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Literary Review
Books that struck a chord
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We asked prominent authors, artistes and filmmakers to share and discuss the books they enjoyed reading in 2007.
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Photo: K. Murali Kumar
Barry John
Closer, Patrick Marber, Methuen, 2007, price not stated.
One of the best books I have read this year is Closer by Patrick Marber. I picked up a student edition of this play, which is rich in supplementary materials on the play and the playwright, just like the Director’s Cut of a DVD movie. I liked it for this fact, but also for the reason that the play is masterfully constructed and written, laying bare the most harrowing take on love in contemporary urban society. It is mathematically elegant and brutal. And truthful.
Photo: V.V. Krishnan
Anjolie Ela Menon
All the Stories of Muriel Spark, Muriel Spark, New Directions, 2001, p.416, $19.95.
I last read Muriel Spark’s anthology of stories. I have been reading her works since long. The anthology that I am reading is just wonderful. What I like most about them is that all her stories have a very stately prose. There is always a bit of enigma in them; this I believe is the best characteristic in her books. It makes her stories all the more beautiful, and enjoyable.
Photo: Anu Pushkarna
Prakash Jha
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini, Bloomsbury, p.326, £3.50.
I have read a couple of good books this year. One of them is The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. It was published in 2005 but I read it only this year. I liked it because of its style, content and characterisation. At one level, it
is natural, at another, it is so deep. The book is fantastic.
Photo: K. Ramesh Babu
William Dalrymple
Indian Summer, Alex Von Tunzelman, Henry Holt & Company, 2007, p. 416, $30.
Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life, Kathryn Tidrick, I.B. Tauris & Company, 2007, p.400, $35.
Adventures of Hamza, Abdulla Bilgrami and Ghalib Lakhnavi, translated by Musharraf Farooqui, Random House, 2007, p.992, $45.
A good year for books about India. The book that impressed me most was Alex Von Tunzelman’s Indian Summer — unquestionably the best book I have read on the Independence and Partition of India and Pakistan, and pretty close to a flat-out masterpiece. It is also the most amusing, and balanced account of the Mountbattens and their strange ménage a trois with Nehru.
Very different and almost as good was Kathryn Tidrick’s iconoclastic Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life in which Tidrick locates the roots of Gandhi’s thought in the lunatic spiritualist fringe of late Victorian England among the occultists, high fibreists, mediums and the ectoplasm-seekers who flourished in late 19th century London. It is almost too good to be true that the huge, pompous Curzonian edifice of the Raj was undermined by ideas emanating from such wonderfully dotty sources, yet Tidrick makes her case very persuasively.
I was also bowled over by a remarkable new translation of what was once the most popular oral epic of the Indo-Islamic world. The Adventures of Hamza is the Iliad and Odyssey of mediaeval Persian world: a rollicking, magic-filled heroic saga, full of myth and imagination. It was originally composed in Iraq around the 9th century, but it was in India that the epic took on a life of its own, growing to an unprecedented size, and absorbing endless Indian myths and legends. Remarkably, the translation which has just been published by Random House Modern Library is the first time the epic has been translated into English and is as close as is now possible to the world of the Mughal campfire — those night gatherings of soldiers, Sufis, and musicians that one sees in Mughal miniatures: a storyteller beginning his tale in a clearing of a forest as the embers of the blaze glow red and the eager fire-lit faces crowd around.
Photo: Sandeep Saxena
Rahul Bose
Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire, Rajmohan Gandhi, Penguin India, p.760, Rs.495.
My best read this year was Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire by Rajmohan Gandhi because it is the most accurate, unbiased and dispassionate account on Mahatma. It tells us that the entire country was not behind Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. He had to deal with different viewpoints.
It uses cross references to develop Mahatma in flesh and blood as a human being rather than as a leader or a politician.
Photo: Sandeep Saxena
Susan Visvanathan
The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald, Flamingo, 1996, p.240, £7.99.
The best book I have read this year would be Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. It is set in the late 18th Century Germany and is about a poet. It’s written in an imitative style and recreates society and people. Actually, poets lead a tormented life when compared to a novelist. There is a greater sense of shedding in the lives of poets and a greater sense of agony. They suffer more than what prose writers do. It is about the survival of the fittest work. Fitzgerald captures the space of a family, culture, town and university using an imitative form. The book is not in German but it conveys the essence of the place very vividly.
The quality of prose brings out the sensibility of poetry.
Photo: K. Bhagya Prakash
Jeet Thayil
Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, p.624, $27.
May be you’ve read Jesus’s Son, Denis Johnson’s book of stories loosely (very loosely) linked by a numb, self-hating narrator who goes by a name I guess I can’t mention in a family-type newspaper.
Anyway, there’s more poetry in that book than in many books of verse. Johnson said once that writing a novel is like setting off in a boat with no idea where you will arrive, which beach or port or imbroglio. (I’m paraphrasing.) His 2007 Vietnam novel Tree of Smoke has a plot that drifts all over the place, like a small craft (a raft, say, or a canoe) on the high seas in strange weather. But it may be the definitive hallucinatory novel about a defining hallucinatory war.
Photo: K. Ananthan
Anita Nair
Endurance, Alfred Lansing, Tyndale Publishing, 1999, p.280, $13.
The best read this year for me was Endurance by Alfred Lansing. The true life account of Shackleton’s voyage to the Antarctic, it straddles several genres — biography, travelogue, thriller and finally works as a splendid piece of narrative writing.
For a diehard Shackleton fan like me, it brings home the true import of Sir Raymond Priestley’s observation: “For scientific discovery, give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel, give me Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when you are seeing no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.....”
Photo: Anu Pushkarna
Samit Basu
Un Lun Dun, China Mieville, Macmillan, p.528, £12.
The book I enjoyed reading this summer is China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun. It is the closest successor I have seen to Alice in Wonderland.
This book, for children and young adults, is a dark story and has a child protagonist. It shows an alternate London bleeding into a real one.
Photo: K. Murali Kumar
Arpana Caur
I am Thou, Ramachandra Gandhi
These days I am reading Ramachandra Gandhi’s I am Thou. I haven’t finished it yet as it has nearly 80 chapters. This book was published way back in 1984 and is now out of print. Someone gave me a photostat copy. It is a new look at the almost all the religions and philosophies, from Islam to Buddhism. He used to come to our Academy of Fine Arts and Culture to deliver lectures. We, a group of people at the academy, are jointly reading it and we plan to come out with a homage programme on it and his lectures that we recorded.
Photo: G.P. Sampath Kumar
Shashi Deshpande
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion, Knopf, 2007, p.227, $13.95.
This book, written a year after Didion’s husband’s sudden death, at a time when their daughter was lying unconscious in hospital, is her attempt to make sense of what had happened.
“This is a case in which I need more than words …” she says. But it is through words that she courageously explores the reality of death and grief. What is amazing is how her clarity of thought and language magically takes away the darkness from grief and death.
Photo: S. Mahinsha
Jahnu Barua
The last two years, I have not read much simply because film shooting is taking a lot of my time. I have read a couple of Assamese novels. I like Arupa Patangia’s latest novel. As a filmmaker, I am always looking for a possible film script in a book. Nothing significant from that point of view this year.
Photo: P.V. Sivakumar
Jogen Choudhury
I have just finished reading an anthology of poems by Utpal Kumar Basu. He is the most famous poet of Bengal and a close friend of mine. He is 70 now. He presented this book to me recently. I have been an ardent admirer of his poetry since long. In this collection of almost 100 poems, as usual, I loved the use of is allegorical fantasies. He writes about life, people, city and society. I am still reeling under it.
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