What elephants! What tigers!

William Radice writes a well-meaning review of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets:
"Their poems start to rub up against each other, more interestingly and movingly in this anthology than in any other I have seen."

Radice is an old India hand, but the rest of the review is illuminating because of his annoying assumptions about how Indian poets should write. "...For the reader of the anthology, the exuberance of India is precisely what is missing. Where are the colours, the light, the heat, the skies, the crowds and the birds? Where are the family relationships that the Indo-Anglian novelists have explored so lovingly?"

I was taken aback at that archaism--I haven't heard anyone in India describe Indian writers by the term "Indo-Anglian" since the dark ages--and irritated at Radice's appeal for Indian poets to abandon iambics in favour of the "tabla-beat of India". It's telling that he quotes Raine, who discovered India at the age of 74: "The place of every arrival, the term of every spiritual quest."

Jeet Thayil, the editor of the anthology--full disclosure, on the McCrum scale quoted below, Jeet's probably a 7--has responded:
"Radice's orientalism would be quaint enough to be endearing - if it weren't so annoying. He tells the reader (breathlessly, I imagine) that my anthology lacks "the colours, the light, the heat, the skies, the crowds and the birds" of India, not to forget "family relationships", "children" and groups of enthusiastic "Indian university students". What a happy picture must be playing in Radice's overheated 19th-century imagination! What elephants! What tigers! What heat and dust and palanquins!" Check out the lively discussion in the Comments section.

Why am I blogging this? Not just because it's a "fight" or a controversy. Not just because Jeet is a friend. But because this exchange feeds into a very contemporary debate, where many of us are beginning to question what the West wants to read about India and how it wants Indian authors to respond.

Amitava Kumar: http://bostonreview.net/BR33.6/kumar.php

David Baddiel: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5205157.ece

The McCrum scale

In Robert McCrum's column on the best of the year's fiction, he tackles the logrolling issue by offering full disclosure on the degree of his relationship with each author on a scale of 0-10, with 0 being "don't know at all", 9 being "very close" and 10, which no author gets, being presumably "she and I are still playing footsie in bed".

I'm all in favour of full disclosure. But the McCrum Scale For Critics sends shivers down my spine. It has great potential: there's the possibility of discreet name-dropping, for example (so Paul Auster rates a 9 with McCrum and Peter Carey an 8? Zoe Heller has some catching up to do...).

What if you get it wrong, though? That pleasant evening with El Nobelista you remember so well might show up as a 6 on your scale, but El Nobelista might write back with a puzzled: "And you are...?" Or worse, if you get it wrong on the opposite end of the scale, and Struggling Young Turk realises, too late, that the "close friendship" he's been boasting of rates a dismal 2.5 in your book. And then there's the need for revisions: you could chart entire cultural and personal histories just by perusing the rise-and-fall on the critic's full disclosure posts.

"Yes, back in the days when they agreed on the importance of transgressive writing, he was a 9; but then she did that take-down of what she called the "ersatz narratology" in his Great Novel and he slid down to a 1.5, after which they found themselves on the same side of the Derridean fence, and jogged along at a 5.6, but then they slept together and he went back to 8, but he was so miffed that this didn't rate a 9, they broke up and now he's a permanent 3."

And then you might have Fledgling Critic-Cynical Doyen disagreements on what exactly each number on the scale stands for:

Author gets a 0:
Fledgling critic: "I'm proud to stand outside the corrupt circus of the literary establishment and offer an independent opinion untainted by personal contact with authors that might taint my perfectly independent, furiously honest review!"
Cynical Doyen: "The author's dead, or we'd be doing lunch at his chateau."

Author gets a 5:
Fledgling critic: "He raised an eyebrow at me at so-and-so's book launch, and said, oh hello there."
Cynical Doyen: "He's slapped my face with his glove thrice after bad reviews, but we've been out for drinks seven times after the good ones so I guess it evens out."

Author gets a 9:
Fledgling critic: "I interviewed him once and he wrote me the sweetest thank-you email afterwards."
Cynical Doyen: "Some people call him Snuffles and bring him fluffy blankets with ducks on them to warm up his cold toes, but I never did that. The blanket with my initials on them and 'CD Lurves You, Yes I Do' hand-knitted across the bottom row? My rivals must have planted it."

I'm having way too much fun with this so I'd better stop now. Oh, and McCrum's picks are pretty good.

Speaking Volumes: 2008's best fiction

(I know: best-of-the-year lists are the ultimate cliche, the lazy columnist's easy standby, and I've been doing them since 2002, so I should know. The truth is I like doing them for entirely selfish reasons: they give me an excuse to potter around my bookshelves, page back in my reading diary and reconnect with books I liked but that might otherwise sink to the back of what I fondly like to think of as my mind. {Visualise the room at the back of the house where all the stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else has been piling up since the 1980s--you know, the one where Miss Havisham has her own rocking chair and yes, that would be my brain.}
This is the published and necessarily truncated column: I'll be adding to the list over the course of this week. Many thanks to Vikram Johri, my colleague and fellow reviewer, who gently pointed out that I'd absent-mindedly portmanteaued Haruki Marukami's name together, creating a brand-new author called 'Harukami'.)

If you needed any proof that the novel has become more international than ever, and that it is still as much of a carrier of “news” as it was in the 18th century, 2008 provided ample evidence.

The year was bookended by two masterpieces. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz, was technically a late 2007 release, but reached India only in early 2008. The Dominican-American writer exploded onto the literary scene in the 1990s and survived writer’s block for ten years before coming out with this Pulitzer-Prize winner. Oscar Wao is an overweight Dominican Star Trek fan, pursued by the lurking ghosts of “fuku” and the fear that he will never lose his virginity. Diaz is hilarious and savage by turns, and this definitely qualified for heartbreaking work of staggering genius status.

Roberto Bolano’s 2666 came out a full six years after the author’s death, and consolidates the posthumous fame that came to him after the publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007 in English. Its central theme is the unsolved murders of over 300 women in Santa Teresa, and he brings together a group of literary critics, a mentally unstable professor and a mysterious writer in classic Bolano style. Don’t be deterred by the 1,100-odd pages—it’s worth your time.

Though Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Peter Carey, Salman Rushdie and Pat Barker had works of varying degrees of excellence out this year, some of the real surprises came from less well-known names. Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland polarized opinions: critics thought this post-9/11 novel with its evocation of the hidden world of cricket in New York was brilliant, while the Booker judges disagreed. I’d say O’Neill’s perfectly tempered prose and the immigrant world he conjures up are irresistible. Less satisfying was Sebastian Barry’s beautifully written The Secret Scripture. This novel about an old woman incarcerated in a mental asylum in Ireland had promise, but lets you down in the final stretch. For more demanding but infinitely better reads, try The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich or Rawi Hage’s explosive, bitter Cockroach.

The first part of Amitav Ghosh’s trilogy, A Sea of Poppies, was a fast-paced read that made up for occasionally one-dimensional characters by offering an unusual take on the Opium Wars and maritime India. Rushdie’s Enchantress of Florence was often mired in complexity, but the breadth of his ideas made many of his fans look at concepts of East and West differently, even as the novel made some of us nostalgic for his non-fiction. Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth was an almost pitch-perfect, moving collection of short stories; she has an unusual gift of compassion that makes up for the sometimes narrow focus of her work.

Nadeem Aslam’s intricate The Wasted Vigil approaches Afghanistan from a distinctly fresh viewpoint—worth reading despite his predilection for dense thickets of prose. Mohammed Hanif’s black comedy, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, took on General Zia’s assassination with verve and devastating wit—definitely a keeper. And from another age, The Adventures of Amir Hamza in a fresh translation reminded us that black farce and outrageous sexual innuendo were not invented in our century, but much earlier.

P D James offered a classic murder mystery in The Private Patient, which also hinted that her poet-detective, Adam Dalgliesh, might be on the way to retirement. Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a sharp-edged thriller that took on financial skullduggery and sexual abuse in Sweden, was one of the surprises of the year—sadly, Larsson died before he could witness the success of his book. Stephen King’s Duma Key is the second book from the master of horror in recent times to signal his return to form, after a string of duds.

But if you’re looking for the unusual, try one of these. Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is a work of alternate history that introduces us to the “frozen Chosen”, two million Jews rescued from the death camps and relocated to Alaska. Closer to home, Manjula Padmanabhan explored an alternate reality, a world without women, in the provocative Escape.

For those who prefer light reading, Mark Crick’s parodies of great writers in Kafka’s Soup and Sartre’s Sink were brilliant and deadly. He mimics the voices of the greats, from Steinbeck to Dostoevsky, Goethe to Murakami, with incredible wit. The first of his collections gathers together recipes that the greats might have written about; the second collects D-I-Y mishaps. Brilliant work, and far more satisfying than the overhyped but ultimately weak The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.

Speaking Volumes: Reading in a time of terror

In the days just after the Mumbai attacks, reading is the last thing on my mind. Like most of the people I know, I’m reading not books but blogs, Twitter feeds, the newspapers.

In the course of time, we read the lists of the dead, dreading the moment when our eyes will snag on a familiar name, when a single line of type will bring grief surging into our lives.

Terror and war force a pause, a kind of mourning from even the most dedicated readers and writers. In the aftermath of an attack anywhere in the world, at any moment in history—Hiroshima, Bali, Madrid, Beirut, New York, Mumbai—we seem to veer briefly away from fiction. After 9/11, bookstores reported that sales of non-fiction on military affairs and terrorism soared, as though by reading about the enemy one could draw a circle of protection around oneself, one’s family.

Terror strikes too close for us to want to see our lives reflected in the mirrors held up by Dom DeLillo, Amos Oz, Claire Messud, Denis Johnson, Mohsin Hamid, Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan and a score of others. We always go back to fiction, in the end, but after that necessary pause, that breathing space.

Many of my friends turned to ancient sources of comfort: the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, especially Ecclesiastes. The best-known lines from Ecclesiastes are from Chapter 3: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal …”

But further along, you come across these lines: “So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.” It is a naïve thought, but it was at that moment it struck me: someone as human as me and you wrote the Bible. It may have been King Solomon, but he was no distant, magisterial author—like us, he had borne hapless witness to suffering and struggled to make sense of it.

Over this week, I have found my way back to fiction through poetry. I re-read W H Auden’s bitter ‘September 1, 1939,’ which was read so often in the US after 9/11. “Who can release them now,/ Who can reach the dead,/ Who can speak for the dumb?” Auden asks in an especially bitter verse, written for an earlier war. And then he flows into one of the most moving passages in poetry: “All I have is a voice/ To undo the folded lie…./ We must love one another or die.”

Auden led me to two poets closer to home. I had read Jeet Thayil’s ‘At Kabul Zoo, The Lion’ many years ago, in a different context. In this poem, Thayil imagines the devastation wreaked on the Kabul zoo (“So this is fear: tracers flaring/ above the pens, the fat thud/ of bullets…”), told from the point of view of one of its oldest inhabitants, Marjan the lion (“blind in one eye, / my jaw in shreds, my mane / singed to a useless crop, / I’m still here…”). Another place, another time: but his images hit home, almost painfully.

Then I went back to the late Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems. Kolatkar was never a sentimental writer, and in this collection what he captured about Bombay wasn’t the city’s famed, and overstretched “spirit of resilience”. His Bombay was inhabited by the Boomtown Lepers’ Band, by pi-dogs and drug-pushers, by the drunk who rails against this “shit city… one big high-rise shit; waiting for God/ To pull the flush”.

What do you look for when you read at a time like this? Not comfort, not just a mirror image of shared sorrows. Perhaps what you look for most is some kind of meaning, an unromanticised reminder of how things really were, an antidote to easy empathy, knee-jerk sentimentality.

Many will find their bearings in more concrete books: analyses of terror, treatises on the politics of South Asia. Some will find solace in older accounts of wars and battles, in the Iliad, in Herodotus, in Michael Herr. Perhaps my tastes—poetry and the ancient religious texts—will not be shared by all. But I have learned this week that if reading does not provide answers or salvation, it does provide a path back to some sort of acceptance.

(Published in the Business Standard, December 5, 2008)

Speaking Volumes: Kill all the (wo)men

(This was supposed to be a gentle ode to the joys of reading books in connected series, rather than in isolation, but I got caught up with Manjula Padmanabhan's Escape and its predecessors. As sometimes happens, I discovered later that I'd drawn on information I'd first researched for a column written many years ago, but I think I put a different spin on it. As I get older, my memory shreds into tinier and tinier bits.)

Many readers often wish there was an accurate system of “book pairings”, in the same way gourmet chefs suggest wine pairings, just to enhance reading pleasure. We do our best, with collected editions dedicated to a particular author or genre, or with Amazon-style attempts to suggest books that might go together, but there just isn't enough out there.

Here’s a classic instance of how it might work. If you're interested in Vietnam, start with The Quiet American (1955), Graham Greene’s blackly funny dissection of US intelligence efforts in that country, then move on to Michael Herr’s tour of duty reportage in Dispatches (1977), and close with Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (2007). All three books are Nam classics in their own right, but read together, they have an indelible, cumulative impact.

Or, to take another genre, start with Mary Shelley's horror classic Frankenstein (1818), where a scientist’s dream of creating life has monstrous results, move on to Rosemary’s Baby (1967), by Ira Levin, where an ordinary New York apartment building conceals Satan’s child, and close with Stephen King's Bag of Bones (1998), about a secret that menaces generations of children.

As Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape came out last week, I found myself hoping that readers wouldn’t read this intriguing work of dystopian science fiction in isolation. I can’t comment on the literary merits of Escape for reasons of conflict of interest, having read a very early draft, but as one of the few works of modern Indian science fiction, it’s an important debut.

A brief plot summary: Escape is set in a world devoid of women, dubbed the “Vermin Tribe” by the generals who run the land. There is, however, a single woman left— a young girl called Meiji, who has been raised in isolation by her three uncles, and as she emerges into adulthood, must escape in order to survive. It’s a complex tale, where, as with much of 21st century science fiction, the development and growth of the characters is just as important as the futuristic setting.

To read Escape in a vacuum, however, would be to do both the book and yourself a disservice. It should be book-ended by a utopia and a dystopia— both written by Asian women. In 1905, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein published Sultana’s Dream, set in the relative utopia of ‘Ladyland’. Women rule this world, but view men with maternal affection, seeing them as helpless creatures at the mercy of their own appetites, who must be placed in purdah for their own protection. Rokeya Hossein was born and brought up in Bangladesh, and her gentle utopia is filled with touches of whimsy— the work day in Ladyland is only two hours long, for instance, because the men used to waste the remaining hours in smoking hookahs. Rokeya Begum continued her exploration of utopia and its challenges in a second novella, Padmarag.

Almost nine decades later, the feminist scholar and imaginative writer Suniti Namjoshi published Mothers of Mayadip in 1989. This fable was set in a far darker world than Ladyland, and Namjoshi set down a flatly didactic novel: what if a feminist utopia depended on killing off all men? How utopian would it remain, set on a foundation of fear and deliberate cruelty? What would happen if any one of the women decided to save even a single baby boy? Namjoshi’s world was the exact opposite of the world Padmanabhan evokes in Escape, but they share a common basis: in each, one gender's sense of identity is based on its fear of the other.

Mothers of Mayadip is much shorter and much less ambitious in scope than Escape; Namjoshi’s interest lay in writing a fable, not a full-length novel. Like Padmanabhan, Namjoshi offered no easy conclusions: a world minus men was not guaranteed to be fair, equal or free of fear, and would inevitably face its own troubles. Escape is far more interested in the question of what form a world inhabited by just one gender would take; Manjula Padmanabhan’s predecessors were more interested in the idea of a feminist utopia/ dystopia as a thought experiment.

Reading the three together— if you can find Padmarag and Mothers of Mayadip in secondhand bookshops— is well worth it, and not just as an academic exercise. It’s interesting to see how the same questions are raised by three members of very different generations of women, and how the answers become increasingly complicated over time.

(Published in the Business Standard, November 25, 2008)

The Food Club: Changing palates

(Some time ago, the Business Standard asked me to do an offbeat food column. It's still finding its feet, but it's a lot of fun to write.)

Mention “eating healthy” to most normal people and they automatically think “deprivation”. The idea of dieting in any form, whether you’re a diabetic, a heart patient or a model, is linked with the idea of doing without: it’s easier to visualise the dark chocolate ice cream that you can’t eat than it is to visualise a healthy heart.

Never having dieted in my life, I was curious about how I would react to a month-long, ayurvedic and naturopathic diet. It’s astonishing how happy your so-called friends are to share their unpleasant diet experiences. The one who’d done the dismal cabbage diet (cabbage soup for breakfast, lunch and dinner) for ten days said, “Watch out for food dreams… I dreamt of wedding food and banquets and royal Mughlai cooking every single day, it makes you wake up crying.”

A recent heart patient spoke wistfully of his yearning for steak: “All I want is a very large slab of very red meat,” he said. “Kobe beef. Pork chops in apple sauce. Badam pasanda.” I said politely, “So, what’s for dinner tonight?” There was a long, pained silence. “Steamed vegetables and soya-flour chapattis.”

So I entered my ayurvedic retreat prepared for the worst. The day before I left, I treated myself to a steak in mushroom sauce with lightly steamed asparagus on the side, following that up with a double chocolate mousse. I figured I needed some good food memories to get me through the next month.

What is a healthy diet, exactly? I spent some time at a naturopathy centre and some time at an ayurveda centre, and came back with two contrasting opinions. Naturopathy and ayurveda both agree on an avoidance of “poisons”— both steer clear of meat as far as possible, eschew coffee, tea, alcohol, white sugar, refined flour and excess salt.

But naturopathy believes that most foods (read vegetables) are best eaten as close to their natural state as possible — juices and salads will predominate over curries and cooked dishes. Ayurveda believes that lightly cooked, bland foods are best for the system. In addition, ayurveda prescribes three different kinds of diets depending on your “dosha”.

The naturopathy diet was, for me, the more austere of the two. I dreamt of foie gras for three straight nights in a row, and began to miss desserts and sugary drinks about three days into the diet. Feeling deprived on a full stomach — the naturopathy meals were filling and the portions large — was an odd, disorienting experience. I knew after a week that however healthy this regimen of juices and salads might be, it wasn’t something I wanted to follow in my daily life.

Perhaps the ayurveda diet was better geared to my system, but I actually thrived on it. Meals were simple but excellent: fruit and either steamed idlis or moong-dal dosas for breakfast, a choice of three perfectly cooked vegetables with dalia khichdi for lunch, an occasional dessert, and more organic, locally-sourced vegetables for dinner. It sounds bland, but the variety in the vegetable dishes was extraordinary, and one never felt either hungry or too full.

I went out once to a nearby restaurant for lunch, and after nearly three weeks of healthy and tasty eating, it was a bizarre experience. Everything tasted too intense — too strongly flavoured, too salty, too spicy, too oily. I ate two bites of the beef curry I’d been craving, and stopped: it wasn’t what my palate wanted, though it was superbly cooked.

A month down the line, eating “normally” still feels wrong and food at parties seems too heavy.

I like some things about getting back to a normal diet — mostly the little treats and surprises, the lemony explosion of a perfect Tom Yam, the smoky silkiness of braised eel, the homely, memory-laden taste of a simple meat-and-potato curry.

But the change in my diet has changed the nature of my cravings: I dream of fresh fruit and of beetroot thoran, I find myself wanting green tea and fresh-caught, lightly steamed fish with just a bit of ginger and lime. Eating healthy, it turns out, isn’t always incompatible with eating well.

(Published in the Business Standard, November 2008)

Speaking Volumes: A legend at lunch

Getting older has its privileges, if very few of them. One is the pleasure of meeting an author who has shaped your world view over the course of decades.

Back in the 1990s, Nadine Gordimer had an unexpected effect on the narrow world of Delhi University’s students. She was often cited, her works were passed from hand to hand and discussed in fierce tones, and her politics informed our lives as we dissected apartheid and looked at India’s own unspoken policies of discrimination anew.

Many of us could quote portions of her Nobel speech by heart. She had won the Prize for literature in 1991, and I still remember the electrifying shiver that ran down my spine when I heard the first line: “In the beginning was the Word,” she started her speech, borrowing from the Bible and making those ancient words her very own.

She spoke powerfully of what it was to grow up in the South Africa of the apartheid years: “Only many years later was I to realize that if I had been a child in that category — black — I might not have become a writer at all, since the library that made this possible for me was not open to any black child.” Gordimer’s books were often banned, though unlike her contemporaries—Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus and Jaki Seroke among others—she was not sent to jail.

At a private lunch hosted by the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi to celebrate her first visit to India in 14 years, Gordimer is relaxed and open. The lecture she gave in Calcutta was something of a triumph, the event attended by over 700 people; a quiet reading in Delhi will attract over 150 squeezed into a small hall. Her apparent fragility is misleading; at 85, she has the energy and curiosity of a much younger woman. She’s looking forward, she confides, to a trip to Mexico later this year to attend the birthday celebrations of her friend, the writer Carlos Fuentes, and expects to spend her own birthday on a plane.

It gives her great pleasure to know that censorship no longer exists in South Africa; she comments wryly on the excellent taste of the government’s censors. Of her more than 14 novels, the South African government had seen fit to censor four—The Late Bourgeois World, The Conversationist, Burger’s Daughter and July’s People. It’s something of a tribute to her powers as a writer that the last three of these haven’t dated and still remain relevant today.

Over lunch, the discussion ranges across a number of subjects. Gordimer has a sharp, alert birdlike presence; she’s an intent listener, picking up the unspoken nuances in our questions. She finds parallels between South Africa and India, and speaks of how the younger writers in South Africa mine the question of race relations and discrimination from an entirely different perspective. “We were three separate nations for so many years,” she says, “white, black and coloured; we are still getting used to being one country.” Her years of struggle are touched upon lightly; she insists that despite the many bans on her books, she never suffered as much as others did.

Like many writers who have lived through times of suffering and repression, Nadine Gordimer remains intensely attuned to injustice. There is passion in her voice when she speaks of how Salman Rushdie’s proposed visit to South Africa had to be aborted—Rushdie is a personal friend of hers, and over the years, Gordimer has spoken up against the fatwa that kept him in hiding after the Satanic Verses controversy. She had, she says, very much wanted him to come to South Africa, but the visit was cancelled after the Muslim community erupted in protests and made death threats against the writer. Her voice is laced with indignation as she speaks of this, after all these years.

Is she still writing? At 85, many authors would have settled back and rested on their laurels, but Gordimer cannot imagine a life that didn’t involve writing—her most recent collection of short stories, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, came out in 2007. She rarely discusses current work, but confirms that she has something in the pipeline.

I wonder if I’ll ever get a chance to tell her what this casual meeting means to me. For my generation of readers, Nadine Gordimer opened up a much larger world than any of us could have imagined, and I like to think that she also stirred our consciences. There are authors whom you love, and there are authors who change your life. And sometimes, the same person can be both things to you, as Nadine Gordimer has been for so many of us.

(Published in the Business Standard, November 18, 2008)

Speaking Volumes: The Gulag's Lonely Voice

(For the Business Standard, August 3, 2008; my small tribute to the man.)

For Alexander Solzhenitsyn to die a normal death, of a heart attack in his autumn years, was no small achievement.

The Nobel Prize winner survived the Second World War, where he earned two decorations. In 1945, his ribbons and gongs didn't prevent him from spending eight years in Russian detention camps after he called Stalin "Old Man Whiskers". The camps killed many, but Solzhenitsyn made it through. In 1953, he almost died of cancer while still in internal exile. In later years he would survive less immediate threats—exile, disillusionment with the West.

Though his complete works run to almost 30 volumes, the ones that we most remember Solzhenitsyn by today are the remarkable One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the indelible The Gulag Archipelago.

Ivan Denisovich, published in 1962, shook the Soviet Union and forced the world to acknowledge the truth of what had been happening in Soviet Russia. The novel follows prisoner 854 through the travails of a normal day, as his co-prisoners scrounge for tobacco, discuss God and deal with the severe hardships of life in camp. The Gulag Archipelago was savagely analytical: it was a three-volume analysis of how one goes about building a police state. It remains one of the most extraordinary testimonies against the power and organization of brutality in our time.

In retrospect, the most astonishing thing is not that Solzhenitsyn managed to get his writings published, but that he wrote at all. In his Nobel lecture, he would refer to those writers who "vanished into that abyss". He wrote, "A whole national literature is there, buried without a coffin, without even underwear, naked, a number tagged on its toe."

His struggle for many years was that he was a writer without an audience, a writer who wrote in an asphyxiating silence. For Solzhenitsyn, the essential silence enforced on him for many years by the Stalinist regime was intolerable, a gulag of the mind.

The story of how The Gulag Archipelago was written is well-known, but perhaps there is no better way to honour Solzhenitsyn's passing than to retell it. Ivan Denisovitch had been published with the blessings of Krushchev; none of Solzhenitsyn's later works, including Cancer Ward, were as lucky. The KGB kept an eye on this "non-person" who was also being turned, slowly, into a "non-writer" by the lack of publication.

Solzhenitsyn had legitimate fears that the manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago would be seized by the KGB. He wrote the first volume in short drafts; you could recreate a map of Moscow from where various parts of the book had been secreted, a few pages at a time hidden in the houses of different friends.

Though he managed to get copies out into the West, there were just three copies of the completed manuscript in Russia when he'd finished, all three compiled with no small effort. One copy was with a woman in Leningrad, who had carefully buried it in the ground. The KGB interrogated her relentlessly until she confessed. On her release, she hanged herself, distraught over what she saw as her betrayal of Solzhenitsyn.

The writer had to work equally hard to smuggle out the manuscript of his Nobel Lecture. He photographed it; his wife hid it in her baby carriage, and handed it over to the wife of a friend, similarly equipped with pram and baby. The friend managed to cut the photos into strips, hide them in the back of a radio and get them into Helsinki.

Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Lecture contributed to his many years of exile from Russia, but looking back at what he had to do in order to write, I think I understand his words a little better.

"In order to mount this platform from which the Nobel lecture is read, a platform offered to far from every writer and only once in a lifetime, I have climbed not three or four makeshift steps, but hundreds and even thousands of them; unyielding, precipitous, frozen steps, leading out of the darkness and cold where it was my fate to survive, while others - perhaps with a greater gift and stronger than I - have perished. …

"Once pledged to the WORD, there is no getting away from it: a writer is no sideline judge of his fellow countrymen and contemporaries; he is equally guilty of all the evil done in his country or by his people. If his country's tanks spill blood on the streets of some alien capital, the brown stains are splashed forever on the writer's face."

That was his creed; and those who have read it and read his works may be sure that Solzhenitsyn will rest in peace. He did what he had to do; a simple epitaph, but not one often earned.

Speaking Volumes: Oh, the places that you'll go

(Published in the Business Standard, July 29, 2008)



At 84, Charing Cross Road, just a brass plaque commemorates the place where Marks & Co sold secondhand books, most notably to Helene Hanff. Devotees of the book still make the pilgrimage to see the plaque, undeterred by the demise of literature's best-loved bookshop.

Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare's birthplace, is bustling in comparison. Stratford's blend of kitsch and nostalgia makes it the Disneyland of literary tourist attractions. Closer to home, Rabindranath Tagore's Jorasanko in Calcutta is a well-maintained family museum that gives visitors some sense of the writer's life and times. Ghalib's home in Ballimaran in Old Delhi has been recently restored, and attracts would-be poets by the score.

What if you wanted to visit West Egg, Long Island, where Jay Gatsby threw his parties, hosting a permanent "great festival"? Or Oz, where Dorothy and the Wicked Witch face off? Until recently, all we could do was use our imaginations—or perhaps be passive observers at the film version. The makers of virtual worlds from Second Life to Google Lively have a different concept in mind: a place where you can visit and create your favourite literary destinations. It's still in beta, so there are some issues, but it's tempting:

This is my list of the top five literary destinations I'd like to explore in a virtual world:

1) The Arabian Nights: Shahryar's kingdom, which stretches from ancient Persia to India and China. This is the vast territory that forms the setting for the Arabian Nights, the kingdom where Scheharazade uses story-telling to postpone her execution from one day to another. It's a rich landscape where commoners and kings collide, and it has some resonance with these present-day countries. Tahir Shah, in his book In Arabian Nights, guides you between both worlds.

2) Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Macondo: This small town appears in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and is possibly the best recognized literary landscape of all time. Garcia Marquez based Macondo, according to his own accounts, on the town he grew up in—Aracataca.

In his autobiography, he offers a classic origin myth: "The train stopped at a station that had no town, and a short while later it passed the only banana plantation along the route that had its name written over the gate: Macondo. This word had attracted my attention ever since the first trips I had made with my grandfather, but I discovered only as an adult that I liked its poetic resonance. I had never heard anyone say it and did not even ask myself what it meant…" And so a legend came into life, and a place that has obsessed me all of my adult years as a reader came into being.

3) The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: If you go to Seoni in Madhya Pradesh, most astute readers of Kipling will recognize the landscape in which the Jungle Book is set. Here are the python-friendly rocks, the forests undisturbed by man, the ruins in which monkeys can create a second kingdom unknown to human beings. Kipling's accuracy in setting down the Seoni landscape was considerable—and yet, he asserted that he had never been to Seoni, that he "got it all" from Sterndale's Gazetter. This shouldn't deter those who grew up with the sound of Akela's "Look well, look well, ye wolves" ringing in their ears.

4) Wonderland, in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland: Choosing just one out of a myriad familiar landscapes from children's fiction is heartbreaking: how could you privilege Watership Down over the rivers that govern The Wind in the Willows, for instance? And in this category, I have far too many contenders: Oz from the Wizard of Oz, all of Dr Seuss's phantasmagorical lands, Beatrix Potter's very English world, or Narnia. But in the end, Carroll's Wonderland prevails because it has had such a grip on the imaginations of children from his time onwards. I have never yet met a My Space/ Facebook/ Twitter/ Role Playing Games conversant child who hasn't at the same time been beguiled by Carroll's vision of Wonderland. He didn't know he was doing this, but what he wrote was a vision of something that has proved to be eternal and enduring.



5) Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: Though Conrad never makes it explicit, it is generally understood that Heart of Darkness plays out on the lifeline of the Congo River, descending into the Congo Free State. He offers a searing vision of a man learning what the true cost of betrayal is, and for first-time readers, this vision is indelible. To explore this particular landscape in a virtual world would be dangerous—but also, perhaps, inevitable.

Those are my top five: what's yours? Email me and let me know.

I loved the responses that came in to this column--here are a few:

From Thomas Cherian:

I liked today's column on places in books that one would love to visit.
I was surprised and a little miffed :) (sorry, die hard fan's stubborness) to see that you had not included Middle Earth. I for one, would love to visit Tolkien's majestic creation and walk through the forests of Lorien. I would also include Narnia as well as the home of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. (I'm sure many younger readers would like to join the Famous Five and go to Kirrin Island) I may also like to have looked on the life on the ship in amitav ghosh's sea of poppies.

From Priyanka Chowdhury:

I loved this so much I decided to mail you my list.

1) Coleridge's Xanadu (Kubla Khan)

2) The skewered Book-of-Genesis-universe in Boating For Beginners where God is an ice cream cloud.

3) Dorian Gray's room (The Pic of DG)

4) Dr Jekyll's laboratory (Dr J and Mr H)

5) Mary and Colin's secret garden (The Secret Garden)

From Sowmitri:

I would go watching life along the River Mississipi along with Mark Twain. Also, stay for a couple of days with our own R K Narayan in Malgudi.

Speaking Volumes: Batman's Long Reign

(For the Business Standard, July 22, 2008. I'm slightly exasperated with this column; it was an attempt to pack a lot of stuff into the 800-word space, and it reads like a floppy introduction to a longer but unwritten piece. For a much more detailed and acute take on The Joker, read Joseph Kugelmass' essay in The Valve.)


'

See, there were these two guys in a lunatic asylum and one night... one night they decide they're going to escape! So like they get up on to the roof, and there, just across the narrow gap, they see the rooftops of the town, stretching away in moonlight... stretching away to freedom.'

'Now the first guy he jumps right across with no problem. But his friend, his friend daren't make the leap. Y'see he's afraid of falling... So then the first guy has an idea. He says "Hey! I have my flash light with me. I will shine it across the gap between the buildings. You can walk across the beam and join me." But the second guy just shakes his head. He says... he says, "What do you think I am, crazy? You would turn it off when I was half way across.""

—The Joker, telling Batman a story in Alan Moore's The Killing Joke.

At the Osian's film festival last week, I was riveted by scripwriter (now director) Abbas Tyrewala's view of the difference between a screenplay and a "literary" work.

Tyrewala, who's written the screenplay for Hindi films as disparate as Main Hu Na and Maqbool, said that a screenplay was not authored so much as written for a director. The screenplay writer's function was not to impose his signature, his handwriting on the script, but to produce a story that met the needs of an entire universe of collaborators—the director, the cinematographer, the actors.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the world of comic books makes most literary commentators uncomfortable. Comic books offer easy-to-understand, formulaic myths, created by a profusion of authors and collaborators rather than the solitary figure of the writer.

With Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight in theatres this week, the figure of one of the most influential superheroes of the last 70 years looms large in the collective consciousness. Batman has no superpowers, merely an arsenal of technological toys and fighting skills. As a child, he witnesses the murder of his parents; when he grows up, the millionaire Bruce Wayne leads a secret life warring against criminals, in an attempt to balance the scales of justice. As Nolan (and several of the authors of the comic books) notes astutely in Dark Knight, there is a kinship between the "good" hero and the evil villains he seeks to stamp out—his nemesis, the Joker, claims that kinship when he says that they're both freaks. Batman never sank into obscurity, unlike now-forgotten "superheroes" like Foolkiller or Moonknight.

Created by Bob Kane in 1938, Batman initially followed the bang-kapow! conventions of the pulp comic book, gradually gaining complexity in the hands of writers as different as Dennis O' Neill and Frank Miller. But unlike Bill Willingham's Fables or Neil Gaiman's Sandman stories, the Batman comic books are not easily claimed as literary works.

Take a popular literary figure like Sherlock Holmes—along with Dracula, often claimed as a source of inspiration for Batman. The Holmes stories follow a linear sequence; the Batman comic books can be read in parallel, where the character follows one path in one set of books, and a completely different path in another. Depending on the imagination of the author of the moment, the Joker might be merely a scary clown gone to the bad, or a psychopath rivaling Hannibal Lecter as a compelling portrait of true evil.

What makes me care about Batman, though, is that ever since 1986 if not before, he began to resemble in both comic books and films the mythic, ancient figure of the flawed hero. He's an orphan, following the long history of heroes who have lost either one parent or both and the figure of the hero in the old fairy tales who arrives, seemingly unparented, on the scene. He's slightly grotesque, in his hunched-over bat's costume, his eyes literally masked and unseeable; nocturnal, on the edge of being inhuman, possessed of an innate feral quality, like Dracula.

Batman has no superpowers, which makes him one of us and more—a Greek hero, very human and trapped by the same qualities that makes him a hero, battling as much with his own persona as with any flesh-and-blood villain. Superman offered a playful fantasy of incredible powers—flight, superstrength, invulnerability. Spiderman offered the fantasy that you could be a weak guy but have skills beyond belief. Batman, instead, offers the premise that we all live in a lunatic asylum; the difference between the villains and the guardians, and the rest of us, is that they know this and we don't.

Book review: Something To Tell You

(I don't review books published in India for reasons of conflict of interest, and enjoyed the break for a while. When this came my way, though, I realised how much I'd missed it.)






Something To Tell You
Hanif Kureishi
Faber & Faber,
Rs 495, 345 pages
ISBN 978-0-571-23874-3


There's a certain kind of writer who should be allowed to grow old only if he promises to do it disgracefully. Many of Hanif Kureishi's fans would argue that he belongs to this group, and perhaps some of the disappointment that a faithful Kureishi reader feels when reading Something To Tell You stems from the fact that this is such a neatly wrapped, conventional, sedate novel.

Something To Tell You could be seen as the bookend to Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia. It features a similar laundry list of characters, ranging from the eccentric to the forceful to the lost, drifting through the landscape of Britain's suburbia. Many of Kureishi's characters are either deeply seductive or determinedly mundane, caught in political causes or domestic dramas that are large enough to encompass and engulf their lives. In this novel, Kureishi's sixth, he stirs so much into the mix that what emerges is a thick soup where no particular ingredient stands out.

The central character is Jamal Khan, psychoanalyst: "Like a car mechanic on his back, I work with the underneath or understory: fantasies, wishes, lies, dreams, nightmares—the world beneath the world, the true words beneath the false… At the deepest level people are madder than they want to believe." It's promising stuff, but the story unfolds in predictable ways. Jamal has his own secret, one so dark that when he unburdened himself to his own analyst, the experience was classically cathartic, unleashing floods of shit and vomit in the aftermath of the session.

As Jamal, now middle-aged, looks back to the world of 1970s suburbia, where his personal tragedy is set, Something To Tell You flashes into beguiling life every so often. Jamal may be the quintessential dull character made interesting by circumstance, but many of the people who surround him are fascinating—Kureishi has a master's eye for speech, dialogue and the quirks of the individual, and there's much to hold the reader's attention. There's Jamal's tattooed-and-pierced sister Miriam, a cameo appearance by Karim from The Buddha of Suburbia, and another by Omar Ali, now 'Lord' Ali, from My Beautiful Laundrette. Karim discusses the negatives of being on Celebrity; Ali is now one of the smooth millionaires who mushroomed in Tony Blair's warmth. Jamal's London is as detailed as ever, from the unlimited menu of sexual possibilities to the children's school that comes recommended by Mick Jagger.

It's when Kureishi drags his attention back to the plot that Something To Tell You sags. Jamal's most important love was with an Indian girl, Ajita, who carries her own set of secrets—secrets rendered almost banal in the retrospective gaze of the therapist who has, almost literally, heard it all. But as a young man, what he learns sparks a tragedy; he and his friends confront Ajita's father. In the misadventure that follows, the man dies, leaving Jamal and his friends marked in very different ways.

In the aftermath of this death, which is laid securely at the doors of those who had organized protests against Ajita's father's factory, Jamal introduces a compelling interlude in Pakistan. He and his sister Miriam are reunited with a father who smells almost comfortingly of alcohol, and to the world of Karachi. Neither Karachi nor Pakistan are what he had imagined; instead of the spirituality Miriam expects to find in Karachi, she and Jamal discover a ruthlessly materialistic place: "Deprivation was the spur". His father is a trapped man, rare in Karachi for his integrity, but yearning not for Britain so much as for Bombay. There's a moment of genuine poignancy here; Jamal is at home in Britain in a way his father will never be in his own country.

But that moment passes as Kureishi returns us to the world of the couch and the closet, and introduces a new but ineffectual plot twist. As one of his friends attempts to shoulder his way back into Jamal's life, the now-respectable therapist has to decide what to do with this particular twist in the narrative. He is at peace with the past; the moment when the man he has inadvertently murdered "clung to me, his fingernails in my flesh" has passed. What he has to solve now is his friend's demand for redemption and reparation; the incident damaged his friend far more than it damaged him, and for a brief moment, the secure foundations of his comfortable therapist's life are rocked. But only briefly; Kureishi is unwilling to take this book into the messy, action-packed territory of the conventional thriller, and the threat peters out, leaving a kind of resolution in its wake.

Kureishi's preoccupation is with the stories we can and can't tell, with the narratives we suppress that may come back to haunt us, and yet as Something To Tell You limps to a desultory close, it resembles nothing more than a rambling session on the psychiatrist's couch. The vast and often amusing, sometimes tedious landscape of this novel is littered with the jargon of psychiatry—avoidance, catharsis, subliminal memories, the "spume and irruption" of the unconscious—but few of the profession's deeper insights. There are moments of illumination, as when Jamal remarks that "Listening is not only a kind of love, it is love." But as with many of the key insights and observations in this novel, it's left to lie there on the couch, never coming to life.

Kureishi might argue that this is the right shape for a novel of this decade, that indeed, the novel should be loosely constructed of random conversations, that it should introduce you to people who flit in and out of the narrative just as real people do in our lives, that it should be full of incident and trivia simultaneously, that it should avoid closure, since most people's lives have little closure in them. For the reader, though, Something To Tell You doesn't have nearly enough to say.

(For the Book Review, July 2008)

Speaking Volumes: In Midnight's Shadow

(Blog neglect plus backed-up posts= blogger overload. At some stage I'll get around to posting the old stuff, but I figured I'd start archiving the more recent work.)

(Published in the Business Standard, July 2008)

There wasn’t much surprise when Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won the Best of Bookers—for the second time—last week. The shortlist included works by Nadine Gordimer, Pat Barker, J G Farrell, Peter Carey and J M Coetzee.

Those who voted in the public poll did so with a slight sense of déjà vu, for Rushdie had won the first Booker of Bookers for the same book in 1993; it’s a bit like handing out the same gong twice, or like presenting a re-Nobel Prize.

What the second Booker of Bookers really accomplished was to shed some light on the process of how a book becomes an enduring classic. In 1981, when Midnight’s Children won the Booker—this would be the plain vanilla version of the prize—Rushdie was seen as a fierce young talent with a pile of unpublished books in his drawer and a work of equivocal merit behind him.

Grimus, his first published work, hadn’t done that well and remains a literary curiosity—though this early, science fiction-influenced work, still has its admirers and was a pointer to the sometimes alarming erudition that Rushdie would summon throughout his literary career.

But Midnight’s Children, though it drew puzzled reviews in the UK, captured the imagination of Indians and some of the more attentive reviewers in the US fairly soon. Rushdie’s central conceit was the perfect metaphor for a nation still looking back at Independence and Partition. His protagonist, Saleem Sinai, is born (like Rushdie himself) in 1947, and along with those born on or close to midnight on August 15 of that year, possesses certain talents. Saleem is a telepath; the boy with whom he’s accidentally switched at birth, Shiva, possesses extraordinary fighting skills. Saleem’s fortunes mirror those of a changing India, and he and midnight’s other children are threatened by the figure of the Widow, whom most readers had no difficulty recognizing as the figure of Indira Gandhi in the Emergency years.

It’s just as hard to assess the impact that Midnight’s Children has had on Indian writers as it is to imagine Indian literature without this book. The novel has its detractors: Amit Chaudhuri attacked the “loose, baggy monsters” that it spawned in its wake. It also has its imitators, those who have, with varying degrees of success, attempted to carry off Rushdie’s swashbuckling brand of magical realism or to create equally large, “holdall” novels where everything of importance about India can be crammed.

For my generation of readers, Midnight’s Children gave us a voice that had been either constrained or limited previously. From the publication of the first Indian novel in English—Bankimchandra’s Rajmohan’s Wife—writers had struggled with what might be called the “salad” problem. Struggling to find the words to describe the dish created by a Bengali housewife from vegetables plucked in her garden, Bankimchandra came up with the term “garden salad”, though the very English image that conjures up is nowhere near the reality of the Indian dish it describes.

A few writers—R K Narayan, Raja Rao—had found a way out, deploying simple, almost artless language that allowed them to duck the problems of depicting accent and cadence. A good eight years after the publication of Midnight’s Children, a writer like Shashi Tharoor would feel free to employ his very Stephenian English to rework the Mahabharata into his The Great Indian Novel. But Rushdie’s English in Midnight’s Children was deliberately, exuberantly over-the-top. Saleem ‘Piece-of-the-Moon’ Sinai, “handcuffed to history”, switched back and forth from Indianisms to lyrical flights of almost classicist English—in exactly the same way that most Indians do when we speak.

Some have suggested that Midnight’s Children has survived because of Rushdie’s personal, and growing, fame, his second life as a celebrity. But that’s a facile interpretation. The difference between Midnight’s Children and a worthy, but now little-remembered work like Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (Booker winner, 1978) is that the former continues to generate new readers. Each generation reads Rushdie very differently, perhaps; but none can bypass him, can ignore this blaring, audacious and triumphant early novel.

If this remains true in another 20 years, I suppose we’ll have to put our hands together for Rushdie and Saleem Sinai yet again in 2028, presuming they win some future Absolutely The Best of the Bookers. To paraphrase Rushdie, sometimes the legend really does outstrip reality.

Jhumpa's world

I know, someone who works as an editor in publishing shouldn't comment on another publisher's writers. But I took a private call on this--how likely is it that I'll make a pitch for Jhumpa Lahiri? Answer: I don't think she'll shift from Picador for a while--and figured I could consider myself free to write about her latest book, Unaccustomed Earth.

I didn't buy Unaccustomed Earth right off: instead, I read the reviews, all of which seemed to stress the point that Lahiri had returned to the rich but narrow and circumscribed world of Bengali immigrants, the world she's explored before in Interpreter of Maladies and in The Namesake.

Then I bought the book, and spent a few weeks with her stories. Don't expect literary criticism in this post; I'm not going to attempt a review when there are so many available on the Net. But reading and living with these stories made me question the validity of those reviews--when reviewers spoke of her mining the comfortable and small world of Bengali immigrants, did they know what they were talking about? Because in this book, Lahiri seems to have given herself permission to go beyond the relatively safe, if riddled with faultlines, terrain she charted in Interpreters.

Let's take this objectively. Look at the subjects she's tackling in Unaccustomed Earth. There's hidden alcoholism that rips a family apart, several times over. There's an abortive suicide, attempted by a woman whom you would never have suspected of being suicidal. There's desperate, married sex, applied like a Band-Aid across wounds too deep for a Band-Aid. There are affairs, betrayals, a sequence where a key character can only deal with pain by cutting herself. This is a deeply riven, often violent, often terrifying world that Lahiri's opened her writing and herself up to. And this is the genteel, limited world of the reviewers's imaginations? That's like saying Raymond Carver was a quiet, restrained writer because most of his characters come from Middle America.

This collection of stories terrified and entranced me in a way that more obviously grandly themed books by Indian writers have not, because Lahiri's craft is so deceptive, and so effective. Very, very few writers have parsed and analysed the workings of the Indian family as well as she has: she captures all of its warped toxicity, its suffocating shibboleths. Don't allow yourself to be distracted by the fact that most of her protagonists come from the same, middle class, relatively prosperous immigrants' background--that is just the background. There's more quiet violence and more understanding of fractured relationships in her stories than there is in the more dramatic Indian novels. To read her as just a chronicler of the mundane, sheltered lives of a certain class of American immigrants would be a gross misreading--something like interpreting Oedipus Rex as an unpleasant family drama played out by wealthy Greeks.

What was interesting for me about Unaccustomed Earth was the sense that Lahiri has given herself permission, unshackled herself from the unspoken protective responsibilities that an Indian woman writer of her class might be expected to bear. She has a searing, unforgiving eye for the truth, and this collection bears out not just her talent, but her honesty. Read this, and ignore the reviewers; this is not a quiet, genteel collection, but its exact opposite--it's a collection of short stories that analyses the great violence that the construct of the perfect Indian family has visited on all of its inhabitants.