I’ve been devoting what Rushdie calls the first energy of the day to this novel, and at last am feeling the rush of forward motion. It’s harder in some ways than the day job because of the madness of a yawning page. It’s a far less structured task than making things work with other things.
The only sanity: forswear too much magical realism, set the characters down in your maze and watch how they roam when they’re true.
Omair Ahmad’s novella The Storyteller’s Tale is a stylish third of a book, a meta-tale about the art of telling tales. A dispossessed storyteller fleeing Ahmad Shah Abdali’s sack of Delhi happens upon a begum from the opposing side. She gives him shelter, and at night they take turns telling the same story from different angles, Kurosawa-style.
In the tale, the begum is both beautiful and as compelling and inventive an embroider of tales as the tired horseman she takes in. This is a pervasive male fantasy, the writer’s version of Barbie/commando Lara Croft. There are far fewer great female standup comedians as men. It’s not that women can’t, for we all know women who are frickin’ hilarious — but the vast majority simply don’t to any great degree.
According to traditional gender roles, most men tell stories and jokes and needle each other as a display of social dominance, while most swomen use storytelling to build interpersonal connections. One friend is never happier than when he’s surrounded by a gaggle of pretties tittering over his every tale. When his stories don’t entertain, he loses interest and wanders off to find a new audience.
The book is stylish but vaporous, an entertaining and innovative 122 pages of neo-myth which find little purchase in the memory a scant few weeks later. There are three angles to a tale, full stop. The begum is beguiling. Nothing much is lost or gained. Had Ahmad fleshed this out into a full novel, he may have turned this tone poem into an epic like The Enchantress of Florence.
Thanks to anonandon, whose review of the book is here, for heaving it from the desh.
I find alternate histories great fun to read. They often try to correct some injustice, an impulse like John Lennon’s iconic song. Artistically, they achieve a most satisfying asymmetricity: close enough to what actually happened to twin reality, seen through a mind askew.
In the case of popular Bengali humorist Rajshekhar Basu, pen name Parashuram, who passed away in ‘60, his short story of what happened when Bengal colonized Britain is both a hysterical ancestor to Goodness Gracious Me and a dispiriting reminder of the fissures within India’s independence movement. Once again an artist tweaks in fiction those who escaped just desserts in real life. The story leaves me with an ashen taste even as I enjoy the Shakespearean reversals. It is the impotent shake of a thin intellectual fist.
‘The Scripture Read Backward’ was translated into English for Words Without Borders (thanks, blackmamba), a recent anthology with the gimmick that well-known authors would drag out of obscurity their favorite stories in languages other than English. Thank Amit Chaudhuri for this one. In the story, Britain is ruled by the mighty and paternalistic Indian government, and children vie to dress like civilized Bengalis. To this student of the British Raj, this mirror world has the joyful sting of first snowfall. Here’s reverse Macaulay, where Indian-written textbooks exhort the natives to uplift themselves out of their savagery. Here are competing newspapers, the resistance organ which sees the government as naked imperialists and the loyalist rag which believes it can do no wrong.
But Parashuram diagnoses the ills of the independence movement with particular bitterness. He pens Irishmen riven from their British neighbors due to ancient hatreds, unable to make common cause. Here are mirror princes, British royalty content to nosh on opium and sell their loyalty to the highest bidder. Here, most un-PC, is a feminist movement which demands its own liberation at a most inconvenient time. (One has to wonder what Parashuram’s wife had to say about this.) The story, short and pointed, is a time capsule of the issues of the day.
I’ve read several brilliant books in which I couldn’t point to a single memorable passage. Their excellence lies in the gentle accretion of detail, like overnight snowfall; they say things sideways rather than in a blaze of textual craftsmanship.
The funny, beautifully-written Atlas of Unknowns (plot summary) is the inverse of this. Debut novelist Tania James, 28, fills the book with beautiful, memorable passages and piquant wit. But the book suffers from a poverty of ambition. Unwilling to actually become a pirate or a commando or commit murder or go to war, I read to stretch my mind and profit by the experiences of others. This novel doesn’t offer that. Mired in a very middle-class sensibility, Atlas is gorgeous but trivial and bounded, content in a sandbox of its own making.
The central conflict, two separated sisters reuniting, is done with less pathos than any middling Bollyflick. The plot thrives in Kerala, where characters face actual privation and penury, and droops in NYC. The sister who walks out faces nothing more dangerous than a subway ride in mundane areas of Manhattan and Queens. A lesbian subplot meant to drive much of the drama is hinted at in the softest of terms before the author turns away. The character remains a bit of a cipher, and it comes across as unwillingness to go there rather than elegant restraint. The book is terminally G-rated, well-crafted auntie lit which never lets its freak flag fly. The author either hasn’t truly lived or is unwilling to share it.
It’s one thing for a novel like No Onions Nor Garlic to stick to light comedy. But James has greater ambitions. She writes in a literary style, and in the U.S. at least, Atlas isn’t saddled with the dreaded sari cover. It feels like the author is content to bite off something rather less than she’s capable of. Tony D’Souza’s Whiteman, in contrast, is written in fairly spare language. But he joined the Peace Corps, traveled through West Africa and wrote an Ivory Coast novel of considerable emotional heft.
This has less to do with the subject matter, the emotions of intimates, and more with the author’s predilections. Mavis Gallant’s stories also focus on relationships between mothers and sisters. But, like The Remains of the Day, they pack a hidden punch, focusing on trivialities on the surface, plumbing deep drama beneath.
Though fundamentally unambitious, Atlas is great fun to read. James skewers American foreign policy, capricious visa denials, Orientalism, Malayali hypocrisy, the upper class in Kerala, and especially documentary filmmakers. Boy, does she have it in for NYC documentary-wale (her undergrad degree was in film). She shouts out to the locals: an auntie with a Namaste America-style talk show writes large checks to the IAAC, and much of the action is set in Jackson Heights.
Late at night, at my regular café (this, too, now host to a desi barista), I’ve been flipping back and forth between short story master Mavis Gallant and Tania James’ Atlas of Unknowns. They’re both darkly witty satirists who craft gorgeous little bon-mots along the way. They’re also disciples of extreme zoom, getting at larger truths through a focus on the intimate.
And their tales are resolutely female-centric. I tend to prefer larger stories, but these two are highly entertaining, like more joyful Jhumpas. I haven’t read a second-genner with this skill since Tony D’Souza. 29-year-old James reminds me a bit of Nikita Lalwani (Gifted), whose writing is more infused with formless worry, or a less macro Zadie Smith.
In ‘The Chosen Husband,’ Gallant writes of an awkward suitor in a scene reminiscent of the courtship setpiece from Ravan & Eddie:
But then Louis began to cough and had to cover his mouth. He was in trouble with a caramel. The Carettes looked away, so that he could strangle unobserved. ‘How dark it is,’ said Berthe, to let him think he could not be seen… Louis still coughed, but weakly. He moved his fingers, like a child made to wave goodbye.
From Unknowns:
‘Is everyone treating you well?’ …
‘There was a rude beggar on the train,’ Anju ventures.
Miss Schimpf gives her a wincing smile. ‘Here, we say “disadvantaged.”‘
‘There was a disadvantaged beggar on the train.’