My First Book

Perhaps it’s apropos for a week in which the London Book Fair kicks off to write this blog post.

This is a post about reading. And about the very first book that I ever read, by myself, to myself. 

This happened many, many years ago. It was an oddly iridescent autumnal afternoon in New York City. I was in the library of a school on the Upper East Side, surrounded by classmates as we made our way through our readers. I remember looking at a hardbound book, the cover an odd aquamarine green, with a large brown/white chick on it, purportedly frolicking in a treetop nest.

It was a book I knew well; I had been introduced to it some weeks back by a South Korean classmate who could already read. She had read it out to me, the story a tragic one of a bird that hatched while its mother was away and who then went on a long, arduous quest that covered several pages encountering strange and wonderful animals and machines, to which it always posed the same, distraught question.

Shawn had read the story out to me, one to one. We had already decided that we were dating. So what if we were only six? This was life in the Big Apple, and one moved quickly, before a Puerto Rican called Carlos or a New England WASP called Douglas moved in. Her name was Shawn, and she was a child model for magazines and catalogues. Yes, it was that kind of school. (To be fair, we were both the best looking ones in that class, and it was inevitable we’d have ended up together. Not to mention the fact that her mother, on having met me on a number of parent-student occasions, was in love with me too)

Anyway, I digress. Shawn had read out the contents of this book to me, and I was stricken. Madly in love with the idea of being able to pick up a book, any book, and being able to read, to decipher it, to understand what mysteries it held within, held a strange and wonderful allure.

Several weeks after that first instance, I found myself standing in the same library, my eyes looking for that green hardbound cover in a sea of books that lined the bookshelves. I had applied myself to understanding the power of the written word with great diligence, keen to impress upon Shawn that I was not a laggard, but merely that I had spent the past several months travelling the South Asian continent whilst she had been learning how to read during a hot New York summer month (yes, Asian children are overachievers.)

I still recall my eye catching that cover, seeing the distinctive (almost feathered) lettering and pulling out the book. I can still close my eyes and remember the feel of that book, its cover having absorbed the dust of several years of grubby schoolchildren fingers into its paper, holding out a slightly grainy feel. I can see myself opening the book, my chubby six-year old finger tracing the letters of the title as I mouthed out the words that I had learnt together made a sentence.

“Are You My Mother?”

And so was born the greatest love affair of my life. The love of reading; the love of the written word, the love of finding a book to read all by myself, no matter where I was, how lonely or scared or unhappy or bored or tired or unwell or happy or content or just there.

A love to last a lifetime. 

The Maps of Our Lives

This story begins on a cold winter's day in the North West of England.

A young man walks through long corridors lined with books. It is quiet in this part of the library - most students tend to lurk around the sciences and management sections. This is the literature section, and there aren't that many takers for world literature. The department for literary studies is small, and other students save their lending tickets for course books; weighty tomes about critical theories and comparative studies.

All except the young man, of course.

Of all his precious library tickets, he saves one to use for bed time reading. When tiring of books dealing with advanced statistics, financial analysis and econometrics, he retires to a narrow single postgraduate student accommodation room bed, his dinky student laptop streaming the latest Napster download, to try to fall asleep whilst reading his latest fiction lending library selection. Over the past three months, he has read many books this way. Writers from all around the world have kept him company in this cold winter in the North West of England. He has made friends with Ariel Dorfman, Doris Lessing, John Ruskin, Amitav Ghosh, Ian McEwan.

Except tonight, he has a book by a writer he's not read before. 

The book is good enough. What foreign student wouldn't relate to a novel about a non-EU student who is trying to reconcile a childhood spent in heat and dust with time spent in a small rural community in a cold, dark corner of Lancashire? A narrative of reconciling different facets of one life, one human being split across different continents?

That was how I made friends with an Egyptian writer called Ahdaf Soueif. I started out reading In the Eye of the Sun. Discovering her to be an alumna of my university, I set out  to make the most of my enjoyment of her writing and my loyalty towards my alumni by trying to track down everything she'd written to read. Over the coming years, I was to read The Map of Love, her Booker-nominee novel, various short stories, and eventually her many articles in the Guardian. (Yes, even her writing for that rag did not diminish my appreciation for her). 

Eventually I was to discover her work in translating the amazing Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti's work describing his return to an exiled West Bank. Shortly followed by a read of her short stories, I Dream of You. By then, I had been to Egypt. I had walked through the dusty, smelly, magical streets of Cairo, fallen in love with the ageing, crumbling beauty of the city, drunk cocktails at the rooftop bar at the Ramses Hilton, had lunched by a slow Nile in the early April heat. 

I fell in love with Soueif's Cairo, her Al-Qahirah, a city whose mystique was matched only by Istanbul and my own precious Delhi. An ageing, crumbling city that felt as if it was, to quote Urdu poet Gulzar, in the pieces of its past life. A city that, unlike Delhi, had fallen into hard, sad times, overrun with the stench of tyranny. But a city that was eternally beautiful, despite its ugly architecture, its suppressed populace. Cairo revealed itself to me as a city that would not be broken. Damaged, yes, but not broken.

And then, in early 2011, the Egyptian revolution came to our doorsteps. As I sat in the UK, captivated by the visions brought to my screen via Twitter, Facebook and BBC News, I was overwhelmed with visions of the Arab Spring. These street battles in Midan el Tahrir were taking place through places in Cairo that I had visited and driven through. These were people I had seen in the cafes and restaurants in Zamalek, students I might have interacted with whilst they were studying in the UK, professionals I had worked with when we both were working in the banking institutions based in the City of London. And now they were changing their destiny. 

I was riveted.

So when the opportunity to mix these two experiences, by going to an English Pen event in Farringdon tonight, to listen to Ahdaf speak, as a revolutionary, a journalist, a troubadour and a raconteur, to hear her describe what she had seen on the streets of Cairo as an observer and a participant, was presented to me, there was really only one choice. Of course I was going to go.

I was slightly concerned, of course. So many times have I met people that I'd read and liked, but who had ended up having feet of clay in person, that I admit to maintaining a sense of trepidation. I was pleased, however, to be presented with a diminutive firebrand of a woman; smart, articulate, witty, and not without an ironic sense of self-depracation. But also someone who I heard speak, whom I asked a question of, who sounded in person exactly like she sounds in her writing. 

And so it was not without a sense of karmic completeness that I am pleased to report that I managed to connect with - in person - that lonely foreign student who wrote about being a lonely foreign student and whose work gave succour to another lonely foreign student. Because perhaps at some point, some place, in some instant, all the maps of our lives coincide. For a small, infinitesimal instant, but nevertheless connect us to our fellow humans.

And all we have to do is live that moment. As I hope I did tonight.

The Symphony of Meretricious Wounds

After my initial post several weeks back about the rules of how to write an Indian novel in English, some people asked me if I was being too harsh. I disagreed and explained, either via emails, on Twitter or over various pints of beer in random pubs, that I was completely, utterly and absolutely correct, and that everything I said or did could be proven empirically.

I am still somewhat surprised why people bother arguing with me. They know I'm always correct, but I suspect it's like a mind gym for them - a bit like trying to sharpen their limited intellect against the whetstone of my brain.

Anyway. We digress.

My rules of writing an Indian novel in English (henceworth referred to as "IWE") ruffled some feathers, but then what would I be if not the ultimate feather ruffler? And imagine my glee at finding a work of non-fiction, written by an Indian doctor of medicine in English about cancer. What did Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee choose to title his work? A very humble, and not at all bombastic "The Emperor of All Maladies".

(Cue the smell of freshly ground chillies as they hit hot mustard oil in a California kitchen. Children play noisily on the floor as a fat Tamil woman, stoic in the face of her own sexual futility and loveless existence, prepares dinner for an uncaring doctor of a husband who spends his days in pathology labs having tumultuous bacteria-ridden sex with a blonde resident)

Anyway. You get my point.

So I was berating the ridiculousness of this title on Twitter, when the inspiration struck: I too would create an IWE. And not only that - I would write an IWE ON TWITTER.

So, dear reader, presented to you below, in all its glory, is my Twitter Indian Writing in English. my TIWE, if you will. The text below is a direct collation of my series of tweets relating to the subject.

I'd like to write a novel called "The Symphony of Meretricious Wounds". It would be a fantastic exemplar of Indian Writing In English.

It'd revolve around a young man, in his late 20's. He' be American, but of Indian heritage. I would call him Surya. Or Sunil. Or Jack.

Jack would be from South India. Preferably Kerala. That would allow him sensual brown skin. And the use of coconuts as sexual innuendo.

He would live in the East Village, leading a hedonistic lifestyle of sex, drugs, rock'n'roll & denial of his own ethnic heritage.

But in Jack's past lurked a deep, dark family secret that an aloof father, a hapless mother & a retarded sister would never resolve.

The secret would craft and shape Jack's entire identity, forcing him to run away from his family to New York. They lived in Menlo Park.

This secret was so powerful, so terrible & so unspeakable that nobody in Jack's entire extended Keralan family ever spoke of it.

The secret was this: Jack did not like coconut in his masala dosa.

Long had his mother sobbed at little Jack's refusal to eat coconut with his food. His father beat him, his sister made faces at him.

His many aunts, redolent in heavy silk saris, reeking of jasmine & oiled hair, whispered when he came to family get-togethers.

His cousins pointed and laughed at him, refusing to let poor Jack join in their little Keralan games. Jack played by himself.

The family crisis came to a head when his father, in a drunken rage, tried to force feed him dessicated coconut. Jack nearly died.

His mother screamed as his father kept slapping teenaged Jack, shoving handfuls of coconut into his mouth. His retarded sister drooled.

After all, what kind of good Keralan girl would marry a boy who didn't eat coconut?

Jack was taken to the hospital that night. New Jersey doctors pumped his stomach clean of all coconut. Social services was called.

Social Services took Jack away from his abusive, coconut-force feeding father. He was put up with a large Croatian family.

The Croatian family did not eat coconut. Jack was happy.

Jack grew up, went to university, and met a good Hungarian girl. He moved to Manhattan, became a photographer & built a life.

And then it happened.

He was walking through Union Square when he bumped into a beautiful Indian woman. She wore kajal in her eyes. And bangles.

Her name was Shakuntala. Or Katyayini. Or Jane.

Jane was fresh off the boat from India. She was studying politics at Columbia. She was opinionated. She oiled her hair.

She'd carry mango pickle in her coat pocket. In the middle of heated intellectual debate, she'd pull out a piece, suck it & go "ooh".

Her sex appeal was off the charts. It was also largely predicated on sucking bits of pickled fruit. Jack was smitten.

Jack & Jane had a tumultuous affair. Their relationship was marked by long walks by the Hudson, debates about Sartre & lots of bad sex.

Jane was the one who made Jack watch his first non-Fellini film in years. Thanks to Jane, Jack watched Rajnikant. In Robot.

It was to Jane that Jack finally described his underlying dislike of coconuts. He slowly opened up to her, verbalising his loathing.

As softly as she could, Jane whispered, "But Jack, if you hate coconuts, you hate yourself."

"You are a Keralan American, raised by Croatians, denying the everlasting allure of coconuts. You are the ultimate coconut, Jack."

Jack stared at her fat naked body in bed. He was thunderstruck. She had struck him at his white, watery core.

Unsure of what to say or do he did reacted viscerally. He started hitting her. Because what was an IWE without domestic violence?

Jane screeched as he held her by her plait & slapped her. But her coconut oil had done the trick. Her plait slipped out of his grasp.

Racing to the kitchen she hurled the first thing she could find at him. It was - but of course - a coconut. It hit Jack on the nose.

Jack stopped still in his tracks. His nose was broken. Yet again he was rushed to the hospital in a coconut-related emergency.

Mt. Sinai doctors set his nose straight. "How strange", said the weird Telegu doc. "Why waste a good coconut like this?" Jack agreed.

Unable to face Jane after that scene, Jack walked aimlessly across New York. He listened to pretentious American rock on his iPod

Finally, unable to avoid the issue any longer, he went to the curry shops in Murray Hill. He was a man on a mission. A coconut mission.

Walking into a South Indian restaurant, he sat down beneath the large statue of Ganesha. Incense sticks filled the air. Rose petals too

"What would you like to yeet?" the obsequious waiter yasked him. Jack drew in his breath. "Bring me... a coconut masala dosa".

The waiter brought the dosa, hot, steaming and full of coconutty goodness. Jack stared at it, his face impassive, unyielding, immobile.

Suddenly, an old Bollywood song came on the radio bleating in the corner. It was a song Jack's mother sang to him as a child. Badly.

And as he sat there in a curry shop in Murray Hill, with a broken nose, staring at a coconut masala dosa. Jack softly began to weep.

Because if you were a 20-something man who hit his girlfriend & had his nose broken by a coconut, you would weep too. A LOT.

But most importantly, Jack wept because as he sat in a grubby curry shop in Murray Hill, he realised the worst thing of all.

He had forgotten his pants at the hospital and was walking around town in a hospital gown.

The. End.

The 10 (okay, 13) Commandments of Writing Indian Fiction in English

For those of you who know me (or at the very least read my blogs or tweets) you may recall that I am a fan of fiction. By virtue of my ethnic origins, I also bear more than a passing interest in fiction written by writers from the South Asian subcontinent. Including that written in English.

Indian authors have written in English for decades now. However, only recently has the work that they've produced taken on an international dimension; with the Indian community spread far and wide across the globe, publishers have discovered a new genre in fiction: the indubitable Indian Writing in English (henceforth known as IWE). This happy interest in all things Indian has also been mirrored by a growing non-desi interest in South Asian fiction. So just as much of Britain finds going for a curry part of the norm on a Friday night, so do literary types in Bloomsbury offices and Hampstead flats find reading the latest product of the dusty subcontinent gratifying in an intellectually suggestive way.

This international interest, has, of course, opened the flood gates to thousands of Indians, educated in the English language, to try their hand at writing the great Indian novel. (No, not The Great Indian Novel - that's already been written by some former UN bureaucrat) But what these poor souls, all frantically rushing to hurl their mediocre Indian childhoods into a word document, do a quick "Find - Replace" for major character names, and then add a title don't realise is that there are very clear rules to be a successful writer of Indian fiction in English. The title of IWE is not one lightly bestowed or easily won.

However, because I am a kind and nurturing soul, I've taken the liberty of codifying the main principles of how to write a novel in order to win the title of IWE. Stick to these, oh mediocre writer, and all will be well. Watch the plaudits come rolling in, the publishers lining up at your door, and the pundits gushing over your shoddy tale in the weekend edition of The Hindustan Times.

The Ten (okay, Thirteen) Commandments

1. Thy Book Must Have a Title That is Strange & Wonderful. Also Very Long.

2. Thy Narrative Style Must Be Long Winded With Disjointed Grammar. And Much Punctuation. Badly Used.

3. Thy Male Characters Must Be Misogynists, Brutal & Uncaring. Or Sensitive & Caring. But Only If Gay. Or Dead.

4. Thy Female Characters Must Be Sexually Frustrated, Oppressed & Withered. Or Wild, Wanton & Uncontrolled. But Dead.

5. Someone In Thy Fiction Must Have Magical Powers. Or Purport To Have Some. Preferably a Grandparent. Preferably Female.

6. Thou Shalt Write About The Sordidness & Poverty Of India. Thou Shalt Not Ignore Caste or Religion-Based Violence.

7. Thy Novel Must Have Long Passages Devoted to Indian Food & Its Preparation. They Must Be Boring. And Accurate.

8. Thou Shalt Write About the Healing Powers of Spices. And Not Ignore The Sexual Tensions Inherent In Green Chillies.

9. They Characters Who Live Outside India Must Return to Discover Themselves. And Be Desperately Unhappy Wherever They Are.

10. Thy Prose Shalt Be Peppered With Much Vernacular. But Italicised & Used Like a Foreigner. Like French. Or English.

11. Thy Novel Shalt Have Tales of Lust. Preferably Incestuous. Or Consummated Amongst Pickles. Or Spices. Or All Three.

12. Thy Characters Shalt Always Have Bad Sex. Straight Sex will be Dull & Unsatisfying. Gay Sex Shalt Be Rancid & Devious.

13. If Travelling Abroad, Thy Brahmin Character Shalt Debase His Purity Via The Medium of Alcohol, Meat & White Women.

And as some old crabby God said to the Israelites in the Middle East - keep my commands and live; and my law as the apple of thine eye.

Now go forth and prosper, ye maggoty rats.

It's all about me....it's all about me baby!

Given that so many different friends are doing these, and have tagged me in their lists, I have buckled and am posting my version. So for all those people who wanted to know me better, or didn't, here goes.

1. I am a sucker for forwards, tags, and other random facebook-related pseudo chain-mail epidemics, as this particular post amply demonstrates. (A side note - don't you love the word "ample"? It just curls your tongue the right way. English doesn't have enough words that do that - which is why I find German so much satisfying since you can really get your tongue around it. I guess I'm actually all about the tongue....)

2. I refuse to worship at the altar of puritanical language use, choosing to meld it to my preference, and will therefore use words like "sucker" and "epidemics" in the same sentence with no sense of irony or apology. I will also throw in words from other languages, just for the fun of it.

3. I am a serial traveller - and cannot remember how many countries I visited in 2008. I think it was 12 different ones, but I cannot confirm that.

4. I have therefore decided to slow down a little in 2009, because I really should be able to keep track of myself. I guess I shouldn't worry about keeping track of myself though - I'm probably being monitored by terrorists, my boss, the CIA, space aliens, or all of the above so I'm doing my bit in fighting the global recession by providing employment opportunities (Side note - maybe my boss is a space alien terrorist who secretly works for the CIA? hmmm....)

5. As an aside - 2008 was an awesome year; the travelling was just the icing on the cake, though there were quite a few irritations along the way. (Side note - I am OBVIOUSLY unable to do this without side notes, subtle jokes, and generic ramblings. How very tedious and simultaneously amusing. I'm obviously not just all about the tongue, I'm also all about the tangent.)

6. I am officially in love with Berlin, and if I could find a job there, I would move tomorrow. (this is a polite nudge for people who can help me find jobs in Berlin) I absolutely detest Singapore, and would rather move to Timbuktu or Twyford before I moved there. I actually would enjoy going to Timbuktu, so that's probably not a fair statement.

7. I speak two languages perfectly (English and Hindi - though both come with the disclaimer in No. 2 above) and several others (French, Spanish, Bhojpuri, Punjabi and Urdu) badly. I also speak enough Spanish to buy a beer, find a bathroom after drinking the beer and have conversations with Chilean ballet dancers and Catalan clowns about life, the universe and everything, so I guess I speak more Spanish than I logically should.

8. I am perpetually sleep deprived, due to a combination of factors including work, movies, novels, the internet, the local stables, my friends, my friend's playstation, and not least of all alcohol. I am therefore probably walking around with terrible skin, though thankfully I don't get too many pimples.

9. I have never had a tattoo or a body piercing - the former because I still haven't found what I'm looking for, and the latter out of a healthy fear of my father, and his threat that he would rip out any piercing I had. If you know my father, you would have a healthy fear of him too.

10. I am currently toying with the idea of a body piercing, but realise that it is essentially a potentially juvenile way to demonstrate that I no longer live in fear of my father ripping it off. I will therefore probably never get a piercing, but hey, you never know.

11. I love dancing, and can dance saala (unlike pappu). I am also an energiser bunny when i'm dancing, and can dance all night (I can also drive all night, and not be Cyndi Lauper, but that's another story). I am generally in serious pain the next day since my feet are generally sore, but hey, what the hell.

12. I love a wide variety of music, though house / techno / european electronic / rap doesn't really cut it for me. Put on Bollywood, though, and you've got a winner. Which then leads me to the next point (which should really be No 13, but I'm enjoying this too much to hit enter) and that is that I am a Bollywood fanatic. I will draw the line at anything with Himesh Reshammiya in it or providing the music for it, and anything with Mithun Chakravarty also tends to be off limits (though he was very good in Agnipath).

13. I have now hit enter, and on reading number 12 am more than slightly disturbed that I have managed to include both Mithun Chakravarty and Himesh Reshammiya into a piece about me and my life.

14. In a possibly futile attempt to recover from the trauma identified in Number 13, I will move swiftly along onto another obsession - books. I only read fiction, and will tend to avoid anything on a bestseller list, (yes, yes, I know, I'm an intellectual snob, but frankly, given that I'm smarter than atleast 95% of the world, I don't see the issue with being realistic). Favourite writers include Haruki Murakami, Orhan Pamuk, Michael Ondaatje, and my sister, Sunny (and that is NOT being parochial. You wanna take this outside?!)

Other writers I tend to enjoy include Ahdaf Soueif, Amin Maalouf, Alan Hollinghurst, Emile Zola, Amitav Ghosh, F. Scott Fitzgerald (I cry like a baby everytime I read Tender is the Night, which isi far too often, and which means that I cry like a baby quite often) Tolstoy (though I think War and Peace was in dire need of an editor, whereas Anna Karenina rocked) and E.L. Doctorow. Ariel Dorfmann is awesome too, and unlike Isabel Allende (who I think is a bit of a sell-out now and has never been able to match the dizzying heights of excellence that was Eva Luna) and Mario Vargas Llosa (who is good, but can be tedious - maybe its the translations and I should try reading him in the original Spanish - cross ref to No. 7 above) I like the fact that Dorfmann doesn't write with the ghost of Marquez on his back. Speaking of whom, 100 years of solitude is another all-time favourite - I think part of the attraction is that sometimes I think that the Buendias could have been inspired by my family....

15. I love cinema, though the troubling thought is that everyday there are more movies made and released and are added to my pile of things that I have to watch and don't have enough time to watch. It often feels like I'm trying to empty a bucket with a teaspoon while someone else is filling it up with a jug - very biblical, don't you think?

16. I am a serial post-colonial post-modernist, and will argue till the cows come home, bed down for the night and go out again in the morning after being milked about how both are incredibly valid criticisms and frameworkds for analysis even today. I therefore have massive issues with books like Shantaram and movies like Slumdog Millionaire, in which the authenticity of the narrative is established by virtue of the filmmaker or writer being Western. Apparently us poor non-Westerners aren't good enough to tell our own stories, and our attempts are somehow not good enough. Obviously people who're born and bred in Mumbai can't make movies about Mumbai as well as some random Scottish bloke can. And you didn't see Johnny Depp running to buy the film rights to Sacred Games, now did you?

17. Ella Shohat rocks. Alan Dershowitz does not. 'nuff said. (Reader, there's a pun there. Try to find it. It does not have anything to do with Jane Austen).

18. I have few obsessions, many hobby horses, and a collapsible soapbox that I whip out whenever needed. I also tend to win arguments. In fact - I tend to win. Period.

19. I love riding horses. I do not love riding motorbikes or other twowheeled motorised contraptions.

20. I am tiring of the need to get to 25, which helps demonstrate one of my vices, which is my severe lack of patience. A lasting family joke is how as an Americanised 7 year old stuck in a traffic jam on the Washington Bridge in the Big Apple, I stuck my head out of a silver sedan with a diplomatic licence plate (no, i wasn't the one driving - even the evil diplomats don't let their 7 year olds drive), and yelled to the six-foot plus driver of the 4x4 in front, "move, buddy, MOVE!". Everytime that this story is told, generally with great hilarity ensuing, I have to calmly remind everyone that buddy duly moved, and we were on our way. Funny - you would think they would care to remember that.

21. I do not like seafood, but I also do not dislike it. That may sound ambivalent, which is exactly what my relationship to seafood is like. I do like a spicy prawn curry, and a mean meen moili hits the spot (but not everytime i eat it - hence the ambivalence). I do not like sashimi. ever.

22. I would rather die than stop eating meat. I do not need to eat it all the time, everytime, and in arterty-clogging quantities and preparations, but more than two days without meat and I start feeling faint. Nothing can quite match a solid biryani, or a well-cooked steak. I don't like raw meat though, and things like tartares and rare portions don't really rock my boat.

23. I can, and often, drink like a fish (funny that, given my ambivalence to seafood - see number 21 above. Side note - I am big on cross-referencing, which is possibly the consequence of having too many PhD's in my personal sphere of influence and interaction. Blame the academics, I always say) I am usually able to outdrink most friends, make it home at 4 am and then get up at 7:30 to go horse riding (generally without a hangover). I agree with most spirits (and they tend to agree with me too, which is why we get along so well). I do not, however, react well to either Guinness, or anything that is from the fennel / aniseed world (so no raki, ouzo, or sambuca, thank you). You risk having me throw up all over you if you get me onto tequila.

24. I have a blog, which I update less frequently than I would like. I am also shameless at self-promoting, but my logic is that if I don't tell people how wonderful I am, who will? Besides, its not as I'm misleading them when I tell them that. I am also not a modest person, but then, that's just me being a brutal realist.

25. I am relieved at having made it to No 25, and cannot think of anything to add to this section, other than to say that things like this particular post are really dangerous because they give self-loving soapbox carrying erudite maniacs like me an opportunity to hold forth for far longer than we should. Don't you just love the internet?! :)

The Art of Forgetting

Memory and the art of remembering is something that writers and philosophers choose to dwell on at great length - perhaps because in so many cases the creative process itself is a means of commemorating a past, and the act of creating a story is often the path to remembering something. Over the past two hundred years, authors ranging such as Kafka, Kundera, Borges and Murakami have spent a great deal of intellectual horsepower on what it means to remember, and what it means to forget.

Following this noble and illustrious line of storytelling is The Amnesiac, by Sam Taylor. The narrative opens in Amsterdam, where the protagonist, James Purdew, is recovering from a broken ankle. Living an apparently satisfactory life (he has a stable job, a loving girlfriend, an apartment in the heart of Amsterdam) his veneer of contentment is perpetually ruffled at the edges by premonitions of his past, and the fact that he has no memory of approximately three years of his life. What happened to him when he was a university student in the English town of H.? Why is he haunted by the strains of a tune that he cannot remember more than two lines of? And above all things, who is Anna?

Ankle healed, relationship with Dutch girlfriend Ingrid terminated, James returns to H. (why can’t we call it Hull and be done with?) to try to find out more about his past, and to (both figuratively and literally) find a key to unlock his past – because of all the diaries he’s ever kept throughout his life, the ones pertaining to the three years he cannot remember are in a locked black box, and he cannot find (or even remember) where the key is. From here on the novel begins its tortured tour through the past of a life that is at once fascinating and also equally dull and pointless. For Purdew’s life is very bourgeois, with all the trappings of a traditional English childhood in the seventies and eighties – the bad hairstyles, the quaint television shows on the BBC, the agony and the ecstasy of first love, sex and death. Add to this mix an ongoing renovation project that Purdew takes on (how could a novel so thoroughly English leave out the persistent English obsession with home equity?) and you have a classically English novel for our times. Through all these events, clues towards unlocking the past slowly accumulate; references (almost tongue in cheek) zip past as we hurtle along the narrative as the author throws in clues to the denouement.

Taylor does well in creating a haunting reality, almost Camus-like in his emphasis on duality; his one passage on how hope and fear, light and dark, are potentially merely two sides of the same emotion is very reminiscent of The Absurd. Taylor veers between different times and narratives, choosing to work in several voices (the hidden observer, the narrator, the first person) to move the story forward. Over the course of nearly four hundred pages, Taylor moves (sometimes smoothly, other times not) between genres, going from nihilistic twentieth century self-reflexive novel to Robin Cook-like medical thriller involving large sterile corridors and doctors with mind-altering chemicals speaking in hushed tones through to nineteenth century Victorian murder mystery, tracing its path through the narrow side alleys behind Waterloo.

But alas, that is where the good times end. The extended references to Borges are cute to start with but soon belabour the point, and there are sections where he insists on discussing philosophy that could have been handled with more subtlety; either readers will already know about solipsism, or they will have the good grace to find out; you don’t need to explain it a la Philosophy for Dummies. And perhaps most disappointingly, after all the build-up, the denouement is completely unsatisfactory; loose ends come together a little too neatly, the whodunit solved cleanly, all the pieces falling into place too well, but the overall conclusion is like the English football team (who also make an appearance, albeit tangentially, alongside Doctor Who) – just not good enough. And if you rely on Borges’ trick of nothing being as it seems, surely there was some way to keep the ending as engaging as Borges?

Despite its flaws, The Amnesiac is an engaging read; Taylor writes cleanly, albeit a little too consciously and cerebrally, and his prose is crisp and engaging. One has to acknowledge that despite the shortcomings, The Amnesiac is better than a lot of what passes as literary fiction these days, and Taylor knows how to dot his literary i’s and cross his cultural t’s; he just needs to do it with a little more aplomb. Maybe he'll remember that for next time?

(The Amnesiac is published by Faber in the UK and Penguin the US)

Water under the bridge...

So its been almost a month (probably just under) since my last post. Thanks, everyone, who wrote in, either online, or backchannel, to ask about the burglary. There's really not that much to report - came back late on Friday night to an empty house, with my door kicked in, and without several electronics and some cufflinks. The lack of a laptop, and my inertia in going to go get another one, is primarily the reason why I've not replied to several emails. So if you were wondering why I hadn't replied, let me just say that its not you, its me!

And there is so much water under the bridge. Too much to tell and not enough time to spend several posts on each, so let's do this by themes...

Life in London

Winter has definitely set in, and today there was ice and frost on the ground in Hyde Park. We didn't see much sunlight, and there is a wet, slightly damp smell of cold weather perpetually in the air. The tube is actually comfortably warm, and Oxford Street has its Christmas lights up. I'm wondering whether it will snow, but I'm not sure if I'm going to be around to see any..

Travels

4Q 2007 is definitely turning into travel season. I'm off to South East Asia with work for several weeks, and will be jetting around from one city to another. Given that its going to be about 25 degrees down there, you don't exactly see me complaining! I've never been to Taiwan before, and there's also a chance to sneak a trip to Beijing, so I'm definitely psyched! Oh, did I mention that I might try to nip across to Hong Kong and/ or Bangkok as well?!

But its not all travel for work...there was a weekend spent in Berlin, which I have to admit is the only city in Europe after London that I could see myself living in. The city has an amazingly historic sense to it, especially the parts that are close to the former Berlin Wall. It's also incredibly moving to go and actually see the Reichstag which has been restored to its pre-1933 grandeur, with the addition of a spectacularly gauche glass cupola that is totally out of place with the Gothic architecture otherwise seen.

I think that the two things that moved me the most, out of the entire visit, was walking after dark along the one stretch of the Berlin Wall that is still standing, and getting an incredible sense of being fenced in, so to speak. Given my own claustrophobia, the thought of being trapped behind a wall, unable to move because of global geopolitics, was a very disturbing feeling. And what made me even more troubled was that there are so many places in the world where similar walls and boundaries exist - the latest Israeli attempts to fence in the West Bank being a case in point.

The second most moving place in the whole of Berlin has to be Bebelplatz, a large square in the centre of old Berlin. The square is ordinary enough by itself, but its only when you look at the cobblestones and realise that this was the site of the Nazi's great book burnings does the chill set in. A German philosopher (whose name eludes me) said in the 1800's that anyone who started out by burning books would end up by burning people, and we all know how prophetic those words are. As someone who's pathologically obsessed with books and knowledge, I can't actually imagine what it must be like to be crazy enough to want to burn books. And I hope I never have to find out, or meet anyone who does...

But Berlin was not all doom and gloom - this is Germany, remember! The city has a vibrancy and feel that is gritty and exciting, with real artists painting or sketching on the streets, large tree lined avenues and grand classical buildings sitting next to districts with punks and hippies with large warehouses and industrial architecture. And of course, how could I forget...

Bollywood!

Getting back to my hotel room in Berlin at something like 2 am (yes, I was out partying...) I turned on the TV and had the somewhat dubious pleasure of watching the opening credits of Dhoom 2! In full three hour, unedited glory, there was Hrithik, Abhishek, Bipasha and Aishwarya, speaking GERMAN! I confess that my German is not good enough, and neither am I crazy enough to stay up till 5 am watching a movie that was timepass at best, but I think that my last recollection of the movie is a scene of Abhishek Bachchan going, "Wohin ist diesen Herr A?!"

(Curiously, they don't dub the songs, but because I guess it may be somewhat boring to watch a song where you don't understand the words, they edit out the verses completely...so all you get instead is a series of five minute sequences of the dancing, but just when you expect to hear, "na usko ko pata..." all you get is "crazy kiya re.....crazy kiya re..." ad infinitum... )

And finally, books...

I can highly recommend Orhan Pamuk's Black Book, (which is called Kara Kitap in the original Turkish)... a slightly surreal, dreamy recollection of a simple life turned complex, it has the best of Pamuk - Istanbul, love, Turkish identity, and that smell of winter...

Anyway, so that's pretty much where things are at this point in my life. Mad, hectic, but so far a good 2007, and one to look back at fondly. A friend said today that the past few years had been reasonably "unbalanced" and I know what he means. I just hope that I get a few more years lacking balance, because in the words of the Goo Goo Dolls, yeah you'd bleed just to know you're alive...

How now, Sir Salman?

Given the hullabaloo in our literary orchards recently over the be-knighting of the writer formerly known as Salman, I was trying to get my head around why I think he deserves the honour. Because when I heard that news that he was to be made a knight, I didn't think it out of place, or disagree with it at all. It just seemed appropriate. So while I was chewing over why I think its a good idea, I thought it would be good to try to express why I supported the knighthood.

Sunny Singh, however, managed to capture my thoughts pretty succinctly. I'm sure they're really her thoughts, but I just agreed with everything she said. So rather than repost, or try to say it all over again, I'm going to cop out and just redirect you to her article instead.

Oh, and by the way, can you imagine Padma Lakshmi as the first supermodel/ TV celebrity chef to become a lady? If only she'd married the man when she had the chance!

Anyway, snide comments aside, the one thing that really bugs me as a liberal Indian capitalist is the fact that India continues to be one of a handful of countries that maintains the ban of The Satanic Verses. (Most of the others are tin pot Islamic fundamentalist whackos like Iran & Pakistan). It goes against every grain of what it means to be a democracy to put in place bans like that. And that extends to ridiculous things like the MF Hussain mess, the Chandramohan fiasco, etc. What is with the stupid moral-religious police?!?! I find actions like that incredibly invasive of my personal decisions to read what I want, say what I like, and basically express my fundamental rights of freedom of choice & expression.

I'm tempted to start a campaign to un-ban the book in India...so watch this space.

(Image pinched from Ultrabrown)

What happens After Dark?

Children of the night; dark alleyways. Lives small and limited, but simultaneously interconnected and expansive. Coincidence, destiny, chance encounters, randomness.A series of unrelated concepts & events unfolding through the course of one night. Spare, precise prose. Japanese minimalism, white walls, brushed sand, polished river pebbles.

But perhaps, most of all, a haze. That slightly nauseating dizziness, a sense walking through clouds, where images don't seem quite solid, when moving figures seem lose shape as they pass through air thicker than mercury, where the boundaries that define images begin to blur, when nothing seems real anymore. The intoxication brought on by insomnia, by fatigue, by watching the change from dark to light as a new day breaks.

All of these permeate After Dark, Haruki Murakami's latest novella. And it is a novella of several firsts. For starters, it is a short work by most standards, but doubly so for one by Murakami, whose novels tend to be long and complex narratives that allow the reader the luxury of many, many pages of the sparse prose so characteristic of his writing. Another departure for Murakami is the time span of the story, starting just before midnight and ending soon after dawn breaks the next morning. The one thing that Murakami retains is his the simplicity and honesty of his characters; their utterly ordinary lives, which are at the same time unique & quixotic.

If that seems oxymoronic, it is, because in true Murakami style, while initially each character appears, at least on the surface, to be totally unexceptional, it is when you get under their skin that their unique circumstances paint them in a more unique light. It's almost like you're walking down the street and ignore the ordinary masses all around you, but suddenly have one deconstructed in front of you to reveal the complexity within.

And then, there is the emergence of Murakami the voyeur, the film-maker. His prose veers eerily close to the tightness of a crafted script, minutely filling out the mise-en-scene; the music in the background, the colour of her jumper, the half eaten sandwich on a plate. There are directions for the cameraman, of when to pan out and take in the room, of when to focus in on the twitch of her lips as she sleeps.

What is the story? To be honest, it doesn't matter. The specifics of the events that take place during the night are irrelevant to the overall writing. There is meaning and symbolism in everything, but at the end, do the events of the night make a difference?

Ask someone who spends the entire night awake, only to see the morning wipe away all the fantasies that the darkness allows.

Shopping...

So after finishing my exams last week, I finally have control over my own free time again. No more needing to lug study notes around on the London tube, or wake up on weekends workplanning my study schedules for the day. So to celebrate, I walked into a bookstore earlier this week, and sort of went a little mad...

First I saw this, which I just HAD to buy...


And my excitement was further heightened when I saw this one:




I was somewhat disappointed to know that this one isn't going to be out in the UK until September, but then soon overcame that when I realised I could buy it from Amazon and have it shipped out from the US.



So that came in today!

I'm already almost through with the Murakami - and I find it fascinating to see how his writing style has evolved over the years. It's still the same spare, whittled down prose that is classically Japanese in its minimalism, but he is suddenly so much more attentive towards the mise-en-scene. At times I get the sense that I'm not so much reading a novel as I am a screenplay - each scene, each frame is composed in his mind and almost effortlessly communicated...

Watch this space for the reviews....

Cairo Claustrophobia

It's funny, isn't it, how travelling to a place always somehow makes something written that much more real and identifiable? I always find that once I've been to the place that a particular novel is set in, the stories that I may have read before become that much more magical for me when I read them again. Perhaps all I do is colour in the narratives in my own head with what I now know of the place, but in any case, I somehow find the second reading so much more intimate.

This is exactly what happened with a book I'd read some months back, but hadn't thought to write a review of. But after my whistlestop tour of Cairo, which only served to whet my appetite for going back, I picked up The Yacoubian Building again. The book itself was a gift from a friend who was passing through London from Cairo last year. When I'd read it originally, it had seemed a good read, but nothing exceptional. But after spending just over 36 hours in Egypt, with a hotel view that looked out over Garden City towards Mohandiseen & the Citadel, I was somehow drawn back to the novel, and picked it up again last week.

First published in 2004 in Arabic, The Yacoubian Building is the work of Egyptian author Alaa al Aswany, a dentist by profession. The story traces the lives of several characters, each from different walks of life and different social strata, with very little to connect them to each other other than the fact that they all live in The Yacoubian Building, a typical Egyptian residential block in the old city. While the more affluent & powerful residents live in the large apartments in the main building, the roof contains small rooms which are inhabited by the poorer characters in the tale.

The story reads like a mosaic, moving fluidly between multiple narratives and tracing the ordinary lives of its protagonists, each of whom is in a unique way a victim of their own circumstances. There is Zaki Bey, an affluent man from a landed family, who was destined for power and influence, but had that deprived by the 1952 revolution. Taha just wants to be a police officer, but his humble antecedents deprive him of a place in the academy. Busayna does her best to earn enough to feed her widowed mother and younger siblings, but ends up in all her jobs as the victim of sexual exploitation. And there are many, many others.

Through all of their troubles and worries, the Yacoubian Building is the recurring leit motif. The story takes place in many locations, but at several points the scene is set in one of its apartments or on the crowded rooftop. On the whole, the story is not particularly cataclysmic, and there the ending of the story is somehat abrupt, leaving you feeling as if you were being led along, but were not given any catharsis. The small joys and sorrows that are spread through the novel continue until the end, perhaps appropriately illustrating what the realities of its characters must be like to live through. But there are two things I found remarkable about this novel, and more so after my trip to Cairo.

The first is this incredible sense of claustrophobia that pervades the novel. The overwhelming sense of entrapment, of being stuck in a situation from which you cannot get away, is one that affects each and everyone of the characters. Whether due to a lack of money, or for other, more complex circumstances, each protagonist is a prisoner of their own reality, unable to break out of a cycle of corruption, fraud and exploitation, whether a perpetrator or victim. While this claustrophobia came across even the first time I read the novel, it was magnified after I went to Egypt, and could see the streets and city for myself. Like so many developing countries, people in Egypt are either extremely rich or extremely poor, with very few individuals qualifying as "middle-class". And associated with these extremes are the classic cycles of exploitation, whether economic or sexual.

The second point that, at least for me, was quite unusual, was the sexuality of the writing. The Yacoubian Building was originally written in Arabic, and was for some time a best seller across the Arab world. Perhaps this is symptomatic of my own ignorance of the region and its multiple realities and complex social mores, but there is a frankness in dealing with so many things that I would have thought would be taboo. Whether it is the detailed exposition of Busayna's exploitation at the hands of her many bosses, the extensive lovemaking between various couples (never graphic or titillating, nor even erotic, but suggestive) or in the extensive description of the gay scene in Cairo, I was suprised by the extent to which Aswany deals with what I would have thought taboo, especially in a country like Egypt.

Finally, and perhaps appropriately for our present day realities, there is one subplot that is worth mentioning. Aswany describes in one of his subplots the evolution of an Islamist, one who is motivated by the desire for change in what is perceived to be a corrupt and decadent establishment to one that is fair, egalitarian and just. The sense of inevitability that surrounds the birth of the extremist is handled adeptly, but also sensitively, without going into any moralising or political grandstanding. Aswany reminds us that there are no black & whites - just one really confusing grey.

Love Twinned with Darkness

Buying novels at an airport can either prove to be serendipitous or they can be terrible finds. Either you end up reading another rehash of the Da Vinci Code ilk of writing, or you can often find some hidden gems. Airports in India especially seem to favour selling copies of Pablo Neruda right alongside Dan Brown, Borges next to Barbara Cartland. The eclectic organisation of books can be either frustrating or entertaining, but never dull.

It was during a frantic rummage while my flight was being called that I stumbled across Amos Oz' autobiography, A Tale of Love & Darkness. A quick glance at the backflap, coupled with the heft that would guarantee the consumption of several hours of flying time(and did I mention the dirt cheap price?) made the purchase an easy decision.

I didn't manage to get around to reading the book until many months later, but the decision still remains a good one. Oz's story traces the origins of his family in Eastern Europe, where as Polish & Lithuanian Jews they are persecuted over several centuries. Subsequent migrations, to the USA, Odessa, and finally to Ottoman/British Palestine in the early 20th century are traced in the first part of the novel, as Oz builds up through a mosiac of stories the extended history of a family. Oz narrates the story along multiple chronologies, moving between family history in the "old country", while his "present" traces the development of the state of Israel in the 19030s through to the late 1950s. Stories of how the Irgun, Stern Gang & Haganah begin the process of British resistance are counterpoised against the tales of industrious ancestors running flour mills in 1800's Poland.

More disturbingly, the entire narrative is an attempt by Oz to understand and explain his mother's suicide in 1952 through an overdose of pills for her depression, a time when Oz was an incredibly intelligent & sensitive 12 year old. Oz takes us through both the origins of his family and the present of his mother's time to deconstruct the sources of her depression, her loneliness and the marital discord between his parents that eventually drove his mother to take her own life. By reconstructing the events, both political & personal, that eventually led to her death, Oz tries throughout the narrative to understand why his mother would choose to abandon him.

Perhaps the strongest emotion that comes through the story is that no matter what the circumstances of our existence, and our daily realities, the greatest asset & burden we all have is the legacies of our personal histories. The legacy that Oz carries has helped feed his writing, his characterisations, his creativity; for his mother, they became a large part of what finally drove her to take her own life.

The centrality of the narrative is on the development of Oz's identity, and that of his family, as Israeli Jews. While focusing primarily on the implications of what it meant to be Jewish from the 1930s, and by focusing on the individual stories of what his own family goes through, Oz manages to describe a broader sociopolitical phenomenon - that of the construction of a national identity. The one insight that was perhaps most interesting for me is the realisation that despite being returned to what was their original "home" 2000 years ago, most European Jews were unable at the time to divorce their Jewish identity from their European one. Auteurs, musicians, artists, intellectuals, people who heard Mozart & Rachmaninoff, studied Spinoza & Kant, and often spoke several European languages, many immigrants to what was then British/Ottoman Palestine were distressed and horrified at being returned to what was clearly the "Orient". Palestinians weren't only just Muslims who were against the resettlement of Jews in their lands, they were also clearly Orientals who didn't understand the justification of the Israeli state. Ah, what it must have been to be European and full of the "white man's burden" back in the 1900's.

The book is surprisingly easy to read; possibly a result of being a translation from the original Hebrew, which is itself a more grammatically directive language than the obscurities & tangentiality afforded to the writer in English (amazing what you can do with an infinitive, isn't it?) Despite its considerable length (thankfully not as long as some novels, but easily crossing 500 pages of small font) the book can be one that you can choose to linger over, savouring the stories on each page, or one that you can blaze your way through.

A poignant, nostalgic and emotional look back at a personal history, A Tale of Love & Darkness, promises a lot, and thankfully delivers.

Memory & the Art of Writing

No matter how hectic my schedule, there is always time to read in it - either while commuting on the Tube, or in bed before falling asleep. I usually read very quickly as well, and I can go through several books in one weekend, or on a long flight.

It therefore always surprises me when I find books that force me to slow down and really spend time turning the pages. So it was rather a bizarre coincidence to find not one, but two books, both borrowed from a friend, that managed to do just that. In fact, I probably took over four weeks to really go through them - a completely surprising thing, given that cumulatively they're only about six hundred pages.

I think what really forced me to slow down and take the time to go through these at leisure is that they both wrote so eloquently about something that is usually so complex and multidimenstional that it is difficult to capture completely in work - the act of remembering.

The Memory Artists and The Museum of Unconditional Surrender are written by Canadian Jeffrey Moore & Croatian Dubrovka Ugresic (I am unfortunately missing some critical diacritical marks from the second name) Both write about very different circumstances & realities, with very different structures and plot elements, but are essentially connected with the power and helplessness of memory, and how in so many ways it forms an integral part of our worlds.

The Memory Artists is set in the narrative of an immensely talented character who is diagnosed at a young age as being a hypermnesiac synaesthete - his memory is startlingly accurate, but he sees words as colours in his own head. Moore spends many paragraphs spinning out how simple words and sentences can trigger chains of association in the protagonist's head, a myriad of colours, shapes, images, all carefully and tumultously documented as we're taken on a tour of the mind of a synaesthete. Noel's "normalcy" is severely hampered by his synaesthesia, but his ability to remember the most minute of details is unerring, allowing him to remember detailed conversations had many years ago. Once Noel experiences something, it is as good as graven in stone, for him to be able to recall at a later date.

The counterpoint to his own unfailing ability to remember is his mother, who's descent into Alzheimer's disease is probably the single most disturbing part of the novel. The complete inability of Noel, who has more than enough memory for the both of them, to be able to "save" his mother, is completely heartbreaking. Unwilling to let his mother slide into oblivion, Noel starts frantically to search for a cure in the basement of his house, aided in his pursuits by a friend who is unable to feel disappointment, and the occasional interludes from Noel's doppelganger, Norval.

Moore's writing is crisp, and even though the prose flows quite easily, he provides enough weight in a few sentences to keep you preoccupied. Using a multiple of narratives, diary entries and conventional dialogue, the story progesses, pieced together towards an ending that is muted in its joy, but is also equally poignant. The acknowledgements at the end describe how both of Moore's parents were victims of Alzheimer's, and I was forced to go back to the passages that discussed Noel's mother's condition, and which suddenly became even more tragic.

Contrasted to Moore's idea of what it means to remember, and to forget, Ugresic's writing is in some sense much more personal - it almost feels like sitting in someone's head, reading their thoughts, as she flits from one idea to the next. The story is abrupt, and in real terms, there is no plot. That would have been the most damning thing for me to say about any novel, but in Ugresic's case, the lack of plot provides the perfect platform to exercise in the act of remembering.

Told from the perspective of a Croat exile who flees to Germany to avoid the ethnic conflict in erstwhile Yugoslavia, The Museum... is one long lament. It is the keening of a woman mourning the loss of a life, a heritage, and a country. Compiled from a set of vignettes, the story starts and end in Germany, cutting back to the Balkans and in time to coalesce into a mosaic describing the lives led by some very ordinary people in ordinary times, only to have that mosaic shattered by events. In many ways painful reading, Ugresic's work is very, very quietly written. She is not one for bombastic or "powerful" writing. But the strength of the work lies in the quiet turmoil that conveys the anguish in the writer.

I know that most authors hate to be asked whether their writing is somewhat autobiographical - it is the most cliched of questions you can possibly ask, but somehow, in both these cases, there are clear glimpses of painful memories that both writers have chosen to deal with, not because they cannot find any way to obliterate them, but because the writing process becomes a cathartic experience - by writing it down, you can purge it from your system. And both The Memory Artists and The Museum of Unconditional Surrender are just that - incredibly poignant, powerfully written stories that leave you disturbed out of your shell, and usually traumatised by the author's act of catharsis. But unlike Greek theatre, there is no dramatic denouement that can help the reader perform his own purge - the internalisation that takes place during the novel cannot be that easily removed.

That takes its own time - enough time for the memory to fade just a little bit.

Satanism, Hedonism & Incunabulum

This is the first book post of 2007, and in a season when we clear out the old to make way for the new, I am going to write over the next few days about three books that I read in December and wanted to share with you before moving onto the new reads of 2007.

The first one is titled The Dumas Club, and is written by Spanish author Arturo Perez-Reverte. The story traces the events in the life of a jaded intellectual detective, an Italian called Dean Corso, who specialises in tracking down and authenticating ancient scrolls, incunabula and rare editions of books. After a rare book dealer is found dead after selling a manuscript for a chapter of Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, and another book dealer acquires an even rarer medieval satanic text titled De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis, which is fabled to hold the secret for summoning the devil, Corso is assigned to the task of verifying the authenticity of both manuscripts. This kicks off a race across Europe to archives and private collections, all the while being followed by a sinister man with a scar across his face and random encounters with beautiful women whom Corso eventually manages to sleep with, despite an occasional inability to get it up - the effect of too much gin, I'd guess.

Perez-Reverte then takes us through several hundred pages of medieval fact finding, wild goose chases, intellectual cartwheels, plot digressions, and several dead bodies littered aesthetically along the course. The story is convoluted, trying as it does to be intelligent and factor into it several narrative styles, and the plot itself relies almost embarrassingly on The Three Musketeers for dramatic impact. There is a Cardinal Richelieu, there is a scheming Milady, and incredibly enough, there is also a Satan (oops - I mean a Fallen Angel) that accompanies Corso through Spain, Portugal & Paris on his quest to determine the authenticity of both works.

While an intelligent premise, the novel fails in its execution, simply because the author writes far too self-consciously. Corso is never completely fleshed out as a character, and the repetitive references to his Bonapartist ancestry is tiresome. He seems to be Perez-Reverte's idea of what Umberto Eco's Casaubon from Foucault's Pendulum would end up like after two decades of intellectual investigation - chain smoking, emotionally dysfunctional, addicted to gin and beautiful, unattainable European goddesses. Perhaps the biggest let down is in the denouement, when what appears to be an increasingly complex web of loose ends are so neatly and simply tied up that you're almost left flabbergasted and disgusted at having been led on a wild goose chase.

I was somewhat saddened by the fact that Perez-Reverte is obviously an incredibly smart man, but writes far too much in the shadow of that master of semiotics, medievalism and fiction, Umberto Eco himself. His plotlines, narrative style and even the forced inclusion of The Eco himself at a gathering of intellectuals & Dumas admirers ("Look who's arrived. You know him, don't you? Professor of semiotics in Bologna...") only underscore that this is a writer who read Foucault's Pendulum and somehow so desperately wanted to create his own version that he ended up writing The Dumas Club. There is also an almost obsessive desire on the author's part to impress the reader with his knowledge of literature, both medieval & contemporary, as well as an urge to write a thrilling intelligent murder mystery. Unfortunately, the book is too self-conscious to make it truly worthwhile.

End verdict? Mildly entertaining, but unfortunately not enough to keep you engrossed to the end. Good reading for the Tube, but only if the Metro doesn't keep you entertained.

Coming soon - The Memory Artists by Jeffrey Moore & Broken April by Ismail Kadare...

Chronicle of a Sati Foretold

The following review of With Krishna's Eyes is by Christopher Rollason, and appears on both the critic's and author's blog - it is syndicated here with their permission.

Sunny Singh’s new English-language novel, With Krishna’s Eyes, is a disturbing and eloquent exploration of the dark side of “Shining India”, in which the modern and globalised coexists cheek-by-jowl with the archaic and traditional, in a contradiction seemingly without issue and yet lived to the marrowbone by its intensely engaged characters. It confronts the vexed question of Indian modernity head-on, by boldly centring its plot on so controversial an issue as sati. In the process, it draws on the resources of Indian English and the Indian and non-Indian literary heritage to offer the reader an exploration of fear, in a specifically subcontinental context, that may justify its being taken as a highly original piece of what might be called “Indian Gothic”. The author, born in Varanasi, now lives in London: the global reach of her work may be deduced from the fact that With Krishna’s Eyes came out in Spanish translation (Sunny Singh was resident in Barcelona at the time) before it was published in English, while her earlier novel, Nani’s Book of Suicides (published in 2000 and also translated into Spanish) was awarded the Mar de Letras literary prize in Spain in 2003.

The title might already raise eyebrows, for the reader may legitimately ask whose are Krishna’s eyes. Krishna is in fact the novel’s female protagonist: women named Krishna are fairly rare, but they do exist. If a gender barrier is being crossed through this naming of the character, we discover that Sunny Singh’s Krishna, in many ways a warrior woman, is not without her resemblances to the Krishna the combatant sage of the Bhagavad Gita (though rather less so to the playful blue-skinned Krishna of the Puranas). The female Krishna of this novel is a warrior in the world of film-making, a US-educated member of a proud Rajput clan who is suddenly called on to make a documentary, all too non-fictional, about a willed and voluntary sati, the conscious choice of an educated woman at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Forced as a matter of family honour and obligation to live this intense contradiction, Krishna finds herself accepting a major part in a drama which she does not approve of but tries her level hardest to understand. She herself is a globalised Indian who has recently emerged from an intimate relationship with Natchek, an NRI and financial consultant even more globalised than herself. Now, back home in her ancestral village east of Delhi, she comes face to face with Damayanti, a friend of her family’s: an educated, apparently modern woman, a graduate of Miranda House, Delhi, a Supreme Court lawyer who had in her time chosen a love marriage, a gadget-happy mobile phone owner, who nonetheless actively and obdurately campaigns for “her right to be sati” (145) as soon as her ailing husband leaves the world: “I have petitioned the court for permission to be sati, when my husband dies” (100).

The inevitability of Damayanti’s sati is etched into the reader’s consciousness from the very beginning – it is as certain to come to pass as the honour killing in Gabriel García Márquez’s Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold), a book to which Sunny Singh’s tale bears some resemblance. Krishna is impressed again and again with its necessity, by the familial pressure that descends on her from her grandfather, her sanyasi uncle, and, from beyond the grave, the voice of her late grandmother. It is a lesson of dharma, of unquestioned and unquestionable duty, of loyalty to family and clan. It is also the manifestation of a harsh and literal reading of the Bhagavad Gita and the homilies of Krishna’s divine namesake. Between this novel’s lines, one may hear the reverberation of the sacred text’s slokas, but we are talking about no benign or liberal interpretation of the concept of dharma. The voice of Krishna which we hear through and around the other Krishna is that which, in the Gita, declares sternly: “Through fixed devotion to Me, it is possible to know Me thus, O Arjuna, and seeing Me truly, to enter into Me, O vanquisher of foes” (Bhagavad Gita, 11-54). For Krishna’s relatives and for Damayanti herself, living in such a world of “fixed devotion”, the sati is as necessary as the elimination of the Kauravas. It is her grandmother who declares: “See Krishna, first we must do our duty. Follow dharma, and most times, it hurts. But to love something doesn’t mean to give up dharma” (91). Her uncle sings to the same tune: “Do what you have to do. That is the dharma of a warrior, right?” (283). Under such pressure, the young and modern woman comes to a large extent to internalise the ancestral belief-system herself.

It is as if Krishna the film-maker had to go through the ultimate anguish of living someone else’s sati under her own skin; and indeed, fear is a major element in the novel, signified as it happens through certain trappings of the Western Gothic transposed into the Indian context. Krishna has already lived through the trauma of 9-11, the quite literal explosion of American Gothic in all its darkness. Used to a New York where “two tall towers rose to the sky like the crowning jewels” (36), she suddenly comes to see the city as “a sinister killing place, full of smoke and death and suspicion” (41). Now, in India, Krishna is confronted with atavistic fears – “dark shadows that crowded my mind”, “long tongues of flame that flickered at the edges of my vision” (226). When first she enters Damayanti’s house, she finds herself in a darkly oppressive Gothic space that recalls Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher, as first experienced by its fear-struck narrator: “I was led discreetly through gloomy carpet covered halls, where the ancient, heavy furniture lay carelessly scattered through the rooms”. Damayanti, “on a low couch, leaning against the many cushions that were piled up behind her”, greets Krishna like a second Roderick Usher, to induct her into a world of ancestral oppression (98). Poe meets Rajput tradition, to generate an atmosphere of Indian Gothic that culminates in the scream that rises to the skies at the moment of the sati – a shriek that is not Damayanti’s but Krishna’s, “my scream that went on and on, forever in my head” (289).

Sunny Singh’s novel does not neglect the sociological and ideological aspects of the sati issue – the saffron militants who demonstrate for Damayanti, the leftists and secularists who oppose her, the local peasants and functionaries who end up worshipping her as a sati-mata. However, the experience of reading this book is that we are dealing not with a tract one way or the other, but with a textually mediated perception of an Indian reality, communicated through specifically literary effects and emotively charged creative language. Seeing the sati with Krishna’s eyes (those of the character and those of the god), reliving the dark tale through the Indian Gothic of Damayanti’s House of Usher, the reader of this novel, Indian or foreign, will sense something of globalised India’s attempt to come to terms with itself, its ancestral fears and still-alive past anxieties, its painful efforts to live through them once again in order, it may be, finally to exorcise them.

**
NB: the quotation from the Bhagavad Gita is from the version translated, edited and introduced by Vrinda Nabar and Shanta Tumkur (Ware, England: Wordsworth Classics, 1997).

You can read more of Christopher's works here
You can read Sunny's blog here

Orhan & his Istanbul

The Swedish Academy announced today that it had awarded the 10 million Swedish kroner Nobel Prize for Literature to controversial Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. Of the many writers who were out there and notable contenders for the Nobel, I could not think of a more suitable winner than Pamuk.

The award citation read, "In the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city, (Pamuk) has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures."

Perhaps this, then, is Pamuk's greatest legacy. Born in a staunchly nationalist Turkey, the memories of Ottoman decline fresh in its mind, and the glory of Kemal Ataturk at the forefront of the national consciousness, Pamuk could be the Cassandra of modern Turkey. His has been the voice of prophecies and quiet introspection, and one that has been incredibly divisive internally. His work has attracted much attention, and a great deal of criticism, with some considering Pamuk to represent a vision of Turkey that is palatable to the West, but which it actually is not. His mention of the massacres of Kurds & Armenians has not gone down well in Turkey either. Pamuk has recently been victim of a lawsuit, brought to court by nationalist Turkish lawyers for insulting the Turkish nation state by accepting the genocides. In fact, its probably no coincidence that Pamuk won the prize in the same year that he faced the lawsuit - many Turks would probably also feel that the lawsuit itself might be the only reason for his winning the award at all.

Pamuk has continually chosen to depict the dichotomies of tradition and modernity and their conflicts within Turkish consciousness in most of his work. His work has focused on more easily identifiable themes, such as the syncretism of Istanbul and its transition from a centuries old capital to a simple commercial city in Istanbul or My Name is Red. He has also chosen to delve deeper into the issues of identity formation and constructivist identities that operate at multiple levels in The White Castle, Snow & The Black Book. There is also a recurrent mystic quality to his writings, whether in his descriptions of art as a means to reach God in My Name is Red, or in the power of books to transform lives (The Black Book, The New Life).

But for me, none of this is anything more than an intellectual exercise.For me, as a non - Turk, non - European, perhaps some of the complexities in his writing are inaccesible. I am definitely impartial to most of the controversies surrounding his work. Pamuk became one of my favourite authors, and the reasons for that were simple. He opened my eyes to his beloved city, Istanbul.

A city that has long fascinated me, I was intrigued by a place that is poised between Europe & Asia, historically, geographically, culturally. I wanted to see how Istanbul, for many centuries a great city, has dealt with no longer being the centre of the known world, where different cultures, empires, societies would meet in the original melting pot.

Pamuk helped answer some of those questions for me. Through his writings, I could trace the transition that Istanbul & Turkey have undergone over the past forty years - from a slow decline of Ottoman tradition, to the steady growth of European style secularism, with recent years seeing a resurgence of Islamism. His work helped me discern the fine divisions that existed between different factions within Turkey and their views of how Turkey should be; how it veered towards a modern, outward looking nation that is increasingly global & consciously European in outlook, against the backdrop of a strong Ottoman legacy, a distinctly Asian heritage and a syncretic society that saw many religions and ethnicities coexist within a distinctly Islamic framework.

The first Pamuk novel I read was his classic, My Name is Red. A historic murder mystery, set in medieval Istanbul, it brilliantly etches the strongly divergent views on art & representation between the Islamic & European worlds. At the centre of the narrative is this discord, of how long established traditions are threatened by new trends brought east by Genoese merchants, of how the quest for modernity can be so easily shattered by the tyranny of tradition. My Name is Red sketched for me a view of an Istanbul that was redolent of power and grandeur, but that was laced with a seamy underside of political intrigue & stifling traditional conservatism, as well as a city that was essentially divided between its European & Asian halves, psychologically as well as geographically.

I read My Name is Red & Istanbul before I visited Istanbul. But Pamuk's writing had painted a glorious picture for me, had opened my eyes to the multifarious realities that make up that uber-city, had prepared me for the schizophrenia that was to confront me at every step. I learnt not to blink at the sight of a woman in a full chador, only her eyes visible, walk down Istaklal Caddesi and pass several open air cafes, their tables occupied by several gorgeous young women, blond, in low cut tops, chatting and smoking cigarettes. I learnt to expect Turks to look Caucasian, Arab, Persian. I learnt that the architecture in Istanbul was a glorious cacophony of different styles, the older Ottoman heritage clearly showing its Mongol ascendancy, while more recent constructions spoke of rococo & Baroque influences. I learnt that it was normal for people to live in Asia and work in Europe, and cross that great divide twice a day on their way to work.

Pamuk's writing taught me, before I had even stepped foot in his city, that if you were in Istanbul, your name, too, would soon be Red. And for that alone, I applaud Pamuk on his Nobel prize - rarely has an award been so well deserved.