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Jhumpa Lahiri was much criticised for writing solely about the Bengali immigrant experience and having a severely limited canvas. However, Unaccustomed Earth had quietness and restraint —qualities that seem to be becoming rarer and qualities that I have learnt to be thankful for.
It had made me angry, this extreme negativity towards homosexuality and towards AIDS. It was important to me, as a reader, to have all these voices coming together to speak out about the people affected both by the epidemic as well as by the attitudes that surround it. I particularly liked the contributions by Nikita Lalwani, Kiran Desai, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Mukul Kesavan and Sonia Faleiro.
It has been recommended by a couple of people and I am interested, despite the fact that I am fairly limited by words and have little visual sense and sadly, any visual art form rarely permeates my senses. I have also ordered a copy of Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer. Another book I plan to read soon is Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape. I usually like her writing, which is slightly disturbing and quite honest. I look forward to the books I will get to read in 2009. I hope it is a good year for both reading and writing.
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Working
The Enchantress of
Florence by Salman Rushdie was
sensual, energetic and flamboyant. It was also congested, noisy and
tiresome. I remain suspicious of magic realism. It is still not clear to
me what exactly it is. However, skirting reality is something that can
be recognised when you see it happening. I see it too often in Rushdie’s
work, even though I admit reality is subjective. The complacent,
self-satisfied tone of this novel tired me and I found it to be a very
grand novel, all the noise and the fireworks eventually leading to
nothing much.
The stories were mostly
about family dynamics, relationships and loss. They had insight, subtle
character portrayals and economic, unhurried prose. I especially liked A
Choice of Accommodations for the way it explored the complicated
business of being married. Also, the melancholic Only Goodness,
in which the protagonist deals with an alcoholic brother. Incidentally,
I realized he is one of her few characters who is not an upper middle
class worldly success. The book ends with the dramatic three-part story,
Hema and Kaushik quite a well-handled, carefully crafted story.
AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories
from India touched me. It
had 16 writers contributing to it. Edited by Negar Akhavi, it is an
excellent collection, with sensitive, thoughtful essays. I read this at
a time when I had just found out from an old friend that a gay man we
knew from college had tested positive and was having a tough time with
his landlord as well as his employers.
Sea of Poppies
by
Amitav Ghosh, the first part of a trilogy he plans, turned out to be a
delightful mix of genres. There is something dazzling about the kind of
detail with which this large-scale novel is written. There is a
bewildering potpourri of language. It delights in most parts.
Occasionally, it befuddles, like when Ghosh described a place as being
full of "crowded sampans and agile almadias, towering brigantines
and tiny baulias, swift carracks and wobbly woolocks". Ghosh’s
fascination with peoples and their histories, his sense of travel
through time and places and the scholarship he brings to this novel made
it a compelling read. I look forward to the second novel in this
trilogy.
I read The White Tiger
by Aravind Adiga in one go. It has a gripping story that is well told.
The only problem I had with it was that I felt that Balram, the
protagonist in whose voice the novel is told, has a tone that is very
sophisticated for someone who is uneducated. It just did not sound
completely convincing, and was, after all, clearly the writer’s voice.
Also, there is too much of intelligent summing-up that Balram does,
sometimes, I felt, even on the reader’s behalf. But despite my niggles
with this novel, I found it to be interesting and readable. I read an
interview where Adiga said that most Indians were even denied basic
health care, education and employment. As a result, there is "a
kind of continuous murmur or growl beneath middle-class life in India,
and this noise never gets recorded". Recording this
beneath-the-surface growl is what Adiga attempts to do. Not an
uncomplicated task, so maybe the flaws were inherent. I appreciated this
novel and what it was trying to do, though.
It was lovely to sink my
teeth into The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets edited
by Jeet Thayil. I do not read a lot of poetry and don’t know much
about it, but it was pure pleasure to go through the work of over 70
Indian poets, who are from diverse backgrounds and locations, each with
a distinct voice and style. Right from Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra,
A. K. Ramanujan and Dom Moraes to younger poets like Tishani Doshi and
Sridala Swami, all share this wonderful platform. This collection stayed
on my bedside table and lasted me for days.
One book among the many
that I missed and mean to read is Amruta Patil’s graphic novel Kari.