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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
The International Booker Prize for 2023 has been awarded to Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, translated by Angela Rodel. Accepting the Prize, he said, “As long as you are telling a story, you are still alive,” and then sounded a clarion call to fellow writers: “Keep telling your stories!” Describing his ambitious novel, he said it was about “memory and time, the flood of the past and the weaponisation of nostalgia.” Leila Slimani, the Morocco-born novelist who chaired the jury, praised Time Shelter as a “great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future, where the past is reinvented and nostalgia is a poison.” The novel showcases a “clinic of the past” offering a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers with each floor reproducing a decade in minute detail, taking patients back in time. As the rooms become more convincing, even healthy patients seek out the clinic as a ‘time shelter’ to escape the horrors of the present; and there are consequences when the past invades the present. Though Ukraine was not mentioned, it was obviously on everyone’s minds with Gospodinov saying, “In the time of war, there is an obligation to tell the story from the side under attack.”
In reviews, we read about the Oxford School of Philosophy, a father’s journey to make a love warrior out of his son who is diagnosed with autism, Smriti Ravindra’s well-received debut novel about “the woman who climbed trees”, the International Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, Whale, and more.
Books of the Week
View of the Radcliffe Camera (the library reading room) and neighbouring colleges at Oxford.
In A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-60 (Profile Books), Nikhil Krishnan appraises the work and times of philosophers like Gilbert Ryle, J.L. Austin, Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch and others responsible for the growth of linguistic (or analytic) philosophy which abhorred metaphysics or anything obscure and unprovable. Krishnan tells Suresh Menon that he was “improved morally and spiritually by my immersion in the philosophy of this period,” referring to 1900-1960, which saw the rise of the Oxford school, the period he deals with in his book. Ryle, the oldest of the group, dismissed Plato’s forms and sought instead a new form of words that would clarify rather than confuse. Later he would dismiss the body-mind dualism of Descartes. Those who followed him – A.J. Ayer (“the wickedest man in Oxford”), Philippa Foot, R.M. Hare were thus given a platform to build on, even if it wasn’t a single monolithic structure but one that reflected Ryle’s pronouncement that analysis was the proper business of philosophy. Austin took Ryle a step further, arguing that words we use most often are not so much descriptive as “performative”. We “do things with words,” which are thus not something inert but have kinetic energy. As Krishnan says, Oxford philosophy didn’t have “shared doctrines”, but “particular virtues it aspired to embody.”
Nikhil Krishnan’s ‘A Terribly Serious Adventure — Philosophy at Oxford 1900-60’
I Have Autism and I Like to Play Good Bad Tennis (Westland) is, on one level, a journal of a father, Debashis Paul, who reminisces about his journey with his son, Noel, who was diagnosed to be on the autism spectrum at an early age. But, as the reviewer Nalini Ramachandran points out, its layered narrative shows that the book is much more than just that—“it is a celebration of life itself, a reiteration of familial bonds, a humble request for inclusivity, an attempt to alter the general view of autism, and most importantly, a handy guide to parents of neurodiverse as well as neurotypical children.”
May being Mental Health Awareness Month, Soma Basu writes an essay on how to cope in the age of anxiety by tracing the work of writers and psychologists who have tried to explore the relationship between diagnosis and treatment. “The good thing is that there are scientific research-based books available on mental health, like Kimberley Wilson’s How to Build a Healthy Brain: Reduce Stress, Anxiety and Depression and Future-Proof Your Brain, that can be a useful way to process one’s own experiences, learn about psychology, and find techniques that could help in day-to-day life.” Besides, there are several books by authors to help differentiate between anxiety and stress. Mumbai -based clinical psychologist Sonali Gupta offers empathetic guidance to identify anxiety as a mental health crisis and how it is triggered at work, in relationships and by social media. Her book Anxiety: Overcome it and Live without Fear highlights multiple case studies. Another book, Age of Anxiety: How To Cope by Amrita Tripathi and Kamna Chhibber, also explains how to distinguish between anxiety as “an attack of the nerves” or something that will come and go, and anxiety as a disorder, which will need treatment. The conversations are pertinent in the backdrop of the pandemic and prolonged periods of social isolation.
Mental health awareness month: how to cope in the age of anxiety
It’s almost 20 years since Cheon Myeong-kwan achieved instant recognition in South Korea with his debut novel. Translated into English by Chi-Young Kim, Whale (Europa Editions), a rollercoaster of a novel about Geumbok, her verbally-challenged but imaginative daughter Chunhui and several other women and their lives in Korean society, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023. In her review, Geeta Doctor writes that the narrative, despite the tidal wave of misfortune that engulf the characters, is not a victim narrative, nor does it blame the barbarians at the gate. “It looks within. What it reveals is a valley filled with wild flowers and the promise of a scented breeze filling the air with the enchantment of stories.”
Review | Korean author Cheon Myeong-kwan’s International Booker shortlisted ‘Whale’
Read the reviews of two other books on the International Booker Prize shortlist here:
Review of GauZ’s Standing Heavy: Doubly invisible
Review of Eva Baltasar’s Boulder: Love as a rock
Spotlight
Smriti Ravindra
Blending everyday stories about household chores, ghost stories, myths and folktales, Smriti Ravindra’s debut novel, The Woman Who Climbed Trees, takes readers into the heart of a social world in which women exist mainly to fulfil men’s needs – and how women navigate their space. Meena is 14 years old when her parents marry her off to Manmohan, a 21-year-old Nepali boy she has never met and who studies in Kathmandu. Meena embraces the home and identity of her husband’s family in the village. The story is about how Meena learns to survive “the loneliness of marriage.” In an interview to Sumana Ramanan, Ravindra points out that Meena’s outlet is not that unconventional. “She tries to initiate a relationship, emotional and physical, with her sister-in-law, and loses her friendship.” Asked how she could vividly capture Meena’s mental state who descends into insanity, Ravindra says, “I come from a family of mad women. This is not genetic; it is environmental. Wonderful, vivacious, colourful women made mad by the oppression of demands and lovelessness. We are stingy with our love for women and excel at crazing them.”
Interview | Smriti Ravindra on her debut novel ‘The Woman Who Climbed Trees’
- The writings and speeches of thinkers such as Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghosh, Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, B.R. Ambedkar and others show that the pursuit of freedom was both individual and political, argues Dennis Dalton in Indian Ideas of Freedom (Harper).
- David Grann (of Killers of the Flower Moon fame) is out with his new book, The Wager (Simon & Schuster), which tells the story of survivors of a British ship that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain.
- Begum Hazrat Mahal: Warrior Queen of Awadh (Niyogi Books) by Malathi Ramachandran is a fictional saga depicting the dramatic events leading up to the 1857 uprising and the role of Begum Hazrat Mahal as she fought to defend her state and its throne for her young son Birjis Ali.
- Rimli Sengupta’s novel, A Lost People’s Archive (Aleph), is the story of two neighbours, Noni and Shishu, who meet as children in Patuakhali town in East Bengal in 1922 and what happens when their paths diverge after Partition.
