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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. Journalist-writer Nathan Thrall has won the Pulitzer Prize in the nonfiction category for his book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, in which a father goes in search of his young son who has been in a school trip accident. But Abed Salama is Palestinian and there are many hurdles to cross -- checkposts, permits, walls -- before he can get to his son, Milad. Thrall, whose previous books include The Only Language They Understand, writes this heartbreaking true story, placing it in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For instance, Anata, where the Abed family lives, “began to change after Israel conquered it and the rest of the West Bank in the 1967 war. Over the following decades, the demography and the geography of the occupied territories were transformed by Israel, which used a range of policies to Judaize them.” In Anata, writes Thrall, the government seized the land piece by piece, issued hundreds of demolition orders, annexed part of the town to Jerusalem, erected a separation wall to encircle its urban centre, and confiscated the rest to create settlements, a military base, a segregated highway and so forth, making life very difficult for Palestinians.
The fiction prize went to Jayne Anne Phillips for Night Watch, set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum after the Civil War where a mother and daughter are trying to heal.
The literary world and readers are mourning the passing away of American writer Paul Auster from cancer complications at 77. His books, including The New York Trilogy, The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions, Timbuktu, The Music of Chance and Baumgartner, deal with life and death, love and loss, and the twists and turns of any existence. He was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017 for his novel, cryptically called 4 3 2 1, the story of four lives, “made of the same genetic material.”
In books, we read Salman Rushdie’s trauma memoir, Gurcharan Das on the perils of being a liberal in contemporary India, Percival Everett’s revisiting of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the perspective of Huck’s slave companion, Jim, and more.
Books of the week
In August 2022, Salman Rushdie was viciously stabbed by an assassin at a public book event. He lost an eye and the use of an arm. But, luckily for Rushdie, for the world of letters and for all those who believe in the (inextricably twinned) values of liberalism and free expression, he survived, writes Mukund Padmanabhan in his review. “Even better, he has lived to tell the tale in a bright and rousing book about how he dealt with the cruel cuts and, quite miraculously, stitched his body and his life together again.” Also, wrapped tightly and ardently in the middle of this gripping book, is a love story. “Knife is dedicated to the many men and women who prevented Rushdie from dying and nursed him back on his feet, but the book is also a paean to his fifth wife Eliza (Rachel Eliza Griffiths), the gifted poet/novelist/visual artist.” Rushdie had been living in New York for two decades, moving from the U.K. to the U.S. after going into hiding there following Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa for The Satanic Verses in 1989.
Gurcharan Das, the Harvard trained philosophy graduate who went on to head the global consumer goods major Procter & Gamble’s Indian unit before switching from life in the corporate fast lane to a career as a successful and celebrated writer and public intellectual, finds himself today on the horns of on existential dilemma, writes Suresh Seshadri in his review of The Dilemma of an Indian Liberal (Speaking Tiger). A life-long liberal, sworn to abide by the cardinal precepts of ‘openness, mutual respect and a concern for others’, Das is deeply troubled by the rising tide of illiberalism worldwide, and even more so in his home country. “In his latest book, originally conceived and delivered as a lecture at the Third Annual Liberals Lecture, Das sets out to use his personal journey in quest of a moral meaning to situate his understanding and embrace of liberalism. Over the course of seven chapters, Das lays down the framework of his understanding of the liberal credo. The author traverses territory seamlessly from the definition of what he terms ‘a slippery word’ and its accompanying ideology, to the long-running Indian connection with the liberal temper manifest in the land of ‘330 million gods where none can afford to be jealous’.”
Stepping into Huckleberry Finn’s world, Percival Everett has written Jim into being. Mark Twain’s celebrated but controversial novel of 1884, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is the story of Huck, Tom Sawyer’s comrade-in-arms, who fakes his death to get away from his father. In his escape, he is unwittingly helped along by a slave, Jim, who chooses to run because his owner wants to sell him to someone else. The runaways, whose circumstances are hugely different, sail down the Mississippi river in a raft from Hannibal, Missouri, and while narrating the duo’s escapades, Twain also investigates race in pre-Civil War America. In Twain’s novel, Huck and Jim are not together all the time. Taking his cue, Everett probes what happens to Jim away from Huck, giving him a voice and a chance to be present, with an incredible twist in the tale. Everett’s 24th novel, James (Pan Macmillan), is set in the Civil War era, after which slavery was abolished, but that of course did not mean freedom in the true sense of the term, as blacks or any other minority community know. Immediately, there’s a chilling resonance to contemporary times. In America and anywhere else, where lives are still defined by divisions, Everett speaks to the present through the past.
In January 1896, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, landed in Bombay which he found bewitching, bewildering and enchanting – “the Arabian Nights come again!”, he wrote in his musings about the city. Anuradha Kumar’s latest novel, The Kidnapping of Mark Twain (Speaking Tiger), is a vivid recreation of Twain’s version of Bombay, a complex cosmopolitan city akin to London and New York with a sometimes-murky heart and an ancient soul, says Preeti Zachariah in her review. Kumar’s tale has an unlikely detective duo, American Consul Henry Baker and the beautiful, mysterious Maya Barton. “The Kidnapping of Mark Twain is an action-packed, pacy roman policier, complete with homicides, a kidnapping, multiple antagonists and a detective duo with an unbalanced power dynamic, vaguely reminiscent of Conan Doyle’s Holmes-Watson, Agatha Christie’s Poirot-Hastings or Poe’s Auguste Dupin and his anonymous sidekick. But it is also a lot more.” Is too much going on? That’s the only grouse, says Zachariah.
Spotlight
In his new book, Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality (Hachette India/Hodder & Stoughton), Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Venki Ramakrishnan says while we better understand, at a biological level, the causes of ageing and death, we are far from major breakthroughs. With several technology mavens, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, investing millions in ageing-related research, and many others self-experimenting with supplements and therapies to halt ageing, the field is generating great interest. However, much of this doesn’t yet have the sound backing of scientific validation, the U.K.-based Ramakrishnan tells Jacob Koshy. Asked if it would be desirable if people live to be 120 years old, Ramakrishnan said: “I think living extremely long lives, where we want to live beyond the 120-limit, would lead to a weird and stagnant society. We are having a much slower turnover between generations than we did before, so it will be a different kind of society. That’s also assuming that your brain stays sharp and aware, and that’s not a solved problem. The whole problem of cognitive decline and dementia is going to be a very hard problem to solve, even with modern tools. Neurons don’t regenerate. We can regenerate other tissues, like the liver and blood cells. Regenerating the brain is not in the realm of possibility right now. Living with cognitive impairment isn’t desirable and this will impact the kind of societies we live in.”
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- The End of Empires and a World Remade (Princeton University Press) by Martin Thomas traces how decolonisation shaped the process of globalisation in the wake of the collapse of Empire. In the second half of the 20th century, decolonisation catalysed new international coalitions, says Thomas, triggering partitions and wars, reshaping North-South dynamics, making it difficult for newly-independent nations.
- Salman Masood’s Fallout: Power, Intrigue and Political Upheaval in Pakistan (Penguin) explores the tumultuous tenure of Imran Khan as Prime Minister from 2014 to 2018 and his complex relationship with the Pakistani military. He analyses the fall of Nawaz Sharif amid the Panama Papers scandal and sheds light on the role of former army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, in the Hybrid Project/Rule.
- In Love in the Time of Hate (Simon&Schuster), Rakhshanda Jalil uses Urdu poetry to look at how the social fabric of secular India is changing. The book is divided into four sections: politics, people, passions, places, and she uses Urdu couplets to suit the theme, cautioning against popular sentiments on ‘othering’ and other divides.
- Growing up in the same Ghanaian town, Selasi and Akorfa are cousins and best friends. But as they enter their teens, Selasi begins to change, and they drift apart, only to meet years later, when things take a turn. Nightbloom (One World/Harper) by Peace Adzo Medie is a debut novel about female friendships and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize in Fiction, 2024.
