→ 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
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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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→ July 21, 2017
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The Strangler Vine.

M.J. Carter’s historical novel The Strangler Vine has the feel of a murder mystery without an actual murder, instead sending its two central characters on a quest in 1837 India to find a missing Briton who disappeared into the north, likely of his own volition, but whose importance to the East India Company has grown in his absence. It’s a fast read thanks to the tremendous narrative greed in the story and the yin/yang Carter created in her two protagonists, but I found the dialogue completely inappropriate for the time period, as she gives her characters modern vernacular and even sensibilities that feel very out of place in this setting.

The story opens with the young Captain (soon to be Lieutenant) William Avery in Calcutta, chosen seemingly as a last resort, to delivery a message to the reclusive company agent Jeremiah Blake and later to accompany Blake on the mission to find the missing author and poet Xavier Mountstuart (which sounds like an Orioles prospect), who has stirred up quite a bit of trouble with the publication of a novel that paints both the Company and the behavior of British expats on the subcontinent in a rather unfavorable light. This comes just as the Company is trying to expand its influence over greater portions of what we know now as India, which at the time was split into many nation-states or local fiefdoms as with pre-unification Italy, and the disappearance of the author has only further complicated the efforts to bring more of the region under the British company’s control. The Europeans are also combatting the plague of Thuggee, a supposed band of marauding bandits who worship the goddess Kali; rob and murder travelers in heinous, ritualistic fashion; and threaten stability in the region as well as local trade. (Thuggee, or at least the campaign against it, was real, and the English word “thug” is derived from its name.) A handful of real historical personages, including the famed William Sleeman, appear in the book, so portions of the story will be obvious if you happen to know something about the time period.

The core suspense story in The Stranger Vine is well-crafted and manages some unpredictable elements even though you’ll see some of the ending coming because we know some of the macro results of the British role in India (especially that the Company was eventually removed from power and replaced by a colonial administration that lasted until independence and Partition in 1948, creating the modern borders of India, Pakistan, and later Bangladesh). There’s a bit of a whodunit here, but the identity of the ultimate bad guy is subordinate to the journey, which Carter animates with strong action sequences and vivid descriptions of both the landscape and the various battles that befall our heroes. Blake is the stronger of the two main characters, an erudite humanist unhinged by the death of his native wife, disillusioned by the Company yet still nominally in its employ, and a spy-like investigator who keeps Avery in the dark for much of the story. Avery, while amiable in his naivete, is more simply drawn and serves as a chronicler whose involvement in the action of the plot is less than Blake’s in total but includes a couple of high points that allow for some character development.

However, Carter hasn’t captured the vocabulary or rhythm of speech from the time period – an observation I make based on novels I’ve read from that era – and has given some of her characters decidedly 21st-century views. When a man makes a (sexual) pass at Avery, the religious 21-year-old politely rebuffs the attempt and the matter is simply dropped – difficult to accept in an era when homosexuality was illegal and seen as a grievous sin. Blake’s concern for the plight of locals under the Company may have been apposite for the time, yet he speaks and acts with an egalitarian perspective that would mark him as a progressive in 2017, let alone in the 1830s. And the antagonists of the story, notably those with the Company who seek to control the subcontinent, are kind of not racist enough, with their opinions of locals marked more by cultural elitism than outright prejudice – the Indian people need the Brits to install a government, to teach them democracy, to raise them out of heathenism, but in a paternalist sense rather than the overt bigotry I’d expect from that time. (She hints at phrenology once in the book, but only to have Blake dismiss it as junk science.)

If you prefer to read for story, The Stranger Vine will be among the more satisfying contemporary novels you read; the plot works, and even with Carter’s missteps in dialogue, she never talks down to the reader or takes easy outs with her characters. I would still say I really enjoyed the book even as the inaccurate tone irked me, because there’s something so meticulous about the story’s construction. It’s merely a bit flawed, but in a way that may only matter to certain readers.

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→ January 25, 2014
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The Man Who Knew Infinity.

Ramanujan was one of the most remarkable and prolific mathematicians who ever lived, a self-taught prodigy who grew up in modest circumstances in south India during the time of the British Raj, rediscovering the previous 150 years’ worth of number theory while also uncovering over 3000 theorems and identities of his own. “Discovered,” in a sense, by the far more famous English mathematician G.H. Hardy, Ramanujan moved to England for about five years, where his work finally received a wider audience, but where he also contracted an unknown illness that eventually killed him at age 38.

Robert Kanigel’s biography The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan tells two main stories – that of Ramanujan himself, and a partial biography of Hardy, whose professional life was thoroughly altered by his time working with Ramanujan and to whom we owe most of the credit for what we know of Ramanujan’s life and work today. It’s a very strong, even-handed biography of Ramanujan, sympathetic without becoming patronizing, but was extremely light on its discussion of the math itself, with just a few cursory discussions of some of his findings that still bear his name today.

Born in southern India in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu, near the city of Madras (now known as Chennai), Ramanujan was a member of the Brahmin caste, the highest social stratum in the caste system, but was born into a poor family and received only a basic education. His mother was domineering and remained deeply involved in his life even into his adulthood and arranged (by her) marriage, only, according to Kanigel, supporting her son’s obsession with mathematics when it appeared it would at least bring him fame – and bring her fortune. Ramanujan failed out of university twice because he couldn’t be bothered with any coursework other than mathematics, but in that subject he was light-years ahead of his professors, filling notebooks with conjectures and equations, most of which he knew intuitively to be true, but couldn’t have published – even if he’d had access to such outlets – because he didn’t need to or understand how to develop the proofs.

In 1912 and 1913, Ramanujan, at the encouragement of some of the few Indian nationals in a position to advise him, sent letters with copies of some of his work to three English mathematicians, only one of whom responded: G.H. Hardy, at the time a professor of maths at Trinity University at Cambridge. Hardy was a purist, a mathematician who studied number theory (the study of the behavior and properties of the integers, with a special emphasis on prime numbers) for its own sake and overtly disdained any branch of “applied” mathematics – that is, math that had a practical purpose, such as the math required in physics or engineering. Hardy was open-minded enough upon seeing Ramanujan’s letter that he overcame his skepticism about an uneducated Indian clerk coming up with mathematical insights that took Western experts over a century to develop and wrote back, asking to see more of Ramanujan’s work. (There’s some irony in Hardy’s hesitation and the other mathematicians’ rejections of Ramanujan, as number theory has its own tradition in India dating back over 1500 years.) The subsequent correspondence led to an invitation for Ramanujan to come spend two years with Hardy at Cambridge, two years that turned into five before ill health sent Ramanujan back home to south India, where he died shortly thereafter.

Kanigel’s presentation of the life of Ramanujan leans toward the personal rather than the professional side, focusing extensively on his upbringing, cultural opposition to much of what he did and wanted to do with his life, and on the non-professional side of his life in England. The emotional cost to Ramanujan of traveling to a foreign country where he’d face outright prejudice but also would struggle with differences in language, weather, and, most importantly for Ramanujan, food. The devoutly spiritual and nominally Hindu mathematician was a strict vegetarian, but had great difficulty adapting his diet to the abysmal food of World War I-era England, where to cook something implied cooking it to death, where all flavor and texture was safely removed from the item to be consumed. Hardy was Ramanujan’s mentor in maths, but not in life, as Hardy does not (in Kanigel’s telling) have any close emotional ties to anyone but his sister once their parents had passed away, and with Ramanujan’s wife in India for the entire time he was in England, Ramanujan lacked for friends and for anyone who could help him look after himself. Kanigel reports on the speculation that malnutrition contributed to Ramanujan’s illness and decline, but his book was published before the 1994 report that he died of an amoebic infection in his liver common in India at the time he lived there.

I also found Kanigel’s mini-biography of Hardy, essential to the story of Ramanujan, fascinating. Hardy’s a great figure for biographers, appearing in one of my favorite books about math, Prime Obsession, for his role in attacking the unsolved Riemann Hypothesis. (Ramanujan’s pre-Hardy work was remarkable, but he did make some mistakes, one of which involved Riemann’s zeta function; Ramanujan assumed the function had only real zeroes, not complex ones, but its complex zeroes lie at the heart of the Hypothesis.) He’s also ripe for caricature, something Kanigel avoids entirely. A lifelong bachelor, Hardy was obsessed by numbers, but also had an equal passion for cricket (and, after a stint at Princeton, baseball). He was a strict atheist who once set out a goal for himself to craft a disproof of the existence of God convincing enough to convert most of the general public, and a pacifist who fought persecution of Trinity colleagues who spoke out against British involvement in World War I. Hardy viewed Ramanujan with great pride, almost as a father would view a son, someone with limitless natural talent whom Hardy could mold into one of the greatest mathematicians the world has ever known, and he was diligent about assigning credit to his protégé whenever possible. He brought Ramanujan to the world, yet it also seems that Ramanujan brought much more out of Hardy than we’d otherwise have had.

My lone criticism of The Man Who Knew Infinity is its scant treatment of the math in question. The reader of a book like this probably has an appetite for math, and the author has merely to explain the theorems or identities under discussion, not to teach them or prove them. Kanigel does very little of any of this, only dipping occasionally into discussions of continued fractions and some of Ramanujan’s explorations of the nature and frequency of prime numbers. Kanigel appears to have skipped the mathier material in favor of asking open-ended questions about the source of Ramanujan’s inspiration and culpability for his illness and death.

Kanigel’s epilogue discusses the final years of Hardy’s life, but it is his discussions with Ramanujan’s widow, Janakiammal, that punctuate the book’s last handful of pages. Still alive at the time of the book’s publication in 1991, Janakiammal spent a long part of her life as a widow in obscurity and poverty before she was rediscovered several decades after her husband’s passing, eventually reaping rewards, both honorary and monetary, before her death in 1994 at age 95. Her few comments evoke a great bitterness at how her husband’s legacy was underappreciated and how her own life was adversely affected by that and by quarrels with Ramanujan’s family.

Next up: The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (Modern Library Paperbacks) by Robert Farrar Capon, a chef and Episcopalian priest. The 1967 book is a classic of the food-writing genre and was reissued in 2002 as part of the Modern Library Food series, edited by Ruth Reichl.

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