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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. The acclaimed American writer Percival Everett is out with his new book, James, (Pan Macmillan) a revisiting of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told through the point of view of Huck’s slave companion, Jim. In interviews he has said that he wanted to give Jim an opportunity to be present in the story. In it, there’s a moment when Jim asks his father why he has to talk in dialect around white folks because when they are alone, they speak standard English. His father tells him: “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them. The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us.” In an interview to CBS News Sunday Morning, when Martha Teichner asks him where does race figure in his world view, given that his books confront it, he said: “Do I think about race? No, but it’s there.... I can’t change this cultural tsunami that happened 400 years ago, and the waters of it are still waiting to recede... I do what I can [write books] and move on.” Everett, who teaches English at the University of South California, has written 30-odd books, including the Booker Prize shortlisted The Trees, the Pulitzer Prize finalist Telephone and Erasure, turned into American Fiction on screen which has just won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay.
In reviews, we read Mani Shankar Aiyar’s memoir on Rajiv Gandhi, Stephen Alter’s book on India’s wildlife and places, Brinda Karat’s recalling of 1975 and the Emergency and more. We also have a special to celebrate World Poetry Day (March 21).
Books of the week
Gopalkrishna Gandhi who has reviewed The Rajiv I Knew by Mani Shankar Aiyar (Juggernaut) says the book has been written by a politician about a politician without being about politics. “It is about a person as human in his vulnerabilities as he was strong in his determination as Prime Minister to not let those vulnerabilities get the better of him.” Aiyar, he writes, has also concentrated on the people that caused Rajiv Gandhi trouble, like Arun Nehru, but Gopalkrishna Gandhi says the book has its share of missed expectations. “As in the pages on Bofors, where Aiyar’s distance from the scene of action befogs the picture. His sum-up of Rajiv in the Bofors matter: (Rajiv was) ‘consistently honest, straightforward, upright’ comes not from Aiyar’s acclaimed vocabulary but that of a Who’s Who. Aiyar says Rajiv did no wrong. He does not explain how the perception of wrong-doing entangled him. The nearly 60-odd pages on ‘the Bofors story’, read like a strong ‘counter’ for M’Lord in a packed courtroom.... The book could have done with another hundred pages. Without those, its story asks ‘...and then....?’.”
Stephen Alter’s new book, The Cobra’s Gaze (Aleph), sets the stage for the travelogue-adventure. In her review, Janaki Lenin says Alter explores his own early influences, of growing up in the plains of North India, and his interest in snakes and leggy wildlife. She narrates the story of Alter locking eyes with a young goral near his home in Landour, Uttarakhand. It arouses in him “a startling sense of shared consciousness.” How did the antelope-like animal perceive him? Alter offers a way of looking at animals in the Anthropocene, says Lenin. “In his encounters with a spectacled cobra and a dancing frog, he ruminates on how they sense him and perceive the world.” And using that springboard, he uncovers “overlooked locations and underrated species, little known cultural and historical sites while also travelling to popular places in his quest to see charismatic animals. His vivid descriptions take readers to the cold heights of Ladakh, the arid plains of Tal Chhapar, and the murky swamps of Sunderbans, while exploring the broad theme of the book: what is our relationship with wild fauna and how do we engage with them.”
Brinda Karat’s memoir, An Education for Rita: A Memoir – 1975-1985 (LefWord Books) is set in August 1975, merely two months after Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency. In her review, Ramya Kannan points out that the slim memoir sets chronology in place, couched in stories of the people, mill workers, in the slums of Delhi, in its crooked bylanes, at the factory gates, in conspiracies and union victories, small and big. “As Karat writes, the reader gets the sense of sitting by a roadside tea shop outside of a textile mill in Delhi, on a cold morning, sipping on a badi chai, as a hanger on, witnessing historic events unfold, ones that we had a mere inkling of. And yet, as Karat pieces them together, the larger tapestry of connections to modern day India become apparent... Leaders of both the Communist movement and the country enter and exit the stories like crucial punctuation marks, enhancing and emphasising the stories with their wisdom and with what they do.”
Spotlight
For World Poetry Day, we offer a special which looks at poems in all its forms, as dissent, awareness, to remember and bear witness, and as chronicler of the times.
For instance, Meena Kandasamy’s Tomorrow Someone will Arrest You (Juggernaut Books), captures the raw, intense realities of contemporary India. The author tells Navamy Sudhish that her poetry is more of a “philosophical-intellectual-emotional love child” and not part of any conscious mission to battle propaganda. “Purely from a political communication perspective, we need to combat false propaganda with data points, historical analysis, fact-checks, first-person testimonies, ground reports, and such like. A poem cannot be birthed at the factual level — that sort of stenography would only lend itself to banality,” says Kandasamy. She believes that it is the civic duty of every Indian citizen to battle the enace of disinformation, even as she draws heavily from political intolerance, caste-based violence, sexuality and cultural identity in her works.
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- Adventures in Democracy: The Turbulent World of People Power (Penguin) by Erica Benner travels from Japan to Poland, Greece to France in a quest to understand what do democratic ideals of equality mean in a world obsessed with competition, wealth and greatness? How can we hold the powerful to account? Benner reveals the vulnerabilities of people power, asking readers to consider why democracy is worth fighting for and the role each of us must play.
- Priya Sahgal’s The Contenders: Who Will Lead India Tomorrow? (Simon&Schuster) follows the next generation of India’s political leaders, and as she writes in the Introduction, she has waited since 2004 (when Rahul Gandhi debuted in Parliament) for ‘Betajis’ to become ‘Netajis’ so that she could write about them. Rahul Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Milind Deora, Himanta Biswa Sarma, Anurag Thakur and others are featured in her book as she also probes what the electorate wants from future leaders.
- And They Lived... Ever After (HarperCollins) is a collection of fairy tales retold by disabled women. Recognising the potential of fairy tales and their ability to build a worldview, “to shape how we perceive love, life, community and belonging,” the ‘new’ stories find community in ‘The Ugly Duckling’ story; ‘Rapunzel’ demands a better life for herself; ‘Snow White’ finds people she can be happy with and ‘Cinderella’ learns to love herself. With disabled women changing the narrative, the stories become a way to heal and thrive.
- Anjali Deshpande’s Nobody Lights a Candle (Speaking Tiger Books) is translated from the Hindi original, Hatya. It is a crime fiction with a purpose. It’s a study on age-old biases and violence in a country gripped with inequalities.
