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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
The countdown has begun for the announcement of the Booker Prize 2023 shortlist on September 21. It’s a diverse and interesting longlist and several of the 13 books are expected to make the cut to the final six. Expect surprises but Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors, Martin MacInnes’ In Ascension, Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s A Spell of Good Things, Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time are being talked about as favourites. In a year when the Booker Prize longlist has held out delightful surprises because of several omissions (think Salman Rushdie’s Victory City, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood – she is a previous Booker winner for her novel, The Luminaries, in 2013 -- and Zadie Smith’s The Fraud), writers like Elaine Feeney (How to Build a Boat), Jonathan Escoffery (If I Survive You), Chetna Maroo (Western Lane), Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow (All the Little Bird Hearts), Paul Harding (The Other Eden) can get a look-in too on the shortlist. We will have a lowdown on the Booker shortlist in the next newsletter.
In other news, bestselling writer and essayist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the 45th Prix Européen de l’Essai for the French translation of her compilation of essays titled Azadi (2021). Read a review here. Commenting on Roy’s body of work, the Charles Veillon Foundation, which confers the award, said that “Arundhati Roy uses the essay as a form of combat.” In Azadi, Roy reflects on the meaning of freedom in a world of “growing authoritarianism”, and her essays, the foundation said, offer shelter to a multitude of people. The essays include meditations on language, public as well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in current times. To celebrate the occasion, Penguin has launched a special edition box set of selected non-fiction by the author, including The Shape of the Beast, The Doctor and the Saint, Broken Republic, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, The Algebra of Infinite Justice and Listening to Grasshoppers.
Tributes are being paid this week to writer Gita Mehta (Karma Cola, Raj, A River Sutra), who passed away in Delhi. Mehta (80), daughter of Biju Patnaik, was married to Sonny Mehta, former head of Alfred A. Knopf Publishing, who passed away in 2019. Mehta started her career as a war correspondent for a foreign television channel during the 1971 war, and made documentary films on Bangladesh. Later, she became a writer, acutely observing life in post-colonial India.
Gita Mehta
In reviews this week, we read Joya Chatterji’s recap of 20th century South Asian history, Madhav Gadgil’s memoir, Zadie Smith’s The Fraud; there’s more Booker-longlist reading with Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience and Feeney’s How to Build a Boat. We also interview war correspondent Anjan Sundaram.
Books of the week
Joya Chatterji’s Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century (Penguin Viking) is a history of nation-making in the 20th century, taking in its sweep political developments like Partition, the birth of Bangladesh, migrations, food consumption and habits, caste, class, leisure, love, family, marriage, cinema and so forth. In her review, Mini Kapoor writes that Chatterji, a leading historian of Partition and now emeritus professor of South Asian History at Cambridge University in the U.K., repeatedly finds a “fascinating symmetry” in the years since Partition all over the subcontinent. For instance, in the mid-1960s, Indira Gandhi in India and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan had the same slogan underpinning their politics: roti, kapdaa aur makaan (food, clothing and shelter). She joins the dots at the connections that bind India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – “Despite Partition, India and Pakistan did not fly off to distant corners of the universe. They stayed right where they were, nestled up against each other in the same ecosystems, connected by the Himalayas, the Karakoram ranges and two enormous river systems, by the monsoons, and by a shared legacy of structures of rules. And a lot else – let’s call it history.”
Bangladeshis celebrate 50 years of victory over Pakistan, at an event in Dhaka, in 2021.
Madhav Gadgil’s memoirs, A Walk Up the Hill: Living with People and Nature (Penguin Allen Lane), is a repository of information about how India’s battle for safeguarding ecology was won and lost. Gadgil pulls no punches as he takes on the caste system or corruption or community forestry that have played a role in India’s ecology and biodiversity. In his review, Serish Nanisetti writes that in spare prose, Gadgil makes sense of India’s huge biodiversity, diverse ecological zones, community requirements ranging from those who live in the foothills, or the Western Ghats, or those who live with sacred groves. “At a time when green norms are being dismantled at a rapid clip across the country, Gadgil’s life comes across as a lesson. A lesson that India is unwilling to learn but appears willing to pay a high price for not learning.”
The tribal communities inside the Similipal Tiger Biosphere Reserve get together at Barehipani village in Odisha. These villagers are continuing their fight against the state government for their forest rights recognition. | Photo Credit: Biswaranjan Rout
The Fraud(Hamish Hamilton) is Zadie Smith’s sixth novel and in it she talks about race relations and identity, through the lens of 19th century Victorian London. Smith immerses herself in the literary and Fleet Street world of Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, the feminist icon who defied the conventional while being conventional, Edward Chapman, publisher, and others. In her review, Geeta Doctor says the genre of velvet-lined novels that hide within them the lessons learnt from their colonial inheritance, now condemned as a defilement to both perpetrator and victim, might be termed as revenge fiction -- and Smith could be described as the Nigella Lawson of revenge fiction. “There is a heart of the most harrowing darkness in the midst of this return to Victorian society with all its perceived glamour. The segment in which Smith lays bare the sickness overshadows the rest of her enticing nuggets. It burns.”
Zadie Smith
In Sarah Bernstein’s Booker-longlisted Study for Obedience (Granta Books), unusual things start happening around the narrator who is never named. All that is revealed is that she has moved to the cold northern part of the country at her brother’s request to house-sit for him while he travels. She is not responsible for the strange things that happen but she blames herself for every disaster that ensues. In her review, Sushila Ravindranath writes that it is a book of lovely descriptions and long sentences and that it is strictly for readers who enjoy good writing and the power of words, and are not bothered about an interesting story or structure.
Spotlight
In his new book, Breakup: A Marriage in Wartime, war correspondent Anjan Sundaram writes an account of two conflicts – the dangerous war he covered in the Central African Republic, and the growing distance with his wife Nat and the toll bearing witness to conflict has taken on his marriage. In an interview with Veena Venugopal, Sundaram says he initially wrote the book as a letter to his daughter, because when his marriage ended, the connection with his daughter was the hardest to bridge. It’s the most personal of his three books – “journalists are trained to turn the camera on the world and not on themselves. It is very intimate because very few journalists have written about how war takes a toll on your personal relationships.” Asked whether he regrets going on the trip to the Central African Republic, he says: “When you are making these journeys you are always wondering when you should turn back. I don’t ever think I shouldn’t have gone on the trip, but I always wonder whether I should press forward or turn back.”
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- You Must Know Your Constitution (Hay House) by Fali S. Nariman traces the history and the origins of India’s document of governance and explains its provisions. He provides a view of all 395 Articles and additions made by constitutional amendments. He also picks critical judicial pronouncements, and legislative and constitutional amendments.
- The Pursuit of Reputation (Westland Books) by Amith Prabhu and Sujit Patil delves into the world of public relations. With insights from PR professionals working across industry sectors and geographies, the volume offers strategies for navigating uncertain environments.
- Hari Krishna Kaul’s For Now, It Is Night (HarperCollins), translated from the Kashmiri by Kalpana Raina, Tanveer Ajsi, Gowhar Fazili & Gowhar Yaqoob, is a selection of stories, shaped by social crisis and political instability in Kashmir. Kaul (1934-2009) explored themes of isolation, individual and collective alienation, corruption and the anxiety of a community which faced loss of homeland, culture and language.
- An old character, Holly Gibney, returns in Stephen King’s new novel, Holly (Hachette India), to find out the truth behind multiple disappearances in a midwestern town in America. She is on her own, and up against a pair of depraved -- and disguised -- adversaries.
