Coming up: The Middle Stage's Books of the Year

Coming up over the next fortnight on The Middle Stage: as in 2008, two long essays on the best fiction and the best non-fiction that's come my way this year.

On Written For Ever: The Best of Civil Lines

Like Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, the literary journal Civil Lines has for many years been an entity thought by most to be dead, even as a few of the faithful still insist it is alive and kicking, and merely waiting for the right moment to return to public life. Five issues of this journal of (to quote the editors) “fine unpublished writing” came out between 1987 and 2001, each edition, published and priced like a paperback, a celebration of the essay, memoir, long-form reportage, and the short story, while at the same time impervious to the charms of writing in translation, literary criticism, interviews, or poetry.

The magazine’s idiosyncracies of taste, irregularity of publication, somewhat cliquish circle of contributors, and lack of either a precise editorial manifesto or a market ambition were all repeatedly explained by the editors (perhaps a little too emphatically) as a symbol of their devotion to no other deity but quality. Since the last edition of Civil Lines appeared at the far end of this decade, might one then interpret this long hibernation as a damning comment on the state of Indian writing in English today – a kind of literary criticism of silence, just as vipassana is of the world of empty talk? Could be.

Alternatively, and much more realistically, one could attribute the disappearance of Civil Lines to financial issues, unsteady support from publishers, the involvement of the editors in more urgent projects, and the vacation air inherent to the magazine’s modus operandi from the very beginning (this when literary magazines usually begin with nothing less than a plan for world domination). In the same way, if one takes some of the editorial preening and pompousness on offer with a pinch of salt, (the introductions to each issue are included in the book, usually directed towards such revelations as this one from CL 5: 'We think that the seven stories in this issue add up to the best and most diverse collection of short fiction you're likely to read till...well, till Civil Lines 6 comes along) one might find plenty to enjoy in Written For Ever, a compilation of some of the best pieces published in the journal as chosen by one of its editors, Rukun Advani.

It is immediately clear from Advani’s anthology that the magazine published some outstanding non-fiction in its heyday (the late eighties, when three issues came out in quick succession). Dilip Simeon’s “O.K. TATA: Mobiloil Change and World Revolution”, an essay about a truck driver who discovers that his khalasi, or helper, is a Naxalite, evokes life on the road in the most sumptuous detail, while Ramachandra Guha’s “An Anthropologist Among The Marxists” describes with a giddy devotion the author’s first-hand knowledge of the various Calcutta factions of Marxism gleaned as a doctoral student in Calcutta. Alongside Pankaj Mishra’s “Edmund Wilson in Banaras” (published elsewhere), these essays must rank as two of the greatest in modern Indian prose. Indeed, Simeon’s piece deserves further praise for the acuity with which it transforms the substantially non-English world of truckers into an English that never seems incongruous. Here is a passage from his essay: here we see the driver, Hardip Singh, meeting his prospective khalasi Partap for the first time, after which there follows a description of a khalasi's duties:

The youth was a bit of a greenhorn and seemed delicately constructed to the driver. He was already on the truck when Hardip approached its owner, a Punjabi lala in his mid-twenties from a Partition refugee family in Delhi's Rohtak Road area. The khalasi seemed to go with the vehicle, though he had only been on it for a couple of month or so, he said. Hardip didn't care. One khalasi was as good as another so long as they kept awake on night journeys, were quick on their feet, and good at massaging one's back and legs. Most drivers' apprentices were teenagers and aspired to become drivers themselves. Glad invariably in grease-stained cotton knickers in summer and threadbare pyjamas or pants in the winter, they were human appendages to the trucks, odd-job hands who leapt out at brief stoppages bearing tyre levers, with which they knocked at the tyres to hear them ring (to confirm they were not punctured), rushed out at octroi barriers to pay the clerks, leaned out of cabin windows slapping the door in city traffic and yelling at rickshaws, two-wheelers, cyclists and pedestrians (here insults could be exchanged and colourful abuse hurled depending on speed and distance), stood behind the vehicle when it was being reversed shouting affirmatives, wiped the smudges of shattered insects off the windshield at night, washed the truck at long halts (hence their other appellation, clean-der), supervised loading and unloading, spread the onboard tarpaulin on to consignments by tying it down with the onboard rope, performed hard labour with jacks and roads during tyre changes, checked engine oil and radiator-water levels, stayed awake all twenty-four hours unless instructed to sleep, and were honoured occasionally by being asked to take the wheel.

This is someone who really knows how to write a sentence, laying into its folds bright, memorable details (knocking at the tyres to making them ring), little jokes ("shouting affirmatives"), and delicately ironical remarks (working all twenty-four hours a day unless given leave) just as efficiently and suavely as the khalasi is supposed to do his job.The essays by Simeon and Guha are easily worth the price of the book, and there are a number of other good essays: a charming memoir about animal-watching by M.Krishnan; a tribute to his father by Brijraj Singh; Advani's own introduction, mostly an account of the origins of the magazine; and and a very funny “prelude to an autobiography” by Amit Chaudhuri in which the writer sets himself up against none other than Shobha De.

In the realm of fiction, however, the magazine's record appears in hindsight more modest. Other than Manohar Shetty’s diverting tale of Goan gossip, “Lancelot Gomes”, it is a struggle to find fiction here that is formally inventive, aesthetically satisfying, or in any way “written for ever”. A number of them work within a narrow palette of first-person reminiscencerealism; while this method can lead to many good things, many stories here are sunk by cliched descriptions of states of mind and feeling. One love story ends with “two anonymous beings at the edge of a sea that threatened every moment to engulf”, while in another story we are told that “Yet out of the blue a new twist did appear, irrevocably changing the status quo of 'Neelu and I.'” This is itself status-quo storytelling. Narrative artistry is a rare quality at the best of times, and the editors’ skepticism towards work in translation – the only example here is a translation by Amitav Ghosh of an unbearably mawkish story by Rabindranath Tagore called "The Hunger of Stones" ("Where had she lived and when, this ravishing, ever-changing beauty? Where was she born, in which palm-fringed oasis, by which desert stream? Who was the tented nomad who brought her into this world?") – seems to have meant a kind of willed fishing in shallow waters, or, to move the metaphor from sea to street, a refusal to engage with any place very far away from the comfortable Civil Lines of a city. Some of the stories collected here supply, I suppose, serviceable descriptions of conditions like immigrant life, society's callousness towards women, or personal angst. Very few work as story.

Civil Lines 6 is apparently to be published next year by Tranquebar Press. It may be very different from its predecessors, but more likely it won’t; journals are usually as stable, in a broad way, as the people who run them. In that case, there will still be much about the Civil Lines to enjoy. But the literary values and assumptions held by much Indian writing in English the late eighties and early nineties seem slightly musty when aired today, and given how much has changed about that literature in this decade, the journal might find itself today, in a far more diverse and energetic literary scene, more to the fringes than it would like or, even with its deliberately contrarian air, can be proud of .

And here is an older post on a recent anthology of essays on Salman Rushdie: "Salman Rushdie and Midnight's Diaspora."

A shorter version of this essay appeared last weekend in Mint Lounge.

Some Things I've Been Reading: Shattuck, Garton Ash, Sharma, and Davis

Some things I've been reading recently:

"Nineteen Theses On Literature" by the literary scholar Roger Shattuck, the author of two fine books on Proust and Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography ("Literature ranges from simple songs and sayings to elaborate and extended tales of human deeds. The most compelling literature concerns persons whose feelings and thoughts and actions engage us in the lived time of mortality. Ideas and abstractions, which systematically separate themselves from persons and from time, do not form the essence of literature and do not surpass it.") The idea that literature allows us to feel more powerfully on our pulse than in real life "the lived time of mortality" seems to me exactly right; this is what we turn to literature and to narrative art for. See also Shattuck's essay "When Evil Is Cool", and a chapter from Proust's Way.

"1989!", an essay by Timothy Garton Ash on one of the most momentous years of the twentieth century, and one that offers a number of sage arguments against the temptations of reductivist approaches to history ("Every writer on 1989 wrestles with an almost unavoidable human proclivity that psychologists have christened 'hindsight bias'—the tendency, that is, to regard actual historical outcomes as more probable than alternatives that seemed real at the time [for example, a Tiananmen-style crackdown in Central Europe].What actually happened looks as if it somehow had to happen. Henri Bergson talked of "the illusions of retrospective determinism." Explanations are then offered for what happened. As one scholar commented a few years after 1989: no one foresaw this, but everyone could explain it afterward. Reading these books, I was again reminded of the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski's 'law of the infinite cornucopia,' which states that an infinite number of explanations can be found for any given event.") Garton Ash has written some excellent books of reportage, and is also the editor, most recently, of Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-Violent Action from Gandhi to the Present, a massive collection of essays by different hands about different lands that I am hoping will be on my desk to reading soon.

"How Sanskrit Should be Taught" by the scholar of religion, in particular Hinduism, Arvind Sharma ("It is an axiom in some schools of Indian philosophy that a question can be fully addressed only if it is approached negatively as well as positively. This means then that a consideration of how Sanskrit should not be taught is integral to a discussion of how it should be.") On this theme, you may also want to read Sheldon Pollock's essay "The Real Classical Languages Debate". Pollock recently set up an endowment to fund three fellowships in Sanskrit at Columbia University each year exclusively for Dalit students. I am not entirely persuaded by the logic of this reservation, but perhaps we will hear more about the reasons for Pollock's thinking, and the expectation should be that the recipients should in time rebut any skeptics with the quality of their work. On the question of a revival of decaying traditions of classical scholarship, see also "A New Loss" by Sugata Srinivasaraju. Arvind Sharma's excellent blog Indological Provocations is here.

An interview with Dick Davis, the translator of the poet Ferdowsi's great Iranian epic Shahnameh ("[Ferdowsi has] become more mysterious to me, further away. I used to think I 'knew' him, or something of him anyway; I don't feel that now. The more one knows of the poem the more complex and fascinating one sees it is [...] He has the discomfort-producing quality that all truly great narrative artists have; he makes you question what you know and what you assume, especially perhaps what you know and assume about himself.")

"A Translational Friendship", an essay by the renowned translator of Arabic fiction Denys Johnson-Davies on Naguib Mahfouz, an excerpt from Johnson-Davies's book Memories in Translation: A Life Between the Lines of Arabic Literature. Not only is this essay a charming work of reminiscence and homage, it also reveals the number of fortuitous connections, word-of-mouth circulations, and serendipities by which even work which retrospectively appears self-evidently great is published or translated.

"Dostoevsky's Dowager", a profile by Martin Ebel of Dostoevsky's German translator Svetlana Geier ("But the 'main thing,' the summit of a life dedicated to Russian literature has been first and foremost translation. 'Hold your nose high,' a teacher once advised her, and she followed his counsel to great advantage. He meant that she should avoid getting caught up with individual words, instead focusing on the whole, should hold within her gaze at least an entire sentence – and in principle the work as a unity. And even more importantly: in her ear. Svetlana Geier’s method, if one can call it that, is an acoustic one. She immerses herself in the text until she has absorbed it completely, is able to hear its unique tenor, or as she says, 'its melody.' Then she induces it to resound in German, and this again takes place acoustically, for Geier dictates her translations.") Speaking of Dostoevsky, Princton University Press has just issued, in a handy abridged single volume, Joseph Frank's biography of the writer, originally in five volumes written over more than four decades, and one of the greatest achievements ever in literary biography. Chapter One is here.

An Indian poetry special in The Literary Review

The new issue of The Literary Review, an American literary journal that has been published quarterly by Fairleigh Dickinson University for more than fifty years, is a special on Indian poetry. Edited by Sudeep Sen, it has about 200 pages of verse by 44 Indian poets.

Here are three poems from the journal that caught my eye for their quality of thought, delicacy of language and beauty of sound. The first one is by Robin S Ngangom:

Houses
After Cavafy

We believe we own them but
In the evening of a street not a soul will be found.
Only a few stars shuffling in the oily sky and
Orange trees for neighbours.
Here, they've lain huddled in December waiting
For Christmas to rock them on its pinewood floors
And in blue afternoons
You can see them drowsing in the barber sun.

Relentlessly, a dream has hemmed me in these hills
While the future has cast me as a bleak interpreter of signs.
And so many things to finish
That I did not pay attention to their birth,
There were no labor pains,
And they have shut me off from their hearths.

Some more poems by Ngangom ("Body", "Flight", "The Last Word") are here, and his book Time's Crossroads is available here.

And here is Karthika Nair's splendid villanelle, "Tempus Fugit":

Tempus Fugit

I think I would like to die watching you dance,
feet staying quicksilver skies, arms a swift crease
of light across longitudes. Stars rise from trance

at your touch, drape the stage with night while stagehands
mix music (bass from springtides, then soughing trees,
I think). I would like to die watching you dance

the tango with Mistress Time—trellised, by chance
or choice, in memory's arms—,transform a frieze
to light. Across longitudes, she twists in trance

till lips landlocked by your will blaze morning, lance
the inky continents, where—like yestreen breeze—
I think I would like to die. Watching you dance,

scissor land and sea, curve orbits with bare hands,
Time learns to whirl on lone, hennaed feet: release
of light on longitudes. Stars fall into trance

as you plummet out of life: no backward glance
of farewell, no thunder, no tears. With such ease
would I like to die, I think, watching your dance
—like lightning on longitudes—strike and entrance.

Often, when copying out poems or passages from books, one is able to better appreciate their qualities because the hand is so much slower than the eye, and so the mind stays with the words longer than it did the first time (this is one very good reason for keeping a notebook). I liked this poem by Nair even better while I was tracing it on my keyboard than when I read it the first time. Nair is the author of a recently published book of poems, Bearings. Some poems from this book are here.

Last, here is Anjum Hasan's "This Biography":

This Biography

My heart beat fast or did not beat at all;
I could not say all that I thought and thought
till words deserted me. I loved too abstractly.
I dreaded how all there was to give me was me—
like water, this biography. I unravelled far too easily
then fled to selfish deserts and slept on the hardest rocks.
I couldn't make what others made and broke and broke
and made, that sweet choreography. I went alone
and missed the world continually. I misread smiles;
I stuttered before open arms, but time passed too fast
for disappointment's imprint on the glass of memory.
I sought the future even when the blood swirled now,
I let the past decide too greedily. I kept searching out
the window, I tried to stay half hidden by the light.

Hasan is the author of the collection Street In The Hill. Here are some of her poems ("Mawlai", "Small Town", "To The Chinese Restaurant"), and some more can be read here.

Meanwhile, almost every Saturday in Mint Lounge you will find on the books page a new poem by an Indian poet, and here are three recent ones: "Ghost Sounds" by Aruni Kashyap, "Identification Marks" by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, and "New Delhi Love Song" by Michael Creighton.

And lastly, an old post about a great seventeenth-century Indian poet, Salabega: "Tigers in the poetry of Salabega and William Blake". This link gives a certain feline symmetry to this post, making it begin with a panther (the animal on the cover of The Literary Review is a fibreglass work by Bharti Kher) and end with a couple of tigers.

On Aseem Kaul's Etudes

Two moments involving the clothes of departed people might serve to give a sense of the distinctive mood and method of Aseem Kaul’s book of very short stories, Etudes. In “The Shirt”, we see a woman who has recently been widowed. Every day she continues to wash one of her late husband’s shirts and then hangs it out to dry, watching – the image is both macabre and touching – “the empty shape of him billow in the back yard.”

And in “The Smell of Smoke”, a woman is abruptly left by her partner, and decides instantly to give away all his clothes. The narrator proffers this observation: “There was something very attractive in the idea that if he did come back (not that she allowed herself to think about this, not even for a moment) he would find his wardrobe empty.” Although the parentheses insist that the woman is not considering the possibility of the man’s return, we know, of course, from the very vehemence of her insistence that she is. The sentence is simultaneously a description of both determination and desolation.

Almost uniquely among Indian short-story writers in English, Kaul is determinedly a writer of short shorts (for similarly compressed and elliptical work by contemporary Indian writers in English, I can think only of Kuzhali Manickavel's Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings). Kaul’s characters are rarely named, their backgrounds barely sketched in, and the places they live in almost never described—all the pillars and plinths on which realist storytelling is based are rigorously cleared away. But for all the austerity of the writer’s method, his creations seem no less real than those of realist writers. What we see his characters do, primarily, is think. In his best stories, we feel as if mind has insidiously established contact with mind, in the same way as we might in a conversation with someone we have just met.

Indeed, many of Kaul’s stories are built upon a model of conversation, either real or imagined. One of them, “Where Shall We Go For Dinner?”, is written entirely in dialogue, without a single word of narratorial explanation. It shows us a couple quarreling over where to eat dinner, and then making up. It is hard to work from such a simplified palette, so the success of this story is no small achievement.

In another story, “Conversation”, a man begins to track the voice of the woman who lives next door, because he can hear her on the telephone through the wall they share. Although they never actually speak, he becomes more and more involved with her life, . When he realises she is sad, he takes “to playing soft music at night – works for solo piano” to soothe her (as the title of his book indicates, this is clearly the kind of music Kaul loves best). But, churlishly, the woman complains about the disturbance, and makes the narrator gloomy. One day he finally takes the plunge, and calls her. She picks up the phone. “He doesn’t say anything, just sits there, hearing her voice coming through the receiver on the one hand, through the wall on the other. Like a conversation.” Kaul’s arresting ending beautifully fulfils the spirit and strangeness of the story.

Like the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who is clearly one of the moving spirits behind Etudes, Kaul loves to write a certain type of mind-bending fiction. In one story, “Googled”, the protagonist Bihag Sharma (one of the few characters in the book who are named) googles his own name, and is astonished to find, among the search results, a few links dated 2014, describing things that are going to happen in his future. Google's reach and power are now so immense, the story suggests, that is knows not just every bit about our past but also the future. A story called “Juliet” puts a wicked modern spin on the love story of Romeo and Juliet, suggesting that Juliet was really a malevolent schemer who cozened Romeo into sacrificing himself so that she could marry someone else. Kaul’s mischief extends all the way to the back cover, with its list of quotes by fictional reviewers, including one Orhan Gutan.

Here, in full, is the story with which the book opens, called "Note Autobiographical":

Note Autobiographical

Every time he speaks to himself you sense something missing, something not quite true. It's not that you doubt his sincerity—on the contrary, you know he's making every effort to be honest. It's just that by putting himself in the spotlight he has blinded himself to his own shadow, to the audience of alternate selves who watch him from the wings. He tells you what he sees, but all the while the real self remains invisible, like light seen from the inside of a bulb.

It's like the difference between the way you picture yourself and your face in a photograph. The way you hold your breath at immigration, waiting to see if the man examining your passport will accept you for who you are.

In six sentences, many truths and intimations about the self are captured, and the three metaphors—the two light-related ones of the spotlight and the inside of a bulb, and the one about the difference between the face's conception of itself and its look in a photograph—are all rich with suggestion, with lights and shadows. Even such a short piece attests to the writer's control over prose rhythm, and indeed, while the 75 stories in Etudes might prove wearying if read at one go, there is not a page here that does not reveal in some way the writer's ferocious intelligence and alertness to metaphysical complexity.

These winning pieces might be seen not only an assertion of a new kind of method, but also be seen as a tacit criticism of the lazy gestures and banalities of much realist storytelling, particularly from the subcontinent. Such a fresh and strange sensibility is very welcome in the house of Indian fiction.

And an older post on another writer of very short stories: "The zany fictions of Etgar Keret", which features Keret's strange and beautiful story "Pipes".

An essay in Foreign Policy

Recently Foreign Policy magazine invited me to venture some thoughts on the problems of and pressures on the Indian novel in English in a globalising time. My essay on this theme, "English Spoken Here", appears this week in the November/December issue.

Here are some essays that discuss in greater detail some of the novels brought up in this piece: Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, Fakir Mohan Senapati's Six Acres And a Third, Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva, and Ali Sethi's The Wish Maker.

The Pakistani short story in Urdu, and Do You Suppose It's The East Wind?

The iniquities of globalization have meant that even as a new generation of Pakistani writers in English have found a mass audience and not inconsiderable material rewards, Pakistani Urdu writers of the present day and of previous generations struggle on in the shadow of obscurity and neglect, or even at best an audience smaller than they deserve. Translation is a way out of at least the last of these predicaments, but even translation is something to which, in a consumer society, the market attaches the tag of “difficult” and, therefore, not consumer-friendly.

Simply put, in a market economy it is incumbent on the reader—the last link in the chain of literature, and therefore in some ways the clasp that ensures from one side the health and integrity of the whole—to be skeptical about the hype generated by publishers, publicists, and deep pockets in the front rows of bookshops and the front stretches of the literary market, and to look further and deeper, to be willing to supply time and mind for more unusual pleasures. Such readers will certainly find much to savour in Muhammad Umar Memon’s anthology of Pakistani stories in translation, Do You Suppose It’s the East Wind?

Memon is the editor of the excellent periodical The Annual of Urdu Studies, which publishes a selection of literary criticism, short stories in translation and scholarly essays every year, and can now be read online. He is also the translator of Indian writers of Urdu such as Naiyer Masud. For his anthology Memon has left out younger Pakistani writers, as if desirous of first giving the greats of the post-independence generation their due. For this reason, many of the writers in his collection, although they lived and died as Pakistanis, were born in the north of an undivided India, and they extol the beauties of a landscape which could just as well be Indian.

Unsurprisingly, one of the best stories comes from the familiar hand of Saadat Hasan Manto. Called "For Freedom’s Sake", it is set in Amritsar in the years of the freedom struggle and centres around two friends: The first, called Ghulam Ali, is a Kashmiri and wants to be a politician; the other is recognizably Manto himself. Always a sceptic of high rhetoric and noble motives, Manto writes cynically of his friend’s meteoric rise in political circles, saying that “the slogans, strings of marigold, songs of patriotic zeal and the opportunity to talk freely to female volunteers turned him into a sort of half-baked revolutionary.” As always in Manto, the mind wants one thing and the body another. His story of a political worker deeply in love with a woman in the same movement is reminiscent—although the narratorial voice is considerably more sardonic—of R.K. Narayan’s later book Waiting For The Mahatma.

Some other Pakistani writers who may be only names, and not really an experience in words, to Indian readers are each given a room of their own in Memon’s anthology. In "Sunlight", Abdullah Hussein tells a moving story of a man returning to his village after 20 years. Javed Shahin presents a different kind of journey, that of a son wandering through small towns and pilgrimage centres in search of his missing mother, in "If Truth be Told". While most of the stories abide by the conventions of realist fiction, a charming turn is taken at the very end by Tasadduq Sohail’s surreal "The Tree", about a man who finds a tree giving him a good scolding for the way he leads his life.

But perhaps the best of these stories is one about the opulence and decadence of the aristocracy of north India as revealed through their quarrels over, of all things, mangoes. In Abul Fazl Siddiqi’s "Gulab Khas", every five years, on the border of Avadh and Rohilkhand, in what formerly used to be known as the United Provinces, there takes place a competition for the best new breed of mango. During this great mango festival, writes Siddiqi, “The whole world was nothing but mangoes and life was lived only for the sake of this luscious fruit.” When a dispute breaks out between two leading mango-growers of the region, the person appointed to arbitrate feels that "the eyes of the whole subcontinent were riveted on him" and that his task is "fraught with historical import."

Siddiqi (1908-1986), whose forte was stories about rural and feudal worlds, liberally embellishes his claim by drenching his story in mango lore, reeling off dizzying catalogues of the best varieties, tracking with delight the conspiracies of growers to develop sublime new strains, and stretching every sinew of his prose to find words to convey the beauties of mango colour, flavour and texture. Just as the Gulab Khas mango, bred by a lowly female gardener, walks off with the first prize in the competition, so too "Gulab Khas" is the crowning glory of this excellent collection.

And an old post: "The film writing of Saadat Hasan Manto".

Orwell on language, and the language of Orwell

The writer Rebecca Solnit has said about the essay form, comparing it to fiction, that, “In essays, ideas are the protagonists, and they often develop much like characters.” This thought might be a good way of making a case for the abiding relevance of the essays of George Orwell. Although remembered in the main today for his novels Animal Farm and 1984 and his travel books The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia, Orwell was also the writer of some of the best-known essays of twentieth-century prose, including “Charles Dickens”, “The Prevention of Literature”, “In Defence of English Cooking”, “Why I Write”, and, most influentially, “Politics and the English Language”.

If ideas are the “characters” of essays, then the main characters of Orwell’s essays could be said to be four heavyweights: Freedom, Socialism, Totalitarianism, and Language. Just as no family ever agrees on any one point or takes one clear line, these four ideas also never work themselves, in Orwell’s writing, into some clear and consistent pattern, easy to summarise and propagate. To learn what he is saying – and we are thinking of a world in which the two World Wars, the Russian revolution, and the rise of Hitler were the main trends through which he was thinking out his ideas – we have to read Orwell, to witness a mind thinking its way through a political and moral minefield (As George Packer perceptively notes in his introduction, "In his best work, Orwell's arguments are mostly with himself."). A good way of beginning such a project would be to go through some of the pieces recently brought together in a sleek new volume called Critical Essays. This title is apt, for it as a critic of trends and currents in the immediate world around him that the essayist wields the most power.

The strongest of Orwell’s stresses (and hence the easiest argument to reproduce) was against totalitarianism, both of the communist and fascist varieties. As early as any other observer of his time, he grasped how the Soviet state was far more evil than the system which it claimed to refute, and that its management of thought and opinion could only end up making automatons of both the bureaucracy and citizens. We know well today the truth of Orwell’s argument that the organised deception practised by totalitarian states is not a temporary expedient, but is rather “something integral to totalitarianism”. In the same way, his observation that, in totalitarian states, “history is something to be created rather than learned” is something that historians of dictatorships from the Third Reich to Saddam’s Baathist Iraq have repeatedly demonstrated. Orwell gives us a lens that lays bare the deceptions of an entire brand of politics.

Orwell’s interest in language as an instrument of politics – as a means not for expressing but “for concealing or preventing thought” – is what animates his most famous essay, “Politics and the English Language”. Here, Orwell’s attack on bad, vague, overwrought or obfuscatory English is made not just as a writer concerned with declining standards. Orwell also sees that such language can be a result not just of plain incompetence or laziness, but of a deliberate intent to distort or mask the truth. Orwell proves that it is often in the interest of the state – or else a class within the state, such as the bureaucracy – to only pretend to be giving information or to be demonstrating intent, or empathy, or solidarity (he cites the classic bureaucratic cliche “we will leave no stone unturned”). But the very vagueness and woolliness of the words being used give the game away, and we would know this only if we have a conceptual awareness of how language is working, or can be made to work.

Orwell’s argument is of course aimed against the state – whether the propaganda machine of totalitarian states, or the hedging and inffectuality of democratic states – and against the peculiar jargon of ideologies like Marxism, of which he was a relentless opponent. But we could easily apply it today to many forces in our times. The hysterical shrieking, pervasive sexualisation, and bad faith of so much advertising and PR-speak today are a conscious debasement of language, as are the peculiar argot of management schools, political parties, and academia, the deliberate hysteria and melodrama of our media, and the many short-cuts of chatspeak when it infects more traditional forms of written communication. (I don’t know about you, but many emails and letters I get address me as “u” rather than “you”, and to me even this apparently harmless and innocent misdemeanour seems not just a diminishment of me, but of language and thought itself.) All these currents, under the aegis of the so-called forces of freedom, threaten our selfhood and independence in the free world as much as oppressive political power might; freedom cannot be something that is bestowed upon us, but is something that emerges actively from our own thought, language, and actions. And for Orwell, where thought is put to sleep, there begins the road to subjugation. Language as a means not of stimulating but of stupefying thought – that is Orwell's target. Writing of totalitarian propaganda, he speaks of how such thought can debase language and hollow it out completely from within, but he is perceptive enough to see that this kind of degradation can work both ways: that "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." We have in our culture today an abundance of shallow language that corrupts thought.

Orwell is one of the most quotable of writers, and the pleasures of his ringing sentences can only be communicated by direct quotation. From a long essay on Dickens, in which Orwell takes Dickens to task for criticising society without ever offering a constructive program, before concluding, more sympathetically: "The vagueness of [Dickens's] discontent is a mark of its permanence. What he is out against is not this or that institution, but, as Chesterton put it, 'an expression on the human face'." From a review of TS Eliot's late poems, which Orwell judged negatively: "If one wants to deal in antitheses, one might say that the later poems express a melancholy faith and the earlier ones a glowing despair." Here, in one of the most moving passages in all of Orwell, are his criticisms of Gandhi and his religiosity in an essay called "Reflections on Gandhi":

Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because 'friends react on one another' and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one's preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconciliable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi — with, one gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction — always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which — I think — most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

And here is the first paragraph of Orwell's review of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, which, through a brilliant summary that is content to leave all analysis for later, summons up an unforgettable image of Chaplin's comic genius:

France, 1918, Charlie Chaplin, in field grey and German steel helmet, is pulling the string of Big Bertha, falling down every time she fires. A little later, losing his way in the smoke screen, he finds himself attacking in the middle of the American infantry. Later he is in flight with a wounded staff officer, in an aeroplane which flies upside down for such lengths of time that Charlie is puzzled to know why his watch persists in standing up on the end of its chain. Finally, falling out of the aeroplane into a mud-hole, he loses his memory and is shut up in a mental home for twenty years, completely ignorant of what is happening outside.

These vigorous and combative essays have dated only slightly; both as a record of their time and as advice for our own time, they still have much to say.

And a recent post that takes up Orwell on the question of writerly depictions of working life: "On Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work".

"In That Place Where Mind Meets Mind"

Here is my poem "In That Place Where Mind Meets Mind", which appeared recently in Mint Lounge's new poetry section, Free Verse:

In That Place Where Mind Meets Mind

In that place where mind meets mind
Eye speaks to eye, and in the same breath hears
The long-barred self is intertwined
With one that it both needs and steers
A peace opens out, and a music binds
One moment to another, and day to day
The soul runs free, and all that it finds
It somehow both keeps and gives away.
Such was the place, or such the dream
That smiled, and then from me was taken
I slipped back into the common stream
My life moved on, but my faith was shaken.

And some other poems: "A Poem Is Someone Close To Tears", "Let Us Just Keep Things This Way", and "Song of Arzee the Dwarf".

On Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes

In one story in Kazuo Ishiguro’s new book Nocturnes, the narrator, a small-time musician who plays in cafés, looks around at his supporting cast and explains, “Playing together every day like this, you came to think of the band as a kind of family.” Of course, it is not only among musicians that music generates feelings of intimacy, tenderness, fraternality—a kind of higher awareness of both the present moment and an overarching continuity. To an extent that the rational side of our minds can never fully explain, our moods sometimes vault dramatically when we hear a melody, the tremor in a singer’s voice makes a hundred memories or regrets come flooding back, and the shape of a tune can make the most banal phrases appear as if they are exploding with significance.

In his new book, Ishiguro, who in his youth nurtured dreams of being a singer-songwriter, conjures up a set of stories about the power of music to bind, console and heal. The word “nocturne” means “a musical composition of a dreamy character”. It struck me that the protagonists of the stories here are not just players of nocturnes; their lives are themselves nocturnes. Some of them are young musicians of modest talent who know that they will never be stars; others are middle-aged drifters whose lives are gently washed by regret. Ishiguro explores the implications of this for their self-perceptions, their friendships, and their marriages in a way that is simultaneously tender and comic.

Like a vibrating guitar string, these stories are never stable or stationary. There is a twist or turn, usually minor but slowly expanding in significance, on nearly every page, as the narrators (all the stories are told in the first person) work out, sometimes not very well, what is happening to their lives. In the story called "Nocturne", we see a middle-aged saxophonist, Steve, whose career has come to a standstill not because he is not good enough, but perhaps because he is not good-looking. Steve’s wife eventually falls for the charms of a richer and better-looking man, but both of them feel so guilty that her paramour offers, as a kind of compensation, to pay for some plastic surgery for Steve. Steve’s agent thinks this is quite a good deal given that Steve is going to lose his wife anyway. After some resistance, Steve finally succumbs and gives himself a new face in the mirror.

Recovering after his operation, Steve finds himself in the room next to the celebrity Lindy Gardner, who is one of those children of the media age who are famous despite having done nothing of significance. Seeing that he and Lindy are now in the same boat, Steve realizes “the scale of my moral descent”. But the despised Lindy turns out to be surprisingly good company, and eventually turns into a kind of confessor figure for him. Ishiguro’s deceptively light and easy touch draws the reader in right away, and much of his dialogue is of an exceptionally high order.

Another story, "Malvern Hills", offers the pleasures of a familiar Ishiguro device seen, for instance, in his novel The Remains of the Day— that of the unreliable narrator. This kind of story features a complex first-person narration where, although we have no other information than that which is being provided by the person who is telling the story, we can nevertheless tell that he is not interpreting life accurately. When carried out skillfully, this makes fiction more stimulating and rouses the reader to activity, because it is as if we are reading a story and constructing an alternative version of it at the same time. Simultaneously, we come to understand, philosophically, how our sense of the world depends so much on subjective perception.

The narrator of "Malvern Hills" is a young, self-involved, hard-up songwriter who goes to spend the summer in a hotel in the countryside run by his sister and her husband. Although he is the one who is being helped out, he quickly comes to resent the few duties thrust upon him, and feels that the artist in him is being suffocated. “It seemed clear I’d been invited here on false pretences,” he thinks, and we laugh at this and commiserate with him at the same time.

At a number of points in Nocturnes, the characters express a preference popular music— evergreen ballads, Broadway hits, the work of “those old pros [who] knew how to do it”—over more challenging and difficult forms. The idea implicit in these gestures is that we often overlook the extent to which music we think of as “easy” is itself the result of great craft and discipline. After six novels, Ishiguro is now an old pro, and as these smoothly tossed-off and beguiling stories demonstrate, he too knows just how to do it.

And here are some older posts on other short-story writers: Daniyal Mueenuddin, Nikolai Gogol, Samrat Upadhyay, Etgar Keret, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Alaa Al Aswany, Mridula Koshy, Chekhov, Manjushree Thapa, Jahnavi Barua, and Houshang Moradi-Kermani.

On Tzvetan Todorov's Torture and the War of Terror

One of the major early decisions of the Obama presidency in America—a decision intended to establish a sharp break with the Bush regime’s way of working—was the resolution to shut down the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010. This site has been one of the key locations, along with the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, that has led to the debilitation of America’s moral standing in the world, and has created a general derision at the purported aims of the “war on terror”.

As the world’s first democracy and, even today, the first among democracies, America has a certain responsibility, no matter how awesome its power, towards democratic norms. But as the philosopher and historian of ideas, Tzvetan Todorov, argues in his new book, Torture and the War on Terror, not only is the Bushian phrase “war on terror” a vague, dubious and scaremongering idea, it has succeeded, in contravention of generally accepted norms in the civilized world, in sanctioning unspeakable human rights violations upon detainees in the interest of “security”.

Todorov is concerned, like many other commentators, about the Bush administration's tactic of introducing euphemisms such as “illegal enemy combatant” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” to work its way around prevailing strictures against the use of torture to extract information from suspects (as glimpsed, for instance, in the line taken by the infamous "Torture Memo" of 2002, on which a comprehensive set of listings is here). He is also worried about the support extended to such practices by other governments in the free world. But he is distressed, most of all, by the recent change in the moral climate that has made ordinary citizens of democracies, like you and me, believe that torture is a worthwhile way of ensuring that our safety is defended.

A common hypothetical situation put forth by those who say torture is under some circumstances justified (and there are many “hawks” among democratic thinkers who subscribe to such views) is the “ticking bomb scenario”. A terrorist has been arrested; it is known he has planted a bomb somewhere. There is only one hour to find out where. The lives of thousands of citizens are at stake. In such a situation, would you not use the harshest methods to get the necessary information out of the detainee? If you say “no”, all too often you are assumed to be an unreasonable and lily-livered bleeding-heart.

But, argues Todorov, the situation involving most detainees on a charge of terrorism is far more prosaic than this cooked-up situation of high drama, and usually our own knowledge of what they may have plotted amounts to no more than a strong suspicion. Further, nothing proves that the information obtained under torture is actually true. As the third-degree methods used by policemen in India often prove, prisoners under duress will confess to pretty much anything you accuse them of. Intelligence obtained by subjecting a man or woman to intense stress or degradation is often not, to use the catchphrase, “actionable intelligence”. Too often, torture is about nothing but the exercise of absolute power of one human being over another.

Lastly, even if torture allows, in a small number of cases, the resolution of a short-term crisis, in the long run it does incalculable damage to the moral standing of nations, inflames hostility among adversaries, and makes the population of neutral countries unsympathetic to the cause. As the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat has written, “Torture aims for a single goal—obtaining information—but it achieves a slew of others.”

Citizens of democracies, notes Todorov, often criticize sharply the human rights violations of totalitarian regimes. But we should look closer home too, to see if we are not, by degrees, being turned into the very brutes that we so abhor. Even if we are not actually at fault ourselves, barbarous acts are being committed by governments we have elected, that claim to be acting in our interest. "institutionalized torture is even worse than individual torture," writes Todorov, "because it subverts the very foundation of the idea of justice and law. If the state itself becomes the torturer, how can we believe in the civil order that it claims to bring or to sanction?" There are no good reasons for torture, either on the count of utility or of morality. Todorov’s short, trenchant book is a reminder that we cannot be tough on terror without also, paradoxically, being tough on torture.

And some links: "Should We Fight Terror With Torture?" by Alan Dershowitz, "If Torture Works" by Michael Ignatieff", "Bush's Intellectual Torturers" by Todorov, "Does Torture Work?" by Edwidge Danticat, and "The Torture Myth" by Anne Applebaum.

Todorov's points also have great relevance closer to home. Custodial deaths in India are among the highest in any of the world's democracies, a sign of how far we have to go on respecting the rights of individuals and the rule of law. We are at the moment debating our own Prevention of Torture Bill, on which point you might want to read Neelabh Mishra's "Dismantle The Iron Maiden".

A reply to Hartosh Singh Bal

A reply to Hartosh Singh Bal's piece "Oh, For a Book to Ban" on the Open magazine website last week:

Hartosh, I'm one of the authors on the list you provide — a list you judge as not to your reading taste even though you have evidently not bothered to read a page of the work of any. I thank you at least for citing your friend's "strong recommendation" of my book Arzee the Dwarf, but despite having got off lighter than the others — for which gesture I am ever in your debt, for we novelists are calculating creatures — I think there may be a few things I want to say in response.

You begin with the banning of Rushdie's Satanic Verses two decades ago and declare: "Today you would be hard put to find Indian fiction in English that anybody would want banned." The banning of Satanic Verses was, it is generally agreed today, a foolish and knee-jerk action by the Indian government, and India remains one of the few countries where it is still illegal to sell the book. Despite the hysteria and controversy surrounding the book upon its publication, no western government thought it fit to ban it.

So it surprises me that an act of such randomness on the part of a government (and whatever the debate about what governments can or can't do, it's generally agreed they're not very good when it comes to judging fiction) should for you become the litmus test for judging the ambition of contemporary fiction. Had the Indian government not banned Satanic Verses (and this could easily have been the case), the book would still have been as good or bad as it is. Only you would then have had to actually read it to have anything to say about it, while now you at least know it was banned, and therefore is good.

Indeed, you don't seem that interested in quality issues, as if this is irrelevant in a work of fiction, even though you then quickly pass judgment on two "ambitious" Indian novels as not being good, because inauthentic. That is, you perversely insist that the ambitious Indian novels being published today are not well-written enough, while the "quiet, well-written books" — well, you won't even read them.

By your logic, were some mediocre novel critical of Hindu society were to be banned, say, by the Gujarat government, that would immediately become an ambitious novel that everyone should read. But only a PR agent would want to think this way about books. Frankly, such a stance is an insult to the entire endeavour of artistic creation. Our powers as writers are limited to realizing our imagined worlds as best as we can. We are not out to write bannable books so that you may read us, although I certainly agree it's a pleasant feeling to be banned and it helps sales in the long run (as your own argument proves).

Your standards for judging fiction seem peculiarly journalistic, as if all that fiction writers do is report true stories while changing the names here and there and adding bits of dialogue and chapter numbers. "As someone who has reported out of Bhopal for two years," you declare," I know that the person excised out of Indra Sinha’s book is the one who has done much of the work on the ground...." Was Animal's People a fact-finding commission? Is everyone who did "work on the ground" in a real-world scenario supposed to be given a starring role in a work of fiction?

You don't argue at any point, citing a specific passage or interpretative point of view in the book, that Sinha's depiction of Bhopal gas tragedy is flawed or manipulative. Your status as "someone who reported out of Bhopal for two years" is supposed to be enough to support your judgment. To judge a work of non-fiction, perhaps (though I would contest even this). But for a work of fiction? Is that all you need? Your problems with the book are actually a direct consequence of the problematic assumptions with which you begin -- assumptions I am surprised you hold, considering you've published a novel yourself (the subtitle of which was, if I recall right, A Mathematical Novel).

Also, may I point out that it is not just us fiction writers, but you non-fiction writers and reporters too who need to pull up your socks? It will not have escaped your notice that Jaswant Singh's book Jinnah, Partition and Independence was recently banned by the Gujarat government. In one swift and satanic leap, Jaswant Singh, despite his wooden prose style, has become the leading Indian non-fiction writer of his day. When can we novelists expect to see a ban-worthy work of comparable ambition and consequence by a journalist or professional non-fiction writer? We're tired of reading the "quiet, well-written" reports you guys are churning out by the dozen -- that's really not what journalism is about.

Lastly, I'm sorry to hear that you won't be reading Arzee the Dwarf (your smirking comment about "dwarves and eunuchs" suggests that you think group identity is the primary identity any individual or fictional character has). But please make sure then that you pre-book my forthcoming novel Love In The Time of Naxalism, which should be more to your taste. In fact, if you have reported on the Naxal movement, may I consult you on it? I promise I won't leave you out of the book (although I may be mischievous and compose a scene where you are shown actually reading a novel, page by page, pencil in hand).

Arzee the Dwarf in Hyderabad, and a roundup of interviews

I am reading from Arzee the Dwarf this Saturday in Crossword Bookstore, Hyderabad, and will be in conversation with the poet Sridala Swami. Here are the details of the event:

Saturday September 19, 5.30 pm
Crossword Bookstore,
City Center, 1st Floor, Shop No. 101-108,
Junction of Road No. 1 & 10,
Banjara Hills, Hyderabad - 500 034.

And one of the pleasures of the last three months has been the opportunity to speak about the book: a chance to answer questions instead of asking them, and to speak not just about my novel but about literature, classics, reading, and reviewing (and about writing this weblog). So I'm taking the opportunity to also put up a list of links to Arzee-related interviews in newspapers and journals, and on some weblogs. Here they are: the Hindu, the Deccan Herald (a longer version of this exchange is on Vinayak Varma's weblog), DNA, Rediff (this one seems to have made me plenty of fresh enemies), Book Nook and Scribbles and Stories.

If don't sound like the same person across these interviews (the only one for which I actually wrote answers is the penultimate one), this only shows, I think, that interviewers are also interpreters, and hear and transmit the rhythms of a person's voice differently from one another.

On Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

The writer Alain de Botton has, by middle age and across a series of books (How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy, The Art of Travel, Status Anxiety), more or less perfected a form of freewheeling, though not flabby, rumination upon a chosen subject. His work embraces, without limiting itself to the understood boundaries of, philosophy, autobiographical meditation, literary criticism and travel writing, generating a fluid and fertile compound of all these elements. The criticism that has sometimes been made of his writing is that it has too much synthesis, and can therefore be synthetic; the writer already knows so many impressive things that he sells himself short on original thought and legwork. But that is not an objection that can be made about de Botton's new book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

De Botton has set out to write “a hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace”. His book is also an investigative report into our highly industrialized, synchronized and globalized civilization. As de Botton says, we live our days surrounded by machines and processes “of which we have only the loosest grasp”. Is specialization of labour making for a life of dignity, increased prosperity, and independence, or are we being turned invisibly into cogs in the wheel, alienated, as Marx argued, not just from the very goods and services we produce but also from each other? What is the ever-expanding reach of the hyperbolic language of advertising and PR-speak doing to language itself, to our capacity to trust in words? What is globalization doing to our awareness of the local and its specific rhythms? These are some of the questions taken up by de Botton.

Armed with a photographer (the book has about a hundred black-and-white photographs), de Botton sets out to explore activities as diverse as fishing in the Maldives and cargo shipping, career counselling and entrepreneurship. His study of supermarkets suggests to him that, even as our access to goods from around the world has grown enormously, our understanding of their origins and history has shrunk. “We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods," he remarks, "as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.”

Certainly there is plenty of wonder in de Botton’s narration. Here he is on that most unromantic of places, the industrial warehouse:

If only security concerns were not so paramount in the imagination of its owners, the warehouse would make a perfect tourist destination, for observing the movement of lorries and products in the middle of the night induces a mood of distinctive tranquillity, it magically stills the demands of the ego and corrects any danger of looming too large in one's own imagination. That we are each surrounded by millions of other human beings remains a piece of inert and unevocative data, failing to dislodge us from a self-centred day-to-day perspective, until we take a look at a stack of ten thousand ham-and-mustard sandwiches, all wrapped in identical plastic casings, assembled in a factory in Hull, made out of the same flawless cottony-white bread, and due to be eaten over the coming two days by an extraordinary range of fellow citizens which these sandwiches promptly urge us to make space for in our inwardly focused imaginations.

Sitting in the cockpit of a commercial plane, de Botton notes how the open sky is revealed, through the flight instruments, “as a lattice of well-marked lanes, intersections, lay-bys, junctions and beacon signals”—it is almost like a road. Following a painter who has spent years in a wheat field in England “repeatedly painting the same oak tree under a range of different lights and weathers”, de Botton comes to the conclusion that “there is an impractical side to human nature, particularly open to making sacrifices for the sake of creating objects that are more graceful and intelligent than we normally manage to be.” At a biscuit manufacturing company, he learns the British biscuit market is technically divided into five categories of biscuit, and does not know whether to be amused or distressed by one high executive’s contention that “biscuits are nowadays a branch of psychology, not cooking”. Of course, the same could be said today about many other consumer goods.

De Botton is by no means a Luddite or killjoy. He is willing to believe, and frequently attests to the fact that human invention and initiative is praiseworthy and on occasion beautiful. What he wants to do is engage with, or recover the possibility of, attitudes and processes related to labour which once existed but to which we may have now become oblivioys. If working and loving are the two most significant activities in life, it might be said that de Botton wants work to contain within itself the possibility of transcendence just as love does.

And here is a recent essay by de Botton on the lack of engagement with the working lives of people in contemporary fiction, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Data-Entry Supervisor". De Botton claims: "It used to be a central ambition of novelists to capture the experience of working life. From Balzac to Zola, Dickens to Kafka, they evoked the dynamism and the beauty, the horror and the tedium of the workplace." But I would be less certain of this kind of distinction than he is. Indeed, the criticism that he makes of contemporary writers vis-a-vis Balzac, Dickens, etc, is, in fact, the very criticism that George Orwell makes very powerfully of Dickens himself in his splendid essay "Charles Dickens":

Dickens has no difficulty in introducing the common motives, love, ambition, avarice, vengeance and so forth. What he does not noticeably write about, however, is work. [...]
In Dickens's novels anything in the nature of work happens off-stage. The only one of his heroes who has a plausible profession is David Copperfield, who is first a shorthand writer and then a novelist, like Dickens himself. With most of the others, the way they earn their living is very much in the background.[...]
Dickens sees human beings with the most intense vividness, but sees them always in private life, as ‘characters’, not as functional members of society; that is to say, he sees them statically. [...] As soon as he tries to bring his characters into action, the melodrama begins. He cannot make the action revolve round their ordinary occupations; hence the crossword puzzle of coincidences, intrigues, murders, disguises, buried wills, long-lost brothers, etc. etc. [...]
With the doubtful exception of David Copperfield (merely Dickens himself), one cannot point to a single one of his central characters who is primarily interested in his job. His heroes work in order to make a living and to marry the heroine, not because they feel a passionate interest in one particular subject. Martin Chuzzlewit, for instance, is not burning with zeal to be an architect; he might just as well be a doctor or a barrister. The feeling ‘This is what I came into the world to do. Everything else is uninteresting. I will do this even if it means starvation’, which turns men of differing temperaments into scientists, inventors, artists, priests, explorers and revolutionaries — this motif is almost entirely absent from Dickens's books. He himself, as is well known, worked like a slave and believed in his work as few novelists have ever done. But there seems to be no calling except novel-writing (and perhaps acting) towards which he can imagine this kind of devotion.

One might apply Orwell's observation that "Dickens never writes about agriculture and writes endlessly about food" all the way back to de Botton, though, and say that is is precisely this gulf in the awareness of production as compared to consumption that he is trying to bridge in his book.

Last, here are two essays on Indian writers (both published this year, one in English and the other in translation) who have written with insight about the life of manual labour and of petty trading respectively: Mridula Koshy and Sankar.

Things I've Been Reading

Some essays, interviews, and transcripts I've been reading recently:

"Markets and Morals" by Michael Sandel, a transcript of the first of the BBC's Reith Lectures for 2009. Sandel's argument is about how, without realising it, we may have "drifted from having a market economy to being a market society", and about all the things in life that are only cheapened by trying to understand them through an (increasingly pervasive and acceptable) economistic logic. Sandel, who teaches a popular course on justice at Harvard University, is also the author of a new book called Justice.

"My Father", an arresting essay by the American writer Leonard Michaels, whose Collected Essays have just been brought out in America by FSG. ("Six days a week he rose early, dressed, ate breakfast alone, put on his hat, and walked to his barbershop at 207 Henry Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, about half a mile from our apartment. He returned after dark. The family ate dinner together on Sundays and Jewish holidays. Mainly he ate alone. I don’t remember him staying home from work because of illness or bad weather. He took few vacations. Once we spent a week in Miami and he tried to enjoy himself, wading into the ocean, being brave, stepping inch by inch into the warm blue unpredictable immensity. Then he slipped. In water no higher than his pupik, he came up thrashing, struggling back up the beach on skinny white legs. “I nearly drowned,” he said, very exhilarated. ")

A conversation between Philip Roth and the Irish writer Edna O'Brien, which is also the first of the interviews with writers collected in Roth's excellent book Shop Talk ("I think it is different being a man and a woman, it is very different . I think you as a man have waiting for you in the wings of the world a whole cortege of women - potential wives, mistresses, muses, nurses. Women writers do not have that bonus. The examples are numerous, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Emily Dickinson, Marina Tsvetayeva . I think it was Dashiell Hammett who said he wouldn't want to live with a woman who had more problems than himself. I think the signals men get from me alarm them.")

"Not A Gentle Kind of Zen", an essay by the cricketer Ed Smith on the footballer Zinedine Zidane. ("For an intimate study of ‘Federer’ at work, watch the film Zidane – a 21st Century Portrait. I had approached the film with some trepidation as I didn’t expect to be much bothered about a real-time replay of the match between Real Madrid and Villarreal on 23rd April 2005.How wrong I was. It is the best insight into the mind and movement of a great sportsman I have ever experienced in any medium. Seventeen synchronized cameras focused exclusively on Zidane throughout the match. The film, which follows the first kick to the last, takes us not only onto the pitch, but also into the imaginative world of a great player in the final chapter of his career.") An essay on this film by Manohla Dargis, a film critic I enjoy reading greatly, is here.

An interview with the poet and critic Clive Wilmer ("Poetry is inherent in language, so all language is potential poetry. Language as we speak it has all the characteristics of poetry: rhythm, music, richness of meaning, analytical and critical qualities. By being a poet one is foregrounding what is already in language. One is trying to take the potential of the language and make it manifest....While you are in love with language, you also have to be in love with what is beyond language. Language is, in a sense, an attempt to take possession of the world. A lot of what I write is an attempt to take hold of what I love but can’t really have.")

And last, an interview with the philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, who makes a number of subtle and stimulating observations over the course of 25 pages ("The most fruitful intellectual encounters are not those in which you are in total disagreement with the other person. A dialogue, to pick up a hackneyed term, is situated somewhere between war and perfect harmony; if different voices merge into one or if they fight each other tooth and nail, their plurality brings no enrichment. I’ve learned the most from authors with whom I could peacefully travel a certain distance before they lead me off in an unknown direction. When you’re three-quarters in agreement and a quarter in disagreement, the latter becomes the starting point of keener,more nuanced thinking. And when you have that many things in common, you have no desire to engage in a head-on confrontation anymore.") Todorov is also the author of Facing The Extreme: Moral Life In The Concentration Camps and, most recently, Torture and the War On Terror, which I'm reading right now.

Indian poetry in Mint Lounge

If you haven't noticed thus far (or simply don't read the paper), Mint Lounge now has a space for poetry on the books page every Saturday.

Although it is, for now, only a small space – down in the bottom-right corner, enough for about a sonnet or a bit longer – the idea is to provide a room for the best Indian poets of today to declaim from. Today's poem, "War Poetry", is by Aseem Kaul, and here is last week's poem by Anjum Hasan, "Distant Gods":

Distant Gods
by Anjum Hasan

When the bombs go off and there is blood all over the TV,
he'll be sitting in some human corner of the world,
drinking his tea, stunned by the impersonal reach
of his act, just as you are by how far this screaming thing
has travelled - translated by distance into helplessness
at being dumb witness again to the guts-spilled-open
suffering of random strangers.

And this is how we realise the world's grown-up -
by knowing that the act of twisting a knife
inside the warm heart of your enemy on a summer night
is far too local a measure of your loathing, while to kill people
you do not know and will never see is to speak a language
of the universe that can be relayed on the TV.


And an old post: "Anjum Hasan and the Indian Shakespeare". And some old posts on poets: Wislawa Szymborska, Constantine Cavafy, Dunya Mikhail and Osip Mandelstam.