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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
Jhumpa Lahiri is coming out with a new short story collection after Unaccustomed Earth (2008). The Pulitzer Prize winner (Interpreter of Maladies in 2000) has been writing fiction, essays and poetry in her adopted language, Italian, since 2015. The new collection, Roman Stories (Penguin), has been translated into English by the writer and Knopf editor Todd Portnowitz. A mailer from the publisher says the protagonist is Rome and the stories take in urban as well as rural situations. In ‘The Boundary’, for example a family holidays in the countryside where the caretaker’s daughter has some angst about her family’s immigrant past; in ‘The Steps’, on a public staircase that connects two neighbourhoods, we see Rome in all its social and cultural disparities.
Walter Isaacson, who has written biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs and Einstein, has come out with a biography of Elon Musk, the controversial innovator-billionaire who dabbles in electric vehicles, space exploration and AI. Musk, of course, also took over Twitter and promptly changed its name. Isaacson spent two years by Musk’s side, attending meetings, visiting factories, and talking to family, friends and adversaries to write the biography. In an interview to CBS, asked “What is Elon Musk like?”, Isaacson said: “There is no single Elon Musk, he has many personalities. You can almost watch him go from being giddy and funny to being deeply in engineering mode and then suddenly the dark cloud happens – it’s almost like Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
We have begun reading the Booker Prize 2023 longlist -- the shortlist of six books will be announced on September 21 -- and this week we bring you reviews of Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s A Spell of Good Things and Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You; historian A.R. Venkatachalapathy talks about Subramania Bharati’s writings in The Hindu; and to mark Nutrition Week (September 1 and 7), we write about books that offer informed choices on food and well-being.
Books of the week
People selling different goods in the street in the city of Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria and the African continent.
Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s second novel, A Spell of Good Things (Canongate Books), which has been longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023, is a contemporary story about two Nigerias, of haves and have-nots. She weaves it around the lives of Eniola, a teenager, whose father Baba Eniola, a history teacher, has just lost his job. This pushes the family into poverty. Wuraola, on the other hand, hails from a wealthy family and a doctor in her first year of practice. When violence shatters a party, the lives of Eniola and Wuraola will become linked. In her review, Radhika Santhanam writes that as Adébáyò shows, “deep economic fissures may run through a society but they can never slice apart the lives of the rich and poor; the two worlds always interact in mostly obvious, sometimes imperceptible, and sometimes devastating ways.”
Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You (Fourth Estate/Harper) is a set of eight interlinked stories on the migration experience in America. The book’s selection in the Booker Prize 2023 longlist immediately triggered a row over whether a novel of essentially short stories should have been nominated. But does the format really matter? With just three words ‘What are you?’, the novel sparks discussions on a host of issues from race, identity, economic (in)stability, father-son relations, immigrant life in the U.S., the Caribbean’s complex history, and also climate change as a hurricane will disrupt more than one life. In interviews, the Jamaican-American writer has said that he wants to write about characters who look like him. “Visibility is important. Otherwise, it’s as if we don’t exist,” he says, and in this novel, he has created a family of characters who look like him. The year is 1979 and Topper and Sanya are forced to flee to Miami from Kingston, Jamaica which is gripped by political violence. They expect a lovely welcome in America but things are not quite that simple, and thereby hangs a tale.
As if we don’t exist | Review of Booker-longlisted ‘If I Survive You’ by Jonathan Escoffery
Public health experts are of the opinion that the COVID-19 pandemic was a result of a flawed relationship with nature. A collective way to confront the impending threats the world faces is to understand the connection between humans, other species and their shared environment. That human health is the single biggest driver for change in environmental management, is brought out well by Dr K. Srinath Reddy in his new book Pulse to Planet (HarperCollins). He has put together the knowledge of science, medicine and public health to explain the social and commercial determinants of planetary health and how nature and nutrition promote a healthy world. Unless we connect the dots of our health and food with the health of the planet, the luxury of good healthy living may be fraught with more challenges in future, the book underlines. Other books like Michael Greger and Gene Stone’s How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (Macmillan), is about using diet and nutrition for longevity. The book examines the top 15 causes of premature deaths including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s, high blood pressure and explains how nutritional interventions can often produce better results than pharmaceutical drugs.
The good food guide: building a healthy world for future generations
Spotlight
Students of NIFT-TEA College of Knitwear Fashion in Tirupur making a dactylogram artistic tribute to poet Subramania Bharati. | Photo Credit: R_VIMALKUMAR
Between 1910 and 1913, when many publications were banned by the British, the Tamil nationalist poet, Subramania Bharati (1882-1921), espoused the causes of justice and social reform in the pages of The Hindu. Most of his writings were in the form of letters to the editor. A.R. Venkatachalapathy, historian, and professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, who has edited Subramania Bharati: Writings in The Hindu, argues that Bharati’s political position in the aftermath of the brutal crushing of the Swadeshi movement was nowhere more clearly expressed than in these writings. In an interview with B. Kolappan on the 102nd death anniversary of the poet (September 11), Venkatachalapathy says that what Bharati wrote in The Hindu is of considerable value because they throw new light on his evolving political position, which cannot be discerned from his other writings. “For instance, reacting to the Lord Chancellor of England, he writes, ‘This remark strikes me as a piece of national insult levelled at us because the man was pretty sure that there was no harm in insulting a disarmed and subject nation.’” Bharati, says Venkatachalapathy, was also a sound critic of conservatism and orthodoxy within the Hindu religion.
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- Echoes from Forgotten Mountains (Viking) by Jamyang Norbu is the story of “forgotten” Tibetans – resistance fighters, secret agents, soldiers, peasants, merchants – and works as a history of “memory” of the Tibetan struggle.
- Writing within the discipline of linguistics and using the framework of ‘Conversation Analysis’, Suranjana Barua’s Revelation of Self in Language: Narrative Identity as Emergent in Conversation (Tulika Books) draws readers into questions about personal identity as gleaned from narratives recounted in various contexts. It proffers insights into why and how we tell our life-stories.
- Percival Everett’s new book, James (Pan Macmillan), is a retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved friend Jim. His last book, The Trees, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year and it traces a murder probe which also becomes an inquiry into America’s violent past.
- The next in the Thursday Murder Club series, Richard Osman’s The Last Devil to Die (Penguin), is releasing this Thursday (September 14). On Boxing Day, a dangerous package is smuggled across the English coast. When it goes missing, chaos is unleashed. The body count starts to rise -- including someone close to the Thursday Murder Club – and the gang faces an impossible search and some deadly opponents.
