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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. The shortlist for the inaugural Women’s Prize in Non- Fiction has been announced with books covering a wide range of subjects from religion, life, art and history, AI and social media politics on it. If Madhumita Murgia’s Code Dependent (Picador India) traces life in the shadow of AI, Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World (Allen Lane) is about living in the time of social media. Noreen Masud likes to describe A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton) as a memoir-travelogue about Britain’s “beautiful flat landscapes”. Masud who grew up in Lahore says the walks may show “us a new way of relating to one another, and a new mode of solidarity in a still-too-colonial world.” Tiya Miles’s All That She Carried (Profile) is a chronicle of enslavement, “Black love, familial resilience, and woman’s craft.” It retells the story of American slavery by tracing an embroidered bag, “passed down through a single line of female kin.” In Thunderclap (Chatto & Windus), Laura Cumming explores the ties between art and life as she tells her story, that of her Scottish painter father who died young, and the artists of the Dutch Golden Age; and Safiya Sinclair’s How To Say Babylon (4th Estate) is about growing up Rastafari in rural Jamaica. The winner will be announced on June 13.
In reviews this week, we read Gabriel Garcia’s Marquez’s last novel, a handbook on caste, Yuvan Aves’ philosophical book on the environment and more. Amal Allana also pays tribute to Edward Bond, the radical playwright and theatre director who passed away recently.
Books of the week
Authors sometimes decree that their unpublished works be destroyed. These orders are often flouted by those tasked with carrying them out – happily for readers, to give just one example, Max Brod ignored Franz Kafka’s instructions. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s sons faced a similar predicament before deciding to go ahead with the publication of Until August, which Marquez, losing his mind to dementia, had said, “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.” One of his sons, Rodrigo Garcia, who wrote a grief memoir on his parents, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, says in the book that one of the things Marquez hated most about death was that it would be the only aspect of his life he would not be able to write about.” In that context, he would tell his sons, “There is nothing better than something well written.” So, in their decision to publish an unfinished work, they must have sought refuge in another of Marquez’s pronouncements: “When I’m dead, do whatever you want.” In his review, Suresh Menon writes that the ethical question involved in the posthumous publication of Until August ten years after the writer’s passing is separate from the literary one. The sons of the great Colombian Nobel laureate say in the Preface, “In an act of betrayal, we decided to put his readers’ pleasure ahead of all other considerations.” “Until August is most profitably read as a novella; it is coherent and consistent as it stands. It is far from perfect, however, although had it been written by someone else it might have been hailed as superb. But ‘superb’ is a comedown for a great writer, and that’s Marquez’s fate here.”
The Oxford Handbook of Caste (Oxford University Press) is a 660-page compilation of essays on a hot-button issue by academic experts from India and abroad. Edited by Surinder S. Jodhka and Jules Naudet, its publication coincided with the political buzz generated by Bihar’s caste census followed by the Bharat Ratna for its social justice pioneer Karpoori Thakur, writes Manoj Mitta in his review. “Though this treasure trove omits to mention Thakur, let alone his impact on the Hindi belt, one of its 42 essays is titled ‘Census, Caste Enumeration and the British Legacy’.” Despite the omissions, Mitta says its staggering range of essays does include other topical aspects of caste, like the section of five essays labelled ‘Caste and the Religious Realm’, a subject that has gained greater traction in the wake of the Ayodhya temple inauguration. While one of those essays deals with ‘Hinduism and Caste System’, another delves into ‘Caste and Hindutva’.
In her introduction to Ismat Chughtai In Her Own Words: Letters & Interviews (Women Unlimited), translator Tahira Naqvi says that letters by writers have little meaning unless read in tandem with their works. But the letters written by rebellious Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai to her family, friends, editors, and other associates, actually enables readers to develop a connect with the people she is writing to, says Soma Basu in her review. “Chughtai’s words breathe power; her imagery, description, style and fearless expressions seamlessly build the narrative of the times she lived in, even though the carefully curated collection contains letters from different decades and many that were left incomplete or not posted. It exposes the conflicts and tension between men and women created by society and how only those who could break free from social conundrums moved forward.” Beautifully translated by Naqvi from Chughtai’s original Urdu letters, the compilation draws an interesting canvas about life in an upper middle class progressive Muslim family in early 20th century. “There is a delightful amount of revelation packed in the 275 pages of the comprehensive volume that contains eight interviews and more than 50 letters written over a 30-year period.”
The intertidal is an area that undergoes periodic flooding during high tides. In his book, Intertidal (Bloomsbury), Yuvan Aves compares this with the flooding of the human mind, as he combines his explorations of the coastal and marshy areas of the city (Chennai) he calls home with his growth as a teacher, nature educator, activist and author. In her review, R. Krithika says the book is deeply moving and that Aves while recording his observations, also offers readers a way to engage not just with the book but also with the world around them.
Spotlight
Edward Bond, who passed away on March 3 at the age of 89, was highly esteemed among 20th and 21st century theatre practitioners, writes a fellow theatre personality, Amal Allana, whose biography of her father Ebrahim Alkazi, Holding Time Captive, is just out from Penguin. Bond, says Allana, first attracted attention with The Pope’s Wedding and Saved in the 1960s. “A playwright, theatre director, poet and dramatic theorist, Bond, obsessed with the question of responsibility, confronted his audiences with violence and cruelty around themes such as imperialism, economic exploitation, war and apartheid. This was reflected in plays such as Saved and Narrow Road to the Deep North.” In 1975, when Allana, as a young director, chanced upon a script of Saved, she felt compelled to stage it. “There was a sense of unease across the country as Emergency had been declared a few months earlier in June. A lurking sense of fear of being exposed to unknown forces made one anxious. This was one of my reasons for staging this play at the time.” She recalls that her father had staged Narrow Road to the Deep North in Delhi in 1973 at the National School of Drama. “A satirical play on the British Empire, it was a political parable set in Japan in the Edo period, dealing with the poet Basho and the changing political landscape over 35 years. Told with Brechtian simplicity, here we saw the conflict between two worlds: an extravagant world where Britannia ruled and the cool samurai deliberation of a traditional Japan. Raising moral issues, Alkazi’s production highlighted satirical references to historic events at a time when we in India had begun to reinvestigate our experience of colonialism.”
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- The former Reserve Bank of India Governor, Duvvuri Subbarao, is publishing his memoir, Just a Mercenary? Notes from My Life and Career (Penguin). His previous book, Who Moved My Interest Rate?, recounted his experience as RBI Governor from 2008-2013. But before he took over at the helm of the RBI, Subbarao had a 35-year career in the IAS, and in his memoir, he weaves his experiences “into a comprehensive framework.”
- Liberty: The Indian Story (Speaking Tiger) by John Harriss is a monograph that explores the difficult relationship between the Constitution and Parliament. Ever since the setting up of the republic, a fierce battle has played out, he writes, between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ freedoms, or, broadly, the guarantees of the Fundamental Rights, and the goals of the Directive Principles of State Policy. Some of the questions he raises include: Are individual freedoms under threat? Is the central constitutional aim of liberty still a long way off?
- The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories is a new anthology of Bengali literature in English, including many previously untranslated stories. The prose short story arrived in Bengal in the wake of British colonisers, and Bengali writers quickly made the form their own, and translator Arunava Sinha chronicles many such stories on a diverse range of themes, land wars, famine, the caste system, religious conflict, patriarchy, Partition and the liberation war of Bangladesh. The dazzling array of writers include Tagore, Banaphool, Parashuram, Premendra Mitra, Satyajit Ray, Ashapurna Devi, Mahasweta Devi, Nabaneeta Dev Sen and others.
- Crooked Seeds (Pan Macmillan) by Karen Jennings takes readers to post-apartheid South Africa. Set in 2028, Jennings examines the personal struggles and trauma of a woman named Deidre van Deventer, who confronts her family’s troubling past. Jennings’ earlier novel, An Island, was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
