This article forms a part of The Hindu on Books newsletter which brings you book reviews, reading recommendations, interviews with authors and more. Subscribe here.
Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
Pico Iyer’s new book, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise (Penguin), is out in January. After half a century of travel, from Ethiopia to Nepal, Tibet to Jerusalem, and his fabled travelogues (Video Night in Kathmandu, Falling off the Map, Cuba and the Night and others), essays (The Global Soul, Tropical Classical), several books on his adopted country, Japan, including A Beginner’s Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations and Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto, a biography of Graham Greene (The Man Within My Head) Pico Iyer turned inwards in his 2019 novel, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells. He opens with an epigraph by the 17th century Japanese Haiku master Basho (How happy/to see lightning/and not think, “Time is fleeting!”), and goes in search of changelessness in a changing world when everything feels more fragile than ever. As Iyer rushes back home in Japan after the sudden death of his father-in-law, he meditates on love and loss, revolving around the theme of autumn and a sense of ending in life. He has followed it up with a new book in which he asks what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict. Do we, as he mentioned in a recent talk ‘Why We Travel’, look within, like Thoreau seemed to suggest: “Thoreau knew that travel isn’t about seeing the sites. It’s about getting a new way of seeing. As soon as you have that new way of seeing, even the old places look different. Travel wasn’t really about movement. It’s about being moved.” In his journey, Iyer moves both inward and outward as he roams from crowded mosques in Iran to a film studio in North Korea, from a holy mountain in Japan to the sometimes haunting emptiness of the Australian outback. He connects unexpectedly sometimes with strangers and draws on his memories to suggest that perhaps paradise exists right in the heart of a confused and divided world. In an interview to The Hindu, he said the new book is “very much a pandemic book,” and it chronicles 48 years of his life travelling the globe. The book details his time with the Dalai Lama and Benedictine monks, as he has spent more than 30 years of his life in monasteries. “I have always been interested in the crisscrossing of cultures that happens across the globe and inside people’s hearts.”
This week, the world bid goodbye to celebrated French writer Dominique Lapierre, whose book The City of Joy on the “wretched inhuman slum” of Calcutta and its extraordinary souls brought a lot of attention to a city, once the capital of Empire. At 91, he died of old age, his wife told a French newspaper on Sunday. His 1985 book followed after two years of roaming the city, including a slum in Howrah, where he gathered material and realised straightaway that he would tell the story of the “human capacity to beat adversity and survive every possible tragedy.” A rickshaw puller’s story became Everyman’s and Lapierre said the experience of the slum changed his life forever. He stayed connected to the city and contributed large sums, including royalties from the bestseller, which was also made into a film by Roland Joffe, for the upliftment of the poor. As he wrote in his Afterword: “After this confrontation with the real issues of existence – hunger, diseases, total absence of medical facilities, lack of work – I no longer fight for a parking place when I return to Europe or America.” Sadly, some of the issues are yet to be sorted out for the poor in India, and it’s not just in Calcutta/Kolkata.
In reviews, we read a biography of Nirmal Verma, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s new novel, Bob Dylan’s new book and more.
Books of the week
Vineet Gill’s biography of the Hindi icon, Nirmal Verma, Here and Hereafter: Nirmal Verma’s Life in Literature (Penguin), puts not only the writer under his microscope but also on all other issues associated with literary creation. This, says the reviewer Kuldeep Kumar, makes the book rather dense but still it will be of great interest to those who are not familiar with Hindi literature and Nirmal Verma’s writings. Verma was the most cosmopolitan of Hindi writers and his novels and short stories were often set in foreign lands. He tried to wear two hats, that of a creative writer and a thinker, after being catapulted into fame with Parinde where the main protagonist is the lonely Latika whose inner world Verma described in great detail. In profiling Verma’s work, Gill mentions his creative writings, and discusses them in passing, but they do not form the focus of the book. “As Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has noted, Here and Hereafter is ‘as much about Verma’s life in literature as it is about Gill’s’. At one level, this book fascinates the reader as he travels through two interwoven worlds of Verma’s and Gill’s. At another, it is rather disappointing as it tells more about Gill’s world than Verma’s and fails to focus on his creative writings.”
In the 75th year of Independence, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of around 20 books, with many bestsellers among them, visits the events of the year leading up to August 15, 1947 and the months after that, and narrates how the lives of three sisters and their intimate circle are transformed. The formative experiences of the Ganguly sisters in Independence (HarperCollins) take place in Bengal, on both sides of the border ultimately drawn by Cyril Radcliffe. In her review, Mini Kapoor writes that Divakaruni is an insistent writer — there is a spareness in her descriptions of place and the historical timeline as she writes in the present tense to convey the interior dialogue of the three sisters. “Feminism, communal amity, empathy and self-growth are among the requisite qualities she identifies for both a country and a human being to be truly independent. Attainment of these may still be works in progress for the country, in fact there has been too much slip-sliding; but in the closed circle of the Bengali households set in turmoil more than 70 years ago, there is hope. And so it is that they speak to their present and their country’s future.”
Book review | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Partition tale, ‘Independence’
Sixty-six American songs have been given the Bob Dylan treatment in his new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song (Simon&Schuster). The book does not claim to be a history of popular music and hence the songs are not organised chronologically. The flitting nature of the arrangement echoes Dylan’s stream-of-consciousness style. In her review, Mini Anthikad Chhibber says that sixty years on, Dylan continues to bewitch and bedazzle with his liquid, live-wire prose. “Words dissolved into runs of vowels without the traffic lanes of consonants,” is just one example. “Each song,” she says, “is a springboard into the winding lanes of a keen mind, with magpie-like references to pop culture markers.” Elvis Presley’s ‘Money Honey’, for instance, talks about art and money. “Art is disagreement. Money is agreement. The only reason money is worth anything is because we agree it is.” At the end of the book, Chhibber says, you feel like you have spent time with a friend who is an excellent raconteur and allowed you a glimpse into the workings of his mind and craft.
Spotlight
A new anthology, Indian Christmas: An Anthology (Speaking Tiger), edited by Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle, reflects on the many ways India celebrates Christmas. In her essay, ‘Christmas in Many Flavours’, Liddle takes readers to Mambally Royal Biscuit Factory bakery in Thalassery, Kerala, where its founder Mambally Bapu baked the first Christmas cake in India. Mambally Bapu’s cake is supposed to have contained among other ingredients cocoa and dried fruit. Giving that baking powder hadn’t been invented yet, Bapu used a local brew, fermented from cashew apples and banana, to help the cake rise. Christmas cakes in India differ from region to region and there are more variations than one can count. “The Allahabadi version, for instance, uses petha (candied ashgourd), ghee instead of butter, and adds a generous dollop of orange marmalade to the mix.” This indigenisation of Christmas, she writes, is something that’s most vividly seen in the feasting that accompanies celebrations, from pork curries in Nagaland to sausage pulaos in Goa.
Indian Christmas: An Anthology, edited by Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle, reflects on the many ways people in India celebrate the most exuberant festival in the Christian calendar
Browser
- Ed Yong, a science journalist, explores the world perceived by animals in An Immense World (Bodley Head/Penguin). He describes what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes or what dogs smell on the street. He argues that to understand the environment, we need to see through other eyes.
- In Hard Times (Bloomsbury), edited by Manoj Joshi, Praveen Swami and Nishtha Gautam, is a collection of essays which highlights the major security challenges India faces and the ways they can be tackled, especially in the light of upheavals caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The contributors state that India needs a national security strategy for hard times.
- Amitabha Bagchi has translated the selected ghazals of Muneer Niazi (Lost Paradise/Juggernaut). One of the finest poets of the late 20th century, Niazi’s iconic poem, Hamesha (Hamesha der kar deta hun main/I always leave it late), like all of his oeuvre, touches emotional chords with Partition memories weighing on his mind. The English translation will give a fresh lease of life to his words.
- In Dark Star (Context) by Ranbir Sidhu, an old woman must follow her heart even as she lies in bed in Punjab, dreaming of an India before Partition. She wants to walk all the way to Delhi to tell the men who rule India what she really thinks.
