyanov doesn’t let it come in the way of a good story. There are some howlers (such as the repeated use of ‘bubukhana’ instead of ‘bibikhana’), some scenes skirt uneasily close to Orientalist fantasy and many passages contain stilted dialogue, but overall, the account is vivid and compelling.

There is another aspect to the book, though, and it’s one that’s not so easily overlooked. Quite simply, Burton never satisfactorily comes to life as a living, breathing flesh-and-blood character, with motivations and impulses common to the rest of us. He remains enigmatic and mythical, a person whose exploits on the page have the power to fascinate, but not one whom we come to know.

In his brief introduction, Troyanov states that his is “a personal approach to a mystery rather than an attempt at definitive revelation”. Perhaps it’s just that Burton’s inner demons have the cunning to escape all of the nets that writers set for him.

Final Chapters

This is from today's Hindustan Times. Do also see McSweeney's for a "thread of memories" by those who knew, met and studied with David Foster Wallace, including Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith.

By now, the most-read piece by David Foster Wallace must be the text of the speech he delivered to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005, where he stressed the importance of staying “conscious and alive in the adult world”. Alluding to the cliché of the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master, he went on, “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master.”

It’s a sad and a cruel irony, then, that the talented, Pynchon-inspired and footnote-obsessed 46-year-old author succumbed to his own terrible master last week.

Wallace’s father has said that his son had been bedevilled by depression for a few months before the end. In fact, study after study indicates that it’s those in creative professions, notably writers, who are more susceptible to mental illnesses such as depression and bipolar disorder. William Styron, who described his own battle with the mind’s savage gods in Darkness Visible, once wrote, “The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.”

The neurosis that creates art is also the affliction that leads to suicide. Some, such as Graham Greene, play Russian roulette and survive; others, more determined, go ahead and write their own premature final chapters.

Age doesn’t play a role here. Sylvia Plath was 30 when she placed her head in a gas oven; Virginia Woolf was 59 when she walked into the River Ouse; Ernest Hemingway was 61 when he aimed a shotgun at his head; Hunter S. Thompson was 67 when he yielded to his fear and loathing; and Sandor Marai was 88 when he doused the embers.

If it was Albert Camus who commented that there was but one truly serious philosophical problem and that was suicide, it was Japanese writer Yukio Mishima who contemplated this problem more than most. Reports suggest that he planned his ritual disembowelment for a year before he performed the act, but not before delivering a prepared speech exhorting the primacy of the Japanese emperor from a balcony to a troop of soldiers below.

One would imagine that writers taking their own lives would pay careful attention to the wording of their suicide notes; but such notes aren’t all that common. Understandably so, come to think of it, because those acting on impulse and in the grip of hopeless melancholy clearly have other things on their minds.

Yet, parts of Virginia Woolf’s last missive to her husband Leonard are heartbreaking: “I feel certain that I'm going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time.” The poet Hart Crane, more terse, was heard to yell, “Goodbye, everybody!” as he jumped off a cruise ship. Another American poet, Vachel Lindsay, proved to be as laconic by writing, “They tried to get me – I got them first!” before swallowing a bottle of disinfectant.

Mental illness and dire circumstances apart, one of the reasons writers are driven to terminal despair could well be because of their struggle to make sense of the world by using the inadequate medium of words. As Gustave Flaubert – also possessed of an unstable temperament -- wrote, “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”

Those among you who imagined that writing was a safe, non-threatening pastime involving lounging about in pyjamas all day will simply have to take up an alternative occupation.

Black Is Back

THE LEMUR Benjamin Black

By their metaphors ye shall know them. Try these on for size: a policeman has a face like “an El Greco martyr”. A woman’s gaze is “as blank as the face of her son’s expensive watch, with a myriad unseen, infinitely intricate movements going on behind it”. And shelves of unread books are – how nice – “a battalion of rebukes”.

Yes, it’s the return of John Banville’s alter ego, Benjamin Black, with this slender novella that was serialized in The New York Times earlier this year. Unlike Christine Falls and The Silver Swan, The Lemur doesn’t feature the dour Quirke, but instead dwells on John Glass, a one-time intrepid, passionate journalist, now burnt-out, living in Manhattan, and commencing work on the authorized biography of his father-in-law, William Mulholland. (With a name like that, Mulholland is, of course, a billionaire entrepreneur and former CIA agent.) Glass ropes in researcher Dylan Riley to help him and it’s when the latter is found dead with a bullet in his eye that a Pandora ’s Box of family secrets is unlocked.

Though there isn’t as much depth as in the other Black novels, the prose is crisp and elegant, and things move at a fast clip -- interspersed by apt (and sometimes wry) descriptions of people’s appearances, their motivations and the geography of Manhattan and its environs. It seems clear that Banville had fun writing this one, and reading it affords the same pleasure.

Spaced Out

This appeared in today's The Sunday Express

CLEARING A SPACE Amit Chaudhuri

“The literary essay,” wrote American essayist Arthur Krystal, “though it may begin by addressing books, always ends up being about the interaction of society and culture.” An observation that’s exemplified yet again by Amit Chaudhuri’s pieces in Clearing A Space, comprising articles earlier published in The London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement, among other places.

A common thread running through many of the essays here is Chaudhuri’s concern with tracing an alternative version of Indian writing, one that steers a course between the idea of India as a mystical, exotic land and the postcolonial, polyphonic torrents of Salman Rushdie and those who followed him. This is the space that Chaudhuri tries to clear, one that exists in “the elisions that direct the binaries (East, West; high; low, native; foreign, fantasy; reality, elite; democratic)”.

To chart this, Chaudhuri attempts to define a separate Indian modernity through the actions of its literate middle class over the years, particularly that of the Bengal Renaissance; to reevaluate Indian writing in the vernacular; and to look at the texts of those who pre-date the “boom” in Indian-English writing. Thus, there are essays that offer perspectives on writers such as Nirad Chaudhuri, R.K. Narayan, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Jibananda Das and, of course, arch Bengali humanist Rabindranath Tagore.

In expressing unease with triumphalist narratives of India’s rise, and glib theories of what Indians ought to be writing about, Chaudhuri favours delicacy, nuance and the minutiae of the everyday – which, of course, are the qualities that distinguish his own novels and stories. These are reminders that the house of fiction, with its foundations in India or elsewhere, ought to contain many rooms, and not just one great hall for the majority.

It ought to be pointed out though that many of the essays, thought-provoking though they may be, are couched in concepts borrowed from poststructural and postcolonial studies which make them heavy going for the lay person. (Never mind the irony of using postcolonial tools to dismantle postcolonial conceits.) These are offset by a few others that offer autobiographical vignettes, such as his move to Bombay with his parents when he was a child, his life in Oxford and his return to Calcutta. (Readers of Chaudhuri’s earlier work will find themselves on familiar ground.) Also of note is a piece on the stasis of what’s called fusion music as well as some astute observations on the commonalities and differences between Bollywood and Hollywood.

Despite the insights on offer, one can’t help but sense a feeling of datedness about the collection. The earliest of these essays was written 14 years ago, and when it comes to Indian writing in English, much has changed. Yes, Midnight’s Children did cast a gigantic – and well-deserved – shadow, but those that came after Rushdie have by now have emerged into their own light, with Vikram Chandra and Amitav Ghosh being merely two examples.

However, the triumphalism referred to earlier clearly is on the ascendant, not just in the discourse of fiction but in every other sphere, be it economic performance or Olympic medals. It’s in this context, then, that Clearing A Space is a necessary reminder of the worth of alternative ways of seeing and relating.