Kobo Abe and the face of another

Novels sometimes serve as sophisticated thought experiments, exploring the effect on human nature of some unusual eruption or crisis. The characteristic method of Kobo Abe, one of half-a-dozen or so major twentieth-century Japanese novelists, was to concoct such extreme situations for his characters. Laid out on the rack as if in a bad dream, his protagonists both arouse our sympathy and pique our curiosity. What might it be to live like this?

Certainly very few characters in fiction suffer such extended torture, privation and abasement as Niki Jumpei, the protagonist of Abe's novel The Woman in the Dunes (1962). Jumpei, a teacher and an amateur entomologist, goes out into the desert in search of a rare beetle. Stopping in a remote village for the night, he is hosted by the villagers in a woman's home inside a deep sand pit. The next morning he finds that the ladder leading out of the pit has been removed. The only company he has is his host.

Jumpei rages and rebels, but to no avail, for he has no choice. If he does not work, there will be no food or water for him, and he will end up being buried by the sand. In the space of a day his place in a civilised social order has evaporated; he has become a slave and an animal. Abe's narration records Jumpei's thraldom to hunger and thirst, the gradual derangement of his thoughts, and his fierce desire for escape. Maneuvering a clever getaway, Jumpei is caught at the last moment and returned to his prison. The novel's poignant last section shows us a pathetic Jumpei reconciled to life in the pit. His spare time is given to preparing a pit of his own, in which he hopes to trap a crow.

In The Woman in the Dunes the conditions that affect the protagonist are external to him, and are therefore open to the charge of being contrived. Abe was to come much closer to illuminating the nature of the self and its relation to society in his next novel, The Face of Another (1964).

The unnamed narrator of the story is a scientist whose face is badly disfigured in a laboratory accident (the still above is from Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1966 film based on the book). Swathed in bandages that cover his ghastly scars, he realises that, although his personality and his work remain what they were, he has dropped out of society owing to the lack of a face. As a plastic surgeon explains to him, the face "is a roadway between oneself and others"; people cannot reach out to a man "without the passport of the face". Even his wife, for whom he should be much more than a face, treats him with a suppressed revulsion. The protagonist retreats to a quiet hideout and attempts to fashion himself a new face.

Estranged from the world when without a face, he finds that with his new face he is suddenly a stranger to himself– it is as if he has a new identity upon his old one. His plan is to approach his wife as a stranger and seduce her, but this proves more complex than he had imagined. In Abe's hands the problems of having no face, and then a new face, become the material of a drama more compelling than any detective novel or thriller.

And two old posts about the human face as observed in art and literature: On Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red and On The Essays of Leonard Michaels.

On Ali Sethi's The Wish Maker

The most startling feature of Ali Sethi’s debut novel The Wish Maker is that although it is over 400 pages long, its protagonist (who is also for the most part its narrator) is a cipher, registering on our consciousness as not very much more than a pair of eyes. When we meet Zaki Shirazi for the first time, he has just returned to his family home in Lahore (inevitably, for a wedding) after two years as a student in America. What should be the beginning of the book’s action is actually pretty much the end, and Zaki spends his time observing the new Pakistan (“We passed a hoarding on the bridge. It was advertising a new deal for mobile phones...”; “At night I went with Isa and Moosa to see the new places of leisure”) and lapsing into loops of ever-retreating flashbacks.

The Wish Maker swiftly reveals itself, to those with some experience of the genre, as that old chestnut, the three-generation South Asian novel: one tier retailing memories of Partition, the second covering the era of the wars with India and the Bangladeshi independence struggle, and the third, the Pakistan of the present day, both modern ( those"new places of leissure") and medieval when seen through the narrator’s wide-eyed gaze (“She said that such things were common in the villages, where customs were old and went largely untouched by the new ways that developed continually in the cities”). There is plenty of quasi-journalistic observation, a score of aunts, cousins and servants, and a number of songs and weddings, none of which can conceal the instrinsic hollowness of the mind and voice that speaks.

Sometimes such stories can be redeemed by depth of characterization or distinction of language, but strangely enough for someone writing his first book, Sethi shows no desire to contest any of the rules of an old, old game. Although Zaki has been brought up in Pakistan, and has been away for just two years, his eye is always noticing things in touristy ways, such as “old men sitting under trees on the footpath with colourful powders and bottles”, even as his memory is recalling such momentous occurrences as “After the maths period there was the physics period, and after that chemistry, for which we had to go to the chemistry lab in a line led by the teacher...”

Further, the narrator of The Wish Maker seems highly conscious of the need to record—indeed to celebrate—the specifics of Pakistani culture, language and place, while also trying not to turn off a global audience whose apprehension of these things is dim (one of the blurbs on the back cover of his book acclaims it as “a brilliant example of the new global novel”). This leads to a kind of backand-forth covering of bases that often clogs the narration. Sethi is the kind of writer who, when writing about a visit to a neighbourhood, will say that it was “a mohalla, a neighbourhood”, and not one or the other. Sometimes he can write an interesting English: a sentence about how the sun is “like a difficult god, present in the things it made visible” was one of the few bits of the book I enjoyed. But his English is also specked with local colour and subcontinental sounds in the most cliched way, with a carefully italicized “hai” here and a “taubah” there, and (since no narrative is authentic without a sampling of local swear words) one careful mention each of the words “bhenchod” and “maaderchod”.

The same contradictory imperative guides Sethi's attitude towards cultural detail, towards what he thinks should be explained and what only named. Zaki’s cousin, Samar Api, idolizes Amitabh Bachchan, who, Zaki explains, “was said to be the most famous actor in the world”. A police officer sits under “a framed portrait of the Quaid-e-Azam, the founder of the nation” (if an Indian novelist wrote such a line about a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, we would think he or she was being ironic). I have no idea what Sethi’s politics are, but it was surprising to see Benazir Bhutto’s personal and political life described in great detail while, when he approaches the political scene of the late nineties, Sethi devotes a few pages to Nawaz Sharif without ever naming him, only saying that “(Daadi) was pleased when her man won the election”. These are the riddles and puzzles, more than the mysteries of character or situation, that the reader of The Wish Maker ends up pondering.

Here, as a longer example of what seems to me the mechanical nature and aridity of Sethi's narration, is a passage from the book describing a journey made by Zaki's grandfather from India to Pakistan. The passage is told from the point of view of Zaki's mother, Zakia:

[Papu] took trains. They took him from Kanpur to Agra, Agra to Jodhpur, and from Jodhpur into Sindh. The train compartments became crowded. He looked past his window and saw desert turn to desert, and his mind filled with foreboding. He had a little money, and his clothes and his diploma were in his suitcase. He kept the suitcase between his legs. He closed his eyes and tried to think of the city that awaited him, a city he had never seen but had to envision in that moment for its own sake.
'Brother,' said a voice.
It was the old man sitting across from him. He had asked Papu earlier to consider some items, some things he had with him in a cloth bundle.
Papu said he wanted nothing from the man.
'Oh,' said the man, as if hearing it for the first time. 'Oh, I see.'
The train went on shuddering on its tracks. Papu closed his eyes again. And again the man disturbed him, until Papu, unable in that crowded train to change his seat, had to sit with his eyes wide open, his face turned resolutely to the window and his ears unresponsive to the man's increasingly maudlin appeals.
Zakia said, 'Didn't it get any better?'
And Mabi said, 'It didn't.' She knew because she had been with Papu on those trains. She said that in Karachi they had had to sleep in camps...

Oh, so Papu took Mabi along on those trains, did he? But shouldn't we know this from Papu's experience of the train journey, instead of it being tacked on at the end almost as an afterthought? In fact, wouldn't Papu's concern for his wife be central to his memory of those trains, as much as his foreboding about the city they are headed towards?

Unlike in non-fiction, in fiction we are not obliged to accept that something is real, or true, merely because it is asserted as fact, as it is here. Scenes like this demonstrate, by their negative example, that realism in fiction is not a matter of getting the details of history or of culture right, and expecting that one's characters will live and breathe because thrown into this recovered world that is "true". Fiction, too, is a more difficult god than Sethi seems to allow for. Although we are told that Mabi has gone on this journey with Papu, her presence is so anachronistic that for all practical purposes she never leaves home.

And, while on the subject of "increasingly maudlin appeals" that annoy the auditor, here is another passage— one might think of it as the title scene of the novel:

'Samar Api,' I said one night, 'do you think [Mother] doesn't want to get married because of me?
We were lying in wicker beds on the roof. It was August, the last month of the monsoon. All day the rain had been slashing and insistent; trees swayed and fell and lay like logs in the roads, which were swamped. The overhead wires had snapped; there was no electricity in the neighbourhood and the house was dark.
On the roof the night was clear. The clouds had left the moon in light.
'Not at all,' said Samar Api. 'She doesn't do it because she doesn't want to. There's nothing like your first love.' She closed her eyes and released a sigh. It merged with the breeze.
'Samar Api?'
She moaned.
'Make a wish.'
She cupped her hands, brought them to her mouth and whispered the wish, which was chosen without deliberation, without hesitation, then blew it away and watched as it went up into the night.

From sighs that merge with the breeze and wishes that are watched as they go up into the night, it is hard to beat this scene for exertion in making the invisible visible, and for turning yearning into bathos.

Although original and complex fiction in English about Pakistan is being written currently by writers as diverse as Nadeem Aslam, Mohsin Hamid, Aamer Hussein, Mohammed Hanif, Musharraf Ali Farooqui, Azhar Abidi, and Daniyal Mueenuddin, Sethi’s tutelary deity is clearly the Afghan émigré Khaled Hosseini. Hosseini's long and enthusiastic blurb on the back cover ("an engaging family saga, an absorbing coming-of-age story, and an illuminating look at one of the world's most turbulent regions") sounds like just the thing Hosseini would want said about his own book The Kite Runner.

Indeed, the very title The Wish Maker seems to reach out towards the large global audience which delighted in Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Sethi's writing and plot construction replicate many of Hosseini’s faults, though to my ear his prose has a slightly richer sound than Hosseini’s blundering and bathetic narrations. If this banal and almost willfully unsubtle work is really an example of “the new global novel”, then let us turn to our so-called local writers instead.

And two older essays: on Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and Mohammad Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes.

[A shorter version of this essay appeared last weekend in Mint]

On Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

“In this game of love, women have immense power...much more power than we do,” writes the Scottish painter Jack Vettriano, whose works often depict couples netted by one another, oblivious to the world. “They can really tie us up in knots. We’re animals by comparison.” It is a long stretch from Vettriano’s coolly erotic portraits of beautifully dressed (or undressed) men and women, bright in their own power, to the lawless longing, veiled wooing, insecure dependency, and difficult mingling of unequal partners in Daniyal Mueenuddin’s startling debut story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. But the root feeling is the same. Many of the best moments in Muenuddin’s book involve men who are “wholly masculine” – that is, secure in their place and role in a man’s world, confident that they know what life is – being humbled by a power that disarms their own strength, being surprised by eros or by an emotion that they fear is love. Two of the eight stories in Mueenuddin’s book take their titles from the names of their female protagonists, and at least two more could have.

Mueenuddin’s linked stories – this has now become a convention in short fiction, but in this one instance the material demands it, for the characters are part of an ancient and elaborate hierarchy – wind their way leisurely through the great Lahore house and even bigger country estate of KK Harouni. A pillar of Pakistan’s old feudal order, Harouni rules over a world “as measured and as concentric as that of the Sun King at Versailles”. But Harouni is now aged and enfeebled. Unable to watch over his holdings with the same care of old, he is squeezed of his riches by his extended family of servants, retainers, managers, and workers (many of whom figure as characters in their own right, and are therefore granted a higher status in Mueenuddin’s construct than that of their master, who only cares for them insofar as they contribute to his comfort and standing).

But Mueenuddin’s stories are fascinating not only for what is present in them – the beautifully relaxed, wheeling exposition that recalls the work of Jhumpa Lahiri, the love of the natural world expressed in ripples of memorable language, the dramatisation of the jagged route that human beings take towards understanding themselves and others – but also for what is absent, which is a criticism of the feudal order through which these stories wander. His gaze is curious but uncritical; he sees the world as his characters, who mostly accept the rules of the game, see it; it is as if the world can only be this way. His interest, in fact, is in those individuals who are secretly ambitious in a world where everybody is expected to know their place; his gaze halts upon those who want to rise, and those who can raise.

In the story “Provide, Provide”, Harouni’s elderly and opportunistic estate manager Jaglani, who has long been appropriating his master’s property, takes as his mistress a married woman, Zainab. Zainab gives him whatever he asks for by way of service and bodily pleasure, but stoically, as if performing a duty. When she says she must return to her husband, Jaglani impulsively decides to marry her, although he has a family and children. Shrewdly tracking his thoughts, Mueenuddin tells us that Jaglani feels he is so powerful that “now he deserved to make this mistake, for once not to make a calculated choice”. Jaglani’s marriage brings him pleasure and pain in equal measure; he finds that “although he had made a career of fearing no one”, he fears his wife, and “yet his love kept increasing.” It is only later, when the deed has been done and its consequences have taken hold both in his home and in his mind, that Jaglani begins to regret his actions. Now he cannot even go back to the estate, which he loves, without being reminded of his folly. Here is a paragraph from Mueenuddin:

Yet Dunyapur has been spoiled for him by the presence of Zainab. He minded very much that he had given his sons a stepmother of that class, a servant woman. He minded that he had insulted his first wife in that way, by marrying again, by marrying a servant, and then by keeping the marriage a secret. His senior wife had never reproached him, but after Jaglani told her she quickly became old. She prayed a great deal, spent much of her time in bed, stopped caring for herself. Her body became rounded like a hoop, not fat but fleshed uniformly all over, a body thrown away, throwing itself away, the old woman sitting all day in bed, dreaming, muttering perhaps when left alone. He reproached himself for taking his eldest son’s daughter and giving her to Zainab, transplanting the little girl onto such different stock. Secretly, and most bitterly, he blamed himself for having been so weak as to love a woman who had never loved him. He made an idol of her, lavished himself upon her sexual body, gave himself to a woman who never gave back, except in the most practical terms. She blotted the cleanliness of his life trajectory, which he had always before believed in. She represented the culmination of his ascendance, the reward of his virtue and striving, and showed him how little it had all been, his life and his ambitions. All of it he had thrown away, his manliness and strength, for a pair of legs that grasped his waist and a pair of eyes that pierced him and that yet had at bottom the deadness of foil.

Among the many satisfactions of this passage is the way in which the pleasure of the thought – a kind of Macbethian regret at an expensive dream gone sour – is both paralleled and improved, the two linking hands as prose writing of a high order almost always does, by the acuity of Mueenuddin’s syntax. It is worth thinking about the impact of phrases which effect small, rueful inversions like “how little it had all been, his life and his ambitions” and then, immediately after, the similar, “All of it he had thrown away, his manliness and strength”. And also the sentence: “Her body became rounded like a hoop, not fat but fleshed uniformly all over, a body thrown away, throwing itself away, the old woman sitting all day in bed, dreaming, muttering perhaps when left alone.”

This observation is an example of a very characteristic and striking register of Mueenuddin’s prose, which is a sentence that seems about to close, to expire, until it suddenly takes a new breath and then runs on strongly again, as if it has seen something new late in the day (here the anticipated close might be “a body thrown away”, and the revival “throwing itself away”, which both changes the tense and, through repetition, better indicates the effect of continuous stress this is having on Jaglani’s mind). Her is another example of this kind of sentence, from the story “Lily”: “It wearied her that this memory came now as she turned and stood, appraising Murad’s clothes, loafers with unfortunate tassels, pressed jeans, white shirt tucked in – resembling somehow an army officer out of uniform, the effect touching to her, sincere, a gentleman calling on a lady.”

“Provide, Provide” works itself through to an exceptional conclusion that features neither of the principal characters, thereby greatly enhancing its beauty and strangeness (a strangeness seen again in “Nawabdin Electrician”, a story about a man shot by a thief, and who lies on the road thinking he is going to die, remembering, of all things, “the smell of frying fish”). In his attention to the minds of Zainab and Jaglani, or that of Husna, the impoverished distant relation who, in the title story, infiltrates the household and then the affections of Harouni himself, Mueenuddin serves up a series of masterful character studies set into the massive edifice of Harouni’s world.

In keeping with the need for economic security or love of luxury revealed by so many of his protagonists, Mueenuddin’s writing has a heavy, beguiling materiality. “The hard blue sky stood enormously tall over Paris,” he writes at one point, throwing us right into the scene with that unusual adjective “tall”, which is a tautology – what else could the sky be other than high, or tall? – and is yet expressive, here, a sense of freedom and possibility being experienced by the narrator. Describing Nawabdin’s prowess with tampering with electrical meters, Mueenuddin offers this bouquet of explanations: “Some thought he used magnets, others said heavy oil or porcelain chips or a substance he found in beehives.” When Husna begins to live with KK Harouni, she hoards a secret stash of goods in “two locked steel trunks, which she filled with everything from raw silk to electric sandwich makers.” A couple make love in a small hotel in the French countryside: “The loose bedsprings made long rusty sounds, like a knife leisurely sharpened on a whetstone.”

In Mueenuddin’s hands the material realm often seems to take off, almost become ethereal: “Nawab would fly down this road on his new machine, with bags and cloths hanging from every knob and brace, so that the bike, when he hit a bump, seemed to be flapping numerous small vestigial wings; and with his grinning face, as he rolled up to whichever tubewell needed servicing, with his ears almost blown off, he shone with the speed of his arrival.” It might be said that many of his characters, too, seem to be flapping “small vestigial wings” when they accrue for themselves some precious good. Some works of fiction, by their excellence of craftsmanship, singularity of worldview, and richness and precision of language, announce themselves instantly as classics, and this book of many wonders is one such.

And some other essays on short-story writers: Jhumpa Lahiri, Samrat Upadhyay, Etgar Keret, Houshang Moradi-Kermani, Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay, Parashuram, Jahnavi Barua, Aravind Adiga, Kunal Basu, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Manjushree Thapa, and Nalini Jones.

On Mohammad Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes

A shorter version of this piece appeared last weekend in the Sunday Telegraph.

Whenever someone famous dies in mysterious circumstances, conspiracy theories proliferate; meanings rush in to fill the void. The insight of Mohammed Hanif’s funny and anarchic novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes – a properly fictional insight – is that the wild explanations proffered in such instances may not be all false, but, remarkably, may all be true. The reasoning at the root of Hanif’s story is something like this: Conspiracy theories are almost by definition false. Therefore they are all equally untrue. If we hold that even one of them is true, it pretty much amounts to saying that any or all of them are true. And indeed, if we are prepared to consider one of them, might we not consider that all of them somehow are true?

Hanif’s book is about the mendacious Pakistani dictator Zia ul-Haq – a proponent of Islamicization, an ally of America in the Cold War – who died when his private plane went down in August 1988. In A Case of Exploding Mangoes all kinds of forces – the machinations of generals, the resentment of a junior army officer, the curse of a blind woman, the wrath of a Communist group – are shown with their sights trained on Zia, so that when he dies it is not possible to establish the immediate cause, as it were, in this vast field of possible causes.

The Zia of the novel is a suspicious old man hobbled by age and care, nurturing both delusions of grandeur and paranoia about his safety. He opens to a page of the Quran every day to look for signals from the Almighty, “as if it was not the word of God but his daily horoscope on the back page of the Pakistan Times”. Like many strongmen, General Zia is the ruler of a kingdom but not of a home: he is repeatedly insulted by his own wife, who is disgusted by his lechery.

The irreverent language and set-ups of Hanif’s novel relentlessly puncture the pretensions of power. In one marvellous scene, the First Lady heads for her husband’s office in a fit of rage, but abruptly finds herself shooed into a line of widows waiting for alms from the General. Reaching the top of the line, she declares to her astonished husband that from this day she too is a widow. In another, General Zia, dressed as a commoner, teeters out into his kingdom on a bicycle, and is picked up and humiliated by a constable.

Among the best walk-on parts is that of “a lanky man with a flowing beard” who arrives at a party hosted by the American consulate to celebrate the success of the Afghans against the Soviets, introduces himself as “OBL”, and gets very little attention from the dignitaries present. Even as it entertainingly answers the questions still asked about Zia’s death, then, Hanif’s novel raises the delicious possibility that the rage and rancour of America's most intransigent opponent first erupted when he was not invited into a group photograph.

And two old posts, one on a Pakistani dictator and the other on a lanky man with a flowing beard: "On the memoirs of President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan" and "On Steve Coll's The Bin Ladens".

On Ma Jian's Beijing Coma

A shorter and slightly different version of this piece appeared on Sunday in the Observer.

Dai Wei, the protagonist of Ma Jian’s shaggy and slow-moving novel Beijing Coma, is a man doubly captive. Although he is kept under close observation by the police for his role in the Tiananmen Square student protests of June 4, 1989, Dai Wei is first and foremost a prisoner of his own body: he has been lying in a coma since he was felled by a bullet on the day of the protests. Dai Wei’s mind is still functioning, but his body, which he thinks of as a“fleshy tomb”, is a mere vegetable. The opinion of one of the many doctors who attends to him is that, “Strictly speaking, he isn’t human any more.”

As China is rapidly transformed by economic modernization, and the world-changing ardour of Tiananmen Square recedes from the minds of its citizens, Dai Wei lies in his bedroom, tended to by his mother and occasionally visited by friends. As one of them jokes, Dai Wei, more than any other Chinese citizen, has actualised Chairman Mao’s advice “to remain unchanging in changing circumstances”.

Ma’s novel, a vibrant collage of scenes from Dai Wei’s past and present life, is simultaneously a large-scale portrait of a citizenry writhing in the grip of the Party and the state and a strikingly intimate study of the fragility of the body and the persistence of self and memory. It takes its form and even its tone – that of horror mixed with laughter – from the poverty and deprivation of Dai Wei’s condition. Trapped in an unchanging present, Dai Wei wraps himself around all “the tiny details people generally store in the back of their minds and never get a chance to savour again”. He thinks of the three women he has loved, of his favourite books, of food, of walks in the streets.

Ma (whose work was banned in China following the publication of Stick Out Your Tongue, his book of stories about Tibet) allocates a great deal of narrative time to the discussion of politics and the plotting of stratagems by the rebelling students. But his novel is never uninteresting, because he is not a didactic writer. Even when his characters speak of oppression, there is humour and pathos in their words. Indeed one of the pleasures of Beijing Coma is the author’s skill with dialogue. Wheedling citizens, sloganeering students, peremptory officials, whispering lovers, even the protagonist’s silent conversation with himself – all these are expertly rendered.

“What kind of country is it that punishes the victims of a massacre, rather than the people who fired the shots?” cries Dai Wei’s mother. Yet later she is so excited by the arrival of a telephone that she calls up unknown people listed in the telephone directory just to try out her new plaything. In these two kinds of speech – a despairing lament that exposes the corruption and mendacity of an entire social order, and a wholly gratuitous confirmation of connection – lies one of the clues to Ma’s method. Beijing Coma is full of such unruly and oddly moving details.

The great achievement of Ma’s book is the way we are made to experience Dai Wei’s extreme debilitation, his painful limbo in “death’s waiting room”, almost viscerally. Dai Wei’s body is broken up into parts: his mother has to sell one of his kidneys to pay for his medical expenses; his urine is collected for sale to followers of urinotherapy; and to his embarrassment, his penis grows hard whenever anyone touches him. When his ex-girlfriend comes to visit, he breathes in her smells and admits, heartbreakingly, that: “I long for her to touch my hand, then I remember the cadaver that I am.” Dai Wei feels guilty about all the years of trouble his body has given to his mother, and longs for the day when his death serves as both his release and hers.

In one beautiful passage, a sparrow makes Dai Wei’s room its home. The noises it makes as it hops and flies around allow the sightless Dai to form a picture of his surroundings. “Since it arrived, the room seems to have grown much larger,” he exults. Later the sparrow perches on Dai Wei’s chest and is “lulled to sleep by the ticking of my heart”. Bedridden for almost a decade, Dai Wei’s infirm body nevertheless proves capable of supporting the sleep of a sparrow.

As the novel explores the predicament of the comatose protagonist and of a society paralysed by fear and denial, the meanings of its title begin to ramify, suggesting a parallel between Dai Wei’s wretched body and the entire body politic. In the apocalyptic finale, Dai Wei’s apartment block is razed by the government to make room for a stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games. The residents leave one by one, leaving only the supine protagonist and his half-crazed mother on stage. The irony of Dai Wei’s exhilarating waking as we leave him, Ma seems to suggest, is that he only rises up from one Beijing coma into another.

And some links to other essays about China or Chinese literature: "On Guy Sorman's Year of the Rooster" (Sorman argues that comparisons of China's growth with that of India are virtually meaningless, for a narrowly quantitative analysis does not reflect "non-economic values which matter like democracy, freedom of religion and respect for life"); "Vaclav Havel, Kang Zhengguo, and prison literature"; and "Lush life in Mo Yan" (Mo Yan is in my opinion as good a novelist as Ma Jian, and one feature common to their work is their interest in the lives of birds and animals).

Indian novelists writing in English are often excoriated by local readers for living abroad and (this is often a vague charge) "trying to pander to the West". The irony of the best contemporary Chinese literature, in contrast, is that it is almost by definition the literature of expatriate writers, writers whose critical spirit has led the Chinese government to persecute them and ban their work ("Mo Yan" is actually a pseudonym that means "Don't Speak", and this is an appropriate symbol of the attitude of the Chinese Communist Party towards writers).

China's economic success has led people in important positions the world over to enthuse about a regime that, for fifty years, has blithely erased or rewritten history, made human fodder of its people, systematically ransacked an ancient civilization and vilified or outlawed many of its highest achievements, suffocated all creative endeavour and everyday speech with doctrine, and made political conformity (which is just another name for hypocrisy) the highest measure by which human action is judged. Strictly speaking, such a regime cannot be considered human either. In the year of the Beijing Olympics, and of the Chinese government on its best behaviour, we need novels like Ma Jian's and memoirs like Kang Zhengguo's to tell us the truth about China.

And some other essays: "Boycott Beijing" by the columnist Anne Applebaum (I must say that I am myself not in favour of such a move); "Does the future really belong to China?", a debate between Will Hutton and the economist Meghnad Desai in Prospect; "Empty Olympic Promises", a recent New York Times editorial; "The World of Mao", by Susan Spano; and "Hammers and drills, concrete and dust", a recent piece by Robert Macfarlane.

Update, July 18: Andrew Nathan's "What the Olympics reveal, and conceal, about China".

Samrat Upadhyay's Royal Ghosts

My essay on the Nepali writer Samrat Upadhyay appears in the Los Angeles Times today. It is reproduced here in a slightly modified form.

The Royal Ghosts
Samrat Upadhyay
Mariner, 2006
$12

Most writers, even if they are not especially showy, intend us at least to linger upon a metaphor or a sentence, to notice the brightness of a phrase. But Samrat Upadhyay is among the smoothest and most noiseless of contemporary writers. His is an abstemious art: he sees that his characters, mostly members of the middle and lower classes — businessmen, middle-rung workers, housewives, servants — do not think in any obviously literary manner, and he strives to keep his work in the same key as their lives. He resolutely eschews metaphors, makes sparing use of colons and semicolons, and almost never resorts to that word so favored by short-story writers: "suddenly." His work is so subtle that it does not even seem especially subtle.

Although he has resided in America for nearly two decades, Upadhyay has never lost touch with his native Nepal, a country that has produced very little English-language fiction. Indeed, the capital, Katmandu, is the locale for all of his work. His debut collection of stories, Arresting God in Kathmandu, showed people negotiating a thicket of choices in a close-knit, tradition-bound society in which the needs and preferences of families are as important as those of individuals and various codes of caste and class restrict the free intermixing of people. (For example, even adults cannot marry without parental approval and, in fact, often have their life partners chosen for them by their parents.)

In a magazine interview, Upadhyay has described life as "a constant negotiation between limits and freedom from those limits, regardless of culture." The country of his birth has given him an especially rich mine of material in which the tension between individual freedom and societal constraints is evenly weighted and therefore narratively compelling. It is to his credit that in his 2001 stories and the 2003 novel The Guru of Love, he writes about Nepali society in English, for a primarily Western readership, without ever letting the whiff of exoticism invade his work.

Upadhyay returns in his new collection of stories, The Royal Ghosts, to themes familiar from Arresting God, the most pervasive of which is the struggle of men and women to understand each other, to work their way across the hollows and uncertainties that lie between them and find a way of living together. He often writes from the point of view of an interested third party, not just one or the other protagonist. (As if to dramatize how intricately people's lives are linked with others, his stories always attend closely to the lives of at least four or five characters and how they feel about one another. This gives his stories a kind of novelistic roominess.)

In "Father, Daughter," Shivaram is alarmed by the behavior of his daughter. She has left her husband — a match Shivaram arranged — for no other reason than that she cannot love him and has resumed an earlier liaison with the son of a low-caste cobbler. Conscious of the disapproving murmurs all around him, Shivaram declines to participate in her second marriage, so that "people would say less, say that he'd at least attempted to protect his dignity." His speculative knowledge of his daughter's motives and feelings, and his mixture of perplexity, outrage, tenderness and frailty, gives the story an unusual charge.

In "A Servant in the City," a teenage village boy, Jeevan, is a servant to a single woman and witnesses her affair with her former employer, which has made her a pariah. Gradually she confides in Jeevan, who supports her through her low spells. Over time, Jeevan finds that he has become "strangely possessive of her, as if he were the only one who truly knew her." He suspects that her lover will never keep his promise to leave his wife and marry her, and one day Jeevan blurts out these thoughts, turning from a spectator into an agent. Reprimanded by his mistress for his insolence, he thinks about returning to the village, "to remind himself where he came from."

A new pressure is also at work on Upadhyay's characters: politics and recent events in Nepal. The young democracy overseen by a monarchy has endured a turbulent five years. In 2001, the crown prince fatally shot several members of the royal family, including his father, King Birendra, in a drunken fit before turning his gun upon himself. Since then the country has been riven by a bloody Maoist uprising that has taken thousands of lives. The Royal Ghosts shows how the tension among the monarchy, democrats and communists has eroded the country's social fabric, demolishing the old stability against which the characters of Arresting God in Kathmandu played out their lives. This darkness and violence lie at the edges of several stories in the new collection and are addressed explicitly in a few of them.

In "The Weight of a Gun," the elderly Janaki finds a gun hidden under the mattress of her schizophrenic son, Bhola, who has often boasted that he is a Maoist. She lifts it gingerly, her head buzzing with questions. "Holding it carefully, she peeked out of the window. People were going about their business." Everything is as normal, but this one gesture of Janaki's is revelatory; she has stepped over the threshold and has been sucked into the morass.

Even when he engages most closely with politics, Upadhyay always illuminates the private realm, as in the book's splendid title story. On the morning that word of the killings in the royal family sends shockwaves across Nepal, Ganga, a taxi driver mistrustful of the monarchy and generally of all those in power, drives around Katmandu, observing various scenes. He pays a visit to his younger brother Dharma, who works in a photocopy shop.When Ganga enters the shop, it is dark. He sees his brother sprawled naked on a bed with another man. Learning that Dharma is homosexual hits Ganga much harder than the death of the monarch.

Distraught, he beats up his brother, then wanders from place to place. (Upadhyay's characters are great wanderers — when they feel tense about something, they go for a walk.) Late that night, a very drunk Ganga seeks out an acquaintance, who wonders if there was some conspiracy behind the killings. Ganga's response meshes the day's two big events. "Maybe, maybe," he slurs, interpreting history through family. "How can we know what goes on behind closed doors? We cannot even know with our own relatives."