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Four Irish writers and four debut writers dominate the Booker Prize longlist for 2023 which was announced on Tuesday. The ‘Booker Dozen,’ a longlist of 13 novels, includes an Irish contingent, led by novelist Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time (about a retired policeman who is put on a case which triggers the past), Elaine Feeney’s How to Build a Boat, a tender story on how a boy brings a community together, Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, a story told around a character building a post-apocalypse bunker, and Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song about a society in decline. Others on the list include Nigeria-born Ayobami Adebayo’s second novel A Spell of Good Things (a story of two families which also captures the tumult of modern Nigeria), Kenya-born, London-based writer Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane, a coming-of-age tale about a squash-playing protagonist, Gopi, and Malaysia-born writer Tan Twan Eng’s third novel, The House of Doors, which is set in 1921 in the shadow of Empire. The debut writers on the list include Viktoria Lloyd Barlow for All the Little Bird-Hearts, Sian Hughes’ Pearl, besides Maroo and Jonathan Escoffery (If I Survive You). The jury comprises novelist Esi Edugyan as chair, actors Adjoa Andoh and Robert Webb, James Shapiro and poet Mary Jean Chan. Edugyan said “all 13 novels cast new light on what it means to exist in our time, and they do so in original and thrilling ways.” The shortlist of six books will be announced on September 21 and the Booker Prize winner will be named on November 26.
In reviews, we read a book on the history of cheetahs in India, a collection of essays by Tibetan writers, two early translations of Geetanjali Shree and the book that inspired Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Oppenheimer. We also pay tribute to Devaki Nilayamgode whose memoir is an important social document.
Books of the week
The Story of India’s Cheetahs (Marg Books) by Divyabhanusinh has been re-issued, and comes at a time where there’s a debate whether the once-extinct wild cat will be able to make a home in India again. Last September, two batches of cheetahs arrived in India from Africa, but since this February, they have in the news for all the wrong reasons. So far, five of the translocated cheetahs have succumbed to ailments, injury, in-fighting; three of the first litter of four born in India also died from malnutrition and the scorching summer at Kuno National Park. The big debate around the future of cheetahs is whether the deaths are entirely from natural causes – as the government wildlife experts insist – or whether prescribed scientific management techniques aren’t being applied to improve the cheetahs’ odds of survival, as critics point out. It is amidst this swirling controversy that naturalist and wildlife enthusiast, Divyabhanusinh’s 1995 book, The End of a Trail: The Cheetah in India, has been updated and released. The Story of India’s Cheetahs, says the reviewer Jacob Koshy. is an expansive, exquisitely illustrated and citation-rich account of the cheetah’s history in India.”
Review of Divyabhanusinh’s The Story of India’s Cheetahs: A spotted history
In a new collection, The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays (Penguin), poet and writer Tenzin Dickie has brought together a group of Tibetan writers who reflect on a shared sense of loss and the perpetual search for home. “To speak as Tibetans and to write as Tibetans, is to continually recreate the Tibetan nation,” he writes. Tibet for most is an open wound which refuses to close, with writers either talking about occupation or exile or both. In his review, Ananth Krishnan writes that the collection goes beyond the occupation-exile binary and paints a layered portrait of what it means to be in exile. It also has valuable voices from inside China. Lhashamgyal writes from Beijing that exile isn’t only about geography and is a state of mind that consumes even those still in China. Lhasa is only a flight away, but still remains out of reach: “The home that they so dream of recedes to such a distance that return becomes impossible and this is the great tragedy of the exile.”
Review of Tenzin Dickie’s The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays: The tragedy of exile
Geetanjali Shree | Photo Credit: Thulasi Kakkat
Two early novels published some years before Tomb of Sand, which won the International Booker Prize for 2022, have been re-issued though they had been translated into English soon after their Hindi originals were out. While The Roof Beneath Their Feet (Tirohit/2001) is, among other things, about desire (sometimes unfulfilled), The Empty Space (Khali Jagah/2006) is about a son who has died young, with the mother attempting to fill that loss with a surrogate son, the father continuing to grieve and the surrogate son bearing the brunt of it all. In his review, Harish Trivedi writes that both the novels deal with one theme each, unlike Tomb of Sand, which is “a triple-decker” with a disjunct theme taken up in each successive part. “The rather less evolved Geetanjali that we see in these two novels may thus prove to be a friendlier point of entry,” says Trivedi.
Two early novels of Geetanjali Shree, before the International Booker-winning ‘Tomb of Sand’
The primary inspiration for British director Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Oppenheimer, is American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biography traces the rise and fall of Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb”, a brilliant American theoretical physicist, heading the Manhattan Project to invent “the gadget”. Oppenheimer was “America’s Prometheus,” who led the effort to “wrest from nature the awesome fire of the sun for his country in the time of war.” The insightful biography profiles “Oppie” and his many ambiguities. It quotes physicist Freeman Dyson who saw deep and poignant contradictions in Oppenheimer. “He had dedicated his life to science and rational thought.” And yet, Oppenheimer’s decision to participate in creating a genocidal weapon was “a Faustian bargain.” Like Faust, Oppenheimer tried to “renegotiate the bargain” – and was punished for doing so. “Oppenheimer had led the effort to unleash the power of the atom, but when he sought to warn his countrymen of its dangers, to constrain America’s reliance on nuclear weapons, the government questioned his loyalty and put him on trial.”
Looking back at ‘American Prometheus’, the book that inspired Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’
Spotlight
Radhika P. Menon pays tribute to Devaki Nilayamgode (1928-2023) who made waves in Kerala when her book Nashtabodhangallillathe (With No Sense of Loss) came out in 2003. It was a warts-and-all insider account of the life of an Antharjanam (a Namboodiri woman). She had started writing in her 70s and was around 75 years old when the book was published. Her youth had coincided with the time when the Namboodiri community, like the rest of Malabar, was transitioning from the confines of orthodoxy to the relatively freer space of liberal values. Like other women of her time, Nilayamgode heeded the calls of social reformers, such as V.T. Bhattarthiripad. The memoir, says Menon, is also a rich social document with various threads of changes, in agriculture, women’s empowerment, the nationalist movement and so on, woven in. It shows how Nilayamgode gradually evolves over six decades, from a child born in a prosperous Namboodiri illam to a matriarch, in her own right, of a nuclear family.
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- Historian David Hardiman examines the first surge of India’s freedom struggle by looking at the campaign of 1920-22 in Non-Cooperation in India: Nonviolent Strategy and Protest, 1920–22. While the non-cooperation movement did not achieve its objective of immediate self-rule, it did succeed in shaking the authority of the British in India.
- Politics is still considered an unusual career choice for women. In She, the Leader: Women in Indian Politics (Aleph), Nidhi Sharma profiles 17 trailblazing women who have fought against all odds and created a space for themselves in the political discourse, including Sonia Gandhi, Mamata Banerjee, Kanimozhi Karunanidhi and Ampareen Lyngdoh.
- The Bookbinder of Jericho (Penguin) by Pip Williams is set in Oxford and at a time when World War I is drawing to a close. It brings women unexpected new freedoms, but how will it impact Peggy, who is working as a bookbinder? Will the chaos of war force her to choose between duty and her dreams?
- Annie Zaidi’s Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales of India (Aleph) is a collection of essays in which the writer draws upon her experience of a reporter for decades to bring diverse stories. From the dacoits of Chambal, starvation among the Sahariyas, poverty in Punjab et al, she looks at the connections between economics, society and culture.
