Some thoughts on artistic time and real time

Some kinds of artistic creation, like painting, are experienced across space - we understand them by organising all their elements visually at the same time. Others, like music or film or written narrative, unfold in a linear fashion and are experienced across time. Further, the pleasure we derive from them has its source not just in their subject matter, their content, but in how they unfold over time - how they speed up and slow down, the particular direction they take and the sequence in which their parts are presented.

If we reflect upon our aesthetic experience we realise that time as we experience it in artworks is far more intense, more "rich" with sensory detail and with feeling, than time as we know it in real life. In the best works of art not a moment is wasted: every word, every note, or every shot seems essential. By comparison with artistic time, real time is almost unbearably tedious in its aimlessness, vacancy and sheer sprawl. When we say we opened a book or put on a CD to "pass the time", we are actually saying something quite significant. One of the reasons why we need art is because it allows us not just to forget our own selves (as I argue here, here and here) but also to transcend the quotidian experience and slow time to which we are irrevocably yoked.

Of course, human beings possess the resources to fill time up, to infuse it with urgency and meaning, even without art. Those resources are the memory and the imagination, and they allow us to prepare our own homemade version of artistic time. Each one of us has a private corpus of memories of the most significant events of our lives, memories we are always reexamining and reinterpreting. What has transpired once in our lives is replayed hundreds of times in the private theatre of our minds, with the inessential details sifted out as they would have been in a work of art. And on the other hand there is the imagination, which takes unrelated elements or inchoate yearnings and, by shaping them into a sequence or a whole, creates the same satisfying richness that we derive from art.

It might be said that our memories and our fantasies are our private works of art, only occasionally sensed or glimpsed by others but constantly in our own sights. They are our way of overcoming the tyranny of the present moment, of substituting the inessential with the essential. Even more than in behaviour and in speech, they are where we are most fully ourselves. In fact, art forms like the novel are premised upon this idea, that the dredging up of a person's interior life reveals what is most essential about him or her.

Even so artistic time, itself a product of the human imagination, has a special glow. Putting down a book, or leaving a movie hall, we cross the border from one kind of time to another, and wonder if somehow our lives could not be freighted with the same richness and intensity. Of course, this is a chimerical wish: reality will never support it. But on the rare instances that we do manage to live for extended periods in a state of elevated feeling, we often find the only parallel for that experience in the intensity of artistic time. "I felt suddenly as if I could hear life's music", we say, or "It was like I was a character in a novel".

On Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red

Orhan Pamuk's novel My Name Is Red is that rare book: a contemporary work that can already be thought of as one of the truly essential novels. Although the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to Pamuk last week, is given not for a single book but for a body of work, there can be little doubt that My Name Is Red stands at the centre of Pamuk's oeuvre.

The first chapter of the novel is narrated by a corpse. "I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of the well […] no one, apart from that vile murderer, knows what's happened to me," he begins. There is no one to hear the corpse, yet his words assume a listener. That listener is the reader, and My Name is Red is full of such speakers who, like agitated and unruly witnesses at a public hearing, jostle each other to press upon the reader the stories of their lives and the shape of their feelings.

Pamuk's novel is set in sixteenth-century Istanbul, at the time of the zenith of the Ottoman empire, and it is at different levels a murder mystery, a love story, a meditation on the significance of art in man's life, a parable of the relationship between the East and the West, and an experiment in narrative plurality.

The novel's cast of characters (most of whom are also narrators) include the clever and beautiful Shekure, whose husband has gone missing in war and who therefore may be a widow; Shekure's father 'Enishte' ('Uncle') Effendi, a senior functionary of the Sultan's court; and Black, Enishte's nephew and the protagonist of the story, back in Istanbul after having fallen in love with Shekure when younger and being rejected by her and banished by Enishte from his home. There is also Hasan, Shekure's brother-in-law, also obsessively in love with her; and a band of calligraphers and illustrators employed in a thriving art, the production of illuminated manuscripts illustrating old tales and legends under the Sultan's patronage.

The back-story of My Name Is Red is the encounter of some of the men at the forefront of Ottoman art with an entirely different style of art just beginning to take hold of the human imagination in the West: the art of human portraiture. The clash between two views of artistic practice could not be more total. Ottoman art is above all a religious art. Conscious that idolatry - and by extension painting - is forbidden by the Koran, it produces pictures mainly as illustrations of well-known tales and stories, as ostensible aids in their understanding, and with due care taken to portray the world from "an elevated Godlike perspective," as if leading us to "God's vision."

But the new Western art of portraiture, which Enishte Effendi first encounters on an official visit to Venice, privileges the human subject, depicting the unique and individual characteristics of each face it portrays, and treating painting as an end in itself and an attempt to replicate reality. Enishte describes this art to Black as appearing to embody "a sin of desire, like growing arrogant before God, like considering oneself of utmost importance, like situating oneself at the center of the world." But he is also utterly fascinated by it for the same reason: it seems to immortalise each man it depicts, perpetuate in remarkable fashion his finite life. Enishte remarks with wonder:

If your face was depicted in this fashion only once, no one would ever be able to forget you, and if you were far away, someone who laid eyes on your portrait would feel your presence as if you were actually nearby. Those who had never seen you alive, even years after your death, could come face-to-face with you as if you were standing before them.

His Sultan is equally fascinated by the new art of portraiture. Desirous of having his portrait painted in this fashion, he instructs Enishte to prepare in secret, using his workshop's best artists, a book about his reign on the occasion of the thousandth year of the Hegira, to be presented to the Venetians as a marvellous symbol of the Sultan's power. It is to help him with the book - as also the management of skilled and sensitive artists who must now work in secret, and both personally consider as well as provoke in their wider society the question of blasphemy - that Enishte has recalled Black to Istanbul. And Black, still lovestruck after all these years, is obviously keen to re-explore the question of whether Shekure, now probably a widow, is interested in him. Observing the specimens of portraiture shown to him by his uncle, Black thinks:

Had I taken Shekure's portrait with me, rendered in the style of the Venetian masters, I wouldn't have felt such loss during my long travels when I could scarcely remember my beloved, whose face I'd left somewhere behind me. For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.

Black is a solitary, ruminative sort: his troubled life leads him to assert that "for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness". But he pursues Shekure enthusiastically, and all of a sudden she agrees to marry him if he agrees to certain conditions. Suddenly it is Black's wedding day: he can scarcely believe how he has suddenly been presented "the greatest of gifts…after so much suffering". He finds an imam and goes with him across the Bosphorus river in search of a legal functionary, and on the way imagines how a miniaturist might paint this scene of his life, tinged with the slight foreboding that is a characteristic aspect of his thought:

…the miniaturist ought to depict us amid mustachioed and muscled oarsmen, forging our way across the blue Bosphorus towards Uskudar in the four-oared red longboat we'd boarded at Unkapani. The preacher and his skinny dark-complexioned brother, pleased with the surprise voyage, are engaging the oarsmen in friendly chatter. Meanwhile, amid blithe dreams of marriage that play ceaselessly before my eyes, I stare deep into the waters of the Bosphorus, flowing clearer than usual on this sunny winter morning, on guard for an ominous sign within its currents. I'm afraid, for example, that I might see the wreck of a private ship below. Thus, no matter how joyously the miniaturist colours the sea and the clouds, he ought to include something equivalent to the darkness of my fears and as intense as my dreams of happiness - a terrifying-looking fish, for example - in the depths of the water so the reader of my adventure won't assume all is rosy.

Not the least of the novel's pleasures is the whiff and the savour of its keen metaphysical intelligence, its willingness to engage with life's deepest questions. One such instance appears when Enishte Effendi is murdered. His soul ascends to heaven led by an angel and talks of its experiences, like the corpse with whom the book begins. Slowly coming to terms with his existence in this new realm ("Eternal puzzles and dark enigmas that only the dead might understand were now being revealed and illuminated, bursting forth brilliantly one by one in thousands of colours"), Enishte suddenly senses that he is in the presence of the divine. He is overcome by fear and ecstasy, as also anguish over his probable sin of blasphemy. He blurts out some words and hears a response, not aloud, but "in my thoughts". This is how the matter proceeds:

I could barely contain my excitement.
"All right then, what is the meaning of it all, of this…of this world?"
"Mystery," I heard in my thoughts, or perhaps, "mercy," but I wasn't certain of either.

A startling double note is struck here, of confusion and unintentional comedy on the one hand, and profundity and religious awe on the other. Taken by itself, either of the two possible replies would have been anticlimactic, but blurred together as they are here, they are marvellously satisfying.

As these short excerpts may reveal, Pamuk's narrative artistry, his appetite for ideas, his talent for patterning (a method of producing meaning through the repetition or the contrast of words, thoughts, or symbols), and his flair for observation all find expression in the most remarkable sentences, their beautiful and startling cadences transmitting a sense of agile minds roused to a high pitch. It is hard to think of another book in which practically every sentence has such an aesthetically pleasing shape and a ring to it. Erdag Goknar's marvellous translation has produced a book that, had it been written originally in English, would stand alongside the greatest works of English prose.

The first chapter of My Name Is Red can be found here.

And here are some essays by Pamuk: "Freedom to Write", delivered as a PEN lecture earlier this year; "In Kars and Frankfurt", a piece which considers the novel "as a way of thinking, understanding and imagining, and also as a way of imagining oneself as someone else"; "A Private History", in which he talks about the research that went into My Name Is Red and his use of autobiographical matter in the book; "City of Ghosts", an extract from Istanbul, his book about the city that has nourished his imagination; "The Anger of the Damned", a piece written after the 9/11 attacks; "Humour May Be Our Only Hope", on the Turkish elections of 2002; "Road to Rebellion", on driving through the city of Tehran; "A private reading of Andre Gide's public Journal", on the French writer Andre Gide; and "On Trial", an account of going on trial in Turkey last year for a reference to the Armenian massacre of 1915.

Update, October 30: And here's a new essay by Pamuk on himself and his work, "Implied Author" ("To read a dense, deep passage in a novel, to enter into that world and believe it to be true - nothing makes me happier, nothing binds me more to life. I also prefer it if the writer is dead, because then there is no little cloud of jealousy to darken my admiration. The older I get, the more convinced I am that the best books are by dead writers.")

On Nagesh Kukunoor's Dor

A few minutes into Nagesh Kukunoor's new film Dor - after a set of early scenes of great tenderness and beauty featuring two pairs of newlyweds - we see one of his two female protagonists, the Rajasthani girl Meera (played by the marvellous Ayesha Takia), perched on a pile of rocks with a mobile phone in her hand, making her monthly phone call to her husband in Saudi Arabia.

She asks for him by name, and is told that he is no longer alive. We see the expression on her face change, and the phone drop from her hand. As if it cannot bear to face her grief directly any more, the camera cuts to a low position behind her. She appears framed against the empty blue sky, which seems to reflect back her great desolation and puzzlement.

The camera cuts again to a shot which projects a sharp irony, with Meera in the background, and in the foreground, with his back to her, the man who has given her his mobile phone for a fee. The seconds he is counting down on his wristwatch do not progress in the same way for Meera, for whom time has effectively stopped from this moment onwards. Yet it is not a simple irony, in which the boundless grief of one character and the grubbery of another are unambiguously juxtaposed. In an earlier scene we have seen the man walk away to a distance to give Meera her privacy. This is why, on this occasion, he has no clue of what is happening to her. He is both calculating and kind. From the different aspects of this one scene we can tell that we are going to watch a drama of considerable subtlety.

As Baradwaj Rangan has also noted, Dor resembles Iranian cinema in its close attention to the play of human feelings when presented with complex moral dilemmas. Zeenat (Gul Panag, compellingly direct, droop-shouldered and gravel-voiced) learns that her husband stands accused in a foreign country of the death of another Indian man, and the only way in which he can be reprieved is if the dead man's wife will consent to his pardon. She sets out from Himachal Pradesh for Rajasthan (Kukunoor's use of the two contrasting landscapes to create mood is one of many good aesthetic decisions) in search of the unknown woman who holds the key to her own future. In a marvellous scene in which the two lead characters meet for the first time, Zeenat reveals she is in search of her husband but cannot bring herself to explain the circumstances. Meera innocently asks, "Why, do you think he can be found here?" And we know that yes, in a sense it is only here that he can be found.

Takia's is the most naturally expressive face of any actress in Hindi cinema currently. Here it radiates innocence and simple faith, and, covered at first by a gauzy pink veil and then by austere blue widow's robes, is the subject of many striking close-ups. On several occasions she conveys the state of being overcome by strong feelings, in long takes where the camera stays fixed on her face, by nothing more than a flicker of the eyes and a slight dilation of the nostrils.

Her character has a highly developed moral sense, and also a natural moral sympathy - one does not necessarily eventuate in the other. In one scene where the two women are talking about their husbands (Meera does not yet know the entire truth), Zeenat remarks that they are both consumed similarly by memories. At this Meera pipes up: "But there is a difference: you still have hope, but I don't." This is quite true, but then she becomes aware of her impetuosity and, reaching out to the other, says, "I shouldn't have said that. Loss can't be measured out and compared in this fashion."

The depiction of Meera's many moods and facets make this one of the best character studies of recent times. Meera lives in a world of restricted choices, and admires Zeenat for her freedom and independence. Later, when she learns the truth, she is inflamed, and exudes a heavy contempt. She declares to Zeenat that it has been her dream to slay her husband's killer with her own hands, and refuses to comply with Zeenat's wish. Later, when she rethinks this decision and delivers to Zeenat the letter of pardon just as Zeenat's train about to leave, the image of the life-giving letter exchanging hands is framed against the very sky that seemed to echo once with a sense of Meera's loss. If the first shot suggested human powerlessness before fate, this one attests to the ability of human beings to transcend their circumstances and to change the world.

The last drama of such force I saw was the Iranian filmmaker Tahmineh Milani's Two Women, and indeed Dor might have gone by the same title. Kukunoor is correct, I think, in pointing to how unusual it is in Hindi cinema for two women to work out a conclusion without a man's intervention - in fact the film as a whole carries a bracing feminist message. He is also to be complimented on his use of Indian landscapes (some thoughts by Amrita Sher-Gil and Satyajit Ray on its depiction on film can be found here in this old essay on Sher-Gil), on Salim-Sulaiman's unusual background score - it is a great pleasure to hear the sarangi given such prominence in our synthesiser-and-drums times - and Mir Ali Hussain's beautifully turned-out dialogue. Yet his work also has some faults.

His villains are too simply bad. Girish Karnad, who rarely appears in any other Hindi films these days, seems to take a special pleasure in playing utterly unsympathetic characters in Kukunoor films - the corrupt and conniving coach, shavenheaded like a baddie of old, in last year's Iqbal, and now the bullheaded and tawdry patriarch here, tempted into quoting a price for his own daughter-in-law. The irony is that Karnad is himself a playwright of great distinction. In Dor the exuberant tomfoolery of Shreyas Talpade, the Iqbal of Kukunoor's previous film, as a master of disguises is entertaining enough, but mostly his character exists to provide a few predictable laughs and to add half an hour of screen time. Watching the film a second time, I found his part discordant.

Strangest of all is Kukunoor's own appearance on screen as the factory-owner Mr.Chopra. It is known that Kukunoor's early films, made as a relative nonentity working on the fringes of Bollywood, were shot on shoestring budgets. As if unwilling to make a total break from those old days of desperate moneysaving gambits, he continues to cast himself in major roles in big-budget works, when if he had auditioned for these roles he would have been the first to be cast out. The spectacular dodginess of his delivery of the line "Ab aagya deejiye" ("Now please excuse me") at the close of his first long scene opposite Karnad has to be seen to be fully appreciated.

Some other pieces on film: on Kukunoor's Iqbal, Rakeysh Mehra's Rang De Basanti, and Tahmineh Milani's Two Women. Now I've got some other pressing work to attend to, so ab aagya deejiye.

Saul Bellow and The Republic of Letters

Every writer has a private map of literature, a vision of what the best books are. He considers some books overpraised, and others unjustly neglected. He feels the pressure of literature upon his life, and believes that other people should feel some of that same charge, and if they don't he must show them how. He would like to dredge out the best of the old, and sift the best of the new. In short, every writer would like to to run a literary magazine.

The Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, who passed away last year, founded four literary magazines at different points of his life with his friend Keith Botsford. The last of these periodicals, published more or less biannually from 1999 onwards, is News from The Republic of Letters, featuring fiction, essays serious and lighthearted, reminiscences, excerpts from diaries, poetry, and literary criticism.

The latest issue of TRoL contains, alongside the usual mix, three essays in memory of Bellow, including one by the writer Herbert Gold. Gold first met Bellow in Paris in 1949; he was a young writer spending some time in Europe, and Bellow the same, only some years older, and with two published novels to his credit. At the time Bellow was writing The Adventures of Augie March (his own account of those years can be found in an essay here); and as the rumor had gotten around "that he was destined to be America's new great novelist" he already possessed a devoted circle of admirers, to whom he was given to complaining at length about his many woes, especially marital. Gold presents a scene of the writer holding court:

Usually these family quarrels, hot tongue and cold shoulder, had to do with boredom (his) and jealousy (his wife's). He cultivated the admiration of pretty young women; he received it. He liked to recall how, when his first story was published in a national magazine, Harper's Bazaar, along with a photo, he received a telephone call from MGM pictures. Did they want to make a movie of his story?

He beamed; high wattage. There was an ironic glint in his large dark eyes. His smile delighted. No, they wanted to offer him a screen-test.

When he glanced around his circle of admirers on the terrace of Le Rouquet at the corner of rue des Saintes-Pères and the Boulevard Saint-Germain, we all responded with an echo of his own joyous amusement, just as if we were receiving the tale for the first time. Sometimes there was at least one person present for whom it was new.

It is a very fine and sharp account, alive to good and bad both - Gold describes memorably Bellow's self-regard and need for attention ("He required an audience as devoted as the audience he gave himself"); the particular achievement of his work ("Saul's prose style married classical elegance to Mark Twain and the pungency of street speech; Yiddish played stickball with Henry James….He could spritz like a lower east side comedian and then lament like the prophets….His gifts enabled him to edge abruptly into scenes of vivid desire and grief, as in the last paragraphs of the great story Seize the Day"); his tendency to write up his antagonists in real life as characters in his novels ("I know three people who wrote novels intended as revenge for what he had written about them"); and his extreme touchiness when it came to the reception of his books ("Receiving hundreds of clippings, he was still the man who could be thrown into a raging flunk by that bad review in the Deseret News of Salt Lake City).

In a post on Seize The Day some weeks ago I linked to a number of essays on Bellow, and here are a number of excellent essays by him: "Hidden Within Technology's Kingdom, a Republic of Letters", a piece about the founding of TroL; "To Be Poor Meant Also To Be Free", an account of the hustle and bustle of the Chicago of the nineteen-twenties; "Strangely Independent of Place", about the writing of Augie March; and "My Paris", an account from the eighties about returning to the city he once lived in.

A piece by Botsford I like very much is this essay on WG Sebald from an old issue of TRoL ("...when I, so rarely, find myself with a writer whose every turn of phrase and every thought is so clearly going to be interesting, I become self-denying. I will not just read it; I will savor it. Really good writers command that they be read at almost the pace at which they write—otherwise you will miss something" - that is absolutely correct.) And Herbert Gold has an essay on the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg here.

And the website of The Little Magazine, to my mind the best literary magazine in India, can be found here. Here is a selection of pieces from it: "The idea of India in the era of globalisation" by Sunil Khilnani, "The Hundred Watt Bulb" by Saadat Hasan Manto, "India Through Its Calendars" by Amartya Sen, "The Closed Door" by the Bengali writer Ashapurna Debi, "Babur, the man behind the mosque" by Amitav Ghosh, "Angoori", a story by the Punjabi writer Amrita Pritam, "Ten Dilemmas of Nuclear Deterrence" by Achin Vanaik, and "Bon Appetit", a poem by Arun Kolatkar.

On Hamid Dalwai's Fuel

The Marathi writer Hamid Dalwai (1932-1977) was, like many writers who came to maturity in the decades immediately after India's independence, committed to scrutinising Indian society - in his case, particularly the world of Indian Muslims - and working and campaigning towards a better world. Dalwai was a proponent not just of Muslim social reform in areas such as divorce law, but he also wanted to advance the cause of ideas - secularism, liberal humanism - which he thought were distant from the world of orthodox Muslim society in India. This subject is addressed in what is probably his best-known work, Muslim Politics in Secular India.

But Dalwai also wrote one novel - Indhan, or Fuel, published in 1966 but was only made available in English after the turn of the century, in a translation by his contemporary Dilip Chitre, one of India's most distinguished men of letters. It is a curious novel, covering difficult territory, and a little rough around the edges either in the original or in translation, but it realises vividly the world and the internal dynamics of a small town inhabited by several different communities separated by religion and caste. Its subject is religious strife, and man's inherent tribalism, which in times of crisis leads him to conceive of the most barbaric deeds. Indhan was written when Partition and its horrors were not yet two decades past, and it is a sobering reminder - no less relevant in our times - of how human beings can be brought to collective derangement by real or perceived provocations. The fuel of the title might be thought of as the massive incendiary power under some circumstances of a single human action or gesture.

Indhan is narrated in the first person by a middle-aged Muslim man (he never gives us his name) who is returning from Mumbai to his hometown in the Konkan after fifteen years. The narrator's beliefs were at odds with those of his family, one of a community of prosperous Khots or landowners. Not only is he an atheist, in the years preceding his departure from the village he tacitly supported the program of land reform that worked in favour of the town sharecroppers and against his own class interests (thus, like Dalwai, he might be thought of as standing for a new "idea if India" and for the dissolution of old hierarchies and reactionary ideas). In Mumbai he joined a progressive political party and became a well-known leader; although he has not been seen in his own village for so long, people know of him from seeing his picture in the newspapers.

Now a heart attack has left the narrator in fragile health, and he returns not just to recuperate but also to resume the relationships whose call he has ignored for so long. His father does not even recognise him; his brother has himself aged remarkably, and the narrator is struck by guilt on seeing him: "He carried the added burden of the duties I shrugged off, along with his own. His situation had been like one of a pair of bullocks pulling a cart, finding the other reluctant to budge."

In the days that follow the narrator walks around meeting people he used to know, and this allows Dalwai to lay out the town's complex demography: the former landowning class of Muslims; the Brahmins; the farmer and the barber castes, and finally the low-caste Mahars or untouchables, who have now converted to Buddhism. These communities are interdependent economically but wary of each other socially; notions of high and low, pure and impure, are still in force. However, sex is the force that dissolves these boundaries: the narrator discovers that his brother has a Hindu mistress, and that a family friend has a Mahar woman as a keep. These transgressions are to spiral later into a violent tumult.

In one of the most striking passages of Fuel, the narrator notes the changing of the seasons and watches the dust swirling around his house in the high wind:

The rains vanished and - by and by - swirls of dust took their place. The dust gathered in the air over our house and with the cold wind blowing, started settling all over the house…. The dust was going to gather over and over again, tons of it each day. It was going to spread all over the house and lie still where it fell. It was going to grow into huge heaps. Nobody would take the trouble to sweep it off. Who would sweep it? How often? And what was the use of taking such pains?…Before the next rains, people would sweep this dust away and make heaps of it in their backyards. Then, one day, raindrops would storm those heaps of dust. At first the heaps of dust would swallow up the raindrops battering them. The dust would…drink up the water from all those cold raindrops. But the water would prove too much to absorb. In the end, the dust would exude a fine tantalizing fragrance, a fragrance one would want to get one's teeth into, and the dust would disappear with the rain - just melt away - so as to return, after the next harvesting season, to settle over these houses again.

This vision of the workings of the natural world, serenely defeating all human resistance ("Who would sweep it? How often?") is very striking, and invites comparison with the closing paragraphs of Chekhov's story "The Kiss". But this passage tells us something also about the narrator's own weariness and languor, and it is paralleled later in the realm of human affairs when religious tensions break out with the same pent-up force, and the narrator, after making an abortive attempt to reach a settlement like he had in the past, bows down before the clamour swelling in his ears: "If there was going to be an explosion, let there be an explosion! If it was going to incinerate me, let me be incinerated in it too…"

Indhan reaches a climax in a riot in which outrages are visited on one community by goons recruited by the other; the narrator runs helter-skelter trying to save his own people, but of course he has alliances on both sides. An uneasy peace is enforced by the police, and the process of judicial enquiry begins. The narrator, sickened by all he has seen, leaves again for the city - the novel begins and ends with a bus ride. But even though the narrator has left his hometown behind, he continues to speak of the various players in the drama and their fates, and his narration shifts into the future tense. Is this what really happened, or is this what he is dreaming will happen? The novel combines traditional novelistic technique with modernist elements that disorient the reader.

Translation itself is not a simple process of like-for-like substitutions across languages, and among Chitre's most daring moves is to translate the Konkani Muslim Marathi dialect spoken by the narrator's community as a blend of black and country American dialect. Chitre writes that he was unwilling to render "a dialect in the source-text as standard register in the target-text", and so he has invented a kind of patois to communicate the sense of one in the original Marathi. Here is the narrator's father is admonishing him for his preoccupation with politics: "Izzis all ya'd do in ya life? An' earn nothin'? Not feed yo'self? Not feed yo' family?" This is a surprisingly successful move: when I think of the local dialects in my own state of Orissa, their rhythms are like this, with similarly crooked pronunciation.

Here is an essay by Chitre, "Remembering Hamid Dalwai"; Ramachandra Guha had occasion to discuss Dalwai's political opinions in this piece from two years ago: "Liberal India on the Defensive". Prominent among Chitre's other translations is Says Tuka, his acclaimed renditions of the poems of the 17th-century Bhakti poet Tukaram; the very good introduction to this volume can be read here. Chitre also writes a blog here.

Other posts on Indian writers in translation: on Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay, Sadat Hasan Manto, Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay, and Fakir Mohan Senapati.

In Kolkata for a bit

I'm in Kolkata for a couple of weeks and don't know a great many people here, but I must talk to live, else I'll never get any work done, and then things won't work out as I intend them to, and I'll recede in life instead of advancing.

So if you're a Kolkata blogger, or even a Kolkata reader of my blog, and would like to meet, then email me. I must warn you that I'm an absolute demon: grumpy, poker-faced, silent as a ticket clerk, inscrutable as a cloud, and given to endless curses and complaints. But if you're sunny enough we may be able to overcome these difficulties.

And, by way of other diversions, here's Amitava Kumar on another writer, also Indian, who did not want to meet when in town. Amitava, come over to Kolkata - it's not working out for you at Vassar.

On Saul Bellow's Seize The Day

Saul Bellow's Seize The Day is considered one of the greatest short novels in the English language. It appeared nearly half a century ago, in 1957, and it was Bellow's fourth novel, and the first after the one with which he made his name, The Adventures of Augie March. The Royal Swedish Academy, when awarding Bellow the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, made special mention of Seize The Day, though Bellow himself, in an interview late in life with his great contemporary Philip Roth, asserted that he didn't like the book much, and that he felt very little sympathy for its protagonist Tommy Wilhelm (it would have distressed Wilhelm greatly to know this, for his great problem in the book is that nobody feels any sympathy for him).

Curiously, Bellow is very little read in India - I can't remember his name ever coming up in conversation with other readers. And his books are very hard to find in Indian bookshops: the books go straight from Beaumont to de Bernieres. In fact, it is easier to find a set of his works secondhand, at the bookshop on the pavement opposite Flora Fountain in Bombay, at the place where DN Road and MG Road meet. This was where a week ago I pounced upon an edition of his very hard-to-find book To Jerusalem and Back, an account of a visit to Israel that first appeared as a series of pieces in the New Yorker in the '70s. But to return to Seize the Day.

Tommy Wilhelm is a man broken by life, and he is past helping himself. He is hoping that something or somebody will save him. On the morning on which we meet him first - and the timespan of the novel does not extend beyond this day - we see him at breakfast with his father who, like him, occupies a room at the Hotel Gloriana in New York. But while his father, a retired doctor and a widower, is living at the Gloriana in comfortable retirement, Wilhelm in midlife is a refugee from his home - he is separated from his wife, who now makes constant financial demands on him for the care of their two children - and wracked both by present troubles and unhappy memories.

Wilhelm is a big, still-handsome man, though a little stooped and thickened with age, with an attitude of "large, shaky, patient dignity" - Bellow repeatedly emphasises his heavy physicality, and by implication his burdened soul, by returning to the details of his body and his posture. (An example of the deployment of a similar technique in a contemporary novel might be the references to Chanu's obesity in Monica Ali's Brick Lane - Chanu "moving sideways like a big, soft-shelled crab" or his stomach rolling "a little farther into its nest of thigh" - only here they are suggestive of Chanu's complacent outlook).

Wilhelm thinks of his life as a series of setbacks. A good part of his youth was wasted unsuccessfully trying to make it as an actor in Hollywood (His last appearance on screen, we are told, was as an extra in a scene where he had to blow the bagpipes: "Wilhelm, in a kilt, barelegged, blew and blew and blew and not a sound came out. Of course all the music was recorded.") after which he spent several years as a salesman of children's furniture before falling out with the management and resigning. He and his wife are incompatible, but she will not give him a divorce; he feels she is turning his two children against him even as she sends him bills. And his father, from whom he expects a little sympathy and understanding if not monetary assistance, is cold to him.

The only person who is willing to take time to hear Wilhelm is the mysterious psychologist Dr. Tamkin, one of many Bellovian figures full of flowery talk and bizarre ideas. Among the many bits of advice Tamkin offers Wilhelm ("I want to tell you, don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery.") is to practice living in the "here-and-now" and to "seize the day".

Many criticisms can be made of Bellow - his plots don't move very well, his protagonists are too much like each other, there are few sympathetic female characters in his work- but, like Dickens, he was a master of that most essential of novelistic arts, that of portraiture. Here is his vivid realisation of Tamkin - not at the moment at which he is first introduced, but midway through the book, at a moment when Tamkin happens to take his hat off before Wilhelm:

What a creature Tamkin was when he took off his hat! The indirect light showed the many complexities of his bald skull, his gull's nose, his rather handsome eyebrows, his vain mustache, his deceiver's brown eyes. His figure was stocky, rigid, short in the neck, so that the large ball of the occiput touched his collar. His bones were peculiarly formed, as though twisted twice where the ordinary human bone was turned only once, and his shoulders rose in two pagoda-like points. At mid-body he was thick. He stood pigeon-toed, a sign perhaps that he was devious or had much to hide. The skin of his hands was aging, and his nails were moonless, concave, clawlike, and they appeared loose. His eyes were as brown as beaver fur and full of strange lines. The two large brown naked balls looked thoughtful - but were they? And honest - but was Dr.Tamkin honest?

And here, just for pleasure, is Dickens's famous portrait of Scrooge at the beginning of A Christmas Carol ( Scrooge might be said to have a connection with Wilhelm, in that he too must break with the past and learn to "seize the day"):

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

Seize The Day ends with a beautiful scene in which Wilhelm, having lost most of his money at the bourses, goes searching for Tamkin, stumbles by accident into a funeral procession, is led towards the dead body and, after holding back his tears at several other points during the day, breaks down here and cries his eyes out. There is no neat resolution of Wilhelm's problems, but what we feel instead is a moment of catharsis.

And as always, great writers inspire great writing from readers. Here is a selection of good pieces about Bellow: "Rereading Saul Bellow" by Philip Roth; "The High-Minded Joker" by James Wood; "Editing Saul Bellow" by his long-time editor at Viking, Elisabeth Sifton; and "Bellow's Great Accomplishment", a very perceptive, often negative, assessment of his work by Tim Marchman ("Saul Bellow is a great writer, but I do not think he has written great books. It's difficult, thinking it through, to name one novel of his that is as good as its best passages, or worthy of its best ideas.What we take instead from Mr. Bellow are characters, precise observations, and particular settings of life that together amount to a style of consciousness."). Ramona Koval has a very good interview with Bellow here - you'll have to scroll down the page a little before Bellow begins.

More on Bellow next month, with a piece on the new issue of a journal he edited with Keith Botsford, News From The Republic of Letters.

Krishna Kripalani's faith and frivolity

The journalist and writer Krishna Kripalani is remembered today, if he is remembered at all, for a biography of Rabindranath Tagore he published in 1962. I have not read this, but last week I happened to discover in a secondhand bookshop a collection of his essays, also published in 1962, called Faith and Frivolity. I must confess I bought it primarily because it was only thirty-five rupees, but now I have read it as well, and I have to report that it is a volume of almost boundless charm.

"Without faith it is difficult to live a good life," announces the blurb on the inside cover (which I have no doubt Kripalani wrote himself; would that more writers wrote their own jacket copy, and put an end to empty hyperbole and gratuitous phrasemaking), "but faith itself may become oppressive if not occasionally relieved by frivolity. Our ancestors understood this psychological need well, for they were adepts at mixing the divine with the obscene and had no compunction in making up most frivolous tales about the gods they worshipped."

Faith and Frivolity is divided into three sections: Personalities (with essays on Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore, S.Radhakrishnan, Romain Rolland and others), Trivialities (a title proposed with a broad wink, for it has essays like "Who is a Gandhi-ite?" and "Does Civilisation make for Happiness?") and Frivolities, a collection of diary-style tidbits that Kripalani composed over 1950-51 while he was editing the political weekly Vigil. But whichever mode Kripalani is working in, he is almost evenly dashing, witty and perceptive. Every page of this book carries traces of what must have been a most forceful personality.

Kripalani had that priceless gift without which no essayist can do justice to his form: the gift of succinct and memorable expression, of a rhetorical power that can pack into a paragraph that for which others may require pages. Here, from an essay written in 1945, when the career of Jawaharlal Nehru had not yet reached its peak, is a portrait of the man in two paragraphs:

Nehru occupies a unique position in the world of Indian politics. As a leader he has achieved more eminence than power, and commands more adulation than allegiance. As a politician he is more admirable than effective. He dominates but does not direct events and is more the beloved of the people than their master. His strength lies in the strategic position he occupies between divergent forces. Though not a Gandhi-ite, he enjoys the love and confidence of the Mahatma as perhaps no one else does. The elder politicians value his loyalty, their younger rivals applaud his audacity. The Rightists find him indispensable, the Leftists amenable. He is aggressive enough for the nationalists and international enough for the communists, reasonable enough for the capitalists and radical enough for the socialists. He is identified with no group in Congress. All groups may therefore partially claim him as their own.

What is the secret of this popularity without power, this adoration without allegiance? The secret lies in his personality at once dynamic and stable, revolutionary and rational, rebellious and disciplined. He challenges Gandhism and follows Gandhi, he is aggressive in speech and restrained in action, critical in analysis and compromising in decision, radical in outlook and conservative in loyalties. His revolutionary ardour in challenged by none, his disinterestedness and the innate magmanimity of spirit are trusted by all. He is capable of indiscretion but incapable of meanness, of betraying the larger interest for the sake of a narrow, personal end. He may be betrayed but he will not betray. He thinks for himself, and though he may yield to the superior wisdom of Gandhi or to the discipline of corporate action, he will not use language not his own. He is ready to see another's point of view, a virtue rare in a revolutionary. He tolerates dissent and obliges enemies, virtues rare in a politician.

Note how every sentence builds upon the next by laying out opposing groups or qualities, and demonstrating gradually how Nehru not only seems to bridge them but himself embodies them. All kinds of precise distinctions are made (Nehru "commands more adulation than allegiance"; he is "critical in analysis but compromising in decision") and there is not a word which is superfluous - put together the two paragraphs amount to just about three hundred words, which is how much a person might just as easily take to describe how he was feeling at breakfast. A ringing close is supplied by the final two sentences in each paragraph.

The same powers of concentrated scrutiny and pellucid expression are seen everywhere in the book. Here we find Kripalani noting how science has so demystified the transcendent in human affairs that love is now viewed by serious men as mainly as "a mischief of the libido" and genius "a kind of neurosis". There he is poking gentle fun at intellectuals: "[A]n intellectual is not always one who has a finer intellect than others but one who, whatever his cerebral equipment, believes in it alone and strives to live by it, repudiating more or less the validity of the rest of his being" - an umimproveable formulation. Now we find him giving voice in a lighter vein to something all wives instinctively know: "All married men are envious of bachelors. Having halved their rights and doubled their obligations by marriage, they hate to see bachelors flaunting their freedom." And in another example of happy phrasing he notes in a diary item:

A public meeting in Shradhananda Park in Calcutta ended in a pandemonium following a quarrel between two sections of the followers of Subhas Bose as to whether Netaji is alive or dead. This proves that at any rate his followers are very much alive.

I struggle to articulate what exactly is so funny about that last sentence, but I laughed a great deal when I read it - there is something very droll about it. Of Indian columnists today I can think only of Ramachandra Guha who has the same facility for marrying wit to wisdom. And so I'd like to nominate Faith and Frivolity for republication as the second book of a Library of India series - which I imagine as a series of short, pithy works by both well-known and neglected Indian thinkers, expressing some original point of view but noteworthy also for their style, with introductions by contemporary Indian writers -, the first being a work by Minoo Masani which I wrote about last September.

English and Hindi in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games

Vikram Chandra's novel Sacred Games is written in English, but it is an English that meets its characters halfway – we find in it a sediment of the Hindi in which they really think and speak. Here, for example, is inspector Sartaj Singh threatening a man: "Don't argue with me, gaandu. You want me to take your izzat in front of your family? In front of your daughter?" This is the gangster Ganesh Gaitonde: "Under the grey sky they walked up and down, counting, and while this ginti was going, I discussed my plan with my two controllers."

Even the narrator in the Sartaj sections (the Gaitonde sections are narrated in the first person) often makes this move across tongues. Here is Sartaj at Katekar's funeral: "A man, another constable, carried a matka full of water. Sartaj could hear the rhythmic gulp of the water as he walked. The thali full of flowers and gulal was carried by another constable, close behind... They entered the shamshan through a tall black metal gate." The Hindi is always unitalicised, not marked out as foreign.

As Indian readers we take this quite calmly, and think of it as a judicious and even necessary blend – the language allows us through to the characters by appropriating some of their speech in the original. By annexing a part, Chandra suggests the whole: we can readily imagine how the characters might sound in the Hindi.

Of course, Chandra's characters are themselves attracted by the allure and promise of English. In one of the book's most charming passages, revelatory of the struggle of tens of thousands in our country "born far from English", Gaitonde speaks of how his inadequacy in English stings him, and recounts his agonising struggles to master the language (a trivial paradox here is that his lament about English is actually in English):

I closed my door when I studied English because I didn't want anyone seeing me squatting on the floor, one uncertain and slow finger on the letters….It was humiliating, but necessary. I knew that much of the real business of the country was done in English. People like me, my boys, we used English, there were certain words we used with fluency in our sentences, without hesitation, "Bole to voh ekdum danger aadmi hai!" and "Yaar, abhi ek matter ko settle karna hai" and "Us side se wire de, chutiya." But unless you could rattle off whole sentences without having to stop and struggle and go back and build them bit by bitter bit, unless you could make jokes, there were whole parts of your own life that were invisible to you yourself, gone from you. You could live in a Marathi world, or a Hindi colony, or a Tamil lane, but what were those hoardings speaking…?…What were they laughing about, the people who skimmed by smoothly in their cushiony Pajeros? There were many like me, born far from English, who were content to live in ignorance. Most were too lazy, too afraid to ask how, why, what. But I had to know. So I took English, I wrestled it and made it give itself to me, piece by piece.

Like Gaitonde's boys, Chandra has created a serviceable alloy of two languages, in which the smallest dabs of Hindi keep the language close to the ground, and allow Chandra to take off on the most lyrical flights of English and not sound as if he is talking above the characters. This is Gaitonde taking his bride back home during the Bombay riots to the colony he has built, Gopalmath, which he finds ravaged by conflict. Of the two words of Hindi in this passage one is the resonant 'vatan':

Then I looked about, at the homes of Gopalmath. During a lull in my own war I had left my home, and came back to find my home the battleground for a larger conflict. They, somebody, had drawn borders through my vatan. Here was my Gopalmath, the habitation of my heart, the town that I had caused to be built, brick by brick, where I had walked with my friends, arms on shoulders, with the smell of gajras and falling water in the air, where I had found my manhood, my life. Here was the bright quilt of its roofs, stretching from the bowl of the valley up the hill, this vibrant spread of brown and blue and red knit together by the arcing threadlike lanes, here were the numerous angular reachings of the television antennas, catching their fierce glints from the hovering sun. All of it lay desolate. And at the very edge of the horizon, to the south, a smudge of smoke. Under that unbearably bright sky I took my bride home.

Here the gajras and the vatan with which the English is flavoured might be seen as transforming our reading of such phrases as 'the arcing threadlike lanes' or 'the numerous angular reachings of the television antennas'. The apotheosis of this method, in which the burnished lyricism of the English is steadied and Indianised by deposits from the vocabulary of the character, appears to my mind, in the chapter in which Gaitonde is arrested for the first time. In one long, long sentence, which proceeds as if miming the slow progression of the hours, he describes the routine of life in jail:

In three weeks I was able to execute my plan. And in those three weeks, I learnt the rhythms of this new life: the whistle at five in the morning; the drowsy rows outside for the ginti; the rattling of alumunium plates and bowls and the crackling of the tari on the dal, for which tari you paid extra; the long hours of the morning, and then the smell of cooking from the bissi where they kneaded the atta with their feet and threw rotting vegetables into huge bowls; after lunch at ten, the murmur of conversation and the snores and the smell of hundreds of men sweating; the smokers with their precious little balls of charas and their long rituals of burning and crumbling and rolling; the shifting games of chess, and teen-patti, and Ludo, and the curses and the laughter over the rattle of the dice; my boys ranged around the only two carromboards in the barracks, feeding their passionate following of the championship league they had set up, complete with blackboards for singles and doubles ladders; the tussles and sudden enmities that flared between men packed together, that spread like winding fire through the rows of beds; the shouting and threats as two men faced each other under the eyes of a hundred, each too afraid of shame to back down; the brawny kalias from Nigeria selling tiny fifty-rupee packets of brown sugar in the yard; and their clients, hunched knee to knee in tight little circles over their chaser-pannis, breathing in the smoke with the devout expression of men who had seen another, better world. And the long wait for five o'clock and the dinner of the same watery dal, and the lumpy coarse rice, and the rubbery chappatis, and then sleep at eight.

Here is another piece by Jeet Thayil dealing in some detail with the language of Sacred Games. My review of the novel is here.

Interviewed on Bloggasm

I'm interviewed today on Bloggasm, a media website featuring interviews "from the most interesting blogs around". I've talked a bit about literary blogging and all the good things it allows, and confessed to many things, including never having read any of the books my friends have recommended or gifted to me.

On Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games

[A slightly different version of this review of Vikram Chandra's novel Sacred Games appears today in the Scotsman.]

THE CITY OF BOMBAY (or Mumbai, as it is now called, and even there lies a story) is a case study both in dysfunctionality and the power of the human will. Almost everything about it is made to break the spirit, and yet it pulses alarmingly with life. Its 15 million citizens know it well - indeed, they are never allowed to forget it - as both dreamland and shanty town, a hustler pushing them ever closer and hurrying them on ever quicker, and a theatre of stirring scenes and nightmare grotesquerie. Like all great cities it has a distinctive social and moral temper, mores that bewilder the uninitiated, air smoggy as if with milling human hopes, a colourful bastardised tongue, and a secret order behind the chaos. Nothing is as it appears at first glance, and this is one reason it is so attractive to writers.

"If you want to live in this city you have to think ahead three turns, and look behind a lie to see the truth, and then behind that truth to see the lie," declares a character in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games. Chandra's novel itself might be thought of as an attempt, through the entirely appropriate genre of the cops-and-robbers tale, to explore what it means to survive and succeed in India's great metropolis, and to unravel its elaborate network of truths and lies.

Sacred Games is set in the Bombay of the 1990s, when the city's underworld and police played out intricate games of war and peace. It throws together the stories of the notorious gangster Ganesh Gaitonde, one of the city's self-appointed potentates, and the dashing police inspector Sartaj Singh, who, although he works in a police force full of preening egos and greedy dreams, thinks of himself as only a small player. Some readers will remember Sartaj from Chandra's 1997 book Love and Longing in Bombay; he appears there in "Kama", a story in which his collapsing inner life as he faces a divorce is revealed with astonishing richness. The Sartaj who appears here is older and more weary, his self-image shrunken, and his language coarser, as if from the snuffing out of his family life.

Chandra is very curious, and very thorough. In its documentary impulse - its continuous mapping of links and connections, and its curiosity about the methods and motivations of people inhabiting a liminal world - Sacred Games is reminiscent of a recent work of non-fiction about Bombay, Suketu Mehta's wide-ranging and widely praised Maximum City. (Indeed, Chandra appears in one scene in Mehta's book as "my friend Vikram, who is writing a novel about the underworld".) For instance, both books have a long description of the code words Bombay gangsters use, rich with metaphorical associations, for guns, cash and women. But in Sacred Games the journalistic is a pathway to the novelistic. The book's wealth of real-world detail is always refracted through the consciousness of the two protagonists, Gaitonde and Sartaj.

The Gaitonde sections are the brightest flares in this book: there is a continuous hum in the air of these long passages. Gaitonde's story can in fact be read as a classic Bildungsroman, the story of an individual's development and his gradual integration into society. He recounts how, as an alienated youth, he began as hired help to a small-time gangster, bumped him off and stole his gold, set out in business himself, full of doubts and fears, and moved upwards step by step, knocking each new obstacle out of his way, noting and learning all the time. "I felt my force extending across Bombay like electricity," he exults, "because of me women and men were talking, running moving in patterns I had set in motion, I had thrown the net of my self wide."

Gaitonde's account records, as powerfully as anything in contemporary fiction, the excited surge of the self, its growing awareness of its power and strength, the heat given off by its clenched resolve and adversarial hunger. When he is caught and jailed, Chandra is inspired to provide a magnificent account of life in prison and its memories of lost freedom.

And juxtaposed against Gaitonde's swelling self is a crumbling self: the figure of Sartaj, in physical decline, lonely, weary of his burdens, and rueful as he contemplates the past. Gaitonde thrills at the prospect of power: "The truth is that human beings like to be ruled. They will talk and talk about freedom, but they are afraid of it. Overpowered by me, they were safe, and happy." For Sartaj, all things spill out of control: "Every action flew down the tangled web of links, reverberating and amplifying itself and disappearing only to reappear again. There was no escaping the reactions to your actions, and no respite from the responsibility."

"I am quite useless, Sartaj thought, and felt very bleak." That is the characteristic register of Chandra's precisely tuned English (in his sentences the word "and" always does a great deal of work, serving often to build, not merely to connect). But that register, the narrator's register, is supplemented in Sacred Games by the more novel sound of languages casually mixing, which is supplied by the protagonists and is often revelatory of character. "Under the grey sky they walked up and down, counting, and while this ginti was going, I discussed my plan with my two controllers." Readers tired of the familiar cusses of gangster-speak will also be relieved to find that, here, Chandra has chosen instead to deploy Hindi's sonorous roster of swear words. Some sections of this novel - especially the "Insets" that fan out into the lives of secondary characters, as if in search of an even greater amplitude - can be heavy going, and some plot turns are not entirely persuasive. But the book is rooted in something unmistakably powerful.

At one point Gaitonde watches a gangster movie by one of India's top directors and declares, "It was true, just like life" (notice that he does not simply say that it was true to life). Sacred Games might be said through its great labours to have earned just that very compliment.

And here is Chandra's long essay in the Boston Review early in 2000, "The Cult of Authenticity", which touches on several important issues relating to Indian writing in English. Chandra talks about the writing of Sacred Games in a good long interview with Jai Arjun Singh here.

The zany fictions of Etgar Keret

The short stories of the Israeli writer Etgar Keret are among the more unusual pleasures in contemporary fiction. They really are short, often no more than two or three pages, and while writers from Keret's land are supposed always to be dealing with Serious Things, Keret's characters are more likely to be found playing cards with dwarfs, getting stuck onto ceilings with Superglue, or buying their fathers gold-plated navel cleaners on their birthdays.

Mostly Keret's stories are triumphs of "voice". The film writer Rick Groen once wrote of the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki (The Man Without a Past, Drifting Clouds) that a Kaurismaki film was "invariably a whole lot easier to appreciate than to describe", and that is what made it so intrinsically a film - its power could not be experienced except by seeing it. The same could be said of Keret's stories - the pleasure lies not so much in any summarisable content, or plotline, as in a quirky attitude towards life expressed sentence by sentence through the individual details of the narration.

So here, in its entirety, is the Keret story "Pipes", in Miriam Shlesinger's translation from the Hebrew:

Pipes

When I got to seventh grade, they had a psychologist come to school and put us through a bunch of adjustment tests. He showed me twenty different flashcards, one by one, and asked me what was wrong with the pictures. They all seemed fine to me, but he insisted and showed me the first picture again—the one with the kid in it. “What’s wrong with this picture?” he asked in a tired voice. I told him the picture seemed fine. He got really mad and said, “Can’t you see the boy in the picture doesn’t have any ears?” The truth is that when I looked at the picture again, I did see that the kid had no ears. But the picture still seemed fine to me. The psychologist classed me as “suffering from severe perceptual disorders,” and had me transferred to carpentry school. When I got there, it turned out I was allergic to sawdust, so they transferred me to metalworking class. I was pretty good at it, but I didn’t really enjoy it. To tell the truth, I didn’t really enjoy anything in particular. When I finished school, I started working in a factory that made pipes. My boss was an engineer with a diploma from a top technical college. A brilliant guy. If you showed him a picture of a kid without ears or something like that, he’d figure it out in no time.

After work I’d stay on at the factory and make myself odd-shaped pipes, winding ones that looked like curled-up snakes, and I’d roll marbles through them. I know it sounds like a dumb thing to do, and I didn’t even enjoy it, but I went on doing it anyway.

One night I made a pipe that was really complicated, with lots of twists and turns in it, and when I rolled a marble in, it didn’t come out at the other end. At first I thought it was just stuck in the middle, but after I tried it with about twenty more marbles, I realized they were simply disappearing. I know that everything I say sounds kind of stupid. I mean everyone knows that marbles don’t just disappear, but when I saw the marbles go in at one end of the pipe and not come out at the other end, it didn’t even strike me as strange. It seemed perfectly ok actually. That was when I decided to make myself a bigger pipe, in the same shape, and to crawl into it until I disappeared. When the idea came to me, I was so happy that I started laughing out loud. I think it was the first time in my entire life that I laughed.

From that day on, I worked on my giant pipe. Every evening I’d work on it, and in the morning I’d hide the parts in the storeroom. It took me twenty days to finish making it. On the last night it took me five hours to assemble it, and it took up about half the shop floor.

When I saw it all in one piece, waiting for me, I remembered my social studies teacher who said once that the first human being to use a club wasn’t the strongest person in his tribe or the smartest. It’s just that the others didn’t need club, while he did. He needed a club more than anyone, to survive and to make up for being weak. I don’t think there was another human being in the whole world who wanted to disappear more than I did, and that’s why it was me that invented the pipe. Me, and not that brilliant engineer with his technical college degree who runs the factory.

I started crawling inside the pipe, with no idea about what to expect at the other end. Maybe there would be kids there without ears, sitting on mounds of marbles. Could be. I don’t know exactly what happened after I passed a certain point in the pipe. All I know is that I’m here.

I think I’m an angel now. I mean, I’ve got wings, and this circle over my head and there are hundreds more here like me. When I got here they were sitting around playing with the marbles I’d rolled through the pipe a few weeks earlier.

I always used to think that Heaven is a place for people who’ve spent their whole life being good, but it isn’t. God is too merciful and kind to make a decision like that. Heaven is simply a place for people who were genuinely unable to be happy on earth. They told me here that people who kill themselves return to live their life all over again, because the fact that they didn’t like it the first time doesn’t mean they won’t fit in the second time. But the ones who really don’t fit in the world wind up here. They each have their own way of getting to Heaven.

There are pilots who got here by performing a loop at one precise point in the Bermuda Triangle. There are housewives who went through the back of their kitchen cabinets to get here, and mathematicians who found topological distortions in space and had to squeeze through them to get here. So if you’re really unhappy down there, and if all kinds of people are telling you that you’re suffering from severe perceptual disorders, look for your own way of getting here, and when you find it, could you please bring some cards, cause we’re getting pretty tired of the marbles.

"…cause we're getting pretty tired of the marbles" - there's the Keret voice at its most typical (Note also that "Could be." in paragraph six). Most of Keret's stories work in this fashion. People are stressed-out and long for diversion or escape, reality melts seamlessly into the fantastical, and everything proceeds swiftly in a inexorable fashion like a dream, held together by the rise and fall of the speaking voice. If there are deeper meanings to be found in these bagatelles, then it is we who have to do the work of finding them. Here are some more brilliant Keret stories: "Shooting Clint", "My Lamented Sister", "Island Getaway", "The Nimrod Flip-Out", "Stupor In Our Time", and one curious tale in which we find the writer, or character, Etgar Keret in Moscow, being plied with drink by his hosts till he passes out.

But Keret's not just a sophisticated joker, a miner of the absurd. That is just his fictional persona, the vantage from which he opens out the world in his books. While his characters may long to escape from a troublesome reality, Keret himself has demonstrated a willingness to engage with that reality in all its complexity, especially the intractable Israel-Palestine problem and its many repercussions. Reading his essays, I was struck by the lucidity, moral force and breadth of reference of pieces like "The Sins of the Few", in which he protests against a decision by academics in England to boycott Israeli institutions over the Palestine issue, and "The Way We War", a recent essay in the New York Times on the Israeli government's strikes on Lebanon. Keret writes of Israel's new war:

Suddenly, the first salvo of missiles returned us to that familiar feeling of a war fought against a ruthless enemy who attacks our borders, a truly vicious enemy, not one fighting for its freedom and self-determination, not the kind that makes us stammer and throws us into confusion. Once again we’re confident about the rightness of our cause and we return with lightning speed to the bosom of the patriotism we had almost abandoned. Once again, we’re a small country surrounded by enemies, fighting for our lives, not a strong, occupying country forced to fight daily against a civilian population.

Keret's new book of stories The Nimrod Flip-Out appeared earlier this year. An archive of his pieces for the journal LA Weekly can be found here. He speaks at length about his stories in a very good interview conducted by the radio-show host Ramona Koval here. The blogger Lisa Goldman has a post on meeting Keret here. A review of Gaza Blues, a literary collaboration between Keret and the Palestinian writer Samir El-youssef, follows soon.

Uncertain time in Javier Marias

The work of the Spanish writer Javier Marias is notable for its attention to the nature of the temporal, to our experience of time and our puzzlement with time, thoughts that all of us spend a great deal of time thinking. This has earned him comparisions with Proust, though, as Stephen Mitchelmore points out in this recent piece, these are often very perfunctory comparisions, simply presented rather than argued.

In Marias we feel the pressure of time upon us in two ways. His narrators often not only think, wittily and cogently, about time, but they are also shown thinking in time. That is, their thoughts are presented to us as if in real time - it is not thought recollected in tranquillity and presented in cleanly grammatical sentences, but thought picked up as it is generated, in run-on sentences that swell with clause upon clause. We feel we are watching thought taking a walk without knowing where it will go and what associations it will bring up, which is of course how thought operates, often taking its own thinker by surprise. Some of Marias's signature moves can be found in a story, "In Uncertain Time", that both replicates the trancelike patter of thought in narrative time and deals explicitly with a curious moment in time in the life of the protagonist, a Hungarian footballer called Szentkuthy playing for the club side Real Madrid in Spain.

The story (which appears in the 1999 collection When I Was Mortal) begins with the narrator, an unnamed man, recalling the first time he met Szentkuthy, in a discotheque:

It was in the Joy discotheque, very late at night, especially for him, you imagine that a footballer should go to bed really early, always thinking about the next game, or just training and sleeping, watching videos of other teams or their own, watching themselves, their successes and failures and the missed opportunities that go on being missed for all eternity in those films, sleeping and training and eating, living the life of married babies, it's good if they have a wife who can be a mother to them and supervise their timetable. Most take no notice, they hate sleeping and hate training, and the really great players only think about the game when they actually run out onto the pitch and realize that they had better win because there are a hundred thousand people who have spent the whole week thinking about the confrontation or wanting vengeance against their hated rivals.

Note already: the missed opportunities that go on being missed for all eternity in those films, the players's resistance to a timetable, and their sudden awareness of responsibility and obligation as they run on to the pitch, an alarm bell rung by the awareness of other people's perception of the moment and how long they have been anticipating it. The narrator, who admires Szentkuthy's style of play greatly, engages the player in casual conversation, but avoids the subject of football. Like many successful athletes Szentkuthy is openly boastful about his sexual conquests, joking that, "A different woman for every goal, that's my way of celebrating". But he reveals that he is still pursued by an old girlfriend in Hungary, who seems to have taken literally the promises of fidelity he had once made to her: "As far she is concerned, I will always be hers, always". Szentkuthy resents that 'always'. For him time is a cavalcade of different treats and there is a pleasure in not knowing what will come next. But the woman appears to want only one thing from time, and seems sure she will gain it.

The narrator speculates that the woman will eventually win, because - and here we are witness Marias's acute powers of generalisation - people who know what they want "will always have the edge over those who don't know what they want or only know what they don't want. Those of us in the latter group are defenceless, we are afflicted with an extraordinary weakness of which we are not always aware and so we can easily be destroyed by a stronger force that has chosen us, and from which we only temporarily escape…" His guess is later confirmed.

But the core of the story comes later, in the description of a fantastic incident - soon to become the defining image of his career - in which Szentkuthy "stops" time in an important European Cup game, by delaying and holding off what is an absolute certainty, a thing already taken for granted as having happened. His team requires a goal to win the game, and with a few minutes remaining Szentkuthy, rallying forward on his own, shakes off two defenders and rounds the advancing goalkeeper. Now all he must do is slot the ball into the empty net, but even as the whole stadium rises to respond to the goal, he refuses to shoot. Instead, he advances, and stops the ball right on the goal-line. Then, we are told, as the goalkeeper and the two defenders throw themselves at him, "Szentkuthy rolled the ball an inch or so forward and then stopped it again once it was over the goal line".

What is all this? Szentkuthy displays the arrogance that people feel, very rarely in life, when they have absolute control over a result and over time. "He had thwarted imminence," says the narrator, "and it was not so much that he had stopped time as that he had set a mark on it and made it uncertain, as if he were saying, 'I am the instigator and it will happen when I say it will happen, not when you want it. If it does happen, it is because I have decided that it should.'" Certain of his power over the moment, Szentkuthy exercises it by perversely making that moment uncertain for the thousands of people just as certain as him: "I can't remember," recounts the narrator, "a more suffocating silence inside a stadium." Szentkuthy's action is somehow intensely disturbing, for "it pointed out the gulf between what is unavoidable and what has not been avoided, between what is still future and what is already past, between 'might be' and 'was', a palpable transition which we only rarely witness".

And Marias's curious story, in which even that which appears totally certain is halted and made uncertain by a human being transformed almost into a god, beams a ray of light over our lives that seems to expose to us how fragile our hold over circumstances is - how the experience of the present and of life, for each one of us, is that of perpetually living "in uncertain time". It is only in the past, in memory, that time appears to take on a solidity and a kind of arc of inevitability, and all our lives we attempt, often erroneously, to extrapolate from the "certain time" of the past to help us confront the uncertain time in which we are perpetually wading.

Marias's novel Dance and Dream, the second highly lauded work of what is to be a trilogy called Your Face Tomorrow, has just been published in a English translation by Margaret Jull Costa (who is also the translator of "In Uncertain Time"). A good profile of Marias by Aida Edemariam can be found here, and an old Middle Stage post about his own collection of literary profiles Written Lives can be found here, with links to other pieces by Marias.

And in this recent interview with Christina Patterson, Marias remarks of the novel that it is "the genre, or even the art, in which you can do more unlikely things with time. What interests me in a novel is to make exist the time in life that life doesn't allow to exist at all".

The heresies of John Gray

In a recent essay the British philosopher John Gray writes, about the new series brought out by Atlantic Books, "Books that shook the world":

Drawing up a list of books that have changed the world is a tricky business. We see in the past what engages us in the present, and many books that were once hugely influential are now almost forgotten. In the history of ideas as in history as a whole, our view of the past is prone to a kind of optical illusion in which we mistake what is closest to us for the dominant feature of the landscape. There is a powerful tendency to imagine that if a book has disappeared from view then it can never have had much of an impact. In fact, many books that once shook the world are today unread.

And, going on to consider the first set of titles in this series, on works by Plato, Marx, Paine, Darwin and on the Qur'an, he concludes:

The return of religion as a pivotal factor in politics and war is one of the defining features of the age, and it is time Paine, Marx and other secular prophets were gently shelved in the stacks. The writings of these Enlightenment savants have stirred events for a very brief period in history, now clearly coming to an end. Against this background it is good to have Bruce Lawrence's admirably balanced and informative volume on the Qur'an, and to look forward to Karen Armstrong's volume on the Bible appearing in the Atlantic series next spring. A few great books of science have altered history, as have some works of clairvoyant speculation, such as Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. But the books that have most formed the past, and which are sure also to shape the future, are the central texts of the world religions. Future volumes in the series must surely include Confucius's Analects and the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavadgita and the Buddha's Fire Sermon - texts that have never ceased to shake the world and, as far as anyone can tell, always will.

This is an extreme claim - the "secular prophets" still have a great deal to say to us, and probably always will. And one hopes there is - or at least there should be - room enough within the worldviews of most people for both the great religious and the great secular works. This essay is an example of what I feel when I read the work of Gray - I never feel in total agreement with him, and I certainly feel a great deal more hopeful than him, but I am always curious to hear what he has to say. For some years now his essays and reviews in the New Statesman have been attracting a wide audience, and some of those pieces are available in a book with a characteristically provocative title, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions.

Reading Gray is like taking a bitter pill with no water to wash it down - he is a relentless skeptic, though never a nihilist. None of the thought systems in which most people find some kind of positive meaning - whether religion, the humanist belief in progress and in a better world, free-market economics or of communism, left-wing or conservative politics, rationalism - are of much use to him, perhaps because he has done time in many of these camps. One writer has described him as a "postideological pilgrim", and that may be a good way of seeing him. His work is full of sobering thoughts and curious formulations that pinch sharply.

For example, from Heresies, "In science progress is a fact, in ethics and politics it is a superstition.[…] The human animal may yearn for peace and freedom, but it is no less fond of war and tyranny. No scientific advance can alter the contradictions of human needs. On the contrary, they can only be intensified as science increases human power." Or, "To think that democratic values will ever be universally accepted is a basic error.[…] Today, as in all previous times, regimes are legitimate to the exent that they meet vital human needs - needs such as security from violence, economic subsistence and protection of cherished ways of life."

Some have read such observations as arguments for political passivity, although Gray's intention perhaps is only to be a cautionary voice - among the inevitable things about human nature that he is always pointing out is surely its need to embrace what he thinks of illusions. Gray is not even prepared to accept that what we think of as the self is a stable, understandable entity. In a piece on Peter Watson's Ideas: a history from fire to Freud, he writes:

[Watson] concludes with some interesting thoughts on the failure of scientific research to find anything resembling the human self, as understood in western traditions. He asks whether the very idea of an "inner self" may not be misconceived, and concludes: "Looking 'in', we have found nothing - nothing stable anyway, nothing enduring, nothing we can all agree upon, nothing conclusive - because there is nothing to find."

This conclusion is also mine, but it was anticipated more than 2,000 years ago in the Buddhist doctrine of anatman, or no-soul. The thoroughgoing rejection of any idea of the soul was one of the ideas through which Buddhism distinguished itself from orthodox Vedic traditions, which also viewed personal identity as an illusion but affirmed an impersonal world soul: an idea that Buddhists have always rejected. For them, human beings are like other natural processes, in that they are devoid of substance and have no inherent identity.

The view of the human subject suggested by recent scientific research seems less strange when one notes how closely it resembles this ancient Buddhist view. Modern science seems to be replicating an account of the insubstantiality of the person that has been central to other intellectual traditions for millennia.

Gray's talents are exhibited best in his book reviews, an archive of which is available on the website of the New Statesman. As a sampler of his work one might read his pieces on Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence ("...while freedom may be a universal value, it is far from being an overriding human need. Humans want freedom but they also fear it, and in times of insecurity they tend to retreat into closed, hostile groups. Reason can help us understand this process, but it cannot be reasoned away."), on Terry McDermott's book on the 9/11 hijackers ("For these men, becoming jihadists - not in the sense in which jihad refers to the believer's struggle for his own soul, but rather that in which it enjoins incessant struggle against unbelievers - resolved a chronic existential crisis. From being drifters, they became warriors." This is also the sense advanced by the good early section of Kiran Nagarkar's God's Little Soldier, in my opinion the only valuable portion of that book.), and on Francis Fukuyama's State Building ("In State Building, Fukuyama approaches weak states as soluble problems in institutional engineering.[…]Legal and educational systems are not pieces of machinery that can be programmed to deliver results approved by international banks or development agencies. They are human practices shaped by diverse ethical and religious beliefs. One large reason why the attempt to re-engineer the world's economies on the model of the Anglo-Saxon free market is bound to fail is that economic life is not a system of rational exchange that can be installed anywhere. It is a tissue of meaning that grows locally. The same is true of law and education - and of the state.") There are many things here worth thinking about.

And here are two other essays by Gray: "The Global Delusion", on three recent books on globalisation, and "Will Humanity Be Left Home Alone?". An account of Gray's life and work can be found here in this piece by Andrew Brown, and a long interview with him posted by Jonathan Derbyshire here. A critique of Gray's thought can be found in this piece by Danny Postel, "Gray's Anatomy".