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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
A film may be in the news for all the wrong reasons, but physician-author Abraham Verghese’s Kerala story is already getting praise for his 700-page sweeping saga about a Christian family in Kerala spanning eight decades. Medicine – his first love – history, culture, family and love form the themes of his new novel, The Covenant of Water (Penguin). In an interview with Stanley Carvalho, he says the idea for the book came from a wonderful manuscript his mother had written about growing up in Kerala and that it gave him the confidence to set it there.
“I’d love it if the reader took away a sense of identifying with the characters and resonating with their lives and struggles.” Asked about the recent trend of rewriting books to purge them of offensive words, Verghese says he objects to censorship in any form unless it is truly inciting violence. He calls the erasing of wrongs of history in the name of political correctness a “disturbing trend”, and says banning books is not the answer. “If you don’t like it, don’t read it.”
In other news, the Pulitzer Prizes have been announced, and this year, there are two winners for Fiction – Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, a reworking of Dickens’ David Copperfield set in rural America in the grip of an opioid crisis, and Hernan Diaz’s Trust, the story of a rich couple of New York in the roaring 1920s and the competing strands of how they reached the top of the wealth heap. Vauhini Vara’s The Immortal King Rao was a finalist. Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa’s His Name is George Floyd won a Pulitzer for best Non-Fiction.
There was another exciting books scoop last week, with The Guardian reporting that an unpublished Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel (En Agosto Nos Vemos/See You in August) will be published next year. The writer of novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera passed away in 2014, leaving behind a manuscript, which his sons now think should be made available to readers. The novel has outstanding aspects of Gabo’s – as Marquez is called – work, they said: ”…his capacity for invention, the poetry of language, the captivating narrative, his understanding of the human being and his affection for his experiences and misfortunes, especially in love, possibly the main theme of all his work.”
In reviews this week, we read K.G. Kannabiran’s memoir, Syeda Imam’s love stories, a perspective on P.V. Narasimha’s Rao’s policies and more. We also talk to Kerala’s former health minister K.K. Shailaja about her memoir, and have a special on Rabindranath Tagore’s 162nd birth anniversary.
Books of the week
The Speaking Constitution: A Sisyphean Life in Law (HarperCollins) is an adapted translation of the Telugu memoirs of K.G. Kannabiran, one of the foremost civil rights lawyers in independent India’s history. The title of the book, says the reviewer Gautam Bhatia, provides us with a sense of the two poles that it straddles: on the one hand, the “Sisyphean” character of civil rights practice in India, an enterprise that can often feel akin to pushing a boulder up a hill a thousand times without ever reaching the top; and on the other, despite all of this, to continue in the endeavour to make the Constitution “speak”, so that its potential can be truly realised. “In his long career, Kannabiran was actively involved in cases that covered the entire spectrum of the civil rights movement in India. The memoir reflects that. Here, we have reflections about the Emergency, the culture of “encounter killings”, capital punishment, the Parliament attack case, the Fifth and Sixth Schedule, labour union movements, and so much more. The book is arranged chronologically and thematically, thus providing – through Kannabiran’s eyes – an invaluable history of the civil rights movement, both in the courtroom and out of it.”
Syeda Imam’s book, Like Fine Wine (Roli Books), is a collection of nine monographs of “real, rare love stories.” Each monograph on couples who have been in love and married to each other for decades stands out in its uniqueness, says the reviewer Natasha Badhwar. Among other, Imam writes about the private moments that were the glue in the relationship between superstar actress Sharmila Tagore and Mansur Ali Khan, the dashing cricketer and Nawab of Pataudi; “we read about Viswanathan Anand and Aruna and marvel at how well the pieces of their puzzle seem to complete each other. Dr. Karan Singh’s marriage of 50 years to Asha who had grown up as Yashodhara Rajya Lakshmi, a princess in Nepal, is special precisely because the friendship and camaraderie they share is so familiar to anyone who has witnessed the comfort of long-time love. Meera Saluja and Muzaffar Ali, both artists in their own right, have lived rich and exciting lives before they met, yet their destinies are magnetically drawn to each other.” Real lives are complex, writes Badhwar, and Imam does not shy away from the pain, conflict and confusion that is also an integral part of love stories, like the narrative on Leila Matkar and David Lean.
Review of Syeda Imam’s Like Fine Wine — Nine Real, Rare Love Stories: All about love
In India’s Tipping Point: The View from 7 Race Course Road (Bloomsbury), P.V. Narasimha Rao’s information adviser, S. Narendra, gives a ringside view of the rollout of India’s economic reforms that would subsequently lead to India becoming the world’s fifth largest economy. A career civil servant, Narendra writes about the goings-on in the corridors of power when the reforms were being formulated. The reviewer, Saleem Rashid, writes that the author delves deep into the nitty-gritties of Rao’s government that was also mired in scams and controversies. “On the Ram Mandir-Babri Masjid issue, Rao believed that he was made a ‘scapegoat’ by everyone involved in the government and the political decision-making on the dispute. The unsteady political atmosphere that followed the demolition forced the government to slow down the pace of economic reforms.” A gripping account of his years as Rao’s information adviser, Narendra sheds light on many key events and the internecine rivalries and politics that Rao had to encounter.
Review of S. Narendra’s India’s Tipping Point — The View from 7 Race Course Road: Big-bang reform
Spotlight
K.K Shailaja
In Kerala’s former health minister K.K. Shailaja’s new book, My Life as a Comrade (Juggernaut), co-written with Manju Sara Rajan, she writes about the course of her life that started in a small settlement in Malabar and eventually led her to a Cabinet position in the State government. In her profile/interview, Veena Venugopal writes that Shailaja explains her career as a series of small steps, starting as a party worker, a teacher by day, a social activist in the evening, until the Communist Party bestowed her a ticket to fight the 1996 Assembly election that she won. When she became health minister in 2016, it was a difficult time for the State, ravaged by floods and disease. The first big health crisis came in 2018 with the Nipah virus and “Shailaja plunged deep into it, building a multi-skilled team around her, looking at every aspect of fighting the outbreak, from containment to communication.” When COVID-19 hit, the Kerala health ministry had a plan ready. Asked why doesn’t she call herself a feminist despite upending gender conventions, she said: “I am a feminist, but I am not a radical feminist. True feminism is equality, a comradely relationship and the ability to live with dignity. Radical feminism is the freedom to be anything or do anything. Freedom should be compatible with society.”
Teacher to rockstar | K.K. Shailaja on her new book ‘My Life as a Comrade’
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- Seema Alavi’s Sovereigns of the Sea (Allen Lane) is an account of the Sultans of Oman, their battles and expeditions in the 19th century, and how they held sway over the politics of the Western Indian Ocean, West and South Asia, challenging a Eurocentric narrative.
- With its focus on gender justice, In the Body of a Woman: Essays on Law, Gender and Society (Simon & Schuster India) studies the judicial system and explains why institutional responses need to be strengthened to sort out issues faced by women. The writer, Aaliya Waziri, pushes for gender-sensitive lawmaking in a patriarchal society.
- Manohar Shetty’s Borderlines (Copper Coin) is his ninth book of poetry, and the verses range from elegies on nature and its pristine beauty to the relationship between people and animals. He devotes a section to the coronavirus and its all-encompassing effects.
- When police detective Aaron Falk goes to visit an old friend, it happens to mark the one-year anniversary of a young woman’s disappearance. Before he knows it, Falk’s holiday is upended, and he is thrown into an avalanche of suspense in Jane Harper’s Exiles (Macmillan).
