A diverse range of good reads
Short stories, novellas, science writing, memoirs, and fiction that examines feudalism, patriarchy, fanaticism, marriage, and identity all make it to the HT reviewers’ list of favourite reads of 2019
Annie Zaidi’s novel, Prelude to a Riot left me numb. To say that I was deeply moved would be an understatement. It made me think about how troubled a writer must feel in contemporary India to produce a work like this. Set in an unnamed location in southern India, the novel revolves around
S hortly after his death in September, I decided to re-read Kiran Nagarkar’s Jasoda, one of the last novels he wrote. Given the author’s penchant for challenging toxic patriarchy as a novelist and playwright, I was prepared to read the story of a woman of steely resolve who stands up to both patriarchy and feudalism. But as I turned the pages, I could barely breathe. Nagarkar’s disturbingly graphic-yet-compassionate account of this extraordinary woman shook me to the core. From managing food for her family from the neighbourhood’s lecherous grocer, to taking
Robert Macfarlane’s Underland is described as ‘a deep time journey’. It starts with what is underneath the soil, but is really about our relationship with the earth and with time. In clear prose, Macfarlane conjoins adventure with geology, perspective with geography. He takes you down pits, caves, tombs and nuclear waste containers, and draws a portrait of the world through places we don’t see. This is science writing, but reads like a loosely-plotted stream of consciousness,
If there’s a book I’ve had the most fun reading this year, it is Upamanyu Chatterjee’s first volume of short stories, The Assassination Of Indira Gandhi: The Collected Stories (Volume One). There are several reasons this collection is to be celebrated: Chatterjee is a proficient wordsmith who uses historical figures, fictitious journeys, old heroes and contemporary issues to convey that the emperor is always naked. His subjects include homesick Sir Thomas Roe and his misadventures with translators and maharajas; a father’s obsession with Othello; thirteen-year-old students dealing with the aftermath of their classmate’s murder; a bored civil servant’s first contact with small-town India; and a young boy’s study of the absurd legal quagmire that is section 377. While Chatterjee explores the various shades of humour, he enjoys examining the consequences of the trivial – Sir Thomas Roe reading the book of Jehangir backwards having opened it the wrong way, and life imprisonment under section 377 hinging upon the definition of the word ‘penetrate’. Underneath the humour that is characteristic to his work, Chatterjee hides devastating truths. This collection is a fine balance where neither the truth nor the humour overpowers. Both are employed using a light touch making this a perfect note on which to end the year. two families – one Hindu and the other Muslim. Religious intolerance, labour rights, fanaticism, class conflict, the misrepresentation of history – all the ills that besiege contemporary India appear in Zaidi’s novel. Prelude to a Riot will also be remembered for its finely etched characters – Dada, the grandfather, Mariam, cook and masseuse, and migrant labourers Mommad and Majju. My personal favourite is Garuda, social science teacher at the local high school, who is trying to teach history to a bunch of disinterested students.
Zaidi makes an earnest attempt to unravel the psychology of a society that breeds dogma and fanaticism while eschewing all attempts at dialogue. care of her ailing mother-in-law and being a dutiful wife to her abusive husband, Jasoda functions as mechanically as the cow she grazes in the barren fields of a village called Kantagiri. Especially gut-wrenching is the description of her role as a baby-producing machine. It’s easy to lose count of the babies she delivers, but not easy to forget her expertise in delivering them. She lets them into the world with no help, often following it up with their quick strangling, if they are the wrong gender. Is she a nurturer or a murderer, you wonder. When just a handful of families is left in Jasoda’s parched village, she moves to Mumbai with her sons and ailing mother-inlaw. The city gives her enough money and a view of the sea. After spending seven years in Mumbai, she returns to a now-buzzing Kantagiri and becomes a restaurateur. A few problems affect the book. However, despite the shortcomings, Nagarkar’s quotidian heroine wins hands down. as if you are in a room listening to the author’s voice; the chapters like braids of rope in the dark. My favourite passages are those on fungus. According to Macfarlane, these are beings that defy definition, that can “liquidate our sense of time.” Read the book for its literary shine too. “Rivers of sap flow in the trees around us,” Macfarlane writes. If we place a stethoscope on the trunk, we would hear the sap “bubbling and crackling.”
In focusing on both the gigantic glacier and the minute lichen, this book is also about paying attention, and on why we should.
In a scene in Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, the 2008 novel which won a Pulitzer, Olive had run a marker across a sweater in her daughter-in-law’s closet. She had raged at her gentle, pharmacist husband Henry and their son Christopher — and eventually lost them: Henry died, Christopher moved away. Olive had aged, angry and more bitter — and hilarious. She is one of my favourite characters in modern fiction. She is cranky, moody, and so honest. And now she is back. In Olive, Again, she has softened in her late seventies. She marries Jack Kennison, a Republican Ivy League type she had loathed, and they’re kinder to each other than they ever were to their late spouses. Her relationship with Christopher improves. Both books are set in the fictional town of Crosby, Maine. The Olive novels belong to a genre of fiction in which nothing happens. They are stories of ordinary people in a small town — but Strout plunges into the dark undertones of their routine normalcy. She explores jealousies, anger, madness, fetishes and loneliness. We get glimpses of the unbearable trauma that people carry — of loss, mental illness, cruelty, the messiness of everyday life. When all conversations cease, conflict seems like a preordained eventuality. Censorship, oppression, and the denial of human rights has recurred in Zaidi’s writing. In her thoughtful non-fiction, she has constantly returned to many of these concerns, which she also brings to Prelude to a Riot thus making a definite statement about her politics and world view. Sample this: “I am not here now to help you read between the lines. Please read out of syllabus. A syllabus is ‘set’ for you. You understand? It is ‘set’ by people whose job it is to limit your knowledge. I am against syllabuses.” Prelude to a Riot is a bold book, a work of remarkable artistic merit, courage, and vision.
TBusiness memoirs are unfamiliar terrain. So when I gingerly picked up Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, I was not sure what to expect between its covers that display the most famous tick in the world. Shoe
Dog is the Nike story in its creator’s warmth-soaked words. The story began in the early 1960s with a
ayari Jones’ An American Marriage is the best book I’ve read this year. Centred on a wrongful rape conviction of an educated, middle class newlywed African American, Roy, the novel charts how this incident shapes the lives of those connected to him. Told through the perspectives of Roy, his wife Celestial, and her close friend Andre, the narrative pierces through the hollowness of the American dream. The unfairness of the situation is poignantly brought out in the letters Roy and Celestial write to one another after Roy is put behind bars, where he writes on the difficulty of writing, of expressing. As he puts it, the challenge lies in his wishing “to write something on this paper that will make you remember me – the real me, not the man you saw standing in a broke-down country courtroom, broke down myself.” The act of writing becomes the need to create a safe intimate space perhaps with an awareness that these letters
are read by agents of the state apparatus. The exchange is suggestive of the state surveillance of coloured communities in the US. The communities are striving to move out of an earlier generation’s distrust of the state. Yet, as in Roy and Celestial’s case, they are made aware of the futility of such an exercise. Jones touches upon not only the presence of racism in American society but also takes on complicated questions about the institution of marriage, of motherhood, and of exceptional choices needing to be made against the backdrop of exceptional circumstances. Roy and Celestial are navigating love and life in difficult times. As Celestial writes in her first letter to Roy, “Our house isn’t simply empty, our home has been emptied.” By situating the unfairness of the US legal system in the private lives of those involved, Jones’ narrative becomes a heartbreaking and moving story about relationships and the struggle for survival in unjust times. 24-year-old wanting to make a difference by coming up with that one Crazy Idea. Before he embarked on his mission, Knight set out on a dream backpacking tour around the world, wanting to “visit the planet’s most beautiful and wondrous places. And its most sacred.” The enchanting trip, which makes for only a few pages in the book, had quality Japanese running shoes as part of his larger adventure. A fanboy, Knight’s idea was to import the Onitsuka Tigers and sell them in the US market, partnering with his athletics coach David Bowerman, the design experimenter known for creating the waffle iron shoe. Impulsively, the shy boy from Oregon created the Blue Ribbon Company while standing
We are living in anxious times. Much evolved though it may seem, society and systems have instead invoked Nietzsche’s fateful phrase: ‘Nothing is true, everything is allowed’. In this context, Roberto Calasso’s The Unnamable Present is a brutal but meditative enquiry into the indefinable present that urges us to give up courage, make cowardice a virtue, and see that both real and virtual war don’t end. The book examines the ongoing project of dehumanization that has blurred the distinction between the tourists and the terrorists.
s the momentum built up towards celebrating India’s platinum jubilee Republic Day on 26 January, 2020, I was surprised at the scarcity of valuable socioeconomic literature on the broad subject of the Republic of India, not merely on the narrow
IAssues of ethnic homelands and borders continue to roil the north east. Given this, the historian Pum Khan Pau’s monograph, Indo-Burma Frontier and the Making of the Chin Hills: Empire and Resistance is timely. It deals with the nature of relations between chiefs, kings and empires since the 19th century, the fluid frontiers that marked rule before the nation-state system with clearly defined borders imposed itself in the Indo-Burma borderlands. It makes our fights over each community’s “ancestral homelands” look stupid. Next is Sunil Khilnani’s Incarnations: India in 50 Lives. Khilnani blends serious scholarship with beautiful writing. Here, he explores the lives of 50 Indians, ranging from Kautilya to Birsa Munda and Dhirubhai Ambani, distilling their intelligence, wit, and uncommon wisdom. Lastly, there’s Rakesh Batabyal’s JNU: The Making of a University. At the time of its founding, JNU was a truly national project with the best talents brought together to make it grow. It’s not just an institution, it embodies an idea. To read this book is to understand why that idea and that institution need preserving today. before the inscrutable Japanese attempting to sell his idea to the Onitsuka Corporation. From selling shoes from his car at track meets to building a team from scratch, to becoming a global giant, Shoe Dog traces this remarkable odyssey and the mad struggle of a maverick’s venture. A tale of grit, steely determination, and wisdom beyond age and sometimes reason, it is all strung beautifully together in lucid writing. This is a heart-warming tale of turbulence and triumphs, snippets about family and expressive portraits of the close circle of his trusty team mates who become family. Shoe
Dog exemplifies the fact that even the story of a global brand of shoes is better told when it has a soul.
Aren’t both out there to destroy the creation of nature, he asks? With algorithmic information eating into human consciousness, mythomania has become the new normal. We only need to plug into it to ensure its constant supply.
I found compelling reasons to agree with Calasso’s proposition that, much like the world that made a partially successful attempt at annihilating itself during the Second World War, our unnamable present too is hurtling down a murderous path.
It is clear that the past continues to haunt us. Things return in a different form. We may have got rid of Hitler and Stalin but not the society that created them. The creation of democracy as an antidote to dictatorship has come to reflect a wishful nothing, extending to everyone the privilege of access to things that are no longer there, which lugs within it the seeds of self-destruction.
The Unnamable Present raises new questions on the transformation happening in our society. specifics of our Constitution. The jinx was broken this summer by economist Surjit S Bhalla, Executive Director for India at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Despite its dour title and cover, his book Citizen Raj stands tall as the first contemporary chronicle that analyses the evolution of post independent India’s economic background. Bhalla’s views are cogent. He doesn’t compromise credibility by trying to be “politically correct.” He doesn’t balk at discussing the pros and cons of post-independence Nehruvian hegemony. He examines why demonetisation not only had zero positive effects but huge negative consequences. Bhalla also takes a look “at the way India ceded space to a man called Narendra Modi.” He doesn’t shy away from politics but is as apolitical as I am. Read Citizen Raj. It is an extraordinary book.
If one were to think of the comprised achievements of Indian literature as an immense library, the bookshelves reserved for quality autobiography and memoir would remain conspicuously bare. In this important category, Indian writers have tended towards apologia and auto-hagiography. Such pure pleasure then to encounter Shanta Gokhale’s gentle, grace-filled but unrelentingly cleareyed Óne Foot on the Ground: A Life Told Through the Body, which tracks the author from birth through the cusp of her eighties, via the framing device of various parts of her anatomy. Thus we have chapters titled, variously, Tonsils and Adenoids, Menstruation, The Nose, and eventually Glaucoma, as well as Full-Blown Cancer. This unusual technique was always going to be a gamble. The author says in her introductory Chapter 0, “I have never looked at myself through the prism of my body. To look at it now, one organ at a time, remembering the circumstances that forced it on my attention in the course of my seventy-eight-year-old life, promises to be a heuristic exercise leading to another kind of self-knowledge...” This is one of the best books of its type that I have read. Huge congratulations are due the author, and also those who aided the writing of this brilliant contribution to an otherwise undistinguished genre of Indian literature.