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Literary Review
Which book did you like the most this year?
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In a year of relative boom for the publishing industry, it is not an easy task to zero in on books one particularly liked. In this year-end special issue, ANURADHA ROY talks to a random selection of informed readers to find out which books stood out for them.
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AMONG the people to whom I popped the question about the books they liked best this year, some responded with delight, some with silence, others with helplessness. Amartya Sen, shuttling between Harvard and Cambridge, expressed popular sentiment about the frenetic pace of life when he said, "... the pressure of work is... making it hard for me to read books to be able to write about them!" Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie echoing him, said, "... my brain is so over-run with things to do... that I can't even think of the most memorable book I've read this year, let alone say a few words about it."
Here are some of those who managed to both read and write on the books that moved them particularly this year. This is a random, rather than representative group of informed readers of books.
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AMIT CHAUDHURI
THREE books stand out for me this year. The first is the recently published Dissenters and Mavericks: Writings About India in English, 1765-2000 (OUP) by Margery Sabin, which I read more than half of in a stationary train from Boston to New York, as workmen tried to repair a bridge in Connecticut; besides other things, it helped to take my mind off, at least temporarily, the experimental state of public transport in America.
Sabin's engagement with her unusual subject is always meticulous and intelligent; and welcome, too, given that it focuses on a nation and a class whose intelligentsia takes itself so seriously. A similar study needs to be written on the extremely powerful and rich tradition of dissent in the Indian vernaculars, and on the conundrum of why this tradition did not enrich post-Independence Indian English writing in more palpable ways; but that is another book. My second choice is, indeed, a collection of essays, Time Warps (Permanent Black), by one of India's greatest contemporary dissenters, Ashis Nandy, who perhaps falls outside the purview of Sabin's book because he is not a "literary" figure. Nandy continues, in this book, his assault on both right-wing and secular formulations in modern India, in a language that, for all its energy, maps an area of inward dislocation more suggestively than any other Indian commentator's; it's worth noting in passing that India's two great living dissenters in the English language, Nandy and Aijaz Ahmed, have one thing in common despite their different political beliefs — English is not their first language.
My final choice is a first novel, Point of Return, by Siddhartha Deb. More than a hundred years ago, Kipling annexed, in English writing, the makeshift townships that came into existence in the hills of India under colonialism. Deb returns to that territory and discovers that not much has changed in the decades after Independence: the tentative civic reality, the remoteness of national government, the daily succession of local rulers, the pointless, fusty bureaucracy, the magic of the cold weather in a hot country. From the first chapter, which describes a son and father's excruciating wait for a pension cheque, to the subsequent chapters, which explores the relationship these two figures have with each other and with their surroundings, we know we are in the hands of a craftsman who has the gifts of observation, memory, and expression.
Dissenters and Mavericks: Writings about India in English, 1765-2000, Margery Sabin
Time Warps, Ashis Nandy
Point of Return, Siddhartha Deb
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NASEERUDDIN SHAH
TWO books which I really should have read earlier but have only just discovered are Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet and a book of Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poetry in an English translation by Victor Kiernan. Faiz saheb ranks up there with any T.S. Eliot or Shakespeare, of course, and his stuff isn't easy. This translation made his work a little more accessible to me. Gibran's book (which everyone has read) is the most simple and profound thing I've ever come across. I realised how much one of my favourite books heretofore, Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, owes to Gibran. I am actively working on The Prophet as a stage presentation also.
The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran
Poems by Faiz, tr. V. Kiernan
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PANKAJ MISHRA
I READ A.N. Wilson's The Victorians (Hutchinson) with renewed admiration for Wilson's capacity to shape an absorbing human narrative out of the most unwieldy material and for those virtues of moral clarity and intellectual rigour that are much rarer than they seem. Eric Hobsbawm's memoir, Interesting Times (Allen Lane), offered disappointingly few moments of self-revelation, but I was held by the accounts of his travels through the peculiarly cosmopolitan world of communist and socialist movements outside the West. Siddhartha Deb's novel The Point of Return (Picador) revealed him as one of the most talented of a new generation of Indian writers. In Time Warps (Permanent Black), Ashis Nandy examined Indian politics and culture with the same intimacy and originality that have made him India's leading public intellectual. Gyan Pandey's Remembering Partition (Cambridge) was another reminder of how the dreadful events of 1947 have shaped, mostly for the worse, the nationalist self-images of India and Pakistan. I found myself often rereading with delight Cyril Connolly's essays, which were admirably republished in two volumes this year. I enjoyed Philip Hensher's ironic take on imperial and Afghan history in his novel The Mulberry Empire (Flamingo). There were plenty of stimulating ideas amid the contentious assertions of Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate (Allen Lane) and John Gray's Straw Dogs (Granta). The historical sweep of Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles (Allen Lane) was impressive even if the book's vision of the decline of nation-states and the rise of "market-states" seemed a bit premature.
The Victorians, A.N. Wilson
Interesting Times, Eric Hobsbawm
The Point of Return, Siddhartha Deb
Time Warps, Ashis Nandy
Remembering Partition, Gyan Pandey
The Mulberry Empire, Philip Hensher
The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker
Straw Dogs, John Gray
The Shield of Achilles, Philip Bobbitt
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ASHIS NANDY
ZIAUDDIN SARDAR'S The Consumption of Kuala Lumpur is one of the most memorable books I have read in recent years. Sardar started life as a philosopher and historian of science and is also a distinguished and sensitive scholar of Islamic civilisation. In this book, he has blended a distinctive mode of political ethnography, which has an in-built place for myths and legends, and the story of his personal encounter with a bustling Asian city, which is trying to reinvent itself as a global city. The blend has produced one of the most difficult things to do in contemporary social sciences — a successful, readable biography of a living city that is also simultaneously an intimate personality profile of a community. Kuala Lumpur becomes in Sardar's hand a way of posing some of the central issues of our times, among them the future of disorienting yet creative encounters among cultures and traditions; the fate of democracy in an essentially plural, Asian society trying to gatecrash into the big league of development; and the clashing demands of the aesthetics of contemporary civility and traditional lifestyles. The Consumption of Kuala Lumpur is a story of our ambivalences being acted out, safely, by some others in a not-so-distant neighbourhood.
The Consumption of Kuala Lumpur, Ziauddin Sardar
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NIRMAL VERMA
THE most stimulating book which I read this year was Roberto Calasso's Literature and the Gods, a sad reminder of the lost times when gods played such a central role in the creative imagination of the artist. Calasso is a fabulous writer, a unique philosopher and critic, who, with his brilliant insight illuminates the treasures of the mythic imagination both of the Greeks and ancient Hindus. His wonderful book Ka beautifully weaves ancient Indian myths into the most lyrical gems of fantasy which are very deep in the multiple layers of the inner world.
And I re-read with great pleasure the Turgenev classic The Hunter's Notebooks, which evoke with such loving detail the forest valleys and rural landscape of 19th-Century Russia and the wretched fate of serfdom to which the Russians were doomed or condemned at that time. It is said that the Russian Czar, having read Turgenev's book, was so deeply moved that he took constitutional steps to remove serfdom. And then, lastly, I concluded my readings this year by Graham Greene's most moving book on love, which I read years ago but immensely enjoyed reading again — End of the Affair — a book which I read as it should be: in the autumn days of the dying year.
Literature and the Gods, Robert Calasso
The Hunter's Notebooks, Ivan Turgenev
End of the Affair, Graham Greene
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PICO IYER
THE book that really took me aback this year (and I know it's the case with many other readers) is Ian McEwan's Atonement. I've never really got on with his writing before — have always found it a little too crabbed and dark and malign — but in this case seeing the world through the eyes of an 11-year-old girl seems to have liberated him for a really searching and often emotionally complicated investigation of innocence, Britain before the Second World War and the whole country-house tradition of Austen and Woolf. Apart from anything, it's a delight to see a novelist absolutely in command of his form, so he can write with seeming effortlessness about war, love, and the farthest reaches of both innocence and its despoliation. Among non-fiction books, perhaps the one that has stayed with me most deeply is Janet Malcolm's Reading Chekhov, again an investigation of a writer in whom I've never been much interested, which somehow got me wanting to read everything by and about him. The psychological intensity of Malcolm's enquiries is so deep and involved and deft — she says more in a page than most biographers can manage in a chapter — that one gets caught up not just in her subject, and not just in her own journey, but in the curious and shifting relation between them both.
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Reading Chekhov, Janet Malcolm
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SHASHI DESHPANDE
AT a time when books were not so much written or talked about as read, there were two categories of books: the Classics and the Rest, which last was a vast ocean to be explored, the reward, sometimes, being an exciting discovery. Just when I thought this could no longer happen and life seemed bleak, all good books already read, I stumbled upon Michael Frayn's Headlong.
"I have a discovery to report" the novel begins, the "I" being a young scholar, Martin Clay, who, seeing a painting in his neighbour's house, is struck by instant recognition. This unsigned painting, titled "The Merrymakers" is, he is convinced, by Bruegel, a Flemish painter of the 16th Century, the one missing painting of a series called the The Seasons. And so he (and the reader) plunges headlong into an attempt to identify it as a Bruegel and to keep the fact from the owner, Tony Churt. Frayn spins an exciting story out of this material, a keeping-you-on-the-edge-of-your-chair narrative. Martin embarks on a vertiginous journey, haring off after every clue that will confirm his conviction it is a Bruegel, his scholarly tracking taking him into the history of the Netherlands at the time, a period of Spanish occupation and to probing into what Bruegel was. Was he a heretic? A collaborator with the Spanish occupation? A political dissident who cleverly concealed his dissidence in his religious pictures? And when those were so full of hidden allusions to persecution, why did he paint this bucolic paradise in the "Seasons"? Or, is there something so dangerous in the Merrymakers that it had to be concealed and so went missing?
This scholarly process of research and inferences is brilliantly contrasted with the burlesque of Martin's ham-handed attempts to deceive Tony, as he tries, tape measure in pocket, to get a close look at the picture without revealing his interest in it to Tony, being distracted each time by the alluring Laura, Tony's wife. Tony, Laura, and Martin keep overtaking one another in this maze of deceit and even Kate, Martin's scrupulously honest scholar wife, is a step ahead of Martin in this game. But ultimately his inept deception succeeds so well that ...
No, I won't reveal the end. This is a book to be read to the last word, each word savoured to the full. I can only say it's been long since I read a book I enjoyed so hugely, a book I laughed over aloud. As a writer I admire the extraordinary skill that weaves scholarship so seamlessly into a story, the virtuosity with which he describes the paintings, something few writers can do well. (Charlotte Bronte's embarrassing descriptions in Jane Eyre, for example.) Frayn draws you into the pictures, you almost see them.
A book of ideas, a book about words, about identity, about art, and about morality too, for there is a satisfying end, all, including the paintings, getting their just deserts. An intelligent (not clever) book. And entertaining.
Headlong, Michael Frayne
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NABANEETA DEV SEN
AMONG recent reads, I loved Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist and enjoyed Yann Martel's The Life of Pi. But Mirza Sheikh Itesamuddin's account of his voyage to Vilayat (England) was a real discovery. A gentleman of leisure from Bengal, he was apparently the first Indian aristocrat to travel to Europe. His detailed, discerning, mature account in Persian of western culture seen with eastern eyes, describes European social structure, the economy, the form of government, the tradesmen, the religious scene, the status of women, etc with rare sophistication.
We get a great deal of 17th/18th Century writing, when the West was discovering the rest of the world. There are European travel and Oriental Tales (imaginary travellers' tales) like the Persian letters, where Europeans comment on Europe by borrowing the eyes of an Oriental foreigner. This is the first time I have come across a real Oriental Tale by an Oriental traveller! It's a fresh English translation, makes delightful reading.
The Alchemist, Paul Coelho
The Life of Pi, Yann Martel
Mirza Sheikh Itesamuddin's Travelogue
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GITHA HARIHARAN
I have not read too many new books in 2002 because I have been negotiating the last lap of my own new novel. But one of the discoveries I made this year is the Chinese filmmaker Dai Sijie's debut novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. I have to confess I began the book with a suspicion that it would be one of those books, now all too familiar, taking on the Cultural Revolution with all the advantages of hindsight, to say nothing of the Western reading market. Indeed the book is about two boys exiled to the countryside for "re-education". The author was himself "re-educated" between 1971 and 1974, then left China in 1984 for France where he now lives. But this little gem of a novel has the quality of a parable; it lifts the experience of yearning for freedom above its specific location in the mountains of Western China. The novel has at its heart a simple, eloquent design — Balzac, stories, storytelling and story-receiving exemplify the craving for new worlds beyond the reach of any sort of regimentation. It is not living in the countryside or being part of the "people" and the ongoing necessities of the "revolution" that sees the students through their growing-up pains in terrified, lonely exile. It is art that does — and in this case the art consists of a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation that the narrator secretly appropriates and makes his own. The story-lessons from another time and tradition help him woo the young seamstress and her father; and they transform the students as well as the young Chinese seamstress forever. What transforms them is the power to enlarge their imagination — a small but powerful legacy of growing up in a painfully circumscribed corner of history.
It is difficult not to read, even if you are drowning in your own book-in-the-making. So I found myself re-reading several books on my shelves this year. Two of these which made a fresh impression on my memory: Sara Suleri's memoir Meatless Days and William Trevor's collection of stories, The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories.
It is impossible to be satisfied with calling Meatless Days a memoir, so curiously does it manage to combine facts, memory, and interpretation. The result is a most intelligent meditation on women's lives and men's; location and its equally troublesome cousins, relocation, dislocation; the body, food, language, families, countries, boundaries, loss, and most of all, the fabulous creature that brings all these together: the imagination. And Suleri's language manages some stunning acrobatics. Simultaneously dense and elegant, never "post-colonial" without a delicious sense of irony, Suleri's book is memorable for the way in which word and texture are as much part of the point as the elusive notions she teases into existence.
I have not come across any of the Irish writer William Trevor's other books, but if they are anything like The Ballroom of Romance (first published 1972), they are certainly worth adding to anyone's reading list. These 12 meticulously observed stories effortlessly strip layer after layer from an assortment of ordinary lives, both children and adults. These ordinary lives, in the hands of this writer, become as intriguing as all ordinary lives should be in fiction. Whether in the throes of pain or timidity or fear, the people living their lives in these stories convince with their striving for a balance between love and illusion.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie.
Meatless Days, Sara Suleri.
The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories, William Trevor.
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K. SATCHIDANANDAN
WHICH of the books I read this year do I write about? Yann Martel's Life of Pi that I finished reading last week or Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter that I am almost through? Or the many favourites I keep reading and rereading like Borges, Italo Calvino, Patrick Suskind, Ingeborg Bachmann, Clarice Lispector, John L'Heureux? Or the complete works of my dear poets Paul Celan and Cesar Vallejo? The collections of short stories by T.R., Paul Zacharia and N.S. Madhavan, the best of Malayalam short fiction writers? Or M. Mukundan's Nrittam (The Dance) or Anand's Apaharikkappetta Daivangal (The Stolen Gods) or the many Indian novels in translation including Nirmal Verma's Antim Aranya? These are some of the authors and books I do care for. But I have chosen to write about a fine poet who died in the prime of life, Agha Shahid Ali whose collection, The Country Without a Post Office (Ravi Dayal) truly moved me. He writes about his beautiful land torn asunder by double violence with the same passion with which Lal Ded and Habba Khatun had sung their spirituals among the lowly. Guns shoot stars in to the sky in Srinagar as the women pray in the night of Tsvetayeva and men in that of Mandelstam. Jhelum's flow is at times punctuated by a dismembered body and it is terror that now reddens the chinar leaves. "I am everything you lost. You won't forgive me. /My memory keeps getting in the way of your history." Memory and history are the two great springboards for his poetry from which he flings his soul and his senses into the depths of language: he comes up as a witness, a beloved witness to death, to martyrdom — "Shahid" means the "beloved" in Persian and "Witness" in Arabic and "martyr" in popular parlance — all over the world — from Chechnya and Bosnia to Kashmir as is proved by the poems in this book as also in A Nostalgist's Map of America and The Beloved Witness. His world is a world of Kafkaesque dread where someone is itemising our lives, gathering news "for a file you'll never see." He is an unrelenting critic of absolute power and of the many borders man has erected on earth. He weeps with the violins for the refugees and victims of a cruel history everywhere; his lines haunt us with their pathos and anger, feelings growing rarer in the cyber games of post-modern poetry. He is a poet of curfewed nights, shadows chased by searchlights, naked boys screaming, "I know nothing," of abodes of snow where gods are asleep like children, of saffron suns, of ash filigreeing roses carved in the wood of weeping trees, of the visions of Elijah and Jezebel, of the sacrificed Ishmael, of pastorals and ghazals, of words vainly echoing by the ivy at sunset, people inside fires looking for the dark rain, of prayers to the deaf worlds, of "dead dervishes damascening the dark", the warm June rains of Harappa with the sculptors polishing the pain of the servant maid, of scripts not deciphered, wrecks not retrieved, of Brahma's voice in torn water, of death arriving like a thin bureaucrat from the plains, of flowers of smoke. I meet him on my way from Ghalib to Lorca: "I want to live forever. What else can I say? It rains as I write this. Mad heart, be brave."
Agha Shahid Ali, The Country Without a Post Office
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SUKANTA CHAUDHURI
AS a middle-aged professor of English, I have grown rather wary of campus novels about the bumbling randy lives of fictitious colleagues in the profession. My first reaction on starting J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (Martin Secker and Warburg, London, 1999) was: is Coetzee, that dour and unsparing allegorist of our times, about to do a David Lodge? His hero, David Lurie, abandons his accustomed mistress to seduce a student, and is sacked from his university in Cape Town as a consequence.
The sacking itself tells us that this book will be very different from the cynically cheery campus novel. Lurie goes to stay with his daughter Lucy, who leads an opter-out's life in the remote South African countryside. Their natural affection gradually cracks to expose a basic alienation — not only between the generations but between the urban academic and the self-rusticated déclassé and, most radically, between the old and the new orders in South Africa. A group of Africans break into the house, steal and vandalise property, attack Lurie and rape Lucy. She makes her peace with them and their community — not only in self-protection (though that factor is acknowledged) but from a deeper compulsion of spirit, an urge to understand and integrate.
It is a measure not only of Coetzee's verbal skill but his honesty and insight that he can present such a story without seeming to come down on either side, without turning either resentful or sentimental. Disgrace is as sombre as his macabre masterpiece of political allegory, Waiting for the Barbarians, or his bleak depictions of backwoods Boer life; but it strikes a more humane note. No-one achieves anything in this novel. It recounts a tale of waste, failure, foreboding and evil; but through it all, characters endeavour to make peace with themselves. By entering into the life of the Africans, Lucy extinguishes much of her being yet looks for meaning in what remains. Lurie is frustrated in every way; yet he too finds a kind of meaning in his futile labours for dying and dead dogs, his unexciting affair with the woman who treats the dogs, and his residual paternal bond with Lucy.
As usual, Coetzee does not philosophise, still less moralise. His position emerges from the narrative — its unforced parallels and contrasts, its spare sinuous dialogue, the directness of the prose. And the issues he raises are not restricted to South Africa. Wherever we may live, his story holds a meaning we would do well to think over.
Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
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