(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.
Sunday, April 10, 2005
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.
The BS column: Hans Christian Andersen
(This column first published in Business Standard: Speaking Volumes, March 29, 2005)
This was a bread-and-butter piece, but writing it was...weird. I've had malaria for the last two weeks, and spent the week before I wrote this in bed with Andersen's fairy tales. Let's just say that delirium isn't helped along much when you're dreaming of giant dogs with eyes the size of teacups and mermaids with bloody footprints. Had fever when I sat down to write this; remember flexing my fingers over the keyboard, remember getting back into bed and going off to sleep, and remember absolutely nothing in between. If you hate the column, don't blame me, go shoot a mosquito.
In the two centuries that have passed since Hans Christian Andersen was born on April 2, 1805, his fairy tales have endured the demands of time. They have been prettified and Disneyfied, like The Little Mermaid , leached of some of their darkness and terror in order to be made more palatable to an audience accustomed only to cartoon evil.
They’ve been used as corporate fables or re-interpreted by the likes of Clarissa Pinkola Estes as primers for women who run with the wolves. Some stories have entered the English language, though they were originally written in Danish: Jassi still undergoes a transformation from ugly duckling to swan, emperors are even now revealed to have no clothes. Some have lost ground over the years, like The Tale of Little Tuk ; some, like The Snow Queen , peaked in popularity over a century ago and are now less told. Some, like Thumbelina and The Ugly Duckling , have become so much part of the corpus of fairy tales that it comes as a slight shock to think that the story was invented, rather than part of the general body of folk tales.
In the menagerie of creatures Hans Christian Andersen brought to life, from the dogs with eyes like saucers and the brave little tin soldier with one leg or the strange undersea witch, he was perhaps the oddest inmate. From his portraits it appears that he cut a strange figure—gawky and awkward at over six feet, “with a face as pale as blessed Werther,/ And a nose as big as a cannon,/ And eyes as tiny as small green peas”, as he wrote of himself mockingly in a poem. As a boy, he had survived great hardship and much mockery. He was born in Odense and his early years were marked by poverty: his father was a shoemaker with pretensions to a better lineage, who died when Hans was barely eleven, and his mother was an uneducated seamstress.
But they passed on to him a love of stories. He heard folk tales and women’s stories from the poor women of Odense at the workhouse; his father may have had no more than a one-room house, but he filled it with books and read to his son from Shakespeare’s and Holberg’s plays and from A Thousand and One Nights. Andersen’s mother may have been illiterate, but she, too, told him all the stories she remembered—chiefly tales from myth and legend and more homely local folk stories. After his father’s death, he was allowed to stay at home for a while; he became known for his puppet theatre, his remarkable memory and his love of telling stories.
The full extent of his imagination would only become clear in later years: one scholar estimates that out of the hundreds of fairy tales he wrote, only 12 were based on extant folk tales—everything else came out of Andersen’s mind. Unlike earlier exponents of fairy tales, such as the Brother Grimm or Charles Perrault or even the writers of the Panchatantra and the Jataka tales, Andersen’s technique didn’t depend on rewriting or updating old material. Unlike some later writers, such as Oscar Wilde, Andersen’s fairy tales have lasted beyond his time and have passed into popular mythology: the ugly duckling belongs on the same shelf as the wolf in Red Riding Hood in a way that Wilde’s selfish giant doesn’t.
But the fairy tales that made Andersen famous and that are being celebrated this week, in commemoration of his birth anniversary, were not what he had intended to build his life upon. He wrote according to one calculation over half-a-million words during his lifetime, adding to a history of peculiar and persistent failures. He meant to be an actor but his looks and his shyness went against him. He fell in love, with men on several occasions, women on at least three, but this was never reciprocated. He never married, and by his own account, nor did he ever have more than a Platonic relationship with any of his objects of adoration. He earned early success as a travel writer, with a fantastical account of a journey, and his first novel was praised as much as it was attacked. It seemed, in the period between the 1820s and the 1840s, that Hans Christian Andersen would make a career as an acclaimed literary writer after all.
But then the setbacks began to accumulate. The career he had dreamed of in the theatre failed to materialise; his plays were not successes. The fairy tales that had received a lukewarm welcome when they had first been published began to be in demand through the 1840s; three decades later, Andersen was still, if increasingly reluctantly, adding to the corpus. He did not take them seriously himself, and it must have been uncomfortable to realise that this was what readers now wanted from him, not the novels that he was anyway struggling to write. He had written many of them for children; as with many other authors, the best side of his character showed with them.
He drew and illustrated his stories for children; he created cunningly constructed papercuts that unfolded to reveal hidden mysteries; he even made entire books of drawings and papercuts for some of his younger friends. With children, he could let go of the insecurities and unpleasantnesses of character that led Charles Dickens, who met him, to cariacature him as Uriah Heep. He could share with them the secret of his life: “He beheld his own image, and it was no longer the reflection of a clumsy, dirty, gray bird, ugly and offensive. He himself was a swan! Being born in a duck yard does not matter, if only you are hatched from a swan's egg.”
This year will be full of tributes to Hans Christian Andersen, from Tina Turner concerts to symphonic performances of fairy tales, readings and the rest. I’m reminded, however, of the Hans Christian Andersen statue in Central Park, that has a bronze version of the author seated on a park bench. Children are encouraged to clamber all over it; the duck at his feet and the open book on his lap are supposed to be favourite perches for the young. The best tribute to Andersen this year might be to go back to his stories and rediscover them as he told them, from the sorrowful tale of the Nightingale who sang her heart out to the Little Match Girl lighting inadequate fires, to the Ugly Duckling who found his happiness eventually.
This was a bread-and-butter piece, but writing it was...weird. I've had malaria for the last two weeks, and spent the week before I wrote this in bed with Andersen's fairy tales. Let's just say that delirium isn't helped along much when you're dreaming of giant dogs with eyes the size of teacups and mermaids with bloody footprints. Had fever when I sat down to write this; remember flexing my fingers over the keyboard, remember getting back into bed and going off to sleep, and remember absolutely nothing in between. If you hate the column, don't blame me, go shoot a mosquito.
In the two centuries that have passed since Hans Christian Andersen was born on April 2, 1805, his fairy tales have endured the demands of time. They have been prettified and Disneyfied, like The Little Mermaid , leached of some of their darkness and terror in order to be made more palatable to an audience accustomed only to cartoon evil.
They’ve been used as corporate fables or re-interpreted by the likes of Clarissa Pinkola Estes as primers for women who run with the wolves. Some stories have entered the English language, though they were originally written in Danish: Jassi still undergoes a transformation from ugly duckling to swan, emperors are even now revealed to have no clothes. Some have lost ground over the years, like The Tale of Little Tuk ; some, like The Snow Queen , peaked in popularity over a century ago and are now less told. Some, like Thumbelina and The Ugly Duckling , have become so much part of the corpus of fairy tales that it comes as a slight shock to think that the story was invented, rather than part of the general body of folk tales.
In the menagerie of creatures Hans Christian Andersen brought to life, from the dogs with eyes like saucers and the brave little tin soldier with one leg or the strange undersea witch, he was perhaps the oddest inmate. From his portraits it appears that he cut a strange figure—gawky and awkward at over six feet, “with a face as pale as blessed Werther,/ And a nose as big as a cannon,/ And eyes as tiny as small green peas”, as he wrote of himself mockingly in a poem. As a boy, he had survived great hardship and much mockery. He was born in Odense and his early years were marked by poverty: his father was a shoemaker with pretensions to a better lineage, who died when Hans was barely eleven, and his mother was an uneducated seamstress.
But they passed on to him a love of stories. He heard folk tales and women’s stories from the poor women of Odense at the workhouse; his father may have had no more than a one-room house, but he filled it with books and read to his son from Shakespeare’s and Holberg’s plays and from A Thousand and One Nights. Andersen’s mother may have been illiterate, but she, too, told him all the stories she remembered—chiefly tales from myth and legend and more homely local folk stories. After his father’s death, he was allowed to stay at home for a while; he became known for his puppet theatre, his remarkable memory and his love of telling stories.
The full extent of his imagination would only become clear in later years: one scholar estimates that out of the hundreds of fairy tales he wrote, only 12 were based on extant folk tales—everything else came out of Andersen’s mind. Unlike earlier exponents of fairy tales, such as the Brother Grimm or Charles Perrault or even the writers of the Panchatantra and the Jataka tales, Andersen’s technique didn’t depend on rewriting or updating old material. Unlike some later writers, such as Oscar Wilde, Andersen’s fairy tales have lasted beyond his time and have passed into popular mythology: the ugly duckling belongs on the same shelf as the wolf in Red Riding Hood in a way that Wilde’s selfish giant doesn’t.
But the fairy tales that made Andersen famous and that are being celebrated this week, in commemoration of his birth anniversary, were not what he had intended to build his life upon. He wrote according to one calculation over half-a-million words during his lifetime, adding to a history of peculiar and persistent failures. He meant to be an actor but his looks and his shyness went against him. He fell in love, with men on several occasions, women on at least three, but this was never reciprocated. He never married, and by his own account, nor did he ever have more than a Platonic relationship with any of his objects of adoration. He earned early success as a travel writer, with a fantastical account of a journey, and his first novel was praised as much as it was attacked. It seemed, in the period between the 1820s and the 1840s, that Hans Christian Andersen would make a career as an acclaimed literary writer after all.
But then the setbacks began to accumulate. The career he had dreamed of in the theatre failed to materialise; his plays were not successes. The fairy tales that had received a lukewarm welcome when they had first been published began to be in demand through the 1840s; three decades later, Andersen was still, if increasingly reluctantly, adding to the corpus. He did not take them seriously himself, and it must have been uncomfortable to realise that this was what readers now wanted from him, not the novels that he was anyway struggling to write. He had written many of them for children; as with many other authors, the best side of his character showed with them.
He drew and illustrated his stories for children; he created cunningly constructed papercuts that unfolded to reveal hidden mysteries; he even made entire books of drawings and papercuts for some of his younger friends. With children, he could let go of the insecurities and unpleasantnesses of character that led Charles Dickens, who met him, to cariacature him as Uriah Heep. He could share with them the secret of his life: “He beheld his own image, and it was no longer the reflection of a clumsy, dirty, gray bird, ugly and offensive. He himself was a swan! Being born in a duck yard does not matter, if only you are hatched from a swan's egg.”
This year will be full of tributes to Hans Christian Andersen, from Tina Turner concerts to symphonic performances of fairy tales, readings and the rest. I’m reminded, however, of the Hans Christian Andersen statue in Central Park, that has a bronze version of the author seated on a park bench. Children are encouraged to clamber all over it; the duck at his feet and the open book on his lap are supposed to be favourite perches for the young. The best tribute to Andersen this year might be to go back to his stories and rediscover them as he told them, from the sorrowful tale of the Nightingale who sang her heart out to the Little Match Girl lighting inadequate fires, to the Ugly Duckling who found his happiness eventually.
The Business Standard column: summer reading (non-fiction)
(First published in Business Standard on March 21, 2005)
This was part two of the summer reading special: non-fiction, this time.
It’s the buzz you hear from foreign publishers and editors eyeing the great Indian pool of talent: non-fiction in India is about to take off. The view from inside the well is interesting. Anthologies, fiction and non-fiction, have proliferated in the last few years; HarperCollins released an anthology of new writing last month, and Penguin’s collection, First Proof is out next fortnight.
Reissues are beginning to make their mark, though there’s only space to note one or two, such as EHA’s nature columns, collected as Zoo in the Garden by Permanent Black and Chitrita Banerji’s classic memoir Life and Food in Bengal (Penguin). And there’s some truly funky original writing out there from Indian writers, along with some good stuff from the international market. Here’s the summer reading non-fiction round-up—indicative rather than exhaustive.
Pundits from Pakistan: Rahul Bhattacharya (Picador India): Here’s a guy who can tell you why Sami is a hot favourite with eunuchs in Multan, analyse the peculiar blend of emotions that accompanies India and Pakistan onto the cricket field and sign off with a wry look at the border. Read it for the cricket, or for the gossip, or as a travelogue, or for the historical analysis, or just for Bhattacharya’s particular brand of wit, but read it.
Open Secrets: M K Dhar (Manas Publications) The problem with the memoirs of retired civil servants is that they’re usually less revealing than a nun’s habit. Dhar’s account of his innings as one of the keystones of Indian intelligence is explosively frank, whether he’s writing about Ayodhya or Kargil. He’s sparked off a debate over whether civil servants have a duty to be more reticent, with much muttering over the Official Secrets Act; but the issues he’s raised are troubling and compelling. If this isn’t already on your bookshelf, you’re missing out.
Fearless Nadia: Dorothee Wenner (Penguin) The inside story of the lady with the whip hand, from someone who knew Nadia’s family well. This is where you discover how a solidly built foreigner who couldn’t speak Hindi without turning “kabu” into “Kabul” became the Pauline of India. There are vamps and sirens and item girls galore, but there’s only ever been one Hunterwali, fighting villains by the dozen and leaping off roofs with casual abandon while wearing some of the most bizarre costumes ever designed.
Re-Visioning the Past
Malavika Karlekar (OUP)
Old photographs rescued from the attics and trunks of Bengali bhadralok homes led Dr Karlekar into this academic but very accessible study of the hidden stories lurking inside those early daguerrotypes and lithographs. Children in Little Lord Fauntleroy suits, married couples posed against a fake Victorian backdrop, clashes between Indian inventors and a British establishment unwilling to give them credit, carte-de-visits all tell a story of imperialism and the changing face of Bengali society.
Collapse: Jared Diamond (Viking)
There’s always a Big Idea book of the moment; with a writer like Jared Diamond, the moment tends to last a long time. You could see Collapse as the next part of the argument he started in Guns, Germs and Steel . He starts with a deceptively simple question: what makes societies collapse? The search for the answer takes him to Easter Island, to Greenland and to Rwanda among other places. Diamond has provocative arguments, as usual, backed up with awesome knowledge, but some sceptics contend that the human race isn’t going to head the earnest lemming way quite as soon as Diamond suggests.
Blink: Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown)
And there’s always a Big Idea book of the moment that is strictly of the moment. Gladwell’s thesis is that we make snap decisions far more often than we realise, that most humans process most of the useful information they need in the blink of an eye, and that intuition and “thin slicing” count for more than we think. Blink is a good, fast read and some of Gladwell’s analysis of relationships and how humans make decisions is fascinating. But the real triumph of Blink lies in the manner in which a relatively thin thesis can be stretched far enough for thousands of readers to intuitively thin-slice their way into buying the book.
India in Mind (edited by Pankaj Mishra)
Picador India
This should be read in tandem with Away , Amitava Kumar’s anthology on India seen through the eyes of travellers, expatriates, exiles and well, inmates. Mishra has attempted to cover a century of writers, chiefly from Europe or America, who traveled to India. In his words, “By attempting to understand India through their own cultural and intellectual inheritance, they reveal honestly a variety of assumptions and prejudices whose history goes back to Herodotus…” From Ackerley to Allen Ginsberg, Forster to Kipling, Jan Morris and Ved Mehta, Paul Theroux and Paul Bowles, there’s quite a collection here.
The Hall of a Thousand Columns
Tim Mackintosh-Smith (John Murray, distributed by IBH)
This is the second part of Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s travels in the company of a 14th century Arab wanderer. With Ibn Battutah as his guide, if somewhat disconcertingly abbreviated to a more casual ‘IB’, Mackintosh-Smith comes to India. Like other pilgrims, he finds the cartoon India, the cliché India…but also the India of Ibn Battutah’s manuscripts. And he’s good at making you journey inside a book.
The End of Poverty
Jeffrey D Sachs (Penguin Press)
From the Amazon page for Sachs, it appears that half the readers who bought this book also bought books by Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz; the other half bought Jagdish Bhagwati’s In Defense of Globalisation and Martin Wolf’s Why Globalisation Works . That’s what I call a balanced audience. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute, weaves in personal experience into this passionate appeal for an end to poverty and a guide to how this might be achieved. He also got Bono to write the foreword—so what you’re getting is Sachs, no drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Two out of three is just fine.
Human Cargo
Caroline Moorehead (Henry Holt)
Moorehead’s travels into some of the saddest stories ever told made one thing clear to this journalist and human rights worker: the 21st century will see the largest flows of refugees, displaced persons and forced migrants ever. She analyses the UN’s hampered and often compromised role and the Fortress mentality of many Western countries with passion and clarity. But she’s at her best telling the stories of those who’ve fled war, violence, poverty and other human tragedies and attempting to give back some of the dignity their journeys have taken away from them.
This was part two of the summer reading special: non-fiction, this time.
It’s the buzz you hear from foreign publishers and editors eyeing the great Indian pool of talent: non-fiction in India is about to take off. The view from inside the well is interesting. Anthologies, fiction and non-fiction, have proliferated in the last few years; HarperCollins released an anthology of new writing last month, and Penguin’s collection, First Proof is out next fortnight.
Reissues are beginning to make their mark, though there’s only space to note one or two, such as EHA’s nature columns, collected as Zoo in the Garden by Permanent Black and Chitrita Banerji’s classic memoir Life and Food in Bengal (Penguin). And there’s some truly funky original writing out there from Indian writers, along with some good stuff from the international market. Here’s the summer reading non-fiction round-up—indicative rather than exhaustive.
Pundits from Pakistan: Rahul Bhattacharya (Picador India): Here’s a guy who can tell you why Sami is a hot favourite with eunuchs in Multan, analyse the peculiar blend of emotions that accompanies India and Pakistan onto the cricket field and sign off with a wry look at the border. Read it for the cricket, or for the gossip, or as a travelogue, or for the historical analysis, or just for Bhattacharya’s particular brand of wit, but read it.
Open Secrets: M K Dhar (Manas Publications) The problem with the memoirs of retired civil servants is that they’re usually less revealing than a nun’s habit. Dhar’s account of his innings as one of the keystones of Indian intelligence is explosively frank, whether he’s writing about Ayodhya or Kargil. He’s sparked off a debate over whether civil servants have a duty to be more reticent, with much muttering over the Official Secrets Act; but the issues he’s raised are troubling and compelling. If this isn’t already on your bookshelf, you’re missing out.
Fearless Nadia: Dorothee Wenner (Penguin) The inside story of the lady with the whip hand, from someone who knew Nadia’s family well. This is where you discover how a solidly built foreigner who couldn’t speak Hindi without turning “kabu” into “Kabul” became the Pauline of India. There are vamps and sirens and item girls galore, but there’s only ever been one Hunterwali, fighting villains by the dozen and leaping off roofs with casual abandon while wearing some of the most bizarre costumes ever designed.
Re-Visioning the Past
Malavika Karlekar (OUP)
Old photographs rescued from the attics and trunks of Bengali bhadralok homes led Dr Karlekar into this academic but very accessible study of the hidden stories lurking inside those early daguerrotypes and lithographs. Children in Little Lord Fauntleroy suits, married couples posed against a fake Victorian backdrop, clashes between Indian inventors and a British establishment unwilling to give them credit, carte-de-visits all tell a story of imperialism and the changing face of Bengali society.
Collapse: Jared Diamond (Viking)
There’s always a Big Idea book of the moment; with a writer like Jared Diamond, the moment tends to last a long time. You could see Collapse as the next part of the argument he started in Guns, Germs and Steel . He starts with a deceptively simple question: what makes societies collapse? The search for the answer takes him to Easter Island, to Greenland and to Rwanda among other places. Diamond has provocative arguments, as usual, backed up with awesome knowledge, but some sceptics contend that the human race isn’t going to head the earnest lemming way quite as soon as Diamond suggests.
Blink: Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown)
And there’s always a Big Idea book of the moment that is strictly of the moment. Gladwell’s thesis is that we make snap decisions far more often than we realise, that most humans process most of the useful information they need in the blink of an eye, and that intuition and “thin slicing” count for more than we think. Blink is a good, fast read and some of Gladwell’s analysis of relationships and how humans make decisions is fascinating. But the real triumph of Blink lies in the manner in which a relatively thin thesis can be stretched far enough for thousands of readers to intuitively thin-slice their way into buying the book.
India in Mind (edited by Pankaj Mishra)
Picador India
This should be read in tandem with Away , Amitava Kumar’s anthology on India seen through the eyes of travellers, expatriates, exiles and well, inmates. Mishra has attempted to cover a century of writers, chiefly from Europe or America, who traveled to India. In his words, “By attempting to understand India through their own cultural and intellectual inheritance, they reveal honestly a variety of assumptions and prejudices whose history goes back to Herodotus…” From Ackerley to Allen Ginsberg, Forster to Kipling, Jan Morris and Ved Mehta, Paul Theroux and Paul Bowles, there’s quite a collection here.
The Hall of a Thousand Columns
Tim Mackintosh-Smith (John Murray, distributed by IBH)
This is the second part of Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s travels in the company of a 14th century Arab wanderer. With Ibn Battutah as his guide, if somewhat disconcertingly abbreviated to a more casual ‘IB’, Mackintosh-Smith comes to India. Like other pilgrims, he finds the cartoon India, the cliché India…but also the India of Ibn Battutah’s manuscripts. And he’s good at making you journey inside a book.
The End of Poverty
Jeffrey D Sachs (Penguin Press)
From the Amazon page for Sachs, it appears that half the readers who bought this book also bought books by Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz; the other half bought Jagdish Bhagwati’s In Defense of Globalisation and Martin Wolf’s Why Globalisation Works . That’s what I call a balanced audience. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute, weaves in personal experience into this passionate appeal for an end to poverty and a guide to how this might be achieved. He also got Bono to write the foreword—so what you’re getting is Sachs, no drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Two out of three is just fine.
Human Cargo
Caroline Moorehead (Henry Holt)
Moorehead’s travels into some of the saddest stories ever told made one thing clear to this journalist and human rights worker: the 21st century will see the largest flows of refugees, displaced persons and forced migrants ever. She analyses the UN’s hampered and often compromised role and the Fortress mentality of many Western countries with passion and clarity. But she’s at her best telling the stories of those who’ve fled war, violence, poverty and other human tragedies and attempting to give back some of the dignity their journeys have taken away from them.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
The Business Standard column: summer reading
I normally shy away from summer reading round-ups, but this one...was kind of fun to put together. It came from realising that there were so many decent books on my desk that I was reading them too fast to write about them, which is a goooood feeling if you're a hack reviewer.
Here's the link and two brief excerpts:
The Shadow of the Wind: Carlos Ruiz Zafon (W&N) A long-forgotten book by a long-forgotten author is rediscovered by a young boy growing into manhood in Barcelona; but someone wants the author’s name, reputation and books to disappear into oblivion. Zafon came up with a brilliant idea in the form of the “cemetery of forgotten books”, a place where every book has at least a chance of discovering a reader. As to the rest, he introduces skullduggery, romance, and twists in the tale every few pages to form a baroque, bizarre romance. The author is a screenwriter based in Los Angeles, and drew some complaints from residents of Barcelona who griped that it’s always raining or cold in the city as depicted in his book. Still, a great read, especially for bibliophiles.
The Alchemy of Desire: Tarun Tejpal (HarperCollins) Rarely has a simple blurb caused so much heartburning in Delhi’s literary circles. But then this one — “At last —a new and brilliantly original novel from India”— was handed out by V S Naipaul, known to bury debut authors rather than praise them. Tejpal accompanied him to Stockholm when the Great Curmudgeon won his Nobel, though, and the friendship between them is of long standing. The book’s about a young couple’s odyssey into desire and marriage, with the point of fading lust marked by the narrator’s growing obsession with a ghost from the past, in a very literal sense. I normally resist coupling book titles, but not very hard. Think Love Story meets Plain Tales from the Hills.
Here's the link and two brief excerpts:
The Shadow of the Wind: Carlos Ruiz Zafon (W&N) A long-forgotten book by a long-forgotten author is rediscovered by a young boy growing into manhood in Barcelona; but someone wants the author’s name, reputation and books to disappear into oblivion. Zafon came up with a brilliant idea in the form of the “cemetery of forgotten books”, a place where every book has at least a chance of discovering a reader. As to the rest, he introduces skullduggery, romance, and twists in the tale every few pages to form a baroque, bizarre romance. The author is a screenwriter based in Los Angeles, and drew some complaints from residents of Barcelona who griped that it’s always raining or cold in the city as depicted in his book. Still, a great read, especially for bibliophiles.
The Alchemy of Desire: Tarun Tejpal (HarperCollins) Rarely has a simple blurb caused so much heartburning in Delhi’s literary circles. But then this one — “At last —a new and brilliantly original novel from India”— was handed out by V S Naipaul, known to bury debut authors rather than praise them. Tejpal accompanied him to Stockholm when the Great Curmudgeon won his Nobel, though, and the friendship between them is of long standing. The book’s about a young couple’s odyssey into desire and marriage, with the point of fading lust marked by the narrator’s growing obsession with a ghost from the past, in a very literal sense. I normally resist coupling book titles, but not very hard. Think Love Story meets Plain Tales from the Hills.
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