The Unforgiving City and Other Stories by Vasudhendra, Translated by Mysore Nataraja

The Unforgiving City and Other Stories by Vasudhendra, Translated by Mysore Nataraja

Published by: Penguin Viking/Penguin

Fiction: Short Stories,Literary fiction

Book summary:

From the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi winner Vasudhendra comes a powerful collection of stories that shock, move and amuse by turns. As the characters struggle to find their feet in a fast-changing India, they mirror our unspoken dilemmas, torn loyalties and the loss of innocence.

In the extremely popular ‘Red Parrot’, an innocuous image from childhood returns to haunt a man when he visits his idyllic hometown. In ‘Recession’, the desire for a child leads a couple down unexpected paths. In other stories, a young woman in love rethinks her future when buried family secrets are suddenly revealed; a boy learns that insomnia may be the symptom of something more ominous; lonely apartment residents discover the thrills and perils of social media.

Deftly crafted with gentle wit and a lightness of touch, each gripping story exposes the deepest contradictions of modern life. The fluid translation retains the flavour and nuances of the original Kannada, creating a rich reading experience.

About the Author:

Vasudhendra runs his own publication house, Chanda Pustaka, which publishes and encourages new writing in Kannada and has instituted the Chanda Pustaka Award which recognizes young short story writers. The author of thirteen books in Kannada,Vasudhendra has won many literary awards, including the Kannada Sahitya Academy Book Prize, the Da Raa Bendre Story Award and the Dr U.R. Ananthamurthy Award.

About the Translator:

Dr Mysore Nataraja is an acclaimed writer in Kannada and has published several collections of poems, plays, short stories and essays. He is the recipient of many literary awards including the Gorur Award (2004) and Alwa’s Nudi Siri Award of Mudubidri (2018).

*My Review:

Thank you Penguin India for the review copy. All opinions are my own.

Vasundhendra’s The Unforgiving City and Other Stories, translated from the Kannada by Mysore Nataraja has 12 stories to offer its readers, each a deft narrative weaving in contemporary elements with the vestiges of the old. The stories set in contemporary backdrops builds on traditional elements so well that I ending up reading them one after the other, and finishing the collection within a day!

From a company employer set on hiring women employees who are not planning pregnancies to cut maternity leave in ‘Recession’ that touches upon to the rush for high pressure jobs cushioned by lifestyles on credit basis and what happens when the bubble bursts to When The Music Stops that looks at parents taking to changes in their life due to the urban choices that their offspring makes, one that includes warming up to accepting an inter marriage prospect, these stories show how the old and new ways sometimes merge together: tentative, uneasy but inevitable.

The beauty of the urban and traditional facets and elements in the stories lie in the way they are not placed at odds with one another. The author does not pitch his characters in a face off nor make the reader take sides but gently probes the ways in which both are part of our times. The stories are relatable and believable expect for ‘Nimmi’ which has an element that can happen only in the realms of fiction but there too, the narrative is one of that looks at the lonely lives of an older parent and how he gets attached to a dog gradually while his son works abroad.

The Red Parrot does go all out in terms of pointing out how the urban eco system breaks the traditional ways but here again the author doesn’t harden stances but reflect the larger worldview of how onerous the task is to reconcile development without moving away from the beauty of nature in it’s earlier ways. The title story is embellished with numerous strands: urban living set in an apartment complex with residents connected over social media chat forums and where the engagement reflects the larger narrative in the country today of people taking sides and being split in the middle with unrelated opinion getting more traction than anything else which is then linked to how society today still looks at single women and those emerging from an earlier marriage. This goes out from me as a major recommendation for everyone who loves a good narrative and very good writing.

What Vasundhendra does with his stories in this collection is place both sides of society as we know today: its traditional core and its fast advance into an overwhelming new world that is diametrically opposite and yet has come about to be. His stories emerge from the sides mixing and trying to blur the hard and at times jagged edges and it his narrative, the characters that he places in the situations they are in and how they emerge or submerge to it that makes each story quite the thing it is. Go read.

The Odd Book of Baby Names by Anees Salim

The Odd Book of Baby Names by Anees Salim

Published by: Penguin Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India

Fiction: Literary fiction

Book summary:

Can a life be like a jigsaw puzzle, pieces waiting to be conjoined? Like a game of hide-and-seek? Like playing statues? Can memories have colour? Can the sins of the father survive his descendants?

In a family – is it a family if they don’t know it? – that does not rely on the weakness of memory runs a strange register of names. The odd book of baby names has been custom-made on palace stationery for the patriarch, an eccentric king, one of the last kings of India, who dutifully records in it the name of his every offspring. As he bitterly draws his final breaths, eight of his one hundred rumoured children trace the savage lies of their father and reckon with the burdens of their lineage.

About the Author:

Anees Salim is an advertising professional and critically acclaimed author. Three of his earlier novels have been accorded a host of literary prizes. His works have been translated into several languages. The Odd Book of Baby Names is his latest novel.

My Review:

Anees Salim’s The Odd Book of Baby Names is a testament to his story telling skill and narrative flair. Eight unforgettable characters hold center stage with their stories and distinct voices; each, a progeny of a King who lies dying after a spell of living in a realm of his own. The eight are just the known progeny of a King rumoured to have fathered over a 100 children, each given a name by him and nothing else. The novel is pegged around a book of names that the King has written down of each of his children born across his kingdom and to women from different social strata. The names are entered along with a brief meaning but very tellingly, without the names of the women he has bedded reflecting how women were dispensable to the larger scheme of things for powerful people.

Set in the mid 60s in an unnamed location but with enough hints to suggest it is Hyderabad and it’s last King that is being fictionalized, Salim’s latest novel effectively captures the decaying world of a ruler and his kingdom, the hold he once had over his people and courtiers but also touches upon the decay of the physical body and mind. As the King lie dying over the days, the lives of the 8 offspring unfolds, each revealing how little he means to them but throwing a giant shadow over them by his absence and the fact that they are of him. Some of the 8 offspring cross paths, some in close proximity, the rest not knowing they are related but every single one of them carrying the burden of being his child in myriad ways. Parts of the narrative strike a socio political chord, especially in the sections that hint at the way Hyderabad and its Nizam was co opted into India and then left in disarray, parts of it flesh the tumult and landscape of a by gone era, parts of it making you chortle with a deadly humour and overall so seductive that you want more than what the 207 pages has to offer.

Is there an analogy in the 8 protagonists living separate or connected lives and yet disconnected from one another with the way citizens trudge through the decisions that present day rulers take with no thought for how it affects the common man and woman hoping they would be noticed and taken care of ? That would be for the author to disclose.

But what the writing and the structure of the narrative tells you is that here’s creative magic happening and all you have to do is submit. The mood, the expression and tone in the narrative shifts every time there is a change in who is the narrator, just the thing that tells you, here is a wordsmith at work. Go read this if you are looking for something off the track but in a very good way.

The Plague Upon Us by Shabir Ahmad Mir

The Plague Upon Us by Shabir Ahmad Mir

Published by: Hachette India

Fiction: Literary fiction

Book summary:

Kashmir in the 1990s, a setting not very different from today…

As blood drips from the pellet-stricken eyes of young men, Oubaid watches a plague of blindness spreading through the streets of his homeland, Kashmir. A voice in his head tells him that he knows who brought this plague, but acknowledging it would mean Oubaid must confront his past and the horrors he has witnessed…

The Plague upon Us portrays Oubaid’s memories from the perspectives of four residents of the Kashmir valley who were once childhood friends – a militant, a rich man, the daughter of a social climber and a member of the Brotherhood. As the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fall into place, there unravels the full tragedy of a people looking for solace and a place to call home.

A searing and power-packed reflection of our times, this brilliantly crafted novel announces the arrival of an arresting new voice in contemporary fiction.

About the Author:

Shabir Ahmed Mir is a writer and poet and has been awarded the Reuel International Prize for fiction in 2017. The Plague Upon Us, Shortlisted for The JCB Prize for Literature is his debut novel.

My Review:

Kashmir, of contested space and troubled lives, of complicated narratives and numerous players with agendas that are politically motivated or are out there for personal gain or both, ones that are at odds with one another, or meeting briefly and then opposing one another again. Kashmir, of lives that are too fragmented to be able to admire the scenic landscapes, that tourists come to exclaim over and label as ‘heaven’ but which remain a living a hell for its natives. It is all of this in the context of Kashmir that is the setting of Shabir Ahmad Mir’s The Plague Upon Us.

Shortlisted for The JCB Prize for Literature this year, Shabir Ahmad Mir’s debut novel captures the vortex that Kashmir has been in over the years, leaving a trail of numerous people who continue to be traumatized beyond repair, dead bodies beyond recognition and forced disappearances by flagging the political flashpoints of what keeps a militarized state going, the fault line that were created, all through strong character arcs and their background stories.

An invocation from Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex sets the tone for the book:

‘By such death, past numbering, the city perishes:

unpitied, her children lie on the ground spreading pestilence,

with none to mourn:

and meanwhile young wives, and grey haired mothers with them,

uplift a wail at the steps of the altars, some here, some there,

entreating for their weary woes.

The prayer to the Healer rings clear, and blent therewith

The voice of lamentation.’

Mir’s writing is striking: it reads like poetry, almost like a ballad on suffering with staccato bursts of pain and anger. The economy of words used throughout the narrative can come across as mere story telling but read between the lines, in between the conversations of various players, and you can see that there is more than meets the eye. The tone is reflective, at times, a rant or politically charged and then, deeply philosophical. But mostly, it asks how does one look at truth and reality when you have been played and placed in layers of what could be truth or what could be falsehoods?

Following the fate of four childhood friends over the same time frame and mostly over the same turns of events but each filling in an additional layer, the narrative brings in a host of characters of different hues, from their different positions and by doing so, repeatedly asking what is truth if it can be manufactured, what is life it you are fated to suffer, what is free will if your wings are clipped and the sky is a torment, out there, but beyond your reach? The four main protagonists cuts across socio economic backgrounds and it is only in their names and trajectories that we can see who they represent, a device that effectively stays away from pigeon holing which side is right or has more credibility as the one wronged. Each of the main characters and those around them are impacted by violence both physical and psychological and reach a point where the male protagonists in turn perpetuate the same form violence on to others to devastating effect.

The four narratives touch upon everything from the old feudal power structures in Kashmir adapting to the changes taking around them by playing dirty with different forces to stay in the game and how they have been living for generations by exploiting nomadic communities; the aspirations of youthful ideology getting stranded at the crossroads with no way out except taking to the gun, either of the Government or those against it; the fate of women and young children and the trauma of men bruised raw by circumstances around them, the collective anger and trauma of suffering, the burden of survivor’s guilt, the saviour complex that the Armed forces bring to the table despite knowing they can only keep their guns busy, in turn only adding to the calumny, the lack of credibility and political leadership.

This is an assured debut that says what it has to, with an insight that is nuanced and is fiercely honest. The book works on many levels: the writing; the character arcs and the way they lead their lives in the shadows, wary and unsure of how events around them will place them; the dashes of magical realism in between the talks of political history and ideology. The blurring of fact into fiction is done just right: those who know a bit of Kashmir will find the facts: the brief political and electoral history covered through the background stories of a few characters, the shift from calls for Azaadi by many to blurring it with the ones for Jihaad and the infamous PAPA II interrogation center operated by the Border Security Forces from the late 80s to the mid 90s fictionalized as TALK 1 operated by the Army.

Albert Camus’ The Plague looked at the affliction of the mind, of the darkness that was the reign of the Third Reich with a Cholera epidemic as a metaphor. And in The Plague Upon Us, Shabir Ahmad Mir goes directly for the bone in the first passage of the book with red and black mirroring the mood in Kashmiris: red for rage, red for the blood that is being shed and black for the bleakness, the indescribable horrors and the weight of trauma, the unsure footing of everyone caught in a precarious setting, the blackness that consumes everyone in a cesspool of not knowing what comes next, the black following the red in a helpless dance. Mir’s main characters are compelling and one cannot help but feel bad for each one of them while seeing them emerge from childhood games to more deadly and fatal ones, each a victim of who and where they are and how they don’t matter in the end in the larger scheme of things. The plague in Kashmir is both red and black. It is an affliction across generations, a curse to be avoided if only one knew how.

The Plague Upon Us is all of 232 pages and yet it brings out with a sharp essence not just the complexities that lie with Kashmir and its people but also the more universal concepts of morality, the quandary over what are rights and what are wrongs. The latter is done, for good measure, by bringing in references to literary analogies starting with Oedipus Rex yes, but also starting and ending each of the four narratives in a surrealistic setting where the conversation is akin to the Arabian Nights. A main character who starts out as a simple youth stumbles on an article that his journalist father had written about Nicholas Gogol’s writings, a writer known for his surrealism and the grotesque while Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment becomes a topic of discussion between two characters. But it is how the beginning and the end are tied together, all the while holding the pieces in between: the descent into personal hells that touch upon one another to become a poisonous collective hell, the incoherent blabber of a character hinting towards the futility of words that emerge from and around Kashmir by various actors, the trajectory of a character in a headspace that is selective about what he has done, and bordering on madness, the losing of the grip over reality that makes Shabir Ahmad Mir’s hold on the reader complete.

And no, he offers no hope, not in the narrative and not through his characters, he offers no solution for surely, that would be akin to the empty promises that the powers that be have been spouting with little showing for it over the years.

How are You Veg? Dalit Stories from Telugu by Joopaka Subhadra, Translated by Alladi Uma and M Sridhar

How are You Veg? Dalit Stories from Telugu by Joopaka Subhadra, Translated by Alladi Uma and M Sridhar

Published by: Stree

Fiction: Literary fiction, Translation, Dalit Writing

Book summary:

Translated for the first time into English, Joopaka Subhadra’s stories expose the lives of Madiga women, the most oppressed among Dalits in Telangana. As she declares that she has drawn these from lived experiences, the reader in turn witnesses the cruelties in the lives of the Dakkalis, who are wandering bards, disturbance in the old feudal hierarchies with the arrival of educated Dalit youth, lack of compassion in society for women with disabilities and the absence of accountability in Government institutions, society and the State. The Stories reveal the subtle discrimination practised despite education and employment. Those on the politics of food are particularly intriguing.

About the Author:

Joopaka Subhadra is a Telugu Dalit activist, poet and writer. She has also written numerous political essays, book reviews, songs and journalistic pieces. Through her work, she has been instrumental in establishing Mattipoolu  Women Writers’ Forum. Her writings have been published in various literary and feminist journals.

About the Translators:

Alladi Uma and M Sridhar teach English at the University of Hyderabad and have been doing collaborative work in translation. Their translations as well as articles on the subject have appeared in many journals. They published a translation of a collection of short stories by Volga entitled The Woman Unbound: Selected Short Stories. They have won the Jyeshtha Literary Award and Katha Commendation Prize for their translations.

*My Review:

*Thank you Stree for the review copy. All opinions are my own.

Translated from the Telugu by Alladi Uma and M Sridhar, How are you Veg? by Joopaka Subhadra is a compilation of 23 short stories that the author says reflects the lives of the Madigas, most oppressed amongst the Dalits of Telangana. The stories make you think and look deeply within at how we can even barely comprehend that in this day and age, there are people who are not treated as equal in society, communities that are marginalized because of what they eat and what work they are restricted to doing across generations.

The beauty of this collection is that the stories, the tone of the characters are not restricted to voicing the injustices that are heaped on them, the oppression they face from others but also talk about the oppression within and how that plays out under the weight of patriarchal norms and belief systems, the abuse of people with physical disabilities.

The stories are then a mix: there are those that make you examine where each of us would stand in case we come across someone who has lived through generations of caste trauma and violence. For after all, don’t many of us even equate food habits with pure/impurity without looking at where that privilege comes from, looking down at those who eat non vegetarian fare and further equating it to morality? There are stories that bring out how for each step that is taken forward, like say reservations in institutions and electoral systems, there are many steps backwards and sideways. One story that looks at how a woman is propped up to win an election in the local body and she is made to realize that she has to think, act and be like the others of the high caste since the position is suitable for them. Another one is about how parents send their children to hostels to educate them, fighting off generations of being kept out of the education system in the hope that they would break the caste barrier and yet, there they are grossly mistreated because of who they are and what they represent.

Joopaka Subhadra’s writing has a strong narrative voice, one that makes you feel you are in the thick of things. Her subtle yet strong positioning will make you just a bit aware of how our own entitlements and privileges comes at the cost of the suffering of others. The stories in this collection bring out in just so many ways how even young children become aware of the way they are looked and treated with, reacting to it with childlike horror or indigence or just reconciling themselves to it, setting the pace for how the rest of their lives will be. Make this a must read!

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd

Published by: Pan Macmillan India/ Picador Books

Fiction: Literary fiction, Translation, Contemporary Japanese Literature

Book summary:

From the bestselling author of Breasts and Eggs and international literary sensation Mieko Kawakami, comes a sharp and illuminating novel about a fourteen-year-old boy subjected to relentless bullying.

Hailed as a bold foray into new literary territory, Kawakami’s novel is told in the voice of a fourteen-year-old student subjected to relentless torment for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, the boy suffers in complete resignation. The only person who understands what he is going through is a female classmate who suffers similar treatment at the hands of her tormenters.

The young friends meet in secret in the hopes of avoiding any further attention and take solace in each other’s company, completely unaware that their relationship has not gone unnoticed by their bullies . . .

Kawakami’s simple yet profound new work stands as a dazzling testament to her literary talent. Here, she asks us to question the fate of the meek in a society that favours the strong, and the lengths that even children will go in their learned cruelty. There can be little doubt that it has cemented her reputation as one of the most important young authors working to expand the boundaries of contemporary Japanese literature.

About the Author:

Mieko Kawakami is a Japanese writer and singer from Osaka. She was awarded the 138th Akutagawa Prize for promising new writers of serious fiction (2007) for her novel Chichi to Ran (Breasts and Eggs). Kawakami made her literary debut as a poet in 2006, and published her first novella, My Ego, My Teeth, and the World, in 2007. Her writing is known for its poetic qualities and its insights into the female body, ethical questions, and the dilemmas of modern society.

About the Translator:

Sam Bett is a writer of fiction and essays. He has translated Japanese fiction by Yoko Ogawa, Keigo Higashino, and Nisioisin. His translation of Yukio Mishima’s Star won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.

David Boyd has translated novels and stories by Hiroko Oyamada, Masatsugu Ono and Toh EnJoe, among others. His translation of Hideo Furukawa’s Slow Boat won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.

*My Review:

*Thank you Pan Macmillan India for the review copy. All opinions are my own.

Meiko Kawakami’s Heaven, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd has the bullying of young people in school by their own peers as the central theme of the book but does not stay within the confines of a young adults narrative or a coming of age story. What the author examines and makes us the reader do the same is to try and look at the essence of our lives, how each of us want to be understood and be accepted and how we get caught up by the conflicting turns of what is right and what is wrong.

The narrative revolves around a 14 yr old boy who is brutally bullied at school daily presumably because of his ‘lazy eye’ (or a squinting eye): the tactics are physical and humiliating. He is not able to find a way to tell his step mother or to the school authorities but finds a semblance of comport and empathy with another student, Kojima who is being bullied because of her unkempt appearance in school and who reaches out to him through short notes and letters. The bond between the two, their communication in class and outside is laced with utter loneliness that brings about a poignant bond. Their conversations are what gives readers a peek into their backgrounds and what is it that makes them different and hence, the target of the vicious bullying.

What happens to the two at school takes a backseat when we have the central protagonist having a run in with Momose, who is a key figure in the group that bullies him. The conversation that follows is deeply philosophical, one that questions the idea of choices and guilt, about being selfish and every one wanting to be accepted and understood, about who interprets something and why for what. What stood out for me was when Kojima who has quite a family baggage and who is herself tormented daily in school comes across as someone who cannot accept a possible physical change in her friend because it is something she would not do. Her stand is a tantalizing hint that her empathy could perhaps be only sympathy on a surface level, that she might not have extended her friendship to him without that and that at the end of it all, we all want to be on ground from where we want to do favours, where we are better off. The author of course doesn’t say all of this but that’s where brilliant writing scores.

The book title ‘Heaven’ alluding to Kojima’s most favourite place where she everything is beautiful and she feels the most innate peace is also an allegory given how it entices the imagination of the boy protagonist. The description of the place and the emotions it evokes in Kojima and how that is transferred to the boy, making him long to reach there is a beautiful allegory of how one looks at utopia, wishes for it but knowing it is well impossible for no one will work towards building that. Go read this!

Guilt and Other Stories by Harekrishna Deka, Translated by Mitra Phukan

Guilt and Other Stories by Harekrishna Deka, Translated by Mitra Phukan

Published by: Speaking Tiger

Fiction: LiteraryFiction, Translation, Assamese Literature

Book summary:

Harekrishna Deka, winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award and one of Assam’s foremost writers, is renowned for his short stories that are as incisive as they are moving. In this selection of his finest short fiction, Deka gives us a searing vision of the human condition, even as he brings alive the unique landscape of Assam in unforgettable images.

In the title story, an old woman, the only eyewitness to a crime, is forced to confront her own role in a long-forgotten murder, and the guilt that has lain dormant in her for years rears its monstrous head. ‘The Temple’ examines how society and religion create the ‘other’, and what happens when the marginalized refuse to lurk at the edges. ‘The Captive’ takes the reader through the forests and small hamlets that were once the refuge of militants as it tells the story of a kidnapped man and his unfathomable empathy with his captor.

Startling, insightful, and original in tone and form, Guilt and Other Stories presents a world that is both tender and painful. Through the collection runs a vein of rich, dark humour along with a deep, inimitable understanding of Assamese society, culture and history. Brilliantly translated by Mitra Phukan, a celebrated writer herself, these stories will live in the reader’s mind long after the last page has been turned.

About the Author:

Krupa Harekrishna Deka was a former member of the Indian Police Service who is known for his writing. He was awarded the Sahitya Academy Award for his poetic contribution in 1987, and the Katha Award for his short story, Bandiyar (Prisoner) in 1995. He won the Assam Literary Award in 2010.

About the Translator:

Mitra Phukan is an author, columnist and translator. Her published literary works include four children’s books, a biography, two novels, several volumes of translations of other novels and a collection of fifty of her columns. Her works have been translated into many languages, and several of them are taught in colleges and Universities. She has translated into English the works of some of the best known Assamese writers of fiction.

*My Review:

*Thank you Speaking Tiger for the review copy. All opinions are my own.

What Guilt and Other Stories by Harekrishna Deka translated from the Assamese by Mitra Phukan, a collection of 13 short stories is a delight to read. Some of the stories are rooted in the Assam ethos and socio-political setting but the rest are stories that could be true of any place because the emotions and characters can be transported anywhere, everywhere. What needs to be celebrated about this collection is the writing and the approach to the character arcs and their placements in the plot.

The author’s IPS background brings in characters associated with crime but the focus in those stories are not the legality or technicalities of the crime itself, but the more basic and different human tendencies of guilt over a past or one brazenly carrying on as if nothing has happened etc.

The writing approach towards the stories in this collection varies, keeping the reader unprepared for the range that this book has to offer. The first story in the book has a poor old woman who may/may not have been eyewitness to a crime and her fear of the police, not wanting to be involved in any police inquiries becomes a different story altogether in a most convincing manner.

One story looks at what true devotion to a godly deity is all about: the characters in the story and what happens to them, the spectacle around a religious ritual is a commentary on how religion is more of showing off and less about following humane actions.

There are stories with writing and writers at the center of them and each one of them is brilliant. One looks at creative expression and how writers resort to writing the real in their fiction but also puts out how real life can be less predictable than fiction; another probes whether writers write for themselves or what they are comfortable with writing or if they cater to what the reader wants, all of this while looking at life and death; still another examines the various labels on writing and writers who have to adapt themselves to fit in those labels: modern, post modern. How this one ends is both hilarious and serious.

A short story collection is difficult to write about because you don’t want to give too much away. Just go READ this!

What We Know About Her by Krupa Ge

What We Know About Her by Krupa Ge

Published by: Context/Westland Publications

Fiction: LiteraryFiction

Book summary:

Yamuna is adrift. A long-term relationship has come to an end. Her mother and she are at loggerheads about their ancestral home in Chingleput, which she loves and lives in. Even her PhD on early twentieth-century music in Tamil Nadu seems to be going nowhere—until it leads her to an unexpected puzzle from the past.

During her research, she comes to be fascinated by her enigmatic grandaunt, Lalitha, who rose to prominence as a Carnatic musician at a time when thirteen-year-old brides were the norm. And then she chances upon a letter written by her own grandmother to her grandfather that opens up another window into Lalitha’s life. She wants to know more. Only, the more questions she asks, the closer her family draws its secrets. No one will talk to her about this long-dead ancestor’s life or death.

What lies beneath the stories they are willing to tell? Beyond the letters that Yamuna manages to purloin from her beloved grandfather’s papers when she visits him in Banaras? What did this family do to Lalitha? Krupa Ge’s debut novel is an absorbing tale of an angsty young woman who must unravel the secrets of her family before she can untangle her own life.

About the Author:

Krupa Ge is a writer based in Madras. Her reportage and writings have appeared in The Hindu, Firstpost amongst many others. She won the Laadli Ward for a weekly column on women in Cinema (2017). She was awarded the Toto Sangam Residency in 2016 and was shortlisted for a Toto Prize in Creative Writing the same year.

*My Review:

*Thank you Westland Publications for the review copy. All opinions are my own.

What we Know About Her by Krupa Ge is about the many ways in which defiance plays out: in relationships, in the domestic and public sphere and in one’s political equilibrium. You begin reading this book for domestic friction, difficult ties, memories of hurt and the baggage of resentments. But you get more than just the domestic sphere, you get carried by the flow of the narrative that takes you to a load more than you expected and you feel yourself opening up to the characters and the situations they are placed in, the actions they take and the fall out later.

The author uses two different timelines: the present shifts back and forth between Benares and Madras which also features in the segments set in the early 1940s through recollections and letters from the time. That the author sticks to Madras when the narrative is set in contemporary times is her defiance to the way a place has severed from its socio political roots with a changed name but stays alive in the minds and imagination of millions in its original flavour and name. It is a delicious addition to the way the writing flows, subtly pulling in many more strands that focus on defiance.

And so, you have the main protagonist’s family, a motley bunch spread across different places and different journeys: a grandfather who rebelled against his orthodox family and took up creative arts and then becomes a Communist but who embraces faith and uproots himself to Benares after he loses his wife in his later years, a grand mother who gives love and affection to another family member but who gets carried away by what she thinks is best and hence, calls back the abusive husband; a grand aunt who had a stellar singing oeuvre but who had to marry early, face domestic abuse and then find her way to herself and her art and some semblance of happiness.

The passages on the discovery of Madras, going beyond its geography to its history in the cultural and social sphere, the music scene, the social ties that bind that are familiar yet unique, all of it keeps you wanting to know just where the story plays out. Each of the characters, their stories and the positions they take in life are real: you like them in parts, you can’t figure them out at times but they come across as real people you want to know. Then, there is the generational angst; with the central protagonist questioning the past and what for her is a battle of wills with her mother. Everything plays out over less than 200 pages: the self discoveries, the realization that defiance is a common thread in the lives and decisions of each family member, the subtle political flavour in the past and the present, the personal equations, the difference and similarities between the political protests of the older generational and the new, the debates over meritocracy and reservation, all of this weave in not screaming for attention but so seamlessly and naturally that makes the writing stand out. Recommended.

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis

Published by: Pushkin Press /Penguin India

Fiction: Literary Fiction, War

Book summary:

Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called “Chocolat” soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land.

Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German’s severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa’s deeds with admiration, but soon rumours begin to circulate that this super soldier isn’t a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend?

Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop’s At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man’s descent into madness.

About the Author:

David Diop is a French novelist and academic, who specializes in 18th-century French and Francophone African literature. At Night All Blood is Black is his second novel, now translated to over 13 languages and winning a host of literary awards including the International Booker Prize for 2021.

About the Translator:

Anna Moschovakis is a Greek American poet, author and translator. Her book of poetry ‘You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake’ won the James Laughlin Award in 2011.

*My Review:

*Thank you Penguin India for the review copy. All opinions are my own.

David Diop’s At Night All Blood is Black, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis is a thin book with many stories. A mere 145 pages that touches on a whole vista of themes around war: the violence and toxicity, its horrors and the way it wreaks havoc on the lives of young men who have not yet started living, the 2021 International Booker Prize winning book says a lot through what it has to say and what is left for the readers to dwell further on.

Diop centers the narrative on Alfa Ndiaye, a 20 yr old Senegalese soldier fighting in the trenches for France in the First World War. It is his words through which we read about the madness that war demands of – the blinding spectacle of savagery that must be worn to instill fear amongst the opposing party, where stories of sorcery and brutal rites are spread and exaggerated about soldiers of colour, how foot soldiers toil for the glory of a nation with awards being handed out like toffees and the demands of a colony ruling nation whose language he knows so little of. The Senegalese soldiers are termed ‘Chocolats’ and that is all they are, mere totem poles to be used and ruled over.

The writing toes a very line: it reads like a simple narration with repetitions of certain phrases and descriptions, a deliberate portrayal of someone who is trying to make sense of what is happening around him and failing, exposing the loss of coherence and sanity. Diop touches on the human psyche: the trauma and fear brought upon by violence, the beliefs and superstitions that men in combat hold on to keep afloat. The only affirmative emotion is friendship: Alfa’s connection to his ‘more than brother’ Mademba but this very friendship is what pushes the former on a destructive path following the latter’s death.

When Alfa takes us to his boyhood: the mother he is separated from, a father left heartbroken and a girl who chooses him and this is the Alfa who could have been if not for the war- looking for love but respectful of what the woman chooses, for on the battlefield, Alfa describes the violence as the plunder of women mirroring stark realities and the way it has changed him.

The core of At Night All Blood is Black is exactly what the title says so well: that every person is the same underneath: the fears, the hopes, the ties that we seek, the persons we could be. Just that David Diop writes all of these with an economy of words and without any exaggerated drama or impassioned plea about race and equality and humanity that makes it all the more effective. This is a book that leaves you with a multitude of thoughts and emotions: it is powerful and disturbing in equal measure. 

Totally recommending this.

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam

Published by: Penguin Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India

Fiction: LiteraryFiction

Book summary:

A young man journeys into Sri Lanka’s formerly war-torn north, and into a country’s soul, in this searing novel of love and the legacy of war from the award-winning author of The Story of a Brief Marriage.

The closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occupying, the warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us somewhere else…”

A Passage North begins with a message: a telephone call informing Krishan, newly returned to Colombo, that his grandmother’s caretaker, Rani, has died in unexpected circumstances–found at the bottom of the village well, her neck broken. The news coincides with the arrival of an email from Anjum, a woman with whom he had a brief but passionate relationship in Delhi a few years before, bringing with it the stirring of old memories and desires. As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn northern province for the funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the soul of a country.

At once a meditation on love and longing, and an incisive account of the impact of Sri Lanka’s civil war, this procession to a pyre “at the end of the earth” shines a light on the distances we bridge in ourselves and those we love, and the indelible imprints of an island’s past. Anuk Arudpragasam’s masterful novel is an effigy for the missing and the dead, and a vivid search for meaning, even amid tragedy”-

About the Author:

Anuk Arudpragasam’s debut novel The Story of a Brief Marriage won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and was Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. It has been translated into seven languages. His second novel, A Passage North has been Longlisted for 2021 Booker Prize.

*My Review:

*Thank you Penguin India for the review copy. All opinions are my own.

A Passage North has a quiet intensity that flows through the narrative taking readers through the remains of war, shared personal traumas and it’s after effects over time and distance. There is no one conventional plot that pitches characters against or with one another. Rather, it is a tapestry of lives, experiences and feelings that come together through Krishan, the main protagonist who by allowing the reader into his meditations on the events that unfolds around him, brings to us a shared discovery of the ephemeral nature of life.

On a whole, the book reads like a reflection: a looking back at things, of what has happened and what it has made one to feel, the relationships that were forged and that went adrift, but before that, the coming together of individual people and how they danced around a bit warily before learning to trust, all of these, as if they are somewhat separate from the present but never removed from it in any way whatsoever.

Anuk Arudpragasam’s writing style settles on you gently, starting with a domestic scene that do not give much of a hint of what he has in store for the readers in the words and pages ahead. The events that take place around Krishan, his thoughts in the present and at times, shaped by his experiences and that of others around him in a not so distant past along with where it has left him are all narrated to us from a moment in time. The author adroitly examines the many ways in which violence touches upon the lives of people caught unaware and where it leaves them many years hence: the grandmother living with the loss of a son and the required exile of a half brother following his ties with an armed resistance group, the grandmother’s care giver from whom the war has exacted the lives of her two young sons and a former brief lover who lived constantly under the threat of possible violence mirrored in the lusty and aggressive stares of men in Delhi.

Through Krishan’s memories of his days in Delhi and his life in Colombo, far removed from the everyday violence of what was happening in another part of his home country, and yet unable to really know what was happening and what would play out, the author examines the ambiguous nature of how war and violence plays out for people differently and yet in some common ways. There are references to literature, to a documentary film, to a newspaper story that are woven into the narrative in a fluid seamless adding to the writing as well as to the flow of thoughts while also referring to how they influence the way people respond to them in different ways.

This is an elegy to the scars of a nation and its people caught in a war brought on by various factors: the shift and changes in the geographical landscape, the physical evidence of way on the bodies of people and deep within their minds, reflected in the availability of medicines for depression in chemist shops and the lines of people for psychiatric care: all heavy themes and yet, they emerge in the narrative in subtle moments. The bond between Krishan’s grandmother and her care giver Rani: two women who have nothing in common besides the weight of their suffering on their bodies and minds is both moving and a firm testament to how shared pain can help people in some little ways.

A Passage North is a book that will make the reader and person in you pause to take stock of how you feel about the things animate and inanimate around you, to take note of how you feel and look back at your feelings and to look for meanings in the ties and relationships that you see around you.

The Lesbian Cow and Other Stories by Indu Menon, Translated by Nandakumar K.

The Lesbian Cow and Other Stories by Indu Menon, Translated by Nandakumar K.

Published by: Eka/Westland Publications

Fiction: LiteraryFiction,Indian Literature, Translation, Short Stories

Book summary:

A Collection of Macabre stories from Indu Menon, who is considered to be Kamala Das’s successor

A Gond tribal activist is kidnapped by the goons of a giant mining company forcibly acquiring land in his village. In order to defame him, they shoot a porn film with him and a young prostitute who turns out to be his childhood sweetheart; a cobbler skins his daughter’s hanging corpse to make the special ‘Cinderella shoes’ he had once promised her; an LTTE female tiger accused of plotting the assassination of an Indian leader ruminates on the deaths of a Sri Lankan Tamil separatist leader and a French priest who tried to assassinate Louis XV on the same date centuries apart; a nurse with bovine features stalks a female patient whose live-in partner confronts the lesbian cow and is assaulted by her.

Indu Menon’s stories are not for the fainthearted. At the centre of all that blood, gore and broken bones lies the inveterate spirit of wronged women, who refuse to go down without a fight. Her stories live unvarnished life truths. With the imagination of a poet, in lyrical and inventive prose, her narratives startle the reader by refusing to draw the line between lived and imagined terrains. Many consider Indu Menon a successor to Kamala Das, having inherited the same insouciance and outlook. This collection may well help us imagine what Das would have written if she were alive today.

About the Author:

Indu Menon is the author of six short story collections, a memoir, a book of poems and two novels in Malyalam. She has won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for young writers

About the Translator:

Nandakumar K is an empanelled copy editor and has co-translated for a novel. He has also retold a selection of stories from the Kathasaritgara in English.

*My Review:

*Thank you Westland Publications for the review copy. All opinions are my own.

It is impossible for the stories in The Lesbian Cow and Other Stories to have been written by a pen on paper or typed out on a staid computer screen. It’s author Indu Menon, could only have carved out the words and the stories and the characters and the plots out with a sharp knife, the blood dripping, coagulating, staining, changing colours over time. Translator Nandakumar K says it all when he says the stories in the collection are not for the faint hearted.

The women in the stories are unforgettable: they are victims and perpetrators of vengeance for deep social and personal shame but the men too are equal carries of festering wounds that have to and indeed burst over time. Reading the ties of the men and the women of the stories and what they do to each other is akin to the experience of watching Oldboy after being fed on a diet of Korean rom com and family drama films.They make you sit up warily and try and scramble to make sense of what hit you, more so because the men and women in these stories are regular people in the traditional conventional get up, dressed conservatively with demure personalities, and then the real selves emerge and how!

The stories explore notions of thwarted and failed love, where the idea of love as something that heralds deep seated emotions and resulting actions, touching upon oppression within the family and society, the power dynamics within personal relationships and same sex love. All 16 stories are told in a vibrant manner, no quarter spared in terms of bringing out the darkness that lurks in human beings out in plain sight, with only one being a tender love story.

It’s difficult to pick my favourites or the ones that stand out from this collection – each one has a lot to say but the title story is a blazing entity with the theme of cows as an allegory and a denouement of how far men are liberal and staunch supporters of feminism. The way the story moves and where it ends is just delicious. This is a book that definitely makes me want to read more of Indu Menon.