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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
To mark the 101st birthday of master filmmaker Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) on May 2, Penguin released Satyajit Ray Miscellany, the second book in the Ray Library series. It has more than 70 write-ups, rare photographs and manuscripts, opening a window to the thought process of a creative auteur. Most of Ray’s iconic films were adapted from literature and thus watching them also gives viewers an opportunity to rediscover the books all over again. For Apu Trilogy (Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Apur Sansar), Ray turned to Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s debut novel Pather Panchali, a story about two children, Apu and Durga, growing up in rural Bengal. The novel has been translated into English and is available to a wider audience. In his essays Our Films Their Films (Orient BlackSwan), Ray wrote why he chose the novel for his debut film: “I chose Pather Panchali for the qualities that made it a great book: its humanism, its lyricism, and its ring of truth.” From Rabindranath Tagore (Broken Nest/Charulata; Home and the World/Ghare Baire), Sunil Gangopadhyay (Days and Nights in the Forest/Aranyer Din Ratri; Adversary/Pratidwandi), Sankar (The Middleman/Jana Aranya) and Premchand (The Chess Players/Shatranj Ke Khiladi) to Henrik Ibsen (Enemy of the People/Ganashatru), Ray borrowed from their work and made them his own. He also famously brought to the screen two of his own famous detective stories (The Golden Fortress/Sonarkella and The Elephant God/Joy Baba Felunath), which have been translated into English in two volumes (The Complete Adventures of Feluda/Penguin). His biographer Andrew Robinson (The Inner Eye/Bloomsbury) calls Ray the “Mozart of cinema”, despite the “thoroughly Bengali ethos of both himself and most of his films.”
In reviews, we read G.N. Saibaba’s chronicles from prison; six girls, erstwhile workers of a factory, opening up about their lives; field notes from India’s sanctuaries; writer Amitava Kumar’s journal, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s new novel and more.
Books of the week
In Mobile Girls Koottam: Working Women Speak (Zubaan), Madhumita Dutta talks to six women who worked in a factory – Nokia, now shuttered – and opened up about their lives, dreams, frustrations and their little acts of rebellion in a patriarchal society. The conversations took place in ‘Muthu’s room’, a small two-room flat on the ground floor of a three-storied house she shared with Lakshmi, Sathya, Abhinaya and Pooja; with their friend Kalpana visiting them often and also becoming part of the talk. In her review, P.V. Srividya writes that rebelling against lazy categorisations of the female rural migrant workforce, the women offer a rich, layered and complex narrative of what they think, see and feel and why they chose to work. The conversations at Kancheepuram town took place in the form of podcasts and the book is the manuscript, providing a fascinating account of the lives of a rural migrant workforce, extending beyond the factory floor.
A volume of G.N. Saibaba’s writings – Why Do You Fear My Ways So Much: Poems and Letters from Prison (Speaking Tiger) – chronicles his days in prison. The wheelchair-bound English professor has been incarcerated in the ‘anda’ cell (the innermost cell in the prison complex meant for solitary confinement) after being booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in 2014. In his review, Serish Nanisetti says the slim volume is “guttingly difficult to read”. But that in a “triumph of the imagination, Saibaba brings out with his free verse the throbbing, pulsating heart of a man who knows love, wants love, and is ready to run into the rain telling everyone about his love.” With this collection, says Nanisetti, Saibaba joins a long list of people who crafted literature and explored the human soul while being locked up – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Oscar Wilde, Nelson Mandela, Jawaharlal Nehru, among others.
Conservation Kaleidoscope (Kalpavriksh & Others), edited by Pankaj Sekhsaria, is a massive compilation of facts and issues from over two decades of the Protected Area Update newsletter, and offers a ringside view of conservation. It provides the reader with a lens to look at and perhaps understand wildlife, wilderness and conservation practices in contemporary India. The extracts and editorials highlight the challenges of conservation and urges the reader to honour the commitment to nature. Above all, it serves as a reminder of all that we have become, and how to forge a path to recovery. In his review, Murali Sivaramakrishnan says the volume triggers a whole range of emotions in the reader— anxiety at the strife and conflict between man and his environment, joy at the success of a conservation effort and frustration when things do not go right. The book highlights the fact that “though we cannot undo the extinction we have caused already, we can strive to prevent a worse fate that could befall our environment and wildlife if we act immediately.”
The Blue Book: A Writer’s Journal (Harper) by Amitava Kumar offers glimpses into his mind, his musings, his quiet introspections and gleanings from his writing life. However, what strikes one most about this slim volume is Kumar’s felicity with art. Interspersed with the text are his drawings and paintings, and they point to another facet of the portrait of the artist as a writer, says the reviewer, Shuma Raha. Though their inclusion is somewhat self-indulgent, The Blue Book is clearly the richer for it. “The journal was penned during the pandemic, although Kumar, who has written several books of fiction and non-fiction, eschews any form of chronology here. The text, which has a ruminative, unhurried quality, is an agglomeration of his meditations on disparate subjects, his memories and encounters.”
The focal point of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s new novel Villainy (Speaking Tiger) is the crime, not the punishment. The institutions meant to contain crimes are hand-in-glove with criminals. This is not a moral story of the Dostoyevskian crime-and-punishment kind, says N.S. Gundur in his review, but a literary thriller in the mode of Agatha Christie or James Hadley Chase. Set in Delhi in the 1990s, it begins with a who-done-it episode – and leads to a sharp criticism of modern institutions including prisons, hospitals, the judiciary and the police. “As a thriller, it does not offer much, except for plot twists and turns. As compensation for the reader, there’s Chatterjee’s dark humour [like in his acclaimed novel English, August]”.
Spotlight
Maybe too tired? This businessman tried to do too much work and collapses on his desk | Photo Credit: marcoventuriniautieri
In his column, Leather Bound, Aakar Patel turns to Aristotle’s Poetics for some advice on the craft of fiction. In it Aristotle discusses tragedy – the most important theme for Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Aristotle says that tragic plots must have someone transitioning from happiness to misery. He also says that the individual must be shown to be consistent in character, so that the audience can identify with him. “The misery bit must come from some error that the protagonist himself has committed (for instance, Oedipus killing his father), which cannot be rectified.” Such a story will stir in the audience strong emotions, such as pity or fear, and induce catharsis. Aristotle says that the craft of writing lies in keeping the plot tight and unified. He divides tragedy into plot, character, thought, diction, melody and spectacle and discusses these.
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- In The Resilient Society: Economics After COVID (Harper), Markus K. Brunnermeier shows how individuals, institutions and nations can navigate an economy filled with unknown risks. Applying his macroeconomic insights to public health, debt overhang, inequality and climate change, he offers blueprints for the reconstruction of societies and economies in a post-COVID world.
- The Struggle for Police Reforms in India (Rupa) by Prakash Singh documents efforts to bring about police reforms in the country. Singh traces the evolution of the Indian Police pre and post-Independence. Capturing the struggles of diverse sections of people, it focuses on transformational changes in the Indian Police and what remains to be done.
- The stories in We Move (Serpent’s Tail) by Gurnaik Johal make up a wider narrative about multiple generations of Asian immigrants in the U.K. In West London locality, Priti speaks English but her grandmother Punjabi – they can only connect via Priti’s mother. Chetan and Aanshi’s relationship changes when a woman leaves her car in their drive, never to return.
- Amelia works in her family’s funeral parlour, doing make-up on the dead in New Animal (Picador) by Ella Baxter. She has her life with the men she meets online. But when a sudden loss unhinges her, she tries to outrun grief by learning more about sex, death, grief, and the different ways pain changes the body.
