(Published in the Business Standard year-end special issue on books, December 2009)
THE FICTION LIST:
A Gate at the Stairs: Lorrie Moore (Knopf)
Moore’s novel of a woman growing up in the American Midwest is funny and heartbreaking in turn, and deserves all the praise it’s got.
Love and Obstacles: Aleksandar Hemon (Riverhead)
One of the best new writers of our times puts Bosnia on the map with these taut, linked stories of immigrant longings, memories and frustrations.
Too Much Happiness: Alice Munro (Chatto & Windus)
One of Munro’s best collections yet, this is all the evidence you need that the short story is a thriving form, and that Munro is one of the most rewarding writers of our times.
Wolf Hall: Hillary Mantel (4th Estate)
The Booker-winning historical novel examines the political machinations and blood-and-guts of Cromwell’s time, in an age where “man is wolf to man”.
The Museum of Innocence: Orhan Pamuk (Knopf)
Love and obsession in Istanbul; and Pamuk collects the objects in his story in a real-life museum.
Brooklyn: Colm Toibin (Viking)
An Irish immigrant travels to 1950s America in this novel of the discovery of a country, and the making of heartwrenching but necessary choices. One of Toibin’s masterworks.
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders: Daniyal Muenuddin (Random House)
This gently incisive first collection of short stories set in Pakistan is Tolstoyan in both range and understanding. Definitely a writer to watch.
Home: Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Few writers understand the human heart as well as Robinson. The sequel to Gilead pits faith against despair, shelter against experience, in this wise, resonant novel.
Love and Summer: William Trevor (Viking)
A woman brought up as a foundling, a man about to leave home forever; Trevor makes magic of these simple ingredients.
The City & The City: China Mieville (Del Rey)
Mieville explodes through dark and rich territory in his latest futuristic sojourn.
Your Face Tomorrow 3: Javier Marias (Chatto & Windus)
The concluding part of Marias’ trilogy reinvents the Cold War spy novel, blending literary fiction with the conventions of the thriller in a spectacular mix.
The Little Stranger: Sarah Waters (Hachette)
This evocative ghost story set in a Victorian house is a classic tale of deception and quietly climactic horror.
Nocturnes: Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber)
The Japanese master offers stories linked by music and musicians in this delicate and moving collection.
Summertime: J M Coetzee (Harvill Secker)
Coetzee fictionalises Coetzee, in this tale of a South African writer seen through the eyes of the women he’s tried and failed to love.
Year of the Flood: Margaret Atwood (Doubleday)
Atwood sticks with SF territory in this clever, apocalyptic follow-up to Oryx and Crake.
The Children's Book: AS Byatt
Children's literature and the perils of growing up, both addressed by Byatt at the top of her form.
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi: Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)
A jaded journalist in Venice, a pilgrim in Varanasi: Dyer romps through this delightful novel with considerable verve.
Cutting for Stone: Abraham Verghese (Random House)
Verghese’s first excursion into fiction is a sweeping, ambitious historical novel.
Solo: Rana Dasgupta (HarperCollins)
Skill and craft fuel this view of Europe from one of its more neglected literary corners.
The Story of a Widow: Musharraf Ali Farooqi (Picador)
Farooqi proves that he’s as good a novelist as a translator with this quiet, satisfying tale of a woman in transit.
The Immortals: Amit Chaudhuri (Picador)
Music forms the backbone of this intensely literary work, which showcases all of Chaudhuri’s lyrical skills.
The Storyteller’s Tale: Omair Ahmad (Penguin)
Ahmad brings back the fable in this delicate and curiously modern tale, despite its medieval setting.
The Story of My Assassins: Tarun Tejpal (HarperCollins)
Tejpal’s journalistic skills flesh out this ambitious novel of darkness and violence in present-day India.
(Caveat: Because of my previous association with Tranquebar as an editor, all Tranquebar picks were made on the basis of the recommendations of other reviewers and critics.)
If It Is Sweet: Mridula Koshy (Tranquebar)
The Shakti Bhatt award-winning collection of debut short stories that map the secret worlds hidden in cities as disparate as Delhi and Los Angeles.
Eunuch Park: Palash Krishna Mehrotra (Penguin)
A brilliant first collection of short stories steeped in black humour explores masculinity and the changing face of urban India.
Arzee the Dwarf: Chandrahas Choudhury (HarperCollins)
A new perspective on Bombay, from the point of view of a dwarf obsessed with a crumbling cinema hall.
A Pack of Lies: Urmilla Deshpande (Tranquebar)
A young woman discovers freedom, sensuality and identity as she struggles with a troubled family history.
Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Short Stories, edited by Ruchir Joshi
India’s first contemporary collection of erotica brings in mofussil lust, Chugtai’s infamous quilt, and a very unusual wedding celebration.
THE BEST OF POPULAR FICTION: THE TOP FIVE
The Lost Symbol: Dan Brown (Doubleday)
Though the kindest word critics had for Dan Brown was “inescapable”, his latest Freemasonry-in-Washington saga hit the bestseller lists.
Two States: The Story of My Marriage: Chetan Bhagat (Rupa)
India’s answer to Dan Brown explores the venerable institution of the great Indian marriage—fans love it.
Under the Dome: Stephen King (Scribner)
The horror-meister delivers one of his best thrillers yet in this SF-influenced tale set in a besieged city.
My Friend Sancho: Amit Varma (Hachette)
Varma’s first novel explores a fake encounter in Mumbai, and bridged the divide between popular and literary fiction in India.
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest: Stieg Larsson (Maclehose Press)
Lisbeth Salander must clear her name of false charges in the final volume of the late Larsson’s bestselling Millennium trilogy.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Books in 2009: What authors were reading
(From the Business Standard special year-end issue on books, published in December 2009)
THE BEST READS OF THE YEAR:
Gurcharan Das, author of The Difficulty of Being Good:
My choice would be the battle books--Books Six to Nine--of the Mahabharata in the recent, beautiful, parallel texts in English and Sanskrit published by the Clay Sanskrit Series/New York University Press (2005-2008). Ten volumes of the epic have appeared in this series. Like the Book of Bhishma preceding them, the epic has named the battle books after the successive leaders of Duryodhana’s army. Notable for its poetic rendering is Drona by Vaughan Pilikian but Adam Bowles’ Karna and Justin Meiland’s Shalya are also impressive. Some of the verses from Pilikian's translation seem to jump of the page.
I only wish that Clay had employed the Sanskrit Critical Edition, compiled painstakingly over half a century by comparing several hundred versions from across India and beyond. Clay follows the ‘vulgate Mahabharata’ of the 17th century scholar, Pandit Nilakantha Chaturdhara (Kinjawadekar R, The Mahābhāratam with the commentary Bharata Bhawadeepa of Nilakantha, 2nd ed. 6 vols, New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corp, 1979.) Hence, its numbering of chapters and verses is different.
Alice Albinia, author of Empires of the Indus:
There’s been something interminable – literally – about previous
translations of the Mahabharata. Bookness does not become this
epic-poem-genealogy-story, and there’s no reason why it should. Indian
audiences have generally absorbed it as a recital or performance;
previous translations into English have been cursed by its
extraordinary length; so this abridged version by John D. Smith is a
feat. The summaries and abridgements aid the flow, bringing out the
operatic, or sometimes even soap-operatic, quality of people telling,
and re-telling stories to each other.
It’s always pleasing to have one’s prejudices about a book confounded.
Last night I read Summertime by J.M. Coetzee, expecting to find it
self-referential and dull. But I liked it. I liked the ‘dour comedy’,
and the teasing overlap between memoir and fiction, and the questions
it poses about politics and truth. It’s good.
William Dalrymple, author of Nine Lives:
Sam Miller’s Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity teems with strange stories and bizarre quiddities, rich discoveries and unexpected diversions that will delight Delhi lovers and baffle and amaze those who have so far remained oblivious to its erratic charms. Doggedly pursuing his subject through the meandering back lanes of the old city, its spiralling markets and its gleaming new highways, Sam Miller has created a book that is both a quest and a love letter, and one which is as pleasingly eccentric and anarchic as its subject.
No less eccentric is Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. I loved its brave and even reckless quirkiness (why all that focus on animals—but then why not?) and thought it an earthy, revelatory and brilliant book by one of the world’s greatest Sanskrit scholars, and certainly its most unpredictable. It’s a model of how scholars can make their work accessible to a general rather than an exclusively academic audience, without any way losing their authority
[Other Rooms, Other Wonders is an astonishing collection of short stories by the new star of Pakistani fiction, Daniyal Mueenuddin. Like Turgenev, Mueenuddin creates a world peopled by rural folk, generously sketched with a wonderful freshness and lightness. I also hugely enjoyed Basharat Peer’s moving and beautifully written Curfewed Night, a worthy winter of the Crossword prize, John Guy's Indian Temple Sculpture, and Shazia Omar’s Like a Diamond in the Sky: I predict she will be one of stars of the next Jaipur Literary Festival, which this year runs from the 21st-25th Jan.]
For me, though this was the year of Cormac McCarthy. There is no question in my mind he is one of the two or three the greatest living novelists writing in English today, and The Road for my money the great dark masterpiece of this decade.
Aravind Adiga, author of White Tiger:
Thomas Pynchon is becoming unfashionable, but his latest novel, Inherent Vice, a detective story set at the end of the psychedelic 60s, reminds us why he is worth reading. If you can put up with the bad puns and the sometimes heavy-handed caricature, you'll find an edgy, energetic, and often very disturbing book.
In Soumya Bhattacharya’s If I Could Tell You, a man who has always wanted to make it as a writer tells his daughter his life's story. Opening with quiet, precise strokes, Bhattacharya's new novel builds up to a terrifying--and ambiguous--crescendo.
Sam Miller, author of Delhi: Adventures in a Mega-City:
My favourite book of the year is, without question, The Running Sky by Tim Dee. It's a remarkable memoir by a man who is obsessed with birds - and always has been. It's a graphically unsentimental book, about a subject which, hitherto, was of no interest to me. Dee writes beautiful prose which never collapses into the breathless, saccharine hyperbole of so much 'nature writing.'
My other book of the year is about Delhi, and no it's not mine, but a gorgeously produced, weighty volume called New Delhi: Making of a Capital by Malvika Singh and Rudrangshu Mukherjee. The text is an excellent introduction to the building of New Delhi and the photographs are extraordinary. They include superb images of the blasting of Raisina Hill to create the plateau on which Rashtrapati Bhavan was built, and another that shows the Indian Parliament, mid construction, looking like a bomb-site.
Namita Devidayal, author of The Music Room:
I loved Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road. After it won the Oscar in 2009, I decided to read the book instead of watching the film, and loved how it unravelled the dark side in a seemingly normal family. I found it particularly inspiring because i am working on a similar kind of novel -- about a big happy Indian family and the duplicity that takes place...how things that get pushed under the carpet only to pop up later in a dream or through a child. For, the past is the present.
I also loved Tarquin Hall's The Case of the Missing Servant, where a marriage broker turned “most private investigator” tracks down a missing maidservant in Delhi-- it was light and funny and perceptive!
Ruchir Joshi, editor of Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Anthology of Erotic Stories
I've been reading Anthony Beevor's books on the second world war. I started with `Stalingrad' and then, having begun `Berlin', I made a detour into `D-Day', just to get the chronology right. Beevor's is an amazing talent, he's someone who can score facts and testimony into a gripping narrative symphony on the bloody grandeur, the tragedy and complete absurdity of war, a compostion where you can simultaneously hear the waterfall of massed brass and rhythm along with the faintest notes of an oboe or a violin.
In the first book, you can see and understand the sweep of large history as the German Army rumbles across the steppe, almost unopposed; you can feel the baffled frustration of the star Generals of the Wehrmacht as their collective greatcoat catches on the large, rusty nail of Stalingrad; you shiver with the young Soviet Frontnik as he attacks the panzers with rationed ammunition, the SS facing him and the NKVD waiting behind to shoot him if he tries to retreat; you can see Samuel Beckett in the detail of the defeated, starving, frostbitten German soldier as he scoops off a lump of live lice and throws it at his Russian guard, knowing full well that this could mean instant death.
Weaving through soldiers' love letters and brilliantly collated army memos, you stumble into the cross-machinations of three old men in Tehran and Yalta as they carve up the world among themselves, an ailing Roosevelt almost enamoured by the wily Stalin, ignoring Churchill's huge and accurate misgivings about the Georgian's post-war intentions.
Moving west, in `D-Day' you witness the gargantuan logistical madness as Operation Overlord goes into first gear, participate in the gamble with the weather which could have meant thousands of lives lost and the war prolonged by months, suffer with the Americans stuck on their landing boat, suspended between the roiling sea and the toilet chute of their British transport, cursing and shouting as the oblivious Royal Navy sailors empty their bowels on the GIs' heads and heavy combat gear.
As the competing`Yanks' and `Limeys' move into the deadly maze of Normandy hedgerows, you see the petty jealousies of the generals on both sides, the peacocking stupidity of Montgomery, the bluster of Patton, the senility of Von Rundtsedt, the fury of Rommel teh first one on the German side to do his sums and come up with the answer: total defeat. Across all three books a masterful portrait is also built up of one Adolf Hitler and his circle of poisonous sycophants and you understand eaxctly to what extent the war was lost by this madman as it was won by the Soviet Army with a little help from the Allies. Finally and most importantly, because of Beevor's subtle rigour and supple story-telling skills you understand how the British Empire ended, why the Cold War began, why the post-war United States behaved as it did, how, in the short span of those five years was compacted the course of the next seventy.
(Compiled by Rrishi Raote and Nilanjana S Roy)
THE BEST READS OF THE YEAR:
Gurcharan Das, author of The Difficulty of Being Good:
My choice would be the battle books--Books Six to Nine--of the Mahabharata in the recent, beautiful, parallel texts in English and Sanskrit published by the Clay Sanskrit Series/New York University Press (2005-2008). Ten volumes of the epic have appeared in this series. Like the Book of Bhishma preceding them, the epic has named the battle books after the successive leaders of Duryodhana’s army. Notable for its poetic rendering is Drona by Vaughan Pilikian but Adam Bowles’ Karna and Justin Meiland’s Shalya are also impressive. Some of the verses from Pilikian's translation seem to jump of the page.
I only wish that Clay had employed the Sanskrit Critical Edition, compiled painstakingly over half a century by comparing several hundred versions from across India and beyond. Clay follows the ‘vulgate Mahabharata’ of the 17th century scholar, Pandit Nilakantha Chaturdhara (Kinjawadekar R, The Mahābhāratam with the commentary Bharata Bhawadeepa of Nilakantha, 2nd ed. 6 vols, New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corp, 1979.) Hence, its numbering of chapters and verses is different.
Alice Albinia, author of Empires of the Indus:
There’s been something interminable – literally – about previous
translations of the Mahabharata. Bookness does not become this
epic-poem-genealogy-story, and there’s no reason why it should. Indian
audiences have generally absorbed it as a recital or performance;
previous translations into English have been cursed by its
extraordinary length; so this abridged version by John D. Smith is a
feat. The summaries and abridgements aid the flow, bringing out the
operatic, or sometimes even soap-operatic, quality of people telling,
and re-telling stories to each other.
It’s always pleasing to have one’s prejudices about a book confounded.
Last night I read Summertime by J.M. Coetzee, expecting to find it
self-referential and dull. But I liked it. I liked the ‘dour comedy’,
and the teasing overlap between memoir and fiction, and the questions
it poses about politics and truth. It’s good.
William Dalrymple, author of Nine Lives:
Sam Miller’s Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity teems with strange stories and bizarre quiddities, rich discoveries and unexpected diversions that will delight Delhi lovers and baffle and amaze those who have so far remained oblivious to its erratic charms. Doggedly pursuing his subject through the meandering back lanes of the old city, its spiralling markets and its gleaming new highways, Sam Miller has created a book that is both a quest and a love letter, and one which is as pleasingly eccentric and anarchic as its subject.
No less eccentric is Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. I loved its brave and even reckless quirkiness (why all that focus on animals—but then why not?) and thought it an earthy, revelatory and brilliant book by one of the world’s greatest Sanskrit scholars, and certainly its most unpredictable. It’s a model of how scholars can make their work accessible to a general rather than an exclusively academic audience, without any way losing their authority
[Other Rooms, Other Wonders is an astonishing collection of short stories by the new star of Pakistani fiction, Daniyal Mueenuddin. Like Turgenev, Mueenuddin creates a world peopled by rural folk, generously sketched with a wonderful freshness and lightness. I also hugely enjoyed Basharat Peer’s moving and beautifully written Curfewed Night, a worthy winter of the Crossword prize, John Guy's Indian Temple Sculpture, and Shazia Omar’s Like a Diamond in the Sky: I predict she will be one of stars of the next Jaipur Literary Festival, which this year runs from the 21st-25th Jan.]
For me, though this was the year of Cormac McCarthy. There is no question in my mind he is one of the two or three the greatest living novelists writing in English today, and The Road for my money the great dark masterpiece of this decade.
Aravind Adiga, author of White Tiger:
Thomas Pynchon is becoming unfashionable, but his latest novel, Inherent Vice, a detective story set at the end of the psychedelic 60s, reminds us why he is worth reading. If you can put up with the bad puns and the sometimes heavy-handed caricature, you'll find an edgy, energetic, and often very disturbing book.
In Soumya Bhattacharya’s If I Could Tell You, a man who has always wanted to make it as a writer tells his daughter his life's story. Opening with quiet, precise strokes, Bhattacharya's new novel builds up to a terrifying--and ambiguous--crescendo.
Sam Miller, author of Delhi: Adventures in a Mega-City:
My favourite book of the year is, without question, The Running Sky by Tim Dee. It's a remarkable memoir by a man who is obsessed with birds - and always has been. It's a graphically unsentimental book, about a subject which, hitherto, was of no interest to me. Dee writes beautiful prose which never collapses into the breathless, saccharine hyperbole of so much 'nature writing.'
My other book of the year is about Delhi, and no it's not mine, but a gorgeously produced, weighty volume called New Delhi: Making of a Capital by Malvika Singh and Rudrangshu Mukherjee. The text is an excellent introduction to the building of New Delhi and the photographs are extraordinary. They include superb images of the blasting of Raisina Hill to create the plateau on which Rashtrapati Bhavan was built, and another that shows the Indian Parliament, mid construction, looking like a bomb-site.
Namita Devidayal, author of The Music Room:
I loved Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road. After it won the Oscar in 2009, I decided to read the book instead of watching the film, and loved how it unravelled the dark side in a seemingly normal family. I found it particularly inspiring because i am working on a similar kind of novel -- about a big happy Indian family and the duplicity that takes place...how things that get pushed under the carpet only to pop up later in a dream or through a child. For, the past is the present.
I also loved Tarquin Hall's The Case of the Missing Servant, where a marriage broker turned “most private investigator” tracks down a missing maidservant in Delhi-- it was light and funny and perceptive!
Ruchir Joshi, editor of Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Anthology of Erotic Stories
I've been reading Anthony Beevor's books on the second world war. I started with `Stalingrad' and then, having begun `Berlin', I made a detour into `D-Day', just to get the chronology right. Beevor's is an amazing talent, he's someone who can score facts and testimony into a gripping narrative symphony on the bloody grandeur, the tragedy and complete absurdity of war, a compostion where you can simultaneously hear the waterfall of massed brass and rhythm along with the faintest notes of an oboe or a violin.
In the first book, you can see and understand the sweep of large history as the German Army rumbles across the steppe, almost unopposed; you can feel the baffled frustration of the star Generals of the Wehrmacht as their collective greatcoat catches on the large, rusty nail of Stalingrad; you shiver with the young Soviet Frontnik as he attacks the panzers with rationed ammunition, the SS facing him and the NKVD waiting behind to shoot him if he tries to retreat; you can see Samuel Beckett in the detail of the defeated, starving, frostbitten German soldier as he scoops off a lump of live lice and throws it at his Russian guard, knowing full well that this could mean instant death.
Weaving through soldiers' love letters and brilliantly collated army memos, you stumble into the cross-machinations of three old men in Tehran and Yalta as they carve up the world among themselves, an ailing Roosevelt almost enamoured by the wily Stalin, ignoring Churchill's huge and accurate misgivings about the Georgian's post-war intentions.
Moving west, in `D-Day' you witness the gargantuan logistical madness as Operation Overlord goes into first gear, participate in the gamble with the weather which could have meant thousands of lives lost and the war prolonged by months, suffer with the Americans stuck on their landing boat, suspended between the roiling sea and the toilet chute of their British transport, cursing and shouting as the oblivious Royal Navy sailors empty their bowels on the GIs' heads and heavy combat gear.
As the competing`Yanks' and `Limeys' move into the deadly maze of Normandy hedgerows, you see the petty jealousies of the generals on both sides, the peacocking stupidity of Montgomery, the bluster of Patton, the senility of Von Rundtsedt, the fury of Rommel teh first one on the German side to do his sums and come up with the answer: total defeat. Across all three books a masterful portrait is also built up of one Adolf Hitler and his circle of poisonous sycophants and you understand eaxctly to what extent the war was lost by this madman as it was won by the Soviet Army with a little help from the Allies. Finally and most importantly, because of Beevor's subtle rigour and supple story-telling skills you understand how the British Empire ended, why the Cold War began, why the post-war United States behaved as it did, how, in the short span of those five years was compacted the course of the next seventy.
(Compiled by Rrishi Raote and Nilanjana S Roy)
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
The BS Column: From Dune to Cyberabad
(Published in the Business Standard, December 8, 2009)If a future historian were to examine the ways of humanity via a library of science fiction, these would be the scholar’s conclusions. Most rocket scientists and space explorers are white and male. UFOs, ETs, alien life-forms and spaceships prefer to visit the United States of America and large parts of Europe, with the occasional foray into Japan and very rarely, deserted patches of the globe.
Astronauts and spaceship crews are chiefly drawn from the West, though an occasional Indian (usually a doctor) or Chinese member (usually a mathematically gifted technician) might find a place on board alongside the token blacks. Africans, Brazilians (and other Latin Americans), and Indonesians or Malaysians rarely explore space, though Russians often do, and even Australians might. (Canadians and New Zealanders are conspicuous by their absence.) Robots, androids and humanoids are either based on Caucasian or more infrequently Japanese models, but evil aliens may reflect certain racial stereotypes of the time.
Around 2006, SF author Ian McDonald began exploring landscapes outside the Western world as possible terrain for speculative fiction. His River of Gods offered a Balkanised India, while Brasyl travelled to both the Brazil of the future and a Brazil of the past. He’s just out with Cyberabad Days, and his vision of India of 2047 is both riveting and eerily plausible.
McDonald has travelled extensively in India over a period of years, but sees himself as a tourist rather than an old India hand. This allows him to make the occasional gora mistake, as when he refers to “fields of dhal” when “fields of masoor” might have been more accurate, but these errors are minor. What makes Cyberabad Days work as a short story collection is not just that he writes brilliant SF; it’s that he creates an incredibly recognisable view of a future India.
In the hands of a seasoned SF master, India/ Cyberabad emerges as a fractured state, torn by increasingly vicious water wars. Marriage bureaus augment the shaadi.com routine with the assistance of aeais (artificial intelligences); hijras transform into “nutes”, taking on the slick mantle of future technology; steel monkey-robots can be found on the pink walls of Jaipur; Ardhanarishva Clinics assist in gender-transformation surgery; and the rivers, down to the Ganges, are “starved and frail” across the land.
One of McDonald’s aims, as stated in his interviews, is to shift the focus of SF to the developing world—a shift that, as he says, should have happened internally, with Colombian or Bangladeshi writers, for instance, joining the phalanx of Indian SF writers. To some extent, that process is happening. Samit Basu’s Gameworld series is an unselfconscious fantasy saga set in a very Indian world, with explicitly desi references. Manjula Padmanabhan’s more recent Escape explores a dystopian world where women are exterminated as a matter of course. Padmanabhan didn’t name her country of the future, but as she says, references to food, clothes and geographical terrain make it clear that her dystopia is a very Indian one. It’s influenced by the present-day phenomenon of a skewed gender ratio caused by the killing of female foetuses and infants by Indian families who want sons, not daughters.
Authors like Anil Menon, Anshumani Ruddra and Basu also have an understanding of the workings of the international market—explicitly Indian SF and fantasy is less saleable than more conventional works set in a recognisably Western world. Anil Menon bluntly counselled Indian authors to look to a local rather than a global audience, though writers like Ashok Banker have had some success with wider audiences—Banker’s updated fantasy reworking of the Ramayana found many readers outside India. It’s not an easy market for writers in India—or Brazil—to penetrate, though, and perhaps McDonald’s success with Cyberabad Days, Brasyl and River of Gods will open those firmly shut doors a crack wider. There will need to be several McDonalds (or Orson Scott Cards) before editors and publishers abroad begin accepting SF set in the developing world.
What we need is for the wheel to come full circle. From the 1850s onwards, India saw a curious phenomenon—a healthy appetite for local science fiction, especially in Bengal and Maharashtra. Early Bengali SF writers wrote about explorations to Venus, automated homes and suitably respectful household robots. One of the great pioneers, Premendra Mitra, allowed his imagination to aoar in the other direction—outwards from India to the wider world.
In his classic Piprer Puran (Saga of the Aunts), Mitra writes of the invasion of “monstrous Ants” who bring the cities of Peru, Venezuela and Ecuador down. Their story, told in the early 20th century, is narrated by a multicultural cast: Asesh Roy, Senor Sabatini, Sukhomoy Sarkar and Don Perito. By setting his SF in Brazil and India, Ian McDonald is returning a very old compliment.
The BS Column: Faiz Ahmed Faiz: the poet in prison
(Published in the Business Standard, November 2009)
The thousands who still recite Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry honoured his 25th death anniversary earlier this month in various ways—through mushairas, book releases and some, Faiz-style, raised a glass of single malt to his memory.
Faiz, born some four decades before Independence, has been claimed by three countries: he was born and brought up in pre-Independence India, made the decision to remain in Pakistan, where he graced the coffee houses of Lahore for many years, and is honoured by many Bangladeshis for his impassioned poetry opposing the massacres that accompanied the bloody birth of that country.
As far as I know, there have been no celebrations of Faiz in Sargodha jail and Lyallpur jail, where he was held in solitary confinement for four years, from March 1951 onwards. Faiz was arrested as part of the Rawalpindi conspiracy, under the antiquated Bengal Regulations of 1818 that deal with crimes of sedition against the state. Faiz Ahmed Faiz was a friend of Major General Akbar Khan, who led a failed coup against Liaqat Ali Khan’s government in Pakistan, but the level of his involvement in the coup was relatively low. He was one of the last of the 15 accused to be released from jail, in 1955.
As Ted Genoways has written elsewhere, Faiz’s prison experiences were perhaps the most formative in a life already shaped by history. He spent a considerable portion of the prison years in solitary confinement—an unusual experience for the man who was at the centre of gatherings of poets, writers, intellectuals and political thinkers. His wife, Alys, and he exchanged letters through these years—Faiz wrote over 140 letters to her in this time. These are collected in Dear Heart, and are well worth reading.
In 'A Prison Evening', Faiz wrote:
“This thought keeps consoling me
though tyrants may command that lamps be smashed
in rooms where lovers are destined to meet,
they cannot snuff out the moon, so today
nor tomorrow, no tyranny will succeed…”
The prison years, he said later, gave him quiet time to write. He produced two of his greatest works, Dast-e-Saba and Zindan nama, in this period, adapting his techniques to the exigencies of prison life. Deprived of paper and pen in solitary, Faiz composed four-line verses called q’itas instead; they were easy to memorise.
Poets seem to be imprisoned far more often than other kinds of writers, and perhaps a nation’s record on human rights might also be judged by the number of poets it holds in its cells. In the months before Faiz’s anniversary, Vietnam finally pardoned and honoured four poets who had been persecuted for their writings against the earlier regime. Two had died by the time the pardon was issued. Samina Malik, the Lyrical Terrorist, was held in Britain for her provocative but not terribly good verse extolling beheadings and terrorism. She was released on appeal in 2008.
Burma holds many of its poets in cells. Especially celebrated is the poet Saw Wai, who wrote the apparently innocuous ‘February the Fourteenth’. Only close examination revealed that the first words of each line spell out: “General Than Shwe is crazy with power.” Perhaps the best understanding of what life in jail means comes from Abbas Khidr, the Iraqi poet tortured by Saddam’s regime: “You leave the prison behind, but you carry it within you, in your mind.”
For Faiz, the prison years were different. He had imagined he would be held for a few weeks, perhaps a month; but he said later that his four years in jail taught him patience and brought him peace. “I sometimes fear that I might turn into a saint when I get out of jail,” he quipped. His political views remained unchanged by his time behind bars. He had been a communist, was fearlessly outspoken—one of his poems, ‘Poem to a Political Leader’, criticised Gandhi, and he made his sorrow at Partition clear in these famous, often-quoted lines:
“Ye daagh daagh ujaalaa,
ye shab-gaziida sahar,
Vo intizaar thaa jis-kaa, ye vo sahar to nahiin..
(This stained light,
this half-bitten dawn
Is not the dawn we had long awaited).”
Prison foreshadowed his years of exile in Beirut, an exile from Lahore and Pakistan that would be followed in turn by dislocation when he had to leave Beirut again. The late poet Agha Shahid Ali wrote with understanding of the imprint these years left on Faiz:
"Twenty days before your death you finally
wrote, this time from Lahore, that after the sack
of Beirut you had no address... I
had gone from poem to poem, and found
you once, terribly alone, speaking
to yourself…”
Perhaps, as the tributes pour in to Faiz this year, and we recite his verses at mushairas or just among gatherings of friends, it is Agha’s words in ‘Homage to Faiz Ahmed Faiz’ that capture the poet’s legacy best:
“I listened:
and you became, like memory,
necessary.”
The thousands who still recite Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry honoured his 25th death anniversary earlier this month in various ways—through mushairas, book releases and some, Faiz-style, raised a glass of single malt to his memory.
Faiz, born some four decades before Independence, has been claimed by three countries: he was born and brought up in pre-Independence India, made the decision to remain in Pakistan, where he graced the coffee houses of Lahore for many years, and is honoured by many Bangladeshis for his impassioned poetry opposing the massacres that accompanied the bloody birth of that country.
As far as I know, there have been no celebrations of Faiz in Sargodha jail and Lyallpur jail, where he was held in solitary confinement for four years, from March 1951 onwards. Faiz was arrested as part of the Rawalpindi conspiracy, under the antiquated Bengal Regulations of 1818 that deal with crimes of sedition against the state. Faiz Ahmed Faiz was a friend of Major General Akbar Khan, who led a failed coup against Liaqat Ali Khan’s government in Pakistan, but the level of his involvement in the coup was relatively low. He was one of the last of the 15 accused to be released from jail, in 1955.
As Ted Genoways has written elsewhere, Faiz’s prison experiences were perhaps the most formative in a life already shaped by history. He spent a considerable portion of the prison years in solitary confinement—an unusual experience for the man who was at the centre of gatherings of poets, writers, intellectuals and political thinkers. His wife, Alys, and he exchanged letters through these years—Faiz wrote over 140 letters to her in this time. These are collected in Dear Heart, and are well worth reading.
In 'A Prison Evening', Faiz wrote:
“This thought keeps consoling me
though tyrants may command that lamps be smashed
in rooms where lovers are destined to meet,
they cannot snuff out the moon, so today
nor tomorrow, no tyranny will succeed…”
The prison years, he said later, gave him quiet time to write. He produced two of his greatest works, Dast-e-Saba and Zindan nama, in this period, adapting his techniques to the exigencies of prison life. Deprived of paper and pen in solitary, Faiz composed four-line verses called q’itas instead; they were easy to memorise.
Poets seem to be imprisoned far more often than other kinds of writers, and perhaps a nation’s record on human rights might also be judged by the number of poets it holds in its cells. In the months before Faiz’s anniversary, Vietnam finally pardoned and honoured four poets who had been persecuted for their writings against the earlier regime. Two had died by the time the pardon was issued. Samina Malik, the Lyrical Terrorist, was held in Britain for her provocative but not terribly good verse extolling beheadings and terrorism. She was released on appeal in 2008.
Burma holds many of its poets in cells. Especially celebrated is the poet Saw Wai, who wrote the apparently innocuous ‘February the Fourteenth’. Only close examination revealed that the first words of each line spell out: “General Than Shwe is crazy with power.” Perhaps the best understanding of what life in jail means comes from Abbas Khidr, the Iraqi poet tortured by Saddam’s regime: “You leave the prison behind, but you carry it within you, in your mind.”
For Faiz, the prison years were different. He had imagined he would be held for a few weeks, perhaps a month; but he said later that his four years in jail taught him patience and brought him peace. “I sometimes fear that I might turn into a saint when I get out of jail,” he quipped. His political views remained unchanged by his time behind bars. He had been a communist, was fearlessly outspoken—one of his poems, ‘Poem to a Political Leader’, criticised Gandhi, and he made his sorrow at Partition clear in these famous, often-quoted lines:
“Ye daagh daagh ujaalaa,
ye shab-gaziida sahar,
Vo intizaar thaa jis-kaa, ye vo sahar to nahiin..
(This stained light,
this half-bitten dawn
Is not the dawn we had long awaited).”
Prison foreshadowed his years of exile in Beirut, an exile from Lahore and Pakistan that would be followed in turn by dislocation when he had to leave Beirut again. The late poet Agha Shahid Ali wrote with understanding of the imprint these years left on Faiz:
"Twenty days before your death you finally
wrote, this time from Lahore, that after the sack
of Beirut you had no address... I
had gone from poem to poem, and found
you once, terribly alone, speaking
to yourself…”
Perhaps, as the tributes pour in to Faiz this year, and we recite his verses at mushairas or just among gatherings of friends, it is Agha’s words in ‘Homage to Faiz Ahmed Faiz’ that capture the poet’s legacy best:
“I listened:
and you became, like memory,
necessary.”
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
The BS Column: Darwin's Savage Reviewers
(Published in the Business Standard, November 24, 2009)
On this day, one hundred and fifty years ago, the publishing house of John Murray brought out a condensed and abridged treatise on The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, in a first printing of 1,250 copies.
The author, Charles Darwin, was delighted when John Murray ordered a second printing of 3,000 copies in the wake of public demand, and when the first printing in the United States of America ran to 2,500 copies. He considered this tremendously successful for a scientific work on the then obscure field that would become known as evolutionary biology. Over the next 150 years, Origin of Species would become one of the most widely read, reprinted and discussed works in the history of science.
Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection have had a massive influence on almost every aspect of contemporary thought. Companies and governments alike often abuse the principle of survival of the fittest. The emphasis on the evolution from man from other species has led animal rights thinkers to the argument that we will, eventually, have to cede non-human species more respect and rights than we are currently willing to offer. And Darwin’s exploration of mating practices in the animal kingdom as part of sexual selection influences a slew of dating games and tactics. It’s incredibly difficult, if you’re a thinking person in the 21st century, to try and imagine a world where we didn’t take the principles of evolution for granted.
Except in one field, where the opposition to Darwin’s The Origin of Species has always been fierce—religion. In the wake of the publication of Origin, the Church found itself split. The Bishop of Oxford came out fiercely against Darwin’s theory of evolution, as did the Church of England faction in general; but liberal Christians were able to support Darwin’s ideas.
Darwin followed these debates with great emotion, complaining bitterly against one reviewer: “But the manner in which he drags in immortality, & sets the Priests at me & leaves me to their mercies, is base.” A few lines later, he was more composed, thanking his friend J D Hooker for his support: “You have cockered me up to that extent, that I now feel I can face a score of savage Reviewers.”
And he has them still, a century and a half after The Origin of Species came out. In that time, there has been little scientific refutation of Darwin’s theories. But opposition to evolution comes from three unlikely, ill-assorted groups. The International Society for Krishna Consciousness is a valiant opponent of Darwinism, if the least influential of his critics today. ISCKON’s The Darwin Delusion draws from Intelligent Design rather than classic creationism to make its arguments. Author Lalithanatha Dasa says, “Darwinism is, more than anything else, the singular cause of atheism in our time.”
Creationism in its current US avatar is a well-funded and influential movement. Schools of creationist thought vary widely, but the basic text is the Book of Genesis, and in the creationist view, the timeline of human evolution is drawn from the Bible. (This seems to lead, as far as the newly established Creationist Museum demonstrates, to an obssession with dinosaurs and the belief that they were still walking the earth long after the fossil record would indicate possible, but that’s another story.)
Where US creationism has been most successful is in the challenging of the teaching of evolution in schools, and in its demand that creationism be taught alongside—preferably as an equally established scientific theory, despite the complete lack of scientific proof, but at any rate as a valid belief system. The debate over mixing science with religion is an ongoing, fierce, take-no-prisoners one, and it has had far-reaching effects on the equally ferocious free speech and censorship debate.
Though they have little else in common, the Genesis-inspired creationists and the burgeoning school of Islamic creationists are united in their hatred of Darwin. In bookstores in Turkey (and New Delhi’s Nizamuddin), you can find entire shelves devoted to theories of Islamic creationist belief. Harun Yahya/ Adnan Okhtar, the man who has written the 800-page standard text on Islamic creationism, is a fascinating figure. Condensed, Yahya’s views are that the world may well have been created billions of years ago, but that the creatures in it exist in the same form that they were originally created, by God. (There is a rather magnificent comparison between Darwinists and the wicked Pharaohs of Egypt, a must-read on Yahya’s website.)
If the first 150 years of the theory of evolution saw a battle between the Church and Darwinists, accompanied by growing acceptance of Darwin’s ideas among the scientific establishment, the next 50 years is likely to see a broader battle, between religious dogma and science, censorship and free speech. The power of Darwin’s theories can be seen, to a great extent, in the ferocity of the resistance currently being offered to them. Reason and scientific proof may yet win the day, but this is in some senses a very medieval, 21st century war.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Book review: The Museum of Innocence
(Published in Mail Today, November 2009)The Museum of Innocence
Orhan Pamuk
Faber and Faber
POUINDS 12.99, 536 pages
ISBN 978-0-571-23699-2
“What I am trying to explain,” Orhan Pamuk wrote in Istanbul (2005), “is the huzun (melancholy) of an entire city, of Istanbul.”
Pamuk, the most celebrated of Turkey’s writers, has had to carve out an unusual path in his decades of writing. Unlike his contemporaries in Turkey, he gives himself the freedom to see his country with a clear, unsparing eye. Unlike writers from the West, he must explain the culture his writing is steeped in. Instead of explaining Istanbul or Turkey, though, he reinvents and reimagines this world for an audience that could just as well be sitting in Istanbul’s cafes as Europe’s salons, or India’s metropolises.
The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk’s first novel after he won the Nobel Prize for literature, is ostensibly about love and obsession. It’s also an evocation of huzun, a meditation on the attractions and uses of melancholy.
“It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.” There is a precision to this moment, as there is to the rest of Kemal’s story—it happens “on the afternoon of Monday, May 26, 1975, at about a quarter to three”, as he enters his lover from behind, and nothing in his life will ever be the same again. Kemal is rich, successful, on the brink of the perfect marriage to Sibel, a girl from a similarly privileged Istanbullu family, and what will change his life is the oldest story in the world—his love for Fusun, a shopgirl, and a distant relative from an impoverished branch of Kemal’s family.
If this sounds like the storyline of a Turkish—or an Indian—melodrama, Pamuk sets up the echo deliberately. The Museum of Innocence is a straightforward tale of desire and obsession; an unusual form for the master of the baroque plot to choose, almost a reversion to the early 21st century Marquezian or Nabokovian explorations of the topography of love. Fusun and Kemal occupy the no-man’s-land between the conventional demands of Istanbul society, and its yearning for the beguiling but dangerous freedom of the individual promised by the West.
The definition of love Pamuk offers in The Museum of Innocence is “deep attention” blended with “deep compassion”; Kemal’s obsession with Fusun is a function of the painful, acutely focused attention he finds himself compelled to offer--as with lovers down the ages, for no good reason. Rendered impotent with his fiancee, he retreats, Sibel by his side, from the round of parties and opulent amusements that govern their “insular, intimate” circle, but the relationship ends; Fusun marries someone else; and Kemal spends eight years at the edges of her life, a guest at her family’s very middle-class dining table, a possible source of funds for the film she wants to make and star in, a casual but committed drunk.
Released from the glittering but airless world of crumbling privilege he was born into, Kemal discovers the vivid and corrupt world of Turkey’s film-makers, who aspire to make art films, sometimes make melodramas, and must usually survive by making or dubbing soft porn films. By the 400th page, the reader knows that this tale will have a conventional, dramatic twist; and Pamuk delivers as expected.
It’s a conventional storyline, but what lifts The Museum of Innocence into the realm of the classic is Pamuk’s understanding of the frailty of love, and the fierce effort needed to maintain it.
Rising up alongside the figure of the lovers is the ghost of Istanbul, a city struggling to be remembered, known, familiar, mired in its own melancholy, reaching for change even as it holds on to the sexual and social shibboleths of the past. And Kemal’s closest kin are not other lovers, but the obsessive collectors of Istanbul, whose homes fill up with the accumulated memorabilia of a city just as he allows the many rooms of his life to be filled with shrines to a love often consummated but never possessed. The last chapter is turned over to the figure of Orhan Pamuk, allowing the writer to make a cameo appearance in his work.
The Istanbul he evokes is familiar to readers of his previous work, and The Museum of Innocence is as much a tribute to its lost, forgotten icons as it is to the power of first love. Turkey’s first domestic fruit soda, Meltem; a floral batiste handkerchief folded carefully by Fusun; a modified Nisantasi map of Istanbul; tombala sets and salt-shakers, New Year’s lottery tickets, china dogs, 4,213 of Fusun’s cigarette butts, bottles of Altun Damla cologne, everything that might be found in the locked glass cabinets of a well-off Istanbullu’s home.
The Museum of Innocence is not Pamuk’s most ambitious work, but it is his most evocative. And Pamuk retains his ability to surprise, even within the bounds of convention. Three-fourths through his lushly told but straightforward narrative, Pamuk reaches Chapter 69, where every sentence, for four pages, begins with the word ‘Sometimes’. The young Pamuk would have felt the need to exhibit his literary exuberance throughout the book; the older Pamuk allows himself this one flourish, and then lets us meditate again on why there are no museums to the human heart, except for the one that he has built in these pages.
(For a much more detailed review and overview of Pamuk's work, read Pico Iyer's long essay, Secret Love in the Lost City. And visit Pamuk's real-life Museum of Innocence--it's beautiful.)
The BS Column: The Man Who Would Map the Mind
(Published on November 15, 2009, in the Business Standard)Only the steady tide of readers overflowing into the aisles of the Gulmohar Hall indicated that this was not just another book discussion at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi. Vilayanur Ramachandran’s lecture drew students, fellow neurologists and inquiring readers in such numbers that we could easily have filled the nearby Stein Auditorium.
The neurologist and author was here to deliver the inaugural Charles Darwin lecture, though his speech was not marked by the high excitement that attended a similar event in 1860 at a meeting of the British Association at Oxford. That debate, on Darwin’s recently published Origin of the Species, saw an epic clash between Bishop Wilberforce and T H Huxley. Sir Joseph Hooker wrote: “The battle waxed hot. Lady Brewster fainted, the excitement increased as others spoke.”
Wilberforce is said to have asked Huxley if he claimed his descent from a monkey through his grandfather or his grandmother—the actual words are in doubt. Huxley’s famous response was that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected to any man who used his gifts to obscure the truth.
No ladies fainted during Professor Ramachandran’s speech in Delhi, or during his earlier presentation at the TED India conference, though there was much applause and laughter. The author of Phantoms in the Brain, The Emerging Mind and The Man with the Phantom Twin is as accomplished a speaker as he is a writer, with a simultaneous gift for humour and clarity. Ramachandran has loyal followers (and readers) around the world in part because he passes the Stephen Jay Gould test.
The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “I have fiercely maintained one personal rule in all my so-called "popular" writing. I believe-as Galileo did when he wrote his two greatest works as dialogues in Italian rather than didactic treatises in Latin, as Thomas Henry Huxley did when he composed his masterful prose free from jargon, as Darwin did when he published all his books for general audiences that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested lay people. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people."
Ramachandran shares Gould’s passion for clarity, and his belief that even the more complex reaches of science are not beyond the grasp of the average intelligent lay person. He led us rapidly through his explorations of the philosophy behind the workings of the brain, but what was of particular interest was his discussion of mirror neurons.
In 2000, Edge carried a paper by Ramachandran that has proved to be one of the most influential works of its kind: ‘Mirror neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution.’ He dubs mirror neurons “Dalai Lama neurons”, or “empathy neurons”—these are cells that fire both when a person acts, or observes an action performed by someone else. Ramachandran’s research led him to a succinct and breathtaking hypothesis: “The mirror neurons, it would seem, dissolve the barrier between self and others.” Going a step further, he suggests that there might be rational and neurological, rather than religious, grounds for ethics.
From his 2000 and 2006 research, Ramachandran’s inquiring mind has already moved further. He ran out of time and couldn’t go on to discuss his next obsession: the possibility of “multiple minds” in a single brain, the idea that your sense of your self might be even more subjective than you realize. If we are “nothing but a pack of neurons”, and if the brain produces our individual versions of reality, why not explore this possibility further? Would you be willing to upload your “self” into cyberspace, would you be willing to be a brain in a (presumably well-maintained) vat, if that allowed you to “be a combination of Einstein, Mark Spitz, Bill Gates, Hugh Heffner, and Gandhi, while at the same time preserving your own deeply personal memories and identity”?
As Ramachandran shifted gears, citing the Upanishads and Advaita philosophies of the self and consciousness with as much ease as he referred to the latest research on autism, I was not alone in my sense of awe. Ramachandran and his colleagues have a long way to go before they can prove their hypotheses, but if they succeed, they will change the way we think about individuality, consciousness and the self forever.
The last time we had such a shift in human thought was in November 1859, when the publisher John Murray brought out the first 1,250 copies of On the Origin of Species and Natural Selection. I’m guessing that within the next two decades, those of us who were present in that small auditorium in Delhi will look back at Ramachandran’s talk on consciousness with a sense of having been present at the making of history. Few readers could ask for more from a literary evening.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
