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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
This week we tracked the reading revolution that is unfolding across open spaces in the country from Bengaluru, Delhi, Chennai to Mumbai, which has also spread overseas to as far as London and Johannesburg. It began in Bengaluru in January when entrepreneur Harsh Snehanshu and his friend (and baker) Shruti Shah created the Instagram handle @cubbonreads, posting a photograph of an open book (Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches) backdropped by a large tree in Cubbon Park with a message: “The old wise tree. Or the old wise book? Find us with books and fruits, next to this tree, every Saturday! Message us if you need the pin drop.” In his essay on the movement, which should make writers, publishers and bookshops immensely happy, Serish Nanisetti writes that over the past few months, over 60 chapters have popped up all over the country and even abroad, with a hat tip to Cubbon Reads.
“On a sandy beach in Chennai, in a park in Pune, under an arbour in Mumbai, in the precinct of the Thrissur Pooram, under the Bara Gumbad of Lodhi Gardens in Delhi and across a rapidly increasing count of parks and gardens.” Which takes us to the next question. What have we been reading this week? On the list: Rebecca F. Kuang’s new satire on a literary heist, Isabella Hammad’s novel on political conflict, Mike Brearley’s memoir, the rise and demise of Sidhu Moosewala and more.
Books of the Week
The story goes that as a young boy, when he left mud on the floor of the family home after evening games, his mother told him: “If you carry on like this, you’ll do nothing but play football and cricket all your life.” While Mike Brearley went on to become one of the greatest players and captains of the game, winning 18 of 31 Tests he led for England and losing just four, he also must have remembered his mother’s words. For, when his cricketing career came to an end – during his playing days too he had taken a break to teach philosophy – Brearley opted for a career in psychoanalysis. Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and in the Mind (Hachette India), which Brearley calls a “memoir of the mind”, is a “book of second thoughts, a second bite of the cherry: not only the original experience, but a new take on it.” In his review, Suresh Menon writes that for those who know Brearley mostly as a great captain and writer on cricket, his memoir is a separation of his personality into its other fascinating parts. “For the writer himself it is a great synthesis, a bringing together of his personalities. His use of poets and musicians, cricketers and novelists, psychologists and philosophers, historians and writers on religion towards this end makes the journey fascinating.”
In Yellowface (HarperCollins), Rebecca F. Kuang tells the story of June Hayward and Athena Liu – they are in their 20s, one a successful writer, the other struggling with a floundering literary career; one white, the other Chinese-American. When Athena Liu chokes to death in a freak accident, June steals Athena’s unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the name Juniper Song. But her act has deadly consequences, and as G. Sampath writes in his review, the “literary heist becomes the perfect setup for a satirical exploration of several interlinked themes: the dark side of publishing; the disproportionate impact of social media on the fortunes, as well as mental health, of writers; the interplay between racism, tokenistic diversity and how they determine editorial and marketing choices; how professional jealousy can masquerade as politically informed critique (especially on Twitter); and the very nature of authorship, fiction writing, identity and friendship.”
Isabella Hammad’s new novel Enter Ghost (Jonathan Cape) is a story of present day Palestine, and thus a story of displacement, diaspora, resistance and everyday indignities. It begins with Sonia Nasar, an actress who has made a life in the U.K., returning to Haifa to visit her older sister Haneen. This is her first trip back home since the second intifada, and soon Sonia realises what it is for her sister Haneen to live on the ‘inside’, the term Palestinians use for areas that became the state of Israel in 1948. In her review, Sumana Ramanan says the books charts the sisters’ relationship as they try to pick up the threads amidst tensions created by their different choices: Haneen lives in Haifa and through her academic work became involved with the Palestinian cause; Sonia remained geographically and emotionally distant from it. “Hammad delicately weaves in the sisters’ back stories and family history, which in turn offer us a window into the tragic splintering of Palestinian society.”
Isabella Hammad’s ‘Enter Ghost’ is a window into the tragic splintering of Palestinian society
Spotlight
Sidhu Moosewala
For Jupinderjit Singh, who has reported on crime for decades, Who Killed Moosewala? The Spiralling Story of Violence in Punjab (Westland Books) was one of his toughest assignments, for he had to “relive the trauma of a young man’s murder, a rising star of the Punjabi music industry at that.” In his gripping book, Singh unravels the events that led to the killing of Punjabi rapper Sidhu Moosewala through 17 chapters, navigating the intricate web of gangs in Punjab. He calls his book a “crime reporter’s account”, and begins the narrative with ‘The Last Ride’, a reference to the title of a song the singer released days before his fatal ‘last ride’ on May 29, 2022. Moosewala shot to global fame in just about five years of releasing his first hit single ‘G Wagon’ in 2017 and collaborated with rappers like Raja Kumari and Bohemia. He was a rebellious and controversial figure who had thousands of fans but there were whispers about his alleged links with gangs; and that his songs promoted gun culture and violence. “The most interesting aspect of Moosewala’s personality,” Singh tells Amarjot Kaur in an interview, “is that he didn’t stop singing, even when he was doing engineering, when he had no money to pay the lyricist and decided to write his own songs.” Why did a singer who followed his passion in the face of constant criticism and controversies, make enemies? Singh tells the story in his book.
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- R Chidambaram, who was also principal scientific adviser to the Government, looks back at his contribution to India’s science and technology sector in India Rising: Memoir of a Scientist (Ebury Press), written with Suresh Gangotra. “The India of my dreams,” he writes, “has always been one which is economically developed, scientifically advanced and militarily strong.”
- Ramani Atkuri walked with Rahul Gandhi during his Bharat Jodo Yatra. In The Peacemakers (Aleph) edited by Ghazala Wahab, Atkuri writes an essay on her experience. Others including Rajmohan Gandhi, Teesta Setalvad, Nandita Haksar, Natasha Badhwar, Oishika Neogi and Teresa Rahman offer stories of hope in the time of hatred.
- The Greatest Indian Stories Ever Told (Aleph), edited by Arunava Sinha, is an anthology of short stories by Indian writers spanning geography, language and literature. The book comprises some of the best works of early masters, as well as those by contemporary and 21st century writers.
- In the quaint hill town of Beri Shola, Piu is a therapist with a not-so-busy practice. But when Rose, the town’s well-connected beauty, is murdered, and Ela, a new patient, hurtles into Piu’s office, the town’s peace is broken in Ela’s Unfinished Business (Harper) by Gayatri.
