→ December 1, 2022
→ By

A Burning.

Megha Majumdar’s debut novel A Burning became a surprise bestseller in 2020, shortly after its release, catching fire (pun intended) in part because of a page-turning narrative and terse chapters that keep the pace moving. It’s a well-written book, crafted as if by a far more experienced writer, but a simple plot and poorly developed characters make it a less satisfying read than other novels with similar themes and settings.

A Burning revolves around three characters in Kolkata: Jivan, a teenaged girl who aspires to the middle class; PT Sir, her former physical education teacher who finds himself rising quickly in the ranks of a Hindu nationalist party; and Lovely, a hijra and aspiring actress whom Lovely is teaching to read English. When Jivan witnesses a terrorist attack on a train near her home, she posts some anti-government comments on Facebook, and finds herself arrested and charged as an accessory to the crime. Lovely could serve as her alibi, as Jivan was with her right before the bombing took place, and PT Sir could be a character witness. Yet they both find that helping Jivan would hurt their own aspirations. PT Sir has gained this status with the party by serving as a witness against various defendants in criminal cases, claiming he saw them commit the crimes in exchange for a small payment and increased favor. Lovely seems to be falling for some kind of predatory scheme aimed at would-be actors, but when a demo reel she posts to WhatsApp goes viral, she’s suddenly famous for that and her connection to Jivan’s case.

The book is gripping, and extremely hard to put down; I read it inside of 48 hours, even knowing more or less what would happen to Jivan. The short chapters keep the book humming along, and the prose itself is clear and concrete. There’s little here beyond the purely descriptive – we don’t get a lot of inner monologues and there are no characters of any note beyond the main three. It’s a just-the-facts novel, almost like an old detective story, which makes the book feel urgent throughout.

There’s also some unsubtle commentary here about upward mobility in modern India, a society that has seen rapid growth of its middle and upper classes in the last 30 years, but that still has an enormous underclass that measures in the hundreds of millions of people. That backdrop may explain how, or why, two otherwise moral individuals, neither of whom had any real status prior to the terror attack, would consider throwing away the life of someone they knew just to help themselves. PT Sir comes across as venal, but Majumdar gives Lovely enough of a back story to depict her with nuance, as someone who survives, and has always had to grab any lifeline she sees.

However, there’s not a lot else going on below the surface, starting with Jivan. She’s less a character than a victim of fate and circumstance, bobbing along on the surface of an ocean she can barely see. She’s an object of pity, and Majumdar gives us just a sliver of her life in flashbacks, as a journalist interviews her, somewhat covertly, for a profile in a tabloid newspaper. They’re not that illustrative of why Jivan is in the situation she’s in, because Jivan didn’t actually do anything wrong – her Facebook comments weren’t even that inflammatory, and it’s a little hard to believe she’d end up charged with a capital crime for them, although that’s probably part of the point. It’s mob justice dispensed by a religious plurality operating with the power and impunity of governmental authority.

The religious divide in India forms a key subtext to the novel, although it doesn’t show itself directly much in the content. Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister since 2014, is a Hindu nationalist and member of a paramilitary group aligned with that ethnocentric philosophy. Since taking office, he’s overseen the passage of laws discriminating against the country’s large Muslim population and Muslims trying to emigrate to India while also revoking the special status of the disputed Jammu and Kashmir regions. PT Sir’s political rise is tied to a Modi-like politician whose party also espouses Hindu nationalist aims, so Jivan, a Muslim girl, is a convenient target for them, a way to stoke outrage and try to drive voters to the party, just as the current Republican Party in the U.S. is targeting LGBT people, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, and so on.

That reduces Jivan to a prop, a useful plot device without much agency or complexity as a character, and that’s ultimately what led me to feel like A Burning fell short of the mark. It’s such an easy, fast-paced read that it’s understandable why it became a bestseller, and it has the veneer of a Very Important Novel. It’s more of a facsimile of works that deal with similar subjects, like the novels of Arundhati Roy or Salman Rushdie, without their thematic depth or character development.

Next up: After finishing Scott Hershovitz’s Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids, I’m reading my friend Eden Robins’s debut novel When Franny Stands Up.

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→ June 27, 2019
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The Satanic Verses.

If you knew one thing about Salman Rushdie, it’s probably that he spent much of his life under an Islamist death sentence known as a fatwa, issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 in response to Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. The Ayatollah claimed that the book was blasphemous, and he refused to retract the order – which said that any Muslim would be a martyr for killing Rushdie and also issued the threat of death against his editors and publishers – even after Rushdie issued a half-hearted apology. The Iranian government has only backed away from the fatwa in the intervening three decades, never lifting it, and the massive bounty on Rushdie’s head is still in place.

The Ayatollahs would have done far more for their own cause by ignoring the book, because I find it hard to believe enough people would read this dense, highly metaphorical, bloated novel, and understand its implications for devout Muslims, to make one iota of difference in the Islamic world. They Streisanded the whole thing by drawing attention to it, and made the book a global best-seller when it would probably have faded into oblivion had they done nothing. I’m not even sure the book is that good, but I feel confident few readers would have waded far enough into it to care about the parts that so offended the Ayatollah.

The Satanic Verses starts with two men who fall from an airplane that has been blown up over the English channel by a suicide bomber but are saved by an unknown miracle, after which they are transformed into the archangel Gibreel (Gabriel) and into a devil, or perhaps the devil. (The book was published less than three months before Libyan terrorists bombed Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.) The two narratives split and then twist around each other, with Gibreel’s story drifting into dream sequences of magical realism or simply the delusions of a man with schizophrenia, while Chamcha, the man who sprouts horns and a tail like a devil, encounters a more mundane series of nightmares that begin with abuse by immigration authorities.

Gibreel’s dreams include visions of a businessman named Mahound – itself a derogatory name for Mohammed – who becomes a prophet, is fooled by a scribe who deliberately errs in writing down Mahound’s words, and whose wives are mocked by the twelve prostitutes at a brothel in Jahilia, which is a pre-Islamic name for Mecca. They also include the incident to which the book’s title refers, in which Mohammed exhorted Arab followers to keep three of their pagan goddesses, only to later recant the statement and claim he was fooled by Satan into making it. The depiction of the prophet Mohammed as a rube, a con man, or a sexual libertine was sure to anger devout Muslims, although some of this is buried beneath Rushdie’s dense, florid prose, and nearly all of it is written in the unreality of Gibreel’s visions.

Chamcha’s journey is much easier to follow, even with his on-and-off transformation into a hirsute demon, and explores more humanist themes of alienation from country and family. His domineering father tried to control Chamcha through money and familial obligations, an oppressive maneuver that helped encourage the son to flee India for England, where he encountered a new type of social and cultural isolation. The metaphor involved, of the father standing in for one’s country of birth, and the natural desire to reconnect before it’s too late to matter, is easier to grasp, and the narrative of Chamcha’s life is mostly linear and grounded in reality. Except for the horns.

Parsing what’s real in Gibreel’s narrative and what’s imagined or hallucinated is difficult enough, but it’s exacerbated by Rushdie’s prose style, between his prodigious vocabulary and often poetic musings, and his lax attitude towards time. The novel’s great climactic scene includes a march of penitents to Mecca and to the sea, led by a young girl Ayesha who claims she’s communicating with the Archangel, where the faithful follow her into the Red Sea. Whether they survived and transcended or merely drowned is left to the reader – and to the surviving, less faithful neighbors and family members who watched them disappear.

Rushdie also engages in substantial wordplay and masked allusion that went well over my head because I have no background in Islamic history or writings and minimal knowledge of even geography in that part of the world. I didn’t realize until after I’d finished that the Mount Cone of the novel is Jabal an-Nour, which houses the Cave of Hira where Mohammed meditated and, according to Islamic history, received his first revelation. Rushdie renames the mountain and then delivers puns on the name, including Gibreel’s very human objet d’amour, Alleluia (Allie) Cone, who has no interest in the spiritual mountain and instead spends her life trying to climb the most materialistic of peaks, Mount Everest.

One recurring motif I did catch in The Satanic Verses is that of characters falling; in Rushdie’s world, a whole hell of a lot of people either jump or fall, mostly to their deaths, except for the two main characters who inexplicably survive. Gibreel, in fits of either madness or jealousy, kills several people by throwing them from buildings. At least two minor characters die by jumping from heights. Allie’s treks on Everest are marked by reminders of the possibility of falling, and eventually hypoxia causes her to hallucinate as well, although her eventual death comes off the mountain. The falls are always in the physical world, but given the context of the novel and Rushdie’s staunch atheism, it seems likely the falls represent man’s ‘descent’ from naïve superstition into the harsher world of a materialist, unthinking cosmos.

I had mixed feelings on Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children, but it was a far more successful and accessible novel than The Satanic Verses. This latter book felt a bit like Joyce’s Ulysses, which Joyce made clear was a book to be dissected and analyzed, not to be read. You could write papers just on side characters or word choices or recurring images across the book, to say nothing of the overarching themes of identity, alienation, or religion. But as a straight read, The Satanic Verses is maddening, and not in the way the Ayatollah meant.

Next up: I finished Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes this morning.

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→ September 28, 2018
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The God of Small Things.

Arundhati Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, appeared twenty years after she won the Booker Prize for her debut, 1997’s The God of Small Things, and the critical response to the latter book was somewhat tepid because of the delay between releases and the way critics seemed to feel the second novel fell short of the promise of the first. Having read both this year, in reverse order, however, I feel the opposite way: her second book, while imperfect, felt much more like the work of a mature, accomplished writer, better able to manage her plot and her characters, while also crafting more accessible prose and better integrating real history into the story.

The God of Small Things unfurls in nonlinear fashion, giving the reader the story of “two-egg twins” Rahel and Estha, born to a mother, Ammu Ipe, who married quickly to get away from her parents only to find her husband was a feckless and abusive alcoholic. They return to Ammu’s native village, living with her parents and her brother, Chacko, whose ex-wife Margaret and daughter Sophie Mol have stayed in England with Margaret’s new husband Joe. When Joe dies in a car crash, Margaret and Sophie Mol visit Chacko for the holidays, but a series of misunderstandings, inadvertent and deliberate, lead the three children to try to run away on a makeshift boat, only to have it capsize and to have Sophie Mol drown, a death that is blamed on a local untouchable (dalit), Velutha, a gifted carpenter who is beloved by the twins and has a brief affair with Ammu that contributes to the plot against him.

One common theme among Roy’s two novels and within her political writing and advocacy is an overt criticism of India’s class system and discrimination that persist today even in the face of a constitutional clause banning caste discrimination. Velutha is talented, intelligent, and kind, but cannot escape the birthright that comes of being born an untouchable. The twins, of course oblivious to such societal mores, come to admire and love him, and eventually Ammu, despite her caste status, does as well, which infuriates her spinster aunt “Baby” Kochamma, who herself lost out on the great love of her life, a Catholic priest who would not leave his orders for her (and whom she chased by briefly entering a convent), and now takes out her bitterness on everyone around her. Velutha eventually becomes involved with the local communist party as well, a step that contributes to the prejudice against him and to Baby’s identification of him as an enemy to be targeted, allowing him to stand in as a synecdochic figure for both his caste and for the party most associated with trying to crush the historical structure of social inequality.

Estha is molested by a stranger in a graphic (and gross) scene towards the beginning of the novel that never received any resolution or connection to the rest of the story. The perpetrator never re-appears, let alone faces any sort of justice, while any effects Estha suffers from the trauma are subtle and never seemed to relate to the tempest of tragedies at the book’s heart – the death of Sophie Mol and the doomed affair between Ammu and Velutha. That such things happen, and are generally not dealt with by anyone or even revealed by the victims, is easy to understand and accept, but the presence of such a scene and the details the reader receives are incongruous in the greater narrative and are simply dropped beyond occasional mention of Estha’s fear that the pedophile will return to abuse him again or seek vengeance on his family.

I thought The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was hard to follow because of my ignorance of the aspects of Indian history that Roy incorporated into her novel, but it was a cakewalk compared to The God of Small Things, which makes even broader assumptions of the reader’s familiarity with real-life events of India’s post-colonial period and political tensions that came with the rise of communism and the extremist Naxalite movement in the late 1960s. Roy’s prose has also become clearer over the last twenty years; The God of Small Things features stunted prose, with far too many sentence fragments that read more like unfinished thoughts, a literary device I’ve always found jarring as someone who thinks and writes in full sentences just about all of the time. (The occasional fragment can work well in context, but too many of them together give me the impression of listening to a vinyl record with a large scratch on it, causing the needle to skip on every rotation.) That this won the Booker Prize doesn’t surprise me; it’s an intelligent, important novel of ideas with huge themes that tackles controversial subjects. Its difficulty level did surprise me, however, given that her later work, while still somewhat opaque, was much easier to access.

Next up: Steve Brusatte’s brand-new The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World.

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→ May 1, 2018
→ By

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

Indian author Arundhati Roy won the Man Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel, The God of Small Things, after which she swerved into non-fiction writing and political activism, earning plaudits and awards for her open criticism of militarism, sectarianism, and corruption in India and in other world powers. Despite rumors for a decade that she was working on a second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness didn’t appear until mid-2017, by which point it seems that some of the popular interest in her work had cooled. It is a sweeping novel that is deeply saturated with modern Indian history and culture, and as such felt opaque to me, an American reader of European descent who has never visited the Asian continent’s mainland and, as I learned quickly while reading this book, knew very little about the politics and recent strife in the world’s largest democracy.

Roy weaves two narratives together in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and while she ultimately combines the two into one by the end of the book, it works more on a metaphorical level than a literal one. The first story, which accounts for about a quarter of the book, covers a hijra named Anjum who is rejected by her family and goes to live in a house of other people who exist outside the western male/female gender dichotomy. (Hijra, as I understand it, is a sort of catch-all term for intersex and transgender people, and is often recognized in south Asian cultures as a third gender distinct from the first two. In this book, at least, they’re depicted as a separate cast, alternately revered and reviled.) Anjum is born with underdeveloped genitalia of both sexes; her parents want her to be a boy, but she feels that she is a woman and lives openly dressed as one for the rest of her life. A Muslim in a time of rising religious fractiousness in India, Anjum is caught up in anti-Muslim violence perpetrated by Hindus, and ends up taking in an abandoned toddler to raise in the hijra enclave, fulfilling her biologically impossible desire for children. Their life is tragicomic, populated by eccentric characters like the self-named Saddam Hussain and the loony protestor Dr. Bharatiya, who writes an opinion newsletter that nobody reads.

The second narrative is more involved and, in my case, harder to follow without a deeper understanding of recent Indian politics. The Christian woman Tilo works at a theater where she meets three men who will all play important roles in her future – one who becomes a journalist in Kashmir; one who becomes a militant fighting for azadi, or freedom from India; and one who works for the Intelligence Bureau, the Indian equivalent to our FBI. The ongoing conflict in Kashmir, a region in the north of the Indian subcontinent that is the subject of a sixty-year dispute between India and Pakistan, with an active insurgency in Jammu & Kashmir against the Indian government, comes to dominate all of their lives. Tilo falls in love with one man but marrying another, the militant (Musa) marries a woman he meets during a grenade attack on a shop in Kashmir, everyone ends up questioned by the IB (which often involves torture), and, improbably, they end up connecting with Anjum, who has taken up residence in a graveyard and built her own little commune of outcasts within it.

I could infer from structure of the second narrative that Roy, an outspoken critic of the nationalist government now ruling India and the demagogues who have incited sectarian killings that include the 2008 Gujarat riots (depicted in the book), was trying to retell the history of Kashmir and of violence against Hindus in miniature through each of these characters – the soldier, the journalist, the government yes-man, the woman victimized by the mistakes of the men in her life. The bad guys here are really bad, and while the heroes are held up even when they err, and there’s a thread of hope and optimism throughout the convoluted narrative. But because I was raised in a country where history education barely includes anything at all that didn’t involve the United States, the allusions that I think were there may have been lost on me, or simply not there at all. Even events from within my lifetime that appear in the book – the Gujarat riots and the train-burning that triggered it, the Taleban insurgency in Kashmir, the repressive tactics of the Indian army in that region – weren’t familiar enough to me for me to fully appreciate what Roy expressed.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness will likely be compared to three novels in particular – her first novel; Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which she checks directly with a reference to Macondo; and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the tone of which is extremely similar to Roy’s tone here. This is an angry novel, one that paints the nationalist Hindu government in India as Trumpian, hate-driven, greedy, and feckless, while depicting India itself as beset by poverty, trash, and fear of violence. It might be a great one, even though it feels a little disorganized and the connection between Anjum and Tilo at the end is tenuous. I just know I didn’t fully grasp it.

Next up: Thomas Friedman’s Thank You for Being Late.

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→ December 30, 2017
→ By

Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

I’d only read one Salman Rushdie novel prior to this month, tackling Midnight’s Children back in 2010; I found it a somewhat difficult read, but brimming with imagination, big themes, and incredible prose and wordplay. What I didn’t know until very recently was that he wrote a children’s novel called Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which appeared on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels ever written. It’s quite wonderful, featuring more of the wordplay and creativity that marked Midnight’s Children, reminding me in many ways of The Phantom Tollbooth, one of the best children’s novels I’ve ever read (twice, in fact, once on my own and again to my daughter), and the works of Roald Dahl.

Haroun Khalifa is the young son of Rashid, a storyteller who suddenly loses his gift of narration when his wife leaves him, leaving the two of them without any means of support and Rashid without his identity. When Rashid fails to deliver at a speaking engagement, he and Haroun are whisked off to the Valley of K for his next assignment, speaking for the politician Snooty Buttoo – there are a lot of Butts in this book – only for Haroun to discover that his father has lost his ability to weave stories because Iff the Water Genie is trying to sever Rashid’s imagination. This leads Haroun to learn about the Sea of Stories, the plot by the evil Khattam-Shud to poison it and block its source, and the impending war between the Kingdoms of Chup and Gup that will determine the fate of the Sea.

Rushdie makes Haroun the hero of his own story in the tradition of children in literature who have to do something to save one or both of their parents. Haroun faces difficult choices and shows courage in the face of great odds, standing up to the various otherworldly creatures trying to steal his father’s gift or kill Haroun’s new friends from Gup or sew the lips of the Princess Batcheat shut. (He gets no help from the vacuous Prince Bolo, the antithesis of the typical prince-hero character, generally saying and doing the wrong thing or just showing no awareness of what’s happening around him.)

The text itself is replete with puns, references to Hindustani words or Indian historical figures, and even pop culture references. Iff and the Butts work for the Walrus, who employs technicians named the Eggheads, a reference I trust I don’t have to explain. Butt the Hoopoe certainly sounds like a nod to the British glam-rockers Mott the Hoople. Many names allude to characters in the stories of One Thousand and One Nights, including Haroun al-Rashid, a real-life Caliph of Baghdad who appears in many of those tales. General Kitab’s name means “book” in Arabic and Hindustani, and his army comprises numerous Pages. And the fish with multiple mouths, or maws, are referred to as Plentimaws … and there are Plentimaw fish in the Sea. (The book also has a brief appendix where Rushdie explains many of the character and place names.)

It’s also hard to avoid the likelihood that Rushdie wrote this as a reaction to the fatwa issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran after the publication of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the general controversy over a portion of the book that some Muslims deemed blasphemous. In the wake of its release, at least ten countries banned the book in some form, including his native India, while many U.S. bookstores declined to sell it. There were also multiple bombings of bookstores and newspapers in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom related to the book’s sale, while the Archbishop of Canterbury called for an expansion of England’s Blasphemy Act to cover offenses against Islam. (That law was repealed entirely in 2008.) Haroun may be just a children’s novel, but it’s probably also a parable about censorship and the threat to the marketplace of ideas, showing how a society might suffer in a world without stories.

Haroun is better for slightly older kids, because the vocabulary would likely be too demanding for children below fifth grade or so, although the story itself would mostly be appropriate – Haroun’s mother runs off with another man near the beginning, but eventually returns without any real comment – and easy for any child to follow. I could see younger kids being disturbed by the threats to sew the Princess’ mouth shut, although Rushdie softens that possibility by having other characters complain about how awful her singing voice is. It’s a book for younger readers, though, so Haroun saves the day, no mouths are sewn shut, and Rashid eventually regains his talent for weaving stories. The beauty of this book is the journey, the literal one Haroun takes to this other world – I haven’t even mentioned the earth’s second moon, Kahani, which you might not have noticed because it moves by a Process Too Complicated to Explain – and the one on which Rushdie takes the reader, with puns and gags flying so fast that you might miss them on your first read. It’s a delight and a testament to Rushdie’s boundless imagination.

Next up: I’m many books behind in my reviews, but right now I’m reading Kat Kinsman’s memoir Hi, Anxiety: Life with a Bad Case of Nerves.

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→ December 16, 2014
→ By

The Lowland.

I wrote about the Yankees signing Chase Headley, the White Sox signing Melky Cabrera, and the various signings of Jed Lowrie, Alex Rios, Brett Anderson, and others for Insiders.

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Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999 for The Interpreter of Maladies, a scintillating collection of short stories that focused mostly on the experiences of Indian emigrants to the United States, beautifully crafted stories with empathetic characters and gorgeous prose. Her second collection of stories, 2008’s Unaccustomed Earth was just as impressive, but didn’t earn the same acclaim because it wasn’t her debut work and because in the interim, she only published one work, the 2003 novel The Namesake, a less well-received book turned into a mediocre film that starred Kal “Kumar” Penn in a serious role.

Lahiri’s second novel, The Lowland, came out late in 2013 and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the National Book Award, with stronger critical reviews than Namesake received as well. It’s a melancholy, introspective book of lives destroyed by the ripple effects across generations caused by one seemingly small choice made in the passion of youth. It features Lahiri’s evocative prose and strong characterization, but with the longer form available to her, she takes the opportunity to grab your heart with both hands and wring it out like a damp towel, yet without the critical or philosophical payoff I’d demand of a novel that delves so deeply into personal pain.

The lowland of the title is a swampy area near the Kolkata home of two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, who are as close as any two friends can be despite very different personalities. Subhash, the elder brother, is shy, cautious, scholarly, and eager to please; Udayan is more daring, outwardly emotional, and, ultimately, politically motivated. As the brothers come of age in the mid- to late 1960s, Udayan gets involved in local communist movements, eventually joining the real-life Marxist-Maoist movement known as the Naxalites, which still exists today primarily as a terrorist organization with only superficial political aims. While Subhash is studying marine biology in Rhode Island, the Naxalites’ activities turn deadly, after which Indian security forces arrest and kill Udayan, leaving his barely pregnant wife Gauri living with in-laws who can’t stand her and pushing Subhash to sacrifice himself to save her from a miserable future and raise his brother’s daughter. That choice has far-reaching and unexpected consequences for all three of them, covering the last two-thirds of the novel, during which we also receive more details on Udayan’s actions and his murder by way of explaining Gauri’s alienation and depression.

The resulting book covers four generations of this family, from Subhash’s traditional parents to his daughter (in all but the biological sense) Bela, who is nearly 40 at the end of the book and has a daughter of her own, with an especial focus on Subhash, Bela, and Gauri dealing with the holes left in their lives by Udayan’s death and in particular Gauri’s emotional withdrawal after it. I found it almost impossible to process Gauri’s lack of connection with Bela and eventual decision to leave her family to pursue an aimless academic career; that her sudden widowhood destroyed something in her is realistic, and Subhash would certainly never replace what she had lost, but for her to bear and raise Bela without forming an emotional bond or attachment just didn’t compute for me.

The ultimate problem with The Lowland its lack of any clear direction or point; it’s an engrossing, tragic story of people broken by history, carrying the fractures across an ocean and through generations, but what is Lahiri trying to get across? She is one of the preeminent writers of immigrant fiction, yet with her second novel, she has only added a good story without saying anything new about the experience of Indian-Americans coming here and returning home after the United States has changed them.

Next up: I’m nearly done with China Miéville’s Hugo Award-winning novel The City & The City.

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→ June 24, 2013
→ By

Last Man in Tower and The Member of the Wedding.

Aravind Adiga’s first novel, The White Tiger, won the Man Booker Prize and was a late cut from my last book ranking, earning a very positive review from me when I read it during spring training in 2010. His second true novel, Last Man in Tower, replaces some of the bitterness and irony with a more open-ended approach to characterization, without losing the scathing social criticism of the new India that made The White Tiger so powerful.

The man of Last Man in Tower‘s title is the retired teacher known affectionately as “Masterji,” who lives in a dilapidated coop apartment building in the Santa Cruz neighborhood of Mumbai, near the city’s massive international airport. Redevelopment is advancing quickly into this district, and when their coop society receives enormous offers to sell out so a developer can tear the buildings down and put up luxury condos, one by one all of the society’s residents accept, until Masterji is the only holdout, insisting that he wants “nothing.” His refusal to sign is not about price or money, but, in his view, about principle, holding back the wave of corruption and gentrification that is destroying the old India and widening the gap between the country’s wealthy and poor.

Adiga strikes a better balance here between satire and storytelling than he did in White Tiger, but in the process lost much of the dark humor that made the first book so memorable. Masterji deserves a more thoughtful treatment than Balram Halwai, and he gets it, with explanations of how the deaths of his wife and daughter and his distant relationship with his son affect his view on the developer’s offer and the threat of massive change spawned by a forced move to another community. Masterji’s apparent obstinacy – his refusal to sign the offer means no one in the building can sell – has its justifications, and while in the end I found myself siding with his neighbors on the matter of the offer, Adiga creates enough ambiguity to prevent the reader from coming down wholly on either side of the matter.

Adiga’s other key decision was to try to personalize the developer as an independent character, rather than leaving him as an unseen, amoral force in the shadows; while he wasn’t entirely successful, it did help to round the book out more fully. Shah is not sympathetic, but he is also real, and is shown as motivated not just by greed, but by ambition, shame, and an unsatiable desire to overcome his humble beginnings. Yet any sympathy his history might engender is rather quickly wiped out by the horrible treatment he dishes out to his assistant and to his mistress, details that I assume indicate that Adiga’s distaste for hypercapitalism on to the page twon out over his desire to craft a fully developed antagonistic force to pull on the reader’s emotions.

Last Man in Tower‘s other characters are all very well-developed, giving Masterji a few friends and many foils just within the coop society, several of whom get their own backstories, often just enough to make you want more; for me, Mary, the building’s maid, who herself lives in a nearby shantytown with her son and whose livelihood is threatened by the potential redevelopment, deserved further screen time. I could see Adiga building up to a longer, even more complex novel from here, one with multiple interwoven storylines involving a multitude of well-developed characters, perhaps rewriting the wrongs done to India by E.M. Forster and Rudyard Kipling. I enjoyed White Tiger more, in part because I enjoy funny, incisive satire like that, but Last Man in Tower is just as strong a novel, less witty yet more ambitious, indicating Adiga’s maturation as a novelist.

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I picked up Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding at Changing Hands bookstore in Tempe – I’m going to miss that store quite a bit – because it was on sale and because McCullers’ best-known novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, is among my favorite novels ever written (#15 on my last ranking, in fact). McCullers’ signature work includes a cast of flawed, mostly sympathetic characters, inhabiting the same world despite narrow and wide gulfs between them, a sphere filled with grief, alienation, and sadness. Member of the Wedding doesn’t reach the same emotional depths, but does turn the conventions of the coming-of-age novel upside down with its story of a motherless girl who fills her life with fantasies to replace what she’s lost.

Frances “Frankie” Addams is a 12-year-old girl living with her mostly absent father, with help from a live-in African-American woman named Berenice, and the frequent presence of Frankie’s young cousin John Henry. Frankie’s brother Jarvis returns from a stint in the Army in Alaska with a fiancee and an announcement that they’ll be getting married in a few days in the nearby town of Winter Hill. Frankie decides that she’s going to run away with her brother and sister-in-law after the wedding, building up a vague, exotic fantasy about a life other than the one she has now.

The central conflict in the book lies between that fantasy, of escape or just change from a destiny that seems predetermined, and the reality of life in their small, slightly backwards town, where blacks and whites intermingle but exist on separate planes, and the army is one of the only ways to leave the track into which you’re born. (Death comes up on the story’s margins as one of the other ways, and probably the most commonly utilized.) Frankie’s narrative touches on themes of oppression, racism, and gender identity, but the one that kept coming back to me was that she’s a girl who needed her mother, and is trying to fill that void, as well as the one left by a father who’s barely present in her life, with anything she can find, real or imagined. That also leads to a disturbing interlude with a soldier on leave in the town, perpetually drunk or in search of it, who seems to mistake Frankie’s age by a hard-to-imagine distance.

The overriding sadness that permates The Member of the Wedding isn’t well balanced the way that a similar vapor in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is, where McCullers pairs the gloom with a deeper understanding of its origins and dimensions. Here, Frankie is a little more pathetic than sympathetic, especially when her vision of escape with her brother doesn’t quite come off as planned, leaving me with the sense of having read something superficial, not the immersive emotional experience imparted by McCullers’ masterpiece.

Next up: Jussi Adler-Olsen’s The Keeper of Lost Causes, a Danish detective novel and first in the “Department Q” series.

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→ July 13, 2010
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Midnight’s Children.

Futures Game recap is up, as well as a video of me & Jason Grey talking Futures Game.

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In autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe.

My only knowledge of Salman Rushdie prior to beginning his much-lauded novel Midnight’s Children was that he was the subject of a fatwa for The Satanic Verses and that somehow he’d managed to bag, even temporarily, Padma Lakshmi. His public image and the controversy over the latter novel gave me the impression that he was a dour, serious writer, and I was only reading this work because it appears on the TIME, Modern Library, and Radcliffe top 100s through which I’m gradually working my way. (It also won the Man Booker Prize in 1981, and in 1993 won the Booker of Bookers, given to the best winner from the first 25 years of the award.)

As it turns out – unsurprisingly to me, and probably to you as well – I’d sold Rushdie short. Midnight’s Children is inventive, sprawling, witty, satirical, acerbic, gross, and, in many ways, important. I wouldn’t say I loved the novel, for a few reasons I’ll get into, but I don’t think I have to love reading a book to recognize it as great literature. It is, in many ways, the Indian One Hundred Years of Solitude, not quite as compact or as immersing, but with the same combination of wide and narrow scopes while using magical realism to tell its story.

The narrator of Midnight’s Children is Saleem, born at the stroke of midnight at the precise moment that India earned her independence from Great Britain, a date that has symbolic significance as well as plot significance within the novel. The symbolic significance is obvious, as Saleem’s story parallels and intertwines with the history of India, not just as a country but as a people struggling to figure out the whole independence thing, while the plot significance derives from the fact that each of the 1,001 children born in India within the hour after independence develops some particular magical skill or power, with Saleem eventually – in rather crude fashion – discovering that he has the ability to read or even enter other peoples’ minds.

The story of the novel spans three generations, going back to his grandfather and his peculiar courtship of his wife – originally his patient, as he was the town’s one doctor, sent to Germany for his education – through his own parents’ unusual union, with each marriage, courtship, or broken heart sowing the seeds of future calamities. As Saleem’s mother gives birth, a Christian nurse with anarchist leanings switches his tag with that of another baby born simultaneously, altering not just their fates but, in Saleem’s story, at least, that of India as a whole. Saleem leaves India for Pakistan and returns after two separate exiles, leads a mental conference of the thousand and one children of midnight, becomes an ascetic with a preternatural sense of smell, falls in love with an illusionist, becomes a father and a widower, and ends up with a strange wasting disease that leads him to write down the story of his life, one that cannot be untangled from the story of India from its independence through the novel’s present day. His dabblings with various forms of extremism all lead to disaster, not just for him but for anyone who comes near him – he is convinced that he is the cause of the misery – standing in for India’s own unfortunate swings toward communism or religious hatred.

Rushdie’s prose is at once maddening and magical, maddening because of stylistic quirks like strings of three adjectives without interruption of comma or conjunction, magical in passages like this one, where he introduces one aspect of the novel’s altered reality where the emotions of a cook enter her food and the bodies of those who consume it:

And, now restored to the status of daughter in her own home, Amina began to feel the emotions of other people’s food seeping into her – because Reverend Mother doled out the curries and meatballs of intransigence, dishes umbued with the personality of their creator; Amina ate the fish salans of stubbornness and the birianis of determination.

(The meatballs of intransigence. I worked for someone once who ate too many of those.)

I’m only superficially familiar with Indian history, although I hit Wikipedia many times to check and see if events described in the novel were taken from real life. (Unfortunately, most of them were.) But it’s clear that Rushdie intended to satirize many aspects of Indian culture, society, and especially its government; his comments on Indira Gandhi led the despot to sue him for libel when the book was published. Saleem and his family – included a number of cousins, uncles, and aunts who are various shades of wacko – seemed to me to stand in for various problems or crises of India as a whole, writ smaller and often with comic effects.

I could even see this book used in a class on comic novels – I took such a class in college, where I first encountered The Master and Margarita and If on a winter’s night a traveler – because of Rushdie’s use of farce and dry, sidelong wit, including this almost throwaway line where he pokes fun at Saleem’s innocence as the character walks through a dirty city street:

…and Japanese tourists who all (on this occasion) wore surgical face-masks out of politeness, so as not to infect us with their exhaled germs;

There were a few plot twists that didn’t sit right with me, generally characters making decisions that made little or no sense to me. There’s also a passage where a magician who specializes in making things or people disappear is presumed killed, but it’s not clear why she wouldn’t have used her power to save herself; I imagine it was necessary to have her killed or removed from the story, but the manner in which Rushdie did so felt incomplete, and I was half-expecting her to resurface.

Finally, I found the meandering story of the plot, especially its jumps back and forth in time, to be very distracting, since the transitions often weren’t clear and much of the present-day content was completely ancillary to the main storyline. I thought Rushdie may have even acknowledged the nonlinear, tangential nature of the book through the voice of his main character:

This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

But I may be erring by putting words in the author’s mouth when they only emanated from that of one of his creations. It was a tough read – not Tolstoy tough, but maybe Faulkner tough – but the creativity, the humor, and the borderline insanity of the book was remarkable, and as a window into a country and culture with which I wasn’t that familiar, it was an educational read as well.

It’s worth a mention that the witch with whom Saleem falls in love is named Parvati, while his second wife, who appears as audience and muse when he steps back from writing/telling his life story, is named Padma. So perhaps J.K. Rowling, in addition to reading A Dance to the Music of Time and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, read Midnight’s Children and threw in a reference via the names of two of her characters.

Next up: Kazuo Ishiguro’s frustrating, dreamlike novel The Unconsoled.

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