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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
All the stories, really, were made in the same way, Alice Munro declared in a Vintage edition of her 1982 collection, The Moons of Jupiter. “Some come from personal experience, others much more from observation. This difference becomes blurred in the making, or it should,” she wrote. A master of the short story genre -- “our Chekov,” she has been called -- Munro passed away on May 14 at 92. Her last volume, Dear Life, came out in 2012. She leaves behind a treasure chest of stories, of men and women, going about their daily lives, encountering love and loss, joys and sorrows, emotional swings due to heartbreak for many reasons including broken marriages and failing health, death and betrayals. But Munro’s writing will perhaps be most cherished for her ability to map the interiors of the mind and its often mysterious ways of functioning. Some of her best stories – ‘Dance of the Happy Shades’, ‘The Beggar Maid’, ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’, ‘The Moons of Jupiter’, ‘What is Remembered’, ‘Runaway’, ‘Wenlock Edge’ -- appeared in The New Yorker, and were later published in anthologies. Most of them were set in rural Ontario where she grew up.
Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2013 for being the “master of the contemporary short story”. That was the year she stopped writing too – by then 14 short story collections and a novel, Lives of Girls and Women (actually a set of interlinked stories), had been published. Munro lived the last 10 years of her life with dementia, a theme she has touched upon in her fiction. In ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’ (included in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage/2001), Fiona is losing her memory and her husband transports her to Meadowlake, an assisted living care home, where she finds a second wind in her sails; and Munro maps what that does to their relationship. In another devastating later story, ‘In Sight of the Lake’, first published in Granta and included in her last collection, Dear Life (2012), Nancy sets out for a doctor’s appointment but realises she has mixed up the dates. She had sought the visit because she wanted to tell the doctor that her mind has been playing tricks. By the end of the story, readers get a jolt with Munro shining a light inside Nancy’s mind. If you are just beginning to read Munro, The Moons of Jupiter is a great place to start; it has her sharp commentary on life and its idiosyncrasies, taken from her own experience and, well, her astute observations.
In reviews, we read the International Booker Prize shortlist – the winner will be announced later tonight (2 a.m. IST), and we will bring you a lowdown in the next edition. With India in the midst of a general election, we also have an essay on new and old books on how we came to vote and its aftermath. Please do read and listen to a special podcast on Ruskin Bond’s 90th birthday.
Books of the week
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos (Granta), translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024, is a remarkable blend of “love and politics”, played out in the backdrop of a tangible barrier – the Berlin Wall. The wall was erected in 1961 to divide Berlin into two, West, which aligned with its western allies, and East, which sided with the Soviets. In her review, Pranavi Sharma writes that Erpenbeck, an author long considered a top contender for the literature Nobel, was born in East Germany, pre-1989 Wall collapse and that in Kairos, she “sharply departs from the head-on treatment of mortality and historical discourse in her previous works.” The novel, she says, is archaically divided into a Prologue, Box I and II, an intermezzo, and an Epilogue. “It tells the story of an unexpected, wild love germinating between Katharina and Hans. Initially reminiscent of an ultimate pop fiction narrative, Kairos soon transcends into the realm of a national allegory, as it voices the aspirations and confines of East German socialism. The magnetic bond between Katharina, 19 at the time, and Hans, who is in his 50s, also gives way to an exploration of the utopian dreams of communism and the global solidarity against fascism.” Read about some of the other shortlisted novels, Selva Almada’s Not a River, Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior , Ia Genberg’s The Details .
Spotlight
In 1947, when India became independent from British colonial rule, its literacy rate was less than 20%, and women’s literacy less than 10%. And yet, writes Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta, in a breathtaking act of democratic faith, every adult person in newly independent India had the right to vote. With a general election going on, Mahadevan-Dasgupta explains through books and essays, how Indians earned the right to vote. The preparation for the nation’s first electoral rolls began in November 1947. This process would extend the franchise to over 173 million people, or 49% of the total population, when the first elections took place from October 25, 1951, to February 21, 1952. Some of the books she mentions are Ornit Shani’s How India Became Democratic, Ramachandra Guha’s essay, ‘The Biggest Gamble in History’, Pradeep Gupta’s Who Gets Elected: How and Why, Sanjeev Singh’s The Online Effect: Decoding X to Predict Election Outcomes and Surjit Bhalla and Abhinav Motheram’s How We Vote: the Factors that Influence Voters.
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- “People need to be heard,” says Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge in his Foreword to Bharat Jodo Yatra: Reclaiming India’s Soul (HarperCollins) by Pushparaj Deshpande, Ruchira Chaturvedi, and that the Bharat Jodo Yatra undertaken by Rahul Gandhi in 2023, “served as an instrument of national integration.” This volume is a collection of essays on the yatra, and how it broke down barriers.
- The Constitutional Conduct Group (CCG), a collective of retired civil servants, has been writing letters to governments and other institutions since 2017 to protect the ideals of the Constitution. In Defence of the Republic (Speaking Tiger), edited by Deb Mukharji & Others, is a compendium of essays and letters which deal with a number of issues, from communalism to failures of governance.
- Several works of the pioneering Punjabi novelist Nanak Singh have been translated into English, including ‘The Watchmaker’, ‘A Life Incomplete’, ‘Hymns in Blood’, ‘A Game of Fire’, by former diplomat Navdeep Suri, who is also Nanak Singh’s grandson. Now, Nanak Singh’s 1932 novel, Chitta Lahu, a story within a story set in Amritsar about the moral rot in early 20th century Punjab society, has been translated into English by another grandson, Dilraj Singh Suri. White Blood is published by Hachette India.
- Coco Mellors’ Blue Sisters (HarperCollins) is set between London, Paris, LA and New York, and tells the story of three sisters grappling with grief and addiction after a fourth sister, Nicky, passes away.
