Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
Can literature mend lives? In bleak times, what role do writers play? With Ukraine battling a mightier power, we are reading several Ukrainian writers who through their fiction have brought out the issues playing out in Eastern Europe, its virtues, flaws, frequent battles, and how ghosts of the past inform the present. Serhiy Zhadan’s novel, The Orphanage (Yale University Press), translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler in 2021, is a story of the cost of war. A city in eastern Ukraine is invaded and becomes part of occupied territory – an uncle, a language teacher, sets out to rescue his nephew from an orphanage there. As Pasha leaves home, where he stays with his father, there’s an eerie silence all around, broken only by the sound of the television, “their very own eternal flame, burning to commemorate the dead, rather than entertaining the living.” Outside, as the bus he is travelling on nears a checkpost, all hell breaks loose with soldiers all around. Pasha realises he has forgotten his papers, an unforgivable lapse. There’s chaos – and hunger -- in the air; “you just want to keep sitting there with your eyes closed and count to a hundred, until all the monsters around you recede.” During his three-day journey to get to his nephew in the city under siege, he is overwhelmed, at the scars wars leave, the dead and injured, burning tanks and the feeling of despair and incommunicable fear. The other contemporary novel by a Ukrainian we are reading is Grey Bees (Hachette) by Andrey Kurkov. Translated from the Russian – yes, he is Ukrainian but writes in Russian – by Boris Dralyuk, it tells the story of Sergeyich, a disabled pensioner and devoted beekeeper, who knows he must leave the Donbas region if he wants his bees to find pollen. It takes him to Crimea where a whole new ordeal awaits, endangering his “beloved bees.” The poignant story is another reminder, if any was needed, of the “bitter aftertaste of gunpowder” that war leaves behind.
In reviews, we read a book on data and the stories numbers tell, palm oil’s curse on the environment, the making of Satya and how it changed the Mumbai gangster genre, Annie Zaidi’s new novel and more.
Books of the week
In Whole Numbers and Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell us About Modern India (Context/Westland Books), Rukmini S., with data from India’s “vast and impressive” statistical architecture — government, the Census, the National Statistical Office numbers and other entities -- and highly regarded private institutions, attempts to narrate “stories numbers tell.” Shattering several myths, the writer gives insights on how India votes, how India eats, prays, enjoys, loves, marries, how much money Indians make and how they spend it and several other interesting behaviour patterns. “For instance, we genuinely think that this is a fast urbanising society. All young people are aspirational, caste differences are disappearing. But the truth is complex and nuanced. Every chapter makes us look at the country with different eyes, says the reviewer Sushila Ravindranath. “’In God we trust. All others must bring data,’ said Edwards Deming. In our diverse country, nothing is what it seems and the reality is messy. For anybody who wants to understand and unite the country, Whole Numbers… is essential reading.”
Having insinuated itself into every facet of our lives over the past few decades, palm oil alone counts for one-third of total global vegetable oil consumption. But far from being a boon to the world economy, the multi-billion dollar palm oil business has been a bane, argues Jocelyn Zuckerburg in Planet Palm (Hurst & Co.). “Our growing appetite has worsened the situation -- more forests are cleared for new plantations, forcible evictions have escalated human sufferings; and enhanced carbon emissions remain the resultant outcome.” In his review, Sudhirendar Sharma says Zuckerman unearths palm oil’s troubled colonial legacy to draw a parallel with its current fetishism, promoted by ruthless industrialisation of modern food systems. “The story of palm oil is the story of colonialism, which is sinister in its present-day design involving armed gangsters, murderous executives, and corrupt politicians.”
Annie Zaidi’s City of Incident (Aleph) is a novel composed of 12 interconnected vignettes set in an unnamed city clearly identifiable with Mumbai. All the ‘incidents’ happen in or around the city’s railway line, in stillness or speed, says Gautam Bhatia in his review. They are told through 12 different eyes: policeman, salesgirl, bank teller, wood-worker, housewife, beggar and others. “They concern the warp and weft of the fabric of urban existence: half-meaningful encounters in the train, different social classes awkwardly rubbing up against each other, the tedium of daily routine, ennui, abandonment, loathing, delay, desire and death.” Zaidi’s characters, says Bhatia, are haunted by all the futures that have been denied to them, futures which they can only grope around for a language to imagine.”
Spotlight
Damodar Mauzo at the Kerala Literature Festival in Kozhikode. | Photo Credit: S. Ramesh Kurup
Damodar Mauzo, the outspoken Konkani writer from Goa, has been given the 57th Jnanpith Award. The 77-year-old writer, who spent many years running a shop, has been a part of Goa’s contemporary roller-coaster history, having fought for its statehood and the constitutional recognition of Konkani. Winner of the Sahitya Akademi award for his 1981 novel Karmelin, Mauzo has written two other novels, short stories, essays and criticisms. In an interview with Stanley Carvalho, Mauzo says what he writes is based on reality, but his characters are imaginary. “I may twist stories a bit to make them believable, so in that sense it is fictionalised.” He rues the fact that though writers across Goa’s borders are doing an excellent job in enriching Konkani literature, their works are not being translated and Konkani lacks popular and government support. “But I am optimistic about the future,” he says.
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- With technology arguably the next big shaper of geopolitics in the world, Anirudh Suri provides a framework that will determine the ability of a nation to succeed in this tech-dominant era. He lays out a roadmap for how any country must develop its own strategic plan for success in The Great Tech Game: Shaping Geopolitics and the Destinies of Nations (HarperCollins).
- The question of weaning rebels away from extremist groups is significant in counterinsurgency and in working towards ending insurgencies. In Farewell to Arms: How Rebels Retire Without Getting Killed (OUP), Rumela Sen goes to the rebels and breaks down the protracted process of retirement into a multi-staged journey as they see it.
- Twelve people accompany an anthropologist to a deserted island, cutting off relations with the outside world. There they are not to use any known language and must begin anew. Three of the 13 survive to tell the tale in Alpha by T.D. Ramakrishnan, translated by Priya K. Nair (Macmillan).
- In Ananya Mukherjee’s An Unborn Desire (Rupa), a happy young man challenges a past-life regression therapist; an old artist of abstract paintings rediscovers inspiration; a woman from Cape Town makes a journey to Istanbul and Prague in the hope of self-discovery, and more.
That is all for this week. We look forward to hearing from you, be it about this newsletter, our reading list, your literary queries or the book you are reading now. You can find us at www.thehindu.com/books and on Facebook and Twitter at @TheHinduBooks.
