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Last week, the world bid goodbye to another icon – the great existentialist Czech writer Milan Kundera who passed away at 94 in Paris, his home for decades. Though his most well-known and oft-quoted book is The Unbearable Lightness of Being, published in 1984, in all his other work too, including The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Life is Elsewhere, he invents stories, confronts one with another, and through this he asks questions about life and death, love and loss, the political and personal, memory and forgetting, home and exile. In an interview to The Paris Review, he had said: “My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form. The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as those that we play out on the great stage of History) and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being.” Kundera was forced into exile following his expulsion from the Czechoslovakian Communist Party for being a dissident. He told the American writer Philip Roth, who edited a series, Writers from the Other Europe, and promoted Kundera’s The Book of Laughter…, “if someone told me as a boy: One day you will see your nation vanish from the world, I would have considered it nonsense… but after the Russian invasion of 1968, every Czech was confronted with the thought that his nation could be quietly erased from Europe.” Kundera told Roth he learned the value of humour during the time of Stalinist terror. “I was 20 then. I could always recognise a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn’t fear, by the way he smiled. A sense of humour was a trustworthy sign of recognition. Ever since, I have been terrified by a world that is losing its sense of humour.”
Read Suresh Menon’s tribute here.
The grand old man of Indian literature turned 90 on July 15. The long writing life of M.T. Vasudevan Nair, or MT to his readers, has naturally mirrored the roller-coaster social changes in his home State, Kerala. He took note of the shocks and upheavals in the matrilineal tarawad system of the Nairs, for instance, in his early novels like Nalukettu (The Legacy), Asuravithu (Demonseed) and Kaalam (Time). But he also mapped the interior monologues of characters, and wrote many short stories on the varied facets of individuals who felt they were misfits in the social order; he was also interested in the epics — in Randamoozham, published in 1984, he revisited the Mahabharata through Bheema. His short stories, novels, travelogues, screenplays may be rooted in Kerala but their stories could be of every man and woman, and hence they have endured, as P.K. Ajith Kumar writes in this tribute.
In reviews, we read an anthology that celebrates every label thrown at women, Margaret Atwood’s new book of short stories, a curated collection of fiction and non-fiction by the eminent Kannada writer U.R. Ananthamurthy, a new biography of Ambedkar and more.
Books of the week
In Becoming Babasaheb (HarperCollins), Aakash Singh Rathore, a scholar who has worked extensively on Ambedkar, shows us vivid glimpses of milestones on Ambedkar’s journey, including his life-changing leadership of the Mahad satyagraha. In her review, Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta writes that Rathore notes that the period when the young Ambedkar was a student in New York was also the time of a new flowering of black consciousness, and the activism of the suffragists, among whom were Columbia students and faculty. “This environment strengthened what Rathore describes memorably as ‘the irrepressibility of (Ambedkar’s) innate need to call out injustice.’ Succinctly, in the final words of his MA thesis about the economic impact of British rule on India, Ambedkar writes: ‘The immenseness of India’s contribution to England is as astounding as the nothingness of England’s contribution to India’.” Ambedkar’s return to Bombay changed the course of his life, and the life of the nation. “Rathore’s retelling of this story is perceptive, elegant, and absorbing…. This riveting narrative takes us on the vast journey into Ambedkar’s remarkable life, his contributions, and his humanity.”
To celebrate 50 years of feminist publishing house Virago published an anthology of 15 short stories, Furies: Stories of the Wicked, Wild and Untamed, written by, among others, Margaret Atwood, Kamila Shamsie, Helen Oyeyemi and Emma Donoghue. The story titles are all labels thrown at women who refuse to fall in line or do what they are told – ‘Vituperator’; ‘Hussy’; ‘Spitfire’. In her review, Sumana Mukherjee says the titles are all synonyms of virago (the Furies reference the classical Greco-Roman goddesses of vengeance) but there’s no superficiality or sameness in their interpretation. Mukherjee reviews Furies together with Margaret Atwood’s new collection of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood (Doubleday). She writes that though it can read a bit like an author’s scrapbook of thoughts and vignettes, the stories have the “shimmering humour and acute observations of ‘Siren’, Atwood’s opening story in Furies.”
A new anthology, The Essential U.R. Ananthamurthy (Aleph), includes excerpts from four of his novels, five poems, six short stories, nine essays and speeches, besides excerpts from life narratives – and A Life in the World (2019), a book of interviews conducted with URA by Chandan Gowda, who has edited this volume with N. Manu Chakravarthy. In his review, N.S. Gundur writes that in URA’s vast repertoire, choosing an appropriate portion of text would be a challenging task, and the editors, who knew URA, the man and the writer, intimately, have done a fairly good job. “For instance, the episode from the novel Samskara (1965/1976), where a dead man’s cremation becomes the focal point from which to analyse society, introduces readers to a slice of URA’s novelistic imagination.” What this volume brings out well is an essential side of URA – that he is one of the world’s most politically committed writers.
Spotlight
In Every Brain Needs Music (Columbia University Press), Larry Sherman, a neuroscientist and lifelong musician, and Dennis Plies, a professional musician and teacher, collaborate to show how human beings create, practise, perform, and listen to music. In his review, Sudhirendar Sharma writes that the duo explores how music – instrumental or vocal -- alters the air molecules that enter the ear and stimulate specialised nerve cells to generate powerful effects on our emotions, of both joy and sadness. In eight musically-curated chapters, the book connects cognitive, sensory and motor functions of the brain’s capacity for creativity. To add more substance to the narrative, the authors conducted a survey of over one hundred composers, professional, and amateur musicians, teachers, students, and music lovers to gauze their response on how music affects them. The examples are self-explanatory about the profound impact of music: An Alzheimer’s patient after listening to his favourite number could recall his family members; a young woman with Parkinson’s could lift her foot after humming a rhythm; and an advanced stage cancer patient could forget the pain after listening to his favourite song.
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- In Empire Building (Penguin), Rosie Llewellyn-Jones writes a new account of the East India Company’s impact on India, focusing on how it changed the subcontinent’s infrastructure in the context of building the railways, docks, municipal buildings, barracks, and cantonment areas. She assesses, for example, how Indians responded to the changing landscape, what they learnt from each other.
- Pakistan’s Security Dynamics and Nuclear Weapons (KW Publishers), edited by Shalini Chawla and Rajiv Nayan, is a collection of essays by experts on Pakistan’s security, politics and economy. One section of the book deals with Pakistan’s nuclear policy, its missile build-up, its efforts to ensure full spectrum deterrence and the debate on tactical nuclear weapons, as ambassador Sujan R. Chinoy writes in the Foreword.
- Guillaume Musso’s The Stranger in the Seine (Hachette), translated by Rosie Eyre, revolves around the story of a celebrated pianist Milena. When she is saved from drowning, a disaster is averted, but as it turns out, Milena is believed to have died a year ago. Will police captain Roxane crack the mystery?
- In The Perfumist of Paris (HarperCollins), Alka Joshi tells the story of Radha, wife and mother of two, who lives in Paris and works for a master perfumer devising new scents. It’s her dream job, but when a long lost son threatens to show up at her doorstep, her already rocky marriage starts unravelling.
