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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. The shortlist for the 2024 JCB Prize for Literature was announced last week, and includes three translations, from Bengali, Marathi and Malayalam, and the veteran novelist Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life (Speaking Tiger Books). In an interview with The Hindu, Chatterjee had explained why he was compelled to write the story of an ordinary man in search of life’s meaning.
Jayasree Kalathil, who had won in 2020 for her translation of S. Hareesh’s Moustache, is back on the shortlist with Sandhya Mary’s Maria, Just Maria (Harper Collins). The other three books are Sakyajit Bhattacharya’s The One Legged (Antonym Collections), translated by Rituparna Mukherjee, Sharankumar Limbale’s Sanatan (Penguin), a story about Dalit lives translated by Paromita Sengupta, and Saharu Nusaiba Kannari’s novel, Chronicle of an Hour and a Half (Westland Books), set in the foothills of the Western Ghats where a storm brews in both the tiny village of Vaiga and on WhatsApp groups.
In reviews, we read an excerpt from Sakshi Malik’s memoir, Malavika Rajkotia’s book on her father and Partition, Dutch writer Yael van der Wouden’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel and more.
Books of the week
While on a protest against the Wresting Federation of India and its then powerful chief Brij Bhushan Saran Singh over alleged sexual harassment and other misdemeanours, Olympic medallist Sakshi Malik and other wrestlers were brutally grabbed by the Delhi Police. In an excerpt from her memoir, Witness (Juggernaut), written with Jonathan Selvaraj, Malik recalls what happened when the wrestlers decided to immerse their medals in the Ganga at Haridwar.
In telling the story of her father, Sardar Jitinder Singh or Jindo, uprooted from his home in Gujranwala, now in Pakistan, Malavika Rajkotia also shares Partition tales that merge into myth and history. In her review of Unpartitioned Time: A Daughter’s Story (Speaking Tiger Books), Geeta Doctor writes that in tracing the arc of time at the moment of her father’s death, Rajkotia “unleashes a quiver full of arrows.” Her father Jindo’s life straddles both sides of the great divide; the past left behind at Gujranwala where the family of wealthy landowners lived in Rajkot, (hence their name), and post 1947, in a greatly diminished piece of land just outside of Karnal which is named in remembrance, Rajkot House. “The arrows illuminate the mosaic of lives of the different people she has known or imagined as part of her ancestry.”
Yael van der Wouden spins her debut novel, The Safekeep (Viking), around a post-Nazi occupation society but tells a forgotten story of the traumas of World War II. The story revolves around an unlikely romance that blossoms in the quiet town of Overjissel but as the reviewer Sharmistha Jha points out, by the end of the story, it becomes clear that all this has been taking place in the long shadows of German occupation and concentration camps. “Van der Wouden writes about memory; about the history of objects of belonging such as a house and family crockery. What happened to the houses and property of Jews who were interned at concentration camps? Non-Jewish people would often ‘safekeep’ such property,” writes Jha.
Spotlight
Writer and archivist Peter K. Steinberg has spent 30 years compiling, editing and archiving materials on the life and work of Sylvia Plath, who would have turned 92 this year. Steinberg, who has previously co-edited The Letters of Sylvia Plath (Vol. I and II), has written at least two dozen essays on Plath as well as a brief biography of the author for high school children. In his latest, The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath (Faber & Faber), Steinberg speaks freely of Plath’s writing and how it should be seen in the modern world. In an interview with Nandini Bhatia, Steinberg says though Plath is primarily known as a poet, her best-selling work is her novel, The Bell Jar (1963), and that by bringing out her collected prose, he hopes to show how seriously Plath took prose writing. “One may be able to gain a better understanding of her storytelling abilities, her development of characters, and the themes which interested her the most,” he says.
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- “The first stroke of good luck in my life was to be born in Singapore,” writes diplomat and writer Mahbubani, who served as president of the UN Security Council. His memoir, Living the Asian Century: An Undiplomatic Memoir, (Hachette) traces a personal journey as well as the rise of Singapore as a rich Asian power.
- Growing up in the Marxist stronghold of Kannur in Kerala, Ullekh N.P. had always been fascinated with Cuba and its leader Fidel Castro. The journalist and writer finally visited the island in 2023, capturing its vibrant history, resilient public institutions, and enduring political spirit in his new book, Mad about Cuba: A Malayali Revisits the Revolution (Penguin).
- After her revenge saga featuring Lilith, the first woman in Eden, earlier this year, Shinie Antony is back with an anthology in a similar vein. Hell Hath No Fury (Hachette), edited by Antony, has 13 authors telling stories of women out for blood. The characters inhabit the grey zone between love and hate.
- The narrator of Devi Yesodharan’s The Outsiders (Penguin), Nita, a teacher from Kerala, has just taken a job in Dubai. But can an immigrant fit in? Her job as a live-in tutor for a young girl puts her in an unfamiliar situation. Nita starts telling the child’s mother a story from ancient India, where Darius, a sailor, arrives at an Indian port seeking his fortune. As she tells this tale, making it up as she goes, she finds that she’s narrating the story of all outsiders.
Published - October 29, 2024 01:16 pm IST