(First published in the Business Standard, April 2005)
(Hmmm. One of those reviews that goes "yes, yes, the book's a bit of a mess but you have GOT to read it anyway because the good bits are SO good". Come to think of it, I have friends like that!)
The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
POUNDS 12.99, 403 pages
As children, we assume that books are eternal, that the books that truly changed our lives will always be available on some shelf or the other. I lost my innocence early, when after years of not being able to locate a copy of The Little Velveteen Rabbit , I finally found a page—transmuted into a paper bag. It was like discovering that a friend had stuffed some beloved but departed grandparent’s head and was using it as a lampstand.
No true bibliophile, haunted by the secret fear that his favourite books will end up remaindered, pulped, forgotten, will be able to resist the central conceit of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind . We are introduced to this by Daniel, son of a dealer in rare books, who is taken at the age of ten to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Hidden inside “the carcass of a palace” in Barcelona, this is “a place of mystery, a sanctuary”. As Daniel’s father explains, “In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands…According to tradition, the first time someone visits this place, he must choose a book, whichever he wants, and adopt it, making sure that it will never disappear, that it will always stay alive.”
The book Daniel chooses, appropriately enough for a metafiction novel, is called The Shadow of the Wind . Now Zafon’s Shadow , first published in Spanish in 2001 and translated only recently into English, has been hugely, improbably successful, a sort of thinking person’s Da Vinci Code . But The Shadow of the Wind that The Shadow of the Wind is about—oh, these literary conceits, what fun they can be, but how tedious when pushed too far—is a different matter. The book Daniel chooses to guard was written by one Julian Carax, an author who died under mysterious circumstances after a life of writing brilliant novels doomed to popular failure. And Daniel’s task is made doubly difficult by a sinister stranger who has spent his life putting as many of Carax’s books as he can find to the torch.
You couldn’t ask for a more promising start, but it’s downhill from here. The Shadow of the Wind pulls all the stops out, piling intrigue upon intrigue, mixing young love with a portrait of war-damaged Barcelona. Julian Carax has a past fraught with high romance and great peril; his future as a writer is uncertain. Everyone whom Daniel meets has a story within a story to tell; he must unravel the myriad threads until he has woven a web of facts from the mess. And what disappointing facts they are: despite the hints at something astonishing, the allusions of so many characters to a dark story that blends myth and history, the final version of Julian Carax’s life is almost mundane.
But then Zafon promised us the earth, a foolish thing to do with your first novel. “…Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.”
No one could have written these lines but a truly extraordinary reader; no one could have delivered the promise inherent in those lines but a truly extraordinary writer. Zafon has a playful mind and takes a deep delight in tongue-in-cheek literary jokes: “The discussion turned to some documents found in the basement of El Escorial that hinted at the possibility that Don Miguel de Cervantes had in fact been the nom de plume of a large, hairy lady of letters from Toledo.” But it would take a genius to make The Shadow of the Wind what Zafon, and we, would like it to be: a book that teaches us that by reading, we can live more intensely.
There is nothing wrong with Zafon’s Barcelona, “a city of shadows” still haunted by the memory of the civil war that nearly tore Spain apart, the repository of bitter memories but also of hope. But his villain is a caricature, a cartoonish, sneering figure who is diminished on closer acquaintance, the winding stories of the rest unnecessarily longwinded and insubstantial. Nothing matches the brilliance of that first chapter, that first conceit, and you read the rest of the book sluggishly, with a sense of growing discontentment. Zafon cannot rise to the challenge of telling Carax’s story, or Daniel’s, or even Barcelona’s: but it is a different matter when he lets himself go on the novel’s real obsession. Its secret hero is the reader and the most poignant, memorable moments in The Shadow of the Wind come when Zafon writes of the act of reading.
“I couldn’t help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.”
This is the secret lament of the reader, the incantation muttered to the bibliophile undergoing initiation. The Shadow of the Wind may contain a minor twinkling star or two instead of a whole universe, but these passages alone are worth the price of entry and the inevitable payment in the coin of disappointment.
Sunday, April 10, 2005
Last Word: Boy, Interrupted
(This was one of the Last Word columns I do for the Kolkata Telegraph's gender page. Haven't put too many of these up because I'm still struggling to get them right...but this was an issue I'd been thinking about for a while. So here it is.)
When I look around at my women friends, I realise how much, and how often, we share our lives with each other. For men, a brief note here: this is what explains the long phone calls that puzzle you, the cackles of laughter from the kitchen that you wonder about, the groups of women hanging out in bars who (heavens above!) don’t appear to need male attention. I sometimes wonder how men manage without the daily back-and-forth of gossip, just-like-that calls, smses and coffee conversations that sustain women.
What got me thinking about the silence of men this week was two things, one personal, one the stuff of tabloid headlines. We met an old school friend after a gap of several years. Initially, conversation was of the awkward sort where you mention the weather frequently and with some nervousness.
But after a bit, our friend opened up…and it was like watching a dam burst. He talked to us about his life, his marriage, the ups and downs and struggles he’d experienced; he talked about his children and his childhood, about old friends and new enemies. And some time around three in the morning, he said, “Men only get to talk like this when there are women around. Even if you’re talking to another man, really, you can’t do it unless there’s a woman in the room…it’s not allowed, to spill your guts among men.”
This week, I read the transcripts of the Michael Jackson trials. One of the most poignant bits of evidence was offered by Jackson’s maid’s son, who is now an adult. He broke down as he testified that the King of Pop had molested him years ago. “I didn’t expect this to hurt so much,” he said as he told his story. “It’s so hard to tell this.” Women rape victims go through similar trauma; similar, but I suspect, not the same. One of the psychiatrists who testified in the Jackson trial was emphatic when he was asked whether some of the young boys who’d accused the singer of molestation might be making up their stories.
In his experience, he said, the hard part was getting young men to acknowledge that they had been abused. They were deeply reluctant to tell their stories; even more so than women of the same age who had experienced abuse. And he had never met a man, or boy, who had made up a story about sexual abuse.
Why? Because, he said, there was too much shame and guilt involved; the issues for a man who had been molested were deeply complex. A man who has been raped or assaulted will experience shame, as women victims do; but women know that they might somewhere also find sympathy. Men are likely to be laughed at, have their masculinity called into question, experience homophobia; some have secret but very deep fears that they will grow up to be perpetrators of violence and abuse themselves.
These are hard, difficult stories to share. But even the good stories seem to be hard for men to share. What would happen if we had a culture where it was ok for men to talk about their lives, to open up and be honest? I don’t know; but clearly the prospect is so scary that it’s hard to even try to break the silence.
When I look around at my women friends, I realise how much, and how often, we share our lives with each other. For men, a brief note here: this is what explains the long phone calls that puzzle you, the cackles of laughter from the kitchen that you wonder about, the groups of women hanging out in bars who (heavens above!) don’t appear to need male attention. I sometimes wonder how men manage without the daily back-and-forth of gossip, just-like-that calls, smses and coffee conversations that sustain women.
What got me thinking about the silence of men this week was two things, one personal, one the stuff of tabloid headlines. We met an old school friend after a gap of several years. Initially, conversation was of the awkward sort where you mention the weather frequently and with some nervousness.
But after a bit, our friend opened up…and it was like watching a dam burst. He talked to us about his life, his marriage, the ups and downs and struggles he’d experienced; he talked about his children and his childhood, about old friends and new enemies. And some time around three in the morning, he said, “Men only get to talk like this when there are women around. Even if you’re talking to another man, really, you can’t do it unless there’s a woman in the room…it’s not allowed, to spill your guts among men.”
This week, I read the transcripts of the Michael Jackson trials. One of the most poignant bits of evidence was offered by Jackson’s maid’s son, who is now an adult. He broke down as he testified that the King of Pop had molested him years ago. “I didn’t expect this to hurt so much,” he said as he told his story. “It’s so hard to tell this.” Women rape victims go through similar trauma; similar, but I suspect, not the same. One of the psychiatrists who testified in the Jackson trial was emphatic when he was asked whether some of the young boys who’d accused the singer of molestation might be making up their stories.
In his experience, he said, the hard part was getting young men to acknowledge that they had been abused. They were deeply reluctant to tell their stories; even more so than women of the same age who had experienced abuse. And he had never met a man, or boy, who had made up a story about sexual abuse.
Why? Because, he said, there was too much shame and guilt involved; the issues for a man who had been molested were deeply complex. A man who has been raped or assaulted will experience shame, as women victims do; but women know that they might somewhere also find sympathy. Men are likely to be laughed at, have their masculinity called into question, experience homophobia; some have secret but very deep fears that they will grow up to be perpetrators of violence and abuse themselves.
These are hard, difficult stories to share. But even the good stories seem to be hard for men to share. What would happen if we had a culture where it was ok for men to talk about their lives, to open up and be honest? I don’t know; but clearly the prospect is so scary that it’s hard to even try to break the silence.
The BS column: O V Vijayan
(First published in Business Standard as SPEAKING VOLUMES FOR APRIL 5, 2005)
O V Vijayan, god or Marx rest his soul: we invoked his name every time someone accused "regional" Indian writing of lacking imagination. Not Vijayan, we'd say, pointing to the Legends of Khasak, pointing to the wart that grew larger than the face it rested on, pointing to the obscene foetus he used in order to cariacature Sanjay Gandhi. If I had one complaint about Vijayan, it was that he came out with a pallid translation of Khasak; one of those where you can sense the original, robust text making strangulating noises behind the translation. Anyway, this was my tribute.
My idea of heaven is a vast, beckoning continent divided into separate segments: here is Shangri-La, over to the left you’d have Macondo, somewhere in between would be Faulkner’s Yokhnapatawpha County and so on. If we get to choose our afterlives, this is where I’d spend mine.
An entire swathe of this imaginary continent would be taken up by a place called Khasak. Like all the best countries of the mind, Khasak not only exists, but has been growing and changing for each reader ever since 1967, when a cartoonist and teacher called O V Vijayan set down its legends. Vijayan passed on last week after a long, hard bout of illness, deeply mourned by all those who knew him and those who knew his books: the funeral drew thousands. He had fewer laurels than he deserved. The Sahitya Akademi award to him was made for Infinity of Grace , not for the monumental Legends of Khasak , and it is a disgrace that he was never awarded the Jnanpith. Few writers, after all, can claim to have changed the course of the history of writing in a language with their very first book.
Khasakinte Itihasam was serialized in the late sixties, and by the time the fourth or fifth installment came out, readers had begun to grasp that something was being born in their midst. Vijayan said once that the book grew out of an image and a landscape; he wrote it, he said, with the sound of the winds whistling through Palakkad in his head. He was often compared to writers like Manuel Puig and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and it is interesting to read The Legends of Khasak in the light of a comment by Garcia Marquez.
He was speaking of returning to his village after an absence; like Vijayan, distance brought a kind of clarity. “I felt that I wasn’t really looking at the village,” said Garcia Marquez, “but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading. For all practical purposes everything had evolved into literature: the houses, the people, and the memories.”
The Legends of Khasak begins with Ravi, the outsider who comes to Khasak in order to be the first teacher the small place has ever had. There are echoes of Vijayan’s experiences in Ravi’s life, but Khasak was much more than a semi-autobiographical first novel. Through Ravi’s eyes, Vijayan presented a shifting view of a small town in flux, where each inhabitant has a story to tell. There is Appu-Killi, the local idiot affectionately known as the Parrot, whose decision to convert Islam has repercussions that are rapidly sorted out: “The Parrot was to be allowed the freedom of both religions. For certain days of the week he could be Muslim. For the rest he could be a Hindu. If necessary, Hindu, Muslim and Parrot all at the same time.”
Ghosts and spirits co-exist with district administration officials, smallpox epidemics and outbreaks of lice infestations are treated with equal seriousness; religious dilemmas and personal dramas make up the ebb and flow of life in Khasak. He could write about infinity and the most domestic of trials in the same breath. Vijayan packed so much into the relatively slender space of this first novel that, over three decades later, we are still discovering new epiphanies in Khasak . He made a comment once about his work as a cartoonist that could also serve as a writer’s explanation: “An indescribable sadness permeates the reality that I am supposed to describe, but nonetheless the prevailing superstition about my profession requires that I make people laugh.”
Readers took to Khasak; the establishment took a while longer, not quite sure what to make of it—one critic tells me that The Legends of Khasak was dubbed “ultramodern” because the term “postmodern” had yet to make its way into the lexicon of discourse in Malayalam. There are apocryphal stories about readers who badgered puzzled men at railway station counters, demanding a ticket to Khasak. It was useless to tell these souls that Khasak did not exist, or to fob them off with stories about Khasak being based on Palakkad; Khasak, to the faithful, was even more real than Palakkad.
It was in the next few years, just before the Emergency cast its shadow across India, that Vijayan wrote some of his strongest, most scathing work. He was by then a disillusioned man: his faith in communism as an ideal had been shaken, his faith in humanity was steadily eroding. He didn’t believe in civilization any more, or in revolution: these concepts and ideals had failed too many, too often. Dharmapuranam , translated as The Saga of Dharmapuri emerged from this period, a time when modern India appeared to have betrayed its idea of itself. It opens with a meditation on the Presidential bowels, with the ministers and the subjects of Dharmapuri engrossed in contemplation of the products thereof. They discuss the Presidential shit; they reflect on the meaning of its form; and finally, the more assiduous of the courtiers eat shit. And that was for openers; The Saga of Dharmapuri is a satire so biting that Jonathan Swift would have been proud to have been its author.
Dharmapuri was to begin serialization in early 1975—in June, the Emergency was imposed, and the book “went into hiding”, to use Vijayan’s phrase. He rewrote some parts, intensifying the satire here, toning it down there, and it was eventually serialized again in 1977. But it was only published in 1985 in book form; as with Khasak , Vijayan was writing well ahead of his time.
There were other books, including gems like Generations and brilliant short stories. Most writers would be content to write one immortal work, but Vijayan had begun his career with two. And of his short stories, the one that resonates most in our times is a piece called The Wart . Like The Foetus , it was inspired by Sanjay Gandhi’s excesses, but it is an allegory that applies to the powerful anywhere, in any age. The Wart is about a man who discovers a wart on his face one day; the wart grows until finally it encompasses the man. It is the perfect image, from a man who could translate awe, terror, compassion and human frailty into great writing. Towards the end of his life, friends reported that his hands shook almost too much from illness to allow him to take up the pen and write or draw. But by then, he had said more of importance than most writers will say in a lifetime.
O V Vijayan, god or Marx rest his soul: we invoked his name every time someone accused "regional" Indian writing of lacking imagination. Not Vijayan, we'd say, pointing to the Legends of Khasak, pointing to the wart that grew larger than the face it rested on, pointing to the obscene foetus he used in order to cariacature Sanjay Gandhi. If I had one complaint about Vijayan, it was that he came out with a pallid translation of Khasak; one of those where you can sense the original, robust text making strangulating noises behind the translation. Anyway, this was my tribute.
My idea of heaven is a vast, beckoning continent divided into separate segments: here is Shangri-La, over to the left you’d have Macondo, somewhere in between would be Faulkner’s Yokhnapatawpha County and so on. If we get to choose our afterlives, this is where I’d spend mine.
An entire swathe of this imaginary continent would be taken up by a place called Khasak. Like all the best countries of the mind, Khasak not only exists, but has been growing and changing for each reader ever since 1967, when a cartoonist and teacher called O V Vijayan set down its legends. Vijayan passed on last week after a long, hard bout of illness, deeply mourned by all those who knew him and those who knew his books: the funeral drew thousands. He had fewer laurels than he deserved. The Sahitya Akademi award to him was made for Infinity of Grace , not for the monumental Legends of Khasak , and it is a disgrace that he was never awarded the Jnanpith. Few writers, after all, can claim to have changed the course of the history of writing in a language with their very first book.
Khasakinte Itihasam was serialized in the late sixties, and by the time the fourth or fifth installment came out, readers had begun to grasp that something was being born in their midst. Vijayan said once that the book grew out of an image and a landscape; he wrote it, he said, with the sound of the winds whistling through Palakkad in his head. He was often compared to writers like Manuel Puig and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and it is interesting to read The Legends of Khasak in the light of a comment by Garcia Marquez.
He was speaking of returning to his village after an absence; like Vijayan, distance brought a kind of clarity. “I felt that I wasn’t really looking at the village,” said Garcia Marquez, “but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading. For all practical purposes everything had evolved into literature: the houses, the people, and the memories.”
The Legends of Khasak begins with Ravi, the outsider who comes to Khasak in order to be the first teacher the small place has ever had. There are echoes of Vijayan’s experiences in Ravi’s life, but Khasak was much more than a semi-autobiographical first novel. Through Ravi’s eyes, Vijayan presented a shifting view of a small town in flux, where each inhabitant has a story to tell. There is Appu-Killi, the local idiot affectionately known as the Parrot, whose decision to convert Islam has repercussions that are rapidly sorted out: “The Parrot was to be allowed the freedom of both religions. For certain days of the week he could be Muslim. For the rest he could be a Hindu. If necessary, Hindu, Muslim and Parrot all at the same time.”
Ghosts and spirits co-exist with district administration officials, smallpox epidemics and outbreaks of lice infestations are treated with equal seriousness; religious dilemmas and personal dramas make up the ebb and flow of life in Khasak. He could write about infinity and the most domestic of trials in the same breath. Vijayan packed so much into the relatively slender space of this first novel that, over three decades later, we are still discovering new epiphanies in Khasak . He made a comment once about his work as a cartoonist that could also serve as a writer’s explanation: “An indescribable sadness permeates the reality that I am supposed to describe, but nonetheless the prevailing superstition about my profession requires that I make people laugh.”
Readers took to Khasak; the establishment took a while longer, not quite sure what to make of it—one critic tells me that The Legends of Khasak was dubbed “ultramodern” because the term “postmodern” had yet to make its way into the lexicon of discourse in Malayalam. There are apocryphal stories about readers who badgered puzzled men at railway station counters, demanding a ticket to Khasak. It was useless to tell these souls that Khasak did not exist, or to fob them off with stories about Khasak being based on Palakkad; Khasak, to the faithful, was even more real than Palakkad.
It was in the next few years, just before the Emergency cast its shadow across India, that Vijayan wrote some of his strongest, most scathing work. He was by then a disillusioned man: his faith in communism as an ideal had been shaken, his faith in humanity was steadily eroding. He didn’t believe in civilization any more, or in revolution: these concepts and ideals had failed too many, too often. Dharmapuranam , translated as The Saga of Dharmapuri emerged from this period, a time when modern India appeared to have betrayed its idea of itself. It opens with a meditation on the Presidential bowels, with the ministers and the subjects of Dharmapuri engrossed in contemplation of the products thereof. They discuss the Presidential shit; they reflect on the meaning of its form; and finally, the more assiduous of the courtiers eat shit. And that was for openers; The Saga of Dharmapuri is a satire so biting that Jonathan Swift would have been proud to have been its author.
Dharmapuri was to begin serialization in early 1975—in June, the Emergency was imposed, and the book “went into hiding”, to use Vijayan’s phrase. He rewrote some parts, intensifying the satire here, toning it down there, and it was eventually serialized again in 1977. But it was only published in 1985 in book form; as with Khasak , Vijayan was writing well ahead of his time.
There were other books, including gems like Generations and brilliant short stories. Most writers would be content to write one immortal work, but Vijayan had begun his career with two. And of his short stories, the one that resonates most in our times is a piece called The Wart . Like The Foetus , it was inspired by Sanjay Gandhi’s excesses, but it is an allegory that applies to the powerful anywhere, in any age. The Wart is about a man who discovers a wart on his face one day; the wart grows until finally it encompasses the man. It is the perfect image, from a man who could translate awe, terror, compassion and human frailty into great writing. Towards the end of his life, friends reported that his hands shook almost too much from illness to allow him to take up the pen and write or draw. But by then, he had said more of importance than most writers will say in a lifetime.
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