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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
The Paradise of Food (Juggernaut) by Khalid Jawed, translated from the Urdu Ne’mat Khana, won the ₹25 lakh 2022 JCB Prize for Literature on Saturday. Jawed explores the travails of existence and squalor through the metaphor of food. Translated by Baran Farooqi, it tells the story of an orphaned boy, Zahiruddin Babar, who is brought up in a joint family, and looks at life from different angles. He is an outsider both at home and in the world. “We look for happiness in every corner, and today I feel I have found happiness by winning this Prize,” he said, accepting it in New Delhi. Baran Farooqi thanked her father, the Urdu litterateur Shamshur Rahman Farooqi, who introduced her to Urdu, and had first brought Jawed’s writing to her notice. Pointing out that Urdu has become a little bit of a stranger in India today, she said it needed people to spread the word because this “stranger has many things to say.”
The Paradise of Food by Khalid Jawed
In reviews, we read about the cell, building blocks of the human body, a brief history of the Indian economy from Nehru to Modi, Haruki Murakami’s essays on how to write a novel, books on football and more.
Books of the week
The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee
In The Song of the Cell (Allen Lane), Siddhartha Mukherjee takes readers on an inward journey, navigating through organs and tissues, and arriving at the cells that make them. He divides his cellular symphony into movements, each with its own cadence. For example, The Healing Cell tells us how cells like platelets and antibodies soothe and heal us. The Discerning Cell, speaks about the intelligence of the immune system and how this wisdom gets passed down. The Contemplating Cell delves into the power of response and stimulus of the neuron. The Renewing Cell talks about the power of the cells and explores how we could use stem cells to regenerate and heal. The final rondo, says the reviewer Pranay Lal, circles back to Dr. Mukherjee’s pet peeve, cancer and accelerated cell death. He labels it The Selfish Cell. “He gently guides the reader to understand their physical and functional roles. In doing so, he builds a deep appreciation in the reader of the unexpected, moving ways in which nature shapes us…. Dr. Mukherjee presents the current understanding (or lack of it) of the function and dysfunction of cells and navigates through complex questions and implications for the future of medicine. He carefully weighs in on everything dealing with CRISPR, stem cell research, immunotherapy, designer babies, and future pandemics.”
Review of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Song of the Cell: Life is cell deep
India’s Economy from Nehru to Modi: A Brief History (Permanent Black in association with Ashoka University), by Pulapre Balakrishnan conveys complex economic ideas in accessible language and brings in data to substantiate all the arguments. The reviewer, Amit Basole, says Balakrishnan brings many years of experience in closely analysing macroeconomic trends to his version of India’s post-Independence economic history. The history is divided into four parts: The Nehruvian period, the period from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s (which he calls the “watershed years”), the early post-reforms period and the most recent period covering the Modi years. “But the book is certainly not merely a chronicling of historical facts on India’s economy. A macroeconomic framework holds the account together and there are many theoretical insights.” The challenge for policy-makers in India is how to be creative about our own problems given our strengths, and to not be, in Balakrishnan’s words, “derivative” or a slave to fashions coming from the rich countries.
Review of ‘India’s Economy from Nehru to Modi — A Brief History’: Good policy, bad policy
Haruki Murakami
In a collection of short essays, Novelist as a Vocation (Vintage), Haruki Murakami explores his journey as a novelist. Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen, in it, Murakami says it continues to amaze him that for more than 35 years, he has continued to write novels, and that his aim in the book is “to hold onto the purity of that feeling of amazement.” Reviewing it, Mini Kapoor writes that Murakami walks readers through the nuts and bolts of the “Herculean task.” When working on a novel, he says he writes roughly 10 Japanese manuscript pages a day (that is, about 1,600 English words). “No more, no less…. At each step, when someone flags a passage for a relook, whether he agrees with the comments or not, he will rewrite it – perhaps not as the pre-publication reviewer intended it, but it will be rewritten nonetheless.”
Haruki Murakami on how to be a novelist
The second part of Manreet Sondhi Someshwar’s trilogy, Hyderabad: Book II The Partition Trilogy (HarperCollins), is a thinly disguised slice of Hyderabad on the eve of Partition. Hyderabad merged with India nearly 13 months after August 15, 1947. Like the first part, Lahore, the second part too has a love story at the centre while the real backroom drama and political intrigue play out on the sidelines. The canvas is large, the events beyond comprehension, the characters larger than life, says Serish Nanisetti in his review. “Missing in this are the small details of their lives. This Someshwar tries to fill in but ends up creating a jumpy narrative like an Instagram reel shot without a tripod.
Spotlight
With all eyes on Qatar for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, Suresh Menon picks 11 iconic books on the game. Every four years, Uruguay’s Eduardo Galeano, the poet laureate of football, put up this sign on his door: ‘Closed for Soccer’. He then spent a month watching the World Cup and writing about it. His Soccer in Sun and Shadow, says Menon, is the greatest book on football. “Only Mexican writer Juan Villoro’s God is Round challenges that.” On his list are David Winner’s Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, about the novelist’s obsession with Arsenal football club, Simon Kuper’s Soccer Against the Enemy on how football shapes national identity, David Goldblatt’s The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football and several others. The books which talk about the history of the game and some of its iconic representatives are ideal to turn to when a World Cup is on.
A pick of 11 iconic books on football: the history and the magic
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- Rajaraja Chola: King of Kings (Aleph) by Kamini Dandapani explores the man behind the larger-than-life image of Rajaraja Chola and the milieu in which he reigned. He became king in 985 CE and the Chola empire reached its zenith during that time.
- In Who Moved My Vote? (Westland Books), Yugank Goyal and Arun Kumar Kaushik dig through electoral data from national and State elections to demonstrate how the system creates leakages in the mandates it returns, and why the whole apparatus needs radical reform.
- The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road returns with the first of a two-volume novel: The Passenger(Alfred A. Knopf) is the story of a salvage diver, Bobby Western, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God.
- Black River (Context) by Nilanjana Roy revolves around a crime in a society in the throes of change, caught between class, religion and caste divide. It is framed as a police procedural and a quest for justice, and in that pursuit, Roy also profiles ordinary people who often carry out extraordinary deeds against all odds.
