OUR FAVOURITE READS OF 2017
From Mohsin Hamid to Jeff Kinney, from graphic fiction to books on the Indian Constitution, the HT Editors’ collective reading list presents some surprises
GHACHAR GHOCHAR By Vivek Shanbhag, translated by Srinath Perur
‘Ghachar ghochar’ may be jibberish but it doesn’t really need to be translated. In any culture, it’s used when traditional vocabulary fails to fully describe the mess you’re left with when, say, the string of a kite becomes so entangled that it is impossible to untwine. Growing up in Lucknow, my childhood term for this was guchar muchar. So Ghachar Ghochar, which was published last year but fell into my hands only this autumn, is a novel about how things get complicated to a point where they cannot be simplified any longer. Written in Kannada by Vivek Shanbhag, and translated into English by Srinath Perur, it tells the story of one family in two different Bangalores.
A lower middle-class household moves from a hovel to a bungalow that “feels like a hotel”. Family equations are realigned, and the longing for more is replaced by the tyranny of having everything you thought you ever wanted. When a new member enters the family in the form of the narrator’s wife, she is unable to understand the dynamic she is now a part of. Hilarity ensues, but only in small measure. What comes with it is contradiction, conflict, and eventually danger. Shanbhag’s work turns the spotlight on what can happen if we allow the strings that hold us together to get so entangled that our emotions, our desires, and our lives become all ghachar ghochar.
EXIT WEST by Mohsin Hamid
The end of the world can be cozy at times,” says Saeed, one of the main characters in Mohsin Hamid’s fourth novel, Exit West, to Nadia when they are sitting in the darkness following a terrorist invasion of the city they live in. An odd remark, but one that signals the sanity of ordinary people in extraordinary times. The two meet in an evening class and their story takes off from a meal at a restaurant. The seeming normality of their romance is in the backdrop of their country being sucked into a violent vortex of war, a place where humdrum activities can coexist with apocalyptic events. Global migration, the immigrant crisis, all problems we face today, forms the central theme of this disturbing novel.
Nadia and Saeed finally cannot take it anymore, they leave their homeland to what they feel is safety. It is a journey to another world. They go to Mykonos with its sun worshippers, to London, which has become a squatter’s paradise. Rather than the grim and gore of migration journeys, the story is told through the allusion of doors. Nadia and Saeed come to understand that the world has an entry and exit system through these man-made doors. “The doors out,which is to say the doors to richer destinations, were heavily guarded, but the doors in, the doors from poorer places, were mostly left unsecured.” The doors through which Saeed and Nadia escape does not necessarily bring them to safety, those whom they are running from, the dystopian world left behind too moves through those doors. The fears that they were fleeing confront them once again.
TEMPORARY PEOPLE by Deepak Unnikrishnan
I’m always interested in what the male of the species really thinks about love, about sex. Naturally, I had to read Amitava Kumar’s The Lovers, following Kailash, a boy from Bihar, as he explores living, loving, thinking and just being in America. A good read, though, in the end, the protagonist’s understanding of his relationships mirrors my own perennial incomprehension.
I also enjoyed ‘instapoet’ Rupi Kaur’s savage young woman poems: i bleed/every month./but do not die./how
am i/not/ magic. - From the lie. In short fiction, I was struck by Deepak Unnikrishnan’s superb Temporary People, which presents the Malayali experience in the Gulf with much linguistic inventiveness. Fone, a story on a telephone that allows the caller to watch who he’s talking to back home grinds together homesickness, jealousy and desire.
Next, Teesta Setalvad’s Footsoldier of the Constitution made me marvel at the author’s spirit. Among art books, BN Goswamy’s Manaku of Guler is breathtaking. I often gaze at the Pahari painter’s surreal ‘The celestial musicians milk the earth cow’ (Bhagavata Purana series) and at Krishna combing Radha’s hair (Gita Govinda series) when I’m disturbed. It always works. I still haven’t found what men really think about love and sex but it’s alright. I’ve read some great books this year. #noconnection!
DEVIL’S BARGAIN by Joshua Green
Steve Bannon is described as brilliant, charismatic, “brimming with vigor” in Devil’s Bargain, journalist Joshua Green’s book about how Donald Trump won the US presidential election and caused “the greatest political upset in modern American history”. Bannon is also a “populist-nationalist” who runs the far-right website Breitbart, and has been accused of racism and xenophobia. He managed Trump’s presidential campaign and later became his chief strategist at the White House before being sacked in August.
Bannon’s campaign strategy did not “make” Trump president, but he let “Trump be Trump”. Trump once said he doesn’t read books. Bannon, in contrast, is a “voracious autodidact” who is wellversed in obscure philosophers, Buddhism and the Hindu concept of Kali Yuga. How did these two men who are so different come together? Shared ideology or world view, Green writes.
According to Green, Bannon’s “response to the rise of modernity was to set populist, right-wing nationalism against it”. Enter Trump, with “his willingness to flout any norms”, his “Make America Great Again” slogan, his loud and clear opposition to immigrants, Islam and liberalism. “America First” united the two men and though they have fallen apart they keep promoting their ideology: Trump with his tweets and Bannon with his website. Green’s book is racy and detailed, but it fails to explain one question: how is a brilliant and talented man like Bannon a xenophobe and believer of racist nationalism theories?
WORD BY WORD by Kory Stamper
Can a book on dictionaries be an exciting page-turner? If it’s Word By Word by Kory Stamper, yes. Stamper is an editor with Merriam-Webster, and her work includes defining words, deciding which new words to incorporate (sometimes there can be as many as 10,000 new entries), proofreading pronunciations in six-point type for eight hours a day, and corresponding with readers. And doing all this in near-silence. (Chatting is not encouraged in the Merriam-Webster office.)
lt felt like I was discovering an exotic, secret world. Even reading about the history of lexicography was thrilling -- I learnt that the first monolingual English dictionary came out in 1604. I also learnt that exactly 11 per cent of a dictionary is made of words that begin with ‘s’. And that commonly used words are the hardest to define -- defining the word ‘take’ took the author a month. The most interesting part of Stamper’s book is her approach to her work and thereby, to language. Dictionaries are not about protecting the English language, keeping it right, pure, good (“prescriptivism”), she says. “We are just observers, and the goal is to describe, as accurately as possible, as much of the language as we can” (“descriptivism”). This is the philosophical basis for almost all modern dictionaries.
MISSION OVERSEAS by Sushant Singh
Looking back at the books I read in 2017, army officer-turned-journalist Sushant Singh’s Mission Overseas: Daring operations by the Indian Army stands out. Singh’s slim volume detailing three missions by the army on foreign soil works as both military history and irresistible page turner. Even the most accomplished author would have faltered in trying to compress Operation Pawan, India’s disastrous intervention in Sri Lanka during 1987-90, into such a slender volume but Singh succeeds by framing the mission through the massacre of 29 Indian soldiers during a poorly mounted helicopter-borne assault against the LTTE in Jaffna University.
The People Next Door by diplomatturned-author TCA Raghavan focuses on little-known but extremely interesting episodes to nudge readers towards a better understanding of the Pakistanis. Thus, we get a get a cast of colourful characters such as Bhupat Daku, the criminal who hopped across the border to evade arrest in Gujarat, leading India to demand his extradition in a move that would have a parallel decades later with the case of Dawood Ibrahim. Clearly, Raghavan is an author to watch out for.
THE BEST WE COULD DO by Thi Bui
Iused to write a weekly column on comics for Lounge, the weekend magazine of Mint, and, in one part because I’m still obsessed with comics and graphic novels, my first pick is The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui. This is a memoir of a refuge family’s journey from Vietnam to the US, and its minimalistic style is complemented by an intricate non-linear narrative and a depth of feeling that not too many people would associate with a comic. Like the best coming-to-America books, The Best We Could Do is a mixture of happiness and struggle and hope.
My second pick of the year is Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York: 2140, a book about very real people and very real problems in a New York ravaged by climate change, so much so that there are no streets, only canals, and each skyscraper is an island, connected to other skyscrapers through walkways. And finally, while on climate change, my third pick is a thriller set in the midst of a drought. Jane Harper’s The Dry, a murder mystery in a very dry Australia, is as atmospheric as Thomas Hardy (I kid you not). I’ve kept details to the minimum to avoid spoilers – but do read the three books. They made my year (or at least, a small part of it).
DIARY OF A WIMPY KID: DOUBLE DOWN by Jeff Kinney
Dear fans of Greg Heffley (the Wimpy kid), here’s a confession I have to make. I got introduced to Greg only a few months ago by my 13-year-old nephew. “I am sure you’ll like him,” he assured. And he was so right. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Double Down, Jeff Kinney’s 11th on the Wimpy series, left me in splits. While my heart went out to Greg so many times, his idiosyncrasies kept me wondering what I would have done if I had a kid like Greg! So then I empathised with Greg’s parents.
Filled with Kinney’s trademark hilarity and jolly sketches Double Down is a delightful read. Bordering on comic strips, the Wimpy Kid books have been sold in more than 63 editions in 53 languages. This year is a milestone for the series as it completes 10 years. No less entertaining than the Harry Potter series, Kinney’s characters and situations, you feel, are taken from everyday life. The parent in you is bound to relate to those PTA meets and the problems and joys of bringing up kids. Maybe you can pick up some parenting tips from Susan Heffley. So next time you buy a new Wimpy for the young adult in your home, please read it first. You might enjoy it more than the kid sitting next to you. You may also thank your stars that you don’t have to deal with a Greg clone!
THE SPARSHOLT AFFAIR by Alan Hollinghurst
Mohsin Hamid is a writer always in tune with the zeitgeist. His latest, Exit West, can lay claim to being one of the first post-Brexit, post-refugee-crisis fictions, preoccupied with the will to leave and the wish to remain; about being torn asunder; about the meaning of migration and belonging. It is a profound – and profoundly complex – meditation on the psychological uncertainty, anguish and alienation engendered by leaving one’s homeland. Hamid has again written a poignant, relevant parable of our times.
In The Sparsholt Affair, Alan Hollinghurst returns to – and revels in – his favourite tropes: gay life, and how it changed, in a changing England; the line of beauty (to borrow the title of the novel that made him famous) that runs through art, architecture and literature; and how the passage of time – inevitable, cruel, kind – burnishes or alters reputations as well as our memory and perception of events. The Sparsholt Affair is made up of five sections, and is spread across three generations. It is as richly layered as his previous – and, for my money, best – novel, A Stranger’s Child. It is a gem, polished to perfection.
The Return by the Libyan-American writer, Hisham Matar, is a searing, haunting memoir. When Matar was 19, his father – a dissident during the Gaddafi regime – was picked up from home and imprisoned. Amid the torture and other hardships of prison life, he would write to his family. Then, the letters stopped. To this day, Matar does not know if his father died in prison, was executed, or is alive somewhere. This is the harrowing account of Matar’s search for his father. In turns tender and angry (and at times both), The Return explores the bond between a father and a son, the notion of home, and the price one can pay for one’s political and intellectual beliefs.
THE INDIAN CONSTITUTION; CORNERSTONE OF A NATION by Granville Austin
For those whose self-imposed task is to bring out the newspaper each day or keep a news website ticking round the clock, the low level of public discourse is of concern but not alarm. In the making of this nation, there have been moments that are best forgotten. This current low should be one such. What about a high, a moment that can be best remembered and reread? Refreshingly, we can go to the very beginning of the Indian republic — the making of the Indian Constitution. A chronicle of those years is best read in the words of Granville Austin in the Working a Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience.
In an age when the founding fathers of this republic are being used and misused this book comes as a erudite reminder that the concerted effort at running down a Jawaharlal Nehru, or misrepresenting a Sardar Patel and using a BR Ambedkar for political expediency has implications for how this generation will understand what it took to get here. They will not know that for the finest moment in our history one does not have to rely on some quackery that supposedly happened in hoary antiquity, but just a few decades ago. This book is a reminder that the work in progress can be done with the finesse of the men and women in the Constituent Assembly who first undertook the task. Next up is another work by Granville Austin — The Indian Constitution; Cornerstone of a Nation.