Book review: The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver

The Lacuna
Barbara Kingsolver
Faber, distributed by Penguin,
Rs 550, 507 pages


“I think our first responsibility, and also our first treasure as writers, is to represent ourselves,” Barbara Kingsolver said in an interview early in her career. She was speaking specifically of women’s writing; and even at that stage of her writing life, 15 years ago, she was instinctively suspicious of categories. “But when I'm writing I don't really think, ‘Who's going to read this?’ I don't feel my books are mainly for women. When students ask, "Is this a chick book?" I say, "Moby Dick is a whale book, but I don't think only whales should read it."

The Lacuna, her Orange-Prize winning novel, both defies and celebrates the stereotypes of “women’s writing”. One of its central characters is the painter Frida Kahlo, and as always, Kingsolver is brilliant at the art of getting inside the mind and emotional life of a complex, creative woman like Kahlo. The protagonist is a writer, Harrison Shepherd, whose childhood was split between Mexico and the US, giving him an insider-outsider identity. And Kingsolver’s concerns in The Lacuna are as always, sharply political, as she explores the McCarthy era and the communist witch-hunts, and the uses and pitfalls of revolutions in general. To summarise, this novel was not written exclusively for whales.

Over her life as a writer, Kingsolver’s personal beliefs and her political views have infused her books. The Poisonwood Bible was, until The Lacuna, called her “most ambitious” work, and it’s the novel that brought her a fame she has accepted with great unease. It’s probably one of the great works, not just about the history of the Congo in the 1960s, but about the cost of apathy and oblivion; closing your eyes to the world around you is not, in Kingsolver’s belief system, a valid way to live. One of her earliest novels, The Bean Tree, was a hard look at the economic and social changes that accompany motherhood; Prodigal Summer reflected Kingsolver’s growing concerns for the environment. In all of these novels, though, the human side of the story remained central—she loved and worked on her characters as much as she worked on conveying her political vision.

The Lacuna starts with fear and discovery: in Mexico, the young Harrison’s dreams are haunted by the howling of what he and his mother, Salome, think are saucer-eyed devils, though the real creatures are far more innocuous. Early on, the world of the sea will become one of the first of the alien worlds he will immerse himself in and disappear into, repeating this discovery in later years with his writing. The first section of the book is set in the time of the revolution; Harrison’s mother is a fickle charmer, whose partners are almost always on the wrong side of the Mexican Revolution. The story is told through his diaries, and here Kingsolver’s craft is flawless, as she allows the boy’s voice to grow into the man’s sure, more guarded, writer’s words.

Kahlo and Diego Riviera will walk through the narrative, rich, true-to-life presences—but for those who don’t know much about these two great painters, this part of the novel may seem opaque, almost inscrutable. Harrison shifts between Mexico, where he has roots and an identity, despite the floating world of their home life, and the US, where he is just another immigrant in the often harsh world of the gringos. And his story is not complete: “People who make a study of old documents have a name for this very kind of thing, a missing piece. A lacuna, it’s called. The hole in the story, and this one truly missing still.”

In the second half of the novel, the lacuna will make itself felt. As Kingsolver analyses the workings of revolution, a stiffness enters her prose—we’re reading about people talking about revolution, in didactic or perfunctory ways, rather than about the ways in which Trotsky, Stalin and co impacted and sometimes devastated their lives. The US is seized by its own paranoia—the McCarthy era is upon Harrison, and his earlier association in Mexico with revolutionaries who spoke of communism and communist leaders with approval is dragged out, now that he is a famous writer.
This is the real lacuna, more than even the missing portions of his history. There is a gap between the writer’s complex, intimate world, his understanding of the quiet betrayals and high ideals of revolution—and the public role that he is called upon to play. “I grew up in Mexico, in the Revolution,” Shepherd says. “Being a Communist was just an ordinary household thing. About like fish on Fridays.”

If Kingsolver had been able to keep the interminable conversations shorter, instead of making them vehicles for well-meaning but polemical arguments, The Lacuna would have been much more than just an ambitious, and worthy, novel. It seems frivolous when so much is spread out on her generous table to ask for entertainment and engagement as well, but for all its virtues, the politics of The Lacuna eventually override its narrative.

For those who’ve loved Kingsolver’s work over the years, The Lacuna is worth your time, for its portrait of a writer, and two artists, as much as for the intensity of its debates. But be aware that as a novel, it never recovers from the missing hole in the story.

The BS column: The Orange Prize and the David Davidar case

(Published in the Business Standard, June 15, 2010)


In the fifteenth year of the Orange Prize, the debate over the world’s first literary prize exclusively for women has shifted. It used to be about men grumbling that women didn’t need a prize of their own; now the complaints sound suspiciously like the Orange is working so well that the men would also like a prize just to themselves.
Tough, since even today the Orange, by spotlighting five to six brilliant and often overlooked books by women each year, underlines how much publishing and literary prizes are still a man’s domain. Here are five great Orange winners who should be essential reading:

Carol Shields (Larry’s Party, 1998): Shields won her gong in the third year of the Orange Prize. She was well-known for The Stone Diaries, and the sweetly funny Larry’s Party wasn’t her best—but winning the Orange made her work accessible to a new generation of readers. Unless, her last novel, didn’t win the Orange—but it forms the best argument for the Prize, arguing that tiny, domestic themes are just as much the stuff of literature as larger, more “masculine” subjects.

Andrea Levy, Small Island (2004): Levy’s The Long Song, a slave’s-eye-view of came out this year to respectful reviews, but it’s Small Island that really captured our imaginations. Set in post-World War Two England, it’s a look at that time through the eyes of Caribbean migrants. Levy’s fourth book was her big breakthrough, both in terms of finding her audience, and finding her voice as a writer.

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2005): There has seldom been such a controversial novel in the history of any prize. Shriver’s tale of school shootings and an alienated, monstrously difficult child took on our last contemporary myth—the myth that maternal love is unconditional and natural. It is also perhaps the best novel ever to be written about the peculiarly 21st century dilemma of surviving a personal tragedy that’s playing out in the full public glare.

Marilynne Robinson, Home (2009): The companion novel to Home, Gilead, was a surprising omission from the 2004 Orange shortlist—but Home made Robinson an icon. Through the lives of the Boughton family—a preacher father, an alcoholic son—what Robinson brought to her writing was craft; but it was also wisdom. These remain among the best, and best-loved, novels of the 21st century.

Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna (2010): The Lacuna is Kingsolver’s most ambitious novel—her best would probably still be The Poisonwood Bible. Kingsolver’s fierce political views and her revisioning of history run through the novel. Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, the much-lauded historical novel about Thomas Cromwell, was considered the frontrunner for the prize, and Wolf Hall remains the more entertaining, gripping book. But The Lacuna is a reminder that a really great writer often brings their conscience to their writing.

The Davidar case: David Davidar’s exit from Penguin Canada, after sexual harassment charges were filed against him by a colleague, is one of the biggest, and messiest, publishing stories of the year. Here’s a timeline of events:

Early 2004: Davidar, then CEO of Penguin India, leaves to join Penguin Canada as Publisher.
2007: Lisa Rundle is promoted to Rights and Contracts Director, Penguin Canada.
2009: Davidar named CEO of Penguin International and President of Penguin Canada.
October 2009, Frankfurt: According to Lisa Rundle’s statement of claims, Davidar comes to her hotel room and sexually assaults her after she rejects his advances. She does not file charges at this time.
May 2010: Lisa Rundle leaves her job; it is unclear whether she resigns or is asked to quit. (Update: Rundle now says she was fired.)
June 8, 2010: Penguin Canada announces that David Davidar will be leaving to pursue his writing career.
June 9, 2010: Lisa Rundle files a $100,000 sexual harassment charges against Davidar personally and a $423,000 wrongful termination claims against Penguin Canada.
June 11, 2010: Davidar issues a statement saying he is “utterly shocked” by the allegations, acknowledging that he was asked to quit, and stating his intention to fight the charges.

At present, those who’ve worked with Davidar and know him well are in shock—HarperCollins CEO Karthika VK echoes the Indian publishing industry view when she says that nothing in David’s personal or professional record indicates that he would be capable of sexual assault, and she finds the charges “very hard to believe”. Rundle’s trauma is also intense; as her lawyer stated, it takes a lot for a woman to file sexual harassment charges. It would be improper to speculate on the facts of the case at this point—Rundle’s charges are available, but Davidar’s defence is not at present. (I have posted my personal experience of working with Davidar elsewhere, on my blog.)

Whatever the verdict, this is a saddening, unpleasant story, and it will leave a residue on the lives of both protagonists. This column will offer a more detailed analysis when the case comes to court.

The BS column: The Saint Sonia Syndrome

(Published in the Business Standard, June 8, 2010)













A few months ago, Norberto Fuentes wrote an autobiography of Fidel Castro, a book that starts and ends in Castro’s voice, where by page 150 the reader has forgotten that this is a fictional creation. Fuentes’ relationship with Fidel was a dark and troubled one; he was once one of Castro’s supporters, then one of Castro’s prisoners, and finally one of Cuba’s exiles.

The Autobiography of Fidel Castro, unauthorized and unacknowledged by its subject, reads like the most venomous of letters from a disillusioned lover: Fuentes was close enough to Fidel to know exactly where to put the knife in, whether he’s describing Fidel’s real thoughts on Che Guevara or his fascination with the bloody exactness of the guillotine. In its original Spanish edition, Fuentes’ fictionalized autobiography is pulling readers in, despite its thousand-page bulk—in part because it fills an unusual gap. Castro, unlike most dictators, has never written his memoirs, and inexact, fictionalized and dependent on Fuentes imagination though it is, his Autobiography fills a need among readers to know more than the sanitized, official hagiographies will offer.

In India, a biography of Sonia Gandhi is available. Written by Rasheed Kidwai, it is dutiful, thorough, respectful—not, in fact, a terribly exciting read. It sold well when it came out, in the absence of better material. In the years since Kidwai wrote his biography and since Javier Moro, the writer-nephew of Dominique Lapierre, penned his “fictional biography” of the Indian Congress Party leader, there have been no better biographies of Mrs Gandhi.

The Red Sari, Moro’s slightly breathless account of Sonia Maino’s life before and after she became Mrs Rajiv Gandhi, has been attacked in a tide of rising hysteria by Congress loyalists. Currently, Moro has been threatened with defamation suits if he publishes the book in India; his publishers, Roli Books, are holding firm and Moro is annoyed enough to have threatened his own lawsuit in turn. The question of defamation—if any—is one for the courts to decide; but defamation only applies if you get the facts of a person’s life wrong.

The Congress point of view, summarized by the arguments of spokesperson Dr Abhishek Singhvi, appears to be that since this is not an authorized biography, it shouldn’t be published. There are also allegations of defamatory material—none of these can be judged until The Red Sari is published here. Moro’s prose tends to the purple, but it’s not very likely with his background as a decent researcher and with Roli’s experience that the book contains much libelous matter. With respect, here are three things the Congress might want to consider.

1) If you’re a public figure, you’re fair game for fiction: The ethics of the fictional biography/ autobiography have yet to be established, but as Paul Theroux knew when he wrote Sir Vidia’s Shadow about his friendship with VS Naipaul, it’s perfectly kosher to write about someone who’s already in the public eye. Moro allows himself to speculate about Sonia Gandhi’s thoughts and feelings—but by calling his work a fictional biography, he’s covered his bases. The famous have lives that can be researched, are often exhaustively covered, and are of great interest to the ordinary public—as long as the writer isn’t making up stuff, he’s on safe ground. Or more bluntly, the famous make excellent raw material for a book. And free speech covers the right to speculate about the inner lives of the powerful. If Castro and Obama can take it, so can Sonia.

2) Don’t be an unpaid publicist for the other guy: The Congress hysteria over The Red Sari has brought it front-page stories, prime time television slots and added anything from 5,000 to 10,000 potential readers to Moro’s audience. Presumably Roli Books and Moro are less than grateful because of the aggravation they’ve been caused, but the Congress PR machine might want to consider that their campaign has raised far more interest in The Red Sari than any publisher would have been able to achieve unaided.

3) Do it the Obama way: There’s no question of an unauthorized biography of Barack Obama doing anywhere as well as his own accounts of his life have done. Why? Because Obama’s autobiographical writings are searingly honest, detailed and brilliantly written. The sleazy, gossipy biography or the fictionalized biography just can’t compete. If Sonia Gandhi wrote her own memoirs, or authorized a really good biographer to write a no-holds-barred account of her life, there’d be no room for the overblown romanticism of The Red Sari. Given that its only competition is a hagiography, Moro’s book will do brilliantly. What would you rather read, the life of St Sonia, or an exaggerated but human account of Sonia Maino’s journey to become Sonia Gandhi?

Food: Following Fish

(Published in the Business Standard, June 2010, in the food column)










The arguments against fish are many, especially in a north Indian city like Delhi. Fish is bony — often, in fact, the tastier the fish, the bonier it is. Its fragrance is persistent, and for some, too pungent to handle. Meat is relatively easy to understand; the subtleties of buying fish change from coastline to coastline and can take a lifetime to master.

I rarely order fish in Delhi, which is in keeping with my position of mild apostasy on fish — heretical in a Bengali family. While my sister ate her way through fishheads, whole gunmetal pabda and chunks of hilsa, I had to be fed fish by stealth: mashed, in a fiery mustard chutney. It was only as an adult that I realised why I didn’t like fish — the dislike stemmed from a kind of austere, demanding love.

Eating freshly caught and flash-fried bhekti in the Sunderbans on a river boat was a pleasure; I tucked into karimeen with gusto in Palakkad; tackled a tiny, grimly bony but delicious fish curry in Goa; and ate my way through the fish platter at the once-legendary Ananthashram in Bombay, demanding second helpings. It was the freshness that counted; my palate will tolerate mediocre hamburger or frozen prawns, but seems to jib at anything less than absolutely fresh, perfectly cooked fish.

For all fish apostates — or inadvertent gourmands — I have one recommendation: read Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (Penguin, Rs 250). This is not just good travel and food writing — as Samanth travels in search of hilsa in Bengal, toddy shop fish curry in Kerala, trawls through fishing communities and examines the live fish treatment for asthma in Hyderabad, he will revive your curiosity and your appetite.

Having a great fish meal requires a lack of embarrassment on the part of the diner (unless you’re eating the standard sole fillet in butter sauce, or sashimi), and while some clubs, restaurants and five-stars serve good fish, your best meals are likely to be in far more humble places. Canteens in Mumbai, shacks in Goa, toddy shops in Kerala, hole-in-the-wall outlets in Kolkata can and do offer meals that rival anything you’d find in the fine dining line.

Eating at Narayan’s in Mangalore, Samanth falls in love with the restaurant’s trademark masala, “the masala that aggregated in fried lumps on the circulating tray like spicy, red snowdrifts”. The thali is served; he works his way through the seer, sardines and ladyfish, then stands next to the kitchen — “simply sniffing at the frying masala on the tawa, deep-breathing fanatically, trying to fill my lungs with enough aroma to last the day”. Travelling in the Kanyakumari district, he meets food maven Jacob Aruni, who introduces him to fish podi, a dried fish powder used like the gunpowder podis, mixed with rice and ghee.

Aruni’s dried mackerel podi, writes Samanth, “looked like powdery jaggery, speckled white in places with coconut, and it had a deep, spicy aroma, shot through with the strong presence of fish. Tasted raw, it races to the back of your throat and proceeds to set your tonsils on fire… They were mackerel with character, bursting out of their envelope of spice like strong actors out of a crowded script.”

When he’s not learning how to eat hilsa, or searching for the perfect, elusive fish curry of childhood memory, Samanth is a wonderful guide to the changing, threatened lives of today’s fishermen, to boat-building yards and the diverse histories of the Portuguese and the Dutch in India.

Two days after reading Following Fish, I found myself in one of Delhi’s small, local markets, searching for hilsa roe and mackerel. The places where you get great fish, rather than cottony, deep-freeze fillets with all the appeal of wilted lettuce, in this city are few but worth browsing, from Andhra Bhavan to Gunpowder, Ploof to Pan Asian, Dakshin to Ai. But if you don’t find yourself drawn to the fishmarkets and then to the spice merchants, and then back to your kitchen to cook after reading Following Fish, I will undertake to travel to Hyderabad and swallow a live murrel, despite my lack of asthma.

Book review: Ayn Rand and The World She Made

(Published in the Business Standard, June 3, 2010)




Ayn Rand and The World She Made
Anne C Heller
Tranquebar,
Rs 495, 567 pages




Here is my second-favourite Ayn Rand story. Challenged by a journalist to present her philosophy while standing on one foot, the philosopher, novelist and all-round provocateur stuck her foot in the air and stated her creed: “Metaphysics: Objective Reality. Epistemology: Reason. Ethics: Self-interest. Politics: Capitalism.”

The longer version of these principles is also well-known, and forms, to this day, a Canticle of Rand for true believers: "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." "You can't eat your cake and have it, too." "Man is an end in himself." "Give me liberty or give me death."

My favourite Ayn Rand story, unlike the first, is not in the canon of twice-told Rand tales. Born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, to a Russian Jewish family, Alissa/ Alice Rosenbaum chose a new name for herself when she came to New York. She had various explanations for the “Ayn”: it was a Finnish female name, she had made it up. “The real explanation,” writes Anne Heller, “may be more sentimental—and more ethnic—than the creator of a philosophy based on the self-made soul would be likely to admit.”

Perhaps Ayn came from “Ayin”, “an affectionate Jewish diminutive meaning “bright eyes”—her mother called her “Ayinotchka” as a child. The idea that Ayn Rand would step into her new, American life casting off the past while still secretively holding on to a tiny sliver of it is seductive.

It is impossible to explain to Ayn Rand believers why some readers outgrow The Fountainhead and why Atlas Shrugged and Anthem are not taught in universities; it is impossible to explain to Ayn Rand skeptics why millions of readers never outgrow the lure of Rand’s philosophy. GB Shaw at once skewered and (faintly) praised another seductive ideology in his famous aphorism: “A man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. A man who is still a communist at the age of thirty is an even bigger one.”

But for all that thousands of readers outgrow Ayn Rand by their late twenties, the list of the ones who don’t is illustrious—John Hospers, Alan Greenspan, Robert Mayhew and other venerables have all indicated their deep debt to her ideas. The contemporary reception to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged is telling: many critics slammed the books for their didactic, “offensively pedestrian” style, and they were right. Many readers bought the books anyway, drawn to Rand’s almost comically force-of-nature heroes and her perversely suffering, noble heroines.

Heller’s objectivity about Objectivism did not go down well with the Ayn Rand Institute; she was denied access to Rand’s unpublished diaries, letters and other documents. She did have access, though, to 40 hours of taped biographical interviews with Barbara Branden in the early 1960s, Russian archives and privately recorded interviews with Rand’s friends. What she produces is an impartial and often acute account of Rand’s extraordinarily forceful life.

Rand’s childhood was marked by the persecution her Jewish family suffered in the Russia of the early 20th century, and by an early determination to make something of her life—in later years, she would reinvent herself as a writer. In the US, she met and married a young, charismatic actor, Frank O’Connor, but her life would always overshadow his. She struggled to make it in Hollywood as a script writer, but it would be her books and her unparalleled ability to command attention and attract a loyal, sometimes terrified, but always fascinated audience that would make her what she became.

It’s hard to explain what constitutes charisma, so much more powerful and inescapable than beauty, intellect or charm, but what Ayn Rand possessed and honed was in the nature of an undeniable, inscrutable inner force. She was a heavy Benzedrine user, and displayed some of the characteristics of the addict, from a restless, relentless mind to paranoia. In later years, she had an affair with Nathaniel Branden, a much younger acolyte who would become a kind of founder of the American self-help movement. It is characteristic of Rand that it was not enough to have the affair—she had to gain the consent of her husband and Branden’s wife, and when Branden fell in love, years later, with another, younger woman, Rand would deal with it by endless rounds of “therapies” with him before a final, irrevocable break.

As the power of the ideas behind The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged grew, what came up around Rand was a cross between a salon and a cult. Over the years, her admiring circle of bright young student minds and heavyweight intellectuals would become a tightly-knit circle of insiders; loyalty and fidelity to Rand (and Branden) was an absolute, excommunication from the circle was final, and in its later stages, signs that the Rand group had become abusive, corrosive, almost Russian in its purges and denunciations, were acute.


None of this explains the continued force of Rand’s ideas, or the continued power of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, in particular, to sway the minds and hearts of readers. Heller’s biography will make Rand skeptics and the faithful uncomfortable in equal measure—but like its subject, this book is impossible to ignore. To steal a phrase from the Simon & Garfunkel song, once you’ve been Ayn Randed, the scar is permanent.

The Business Standard column: Copyright, copywrong?

(Published in the Business Standard, June 1, 2010)

The fantasy of any Indian reader who’s travelled to countries with bigger and better bookstores is simple: we want to be able to buy the books we love when they come out.
Many great books, especially histories, biographies, science writing and world literature/ poetry/ drama in translation will never be stocked in Indian bookshops. Many will come in after six-eight months, or will be prohibitively expensive, or will be stocked in limited copies.

For readers, one way around this is to order online or invest in an e-reader, but that’s still restrictive—you lose out on the serendipity of browsing, the accidental happiness of stumbling across books you didn’t know you wanted. (And as reader Meethil Momayya pointed out in an email, e-books are still subject to territorial agreements.)

From that perspective, the amendments proposed to the Indian Copyright Act might seem like a great idea. The core principle underlying the amendments applies equally to the Internet, digital media, film and broadcasting, and print publishing. Open up the markets, allow books, films and other media to move freely across countries, and give the Indian consumer and reader a much wider choice. So why is Indian publishing unhappy about this, and how is the Indian Copyright Act set to change the way you read?

The publishing perspective: Thomas Abraham, CEO, Hachette India, is blunt: “This will change the face of Indian publishing completely, and disastrously. The worst hit will be the publishers.” His logic, echoed by HarperCollins’ P N Sukumar and Krishan Chopra, is simple. The Act would do away, in effect, with the idea of an Indian “territory”—allowing books to be freely imported, and in the worst case, dumped, in the Indian market. For publishers, the incentive to promote an author or invest in his work in India disappears—if you know that anyone can print and sell copies of the book your publishing house has worked to produce.

Most glaringly, the “open market” is not reciprocal: while US and UK printers could, theoretically, flood the Indian markets with reprints of popular books, copyright agreements in those territories still hold, and Indian publishing cannot do the same. In the long run, this could kill or seriously cripple Indian publishing.

The author’s perspective: While the initial response from authors on the easing of markets is bound to be positive, will they get paid? As happened with the music industry, authors might find that their sales and audiences rise—but they’re not getting royalties on those editions. In a worst-case scenario, if the Act goes through in its present form and the doomsayers are right, the apparent freedoms authors might gain from the easing of copyright restrictions would be offset by the loss of local publishing support. And again, as with the music industry, for authors to gain, they would have to be willing to create book groups, nurture audiences and do much of their spadework. None of this infrastructure exists in India at present.

The reader’s perspective: Gautam Padmanabhan, CEO of Westland, offers a balanced take. “This is terrible for publishers,” he says. “But readers and retail want more choice and this could offer them more freedom—even at the basic level of being able to buy different editions of the same book.”

The biggest question—unanswered because the Copyright Act is geared far more strongly to the needs of the digital and film worlds, than to the complex and competing needs of print—is how this will work in practice. This could be like the Chinese toy revolution: the insidious replacement of local Indian products with cheaper, more disposable alternatives. Many readers couldn’t care less, so long as they have more and better books to read.

But the other argument is blunt, if protectionist: if you want a thriving Indian publishing industry, flooding the market with cheaper editions of books will kill off the publisher’s incentive to support and nurture authors. This could work if markets were open in the other direction as well—if a reciprocal arrangement allowed Indian publishers to ship their editions of US and UK-produced books into those markets—but there is no way the US and the UK would allow that kind of competition.

Like most Indian readers, I want more choice, and better books; and I don’t want to have to wait months to buy my favourite authors. But however well-intentioned, if the practical implications of the Copyright Act would be to cripple local publishing, that’s bad for readers—and terrible for authors. What works for digital industries and films might have entirely the opposite effect on the publishing world, and it’s not a gamble Indian publishing can afford to lose.

Book review: Way To Go, by Upamanyu Chatterjee

(BOOK REVIEW FOR BIBLIO/ MAY 2010)

Way To Go
Upamanyu Chatterjee,
Hamish Hamilton (Penguin)
Rs 499, 359 pages
ISBN: 9780670083527














Life is nasty, brutish and at 359 pages, not short, in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s sequel to his 1994 novel, The Last Burden. In the intervening 16 years, India has become more corrupt, more vicious, more consumerist and stayed as grimy as it was in the first book. Chatterjee’s cast of characters have moved on, too, and not necessarily for the good: Jamun’s divorce has yielded a cheerful child and a long-running TV soap opera produced by his ex-wife that reveals their lives together in grim, but TRP-grabbing, detail. His father, Shyamanand, has gone missing for reasons that remain murky until the end of the novel, and his brother Burfi faces his own set of dismal vicissitudes.


It is now understood—after The Last Burden, Weight Loss and Mammaries of the Welfare State—that the relatively gentle humour of English, August was just Chatterjee’s opening shot across the bows. Upamanyu Chatterjee is perhaps the only contemporary Indian writing in English who belongs firmly to the school of Jonathan Swift and Rabelais, but his irreverence encourages quotation from an all together more plebian source, the hashing song Life Presents a Dismal Picture:

“Life presents a dismal picture,
Dark and dreary as the tomb,
Father’s got urethral stricture,
Mother’s got a prolapsed womb.
Uncle James has been deported
For a homosexual crime,
Nell, our maid, has just aborted
For the forty-second time.”

This, in a nutshell, would be the quintessential Upamanyu Chatterjee world; dysfunctional, darkly comic, but adhering to the social conventions of a predictable order. For many readers, Way To Go (like Weight Loss) should come with a statutory warning: this is not for the squeamish. Most of Chatterjee’s reviewers have reacted with a kind of Brahminical horror to his merciless exposition of the more unpleasant facts of life: turds, suicides, corpses, uncongenial sex, shitters on train tracks, bad breath, sweat and the body’s other emanations, autopsies, morgues with “frozen putrid flesh”, “chemical effluent, slag, ordure, garbage, sewerage”, and assorted stenches.

As I read Way To Go in the company of another friend, one of us counted the number of times turds were mentioned in the text, while the other counted the number of suicides, corpses, the suicidal and the homicidal. Both figures were impressive, and it may be worthwhile noting that Chatterjee doesn’t write in order to shock: he writes with a kind of impartial observation, editing out none of the ordure and sewerage of the world.

The first chapter of Way To Go is one of the funniest and darkest in Indian writing. “For not having loved one’s dead father enough, could one make amends by loving one’s child more?” Chatterjee begins, and having softened us up with sentiment, gets to what he does best. As Jamun reports the facts of his father’s disappearance to a bored police officer in a depressing police station, the exchange moves into the realms of the surreal.

“Any hobby of Missing Person?”
“He and I played chess on weekends. He watched TV and, being constipated, while waiting in the mornings for the urge to visit the toilet, wrote poems in Bengali.”
The constable incised one word on his page. Jamun guessed it to be ‘TV’.”
Having established that the Missing Person is an eighty-five year-old gentleman, widowed and given to a fixed, stable routine, the constable proceeds:
“Bad Company had Missing Person fallen into before/ever/from time to time?”
“No.”
“Missing Person failed his school/ college exams and therefore left home?”
“No.”
“Was fed up with studies in general?”
“He loved books, the older and mustier the better.’
“If Missing Person stayed in hostel, perhaps its atmosphere was vitiated?”
“Such was not the case in the present instance,” replied Jamun, feeling—on seeing the constable nod his head in slow and steady approbation—that he had at last begun to speak his interrogator’s language.”

These are the skills that made Chatterjee’s English, August such a popular, critical and enduring success: he lays bare the fundamental bizarreness and strictly ritual nature of political, bureaucratic and social systems, and does so with his trademark black humour and impeccable comic timing. Unspoken in this exchange is the understanding that little will be done, and that the nature of the situation will not change—the reporting of the Missing Person is a meaningless, but necessary, ritual.

As the novel proceeds, Chatterjee continues his exploration and excavation of the orifices of Indian society. The relatively circumscribed world that Jamun and Burfi belong to is a world of tedium, despair, violence and spectacular dysfunction. A tenant renders a building unrentable by committing suicide within its premises; the presumption that his ghost will be a co-squatter dissuades most prospective tenants. Lobhesh Monga, the builder who “fucks anything”, stands for the vicious, corrupt, unstoppable energy of the new India Shining. A neighbour plagued by leucoderma will try to find a cure in the blood of a freshly-decapitated chicken. And Jamun’s former life is summed up in the “bilingual banality” of his wife’s TV serial, Cheers Zindagi.

The landscape fits the general tenor of the novel: the rank mangrove swamp near Jamun’s neighbourhood is “Nature’s lush pubic hair”, buildings exhale the sweat of decay and waterlogging into the atmosphere, the morgue (where a stomach-turning but brilliantly observed autopsy scene is set) is located in the wonderfully named Popat Kaka hospital.

And nothing works as it should. The “blue-and-white, electric, dual-chambered, musical, ultraviolet-rayed water filter and purifier” in Shyamanand’s home hasn’t been dusted for four years. Jamun’s sex life has “dwindled to a sort of dry, rotting peanut”, giving him leisure to examine the “wretchedness of his carnal life”. “It was hurried, stinking, dry and gave more dissatisfaction than pleasure to the participants.” Even suicide is compromised, as Jamun wonders whether those who place their necks on the railway tracks recall the products of the morning shitters’ efforts. “Surely, just when it was too late… just before their skulls became blood and mincemeat, they wept and climaxed out of fear and depression at how sinfully they had abused the gift of life.”

Before the novel ends, there will be more deaths and more disappearances, but the real flaw in Way To Go isn’t the darkness of Chatterjee’s vision, or even the relentless scatology embedded in the prose. The most powerful themes in Way To Go are death, old age, and tedium, and in many ways, this is the age-old rant against the dying of the light: why must we grow old, why must all of us become bleached bones, why is the body such a sack of bile, guts and shit?

This is a more or less universal protest against the human condition; it isn’t tragedy that overtakes most of us so much as indignity, and even that will be meted out in small doses of humiliation as our will to live dwindles. In this, Way To Go is consistent with the body of Chatterjee’s work—he is the quintessential novelist of protest, and his black humour masks, in a way, a kind of idealism. Only a writer who believed that life was intended to be more than banality and corruption would be able to dwell with such accuracy on the rot within, or would resent it so deeply.

But Way To Go is overtaken by its own tedium, and the sharpness of the opening chapters gives way to a kind of despairing lassitude. The jokes get duller—the lead character in Cheers Zindagi is called Ashwamedha Ponytail; the prose sinks under the weight of its own despair, as Chatterjee chronicles the rush of builders, like vultures on a corpse, to acquire a house in one scene. He is reduced to banalities: “Words conceal rather than convey meaning…” on the way to genuine insight: “…The written word was coinage, the currency of another economy, of interest mainly for negotiating a literate country.”

The average reader, however literate, will struggle to finish Way To Go; it seems to lose interest in its own concerns and offers up a string of unoriginal observations. Death is all around us; life is corrupting and filled with disappointments; most people live lives of desperation (noisy rather than quiet, since this is India); love and sex have nothing to offer; most relationships are failed ones; God is dead; we are all rotting corpses on our way to the morgue.

Literary failure is sometimes far more interesting than literary success, though, and if you step back from the dank terrain that Way To Go inhabits, what is really of interest about Upamanyu Chatterjee is his refusal to occupy the same sphere that his contemporaries do. His novels are rarely about the grand sweep of Indian history, or the epic mythologizing of the great Indian family, or the confused angst of the diaspora. His focus is, like that other genius poet of dysfunction, John Kennedy O’Toole, on the inescapable failures of our lives, the fact that most of us are unmoored by history and unable to hold on to either the old certainties or the new promises of India Shining.

John Kennedy O’Toole wrote a masterpiece in Confederacy of Dunces. In what is now a kind of quartet of dysfunction, from Mammaries of the Welfare State to Way To Go, Upamanyu Chatterjee hasn’t yet found his masterpiece. And while this is not a novel I would recommend to the reader in search of light entertainment, or to those already on the brink of depression, Chatterjee makes good on one of his guarantees. He will always explore the underbelly of the Indian family and of Indian life, and it will, in his vision, almost always be repellently flaccid, wrinkled and flatulent.