(First published in the Business Standard on April 19, 2005)
Upon hearing of Saul Bellow’s death, my first reaction was to call an old friend, a gentle and erudite scholar who never permits himself to engage in what he considers vulgar disagreement. He’s been there on two occasions when someone or the other has referred to Sir V S Naipaul as “the greatest living writer of our time”, and he has voiced his protest mildly, in a gentle murmur of dissent: “Mr Bellow,” his quiet voice would say, “is still with us.”
So we talked of Saul Bellow’s life and his work and his thoughts, and then I ventured to ask my friend what he might say now if someone sought to anoint Sir Vidia as the greatest living writer of our age in his presence. “Well,” he said after long and careful consideration, “Mr Soyinka is still with us.”
He also suggested, as suitable candidates, Mr Heaney, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Ms Gordimer and Mr Mahfouz, but we agreed that his choice of Wole Soyinka was particularly apt. It was Soyinka and Achebe’s generation, after all, that began to provide the answer to the dismissive challenge Saul Bellow had laid down in a 1988 interview with the New Yorker : “Where is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? Show me the Proust of the Papuans and I will read him.” Bellow later said that he had been misunderstood, but his majestic challenge to multiculturalism still retains the power to spark off fierce debate, as did his profound and very public disagreements with the work of the late Edward Said.
The “Tolstoy of the Zulus” remark followed Bellow around for years, but even those who were distanced by it recognised that the author meant no malice; he was the man in the high castle, looking down from a pitiless height with a remorseless gaze upon the world as he saw it. It was a gaze touched by humour, softened by understanding, but remorseless for all of that.
The classic Bellow story is all together a more human one, though. Two years after he won the Nobel, Samuel Beckett read Herzog and discovered a tremendous admiration for Bellow, an admiration that was returned in full measure. A meeting was set up, through a friend of Beckett, and two of the greatest minds in literature finally met face-to-face—and discovered that they had nothing to say. Neither wanted to talk about his work, and the conversation ran aground on a shoal of awkward small talk.
When Bellow accepted the Nobel for literature in 1976, he set out part of his credo as a writer: “The condition of human beings has perhaps never been more difficult to define. Those who tell us that we are in an early stage of universal history must be right. We are being lavishly poured together and seem to be experiencing the anguish of new states of consciousness.” It was his business to explore the anguish, but also to go beyond it. “Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. At the center humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul.”
He began writing novels at a point where the novel had been declared dead—an obituary often repeated, a prophecy that has not yet come true. Bellow’s rebuttals came not through essays and lectures, though he delivered those, but through works like Herzog and Augie March . He refused to see the novel as a dead or dying form; in an essay for The New York Times he wrote: “From the first, too, I had been warned that the novel was at the point of death, that like the walled city or the crossbow it was a thing of the past.” But, he said, books still offered something that technology couldn’t deliver; books shouldn’t be compared to movies or to new technologies (this was slightly before the Net), for they offered different things. In his Nobel lecture, he insisted on the continuing power of books: “Books continue to be written and read. It may be more difficult to reach the whirling mind of a modern reader but it is possible to cut through the noise and reach the quiet zone. In the quiet zone we may find that he is devoutly waiting for us.”
That “he” was problematic for women of my generation, though it was of a piece with Bellow’s claim that he wrote for “mankind”. This was not a question of political correctness—he would have found s/he tedious and coy, and it would never have occurred to him that “mankind” might be an awkward label for all of womankind to adopt. He belonged to a generation for whom these terms came naturally, and in my generation, we read him accordingly: with humility and deep respect for the quality of his prose, the astounding ambition with which he sought to redefine Chicago, America, the novel, mankind.
But we read him at a distance, in the same way we listened to our fathers’ stories—with respect and detachment and a sense that not all of his world was open to us. Engagement would come later, once we had gained more understanding, more experience. Bellow was by no means a misogynistic writer, but his concern was mankind. Not womankind. Those of us who felt the distinction strongly turned to other writers; those who could live with the relative unimportance of his women characters took the rest of what he had to offer, and there was so very much, after all.
The debates over his writing would not have perturbed him at all. As one of his former students commented in a recent obituary, Saul Bellow had an exact sense of his own importance in the scheme of things. He didn’t set much store by prizes, but in the years after he won the Nobel, he would sometimes get a little testy around the time the prize was announced. It had come to him, says his former student, that it was not possible for even Saul Bellow to win the Nobel twice.
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Book review: Conversations in Bolzano
(This was written for the Hindustan Times; should've mentioned that what I liked most about Marai's book was that it sent me back to Casanova's memoirs. That's one of the bits about reviewing that's fun: you get to say, hang on, I've got to read this and move off to Casanova's memoirs (as with Conversations) or Ursula K Le Guin, whom I read alongside Ishiguro's latest, and you can defend all your digressions by virtuously saying you're just doing your homework.)
Conversations in Bolzano
Sandor Marai
Viking,
294 pages, POUNDS 10.50
If Sandor Marai had read Giacomo Casanova’s memoirs, he would have read either the German translation or the French. Neither was a reliable version; the full history of the great seducer’s exploits was only released in the 20th century, and the translations until then were based on incomplete versions of the original. It was only in the 1960s that Casanova’s Memoirs were translated into English.
We read Sandor Marai’s works across the same yawning gap. Conversations in Bolzano is a book set in 1758 and written in 1940 that was first translated in 2004, only the second of Marai’s works to be brought to a wider audience. Marai himself was born in 1900 and survived World War II, but at a high price; he committed suicide in 1989, but left behind a literary legacy that is only gradually being exhumed for a non-Hungarian audience.
His first book, Embers , was translated into English only a year or two ago. That tale of two men tested by war and the vicissitudes of life, returning to an unfinished battle over the soul and heart of an extraordinary woman, leapt the barrier of time effortlessly. Despite the long speeches Marai places in his characters’ mouths and the old-fashioned setting, Embers was a riveting, oddly contemporary read, as it held ideas like loyalty, fidelity and honour up to the light and examined them more closely.
The premise of Conversations in Bolzano is audacious—to examine love and its meaning by way of the man whose name is synonymous with seduction. In 1758, by Marai’s account, it has been two years since Casanova managed to escape from the prison in Venice where he spent several uncomfortable years. Marai is at pains to point out that his Casanova is fictional—“it is not so much the romantic episodes in my hero’s life that interests me as his romantic character”. In his telling of the tale, Casanova comes to Bolzano, the place where he lost a duel and a woman to the Duke of Parma. He has hardened in prison—Casanova went into jail a lighthearted youth given to mischief, and came out a colder, cynical survivor intent on the pursuit, however brief, of love.
The Duke has long since married Francesca, but their marriage has been marred by Casanova’s shadow. He could run Casanova out of town, again; he could exert the full force of his power on the seducer and kill him or exile him permanently. Given that he had once bested the younger man in a duel, he might even contemplate fighting Casanova again. But none of these options will be of any use to him, for they will leave Casanova’s image enshrined in Francesca’s heart. Therefore, he has a business proposition to put before Casanova: he will allow the former lovers one perfect night of seduction, when they can celebrate and inter the passion they once felt—and then Casanova must leave.
But this bargain solves nothing: with the Duke’s seal of consent stamped upon the night, their passion will have been just another expensive purchase. And Francesca has her own ways of exacting revenge, her own demands to make; the real betrayal happened for her when Casanova turned his back on what the two of them had and fled from it.
All this unfolds in steady, measured setpieces, formal and stylized in a manner the novel has long since discarded. It is hard to believe that this was written in the same decade that a whole new generation of writers were dismantling the structure of the old ways of seeing literature and experimenting with language, form, ideas. Conversations in Bolzano is a finely crafted argument, and offers a distinct portrait of Casanova: “a man that was ugly rather than handsome, whose features were unrefined, whose body was unheroic”, but who was “genuinely, most resolutely a man, just that and no more”, perhaps the only real man left in the world.
But it reads like a museum piece, a mothballed relic from another day and age. The three main characters go through their motions like clockwork toys; the fine and noble dilemma before them is resolved through words and musings, not through duels or seductions. Marai attempted to confront a question that has tormented many; how could a man love so many women so persistently and with such relentlessness? His answer is that there must have been one woman who was Casanova’s muse and inspiration, who by remaining unattainable, inspired his lifelong devotion. It is a banal answer, satisfying perhaps only at a certain moment of time, and in a day and age that no longer exists.
Conversations in Bolzano
Sandor Marai
Viking,
294 pages, POUNDS 10.50
If Sandor Marai had read Giacomo Casanova’s memoirs, he would have read either the German translation or the French. Neither was a reliable version; the full history of the great seducer’s exploits was only released in the 20th century, and the translations until then were based on incomplete versions of the original. It was only in the 1960s that Casanova’s Memoirs were translated into English.
We read Sandor Marai’s works across the same yawning gap. Conversations in Bolzano is a book set in 1758 and written in 1940 that was first translated in 2004, only the second of Marai’s works to be brought to a wider audience. Marai himself was born in 1900 and survived World War II, but at a high price; he committed suicide in 1989, but left behind a literary legacy that is only gradually being exhumed for a non-Hungarian audience.
His first book, Embers , was translated into English only a year or two ago. That tale of two men tested by war and the vicissitudes of life, returning to an unfinished battle over the soul and heart of an extraordinary woman, leapt the barrier of time effortlessly. Despite the long speeches Marai places in his characters’ mouths and the old-fashioned setting, Embers was a riveting, oddly contemporary read, as it held ideas like loyalty, fidelity and honour up to the light and examined them more closely.
The premise of Conversations in Bolzano is audacious—to examine love and its meaning by way of the man whose name is synonymous with seduction. In 1758, by Marai’s account, it has been two years since Casanova managed to escape from the prison in Venice where he spent several uncomfortable years. Marai is at pains to point out that his Casanova is fictional—“it is not so much the romantic episodes in my hero’s life that interests me as his romantic character”. In his telling of the tale, Casanova comes to Bolzano, the place where he lost a duel and a woman to the Duke of Parma. He has hardened in prison—Casanova went into jail a lighthearted youth given to mischief, and came out a colder, cynical survivor intent on the pursuit, however brief, of love.
The Duke has long since married Francesca, but their marriage has been marred by Casanova’s shadow. He could run Casanova out of town, again; he could exert the full force of his power on the seducer and kill him or exile him permanently. Given that he had once bested the younger man in a duel, he might even contemplate fighting Casanova again. But none of these options will be of any use to him, for they will leave Casanova’s image enshrined in Francesca’s heart. Therefore, he has a business proposition to put before Casanova: he will allow the former lovers one perfect night of seduction, when they can celebrate and inter the passion they once felt—and then Casanova must leave.
But this bargain solves nothing: with the Duke’s seal of consent stamped upon the night, their passion will have been just another expensive purchase. And Francesca has her own ways of exacting revenge, her own demands to make; the real betrayal happened for her when Casanova turned his back on what the two of them had and fled from it.
All this unfolds in steady, measured setpieces, formal and stylized in a manner the novel has long since discarded. It is hard to believe that this was written in the same decade that a whole new generation of writers were dismantling the structure of the old ways of seeing literature and experimenting with language, form, ideas. Conversations in Bolzano is a finely crafted argument, and offers a distinct portrait of Casanova: “a man that was ugly rather than handsome, whose features were unrefined, whose body was unheroic”, but who was “genuinely, most resolutely a man, just that and no more”, perhaps the only real man left in the world.
But it reads like a museum piece, a mothballed relic from another day and age. The three main characters go through their motions like clockwork toys; the fine and noble dilemma before them is resolved through words and musings, not through duels or seductions. Marai attempted to confront a question that has tormented many; how could a man love so many women so persistently and with such relentlessness? His answer is that there must have been one woman who was Casanova’s muse and inspiration, who by remaining unattainable, inspired his lifelong devotion. It is a banal answer, satisfying perhaps only at a certain moment of time, and in a day and age that no longer exists.
Time Out: The Arundhati Roy piece
(On the subject of Arundhati Roy, I'm happy to be a mugwump--defined years ago by a pal as someone who has her mug on one side of the fence and her wump on the other. I don't belong to the bunch of faithful acolytes who treat every word she writes with religious awe, nor do I belong to the tribe who have a knee-jerk reaction to her and can't get past their dislike long enough to see what she's accomplished. So I loved doing this piece for Time Out, because it allowed me to assume my favourite position: right there, straddling the fence.)
The Greek word for “idiot” refers to a person who takes no interest in what is happening around her, who cannot engage with the world. The Greeks never met Arundhati Roy, unfortunately, or they would have come up with a word that signified the exact opposite. Even her worst critics, the ones who call her the Verbal Terrorist, or the Greater Common Shrill, or eye the halo of Saint Arundhati sceptically, must concede that there is no questioning her passion, her engagement with the world.
After the Booker-winning success of God of Small Things , she was supposed to go off and write another novel, to follow the usual trajectory of prizewinning authors. Instead, she wrote The Greater Common Good , an impassioned essay that argued vehemently against building the Narmada dam at the cost of hundreds of villages. It became a hugely controversial piece—but it also brought a debate that had been confined to activists and NGOwallas into the drawing rooms of middle India.
The seeds of the wrath that led her to add her voice to the growing chorus of condemnation against the Narmada dam (and the ruthlessness of the Big Dam movement) had been sown ages ago. The God of Small Things can also be read as a fiery critique of caste politics, of the Love Laws that dictate who we can and cannot admit into our lives, of political systems that cut women down to size, of places where repositories of the past like the History House are rendered derelict, where rivers can no longer breathe because they’re so stifled by pollution. The seeds of what would become a finely honed, trademark anger are there in the character Roy plays in the cult movie In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones . Training to be an architect, she protests a world which will build fanciful constructions on the backs of labourers whose children grow up on silla heaps. It’s there in the essay she wrote on The Bandit Queen , where she questioned a filmmaker’s right to appropriate the life of an already oppressed woman.
And, oh, how that anger has bloomed in her most recent compilation of work-- The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire . Here are the connections she began drawing when her exploration of the politics behind the Narmada Dam led her to question capitalism, free markets, new imperialisms, the sarkar and what she calls the new colonialism. In a diatribe against the chequebook and the cruise missile, the twin instruments of what she sees as the new imperialism, she says:
“Mass resistance movements, individual activists, journalists, artists, and film makers have come together to strip Empire of its sheen. They have connected the dots, turned cash-flow charts and boardroom speeches into real stories about real people and real despair. They have shown how the neo-liberal project has cost people their homes, their land, their jobs, their liberty, their dignity….This is a huge victory. It was forged by the coming together of disparate political groups, with a variety of strategies. But they all recognized that the target of their anger, their activism, and their doggedness is the same. This was the beginning of real globalization. The globalization of dissent.”
But with Arundhati Roy’s work, the debate never seems to centre over what she says, but how she says it. She employs the skills of a demagogue, gives her essays catchy titles, speaks to auditoriums packed to standing-room-only capacity, is one of the brightest, shiniest stars in the firmament at the World Social Forum. More than any of today’s liberal icons, she polarises opinion. And myths grow up around her.
“You’ll be ushered into the Presence,” a cynical journalist friend who’d met her several times before told me before I interviewed Roy a few years ago. “Remember to kiss the hand.” But the woman who opened the door was almost shy, hospitable, curious—and open to questioning, to argument, to discussion. When she spoke of her writing and her life, there was no separation between the two; her early essays and her relatively iconoclastic lifestyle, the fiction and the current series of attacks on Empire—these are inextricably linked. On the few other occasions we crossed paths, I saw neither the Saint nor the Martyr, though the demagogue put in a refreshing appearance every so often.
She has good friends—Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein are among her warmest supporters. And good enemies—it takes a lot of argument to get under the skin of In Defense of Globalisation author and economist Jagdish Bhagwati, for instance. What gets on the nerves of Roy’s detractors—and supporters, if truth be told—is the peculiar combination of self-indulgence and paranoia that occasionally makes an appearance in her writing.
“I speak as a slave to her king”, she writes in her essay on US imperialism; “I’m not used to doing as I’m told”, she begins the speech on Empire; “Bring on the brickbats”, she urges her critics in a sudden, asymmetric footnote to an essay on a drowned village; she congratulates the Sydney Peace Foundation on being brave enough to offer her, of all people, an award. The thing about Arundhati Roy, though, is that you can’t tell her what not to write, any more than you can tell her what to write. Just as writing, for her, is a question of getting it right the first time so that she never has to rewrite extensively, “breathe the same breath twice”, so is she always confirmed in her opinion that nothing she writes is ever extraneous.
But as you go through the essays in An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire , the myths fall away, leaving behind just the writer and the thinker. I know, I’ve heard the economists argue against her anti-globalisation logic or attempt to take her rants against imperialism apart. But this is the woman who stood up and spoke out against the violence in Godhra, who trenchantly criticized POTA and the sanctioned terrorism of the Indian state. She can take her fans in the US aback when she trained her guns on George Bush, demanding that we “become the global resistance”, that we do not support the project for The New American Century. She can stir up a storm in Australia when she raises the issue of aboriginal rights on the eve of receiving a prize for peace. She wants people, the general junta, the public, to be seen as more than subjects—or potential markets. She wants, to use one of the few slogans she didn’t coin herself, power to the people.
And if you think she’s going to stop putting the World Bank or words like democracy under scrutiny, if you think she’s going to stop calling states and countries to account when they run rampant, you’re mistaken. All Arundhati really needs is a podium and an audience. The crowds will queue around the block, and trust me, she’ll bring her own soapbox if she has to.
The Greek word for “idiot” refers to a person who takes no interest in what is happening around her, who cannot engage with the world. The Greeks never met Arundhati Roy, unfortunately, or they would have come up with a word that signified the exact opposite. Even her worst critics, the ones who call her the Verbal Terrorist, or the Greater Common Shrill, or eye the halo of Saint Arundhati sceptically, must concede that there is no questioning her passion, her engagement with the world.
After the Booker-winning success of God of Small Things , she was supposed to go off and write another novel, to follow the usual trajectory of prizewinning authors. Instead, she wrote The Greater Common Good , an impassioned essay that argued vehemently against building the Narmada dam at the cost of hundreds of villages. It became a hugely controversial piece—but it also brought a debate that had been confined to activists and NGOwallas into the drawing rooms of middle India.
The seeds of the wrath that led her to add her voice to the growing chorus of condemnation against the Narmada dam (and the ruthlessness of the Big Dam movement) had been sown ages ago. The God of Small Things can also be read as a fiery critique of caste politics, of the Love Laws that dictate who we can and cannot admit into our lives, of political systems that cut women down to size, of places where repositories of the past like the History House are rendered derelict, where rivers can no longer breathe because they’re so stifled by pollution. The seeds of what would become a finely honed, trademark anger are there in the character Roy plays in the cult movie In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones . Training to be an architect, she protests a world which will build fanciful constructions on the backs of labourers whose children grow up on silla heaps. It’s there in the essay she wrote on The Bandit Queen , where she questioned a filmmaker’s right to appropriate the life of an already oppressed woman.
And, oh, how that anger has bloomed in her most recent compilation of work-- The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire . Here are the connections she began drawing when her exploration of the politics behind the Narmada Dam led her to question capitalism, free markets, new imperialisms, the sarkar and what she calls the new colonialism. In a diatribe against the chequebook and the cruise missile, the twin instruments of what she sees as the new imperialism, she says:
“Mass resistance movements, individual activists, journalists, artists, and film makers have come together to strip Empire of its sheen. They have connected the dots, turned cash-flow charts and boardroom speeches into real stories about real people and real despair. They have shown how the neo-liberal project has cost people their homes, their land, their jobs, their liberty, their dignity….This is a huge victory. It was forged by the coming together of disparate political groups, with a variety of strategies. But they all recognized that the target of their anger, their activism, and their doggedness is the same. This was the beginning of real globalization. The globalization of dissent.”
But with Arundhati Roy’s work, the debate never seems to centre over what she says, but how she says it. She employs the skills of a demagogue, gives her essays catchy titles, speaks to auditoriums packed to standing-room-only capacity, is one of the brightest, shiniest stars in the firmament at the World Social Forum. More than any of today’s liberal icons, she polarises opinion. And myths grow up around her.
“You’ll be ushered into the Presence,” a cynical journalist friend who’d met her several times before told me before I interviewed Roy a few years ago. “Remember to kiss the hand.” But the woman who opened the door was almost shy, hospitable, curious—and open to questioning, to argument, to discussion. When she spoke of her writing and her life, there was no separation between the two; her early essays and her relatively iconoclastic lifestyle, the fiction and the current series of attacks on Empire—these are inextricably linked. On the few other occasions we crossed paths, I saw neither the Saint nor the Martyr, though the demagogue put in a refreshing appearance every so often.
She has good friends—Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein are among her warmest supporters. And good enemies—it takes a lot of argument to get under the skin of In Defense of Globalisation author and economist Jagdish Bhagwati, for instance. What gets on the nerves of Roy’s detractors—and supporters, if truth be told—is the peculiar combination of self-indulgence and paranoia that occasionally makes an appearance in her writing.
“I speak as a slave to her king”, she writes in her essay on US imperialism; “I’m not used to doing as I’m told”, she begins the speech on Empire; “Bring on the brickbats”, she urges her critics in a sudden, asymmetric footnote to an essay on a drowned village; she congratulates the Sydney Peace Foundation on being brave enough to offer her, of all people, an award. The thing about Arundhati Roy, though, is that you can’t tell her what not to write, any more than you can tell her what to write. Just as writing, for her, is a question of getting it right the first time so that she never has to rewrite extensively, “breathe the same breath twice”, so is she always confirmed in her opinion that nothing she writes is ever extraneous.
But as you go through the essays in An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire , the myths fall away, leaving behind just the writer and the thinker. I know, I’ve heard the economists argue against her anti-globalisation logic or attempt to take her rants against imperialism apart. But this is the woman who stood up and spoke out against the violence in Godhra, who trenchantly criticized POTA and the sanctioned terrorism of the Indian state. She can take her fans in the US aback when she trained her guns on George Bush, demanding that we “become the global resistance”, that we do not support the project for The New American Century. She can stir up a storm in Australia when she raises the issue of aboriginal rights on the eve of receiving a prize for peace. She wants people, the general junta, the public, to be seen as more than subjects—or potential markets. She wants, to use one of the few slogans she didn’t coin herself, power to the people.
And if you think she’s going to stop putting the World Bank or words like democracy under scrutiny, if you think she’s going to stop calling states and countries to account when they run rampant, you’re mistaken. All Arundhati really needs is a podium and an audience. The crowds will queue around the block, and trust me, she’ll bring her own soapbox if she has to.
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