(Published in The Indian Express)
I tried, but there was no way I could use the English title; The Heart Has Its Reasons conjures up the memoirs of Barbara Cartland and of Wallis Simpson, and for the life of me I can't imagine Krishna Sobti in their company.
The Heart Has Its Reasons
Krishna Sobti
Translated by Reema Anand and Meenakshi Swami
Katha
Rs 250, 220 pages
Dil-o-Danish was one of the two books that introduced me to the delights of "reading in place". The novel refused to come alive in an anonymous concrete
apartment block, and remained truculent until it was taken off to Old Delhi.
The streets of Chandni Chowk are far more crowded now than they were in the period that the book is set--Dilli in the 1920s--but shops still sell "muslin-soft" rumali rotis, nugdi ladoos and imartis. The Haveli Chunna Mal may have crumbled, but in an alley removed from the bustle, you might find its facsimile still inhabited by a joint family. And while the social pressures that drive the three protagonists in the novel may have changed, human beings still form the three angles of the eternal triangle.
Many decades ago, Sobti conjured up an alter ego she dubbed Hashmat, and some of her books have been written by herself, some by Hashmat, and some by the two--real writer and imaginary writer--in pleasant conjunction. Sobti, who once quipped that she writes "bisexually", with access to both genders, sets up an
intricate situation in Dil-o-Danish . Kripanarayan is a successful lawyer, allowed by the unspoken complicity of his family and peers to have a wife in Kutumb and a mistress in Mehak--a perk natural to a man of a certain status.
"He himself has two women--one a Musalman, the other a Hindu. Both have children by him. Two women, and I their man. Does that make me incapable of understanding them? Do I have to be a woman to understand that? Or vice versa? There are laws to sort out every other tussle in the world but this—though you may delve a thousand times into deep, legal tomes, you'll never understand."
Kutumb is unwilling to ignore or accept the other family in her husband's life, instinctively rejecting the choice her husband has exercised because it is not
a choice open to her. Mehak's mother was a courtesan, Kripanarayan holds the family treasures in his custody, and she wants an elusive respect and affirmation--for her children, but also for herself. To quote Kripanarayan, "People might eat sweets for leftovers, but no one eats leftovers for their own
sake." But it is one of the small triumphs of Dil-o-Danish that Kripanarayan is not cariacatured; he is fond of both the women in his life, driven to distraction by the machinations in both households, intent on doing or appearing to do, the right thing.
But the rights he assigns so naturally to himself are not rights he can imagine extending to either Kutumb, when she demands that he acknowledge her pain, or
Mehak, when she exercises her right to property that is hers, and her right to choose her own path. One woman is asked to turn a blind eye; the other is asked
to be invisible. As the inevitable schemings and crosscurrents of the joint family complicate matters, against the backdrop of a robust city in the grip of
change, someone must break the deadlock.
One of the pleasures of Sobti's writing is also the hardest to communicate in translation; Mitro Marjani had the torch and twang of Rajasthan's dialects built into its structure, Ai Ladki had an utterly personal, familial voice, and Dil-o-Danish is written unselfconsciously in the Urdu-steeped Hindi of Old Delhi. The translators have an uphill task; it's impossible to capture the exact lilt and sway, the pungency and the grace, of the original. They do manage to retain the flow and the rapid back-and-forth of conversation.
This novel is more conventional in form and theme than Sobti's other work, but no less satisfying. Austen's England and Sobti's Dilli have much in common: what
drives the interplay of relationships and the emotions is, in the final analysis, just the hard facts of property and ownership. Marriages were about property in Austen's world; sometimes the bride brought wealth, sometimes she married wealth, sometimes she was little more than property herself, to be bought and sold and settled without her consent. Dil-o-Danish is about what happens when women, and men, question the norms that apply to property and relationships. It doesn't reach the heights of a Mitro Marjani or Zindaginama , but it is a quietly challenging work on its own terms.
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Sunday, May 01, 2005
Review: Coronation Talkies
(This was written for the Business Standard, May 2, 2005.)
Coronation Talkies
Susan Kurosawa
Penguin Viking
488 pages, Rs 475
Remember the days when patriotic Indians, struggling under the yoke of Empire, swore revenge on the Raj? We did our bit. We introduced Britain to chicken tikka masala and bhangra-rap. We took over cricket, and we did our best to unleash Lagaan on an unsuspecting world. Just to rub it in, we gave the West End Bombay Dreams and we rehashed Jane Austen into the worst kind of Bollywood musical.
But there’s a new breed of writers out there, from Barbara Cleverly to Thalassa Ali to Susan Kurosawa, who’re doing their best to ease the brown man’s burden. You want reprisal? Cleverly offers bad detective stories and the romance of the Raj. You want payback? Ali offers lurid tales of dastardly intrigue, and the romance of the Raj. You really, really want vengeance? Susan Kurosawa does to the romance of the Raj what Dr Hannibal Lecter did for the popularity of brain curry recipes. Her only weapons are an imaginary hill station called Chalaili and a touching belief in the dictum that history repeats itself twice, the second time as parody.
Chalaili is a composite made up of hill stations visited by the author. With its reputation for rain and occasional depression among the inhabitants, it’s not hard to guess that it has bits of Cherrapunji and Doolali stirred together, with a dash of Chail chucked in for good measure. This is the setting for a story at once so dreary and so preposterous that you know it will come to a bad end and probably be reincarnated as a Broadway musical. (The British shouldn’t have to suffer alone; the Americans must take their chances like the rest of us.)
Mrs Rajat Banerjee, future proprietor of the eponymous Coronation Talkies, soon to be the movie theatre that is the pride and joy of Chalaili, introduces herself in deathless prose: ‘“All the time I think of food,” she giggled.’ This, you realise just two pages along, is a blessing, because when she doesn’t, she’s given to “startling outbursts”. “As Clark Gable hung the Wall of Jericho curtain in his shared accommodation with the runaway Claudette Colbert, Mrs Banerjee let out a scream so loud that three rows from the back, caught in a still-innocent tangle of unfurling shawls and popping buttons, two visitors to Chalaili, Anita Mehta and Sonny Raman, shot to their feet and hurried in opposite directions.”
The scream is intended to be Mrs Banerjee’s way of paying homage to the beginning of It Happened One Night , and what surprised this reviewer most about it is that the film doesn’t begin that way at all—the Wall of Jericho scene happens quite a bit of the way down. But this is uncharitable-- Coronation Talkies is billed as a comedy, and we must allow the author a free hand with her imagination, even if it does extend to the plot of classic films.
Lydia Rushmore is Mrs Banerjee’s opposite number in this lengthy farce. In contrast to Mrs Banerjee’s opulent charms, Lydia is painted as a flat-chested former spinster hustled into a marriage of convenience. Her husband, a weather researcher with the forest service interrupted his obsession with the climate and its vagaries long enough to have an ill-judged affair with the wife of the visiting British Resident of Kashmir, and was ordered to return from England with a wife of his own or not at all. Lydia’s introduction to India is made fearsome by heat and dust (and beggars), and while her first visit to the local Chalaili club is turned by the other, duly snobbish, memsahibs into the day of the scorpions, her counterpart discovers that sleepy Chalaili isn’t really the jewel in the crown she thought it was when she planned to open Coronation Talkies here.
This is the point at which the novel begins to enter Cold Comfort Farm territory, in the sense that every character turns out to have a past that includes something narsty in the woodshed. Lydia’s descents into gin-fuelled depression and misguided attempt to make a friend of Anil, the sole servant in attendance at Bluebell Cottage, are explained in capital letters: “DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO I BLOODY WELL AM?”
Never mind. We’ll be told in short but mawkish order as Lydia harks back to the days when her father used to call her the Princess Liddie Diddie while getting plastered at the pub. She seeks temporary solace with Simon Fraser-Gough, but what Simon has lurking in the woodshed is far nastier than anything Lydia might have imagined. Speaking of woodsheds, William has something narsty stashed away in his, too, a complicated tale of dark illicit passions that must never be spoken of. Anil, not to be outdone in terms of domestic drama, contributes his mite’s worth by arriving with his sister, who has been forced into prostitution in the wicked city. She has a heart of gold, but her lungs are made of lesser metal, unfortunately, precipitating another tragedy.
Meanwhile, Mrs Banerjee has progressed from her first dismayed look at the brokedown palace that’s Coronation Talkies (“Talking picture theatre, my jolly bottom,” she explains, in a fair semblance of what passes for wit in this novel). Under her careful management, it has survived a disastrous opening night that provided the author with yet another stab at comedy (comedy survived, but it was a close call), and gone on to better things. But, and this may surprise you, Mrs Banerjee, like everyone else in the novel, has a dark secret of her own. This emerges slowly and painfully through a tangle of comic romps, comic lusts, comic interludes, comic memsahibs and comic newsletters that redefine the critic’s cliché “read this and weep”.
There are some really good bits in Coronation Talkies , like the epigraphs before each chapter and the hand-drawn map of Chalaili and the very handsome book cover. Not enough, though, to prevent the sigh of relief that escaped me when this period piece finally reached the last full stop.
Coronation Talkies
Susan Kurosawa
Penguin Viking
488 pages, Rs 475
Remember the days when patriotic Indians, struggling under the yoke of Empire, swore revenge on the Raj? We did our bit. We introduced Britain to chicken tikka masala and bhangra-rap. We took over cricket, and we did our best to unleash Lagaan on an unsuspecting world. Just to rub it in, we gave the West End Bombay Dreams and we rehashed Jane Austen into the worst kind of Bollywood musical.
But there’s a new breed of writers out there, from Barbara Cleverly to Thalassa Ali to Susan Kurosawa, who’re doing their best to ease the brown man’s burden. You want reprisal? Cleverly offers bad detective stories and the romance of the Raj. You want payback? Ali offers lurid tales of dastardly intrigue, and the romance of the Raj. You really, really want vengeance? Susan Kurosawa does to the romance of the Raj what Dr Hannibal Lecter did for the popularity of brain curry recipes. Her only weapons are an imaginary hill station called Chalaili and a touching belief in the dictum that history repeats itself twice, the second time as parody.
Chalaili is a composite made up of hill stations visited by the author. With its reputation for rain and occasional depression among the inhabitants, it’s not hard to guess that it has bits of Cherrapunji and Doolali stirred together, with a dash of Chail chucked in for good measure. This is the setting for a story at once so dreary and so preposterous that you know it will come to a bad end and probably be reincarnated as a Broadway musical. (The British shouldn’t have to suffer alone; the Americans must take their chances like the rest of us.)
Mrs Rajat Banerjee, future proprietor of the eponymous Coronation Talkies, soon to be the movie theatre that is the pride and joy of Chalaili, introduces herself in deathless prose: ‘“All the time I think of food,” she giggled.’ This, you realise just two pages along, is a blessing, because when she doesn’t, she’s given to “startling outbursts”. “As Clark Gable hung the Wall of Jericho curtain in his shared accommodation with the runaway Claudette Colbert, Mrs Banerjee let out a scream so loud that three rows from the back, caught in a still-innocent tangle of unfurling shawls and popping buttons, two visitors to Chalaili, Anita Mehta and Sonny Raman, shot to their feet and hurried in opposite directions.”
The scream is intended to be Mrs Banerjee’s way of paying homage to the beginning of It Happened One Night , and what surprised this reviewer most about it is that the film doesn’t begin that way at all—the Wall of Jericho scene happens quite a bit of the way down. But this is uncharitable-- Coronation Talkies is billed as a comedy, and we must allow the author a free hand with her imagination, even if it does extend to the plot of classic films.
Lydia Rushmore is Mrs Banerjee’s opposite number in this lengthy farce. In contrast to Mrs Banerjee’s opulent charms, Lydia is painted as a flat-chested former spinster hustled into a marriage of convenience. Her husband, a weather researcher with the forest service interrupted his obsession with the climate and its vagaries long enough to have an ill-judged affair with the wife of the visiting British Resident of Kashmir, and was ordered to return from England with a wife of his own or not at all. Lydia’s introduction to India is made fearsome by heat and dust (and beggars), and while her first visit to the local Chalaili club is turned by the other, duly snobbish, memsahibs into the day of the scorpions, her counterpart discovers that sleepy Chalaili isn’t really the jewel in the crown she thought it was when she planned to open Coronation Talkies here.
This is the point at which the novel begins to enter Cold Comfort Farm territory, in the sense that every character turns out to have a past that includes something narsty in the woodshed. Lydia’s descents into gin-fuelled depression and misguided attempt to make a friend of Anil, the sole servant in attendance at Bluebell Cottage, are explained in capital letters: “DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO I BLOODY WELL AM?”
Never mind. We’ll be told in short but mawkish order as Lydia harks back to the days when her father used to call her the Princess Liddie Diddie while getting plastered at the pub. She seeks temporary solace with Simon Fraser-Gough, but what Simon has lurking in the woodshed is far nastier than anything Lydia might have imagined. Speaking of woodsheds, William has something narsty stashed away in his, too, a complicated tale of dark illicit passions that must never be spoken of. Anil, not to be outdone in terms of domestic drama, contributes his mite’s worth by arriving with his sister, who has been forced into prostitution in the wicked city. She has a heart of gold, but her lungs are made of lesser metal, unfortunately, precipitating another tragedy.
Meanwhile, Mrs Banerjee has progressed from her first dismayed look at the brokedown palace that’s Coronation Talkies (“Talking picture theatre, my jolly bottom,” she explains, in a fair semblance of what passes for wit in this novel). Under her careful management, it has survived a disastrous opening night that provided the author with yet another stab at comedy (comedy survived, but it was a close call), and gone on to better things. But, and this may surprise you, Mrs Banerjee, like everyone else in the novel, has a dark secret of her own. This emerges slowly and painfully through a tangle of comic romps, comic lusts, comic interludes, comic memsahibs and comic newsletters that redefine the critic’s cliché “read this and weep”.
There are some really good bits in Coronation Talkies , like the epigraphs before each chapter and the hand-drawn map of Chalaili and the very handsome book cover. Not enough, though, to prevent the sigh of relief that escaped me when this period piece finally reached the last full stop.
The BS column: The Collecting Impulse
(This first appeared in Business Standard, Speaking Volumes for April 26, 2005)
Which reminds me: if anyone knows of good books on collectors/ collections/ collecting in India, please tell me about them? I'm also looking for books about books by Indian bibliophiles (and yes, I've seen Tharoor's latest).
My prejudice against book collectors was formed in haste and repented at leisure. The first person I met who called himself a collector had a small but interesting set of first editions. These, like his other books, were carefully kept but so jealously guarded, with dragon locks and remonstrances, that I was left with two lasting impressions.
The first was that the books most beloved by collectors were ones as pristine as possible, with perfect, unfoxed pages and unmarred spines. The best book, by logical extension, was one that had never been read at all. To my mind, it seemed to set up collectors as the exact opposite of book lovers. To a true booklover, a book was only an oblong, inert object until it had been read; to a true collector, the perfect specimen was something that had remained virginal, untouched by readers, and would be kept in that state forever. The second impression was that all collectors were essentially misers, hoarders of wealth in the form of books that they seldom read but would not allow other people to read.
Over the years, this early prejudice hardened. The salary of a journalist was not the stuff that enables anyone to build up collections of their own. The books that passed through my hands were printed in the modern fashion, on indifferent paper. The ones that were loved were loved for their contents, not for the way they looked; some few, when they passed through the hands of publishers such as Sanjeev Saith and Ravi Dayal, had clearly been cherished as objects in their own right. The majority were just objects to be sold, not objects of desire. The famed bookshops in Simla and the Sunday book bazaar in Delhi yielded curiosities rather than beautiful books.
We all have our personal monuments to false arrogance. Mine lay in a claim that could either be made by a purist booklover or by an absolute philistine: the claim that what mattered was just the text, not the book. I made this claim before I had read Robertson Davies on the subject: “It is splendidly austere to say that Shakespeare is just as much Shakespeare in a paperback edition as he is in the beautiful Nonesuch Press edition of 1929 or the First Folio of 1623, but not all of us are such literary Calvinists. We value beauty and we value associations, and I do not think we should be sneered at because we like our heroes to be appropriately dressed.”
Oh, the force of that gentle rebuke. It travelled well across the gulf of years and genius that separates someone like me from someone like Davies, and I fled into the arms of that old standby, 84 Charing Cross Road . But I landed on the page for October 15, 1950, where Helene Hanff wrote: “The Newman arrived almost a week ago and I’m just beginning to recover. I keep it on the table with me all day, every now and then I stop typing and reach over and touch it. Not because it’s a first edition; I just never saw a book so beautiful. I feel vaguely guilty about owning it. All that gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in the pine-panelled library of an English country home…”
I found myself sneaking over to the shelves that contain one of the very few treasures in a bibliophile but defiantly anti-collection home, where all the books are well-thumbed and dog-eared and marked by the passage of time and our love of them. Among the cheerful spines of paperbacks are the austere leatherbound spines of ‘The Library Edition of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment’. Not a collectors’ edition, but as I turned the pages, I recognised that there was quite a different thrill to reading Burton in an edition “illustrated by a series of seventy-one original illustrations reproduced from the original pictures in oils specially painted by Albert Letchford” than there was to reading him in the plain vanilla Modern Library edition.
It was at this point, when I was caught between a Calvinist’s love for books as just the text and a far more carnal love for books as objects to be devoured with the eye and the imagination as much as the mind, that Ruchir Joshi, a writer friend, called and asked if I’d like to meet Glenn Horowitz.
Glenn is something of a legend in New York circles, a book collector who assures acquaintances that he’s in the game as a businessman, but whose obvious love for books is inescapable—and contagious. His firm has dealt with and represented the collections and papers of writers as diverse as Amiri Baraka and Vladimir Nabokov, Hunter S Thompson and Nadine Gordimer, Alfred Dreyfus and Peter Carey. Many years ago, he acquired the correspondence between R K Narayan and Graham Greene, bringing to the acquisition the same knowledge and desire that he employed when acquiring Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate notes. He was among the first in his family to go to college—Bennington, where he was taught by Bernard Malamud and where, for a while, he intended to write nothing less than the great American novel. It was the deliberate extinguishing of one desire, the urge to be a writer, that kindled another kind of passion for books.
Seeing India through Glenn’s eyes was illuminating. He hadn’t met too many collectors, or perhaps he had met only the kind I had encountered—men whom he dismissed as hoarders. Horowitz, like a handful of other book dealers and collectors across the world, is more a “literary diplomat”, a broker of literary history, than a miser or a hoarder. In the brief time he was in Delhi, he raided bookshops in the way Genghis Khan might have sacked a minor kingdom or two—not an epic foray, just an exploratory excursion that served to keep his hand in.
When we met, I bombarded him with questions about collecting: how did it work, how would he make the distinction between India’s better-known English-language authors versus the sometimes more redoubtable regional language authors, where did literary archives end up, what did the ordinary reader have to gain by this strange pursuit?
His response arrived in a large cardboard box, which we opened and ravaged to discover book catalogues. Here was the Beat Generation, here was Jack Kerouac’s disillusion and frustration and creativity all muddled together. Here were Nabokov’s butterflies; here was the history of James Joyce’s Ulysses and its obscenity trials. F Scott Fitzgerald’s signature, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s collections of books, the drawings of the Beat writers… Little pieces of literary history detonated on my desktop until finally, I thought I began to understand the impulses of collectors, who must be entrepreneur and librarian, businessman and literary historian, diplomat and cutthroat bargainer all in one.
Which reminds me: if anyone knows of good books on collectors/ collections/ collecting in India, please tell me about them? I'm also looking for books about books by Indian bibliophiles (and yes, I've seen Tharoor's latest).
My prejudice against book collectors was formed in haste and repented at leisure. The first person I met who called himself a collector had a small but interesting set of first editions. These, like his other books, were carefully kept but so jealously guarded, with dragon locks and remonstrances, that I was left with two lasting impressions.
The first was that the books most beloved by collectors were ones as pristine as possible, with perfect, unfoxed pages and unmarred spines. The best book, by logical extension, was one that had never been read at all. To my mind, it seemed to set up collectors as the exact opposite of book lovers. To a true booklover, a book was only an oblong, inert object until it had been read; to a true collector, the perfect specimen was something that had remained virginal, untouched by readers, and would be kept in that state forever. The second impression was that all collectors were essentially misers, hoarders of wealth in the form of books that they seldom read but would not allow other people to read.
Over the years, this early prejudice hardened. The salary of a journalist was not the stuff that enables anyone to build up collections of their own. The books that passed through my hands were printed in the modern fashion, on indifferent paper. The ones that were loved were loved for their contents, not for the way they looked; some few, when they passed through the hands of publishers such as Sanjeev Saith and Ravi Dayal, had clearly been cherished as objects in their own right. The majority were just objects to be sold, not objects of desire. The famed bookshops in Simla and the Sunday book bazaar in Delhi yielded curiosities rather than beautiful books.
We all have our personal monuments to false arrogance. Mine lay in a claim that could either be made by a purist booklover or by an absolute philistine: the claim that what mattered was just the text, not the book. I made this claim before I had read Robertson Davies on the subject: “It is splendidly austere to say that Shakespeare is just as much Shakespeare in a paperback edition as he is in the beautiful Nonesuch Press edition of 1929 or the First Folio of 1623, but not all of us are such literary Calvinists. We value beauty and we value associations, and I do not think we should be sneered at because we like our heroes to be appropriately dressed.”
Oh, the force of that gentle rebuke. It travelled well across the gulf of years and genius that separates someone like me from someone like Davies, and I fled into the arms of that old standby, 84 Charing Cross Road . But I landed on the page for October 15, 1950, where Helene Hanff wrote: “The Newman arrived almost a week ago and I’m just beginning to recover. I keep it on the table with me all day, every now and then I stop typing and reach over and touch it. Not because it’s a first edition; I just never saw a book so beautiful. I feel vaguely guilty about owning it. All that gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in the pine-panelled library of an English country home…”
I found myself sneaking over to the shelves that contain one of the very few treasures in a bibliophile but defiantly anti-collection home, where all the books are well-thumbed and dog-eared and marked by the passage of time and our love of them. Among the cheerful spines of paperbacks are the austere leatherbound spines of ‘The Library Edition of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment’. Not a collectors’ edition, but as I turned the pages, I recognised that there was quite a different thrill to reading Burton in an edition “illustrated by a series of seventy-one original illustrations reproduced from the original pictures in oils specially painted by Albert Letchford” than there was to reading him in the plain vanilla Modern Library edition.
It was at this point, when I was caught between a Calvinist’s love for books as just the text and a far more carnal love for books as objects to be devoured with the eye and the imagination as much as the mind, that Ruchir Joshi, a writer friend, called and asked if I’d like to meet Glenn Horowitz.
Glenn is something of a legend in New York circles, a book collector who assures acquaintances that he’s in the game as a businessman, but whose obvious love for books is inescapable—and contagious. His firm has dealt with and represented the collections and papers of writers as diverse as Amiri Baraka and Vladimir Nabokov, Hunter S Thompson and Nadine Gordimer, Alfred Dreyfus and Peter Carey. Many years ago, he acquired the correspondence between R K Narayan and Graham Greene, bringing to the acquisition the same knowledge and desire that he employed when acquiring Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate notes. He was among the first in his family to go to college—Bennington, where he was taught by Bernard Malamud and where, for a while, he intended to write nothing less than the great American novel. It was the deliberate extinguishing of one desire, the urge to be a writer, that kindled another kind of passion for books.
Seeing India through Glenn’s eyes was illuminating. He hadn’t met too many collectors, or perhaps he had met only the kind I had encountered—men whom he dismissed as hoarders. Horowitz, like a handful of other book dealers and collectors across the world, is more a “literary diplomat”, a broker of literary history, than a miser or a hoarder. In the brief time he was in Delhi, he raided bookshops in the way Genghis Khan might have sacked a minor kingdom or two—not an epic foray, just an exploratory excursion that served to keep his hand in.
When we met, I bombarded him with questions about collecting: how did it work, how would he make the distinction between India’s better-known English-language authors versus the sometimes more redoubtable regional language authors, where did literary archives end up, what did the ordinary reader have to gain by this strange pursuit?
His response arrived in a large cardboard box, which we opened and ravaged to discover book catalogues. Here was the Beat Generation, here was Jack Kerouac’s disillusion and frustration and creativity all muddled together. Here were Nabokov’s butterflies; here was the history of James Joyce’s Ulysses and its obscenity trials. F Scott Fitzgerald’s signature, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s collections of books, the drawings of the Beat writers… Little pieces of literary history detonated on my desktop until finally, I thought I began to understand the impulses of collectors, who must be entrepreneur and librarian, businessman and literary historian, diplomat and cutthroat bargainer all in one.
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Speaking Volumes: The one about Saul Bellow
(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.
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.
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.
Sunday, April 10, 2005
Book review: The Shadow of the Wind
(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.
(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.
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