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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. In the first ten days of 2023, we lost two writers who chose to take less-trodden paths and write on the human condition, its frailties and fluidities. British writer Fay Weldon, best known for her work on women’s experiences including the novels The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Down Among the Women and Female Friends died on January 4. She was 91. American writer Russell Banks who explored themes of race and class in his books, besides being an acute observer of life and people, passed away on January 7. His collections of short stories, Searching for Survivors and The New World received great acclaim; as also his novels about life caught in violence and tragedy, Continental Drift, Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter. The Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan adapted the story of a small-town dealing with unspeakable tragedy after a bus accident in The Sweet Hereafter to the silver screen in 1997, winning the jury prize at Cannes. In an interview to The Paris Review in 1998, Banks said the school bus was a powerful image for him – he had a large collection of model and toy school buses at home – and he said that he used it in his writing through various angles. So, the bus in The Sweet Hereafter is a vehicle for death but it is a source of life in Rule of the Bone. In other news, Spare, Prince Harry’s tell-all memoir about the British monarchy, his life with the American actress Meghan Markle and the reasons why they had to leave Britain, will be released in India on January 19. In a pre-launch interview with Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes, Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, said he wanted to emphasise how the palace’s relationship with the British tabloids, and its policy of “briefings, leakings and plantings,” took a toll on his mother, Princess Diana, and later his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. Keeping the door open for reconciliation with his family, Prince Harry said, “The ball is in their court.”
In Literary Review this week, we have two interviews, one of the Sahitya Akademi winner Anuradha Roy who won the Prize for 2022 for her novel All the Lives We Never Lived, and another of long-time Russia observer Mark Galeotti about his new book, Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine. In reviews we read the autobiography of Wasim Akram, co-written with Gideon Haigh, Elizabeth Strout’s pandemic novel, Lucy by the Sea and more.
Books of the week
Elizabeth Strout has been chronicling the life of Lucy Barton, a New York writer, which began with My Name is Lucy Barton. Three other novels complete the quartet, and the third, Oh William!, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. In the fourth, Lucy by the Sea, the eponymous protagonist leaves New York in March 2020 just as the virus is beginning to take hold. Prodded on by her former husband, William, they escape to a rented home on the coast in Maine. As weeks turn to months, and they settle down to a routine with a complex past hovering over them, realisation dawns on Lucy that her whole childhood was a lockdown, and thereby hangs many a tale. Lucy had been brought up in desperate poverty in an abusive home; and even when Lucy grew up, moved away and became a mother and successful writer, the notion that she came from nothing refused to go away. Strout’s mastery lies in enabling her characters to handle devastating circumstances with quiet fortitude and a resilience they didn’t know they had. “We are all in lockdown, all the time. We just don’t know it, that’s all. But we do the best we can. Most of us are just trying to get through,” thinks Lucy.
In Sultan (HarperCollins), Gideon Haigh co-writes the memoirs of fiery left-arm bowler Wasim Akram. In his review, K.C. Vijaya Kumar writes that usually, memoirs tend to hide more than they reveal, but Akram in association with Gideon, pulls no punches. The book is a candid exposition about himself as a person and player while being juxtaposed within the complicated terrain of Pakistani cricket. Akram’s massive respect for Imran Khan and another early mentor, Javed Miandad, shines through while his disdain towards Saleem Malik, Aamir Sohail and Rashid Latif is very obvious. Akram dwells on reverse swing, Indo-Pak issues, injuries, an up-down equation with Waqar Younis, match-fixing allegations, and his coaching and commentary stints. “But above all, he holds a brutal mirror to himself. His dalliance with drugs, losing first wife Huma to illness, the ensuing grief, finding love again with Shaniera Thompson and his feeling of inadequacy as a parent, are all said in a tone that rings true. It is a remarkable book.”
Review of Sultan by Wasim Akram with Gideon Haigh: Reverse swing
Spotlight
At the journey’s start Roy at Walter Spies’ house in Iseh, a little village in Bali. She travelled there in 2018 to see where he painted his great works.
Anuradha Roy’s 2018 novel, All the Lives We Never Lived, recently won the Sahitya Akademi Award for 2022 in the English language category. In an email interview with Mini Kapoor, she talks about the novel, its themes and the historical backdrop. The novel is about a boy who can “somehow enter and inhabit pictures.” It opens with the words of Myshkin, whose mother Gayatri left him in the 1930s to go off to Bali with an English artist. “In my childhood, I was known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman,” he says. Set in Bali and an imagined town in north India, Muntazir, it is the 1930 and ’40s, with the freedom movement intensifying; “this is the time of fascism and World War II.” Roy says she doesn’t plot her novels in any detail when she writes but that she does need to have some signposts. “These came to me in a flash when I was standing in a museum in Bali before the paintings of Walter Spies. He was a fascinating character, an equally brilliant pianist, painter, linguist, who made Bali his home.” Asked if the novel speaks yet more urgently to the present than what she may have had in mind while writing it, Roy says, “In 2018, the book was responding to jingoistic nationalism, the rise of the right wing, the suppression of freedoms – these things were all on the rise. If anything, it has intensified.”
Interview | Sahitya Akademi Award winner Anuradha Roy looks back at ‘All the Lives We Never Lived’
In over more than 30 books about Russia, author Mark Galeotti has uncovered and explained the factors behind the rise of President Vladimir Putin, and his remarkable successes in wars, ranging from the attack on terrorism in Chechnya amid the post-Soviet chaos to the invasion of Ukraine last February. His latest book Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine (Bloomsbury) follows a prescient 2019 book, We Need to Talk About Putin: How the West gets him Wrong, on why the world should have paid more attention to Moscow’s moves in the past few years. In an interview with Suhasini Haidar, he says Putin is as a survivor and a rational actor. “I don’t think we’re going to see the kind of nightmare scenarios of him turning to nuclear weapons or anything like that. Putin might survive, but Putinism won’t, in the sense of a particular model to how you run the country and a vision for Russia’s place in the world. That’s crumbled. Russia is no longer going to be a military great power and it’ll take at least a decade to reconstitute Russia’s forces that have been destroyed over the past year.” Galeotti does not think the Russian regime is on the cusp of imminent collapse. “It’s more that it is losing its spare capacity. Regimes can be pretty much brain dead and still survive for years. Arguably, the Soviet Union did. Tsarist Russia did. So we may be in the closing, dying years of Putin and Putinism, but that doesn’t mean it is going to be quick.”
Ukraine conflict has defied predictions: author Mark Galeotti in conversation with Suhasini Haidar
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- Self-Knowledge and Moral Identity (Tulika Books), edited by Ranjan Kumar Panda, addresses the notion of self-knowledge as relevant in the formation of moral identity, taking off on the work of several contemporary philosophers including Akeel Bilgrami.
- .Yatindra Mishra who spent a decade talking to the artist pays tribute to her in Lata: A Life in Music (Penguin). The biography explores lesser-known aspects of an artist, who lived through social and cultural changes from the British era right up to the 21st century.
- The Nemesis (Eka/Westland) by Manoranjan Byapari, translated by V. Ramaswamy, is the second part of the ‘Chandal Jibon’ trilogy which takes readers through the streets of Kolkata in the 1960s and ’70s. The protagonist is in his 20s and has a hard life amid the rumblings of liberation in East Pakistan.
- Stephen Alter’s new novel, Death in Shambles (Aleph), is set in a quaint hill station. A double murder pulls retired police officer Lionel Carmichael back into the chase as he hunts for clues and tries to uncloak the shroud of mystery that hangs heavy on the town and its residents.
