(First published in the Business Standard on April 19, 2005)
Upon hearing of Saul Bellow’s death, my first reaction was to call an old friend, a gentle and erudite scholar who never permits himself to engage in what he considers vulgar disagreement. He’s been there on two occasions when someone or the other has referred to Sir V S Naipaul as “the greatest living writer of our time”, and he has voiced his protest mildly, in a gentle murmur of dissent: “Mr Bellow,” his quiet voice would say, “is still with us.”
So we talked of Saul Bellow’s life and his work and his thoughts, and then I ventured to ask my friend what he might say now if someone sought to anoint Sir Vidia as the greatest living writer of our age in his presence. “Well,” he said after long and careful consideration, “Mr Soyinka is still with us.”
He also suggested, as suitable candidates, Mr Heaney, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Ms Gordimer and Mr Mahfouz, but we agreed that his choice of Wole Soyinka was particularly apt. It was Soyinka and Achebe’s generation, after all, that began to provide the answer to the dismissive challenge Saul Bellow had laid down in a 1988 interview with the New Yorker : “Where is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? Show me the Proust of the Papuans and I will read him.” Bellow later said that he had been misunderstood, but his majestic challenge to multiculturalism still retains the power to spark off fierce debate, as did his profound and very public disagreements with the work of the late Edward Said.
The “Tolstoy of the Zulus” remark followed Bellow around for years, but even those who were distanced by it recognised that the author meant no malice; he was the man in the high castle, looking down from a pitiless height with a remorseless gaze upon the world as he saw it. It was a gaze touched by humour, softened by understanding, but remorseless for all of that.
The classic Bellow story is all together a more human one, though. Two years after he won the Nobel, Samuel Beckett read Herzog and discovered a tremendous admiration for Bellow, an admiration that was returned in full measure. A meeting was set up, through a friend of Beckett, and two of the greatest minds in literature finally met face-to-face—and discovered that they had nothing to say. Neither wanted to talk about his work, and the conversation ran aground on a shoal of awkward small talk.
When Bellow accepted the Nobel for literature in 1976, he set out part of his credo as a writer: “The condition of human beings has perhaps never been more difficult to define. Those who tell us that we are in an early stage of universal history must be right. We are being lavishly poured together and seem to be experiencing the anguish of new states of consciousness.” It was his business to explore the anguish, but also to go beyond it. “Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. At the center humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul.”
He began writing novels at a point where the novel had been declared dead—an obituary often repeated, a prophecy that has not yet come true. Bellow’s rebuttals came not through essays and lectures, though he delivered those, but through works like Herzog and Augie March . He refused to see the novel as a dead or dying form; in an essay for The New York Times he wrote: “From the first, too, I had been warned that the novel was at the point of death, that like the walled city or the crossbow it was a thing of the past.” But, he said, books still offered something that technology couldn’t deliver; books shouldn’t be compared to movies or to new technologies (this was slightly before the Net), for they offered different things. In his Nobel lecture, he insisted on the continuing power of books: “Books continue to be written and read. It may be more difficult to reach the whirling mind of a modern reader but it is possible to cut through the noise and reach the quiet zone. In the quiet zone we may find that he is devoutly waiting for us.”
That “he” was problematic for women of my generation, though it was of a piece with Bellow’s claim that he wrote for “mankind”. This was not a question of political correctness—he would have found s/he tedious and coy, and it would never have occurred to him that “mankind” might be an awkward label for all of womankind to adopt. He belonged to a generation for whom these terms came naturally, and in my generation, we read him accordingly: with humility and deep respect for the quality of his prose, the astounding ambition with which he sought to redefine Chicago, America, the novel, mankind.
But we read him at a distance, in the same way we listened to our fathers’ stories—with respect and detachment and a sense that not all of his world was open to us. Engagement would come later, once we had gained more understanding, more experience. Bellow was by no means a misogynistic writer, but his concern was mankind. Not womankind. Those of us who felt the distinction strongly turned to other writers; those who could live with the relative unimportance of his women characters took the rest of what he had to offer, and there was so very much, after all.
The debates over his writing would not have perturbed him at all. As one of his former students commented in a recent obituary, Saul Bellow had an exact sense of his own importance in the scheme of things. He didn’t set much store by prizes, but in the years after he won the Nobel, he would sometimes get a little testy around the time the prize was announced. It had come to him, says his former student, that it was not possible for even Saul Bellow to win the Nobel twice.
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Book review: Conversations in Bolzano
(This was written for the Hindustan Times; should've mentioned that what I liked most about Marai's book was that it sent me back to Casanova's memoirs. That's one of the bits about reviewing that's fun: you get to say, hang on, I've got to read this and move off to Casanova's memoirs (as with Conversations) or Ursula K Le Guin, whom I read alongside Ishiguro's latest, and you can defend all your digressions by virtuously saying you're just doing your homework.)
Conversations in Bolzano
Sandor Marai
Viking,
294 pages, POUNDS 10.50
If Sandor Marai had read Giacomo Casanova’s memoirs, he would have read either the German translation or the French. Neither was a reliable version; the full history of the great seducer’s exploits was only released in the 20th century, and the translations until then were based on incomplete versions of the original. It was only in the 1960s that Casanova’s Memoirs were translated into English.
We read Sandor Marai’s works across the same yawning gap. Conversations in Bolzano is a book set in 1758 and written in 1940 that was first translated in 2004, only the second of Marai’s works to be brought to a wider audience. Marai himself was born in 1900 and survived World War II, but at a high price; he committed suicide in 1989, but left behind a literary legacy that is only gradually being exhumed for a non-Hungarian audience.
His first book, Embers , was translated into English only a year or two ago. That tale of two men tested by war and the vicissitudes of life, returning to an unfinished battle over the soul and heart of an extraordinary woman, leapt the barrier of time effortlessly. Despite the long speeches Marai places in his characters’ mouths and the old-fashioned setting, Embers was a riveting, oddly contemporary read, as it held ideas like loyalty, fidelity and honour up to the light and examined them more closely.
The premise of Conversations in Bolzano is audacious—to examine love and its meaning by way of the man whose name is synonymous with seduction. In 1758, by Marai’s account, it has been two years since Casanova managed to escape from the prison in Venice where he spent several uncomfortable years. Marai is at pains to point out that his Casanova is fictional—“it is not so much the romantic episodes in my hero’s life that interests me as his romantic character”. In his telling of the tale, Casanova comes to Bolzano, the place where he lost a duel and a woman to the Duke of Parma. He has hardened in prison—Casanova went into jail a lighthearted youth given to mischief, and came out a colder, cynical survivor intent on the pursuit, however brief, of love.
The Duke has long since married Francesca, but their marriage has been marred by Casanova’s shadow. He could run Casanova out of town, again; he could exert the full force of his power on the seducer and kill him or exile him permanently. Given that he had once bested the younger man in a duel, he might even contemplate fighting Casanova again. But none of these options will be of any use to him, for they will leave Casanova’s image enshrined in Francesca’s heart. Therefore, he has a business proposition to put before Casanova: he will allow the former lovers one perfect night of seduction, when they can celebrate and inter the passion they once felt—and then Casanova must leave.
But this bargain solves nothing: with the Duke’s seal of consent stamped upon the night, their passion will have been just another expensive purchase. And Francesca has her own ways of exacting revenge, her own demands to make; the real betrayal happened for her when Casanova turned his back on what the two of them had and fled from it.
All this unfolds in steady, measured setpieces, formal and stylized in a manner the novel has long since discarded. It is hard to believe that this was written in the same decade that a whole new generation of writers were dismantling the structure of the old ways of seeing literature and experimenting with language, form, ideas. Conversations in Bolzano is a finely crafted argument, and offers a distinct portrait of Casanova: “a man that was ugly rather than handsome, whose features were unrefined, whose body was unheroic”, but who was “genuinely, most resolutely a man, just that and no more”, perhaps the only real man left in the world.
But it reads like a museum piece, a mothballed relic from another day and age. The three main characters go through their motions like clockwork toys; the fine and noble dilemma before them is resolved through words and musings, not through duels or seductions. Marai attempted to confront a question that has tormented many; how could a man love so many women so persistently and with such relentlessness? His answer is that there must have been one woman who was Casanova’s muse and inspiration, who by remaining unattainable, inspired his lifelong devotion. It is a banal answer, satisfying perhaps only at a certain moment of time, and in a day and age that no longer exists.
Conversations in Bolzano
Sandor Marai
Viking,
294 pages, POUNDS 10.50
If Sandor Marai had read Giacomo Casanova’s memoirs, he would have read either the German translation or the French. Neither was a reliable version; the full history of the great seducer’s exploits was only released in the 20th century, and the translations until then were based on incomplete versions of the original. It was only in the 1960s that Casanova’s Memoirs were translated into English.
We read Sandor Marai’s works across the same yawning gap. Conversations in Bolzano is a book set in 1758 and written in 1940 that was first translated in 2004, only the second of Marai’s works to be brought to a wider audience. Marai himself was born in 1900 and survived World War II, but at a high price; he committed suicide in 1989, but left behind a literary legacy that is only gradually being exhumed for a non-Hungarian audience.
His first book, Embers , was translated into English only a year or two ago. That tale of two men tested by war and the vicissitudes of life, returning to an unfinished battle over the soul and heart of an extraordinary woman, leapt the barrier of time effortlessly. Despite the long speeches Marai places in his characters’ mouths and the old-fashioned setting, Embers was a riveting, oddly contemporary read, as it held ideas like loyalty, fidelity and honour up to the light and examined them more closely.
The premise of Conversations in Bolzano is audacious—to examine love and its meaning by way of the man whose name is synonymous with seduction. In 1758, by Marai’s account, it has been two years since Casanova managed to escape from the prison in Venice where he spent several uncomfortable years. Marai is at pains to point out that his Casanova is fictional—“it is not so much the romantic episodes in my hero’s life that interests me as his romantic character”. In his telling of the tale, Casanova comes to Bolzano, the place where he lost a duel and a woman to the Duke of Parma. He has hardened in prison—Casanova went into jail a lighthearted youth given to mischief, and came out a colder, cynical survivor intent on the pursuit, however brief, of love.
The Duke has long since married Francesca, but their marriage has been marred by Casanova’s shadow. He could run Casanova out of town, again; he could exert the full force of his power on the seducer and kill him or exile him permanently. Given that he had once bested the younger man in a duel, he might even contemplate fighting Casanova again. But none of these options will be of any use to him, for they will leave Casanova’s image enshrined in Francesca’s heart. Therefore, he has a business proposition to put before Casanova: he will allow the former lovers one perfect night of seduction, when they can celebrate and inter the passion they once felt—and then Casanova must leave.
But this bargain solves nothing: with the Duke’s seal of consent stamped upon the night, their passion will have been just another expensive purchase. And Francesca has her own ways of exacting revenge, her own demands to make; the real betrayal happened for her when Casanova turned his back on what the two of them had and fled from it.
All this unfolds in steady, measured setpieces, formal and stylized in a manner the novel has long since discarded. It is hard to believe that this was written in the same decade that a whole new generation of writers were dismantling the structure of the old ways of seeing literature and experimenting with language, form, ideas. Conversations in Bolzano is a finely crafted argument, and offers a distinct portrait of Casanova: “a man that was ugly rather than handsome, whose features were unrefined, whose body was unheroic”, but who was “genuinely, most resolutely a man, just that and no more”, perhaps the only real man left in the world.
But it reads like a museum piece, a mothballed relic from another day and age. The three main characters go through their motions like clockwork toys; the fine and noble dilemma before them is resolved through words and musings, not through duels or seductions. Marai attempted to confront a question that has tormented many; how could a man love so many women so persistently and with such relentlessness? His answer is that there must have been one woman who was Casanova’s muse and inspiration, who by remaining unattainable, inspired his lifelong devotion. It is a banal answer, satisfying perhaps only at a certain moment of time, and in a day and age that no longer exists.
Time Out: The Arundhati Roy piece
(On the subject of Arundhati Roy, I'm happy to be a mugwump--defined years ago by a pal as someone who has her mug on one side of the fence and her wump on the other. I don't belong to the bunch of faithful acolytes who treat every word she writes with religious awe, nor do I belong to the tribe who have a knee-jerk reaction to her and can't get past their dislike long enough to see what she's accomplished. So I loved doing this piece for Time Out, because it allowed me to assume my favourite position: right there, straddling the fence.)
The Greek word for “idiot” refers to a person who takes no interest in what is happening around her, who cannot engage with the world. The Greeks never met Arundhati Roy, unfortunately, or they would have come up with a word that signified the exact opposite. Even her worst critics, the ones who call her the Verbal Terrorist, or the Greater Common Shrill, or eye the halo of Saint Arundhati sceptically, must concede that there is no questioning her passion, her engagement with the world.
After the Booker-winning success of God of Small Things , she was supposed to go off and write another novel, to follow the usual trajectory of prizewinning authors. Instead, she wrote The Greater Common Good , an impassioned essay that argued vehemently against building the Narmada dam at the cost of hundreds of villages. It became a hugely controversial piece—but it also brought a debate that had been confined to activists and NGOwallas into the drawing rooms of middle India.
The seeds of the wrath that led her to add her voice to the growing chorus of condemnation against the Narmada dam (and the ruthlessness of the Big Dam movement) had been sown ages ago. The God of Small Things can also be read as a fiery critique of caste politics, of the Love Laws that dictate who we can and cannot admit into our lives, of political systems that cut women down to size, of places where repositories of the past like the History House are rendered derelict, where rivers can no longer breathe because they’re so stifled by pollution. The seeds of what would become a finely honed, trademark anger are there in the character Roy plays in the cult movie In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones . Training to be an architect, she protests a world which will build fanciful constructions on the backs of labourers whose children grow up on silla heaps. It’s there in the essay she wrote on The Bandit Queen , where she questioned a filmmaker’s right to appropriate the life of an already oppressed woman.
And, oh, how that anger has bloomed in her most recent compilation of work-- The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire . Here are the connections she began drawing when her exploration of the politics behind the Narmada Dam led her to question capitalism, free markets, new imperialisms, the sarkar and what she calls the new colonialism. In a diatribe against the chequebook and the cruise missile, the twin instruments of what she sees as the new imperialism, she says:
“Mass resistance movements, individual activists, journalists, artists, and film makers have come together to strip Empire of its sheen. They have connected the dots, turned cash-flow charts and boardroom speeches into real stories about real people and real despair. They have shown how the neo-liberal project has cost people their homes, their land, their jobs, their liberty, their dignity….This is a huge victory. It was forged by the coming together of disparate political groups, with a variety of strategies. But they all recognized that the target of their anger, their activism, and their doggedness is the same. This was the beginning of real globalization. The globalization of dissent.”
But with Arundhati Roy’s work, the debate never seems to centre over what she says, but how she says it. She employs the skills of a demagogue, gives her essays catchy titles, speaks to auditoriums packed to standing-room-only capacity, is one of the brightest, shiniest stars in the firmament at the World Social Forum. More than any of today’s liberal icons, she polarises opinion. And myths grow up around her.
“You’ll be ushered into the Presence,” a cynical journalist friend who’d met her several times before told me before I interviewed Roy a few years ago. “Remember to kiss the hand.” But the woman who opened the door was almost shy, hospitable, curious—and open to questioning, to argument, to discussion. When she spoke of her writing and her life, there was no separation between the two; her early essays and her relatively iconoclastic lifestyle, the fiction and the current series of attacks on Empire—these are inextricably linked. On the few other occasions we crossed paths, I saw neither the Saint nor the Martyr, though the demagogue put in a refreshing appearance every so often.
She has good friends—Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein are among her warmest supporters. And good enemies—it takes a lot of argument to get under the skin of In Defense of Globalisation author and economist Jagdish Bhagwati, for instance. What gets on the nerves of Roy’s detractors—and supporters, if truth be told—is the peculiar combination of self-indulgence and paranoia that occasionally makes an appearance in her writing.
“I speak as a slave to her king”, she writes in her essay on US imperialism; “I’m not used to doing as I’m told”, she begins the speech on Empire; “Bring on the brickbats”, she urges her critics in a sudden, asymmetric footnote to an essay on a drowned village; she congratulates the Sydney Peace Foundation on being brave enough to offer her, of all people, an award. The thing about Arundhati Roy, though, is that you can’t tell her what not to write, any more than you can tell her what to write. Just as writing, for her, is a question of getting it right the first time so that she never has to rewrite extensively, “breathe the same breath twice”, so is she always confirmed in her opinion that nothing she writes is ever extraneous.
But as you go through the essays in An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire , the myths fall away, leaving behind just the writer and the thinker. I know, I’ve heard the economists argue against her anti-globalisation logic or attempt to take her rants against imperialism apart. But this is the woman who stood up and spoke out against the violence in Godhra, who trenchantly criticized POTA and the sanctioned terrorism of the Indian state. She can take her fans in the US aback when she trained her guns on George Bush, demanding that we “become the global resistance”, that we do not support the project for The New American Century. She can stir up a storm in Australia when she raises the issue of aboriginal rights on the eve of receiving a prize for peace. She wants people, the general junta, the public, to be seen as more than subjects—or potential markets. She wants, to use one of the few slogans she didn’t coin herself, power to the people.
And if you think she’s going to stop putting the World Bank or words like democracy under scrutiny, if you think she’s going to stop calling states and countries to account when they run rampant, you’re mistaken. All Arundhati really needs is a podium and an audience. The crowds will queue around the block, and trust me, she’ll bring her own soapbox if she has to.
The Greek word for “idiot” refers to a person who takes no interest in what is happening around her, who cannot engage with the world. The Greeks never met Arundhati Roy, unfortunately, or they would have come up with a word that signified the exact opposite. Even her worst critics, the ones who call her the Verbal Terrorist, or the Greater Common Shrill, or eye the halo of Saint Arundhati sceptically, must concede that there is no questioning her passion, her engagement with the world.
After the Booker-winning success of God of Small Things , she was supposed to go off and write another novel, to follow the usual trajectory of prizewinning authors. Instead, she wrote The Greater Common Good , an impassioned essay that argued vehemently against building the Narmada dam at the cost of hundreds of villages. It became a hugely controversial piece—but it also brought a debate that had been confined to activists and NGOwallas into the drawing rooms of middle India.
The seeds of the wrath that led her to add her voice to the growing chorus of condemnation against the Narmada dam (and the ruthlessness of the Big Dam movement) had been sown ages ago. The God of Small Things can also be read as a fiery critique of caste politics, of the Love Laws that dictate who we can and cannot admit into our lives, of political systems that cut women down to size, of places where repositories of the past like the History House are rendered derelict, where rivers can no longer breathe because they’re so stifled by pollution. The seeds of what would become a finely honed, trademark anger are there in the character Roy plays in the cult movie In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones . Training to be an architect, she protests a world which will build fanciful constructions on the backs of labourers whose children grow up on silla heaps. It’s there in the essay she wrote on The Bandit Queen , where she questioned a filmmaker’s right to appropriate the life of an already oppressed woman.
And, oh, how that anger has bloomed in her most recent compilation of work-- The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire . Here are the connections she began drawing when her exploration of the politics behind the Narmada Dam led her to question capitalism, free markets, new imperialisms, the sarkar and what she calls the new colonialism. In a diatribe against the chequebook and the cruise missile, the twin instruments of what she sees as the new imperialism, she says:
“Mass resistance movements, individual activists, journalists, artists, and film makers have come together to strip Empire of its sheen. They have connected the dots, turned cash-flow charts and boardroom speeches into real stories about real people and real despair. They have shown how the neo-liberal project has cost people their homes, their land, their jobs, their liberty, their dignity….This is a huge victory. It was forged by the coming together of disparate political groups, with a variety of strategies. But they all recognized that the target of their anger, their activism, and their doggedness is the same. This was the beginning of real globalization. The globalization of dissent.”
But with Arundhati Roy’s work, the debate never seems to centre over what she says, but how she says it. She employs the skills of a demagogue, gives her essays catchy titles, speaks to auditoriums packed to standing-room-only capacity, is one of the brightest, shiniest stars in the firmament at the World Social Forum. More than any of today’s liberal icons, she polarises opinion. And myths grow up around her.
“You’ll be ushered into the Presence,” a cynical journalist friend who’d met her several times before told me before I interviewed Roy a few years ago. “Remember to kiss the hand.” But the woman who opened the door was almost shy, hospitable, curious—and open to questioning, to argument, to discussion. When she spoke of her writing and her life, there was no separation between the two; her early essays and her relatively iconoclastic lifestyle, the fiction and the current series of attacks on Empire—these are inextricably linked. On the few other occasions we crossed paths, I saw neither the Saint nor the Martyr, though the demagogue put in a refreshing appearance every so often.
She has good friends—Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein are among her warmest supporters. And good enemies—it takes a lot of argument to get under the skin of In Defense of Globalisation author and economist Jagdish Bhagwati, for instance. What gets on the nerves of Roy’s detractors—and supporters, if truth be told—is the peculiar combination of self-indulgence and paranoia that occasionally makes an appearance in her writing.
“I speak as a slave to her king”, she writes in her essay on US imperialism; “I’m not used to doing as I’m told”, she begins the speech on Empire; “Bring on the brickbats”, she urges her critics in a sudden, asymmetric footnote to an essay on a drowned village; she congratulates the Sydney Peace Foundation on being brave enough to offer her, of all people, an award. The thing about Arundhati Roy, though, is that you can’t tell her what not to write, any more than you can tell her what to write. Just as writing, for her, is a question of getting it right the first time so that she never has to rewrite extensively, “breathe the same breath twice”, so is she always confirmed in her opinion that nothing she writes is ever extraneous.
But as you go through the essays in An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire , the myths fall away, leaving behind just the writer and the thinker. I know, I’ve heard the economists argue against her anti-globalisation logic or attempt to take her rants against imperialism apart. But this is the woman who stood up and spoke out against the violence in Godhra, who trenchantly criticized POTA and the sanctioned terrorism of the Indian state. She can take her fans in the US aback when she trained her guns on George Bush, demanding that we “become the global resistance”, that we do not support the project for The New American Century. She can stir up a storm in Australia when she raises the issue of aboriginal rights on the eve of receiving a prize for peace. She wants people, the general junta, the public, to be seen as more than subjects—or potential markets. She wants, to use one of the few slogans she didn’t coin herself, power to the people.
And if you think she’s going to stop putting the World Bank or words like democracy under scrutiny, if you think she’s going to stop calling states and countries to account when they run rampant, you’re mistaken. All Arundhati really needs is a podium and an audience. The crowds will queue around the block, and trust me, she’ll bring her own soapbox if she has to.
Sunday, April 10, 2005
Book review: The Shadow of the Wind
(First published in the Business Standard, April 2005)
(Hmmm. One of those reviews that goes "yes, yes, the book's a bit of a mess but you have GOT to read it anyway because the good bits are SO good". Come to think of it, I have friends like that!)
The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
POUNDS 12.99, 403 pages
As children, we assume that books are eternal, that the books that truly changed our lives will always be available on some shelf or the other. I lost my innocence early, when after years of not being able to locate a copy of The Little Velveteen Rabbit , I finally found a page—transmuted into a paper bag. It was like discovering that a friend had stuffed some beloved but departed grandparent’s head and was using it as a lampstand.
No true bibliophile, haunted by the secret fear that his favourite books will end up remaindered, pulped, forgotten, will be able to resist the central conceit of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind . We are introduced to this by Daniel, son of a dealer in rare books, who is taken at the age of ten to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Hidden inside “the carcass of a palace” in Barcelona, this is “a place of mystery, a sanctuary”. As Daniel’s father explains, “In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands…According to tradition, the first time someone visits this place, he must choose a book, whichever he wants, and adopt it, making sure that it will never disappear, that it will always stay alive.”
The book Daniel chooses, appropriately enough for a metafiction novel, is called The Shadow of the Wind . Now Zafon’s Shadow , first published in Spanish in 2001 and translated only recently into English, has been hugely, improbably successful, a sort of thinking person’s Da Vinci Code . But The Shadow of the Wind that The Shadow of the Wind is about—oh, these literary conceits, what fun they can be, but how tedious when pushed too far—is a different matter. The book Daniel chooses to guard was written by one Julian Carax, an author who died under mysterious circumstances after a life of writing brilliant novels doomed to popular failure. And Daniel’s task is made doubly difficult by a sinister stranger who has spent his life putting as many of Carax’s books as he can find to the torch.
You couldn’t ask for a more promising start, but it’s downhill from here. The Shadow of the Wind pulls all the stops out, piling intrigue upon intrigue, mixing young love with a portrait of war-damaged Barcelona. Julian Carax has a past fraught with high romance and great peril; his future as a writer is uncertain. Everyone whom Daniel meets has a story within a story to tell; he must unravel the myriad threads until he has woven a web of facts from the mess. And what disappointing facts they are: despite the hints at something astonishing, the allusions of so many characters to a dark story that blends myth and history, the final version of Julian Carax’s life is almost mundane.
But then Zafon promised us the earth, a foolish thing to do with your first novel. “…Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.”
No one could have written these lines but a truly extraordinary reader; no one could have delivered the promise inherent in those lines but a truly extraordinary writer. Zafon has a playful mind and takes a deep delight in tongue-in-cheek literary jokes: “The discussion turned to some documents found in the basement of El Escorial that hinted at the possibility that Don Miguel de Cervantes had in fact been the nom de plume of a large, hairy lady of letters from Toledo.” But it would take a genius to make The Shadow of the Wind what Zafon, and we, would like it to be: a book that teaches us that by reading, we can live more intensely.
There is nothing wrong with Zafon’s Barcelona, “a city of shadows” still haunted by the memory of the civil war that nearly tore Spain apart, the repository of bitter memories but also of hope. But his villain is a caricature, a cartoonish, sneering figure who is diminished on closer acquaintance, the winding stories of the rest unnecessarily longwinded and insubstantial. Nothing matches the brilliance of that first chapter, that first conceit, and you read the rest of the book sluggishly, with a sense of growing discontentment. Zafon cannot rise to the challenge of telling Carax’s story, or Daniel’s, or even Barcelona’s: but it is a different matter when he lets himself go on the novel’s real obsession. Its secret hero is the reader and the most poignant, memorable moments in The Shadow of the Wind come when Zafon writes of the act of reading.
“I couldn’t help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.”
This is the secret lament of the reader, the incantation muttered to the bibliophile undergoing initiation. The Shadow of the Wind may contain a minor twinkling star or two instead of a whole universe, but these passages alone are worth the price of entry and the inevitable payment in the coin of disappointment.
(Hmmm. One of those reviews that goes "yes, yes, the book's a bit of a mess but you have GOT to read it anyway because the good bits are SO good". Come to think of it, I have friends like that!)
The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
POUNDS 12.99, 403 pages
As children, we assume that books are eternal, that the books that truly changed our lives will always be available on some shelf or the other. I lost my innocence early, when after years of not being able to locate a copy of The Little Velveteen Rabbit , I finally found a page—transmuted into a paper bag. It was like discovering that a friend had stuffed some beloved but departed grandparent’s head and was using it as a lampstand.
No true bibliophile, haunted by the secret fear that his favourite books will end up remaindered, pulped, forgotten, will be able to resist the central conceit of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind . We are introduced to this by Daniel, son of a dealer in rare books, who is taken at the age of ten to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Hidden inside “the carcass of a palace” in Barcelona, this is “a place of mystery, a sanctuary”. As Daniel’s father explains, “In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands…According to tradition, the first time someone visits this place, he must choose a book, whichever he wants, and adopt it, making sure that it will never disappear, that it will always stay alive.”
The book Daniel chooses, appropriately enough for a metafiction novel, is called The Shadow of the Wind . Now Zafon’s Shadow , first published in Spanish in 2001 and translated only recently into English, has been hugely, improbably successful, a sort of thinking person’s Da Vinci Code . But The Shadow of the Wind that The Shadow of the Wind is about—oh, these literary conceits, what fun they can be, but how tedious when pushed too far—is a different matter. The book Daniel chooses to guard was written by one Julian Carax, an author who died under mysterious circumstances after a life of writing brilliant novels doomed to popular failure. And Daniel’s task is made doubly difficult by a sinister stranger who has spent his life putting as many of Carax’s books as he can find to the torch.
You couldn’t ask for a more promising start, but it’s downhill from here. The Shadow of the Wind pulls all the stops out, piling intrigue upon intrigue, mixing young love with a portrait of war-damaged Barcelona. Julian Carax has a past fraught with high romance and great peril; his future as a writer is uncertain. Everyone whom Daniel meets has a story within a story to tell; he must unravel the myriad threads until he has woven a web of facts from the mess. And what disappointing facts they are: despite the hints at something astonishing, the allusions of so many characters to a dark story that blends myth and history, the final version of Julian Carax’s life is almost mundane.
But then Zafon promised us the earth, a foolish thing to do with your first novel. “…Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.”
No one could have written these lines but a truly extraordinary reader; no one could have delivered the promise inherent in those lines but a truly extraordinary writer. Zafon has a playful mind and takes a deep delight in tongue-in-cheek literary jokes: “The discussion turned to some documents found in the basement of El Escorial that hinted at the possibility that Don Miguel de Cervantes had in fact been the nom de plume of a large, hairy lady of letters from Toledo.” But it would take a genius to make The Shadow of the Wind what Zafon, and we, would like it to be: a book that teaches us that by reading, we can live more intensely.
There is nothing wrong with Zafon’s Barcelona, “a city of shadows” still haunted by the memory of the civil war that nearly tore Spain apart, the repository of bitter memories but also of hope. But his villain is a caricature, a cartoonish, sneering figure who is diminished on closer acquaintance, the winding stories of the rest unnecessarily longwinded and insubstantial. Nothing matches the brilliance of that first chapter, that first conceit, and you read the rest of the book sluggishly, with a sense of growing discontentment. Zafon cannot rise to the challenge of telling Carax’s story, or Daniel’s, or even Barcelona’s: but it is a different matter when he lets himself go on the novel’s real obsession. Its secret hero is the reader and the most poignant, memorable moments in The Shadow of the Wind come when Zafon writes of the act of reading.
“I couldn’t help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.”
This is the secret lament of the reader, the incantation muttered to the bibliophile undergoing initiation. The Shadow of the Wind may contain a minor twinkling star or two instead of a whole universe, but these passages alone are worth the price of entry and the inevitable payment in the coin of disappointment.
Last Word: Boy, Interrupted
(This was one of the Last Word columns I do for the Kolkata Telegraph's gender page. Haven't put too many of these up because I'm still struggling to get them right...but this was an issue I'd been thinking about for a while. So here it is.)
When I look around at my women friends, I realise how much, and how often, we share our lives with each other. For men, a brief note here: this is what explains the long phone calls that puzzle you, the cackles of laughter from the kitchen that you wonder about, the groups of women hanging out in bars who (heavens above!) don’t appear to need male attention. I sometimes wonder how men manage without the daily back-and-forth of gossip, just-like-that calls, smses and coffee conversations that sustain women.
What got me thinking about the silence of men this week was two things, one personal, one the stuff of tabloid headlines. We met an old school friend after a gap of several years. Initially, conversation was of the awkward sort where you mention the weather frequently and with some nervousness.
But after a bit, our friend opened up…and it was like watching a dam burst. He talked to us about his life, his marriage, the ups and downs and struggles he’d experienced; he talked about his children and his childhood, about old friends and new enemies. And some time around three in the morning, he said, “Men only get to talk like this when there are women around. Even if you’re talking to another man, really, you can’t do it unless there’s a woman in the room…it’s not allowed, to spill your guts among men.”
This week, I read the transcripts of the Michael Jackson trials. One of the most poignant bits of evidence was offered by Jackson’s maid’s son, who is now an adult. He broke down as he testified that the King of Pop had molested him years ago. “I didn’t expect this to hurt so much,” he said as he told his story. “It’s so hard to tell this.” Women rape victims go through similar trauma; similar, but I suspect, not the same. One of the psychiatrists who testified in the Jackson trial was emphatic when he was asked whether some of the young boys who’d accused the singer of molestation might be making up their stories.
In his experience, he said, the hard part was getting young men to acknowledge that they had been abused. They were deeply reluctant to tell their stories; even more so than women of the same age who had experienced abuse. And he had never met a man, or boy, who had made up a story about sexual abuse.
Why? Because, he said, there was too much shame and guilt involved; the issues for a man who had been molested were deeply complex. A man who has been raped or assaulted will experience shame, as women victims do; but women know that they might somewhere also find sympathy. Men are likely to be laughed at, have their masculinity called into question, experience homophobia; some have secret but very deep fears that they will grow up to be perpetrators of violence and abuse themselves.
These are hard, difficult stories to share. But even the good stories seem to be hard for men to share. What would happen if we had a culture where it was ok for men to talk about their lives, to open up and be honest? I don’t know; but clearly the prospect is so scary that it’s hard to even try to break the silence.
When I look around at my women friends, I realise how much, and how often, we share our lives with each other. For men, a brief note here: this is what explains the long phone calls that puzzle you, the cackles of laughter from the kitchen that you wonder about, the groups of women hanging out in bars who (heavens above!) don’t appear to need male attention. I sometimes wonder how men manage without the daily back-and-forth of gossip, just-like-that calls, smses and coffee conversations that sustain women.
What got me thinking about the silence of men this week was two things, one personal, one the stuff of tabloid headlines. We met an old school friend after a gap of several years. Initially, conversation was of the awkward sort where you mention the weather frequently and with some nervousness.
But after a bit, our friend opened up…and it was like watching a dam burst. He talked to us about his life, his marriage, the ups and downs and struggles he’d experienced; he talked about his children and his childhood, about old friends and new enemies. And some time around three in the morning, he said, “Men only get to talk like this when there are women around. Even if you’re talking to another man, really, you can’t do it unless there’s a woman in the room…it’s not allowed, to spill your guts among men.”
This week, I read the transcripts of the Michael Jackson trials. One of the most poignant bits of evidence was offered by Jackson’s maid’s son, who is now an adult. He broke down as he testified that the King of Pop had molested him years ago. “I didn’t expect this to hurt so much,” he said as he told his story. “It’s so hard to tell this.” Women rape victims go through similar trauma; similar, but I suspect, not the same. One of the psychiatrists who testified in the Jackson trial was emphatic when he was asked whether some of the young boys who’d accused the singer of molestation might be making up their stories.
In his experience, he said, the hard part was getting young men to acknowledge that they had been abused. They were deeply reluctant to tell their stories; even more so than women of the same age who had experienced abuse. And he had never met a man, or boy, who had made up a story about sexual abuse.
Why? Because, he said, there was too much shame and guilt involved; the issues for a man who had been molested were deeply complex. A man who has been raped or assaulted will experience shame, as women victims do; but women know that they might somewhere also find sympathy. Men are likely to be laughed at, have their masculinity called into question, experience homophobia; some have secret but very deep fears that they will grow up to be perpetrators of violence and abuse themselves.
These are hard, difficult stories to share. But even the good stories seem to be hard for men to share. What would happen if we had a culture where it was ok for men to talk about their lives, to open up and be honest? I don’t know; but clearly the prospect is so scary that it’s hard to even try to break the silence.
The BS column: O V Vijayan
(First published in Business Standard as SPEAKING VOLUMES FOR APRIL 5, 2005)
O V Vijayan, god or Marx rest his soul: we invoked his name every time someone accused "regional" Indian writing of lacking imagination. Not Vijayan, we'd say, pointing to the Legends of Khasak, pointing to the wart that grew larger than the face it rested on, pointing to the obscene foetus he used in order to cariacature Sanjay Gandhi. If I had one complaint about Vijayan, it was that he came out with a pallid translation of Khasak; one of those where you can sense the original, robust text making strangulating noises behind the translation. Anyway, this was my tribute.
My idea of heaven is a vast, beckoning continent divided into separate segments: here is Shangri-La, over to the left you’d have Macondo, somewhere in between would be Faulkner’s Yokhnapatawpha County and so on. If we get to choose our afterlives, this is where I’d spend mine.
An entire swathe of this imaginary continent would be taken up by a place called Khasak. Like all the best countries of the mind, Khasak not only exists, but has been growing and changing for each reader ever since 1967, when a cartoonist and teacher called O V Vijayan set down its legends. Vijayan passed on last week after a long, hard bout of illness, deeply mourned by all those who knew him and those who knew his books: the funeral drew thousands. He had fewer laurels than he deserved. The Sahitya Akademi award to him was made for Infinity of Grace , not for the monumental Legends of Khasak , and it is a disgrace that he was never awarded the Jnanpith. Few writers, after all, can claim to have changed the course of the history of writing in a language with their very first book.
Khasakinte Itihasam was serialized in the late sixties, and by the time the fourth or fifth installment came out, readers had begun to grasp that something was being born in their midst. Vijayan said once that the book grew out of an image and a landscape; he wrote it, he said, with the sound of the winds whistling through Palakkad in his head. He was often compared to writers like Manuel Puig and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and it is interesting to read The Legends of Khasak in the light of a comment by Garcia Marquez.
He was speaking of returning to his village after an absence; like Vijayan, distance brought a kind of clarity. “I felt that I wasn’t really looking at the village,” said Garcia Marquez, “but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading. For all practical purposes everything had evolved into literature: the houses, the people, and the memories.”
The Legends of Khasak begins with Ravi, the outsider who comes to Khasak in order to be the first teacher the small place has ever had. There are echoes of Vijayan’s experiences in Ravi’s life, but Khasak was much more than a semi-autobiographical first novel. Through Ravi’s eyes, Vijayan presented a shifting view of a small town in flux, where each inhabitant has a story to tell. There is Appu-Killi, the local idiot affectionately known as the Parrot, whose decision to convert Islam has repercussions that are rapidly sorted out: “The Parrot was to be allowed the freedom of both religions. For certain days of the week he could be Muslim. For the rest he could be a Hindu. If necessary, Hindu, Muslim and Parrot all at the same time.”
Ghosts and spirits co-exist with district administration officials, smallpox epidemics and outbreaks of lice infestations are treated with equal seriousness; religious dilemmas and personal dramas make up the ebb and flow of life in Khasak. He could write about infinity and the most domestic of trials in the same breath. Vijayan packed so much into the relatively slender space of this first novel that, over three decades later, we are still discovering new epiphanies in Khasak . He made a comment once about his work as a cartoonist that could also serve as a writer’s explanation: “An indescribable sadness permeates the reality that I am supposed to describe, but nonetheless the prevailing superstition about my profession requires that I make people laugh.”
Readers took to Khasak; the establishment took a while longer, not quite sure what to make of it—one critic tells me that The Legends of Khasak was dubbed “ultramodern” because the term “postmodern” had yet to make its way into the lexicon of discourse in Malayalam. There are apocryphal stories about readers who badgered puzzled men at railway station counters, demanding a ticket to Khasak. It was useless to tell these souls that Khasak did not exist, or to fob them off with stories about Khasak being based on Palakkad; Khasak, to the faithful, was even more real than Palakkad.
It was in the next few years, just before the Emergency cast its shadow across India, that Vijayan wrote some of his strongest, most scathing work. He was by then a disillusioned man: his faith in communism as an ideal had been shaken, his faith in humanity was steadily eroding. He didn’t believe in civilization any more, or in revolution: these concepts and ideals had failed too many, too often. Dharmapuranam , translated as The Saga of Dharmapuri emerged from this period, a time when modern India appeared to have betrayed its idea of itself. It opens with a meditation on the Presidential bowels, with the ministers and the subjects of Dharmapuri engrossed in contemplation of the products thereof. They discuss the Presidential shit; they reflect on the meaning of its form; and finally, the more assiduous of the courtiers eat shit. And that was for openers; The Saga of Dharmapuri is a satire so biting that Jonathan Swift would have been proud to have been its author.
Dharmapuri was to begin serialization in early 1975—in June, the Emergency was imposed, and the book “went into hiding”, to use Vijayan’s phrase. He rewrote some parts, intensifying the satire here, toning it down there, and it was eventually serialized again in 1977. But it was only published in 1985 in book form; as with Khasak , Vijayan was writing well ahead of his time.
There were other books, including gems like Generations and brilliant short stories. Most writers would be content to write one immortal work, but Vijayan had begun his career with two. And of his short stories, the one that resonates most in our times is a piece called The Wart . Like The Foetus , it was inspired by Sanjay Gandhi’s excesses, but it is an allegory that applies to the powerful anywhere, in any age. The Wart is about a man who discovers a wart on his face one day; the wart grows until finally it encompasses the man. It is the perfect image, from a man who could translate awe, terror, compassion and human frailty into great writing. Towards the end of his life, friends reported that his hands shook almost too much from illness to allow him to take up the pen and write or draw. But by then, he had said more of importance than most writers will say in a lifetime.
O V Vijayan, god or Marx rest his soul: we invoked his name every time someone accused "regional" Indian writing of lacking imagination. Not Vijayan, we'd say, pointing to the Legends of Khasak, pointing to the wart that grew larger than the face it rested on, pointing to the obscene foetus he used in order to cariacature Sanjay Gandhi. If I had one complaint about Vijayan, it was that he came out with a pallid translation of Khasak; one of those where you can sense the original, robust text making strangulating noises behind the translation. Anyway, this was my tribute.
My idea of heaven is a vast, beckoning continent divided into separate segments: here is Shangri-La, over to the left you’d have Macondo, somewhere in between would be Faulkner’s Yokhnapatawpha County and so on. If we get to choose our afterlives, this is where I’d spend mine.
An entire swathe of this imaginary continent would be taken up by a place called Khasak. Like all the best countries of the mind, Khasak not only exists, but has been growing and changing for each reader ever since 1967, when a cartoonist and teacher called O V Vijayan set down its legends. Vijayan passed on last week after a long, hard bout of illness, deeply mourned by all those who knew him and those who knew his books: the funeral drew thousands. He had fewer laurels than he deserved. The Sahitya Akademi award to him was made for Infinity of Grace , not for the monumental Legends of Khasak , and it is a disgrace that he was never awarded the Jnanpith. Few writers, after all, can claim to have changed the course of the history of writing in a language with their very first book.
Khasakinte Itihasam was serialized in the late sixties, and by the time the fourth or fifth installment came out, readers had begun to grasp that something was being born in their midst. Vijayan said once that the book grew out of an image and a landscape; he wrote it, he said, with the sound of the winds whistling through Palakkad in his head. He was often compared to writers like Manuel Puig and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and it is interesting to read The Legends of Khasak in the light of a comment by Garcia Marquez.
He was speaking of returning to his village after an absence; like Vijayan, distance brought a kind of clarity. “I felt that I wasn’t really looking at the village,” said Garcia Marquez, “but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading. For all practical purposes everything had evolved into literature: the houses, the people, and the memories.”
The Legends of Khasak begins with Ravi, the outsider who comes to Khasak in order to be the first teacher the small place has ever had. There are echoes of Vijayan’s experiences in Ravi’s life, but Khasak was much more than a semi-autobiographical first novel. Through Ravi’s eyes, Vijayan presented a shifting view of a small town in flux, where each inhabitant has a story to tell. There is Appu-Killi, the local idiot affectionately known as the Parrot, whose decision to convert Islam has repercussions that are rapidly sorted out: “The Parrot was to be allowed the freedom of both religions. For certain days of the week he could be Muslim. For the rest he could be a Hindu. If necessary, Hindu, Muslim and Parrot all at the same time.”
Ghosts and spirits co-exist with district administration officials, smallpox epidemics and outbreaks of lice infestations are treated with equal seriousness; religious dilemmas and personal dramas make up the ebb and flow of life in Khasak. He could write about infinity and the most domestic of trials in the same breath. Vijayan packed so much into the relatively slender space of this first novel that, over three decades later, we are still discovering new epiphanies in Khasak . He made a comment once about his work as a cartoonist that could also serve as a writer’s explanation: “An indescribable sadness permeates the reality that I am supposed to describe, but nonetheless the prevailing superstition about my profession requires that I make people laugh.”
Readers took to Khasak; the establishment took a while longer, not quite sure what to make of it—one critic tells me that The Legends of Khasak was dubbed “ultramodern” because the term “postmodern” had yet to make its way into the lexicon of discourse in Malayalam. There are apocryphal stories about readers who badgered puzzled men at railway station counters, demanding a ticket to Khasak. It was useless to tell these souls that Khasak did not exist, or to fob them off with stories about Khasak being based on Palakkad; Khasak, to the faithful, was even more real than Palakkad.
It was in the next few years, just before the Emergency cast its shadow across India, that Vijayan wrote some of his strongest, most scathing work. He was by then a disillusioned man: his faith in communism as an ideal had been shaken, his faith in humanity was steadily eroding. He didn’t believe in civilization any more, or in revolution: these concepts and ideals had failed too many, too often. Dharmapuranam , translated as The Saga of Dharmapuri emerged from this period, a time when modern India appeared to have betrayed its idea of itself. It opens with a meditation on the Presidential bowels, with the ministers and the subjects of Dharmapuri engrossed in contemplation of the products thereof. They discuss the Presidential shit; they reflect on the meaning of its form; and finally, the more assiduous of the courtiers eat shit. And that was for openers; The Saga of Dharmapuri is a satire so biting that Jonathan Swift would have been proud to have been its author.
Dharmapuri was to begin serialization in early 1975—in June, the Emergency was imposed, and the book “went into hiding”, to use Vijayan’s phrase. He rewrote some parts, intensifying the satire here, toning it down there, and it was eventually serialized again in 1977. But it was only published in 1985 in book form; as with Khasak , Vijayan was writing well ahead of his time.
There were other books, including gems like Generations and brilliant short stories. Most writers would be content to write one immortal work, but Vijayan had begun his career with two. And of his short stories, the one that resonates most in our times is a piece called The Wart . Like The Foetus , it was inspired by Sanjay Gandhi’s excesses, but it is an allegory that applies to the powerful anywhere, in any age. The Wart is about a man who discovers a wart on his face one day; the wart grows until finally it encompasses the man. It is the perfect image, from a man who could translate awe, terror, compassion and human frailty into great writing. Towards the end of his life, friends reported that his hands shook almost too much from illness to allow him to take up the pen and write or draw. But by then, he had said more of importance than most writers will say in a lifetime.
Thursday, March 31, 2005
The Whatchamacallit of Desire
Tarun Tejpal's launch was the last event I attended before the mosquitoes got me good, but it was an Event in ALL CAPs, which Jai's already blogged about. The book--The Alchemy of Desire--has been hugely hyped. I reviewed it for The Indian Express, or at least I think I did: the review came out in the paper this Sunday, but the paper didn't come out in Delhi because it was Holi. Residents of Nagpur, Jaipur and Jhumritalaiya got to read it, apparently. On reflection, I was very, very kind to the book. Must've been pre-malarial euphoria.
The Alchemy of Desire
Tarun J Tejpal
HarperCollins,
Rs 500, 518 pages
Back in 1956, Junichiro Tanizaki wrote The Key, a study of a marriage in deep trouble where the protagonists attempt to bridge the abyss by maintaining diaries. Each one reads the other’s accounts of their most intimate moments; both keep up the fiction that the diaries are really private, off limits. Two decades later, Nagisa Oshima produced In the Realm of the Senses, a controversial ode to the body’s demands and desires: “"In the ecstasy of love the cry is 'I'm dying.' But as one becomes older, the cry becomes ‘Kill me now’."
Both these men recognised the sad truth about sex and desire, often conflated with Newton’s law by schoolboys: what goes up must come down. Their concern was with what lay beyond the surface of the body, with the nature of obsession. Tarun J Tejpal’s first novel recognises the same truth, but flinches from this recognition, seeking a happy ending against all odds. In a cheerfully phallic novel, this is the ultimate phallacy.
There are four stories compressed within the 518 pages of this long, overstretched novel, and Tejpal tells only one with conviction. But that tale is a curiously touching account of the life of a young couple--the narrator and Fizz--as they explore the limits of desire and discover none. The passion in the prose is real as Tejpal lays out the small stumbling steps of courtship, draws the first trials and triumphs of setting up house, invoking a relationship so complete that it needs no outside validation. In an India weighed down by the dark knowledge of Partition, the frank delight these two take in each other’s bodies is the only innocent thing left, their rewriting of history in bed the only true chronicle, their lovers’ nicknames and road journals the only footnotes necessary.
To those who knew Delhi and grew up with a certain kind of Partition story, who remember the trauma that tore Punjab into little pieces before Bluestar, this part of The Alchemy of Desire will be illuminated by familiarity--often over-familiarity, as when Tejpal mines the mundane endlessly. For other readers, Tejpal has the born writer’s instinct for the telling phrase; he will make what they never experienced seem part of the fabric of their memories.
At the bottom of the Sukhna Lake lies the first story that threatens the happiness of the protagonists, an aborted novel, the narrator’s grand attempt at a sweeping saga of Partition that miscarried badly. His attempts to write on an old Brother typewriter with clacking keys initially bring him and his wife even closer together, desire fused with ambition and creativity. When the novel haemorrhages, the wounds inflicted on their relationship are difficult to staunch. As the narrator’s creativity judders and stalls, their marriage goes into a tailspin—if writing is a seat-of-the-pants activity, writer’s block affects the other side, so to speak, and there’s no Viagra yet for impotence in authors.
This is where The Alchemy of Desire could have taken on territory relatively unexplored, where Tejpal could have boldly moved into the realm of what lies beyond the senses. But he invokes a deus-ex-machina; the grandmother whose own Partition history made her disapprove of the narrator’s marriage with a Muslim girl leaves them a legacy, with which they buy a house in the hills. The house comes with a mysterious portrait and a mysterious chest containing mysterious diaries, all of which tell the story of a ghost from the past who is far too literal a device for this reviewer’s taste.
Catherine’s story is supposed to illumine a different kind of appetite, one that moves from mindlessly erotic promiscuity to a warped and magnificent obsession. But in the face of the narrator’s fascination with Catherine, his marriage and the reader’s interest are the first casualties. This shouldn’t happen: Catherine’s tale has the right appurtenances, mixing Paris nightlife with palace intrigue in India, unveiling a forbidden love story between brown and white, with generous doses of skullduggery and murder and even a Harlem interlude thrown in for good measure.
None of the sound and fury and colour can mask the novel's essential emptiness. The heart of The Alchemy of Desire is the story of the ebbing and resuscitation of desire, but once you move past page 300 or so, you’re all too aware that the novel is on a pacemaker. There is an ending, clinically if not emotionally satisfying; there is a ghostly encounter of the very close kind. That brings us to the fourth story, the one that Tejpal could have written and didn’t write. He’s proved in The Alchemy of Desire that he has a writer’s mind, senses, skills, imagination. In his next book, perhaps he’ll get the phallus of chance, to quote one of his catchphrases, to fit rather better in the hole of history.
The Alchemy of Desire
Tarun J Tejpal
HarperCollins,
Rs 500, 518 pages
Back in 1956, Junichiro Tanizaki wrote The Key, a study of a marriage in deep trouble where the protagonists attempt to bridge the abyss by maintaining diaries. Each one reads the other’s accounts of their most intimate moments; both keep up the fiction that the diaries are really private, off limits. Two decades later, Nagisa Oshima produced In the Realm of the Senses, a controversial ode to the body’s demands and desires: “"In the ecstasy of love the cry is 'I'm dying.' But as one becomes older, the cry becomes ‘Kill me now’."
Both these men recognised the sad truth about sex and desire, often conflated with Newton’s law by schoolboys: what goes up must come down. Their concern was with what lay beyond the surface of the body, with the nature of obsession. Tarun J Tejpal’s first novel recognises the same truth, but flinches from this recognition, seeking a happy ending against all odds. In a cheerfully phallic novel, this is the ultimate phallacy.
There are four stories compressed within the 518 pages of this long, overstretched novel, and Tejpal tells only one with conviction. But that tale is a curiously touching account of the life of a young couple--the narrator and Fizz--as they explore the limits of desire and discover none. The passion in the prose is real as Tejpal lays out the small stumbling steps of courtship, draws the first trials and triumphs of setting up house, invoking a relationship so complete that it needs no outside validation. In an India weighed down by the dark knowledge of Partition, the frank delight these two take in each other’s bodies is the only innocent thing left, their rewriting of history in bed the only true chronicle, their lovers’ nicknames and road journals the only footnotes necessary.
To those who knew Delhi and grew up with a certain kind of Partition story, who remember the trauma that tore Punjab into little pieces before Bluestar, this part of The Alchemy of Desire will be illuminated by familiarity--often over-familiarity, as when Tejpal mines the mundane endlessly. For other readers, Tejpal has the born writer’s instinct for the telling phrase; he will make what they never experienced seem part of the fabric of their memories.
At the bottom of the Sukhna Lake lies the first story that threatens the happiness of the protagonists, an aborted novel, the narrator’s grand attempt at a sweeping saga of Partition that miscarried badly. His attempts to write on an old Brother typewriter with clacking keys initially bring him and his wife even closer together, desire fused with ambition and creativity. When the novel haemorrhages, the wounds inflicted on their relationship are difficult to staunch. As the narrator’s creativity judders and stalls, their marriage goes into a tailspin—if writing is a seat-of-the-pants activity, writer’s block affects the other side, so to speak, and there’s no Viagra yet for impotence in authors.
This is where The Alchemy of Desire could have taken on territory relatively unexplored, where Tejpal could have boldly moved into the realm of what lies beyond the senses. But he invokes a deus-ex-machina; the grandmother whose own Partition history made her disapprove of the narrator’s marriage with a Muslim girl leaves them a legacy, with which they buy a house in the hills. The house comes with a mysterious portrait and a mysterious chest containing mysterious diaries, all of which tell the story of a ghost from the past who is far too literal a device for this reviewer’s taste.
Catherine’s story is supposed to illumine a different kind of appetite, one that moves from mindlessly erotic promiscuity to a warped and magnificent obsession. But in the face of the narrator’s fascination with Catherine, his marriage and the reader’s interest are the first casualties. This shouldn’t happen: Catherine’s tale has the right appurtenances, mixing Paris nightlife with palace intrigue in India, unveiling a forbidden love story between brown and white, with generous doses of skullduggery and murder and even a Harlem interlude thrown in for good measure.
None of the sound and fury and colour can mask the novel's essential emptiness. The heart of The Alchemy of Desire is the story of the ebbing and resuscitation of desire, but once you move past page 300 or so, you’re all too aware that the novel is on a pacemaker. There is an ending, clinically if not emotionally satisfying; there is a ghostly encounter of the very close kind. That brings us to the fourth story, the one that Tejpal could have written and didn’t write. He’s proved in The Alchemy of Desire that he has a writer’s mind, senses, skills, imagination. In his next book, perhaps he’ll get the phallus of chance, to quote one of his catchphrases, to fit rather better in the hole of history.
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