On Edna O'Brien's Saints and Sinners

This essay appeared last weekend in The National.

 “Is there a place for me in some part of your life?” a married man asks a woman in “Manhattan Medley”, one of the stories in the Irish writer Edna O’Brien’s new book Saints and Sinners. By asking for a place not in someone’s life, but in a part of her life, the man suggests that he wants to approach something slowly, less dramatically than affairs usually are. By speaking of a sliver and not of the whole, he perhaps indicates too that, realistically, all that he can offer is a part of his own life, and the woman understands as much. 

“We did not have a garden, we had ploughed fields and meadows,” says a girl about her family in another story, “My Two Mothers.” “Somehow I thought that a garden would be a prelude to happiness.” Although she longs for the pleasures of a garden to call her own, the girl still seems to divine that her childish desires can be but a threshold to some ideal state, not happiness but a prelude to it. These are people who seem preternaturally aware, even when in the grip of heightened feeling, of how obdurate life is, of how something may be changed or attained only by small steps, not grand sallies. Even the children are, by observing the world of adults, already adults, and the stories they narrate in O’Brien’s work are adult stories.

Saints and Sinners is the late work of a writer – late in terms of O’Brien’s own age, a vivid eighty, but not in terms of any diminution of her sensibility – to whom we owe some of the most beautiful, limpid, and resonant English prose of the twentieth century, especially that of the great The Country Girls trilogy and the stories later collected in A Fanatic Heart. Across these stories can be found all of O’Brien’s signature characters and narratorial emphases. There are the questing, emotionally dissatisfied female protagonists of small Irish towns and villages, longing for escape from boredom or stiflement; the women who think about their love affairs and the girls who watch the love affairs or marriages of their mothers. There are, too, the hardened men who want to escape from feeling or have succeeded in deadening it through drink or desolation. 

There is the landscape of fields, mountains and marshes, described in language that brings out all their strangeness (from “Inner Cowboy”: “The bogs were more peaceful, stretching to the horizon, brown and black, with cushions of moss and spagunam and the cut turf in little stooks, igloos, with the wind whistling to them, drying them out.”) And there is the society both roused and distorted by what O’Brien has elsewhere called “the hounding nature of Irish Catholicism” (“I was full of fears, thought everything was a sin,” remembers the old man Rafferty about his youth in the book’s opening story “Shovel Kings”. “If the Holy Communion touched my teeth I thought that was a mortal sin.”)

There is O’Brien’s very precise attention to the colours and textures and emotional valency of objects, as when we are shown, in “Old Wounds”, a woman turned out of her house by her son, who wanders down the road “carrying her few belongings and her one heirloom, a brass lamp with a china shade, woebegone, like a woman in a ballad.” And there is the affection for, even adoration of, people who dream and at the same time attend conscientiously to life’s duties and try to do little things well, such as the mother who, despite being poor, applies icing on a Christmas cake with “the rapture of an artist”. 

All these things are presented through a style that knows how to be ornate without being mannered and how to be plain without being poor. O’Brien achieves an effect of naturalness through a palette of options as simple as the omission of a comma where one is expected, and as complex as a clause in a sentence that seems unrelated to anything before it, as if seeking to surprise the very sentence of which it is a part.

Consider, for instance, Miss Gilhooley, the protagonist of the story “Send My Roots Rain”, which borrows its burnished title from a poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins that Miss Gilhooley loves. Miss Gilhooley finds herself abruptly abandoned by a man with whom she has had a passionate affair, but remains possessed by him. Maddened by her pent-up yearning, she goes to see a psychic to see if there is a future for them. Encouragingly, the psychic foresees them “setting up a house together....She drew a picture of their future life together, one or the other, whoever got back first of an evening, kneeling to light a fire and praying that the chimney would not smoke, though at first it would, but in time that would clear, once the flue had its generous lining of soot.”

Though at first it would, but in time that would clear ­– the psychic seems to take her story much further out than she needs to, into a level of detail that should interest nobody, not even Miss Gilhooley. But it is only by her doing so that her story becomes real to Miss Gilhooley even as, on another plane, we comprehend how the writer’s narrative ingenuity has made the story real to us. The psychic’s crafty story also illuminates the craft of story. Miss Gilhooley is gulled by the psychic, but so are we, who are nowhere as susceptible.

In O’Brien’s stories men and women are always blazingly, defiantly, men and women before they are human beings. These are stories that everywhere ask us to think about what it is that constitutes their difference, a difference which undergirds both their mutual attraction and their ultimate incompatibility. Men and women feel differently, think differently, want differently, as a consequence of their biological and emotional differences, and this fact is not something to be evaded or simplified, but rather to be both experienced and rued. This sentiment may be accused of being essentialism, but in O’Brien’s stories it has always seemed, from the situations laid out before us, more like realism. 

“Never give all the heart outright – who said that?” asks Mildred, the rambling, slightly disordered narrator of the marvellous story “Madame Cassandra”. “I have read that men have cycles just like us women...we have cycles because of the presence of the uterus – hence we are subject from time to time to hysteria – whereas men’s cycles do not answer to the womb or the moon but to their own dastardly whims...they simply go on and off the creatures they call women.” 

The story is about Mildred’s visit all the way from a village up to Dublin to meet Madame Cassandra, some kind of psychic or healer, about an affair her husband is having. Madame Cassandra, however, refuses to see Mildred, but even in inaction she precipitates the story’s denouement. On the train back from Dublin Mildred runs, of all people, into her own husband, and finds that he “looked at me almost with wonder, as if he was seeing me in some way altered, his wife of twenty-two years leading a secret life, having a day up in Dublin, a rendezvous perhaps.” Mildred knows now, as they return home, that there is “a little agitation at the core of both our hearts”, and it does not matter if her husband’s rendezvous is real and her own is fiction, as long as her knowledge of the whole exceeds his. This is just one of many unusual closes and catharses in the work of this sensuous, rueful and sublime writer.

And some links: a long interview with O'Brien from 1984 in The Paris Review is here, and a recent one, "Edna O'Brien at 80" is here.

What Novels Tell Us About Life (And About Themselves)

I write to you from a slightly tilted position on the sloping streets, under the low-hanging clouds, and above the twitters of the early-rising birds of Thimphu, where I'm going to give a lecture tomorrow afternoon at the Mountain Echoes Literary Festival called "What Novels Tell Us About Life (And About Themselves)".

Among the writers I'll be discussing are greats such as Willa Cather, Irene Nemirovsky, Ashvaghosha, and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, high-grade novelists from our own time like Orhan Pamuk and David Mitchell, and some of my own contemporaries in Indian literature whose work I admire, such as Manu Joseph and Jahnavi Barua.

On Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's Songs of Kabir

Over the last month I've been reading Songs of Kabir, a new translation of some of Kabir's poems by the Indian poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. My review of the book appeared in the Wall Street Journal this weekend, but instead of merely posting it here, I thought I'd use this space to put up, and think about the work being done inside, a couple of poems from the book.

If this new volume supplies pleasures very different from the translations of Kabir's verse produced in the last decade by Vinay Dharwadker, Linda Hess and Shukdev Singh, and John Stratton Hawley and Mark Juergensmeyer, it is because Mehrotra approaches Kabir not exclusively in the spirit of fidelity to a particular text and context. He comes to Kabir more in the performative tradition, "as an anonymous medieval singer would approach a pada," but equally, as a modern poet would approach an ancient one. Here is one his versions that, since Kabir's poems are without titles, we might refer to by its first line:

"The Night Has Passed"

The night has passed
The day will too;
A heron nests
Where the black bee hummed.
Like a young bride thinking
Will he? Won't he?
The soul trembles with fear.

This raw clay pitcher
From which water leaks
And color runs
Is good for nothing
Once the swan has flown.

My time goes in shooing crows
The arms ache from it
And the palms burn.
That's the end of the story,
Kabir says.

The poem is a forest of powerful symbols dramatising man's fear of death: the heron stands for old age and the crow for imminent death; the black bee for youth; and the swan for the human soul, which is also pictured as a young bride. "The power of the poem," notes Dharwadker, who translates the same poem in his book Kabir: The Weaver's Songs (2003),"lies in its lyricism, its brevity and suggestiveness, and its enigmatc style as well as message." Here is Dharwadker's rendition of the same text:

          "Fable"

The night's gone:
   don't let the day go by, too
The bumblebees have left:
   the cranes have arrived, alighted.

The soul, a young girl,
   trembles, thinking:
I don't know
   what my husband's going to do.

Water won't keep
   in a jar of unbaked clay.
The swan has flown away:
   the body wilts.

Kabir says:
   My arms ache
from scaring off the crows.
   This tale has reached its end.

This is good too, and indeed I prefer the slow descent of Dharwadker's mournful close to Mehrotra's somewhat anti-climactic "Kabir says".

But I think Mehrotra achieves a moment of spectacular success with his rendition of the opening lines as "A heron nests/ Where the black bee hummed", which compresses these contrasting states into the smallest possible space to emphasise the extent of the reversal. It also places the present and more immediate state before the past one (unlike Dharwadker, who may be following Kabir more closely line for line), and uses one present-tense verb and one past-tense one (against two past-tense verbs in Dharwadker). Even the choice of verbs is acute, playing off the moderation of "nests" against the vigour and energy of "hummed".

This is not all. Even the use of "a" for the heron and "the" for the black bee oozes meaning, suggesting the native confidence and long reign of youth, a phase of life that sees its power as something enduring, imperishable, and therefore as the black bee, before it is superseded by the frailty of old age, whose disillusionment is figured as a heron. Mehrotra's version, much more than Dharwadker's, raises the ghost of Shakespeare's great sonnet about old age "That Time Of Year You Mayst In Me Behold", in which the body is pictured not as a clay pot but as an autumn tree:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Notice that Dharwadker gives us four four-line stanzas while Mehrotra breaks up the same lines into section of seven, five, and five; indeed, Mehrotra's versions are frequently more jagged and his lines more free-form than more traditional renderings of Kabir's padas, which in the originals almost always have even-numbered lines. Again, Mehrotra writes as someone who hears Kabir echoing off both the eastern and the western poetic tradition, and has no qualms about prefacing his versions with epigraphs from poems by poets as diverse as Bhartrhari, Devara Dasimayya, Horace, Marcus Aurelius, Ezra Pound, Tom Paulin and the blues singer Lead Belly. Some readers will resist this, but I think it is by the power of lines such as "A heron nests/Where the black bee hummed" that Mehrotra earns the liberty to give us a Kabir that sounds like a New York rapper:

To tonsured monks and dreadlocked Rastas
To idol worshippers and idol smashers,
To fasting Jains and feasting Shaivites,
To Vedic pundits and Faber poets,
The weaver Kabir sends one message:
The noose of death hangs over all.
Only Rama's name can save you.
Say it NOW.

In the yoking of these dreadlocked Rastas and Faber poets to a fifteenth-century Banaras we hear the voice of someone seeking, as Mehrotra says, to produce "both a work of translation based on the best available critical editions and...a further elaboration of the Kabir corpus, taking its place alongside those that have already been in existence for hundreds of years." I'd say Dharwadker's remains the classic text to go to for a first reading of Kabir, but here in Mehrotra is a twenty-first century Kabir with whom you are sometimes likely to quarrel, but which encounter you are unlikely to easily forget. These are translations that repeatedly make us feel that, to borrow a phrase from the classicist DS Carne-Ross on a book of modern translations of the Roman poet Horace, we have been given "a poem for a poem".

If you can't easily find Songs of Kabir in Indian bookstores, as is likely, you can easily buy it on the excellent  online bookeller Flipkart.com here.  Another poem from Mehrotra's book, "Except That It Robs You Of Who You Are", is here. A good interview with Mehrotra in Tehelka about these translations is here ("There Is A Problem With Our English").

Should you want to hear a Kabir in two media rather than one, the book to buy is Linda Hess's recent volume of translations Singing Emptiness, which comes with a CD of Kabir's songs performed by Kumar Gandharva, two of which you can hear here: "Sunta Hai Guru Gyani" and "Ud Jayega". Gandharva's stirring renditions of Kabir can also be heard on the soundtrack of Rajula Shah's marvellous documentary about the presence of Kabir in India today Word Within The Word, a clip from which is here.

And last, since we're unlikely to return in the near future to the subject of herons in classical Indian poetry, here is the Sangam poet Orampokiyar's marvellous "The Herons Have Come".

On Not Coming Down From Trinity

Trinity College, Cambridge is, along with Hindu College, Delhi, one of two places where I learnt how to read and to write. A slightly different version of this short essay about my time at Trinity (2000-2003) appears in the new issue of the College's quarterly journal The Fountain, named after the college's most distinctive scene, the fountain in the middle of Great Court.

I came up to Trinity College in 2000, a raw, nervous, wide-eyed undergraduate in a foreign land for the first time in his life. I remember the beautiful reds and pinks of autumn leaves and their rustle underfoot, the crooked look of cobbled streets, waking on Sundays to the sound of church bells in Market Square, the perpetual misty patter of rain and talk of weather, my first long coat, the comprehension of new shades of meaning to the words "cheers", "massive" and "wicked" – and the pleasure of using my first-ever debit card and buying my first-ever frozen pizza.

At Trinity I was immediately set to read three Shakespeare plays a week under the eye of the formidable Shakespeare scholar Anne Barton – the intellectual equivalent of a student cricketer having to show off his cover drives to Sachin Tendulkar. My literary-critical progress was sluggish. The swiftest I moved that Michaelmas term was to chase down one of Dr Barton’s famous cats (each one named after a Shakespearean actor from the sixteenth century) when I carelessly left her door open. Whenever I enter New Court I still have to beat back my panic at the thought of a precious cat on the loose.

My second year at Trinity was the best year of my student life. My rooms overlooked the pond in sylvan Burrell's Field; not bells now but ducks sounded the start of day. I felt not only more confidence in my ability to read texts, but also a growing sense of a future working life and, more than that, of a vocation.

My rooms, beautiful in themselves with their light wood, high windows, and lovely views, also housed a serendipitous collection of fine books, most of them bought for a pound from the three-storeyed bookshop on Silver Street Galloway & Porter. Many of these books were beautiful editions of literature in translation published by the now defunct Harvill Press (amalgamated now into Harvill Secker), which offered me a parallel education to the more classically English one I was getting inside classrooms. This, I think, made me more agile when after three years I returned home to begin work in another kind of English literature: Indian literature in English. On a visit to Cambridge last August, I headed towards G & P and was dismayed to see that this pillar of my education had shut down.

From K3 Burrell's Field, the University Library was just two minutes away, and I could have any book I wanted in half an hour—an ease of access to intellectual riches I greatly miss today. The circle of lectures, supervisions, friendships, and connections deepened my comprehension of Things That Must Be Understood, and set up a life of dialogue that I continue today in essays and reviews, as well as in my own books.

That year I also bought, with savings from my scholarship, a second-hand IBM laptop, a hardy little machine which allowed me the luxury of typing out my essays in my own room (previously I had used the computer room) and the thrill of reading the world’s literary journals online. This machine held up for seven years, till 2008; all the early drafts of my novel Arzee the Dwarf were composed on it.

It was by reading, while drinking the strong coppery tea you could make if you used Sainsbury's Kenya teabags, and sometimes stopping mid-sentence to answer a pebble thrown against a window by a friend, the literary pages of journals like The New Republic, The New Criterion, The Atlantic Monthly and The Partisan Review on my Thinkpad during these years that I taught myself how to write passable literary criticism. My time at Trinity was also the year I began my adventures in book-reviewing—a necessary part of any writer's trade if he is to live by words alone. Today the pleasure of fat packages of books arriving by post always stirs memories of books lying in my college pigeonhole.

At Trinity I also began, after a hiatus of several years, to play cricket seriously for both college and a local club. I still feel a twitch whenever May comes around and the memories return: green grass, blue skies, seasoned wood, red leather, cricket whites, and tuna and cheddar cheese sandwiches at tea. The captaincy of the Trinity Third chess team (which mainly involved custodianship of five chess sets and five clocks) led to several pitched battles in the university leagues from which our band of five emerged with distinction—except for one disastrous encounter with the ruthless mathmos and natscis of Trinity Seconds.

All this seems far away now, but it was at Trinity, and Cambridge, that I first glimpsed the possibilities of a life in which literature could always be the most important thing and not just a phase, and the means to this end. I came away with the confidence to work independently, and the realization that my degree, taken on one knee before Dr.Amartya Sen in Senate House, was not so much the culmination of student life as the training to be a student all of one's life. In Arzee the Dwarf Arzee, full of good feelings on a big day in his life, jumps over a wheelbarrow lying on the street, and "almost does not come down". My three years at Trinity were, similarly, a big leap for me, one from which I hope I will never come down.

On Sandor Marai's Portraits Of A Marriage

“It was not my muscles she was weighing up, but my soul,” decides Peter, one of the characters in Sandor Marai’s novel Portraits of a Marriage, as he proposes marriage to his maid Judit while she stokes the fireplace, then tries to interpret the long silence that is her response – an inflammatory silence, more provoking than speech, that causes him, for the first time in his life, to lose all control of himself.

“The soul”: novelists might be divided into two camps based on what they think of this word, whether their narrators or their characters use it with irony or in faith. The camp of Marai – if we wanted to cite one contemporary adherent it might be Orhan Pamuk – believes passionately in this word as the human root and mysterious quiddity that adult conversation, and therefore novelistic narration, must never shirk from. In the work of most novelists, a thought such as Peter’s would actually seem like an instance of the writer laughing at the character, through a violent, almost bathetic juxtaposition of the corporeal with the ineffable. But here we know that it is not just the character taking himself seriously, but also the writer. 

Portraits of a Marriage, translated the Hungarian poet and critic George Szirtes, is the fifth novel, after Embers, Casanova in Bolzano, The Rebels, and Esther’s Inheritance, by Marai to appear posthumously in English in the last decade. Reading a few pages of any of these shows that they are the books of a writer who was an adept of a great variety of situations and structures in politics, society, culture and, finally, “human relationships” (another favourite phrase in Marai). Marai was born in 1900, in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, saw out two world wars in Hungary, then fled to Italy after persecution at home by the Communists in the nineteen-forties. From his books we can see why he was resented, because characters in his novels are repeatedly sceptical of the prospect of human beings making themselves new through revolutionary principles, or of violent justice ever becoming the promised peaceful justice. Marai might be considered a kind of conservative.

Marai finally ended up in America, where personal and artistic freedom seemed to him to have reached the other extreme, ending up in a mass of trivialities the very obverse of the moral seriousness attached to the word “art” in hierarchical or totalitarian regimes. (This difference, seen from the American side, is what so attracts Philip Roth to his lesser-known contemporaries in East Europe in his book of interviews Shop Talk). 

But perhaps Marai would have been disappointed anywhere, because even when set against novelists more or less of his time and from his own part of the world who shared something of his spirit – Kafka, Musil, Hermann Broch, Joseph Roth, Witold Gombrowicz – he seems unusually serious, rigorous, fervent, forever linking particulars to universals and realities to ideals. The signal quality of Marai’s work is that it is not just the writer or the narrator who is invested in formulating a theory of human nature from the particulars of the story being told. The characters are equally committed to such a project: each one of these eloquent people is a psychologist, a poet, a prophet, and a philosopher, and knows it. 

People in Marai are passionate generalisers, distillers of experience, forever funneling the “I” of their stories into the “we” of what they are convinced are inexorable human laws. They are never happier than when they are have opened out their sails in a long monologue (against these effusions, Marai’s actual dialogue always seems clipped and sparse). In a fine comic moment in Portraits of a Marriage, Judit, who has been telling her lover her life story over the course of a whole night discovers, at dawn, that he has fallen asleep. The reason why this seems a particularly good, sly joke is that the reader is certainly wide awake at the end of this novelistic night.

Marai’s novels have no need of continuous incidents, because a single dramatic event – a quarrel between two old friends in Embers, a betrayal by a lover in Esther’s Inheritance – is enough to keep his protagonists preoccupied for years, decades, the whole of their lives. The same event is seen first from the point of view of the actor and the acted upon, the betrayer and the betrayed, the man and the woman (male and female nature are always very distinct things in Marai), each time memorably cast into a new mould that brings to bear upon the incident all the important facts and themes of the speaker’s life. Marai’s protagonists are, through marriage or adultery or rivalry, thrown into bruising dyads or triads, and then return to solitude to process their experience. Some of literature’s greatest romantics are to be found in Marai, and their romantic character, it seems fair to warn the reader, is contagious.

Portraits of a Marriage, one of the most original pieces of novelistic architecture in Marai, is actually a portrait of the discontents of two marriages: those of Peter, the scion of a business family, first to the middle-class woman Ilonka and later to the servant Judit. Each of the three reflects on what happened between them, producing, it seems at times, a combined portrait not of three but of nine people. The urgency with which they speak, their love of “tiny but vital details”, and their “passion for truth”  (in Embers there is a fine line about the quest for "that other truth that lies buried beneath the roles, the costumes, the scenarios of life”) becomes, in its own way, a kind of narrative energy. Only the most confident of novelists could trust in his work in this way. Here is Peter speaking of Judit, sex, union, nature, childhood, all in the same reverie:

Jungle and half-light, strange cries in the distance – you can't tell whether it is a man screaming by a well, his throat ripped open by some predator, or nature itself screaming, nature, which is human, animal, inhuman at once – bed entails all that. This woman knew all that was there to be known. She had the secret knowledge: she knew the body. She knew self-control and the loss of self-control. Love for her was not a series of occasional meetings but a constant return to a familiar childhood base: a blend of homecoming and festival; the dark-brown light over a field at dusk, the taste of certain familiar foods, the excitement and anticipation, an under it all, the confidence that once evening came, there would be nothing to fear in the flight of the bat, just the road home at dusk. She was like a child tired of playing, making her way home because the light in the window was calling her to a hot dinner and a clean bed. That was love as far as Judit was concerned.

Under it all, the confidence that once evening came, there would be nothing to fear in the flight of the bat, just the road home at dusk – what strange and compelling words these are even for the strange and compelling paragraph in which they are embedded.

Here, as elsewhere, Marai delights in stacking the odds against his characters, throwing them into a spot from which it will take them all night to extricate themselves. Why does Judit, when she knows that she has Peter completely under her spell, suddenly disappear without a trace for two years, forsaking all that she could win from him? Why does she then return, and take it? Why does Peter suddenly play a trick at dinnertime one day on Ilonka with a friend, pretending that it is his pal who is Ilonka’s husband and not him? Why is Ilonka suddenly filled with profound respect for Judit on discovering her crime, admiring how “she wanted it all, life entire, destiny with all its dangers”? 

Marai’s characters often respond to situations in the most irrational, the most surprising fashion, and then pop up afterwards to justify their behaviour in an enormously persuasive way. They are dangerous and seductive in the way the novel was once believed by moralists to be dangerous and seductive, having the mysterious power to convince or corrupt. Page after page goes by, filled out by the writer with streaks of exquisite perception ("Being human beings is not a responsibility we can avoid, but we can, and do, tell an awful lot of lies in trying to fulfill it") and lines of throwaway brilliance (“He could listen the way others shout”; “The only people capable of being at peace are people who live in the moment”; “Six is the best age for dogs and for wine”) and majestic paradoxes . These are speakers who gather the reader up in the nets of their worldview so powerfully that one believes, with them, that this is the way life really is – until they are contradicted by those of whom they speak and from whom they seem to have learnt what they know.

Of a writer whom she meets on travels, Judit observes that he seemed motivated almost wholly by lust – but not ordinary sexual lust. Rather (the italics are mine) “it was the world that brought on his lust, the fabric of it; word and flesh, voices and stones, everything that exists [that] is tangible and, at the same time, impossible to grasp in its meaning and essence.” This seems an accurate self-portrait of Marai himself, a writer just as capable of devoting a long passage to the importance of pimiento-filled olives as the notion of joy to the meaning of culture. Portraits of a Marriage confirms Sandor Marai’s retrospective status as one of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists, and alongside Irene Nemirovsky, Roberto Bolano, and Alaa Al Aswany one of the finest writers to appear in English translation in the last decade.

And some links: Marai's flight from Hungary in the nineteen-forties is compellingly described by Zoltan Andras Ban, at the enormously useful website of the journal Hungarian Literature Online,  in "The Freedom of Silence" ("Márai had been the most successful writer of the previous period, making plenty of money, treated as a star and leading a perfectly furbished and flawlessly functioning bourgeois lifestyle. By 1945 nothing was left of this. Gone, too, was the illusion which many of the ‘bourgeois writers’ had clung to that, tolerated by the communist regime, they might be able to salvage certain vestiges of a bygone value system at least for a period of time.") Szirtes writes about some of his experiences in translating Marai here ("Márai is easy to translate. What I mean to say is that he gives himself to you and invites you to enjoy the clear rhetorical circling of his prose as he uncovers layer after layer of motivation. He is all burning curiosity tempered by patience") and here, explaining his belief that the last section of Portraits, a marvellous coda delivered by a Hungarian immigrant now settled in America, needed to be translated "not into British but American English" so as to deliver the sense of a change of register. And here is an essay by Szirtes: "Formal Wear: Notes on Rhyme, Meter, Stanza and Pattern." 

A shorter version of this essay appeared recently in The National. 

At Mountain Echoes next month, and at Utkal University this week

My nose is pointing east. Next month, on the morning of Saturday the 21st of May, I'll be giving a lecture called "What Novels Tell Us About Life (And About Themselves) at the second edition of the Mountain Echoes Literary Festival in Bhutan. Among the writers whose work I'll draw on at this talk are Ashvaghosha, Vasily Grossman, Sandor Marai, Irene Nemirovsky, Chekhov, Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay, and Edna O'Brien. The schedule for the whole festival is here, and if you live in India and would like to attend the festival you might want to think about a special flights-and-accommodation passage, details of which are here.

And later this week, at 11 am on Thursday the 28th of April, I'll be speaking for an hour at the English Department at Utkal University in Bhubaneswar in my home state Orissa, on two separate subjects, since universities never invite me more than once, and so many things pop up in my brain in the five-year gaps between these invitations.

First I'll speak for half an hour on "The Pleasures and Problems of Indian Literature Today", and then for the next half hour, after a short break to allow for anybody in the audience who wants to escape to escape, I'll give a talk called "Staying In Literature", about the different careers in literature available today for English literature graduates (in writing, editing, literary criticism and journalism, and publishing) that are potentially more satisfying to self and soul than work in television news, advertising, and other such expanding industries. The Department is home to several people doing excellent work in Oriya literature and its translation into English, such as Jatindra Nayak, the translator of Fakir Mohan Senapati and JP Das among others, and the literary critic Himansu Mohapatra. If you live in Bhubaneswar, you're very welcome to attend.

Senapati, incidentally, is the subject – or more appropriately the hub of a wheel with many spokes of different colours – of a fascinating new book of essays, Colonialism, Modernity and Literature, in which a number of Indian scholars and critics look at his classic novel Six Acres and a Third through a variety of conceptual lenses while also linking him to other language-literatures of his time, such as Hindi, Assamese and Telugu. To my mind Bankim Chandra Chatterji and Senapati are the first great novelists in Indian literature, but Senapati is more idiosyncratic and original than Chatterji, and Six Acres and a Third the first Indian novel that not only successfully mines Indian material but also invents a homespun novelistic mode rooted more in Indian narrative tradition than in classic nineteenth-century European realism, which most early Indian novelists adapted for their own ends. Indian literature needs more books like this to make a proper reckoning with its own roots.

If you'd like to read more about Oriya literature, a recent issue of the literary magazine MuseIndia is a special on Oriya literature and can be found here. And here is an old post on the great Oriya poet Salabega: "Tigers in the poetry of Salabega and William Blake".

On Neera Adarkar's anthology The Chawls of Mumbai

Mumbai would not be the city and the story that it is today without its chawls. These three- and four-storey blocks of one- and two-room tenements, built all across south and central Mumbai on a massive scale over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by both the colonial government and private landlords, stand at the centre of the city’s social history. Although each of the great chawl neighbourhoods of Mumbai – Girgaon, Girangaon, Kalbadevi, Worli, Byculla – has its own distinct history and religious and class composition, together they form an architectural and city-specific continuum through which many of the city's traits can be understood. The quiddity of chawls and their longstanding influence “as a historical actor” on Mumbai’s landscape are illuminated through a variety of academic and narrative perspectives in Neera Adarkar’s captivating new anthology The Chawls of Mumbai.

The word chawl is a slightly anglicised version of the Marathi chaal, which means “anklet” and by extension came to mean “corridor” or, to use the Mumbai word, “gallery”. The very etymology of this architectural form, then, reveals what kind of residential space it was meant to be – one in which the boundary between private and public space was blurred, and communal areas were as significant as private ones. “It is difficult to view a chawl as an empty built form in isolation, like a bungalow or an apartment building,” writes Adarkar in her excellent introductory essay, “because a chawl cannot be stripped bare of its occupants. Its existence in the cityscape can be seen as a theatre, imagined only with performers on a stage.”

It was this human crush, fending for itself as best as it could and devising a variety of creative solutions to problems of food, domesticity, and childcare, that turned Bombay, over the decades, into “the city of gold”. Chawls began to come up in great numbers in the “Indian quarter” of Mumbai, north of the spacious, landscaped European quarter in Fort, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards as the Indian cotton industry boomed, filling up the breach left by the Civil War in America. The colonial government and an emerging class of Indian capitalists needed labour; and migrant workers thronging the city from the Western Ghats and the Konkan coast needed cheap housing. As Bombay urbanised and industrialised, many chawls were built by private parties on what was formerly farmland.

But after an outbreak of plague in 1898, attributed to unsanitary conditions in the native neighbourhoods, the colonial government stepped in, in its own interest, to build chawls on a large scale. The massive Bombay Development Department (BDD) Chawl in Worli, for instance, a colony of over a hundred chawl buildings, were built by the government in what was then cheap uninhabited land in north Bombay, now turned by the advance of history into Mumbai’s centre (There is a marvellous joke about this phenomenon of moving centres in the recent Marathi film Harishchandrachi Factory, in which the struggling Dadasaheb Phalke squanders so much money on his cinemania that his family have to sell their house. The Phalkes are seen receiving the sympathies of their neighbours as they move to some distant place "out in the wild", which turns out to be...Dadar.)

From the very beginning, then, the chawls were marked by human plenitude, by an enormously resourceful attitude towards space, and the assumption of openness to continuous negotiation and “adjustment”. Although (some would say “because”) chawls threw great numbers of people together, they tended to be socially homogenous, each chawl marked by the stamp of a particular religious or caste group and brought alive by the same festivals and mores. Though often remembered now with the rose-coloured glasses of nostalgia, they were often fractious places, from quotidian squabbles over space, water, and access to the communal toilets to murderous communal disharmony during times of crisis, as evinced by some of the heartbreaking testimonies collected by Sameera Khan (co-author of the recent book Why Loiter?) in an essay called "How The Mumbai Riots [of 1992] Changed Life for Muslims in Chawls".

Elsewhere, Adarkar observes acutely that the chawl corridor, centre of its social life and the space that effectively turned the building into a kind of neighbourhood, “brought a spirit of buoyancy to the interface of the chawl and the city, and diffused the boundaries between them.” This “chawl spirit” has been extensively investigated and celebrated in the city’s literature, from the short stories of Sadat Hasan Manto and PL Deshpande’s famous Marathi work Batatyachi Chal (“The Potato Chawl”) to Kiran Nagarkar's Ravan and Eddie and Manu Joseph’s recent novel Serious Men.

Among the pleasures of Adarkar's book is its exceptionally attentive historicization of the changing status of chawls over time in terms of their religious and gender composition, relative position in the various classes of property available in Bombay, and self-image. After the passing of the Rent Control Act of 1947, which froze existing rents and granted many more rights to tenants than previously, the  humble chawl-room suddenly acquired a great cachet as “property”. Many renters chose to evict other men whom they entertained as sub-tenants and bring in instead their families from the villages, completely altering the social character of the chawls and throwing up a fresh set of problems of adjustment to the needs of women.

The Rent Control Act also spawned the city’s indigenous pagdi system of property sale, whereby longtime tenants who could not be shaken by landlords could sell their tenancy rights to a third party as long as they passed on a third of the sale price to the landlord. The tenancy structures of chawls eventually became so complex that often developers seeking to buy up the entire property so as to build it anew threw up their hands in despair. This was because, as Prasad Shetty explains in his essay, of the number of ownership claims registered for every square foot of the chawl, from "subtenants who had forcibly taken over from original tenants, multiple children of deceased tenants wanting different houses, a divorced wife occpuying a room that was in the ex-husband's name, loft occupiers, staircase occupiers, shops within homes, homes inside shops, etc."

With the closure of the textile mills in the eighties, Bombay became a postindustrial city, and in succeeding decades home to the new wealth of a post-liberalization “new economy”. Defenceless against the march of history, the chawls became the site first of the despair of joblessness, and then the object of the profit-seeking eyes of developers. Many chawls today stand uncomfortably in the shadow of tall apartment buildings that were only recently themselves chawls. Creaky with decay and disrepair, sometimes crashing down completely in the gusts of monsoon, they still comprise a large portion of the available housing stock in the island city.

From Shetty in his superb essay “Ganga Building Chronicles”, a history of the fortunes of a chawl building over several generations, to the Dalit poet Namdeo Dhasal in “My Old Neighbourhoods”, a memoir of his childhood across several chawls in Bombay, the contributors to Adarkar’s book do an excellent job of characterising not just how the chawls made up the motley social fabric of the city and were home to many of its root energies, but also what they have contributed to the city’s vocabulary, from the word “gala”, or dormitory, to the concept of the “gallery gaz”, or a measure as wide as a chawl corridor. Somewhere in the story of almost every migrant family in Mumbai – and most people in the city are migrants – lies a chawl. The place of this architectural form in Mumbai’s history is extensively mapped in this chawl-like concert of energies, one of the most warming books ever produced about the city.

Some links: the photographer Atul Loke remembers his childhood in a Mumbai chawl and gives us some pictures here, and the film director Mahesh Manjrekar supplies his own memories of chawl life here.

And here are some older essays about books on Bombay: "The film writing of Sadat Hasan Manto", "English and Hindi in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games", "On Gyan Prakash's Mumbai Fables", and "Rage and Love in Manu Joseph's Serious Men".

[A shorter version of this essay appeared recently in Mint Lounge, with the most pointed byline I've ever received: "Chapter Six of Chandrahas Choudhury's novel Arzee the Dwarf is called 'The Old Wadia Chawl'"]

On Gyan Prakash's Mumbai Fables

“Bombay, it has been said, is not a city, but a state of mind,” enthuses the journalist and screenwriter Khwaja Ahmed Abbas in his autobiography I Am Not An Island, one of many Mumbai-obsessed texts that the historian Gyan Prakash draws upon in his book Mumbai Fables. “It is the state of a young man’s mind, exciting and excitable, exuberant and effervescent, dynamic and dramatic.”

Abbas’s words, smoothly transmuting the city into a mental rather than a physical landscape, demonstrate, further, that a great metropolis is not just a state of mind but also a story – a work in progress in both the physical and the narrative sense. In Mumbai Fables Prakash, previously known for his work on Indian labour history and the intersection of colonialism and science, brings his interpretative skills to bear on the many visions of Bombay/Mumbai nurtured and asserted by a colourful cast of characters across the centuries. Colonial governors and cotton kings, opium traders and tabloid barons, muckrakers and trade unionists, poets and politicians, thugs and town planners, all summoned up and guided by the sometimes too overbearing presence of the author himself, lend their voices to a series of tableaux stretching from the early colonial regime to the present day.

A set of small, swampy, spottily inhabited islands on the west coast of India that over the course of  the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were turned into a thriving port city and a geographically contiguous landmass by the British, Mumbai is of course a city with a past deeply implicated in colonialism and the asymmetric power relations that it vigorously exercised. For even the most charitable observer, this would be a story brimming with iniquity and prejudice. But some indication of Prakash’s overly negative attitude towards Bombay’s colonial history becomes visible when he speaks of the city’s “doubly parasitical birth and development”, as land simultaneously colonized by the British and also reclaimed from the sea by the force of modern industrial technology. The founding of the city represents for Prakash, a double sinning: not just a significant episode in the colonization of India by the British, but also “the colonization of nature by culture”.

But isn't this second claim not particular to Bombay, but true of just about any great city in the world? It is hard to see how any city could be founded and then allowed to expand without tampering with nature in some significant way. This line of argument allows Prakash, though, to interpret the story of Bombay somewhat too simply and adversarially as one of “colonial and capitalist spatialization”. This sets up a persistent strain in the metanarrative of Prakash’s book where the word “capitalism” is reflexively associated with the exploitation of land, workers, and natural resources and with injustice, misery, and subterfuge. The history of capitalism in Bombay is viewed entirely negatively, without any wonder at the remarkable energies it unleashed and the prosperity it generated. 

This approach allows Prakash to point out, entirely fairly, the extent to which Bombay’s economy in its early years was dominated by the British-run trade in cotton, which fed off cheap Indian labour, and the profits generated by local opium lords. But Prakash’s eyes are closed to the extent to which Mumbai’s presiding spirit is essentially an entrepreneurial one, and that its reputation today continues to be that of the one city in India where a man (or, significantly, a woman) may advance not because of his advantages of family or education, but for his capacity for hard work and enterprise.

Not all profit-making is iniquitous, and some kinds of capitalist success may themselves be viewed, as much as labour agitation or radical historiography, as instances of anti-capitalist resistance. Capitalist innovation gets short thrift in Prakash’s book, for which reason there is something grumpy and grudging about long sections of his narrative. The narrator of his book seems most enthusiastic when writing about left-wing movements in the city over time, whether the Progressive Writer's Movement of the nineteen-fifties or the agitations of the mill workers in the eighties, and here it would sometimes seem that all skepticism is abandoned ("The Communists worked furiously to keep up the workers' morale, organizing eight hundred public meetings"; "Sucked into the exciting whirlpool of Communist political and intellectual vision, Raj and Romesh [Thapar] became active in party activities."

Some of Prakash’s most interesting stresses have to do with space (or, as he might put it, “spatialization”). He paints a lovely scene of the early city around present-day Fort and Colaba, self-consciously designed as a European and colonial neighbourhood, being something of a mystery to Indian natives in the layout of its roads, the look of its buildings, and the strangeness of its mores. Meanwhile, a short walk from the Fort area brought the resident Englishman into the teeming and chaotic native quarter of Kalbadevi and Girgaon – a space just as puzzling to him, and one that served as the ugly underbelly to the ordered city dreamed up by the colonial imagination. Much of the story of Mumbai is not just about the expansion of the city northwards and eastwards into the Indian mainland, but also southwards and westwards, in the form of land reclaimed from the sea by governments functioning as a fig leaf for private interests.

However, in one of the book’s many tendentious passages, Prakash attacks an influential group of intellectuals and urban planners in early post-independence India, including the novelist Mulk Raj Anand, founder of the influential architectural magazine Marg, the architect Charles Correa, and the urban planner Shirish Patel. These men dreamt of a Mumbai that was more ordered, friendly, and equitable in the form of a satellite city, just east of the main one, called New Bombay or Navi Mumbai. 

The planners saw the new city as a space that would counterbalance the old city’s congested north-south axis, relieve the pressure on its land by making cheap housing available, and supply an zoned set of spaces for habitation, work and recreation instead of the harum-scarum sprawl of the old city. They also envisaged the state legislature moving base to Navi Mumbai to encourage migration to the new city. This was a grand vision that, persistently held up by red tape and apathy, has only seen partial realization over the last half-century, and might indeed be thought of as a tragic failure.

But, attacking this project for wanting to “engineer an organic urban space to meet the needs of capitalist industrialisation”, Prakash leaches the movement of much of its civic idealism, and presents it instead as yet another imposition upon the masses by those in power. Drawing upon Freud, he argues that “Politics and society, which the planners had suppressed, returned with the rage of the repressed to sour the modernist dream of postcolonial geography.” Indeed, any kind of planning by governments or urban planners is inevitably described by Prakash with loaded words like “dream text”, “fantasy”, or “utopia”. Sometimes this jeering becomes infantile (“The grand plan was now a grand mess...”).

Surprisingly, even as he criticises the Navi Mumbai plan of the sixties, Prakash is entirely silent on, or perhaps even ignorant of, a recent episode that might much more justifiably thought of as a scandalous capitalist landgrab in connivance with the government: the amendment by the Maharashtra Government of clause 58 of the Development Control Regulations in 2001 (whereby "land" was changed to "open land"), so that only a fraction of the defunct mill lands in the centre of the city were returned to the government for public use and for housing projects, and the rest was cleared for sale or development by the mill owners.

Various oppressed entities are persistently, though not always persuasively, seen extracting their revenge in Prakash’s narration. For instance, we are told, in the context of avaricious land reclamation in the posh neighbourhood of Marine Drive in south Bombay, that “The sea had avenged its loss by blasting the surface of Art Deco architecture with unsightly blotches of mildew.” I didn’t want to be the one to point this out, but the sea blasts buildings with mildew even on unreclaimed land, or that occupied by the poor. The sea is avenging nothing here, merely being itself.

Moreover, Prakash’s prose, often swinging unstably in its registers from the academic to the journalistic and back, is often guilty of practising a kind of colonisation of its own. Since his book is based primarily on archival research and a synthesis of secondary sources, he frequently enlists artworks – paintings, poems, films, and comic books – to buttress his points. Often, as with many academics in the social sciences attempting to read artworks, this happens at the cost of denying their specificity, their embodiment in a medium.

Of a painting by the Mumbai artist Sudhir Patwardhan we are told only that, “In Riot (1996) we see communal vitriol at its rawest. The image of society as a collective recedes.” But what happens inside the painting? Doesn’t its materiality come before its meanings? This is a very slapdash way of thinking about art. Quoting from “Mumbai, Mumbai My Dear Slut”, a poem by the fiery Dalit poet Namdeo Dhasal, Prakash argues that Dhasal “exhorts us to revisit the Island City’s past to disclose Mumbai’s history as culture’s triumph over nature”. I very much doubt Dhasal has this intention; if anything, this seems like something that Prakash would like Dhasal to say. Although it is interesting in patches and harnesses a wealth of unusual material, Mumbai Fables, once its own code is cracked, is finally too predictable and too negative to be a persuasive lens on the energy and enthusiasm of the city that it takes for its subject.

And some links. Chapter One of Mumbai Fables, "The Mythic City", is here, and a version of one of the most interesting chapters in the book, an account of the Mumbai tabloid Blitz and its role in the famous Nanavati murder case, is here in "Blitz's Bombay".

You might also be interested in reading "Regional Planning For Bombay" by Shirish Patel (this requires an institutional log-in) and his recent essay "Dharavi: Makeover or Takeover?", Ranjani Mazumdar's "The Bombay Film Poster", Zeno's "Ahmed Ali and the Progressive Writer's Movement", an essay on the film star Ashok Kumar by Sadat Hasan Manto, "Decline of a Great Ciy" by Gerson Da Cunha, "City of Dreams", a special issue of Seminar on Bombay from 2003, "Russi Karanjia, Living Through the Blitz" by P. Sainath, and "A Pile of Dirt Worth Its Weight In Gold" by Farah Baria. Some of these links appear in Prakash's very valuable bibliography.

And two older posts on capitalism and its critiques in an Asian context: on Muhammad Yunus's autobiography Banker To The Poor and Satnam's memoir of his time among Indian Maoists in Bastar, Jangalnama.

On Orhan Pamuk's The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist

This essay appeared last weekend in The National, and was written in Istanbul earlier this month in the lovely common room, overlooking the Sea of Marmara, of the Hotel Niles.

In Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence the protagonist Kemal Basmacı, finding a new unity and clarity in his experience of the world after he falls in love with a shopgirl, speaks of love as “another way of knowing”. In his new book The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, it is Pamuk’s contention that the very nature of the novel itself – in search of the revelations of both an objective standpoint and perspectivism, delighting in ambiguities and secrets, and sifting the essential from the inessential in new and surprising ways – allows us “another way of knowing”.

Pamuk’s title, one notices, emphasises the word novelist and not novel, suggesting that this is a book about the processes of literature rather than the end-product. Its six linked essays, offered up in a tone simultaneously conversational and schoolmasterly (they were originally a set of lectures that Pamuk gave at Harvard University in 2009), are preoccupied with what kinds of knowledge and expectation writers bring to the writing of novels and readers to the reading of them. Like all novelists, Pamuk loves dividing the world of novels into two, the better to illuminate the whole. Here, the principle of partition that he relies on derives from the eighteenth-century German writer Friedrich Schiller’s essay “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry”.

The word “sentimental”, at first glance and in English, appears allied with rather than opposed to “naive”, so that title needs some explanation. Briefly, naive poets are for Schiller the naturals of literature, confident in their ability to understand the world, writing as if there was no gulf between the world and language, seemingly innocent of literary technique, of the artifice that makes art seem real. The totally naive writer is both liberated and limited by his naivete: he cannot change anything about his work but must always just “receive” it as if from without.

The sentimental writer, on the other hand, is the kind of artist who is deeply reflective and self-conscious, bringing doubt and skepticism to his reading of both world and work. He knows that art is always the result of certain decisions made in the realm of style and technique. “Being a novelist,” declares Pamuk, “is the art of being both naive and reflective at the same time”.

Readers can be divided into similar categories. Some may believe that novels are transcribed directly from their author’s experience. Such readers aren’t given to introspection about how their own act of reading brings the book to life. Others of a more theoretical temperament may be acutely aware of, and take pleasure in, the moves and patterns that the writer deploys to produce the experience of the text. Reading involves a different kind of creation from writing, and it is the reflective reader who approaches his task with ambition and awareness. And so for the both-naive-and-sentimental novelist, Pamuk seems to imply, the sentimental reader is more precious than the naive one, even if the latter group is usually bigger in size.

This is quite an interesting theoretical map, illuminating, for instance, the difference between literary and genre fiction, or the relationship between art and reality. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of Pamuk’s novels is the way their narrators confidently braid theory and argument into story. One recalls the grizzled painter of miniatures in My Name Is Red explaining the divergent view of the human subject in Ottoman and Venetian art, or Kemal’s meditations on what love has done to his awareness of temporality, and on Aristotle’s theory of time.

Yet if there is a criticism to be made of Pamuk’s book, it is that it spends too long at the level of abstract argument and generalized assertion. It is not animated enough by the particularities and close reading that distinguishes the literary criticism of, for instance, Milan Kundera, another novelist who constructs grand theories about the novel. Pamuk the theoretician is, paradoxically, more compelling in his novels, where ideas might be thought of a secondary layer under the primary one of story.

The triads of nouns that are such a distinctive mark of Pamuk’s sentences, for instance, seem slacker here than in his fiction (“As our mind performs all these operations simultaneously, we congratulate ourselves on the knowledge, depth, and understanding we have attained”), and a poetics of composition and reception is articulated for long stretches without actual novels being summoned to the scene.

For instance, Pamuk offers some valuable points about how novelists actually verbalize a set of compelling images -- indeed, how they are obsessed with visuality. For Pamuk the roots of novelistic writing lie not so much in story per se as in richly imagined point of view (“The defining question of the art of the novel is not the personality or character of the protagonists, but rather how the universe within the tale appears to them”). He also observes that the novel is actually at its most political not when it works through explicitly political themes but simply when it successfully realizes the effort “to understand someone” in all their individuality and their difference.

But readers may feel that they have already been schooled in these notions by his novels, and that a certain conversational register that works in the lecture theatre becomes less satisfying when transferred to the page. Rather, it is when we come across the odd ringing assertion (Anna Karenina is “the greatest novel of all time”) or the mischievous putdown (“Zola is the sort of writer who thinks, ‘Oh, Anna is reading – so while she does that, let me describe the compartment a bit’”) that the text really hums.

Although the book is perfectly competent, and a pleasure to read, the demanding reader will feel that it is only in the last chapter, “The Center”, that Pamuk really hits his straps. This is where he advances his most interesting claim, namely that all real novels have a veiled locus. “The centre of a novel is a profound opinion or insight about life, a deeply embedded point of mystery, whether real or imagined.” Further, it is important that this center be hard to reach, because “if the center is too obvious and the light too strong, the meaning of the novel is immediately revealed and the act of reading feels repetitive,” as with genre fiction.

The center, crucially, is something that is not only searched for or perceived by the questing reader, but it is also the motor that determines the novelist’s own perception of his text as he works through successive versions of it. And although it is the center, it sometimes arrives last and not first in the process of composition, being, in Pamuk’s striking image, “maneuvered into place” as the work’s form and colours become clearer and brighter.

This is a matrix of ideas that only a novelist could plausibly express and defend. If such a thought appeared today in academic literary criticism from anyone other than, say, Harold Bloom, it would seem too fanciful, unprovable, woolly, conceived in a dream and not at the desk. But literary criticism is impoverished if it does not leave room for progress through metaphors such as this one, if it advances single-mindedly through rational argument. Many searching questions are activated when Pamuk asserts, for instance, that “the difference between The Arabian Nights...and In Search of Lost Time is that the latter has a center we are very aware of.”

It is as if Pamuk himself is roused by these ideas, for the writing in this last chapter has a higher pitch, and a continuous epigrammatic energy (“Because Anna Karenina could not read the novel she held in her hands, we read Anna Karenina the novel”). The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist would have been a more balanced book if Pamuk had placed his idea of the novelistic center itself at the center of his book. But, appearing where it does, it ensures that Pamuk exits the stage on a high.

And here are two old posts on books by novelists about the novel: VS Naipaul's A Writer's People and Javier Marias's Written Lives.

Three new Indian literary ventures: Pratilipi Books, ForbesLife magazine, and Tender Leaves library

Here are some things happening in Indian literature and the book business that I think you should know about -- perhaps you do already, and I was the last to find out:

The bilingual literary magazine Pratilipi has been, to my mind, for some years the best literary magazine in India, and it has recently ventured into book publishing with a set of nine varied books, including an anthology of Hindi poems in translation, a special on The Village (see the recent magazine lead story "Towards A Village-Less Future"), three books in Hindi, and three Swedish novels in translation, the cover of one of which I've put up here. I saw some of these titles at the Jaipur Literary Festival, and they're beautiful books. You can buy these books in select stores, or easier still, order them all online at Flipkart.

ForbesLife India is a new quarterly Indian magazine of stylish feature-writing (usually present in Indian journalism far more as intent than in reality) offering, in its inaugural issue, an excellent lead essay on how 21st century human beings could be "the first immortals", a lovely essay on home schooling by Manjula Padmanabhan, and some other very satisfying pieces, as also lovely design and layout.

And last, Tender Leaves ("It's more than just a library!") is a brand new online library service, offering a range of reading plans to subscribers, a growing library of titles, and free home delivery. The service is confined, in these early days, to readers in Pune, but it has plans to expand to other Indian cities soon. Should you wish to borrow a copy of my new book India: A Traveller's Literary Companion from the library, you'll find you'll receive a signed copy for Tender Leaves readers.

On Patrick French's India: A Portrait

A slightly different version of this essay appeared in The National last weekend as "Your Mother, Your Sister, And All" .

As with the proverbial three blind men before an elephant, unable thanks to the vastness of its size and the diversity of its parts to make a reasonable guess as to the reality of the whole, all books about India “get” some things about the country and miss others. Each observer distinguishes or incriminates himself in his own way, and, for the reader, the task lies in making a reckoning of exactly what they see and what they choose to make of it. Advertised as “an intimate biography of 1.2 billion people” (the adjective alone is worth investigating), Patrick French’s India: A Portrait sets itself up from the very beginning alongside the most ambitious books written about the country.

Whole cupboards of non-fiction are now published every year about Indian politics, society, culture, religion, philosophy and business. Indology is a crowded market, buzzing with grand claims. French’s own contribution to the literature of Indocentrism is the somewhat nebulous: “India is a macrocosm, and may be the world’s default setting for the future.” But for most part French is sharper than this, and, indeed, he often has a merciless way with cant, whether the jargon-laden calls to war of Maoist revolution or the play-it-safe boilerplate of the Congress Party. Cutting up his book into three major axes of inquiry entitled Rashtra, Lakshmi, and Samaj, French deploys impressively the grasp of history and social context and the love of bright detail that he last displayed in his 2008 biography of VS Naipaul.

The only clunky section of French’s text appears right at the beginning. French’s long essay on Indian politics requires him to make a survey, for reasons of context and continuity, of events from the time of independence onwards: nation-formation and constitution-framing, the crisis of succession post-Nehru, the Emergency, the rise of dynastic politics. Here, even French’s talent for elegant synthesis and summary, often finished off with brief, probing glosses  – Jawaharlal Nehru’s classic The Discovery of India is “a fine, slanted and sometimes romantic version of history”– is not enough to reanimate an extensively reported period of national history, the personalities, contours and faultlines of which are familiar to even the casual reader on India.

Once it has emerged from this impasse, though, French’s narration begins to pick up steam, every page delivering something valuable. One of his most diverting studies is that of nepotism in Indian democracy. As a case study he takes the Lok Sabha or the Indian parliament, home to 545 elected MPs. With the assistance of a team of researchers, French attempts to figure out just how many of them might be considered to be what he called hereditary MPs or “HMPs” – that is, MPs with a strong family, if not directly filial, connection to politics.

He finds that almost 30 per cent of MPs fall into this category, including two-thirds of the 66 MPs aged 40 or under. Thus, he demonstrates just how much weight a family name carries when it comes to the restocking of Indian democracy with new blood. Sixty-three years after its ambitious inauguration, then, Indian democracy remains semi-feudal. “I am not suggesting that a ‘hereditary MP’ is a bad MP,” French says, concluding tidily, “merely that this system excludes the overwhelming majority of Indians from participation in politics at a national level”. With a new law mandating that 33 per cent of parliamentary seats be reserved for women about to come into effect in the 2014 general elections, the situation could grow worse as the mothers, wives and daughters-in-law of India are catapulted into the hustings. “India’s next general election,” warns French, “was likely to return not a Lok Sabha, a house of the people, but a Vansh Sabha, a house of dynasty.”

A pair of brief but trenchant sketches of Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh sets off a convoy of polished portraits, the strength of which holds the diverse strands of the book together. The double-sided method that French employs is to let his subjects, when they open up to him, to speak for long stretches in their own voice, and to gird this with a few paragraphs of telling detail sourced from books, reports, and personal observation.By throwing together the famous, the modestly well-known, and the anonymous in complex formations, French achieves an effect of intimacy with both the powerful and the powerless that justifies the word “intimate” in his subtitle.

A Congress functionary in Uttar Pradesh, Yusuf Ansari, talks revealingly about the complexities of local politics and the weaknesses of the Congress Party at grassroots. The Indian telecom baron Sunil Mittal, head of Bharti Airtel, recalls, in a passage that is almost novelistic, wandering about street markets and trade fairs in east Asia in the eighties, looking for a business opportunity, before finally picking on phones as a growth area for the future. A fatalistic, enfeebled low-caste labourer in Karnataka who spent 21 months in chains, unable to put on underwear or trousers, after failing to pay off a debt to his employer, puzzles over his own story after he is freed. Nor far away, in the buzzing metropolis of Bangalore, a construction worker takes French around the pathetic camp thrown together for him and his colleagues by a company erecting premium apartments.

In Kashmir, the lapsed terrorist and political protestor Shakeel Ahmad Bhat (aka the “Islamic Rage Boy,” who made it to newspapers worldwide in 2007) speaks heartrendingly about outrages visited on his family by police in his childhood, a black-and-white that he still inhabits despite, or perhaps because of, his troubles. Elsewhere, in the closing sections of a forceful critique of Naxalism, French visits Delhi’s infamous Tihar Jail to meet one of the movement’s masterminds: the recently arrested Kobad Ghandy. He asks the ideologue how he can continue to believe in Maoism after the arbitrary snuffing out of hundreds of thousands of lives in Mao’s China. Ghandy acknowledges there have been mistakes, but valiantly defends the “philosophy” of the movement. “When taken to an extreme,” remarks French acidly, “idealism is little more than a form of prejudice.”

French’s ear for the exact registers and locutions of Indian speech, reported without smirks or condescension, elevates his work above most other books of reportage on the country, eliding the distance from one’s subjects that often appears in the work of other writers and turning his narrative into an impressive act of ventriloquism in the manner of the Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City or Sonia Faleiro’s recent Beautiful Thing.  Late in the book, an army officer is heard saying, as he describes a face-off between two colleagues, “The 2IC, the second-in-command, started abusing him when he was giving a report, saying your mother, your sister and all.” In such instances it is not the space granted to the subject as much as the attention to cadences of his voice that humanizes him.

Elsewhere, French remarks, inhabiting an Indian idiom instead of merely marking it, “Of the 38 youngest MPs, 33 had arrived with the help of mummy-daddy”. In a diverting passage on Indian school textbooks, he notes the resonant pan-Indian neologism “byhearting”, or committing to memory. One begins to feel that working on India has made an Indian of French. But this notion falls away when, interviewing one of the administrators of the famed dabbawalas of Mumbai, who declares he won't speak without a fee of Rs.5000, French asks for a receipt. Even so, India: A Portrait stands alongside the Australian journalist Christopher Kremmer’s Inhaling The Mahatma and the novelist MG Vassanji’s memoir A Place Within as the most linguistically rich and morally inquisitive books written by writers not native to India about India in recent years.

And an old post from 2008: "On Patrick French's biography of VS Naipaul".