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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
Last week, the Booker Prize longlist was announced, with 13 titles making it to the ‘Booker Dozen’ . Historical fiction, stories inspired from real life, parables, mystery, fantasy are part of the oeuvre, with the youngest nominated being 20-year-old Leila Mottley for Nightcrawling (Bloomsbury), about a 17-year-old who walks the mean streets of Oakland after dark and faces a terrible choice after assault by policemen, and the oldest Alan Garner, 87, for Treacle Walker (4th Estate), a young boy’s encounters and philosophical discussions on life and death with the eponymous wanderer and healer. For our neck of the woods, the excitement is around the nomination of Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sort of Books), published in India as Chats with the Dead(Hamish Hamilton). Set in the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s civil war, the protagonist, a renegade war photographer, Maali Almeida, is tasked with finding out who killed him. Facing ethical dilemmas, red tape, and contrasting memories of war, Almeida struggles to solve the whodunit – a noisy bunch of dead people confuse him further.
Karunatilaka’s debut novel, Chinaman, on a dying journalist’s quest to trace a cricketer, a spinning great who has gone missing, was picked by Wisden in 2019 as one of the greatest books of cricket ever written. Of the 13 books, Glory (Vintage) by the Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo, who now lives in the U.S., is narrated by a bevy of animal voices who talk about a revolution; and Maddie Mortimer’s Maps of our Spectacular Bodies (Picador) is narrated, in part, by a malevolent cancer travelling through the body of Lia, the protagonist. Historical figures, from Abraham Lincoln, Virginia Woolf, R.D. Laing to Emmett Till, a young black lynched in Mississippi decades back, shadow four books on the list – Percival Everett’s The Trees (Influx), Karen Joy Fowler’s Booth (Serpent’s Tale), Selby Wynn Shwartz’s After Sappho (Galley Beggar Press) and Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Case Study (Saraband). Also on the longlist is Irish writer Claire Keegan’s slim novel Small Things Like These (Faber), which has just bagged the Orwell Prize for political fiction, for its “beautifully written evocation of Ireland in the 1980s.” Neil MacGregor, chair of the Booker Prize 2022 judges, said, in proposing the 13 books among the 169 works of fiction they read, the main criterion was to consider the skill with which the writers shaped and sustained “variously imagined worlds, and allow others to inhabit them.” The shortlist of six books will be announced on September 6 and the winner of the £50,000 Booker Prize will be announced on October 17.
In reviews, we read a biography of renowned Hindi poet and iconoclast Agyeya, Anirudh Suri’s observations on the global contest for technological, economic and geopolitical dominance, the world of Tamil writers Jeyamohan and Sujatha and more. We also interview Devanuru Mahadeva whose new book on the RSS has sold more than one lakh copies in less than a month.
Books of the week
The Hindi poet, Agyeya (1911-1987), left an inedible mark on Hindi poetry, fiction, criticism and travelogue, but being an iconoclast and his innumerable innovations and provocations, he earned a host of bouquets and brickbats en route. In his biography, Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya (Penguin), Akshaya Mukul highlights Agyeya’s personal and literary life, family, loves and friendships in rich detail. In his review, Purushottam Agrawal writes that the creative milestones (some of which like the novel, Shekhar: Ek Jeevani, became landmarks in modern Indian literature) and their personal and political contexts have been handled with empathy and understanding. “Describing the controversies and debates, rifts and bridge-buildings with friends, Mukul is neither elusive nor partisan to his ‘subject’. Detailing Agyeya’s relationship with his first wife Santosh, the biographer’s sympathy is with her, not with him, as she was the helpless victim of her celebrity husband’s elusive withdrawals and insensitive silences. Not only of Santosh, Mukul’s treatment of other women in Agyeya’s life—Indumati, Kripa, Kapila and Ila—is equally sensitive and nuanced, but being in the continued thrall of ‘Shekhar…’ since my adolescence, I was left wondering, was Agyeya not obsessively in search of validation from women? Was this search not connected with the apparent ‘absence’ of his mother in his emotional universe (duly noted by Mukul)? This aspect deserved a closer scrutiny.” Mukul concludes that Agyeya is a complicated icon; and the reviewer finds the biography unputdownable because it shines a light not only into the corners of Agyeya’s individual history but also on various aspects of the cultural history of 20th century India.
Reviewing the works of Tamil writers Jeyamohan (Stories of the True, translated by Priyamvada Ramkumar/Juggernaut) and Sujatha (Dream Factory/HarperCollins), translated by Madhavan Narayanan, Sudha G. Tilak says that they offer different milieus but that both speak of the beauty and horror of the human condition. She writes that Jeyamohan’s collection of stories about 12 extraordinary men is a perfect introduction for a wider audience, standing as they do at the “intersection of truth and righteousness, depicting the life of men battling poverty, oppression, messianic zeal, dejection and death.” As for Sujatha, nom de plume of S. Rangarajan, his work leads the genre of pulp fiction. Set in the Madras of the 1980s, Dream Factory “is a hard gaze at the ugly beauty of the Tamil film industry.” It was a world, says the reviewer, that Sujatha was familiar with, having seen many of his stories turned into films by top hats such as Kamal Haasan, Mani Ratnam and Rajinikanth.
Speaking to the truth: reviews of Jeyamohan’s ‘Stories of the True’ and Sujatha’s ‘Dream Factory’
In The Great Tech Game: Shaping Geopolitics and the Destinies of Nations (Harper), Anirudh Suri, a technology-focused venture capitalist, draws parallels between the early 20th century British dominance in telegraph communication networks and the 21st century American dominance in the internet. Instead of telegraph cables, now the competition is over the ownership and control of information infrastructure such as fibre cable networks, 5G technology and satellites. The “global contest for technological, economic and geopolitical dominance”, which he calls the Great Tech Game, will shape the new world order. In his review, Stanly Johny contends that it is “lucidly written with deep research and a fresh perspective.” The book “helps us understand how technology has shaped our past and is changing our present. Some of the arguments such as the quest for technological dominance being the driving factor of conflicts and geopolitical competition in Pax Technologica could be tested at the altar of territorial conflicts, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But nobody can dispute the importance technology plays even in such conflicts.”
Spotlight
Kannada writer Devanuru Mahadeva
One of the tallest figures of Kannada literature, Devanuru Mahadeva, has created ripples with his new book, RSS: Aala Mattu Agala (RSS: Its Depth and Width), which has sold over a lakh copies in less than a month and is set to be translated into several languages including English. A prominent Dalit voice, the 74-year-old Mysuru-based writer uses parables and metaphors to “catch the pulse” of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and communicate the nature of the organisation, its objectives and agenda. Asked why he felt compelled to write about the RSS at this juncture, Devanuru Mahadeva tells K.V. Aditya Bharadwaj, “the main reason is provocation by the RSS, the ruckus created by its affiliate groups and the multiple troubles created by the BJP government, [including the] textbook revision issue.” On the RSS’s objectives, Devanuru Mahadeva says “the organisation stands on three pillars: imposing chaturvarna (caste stratification) and the Manusmriti, Aryan supremacy theory and destruction of federalism, which only leads to the destruction of the Indian Constitution.” He says if we look at coastal Karnataka, it feels Hindutva may have worked, and that the RSS is “exploiting the people’s innocent devotion to their gods.” But he thinks that Hindutva has “reached a tipping point and there is now a downward trend.”
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Ruskin Bond
- ‘What is it about the hills that draw us to them again and again?’ asks one of the editors of Between Heaven and Earth: Writings on the Indian Hills (Speaking Tiger Books). Edited by Ruskin Bond and Bulbul Sharma, over 40 writers explore the reasons and explain the complex histories of hill stations built for the Raj and reshaped in free India.
- Equal, Yet Different: Career Catalysts for the Professional Woman (Penguin) by Anita Bhogle tries to understand why despite the growing number of women acquiring professional degrees, they remain under-represented and almost invisible when it comes to top leadership positions or decision-making roles. Based on in-depth interviews, this book identifies catalysts that can help women achieve maximum potential.
- Anupama Raju’s debut novel, C (Aleph), follows the life of a writer, as she moves between two cities and across centuries. Exploring a range of emotions in prose and poetry, it is narrated by two voices, one of the writer and the other of a sunless city, where time is suffused with voices of a past lover.
- In Satya Vyas’ Banaras Talkies (Penguin), translated by Himadri Agarwal, three friends navigate college life with its many exams and bad canteen food. A nostalgic tour of campus life, it captures the struggles and lives of youngsters, and is filled with Banarasi banter.
