 | The Hindu On BooksWednesday | 23 October, 2024 |  |
| The Hindu On Books newsletter aims to take you deeper into the world of literature every week. Written and curated by Sudipta Dutta, this newsletter comes to you with book reviews, reading recommendations, interviews with authors and more. |
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Hanif Kureishi’s ‘Shattered’, Hilal Ahmed’s history of new India, 10 Indian classics and moreThe Hindu On Books Stack of books on a wooden library shelf, one of them open on top, multicolored book spines background. | Photo Credit: PERCDS (This story is part of The Hindu on Books newsletter that comes to you with book reviews, reading recommendations, interviews with authors and more. Subscribe here.) Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder came out in April, in which he recounts the stabbing attack of August 2022 and its aftermath. Another celebrity writer’s memoir is coming out end of October – Hanif Kureishi’s Shattered, his account of a devastating fall in Rome in December 2022 which left him paralysed. He began dictating despatches of his time in hospital first in Rome, then in London, and they have been “edited, expanded and meticulously interwoven with new writing” into a memoir. “A few days ago, a bomb went off in my life, but this bomb has also shattered the lives of those around me. My partner, my children, my friends,” Kureishi of Buddha of Suburbia fame writes. Rushdie who had often encouraged Kureishi to go on writing during his traumatic days says that in the “moving memoir”, Kureishi deals with “personal calamity with wit, unflinching honesty and literary grace,” calling the endeavour an “extraordinary achievement”. Writer Elif Shafak calls it “powerful, harrowing and utterly absorbing,” and that it will change the way we connect with life -- and love. In reviews, we read Hilal Ahmed’s new book on Muslims in Hindu India, the latest instalment of Hillary Clinton’s memoir, Elif Shafak’s new novel and more. Books of the weekPhoto taken in Delhi, India | Photo Credit: EyeEm Mobile GmbHAfter the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, there was widespread riots. But hatred and social stigmatisation of Muslims continue even after a grand Ram Temple has come up at the site of the mosque in January 2024. A section of the majority community seems to get provoked by any marker of Muslim identity, as Hilal Ahmed writes in A Brief History of the Present: Muslims in New India (Viking): “The established markers of Muslim presence — skull cap, beard, hijab, minarets of mosques and even an advertisement written in Urdu — are being perceived as civilisational threats to Hinduism. Muslims are targeted, abused, insulted and even lynched to death in public to assert nationalism in overtly Hindu terms.” In his review, Ziya Us Salam points out that over the past few years, there have been many attempts at projecting the challenges of being a Muslim in the age of resurgent Hindutva. “Ahmed’s book, with a calm and quiet reasoning, is a welcome addition.” In her new novel, There are Rivers in the Sky (Viking), Elif Shafak works on a single drop of water, which falls from the sky onto Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian king. The drop then enters the system of the other main characters, writes Sheila Kumar in her review, King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums, that self-taught genius who grows up by the Thames; Narin, the young gifted Yazidi girl in a settlement by the Tigris; and Zaleekhah Clarke, the scientist studying the nature of water in London, living in a houseboat on the Thames. Shafak binds these four disparate characters in a bond that is tensile, giving us what might be her best story yet, says Kumar. “We follow the time-honoured tradition here: the storyteller spins us a fascinating yarn that melds the historical with the contemporary, and the reader absorbs it in its entirety, coming out of the spell it has cast only after turning the last page.” FILE - In this Nov. 8, 2016 file photo, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton waves as she arrives to vote at her polling place in Chappaqua, N.Y. Vanity Fair is trying to defuse criticism of a video mocking Clinton and her presidential aspirations. In a statement Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2017, the magazine said the online video was an attempt at humor that regrettably "missed the mark." (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File) | Photo Credit: Seth WenigHillary Clinton’s life path began with a stellar legal career, and led to her often awkward and always controversial run as First Lady of Arkansas and then the U.S., her unsuccessful presidential nomination run against Barack Obama, U.S. Secretary of State to President Obama, and her unsuccessful presidential run against Donald Trump in 2016. For each of those periods of her life, there is a memoir: Living History; Hard Choices; What Happened, and her latest, Something Lost, Something Gained (Simon & Schuster). However, as Suhasini Haidar points out in her review, it is not always possible to get the unsanitised version of events of what happened, as Clinton writes guardedly about anything she may be held liable for later. Despite all the coverage, and the reams of impeachment documents about Bill Clinton and his sexual misconduct for example, Clinton gives no quarter to those who may want to know, even genuinely, about how she dealt with the accusations. SpotlightTo mark the 10th anniversary of the Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI) at Harvard, Massachusetts, it has published Ten Indian Classics, together with Harvard University Press. In the Foreword poet and critic Ranjit Hoskote says the aim of the programme is to create a sumptuous anthology that hopes to make available “the greatest literary works of India from the past two millennia to the largest readership in the world”. In her review, Geeta Doctor writes that the works, including that of the Sufi poet Farid-ud-Din Attar and verses by the first Buddhist women in the Therigatha, appear in their original Indic script with the English equivalent mirrored on the facing page. “It is from this cornucopia of choices developed by Sheldon Pollock, described by Hoskote as ‘the distinguished Sanskritist and intellectual historian of South India’, and Sharmila Sen, the editorial director of Harvard University Press, that the 10 Indian classics of the title were chosen.” At the core of the enterprise is translation. is at the core of this enterprise. “Each of the texts is introduced by the different scholars. They have shared their varied approaches in rendering the material in a lively and invigorating way for the lay reader.” Browser
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