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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. On April 2, the grand dame of Caribbean literature Maryse Condé passed away at 90. In a tribute essay, Kunal Ray first wonders why she was not read in literature classes. She hailed from the French Guadeloupe, and Ray says he discovered Condé much later in his adult life through an independent Kolkata publisher, Seagull Books, which had published three of her titles: What is Africa to me?, Of Morsels and Marvels, and The Journey of a Caribbean Writer -- each different from the other. “From France (Paris) to Guinea to Ghana to Senegal, I travelled to several parts of Africa through Condé’s account. The book also unravels a writer trying to understand or discern her ideological self through experiences in life such as her encounters with Che Guevara and Malcolm X, amongst others, and her disagreements with the Negritude Movement.” Last year, she was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for The Gospel According to the New World, translated into English by her partner, long-time collaborator and eminent translator, Richard Philcox. What does the absence from popular discourse of writers like Condé tell us about our literary spaces and cultures, asks Ray? Is it because she makes us uncomfortable with her politics and sharp critique? That her work is hard to classify or fit into a box? Or is it gender and colour? Were we waiting for the Noble Prize to create another celebrity writer like prizes often do?
In reviews, we read Madhumita Murgia’s Code Dependent, Yaris Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism, Shinie Antony’s new novel and more. We also discuss the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction shortlist and talk to Nikhil Alva about his new novel.
Books of the week
As Madhumita Murgia started out in journalism, she became curious about a “harmless-sounding digital object known as a ‘cookie.” In the introduction to Code Dependent (Picador India), she writes that reporting that story for Wired magazine “took her down a dizzying series of rabbit holes... it revealed the murky world of ‘data brokers’ – shadowy companies that collect data about our online lives and turn them into saleable profiles of who we are today, and who we will one day become.” The heir to the big data business is a single technology – artificial intelligence, and her book reflects on the march of AI. In his review, John Xavier writes that Murgia lifts the veil hanging over humans that are building the base for AI’s super structure to stand on. “Most of them are unaware that the very system they are building would soon gobble up their very livelihood.” Her book offers a cross-section view of tech’s bedrock — labelled data, humans building it, and the influence of automated systems on people. She throws light on the real AI stack, which has humans right at the bottom of the pyramid, without whose inputs, the current crop of AI tech wouldn’t stand.
In his new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Penguin Business), economist and former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism is now dead, in the sense that its dynamics no longer govern economies. “In that role it has been replaced by something fundamentally different, which I call technofeudalism.” In his review, G. Sampath points out that for Varoufakis, who, as Greece’s finance minister, battled Europe’s financial establishment (and lost), capitalism has been killed off by ‘cloud capitalists’, or ‘cloudalists’, a mutant of the old capitalist class that has liberated itself from the twin imperatives of capitalism — market competition and profit. “For Varoufakis, three phenomena – the privatisation of the Internet, the sustained quantitative easing in the decade after the 2008 financial crisis, and the rise of China as an economic powerhouse — were instrumental in the emergence of an ecosystem where profits took a backseat. Instead, they incentivised burning cash to build market dominance, or ‘cloud fiefs’ — a fair description of what digital overlords such as Facebook, Amazon, and Uber have done.”
Shinie Antony’s Eden Abandoned (Hachette) picks up on the apocryphal story of Lilith and gives it her own spin. Legend has it that God created Adam and Lilith out of clay, but Lilith was not submissive enough to Adam. So she left Eden, and a more compliant woman, Eve, was created out of Adam’s rib. Lilith went on to wreak havoc. In her review, Latha Anantharaman says Antony begins with Lilith’s short-lived passion in paradise. But impatient with his fear of her ideas, his subservience to God, and his reluctance to think for himself, Lilith decides to leave. “When she leaves him, she scorns him and she rages, but she also weeps for what she has lost. Because she must embrace something, she embraces the world of demons, and her life of resistance and subversion begins.” Antony’s writing matches the chaos that claws at the edges of humankind’s hard-won order, if we can call it order. Anantharaman says reading the book, one often has the feeling of cringing under a swarm of bats, infected with the horror that lurks just out of our field of vision.
In 1966, the bombing of Aizawl (denied by the Centre) was carried out to put down the Mizoram uprising after Mizo National Front (MNF) leader Pu Laldenga declared independence from India. A two-decade insurgency followed the military action and lasted till Mizoram became a State of the Indian union. The Mizo uprising and the secretive war is at the core of Nikhil J. Alva’s debut novel If I Have To Be A Soldier (HarperCollins), says Stanley Carvalho. “It is a significant piece of work with contemporary relevance and a poignant reminder of the horrors and fallout of conflicts, and the lasting impact it leaves on the masses. Coincidentally, the book was released just days before the 58th anniversary of the Aizawl bombing. As the son of politician and former minister Margaret Alva, the author has had the good fortune of knowing the Northeast region and interacting with its people during his numerous travels accompanying his mother. “These memories, emotions and experiences have helped shape the characters in this novel,” acknowledges Alva. “With his deep research and lucid writing, Alva has documented a dark but significant chapter of India’s post-Independence history for people to read, learn and not forget.”
Spotlight
The six titles on the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction are distinguished by an intimate, introspective approach that in no way minimises the treatment of their subjects, says Sanjay Sipahimalani in an essay. They offer original perspectives on subjects like online polarisation, Artificial Intelligence, enslavement, and the lingering shadows of family ties, he writes. Many of the books are memoiristic, some more than others. The winner will be announced on June 13. On the shortlist are Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place, Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon, Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap, Tiya Miles’s All that She Carried, Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger and Madhumita Murgia’s Code Dependent. Sipahimalani writes that “in All that She Carried, Miles says we need to escape from frames of mind ‘that elevate mastery over compassion, division over connection, and greed over care, separating us one from another and locking us in’. In their own ways, that is what all these shortlisted books urge us to do.”
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- What do democratic ideals of equality mean in a world obsessed with competition, wealth, and greatness? How can the powerful be held to account? Challenging myths of heroic triumph over tyranny, Benner reveals the inescapable vulnerabilities of people power and why democracy is worth fighting for in Adventures in Democracy: The Turbulent World of People Power (Penguin). Fraudster Tales: History’s Greatest Financial Criminals and Their Catastrophic Crimes (Pan Macmillan) by Vijay Narayan Govind, a finance professional turned true crime writer, highlights ten of the most notorious financial scandals that have rocked the world from ancient times to the 21st century.
- The Autobiography of God (Ebury Press) by Lenaa Kumar is a journey of self-discovery spanning 18 years which attempts to answer questions such as: what am I?; Who am I?; Where am I?; Why am I?
- Ramona Sen’s The Lady on the Horse and Other Secrets (Speaking Tiger) tells the story of five generations of a family in Calcutta, unfolding over the course of the freedom struggle, Bengal famine and Partition.
