Is there a way to map internal human weather? Turbulent or calm, sunny or rainy, hot or cold? Literary magazine Granta probes into the ‘state of mind’ in its summer edition, number 140, but can this fluid, shifting, moody inner space be defined or understood? As publisher and editor Sigrid Rausing writes in her introduction: “What’s in a state of mind? How do we describe emotions, or the complex relationship between individuals and the state?...”
Siri Hustvedt tries to understand what caused the “seemingly telepathic communication” with her husband, the American writer Paul Auster. In a sublime peek into Auster territory, she writes, “I have been living with the same person for thirty-six years. I cannot read this man’s mind. He has anterooms in his personality I strongly suspect I have never seen. Mysteries abound.” Yet, she says, time has “produced an uncanny mental mirroring between us,” so much so that a story triggers an “immediate, identical association” in both with each of them able to anticipate what the other is thinking and will say. “The winds rise, and the clouds begin to move, and the sun comes out at just at the same time in two heads rather than one.”
The Korean writer, Han Kang, who won the 2016 Man Booker International prize for her novel The Vegetarian , describes her baby sister in ‘State of Mind: White’. The girl, who died in less than two hours into life, had a face, her mother told her, as “white as a crescent-moon rice cake.” Later, when Han Kang helped shape those rice cakes, “so lovely they do not seem of this world,” she understood what her mother meant and mourned her “startlingly pristine” sister once more.
The lead essay is ‘Notes on a Suicide’ by British-Indian novelist Rana Dasgupta, who tries to unravel “the mystery of Oceane, the young Frenchwoman from the outskirts of Paris, Polish-Turkish by origin, who live-streamed her suicide on Periscope, a social media platform.” She was 19 when she died. Other motley pieces round up a collection, that besides unlocking minds tries to understand how much human beings rely on each other for survival.
For clues, we go looking into Penelope Lively’s bookshelves ‘Books do Furnish a Room’; learn more about Cairo and the “political repression” from Jack Shenker in ‘Coming Home to the Counter-Revolution’; enjoy a football tournament, the Writers’ World Cup, hosted by the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, “a country that doesn’t exist”; and watch the small world of the individual and the big world outside collide in journalist Charles Glass’ meeting with an ISIS fighter in custody.
Granta 140: State of Mind ; Granta, ₹799.
