Janice Pariat: Boats on Land

Vi segnalo la recensione di Boats on Land, raccolta di racconti di Janice Pariat, recensione firmata da Manjula Narayan e pubblicata da Hindustan Times il 6 ottobre 2012. Il testo raccoglie alcune dichiarazioni rilasciate dalla scrittrice:

'There’s something about Janice Pariat’s short stories that makes you want to linger, to return to particular lyrical descriptions of the north east, to set down the book and contemplate the point where folk lore and reality intersect. “I grew up with a lot of stories that my dad told me; my grandfathers were big story tellers,” Pariat says (...) adding that her community, the Khasis, generally have a vibrant tradition of story telling as they were largely an oral culture before the arrival of the British in the mid-1800s.

“I think our stories serve as the reservoir of our history and of our understanding of the world. (...) Our landscape was marked by folktales - why’s the mountain shaped in a certain way, why the cock crows in the morning... With Boats on Land, I’ve taken these folk stories and interwoven them with the Shillong, Assam and Cherrapunji of today,” she says suggesting that a reality imbued with folklore and even superstition is perhaps imaginatively richer. In her stories this mingling of myth and reality hints at difficult truths: the suicide of a young man in The Discovery of Flight, the fear of the army in Sky Graves. “I wanted to find the marvellous real,” she says.

The most powerful story, Boats on Land brings together sexual yearning, beautiful descriptions of Assam, where Pariat spent much time when she was growing up, and a damaged character so well fleshed out she seems real. “It started as a story about a relationship between a boy and a girl and it felt wrong. I couldn’t find the right narrative voice. Then I read Once In A Lifetime by Jhumpa Lahiri where she used the third person narration and brings in the ‘you’. That evening, I sat down and rewrote the story. It became a story about two girls and it just felt right,” reveals Pariat who seemingly writes effortlessly in the male voice. “Even at school, classmates asked: ‘How are you writing as a boy?’ I really don’t know. I try and imagine what it’s like for a particular person and the thing about being a man or woman comes naturally,” she says. “Gender is such a construct.”

Still, writing the book wasn’t easy. “I always had these stories floating around in my head but they didn’t have a context, a place to reside. I went back home to Shillong to spend time with mum and dad and to write about the place that I’m from,” says Pariat who is glad the north east, which is “forever exoticised”, is emerging as a “place with fresh voices and fresh writers”. “People think it is a timeless, ageless place untouched by many things but I’ve tried to show that pockets were also affected by vast sweeps of history, the world wars, the missionaries, Christianity. These are things we forget Meghalaya and Assam were affected by; we forget it shaped the people living there now,” says Pariat, who, much as she loves Shillong, doesn’t intend to ever live there permanently. “I am attached to Shillong in a way that people who leave home are attached to an idea of home; so it’s a home of eternal return. I think there’s a particular attachment that comes from not being in a place,” she says sounding like one of the quiet revelations that stud her stories.

It isn’t the firebird or the dreams of dead kin that make you linger on Janice Pariat’s short fiction; it’s the truth they help you arrive at, that fresh understanding of an old world'.

Mehwish parla al sole - Recensione

[Blog] Recensione di Mehwish parla al sole, terzo romanzo di Uzma Aslam Khan, autrice pakistana di grande talento.

Un perfetto equilibrio - Recensione

[Blog] Recensione di Un perfetto equilibrio, secondo romanzo di Rohinton Mistry, ultimo vincitore del Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Makarand Sathe: The man who tried to remember

Vi segnalo la recensione di The man who tried to remember, di Makarand Sathe, recensione firmata da Suparna Banerjee e pubblicata ieri da Hindustan Times. Il romanzo, originariamente in lingua marathi, sembra davvero intrigante:

'Makarand Sathe’s new novel (...) traces the journey of an ageing public intellectual, Achyut Athavale, from a state of power and stardom through societal imposition of madness on him to a kind of nirvana that allows him to serenely “take each day as it comes” in an upscale mental hospital from which he may never get out. Starting out with the protagonist’s reaction to his new room in the hospital, the novel loops back and forth to reveal the sequence of events leading from his obsession with remembering and communicating, through his unintended murder of a fellow inmate to his acquittal on grounds of a perceived mental breakdown. The pivotal situation in the novel is a Kafkaesque one, of a man frantically trying to prove himself guilty of murder in the face of vociferous public assertions of his unstable mental condition and therefore of his innocence. The acquittal thus dramatises the defeat of the individual before the collective.

Indeed, much of the novel is concerned with showing how ‘reality’ is constructed by collective beliefs and ritualistic praxes - that everything from social institutions to people’s lives to the language through which all experience is ordered and expressed have no ontological purity but is part of the semiotics of social existence. (...) Technically, the novel blends in elements of the modernist stream-of-consciousness with a postmodern absurdist play on language to create a fictional idiom that embodies the author’s social constructionist view of life. Identity becomes a major theme as the protagonist struggles to hold on to his reputation and self-perception as an intelligent, articulate individual even as well-meaning admirers from across the world join forces to prove the opposite in order to save him from being convicted of pre-planned murder. That salvation for someone could mean saving a long-held self-image rather than saving his life is one of the cardinal points made by the novel, as is the implied assertion of the publicly constructed nature of normalcy and sanity. The power of the majority, however, is subverted by the quiet resignation with which Athavale accepts his asylum-life. (...)

The reader’s growing awareness of the madness in what is collectively perceived as reason is balanced by an equivalent perception of the reason in Athavale’s apparent madness. The upshot is that the reader gains an uneasy but morally salutary sense of the fallibility of human constructions, including that of reason itself. The book, despite its philosophical richness, is almost never dull but enlivened with a lively wit that brings out the absurdity - the inconclusive, unending interplay of competing meanings - inherent to language and social praxes. A little more conventional ‘action’ and humour would have further enhanced its readabilty'.

Meenal Baghel: Death in Mumbai

Vi segnalo la recensione del saggio Death in Mumbai di Meenal Baghel, firmata da Gautaman Bhaskaran e pubblicata oggi da Hindustan Times. Il volume analizza un famigerato fatto di cronaca: l'omicidio di Neeraj Grover. Neeraj era un dirigente della casa di produzione televisiva di Ekta Kapoor. Aveva intrecciato una relazione con l'aspirante attrice Maria Susairaj. Il fidanzato di Maria, Emile Jerome Mathew, uccise per gelosia Grover, ed è tuttora in carcere. Ram Gopal Varma ha tratto dalla vicenda il film Not a love story.

'It is never easy to write about an actual murder, a brutal one at that, and Mumbai Mirror’s Editor Meenal Baghel has penned a gripping account of the 2008 Neeraj Grover killing. A young television company executive, Grover may well have been as ruthlessly debonair, callously arrogant and dashingly playboyish as Prem Ahuja was in 1959. When the highly decorated Naval Commander, Kawas Manekshaw Nanavati, found his beautiful wife, British-born Sylvia, having an affair with Ahuja, the enraged husband shot the lover dead. [Aggiornamento del 16 maggio 2022: anche da quel fatto di cronaca è stato tratto un film, Rustom, diretto da Tinu Suresh Desai e interpretato da Akshay Kumar]. Grover’s case appeared to run parallel to the Nanavati story. But unlike the naval officer’s life, Grover’s was one of glamour, part of the celebrity circle that he was. When he met Maria Susairaj, a small-time television actress aspiring to make it big in Bollywood, Grover probably saw several opportunities here. He could have made her a star, and, well, had a passionate sexual affair. Susairaj wanted to fly, but she really did not have the great good looks to hit stardom. Maybe, she saw in Grover, a hope, however faint, to fulfil her dream. But Susairaj was engaged to Emile Jerome Mathew, a dashing naval officer, and this man was jealous, and so horrendously that his fiancée could not even fathom.

Baghel pieces together the events leading up to what can be called a Shakespearean tragedy, and whose dramatis personae were three young people who could not care how they lived their lives or how bloody the road they chose to travel. Here was a woman who played around with the emotions of two men - with one ultimately butchering the other. Here was one man, who threw morals to the winds and slept with one whom he knew was engaged to be married. Here was another man so consumed with jealousy and distrust that he could not hold himself back. Baghel of course had a classic plot to fall back upon that ran like a pulse-pounding thriller, but she goes beyond mere retelling of the murder, mere reportage. And herein lays the book’s value. (...) Baghel bases her work on extensive interviews with the families and friends of Grover, Mathew and Susairaj to take us deep into the psyche of all three. Neeraj was a flirt, a small-town boy with the drive of a big town dreamer. Maria was certainly manipulative, a no-holds-barred climber, while Emile was an upright guy who fell for the wrong woman. (...) 

Baghel also tries to tell us about the pressures of the entertainment industry and how they drive men and women to the precipice. Her chats with Ram Gopal Varma, who made a film on the Grover murder, Not A Love Story, Moon Das, who was offered a role to play Maria’s character in a movie, and Ekta Kapoor, Neeraj’s boss in Balaji telefilms, are insightful. Although Baghel attempts to stop herself from sympathising with any of her characters, it is apparent that she has a soft corner for Mathew. He really was no murderer as Susairaj was a seducer and Grover a womaniser. Yet, Mathew remains in jail, while Susairaj has walked out after serving a three-year sentence. As much as killing can never be condoned, the one who provokes a murder, the one who manipulates emotions must, in the final analysis, bear the cross of guilt'.

Amitabha Bagchi: The householder

Vi segnalo la recensione del romanzo The householder di Amitabha Bagchi, firmata da Arshia Sattar, pubblicata da Open il 17 giugno 2012:

'A corrupt underling is as crooked as the system he works in, but Bagchi’s quiet, masterly prose leaves you with sympathy for his morally bankrupt protagonist. Amitabha Bagchi’s second novel, The Householder, is a delight. And a welcome breath of fresh air in a literary atmosphere clouded with stylish feints and clogged with pretentious storytelling. This appears to be a simple story told in simple, elegant prose that rarely draws attention to itself. Until you finish the book, that is. And realise that neither was the story simple nor the prose unremarkable. (...) Bagchi’s novel is set in the corridors of Delhi’s bureaucratic and political universe, a netherworld where anything can be fixed and unfixed, provided the price is right. (...) The Householder also turns its sights onto the degraded space inside India Shining, where the complete absence of personal ethics goes hand in hand with rampant corruption. Actually, the image that comes more strongly to mind is that of a serpent consuming its own tail - a seamless continuum between the private and public spheres where the decay of one implies the corrosion of the other and vice versa. (...) Bagchi writes with a studied neutrality. (...) It is Bagchi’s control over the authorial voice that makes The Householder deceptive in its apparent simplicity. (...) The power of this book lies in showing us how unremarkable corruption and the corrupt have become in India. Bagchi paints this picture without resorting to satire or patronising mockery or through lurid descriptions of sordid crimes and garden-variety misdemeanours. There is no other world but this. (...) The Householder is a masterful piece of writing because it manages to hold cynicism and righteous anger at bay. By doing so, it reveals the truly tragic proportions of contemporary India'.

Autori vari: Amul's India

Vi segnalo la recensione del saggio Amul's India, firmata da Anwesha Mittra e pubblicata oggi da The Times of India. Nel subcontinente il burro Amul è da cinquant'anni un'istituzione. Le campagne promozionali commissionate dall'azienda sono rimaste praticamente invariate nella concezione, ma con uno slogan nuovo (e una vignetta nuova) quasi ogni settimana. In modo arguto e colorato commentano qualsiasi argomento, dalla politica alla cronaca all'intrattenimento. Un fenomeno pubblicitario forse più unico che raro. Il volume include anche un contributo di Amitabh Bachchan.

'Amul’s little moppet in a red polka dotted dress and a blue ponytail delivered on a regular basis a humorous take on everything that bothered us, everything we thought deserved a repartee. Like a true spokesperson of the masses, she rose to every occasion, be it a cricketing double century, scandals surrounding politicians, to controversial diplomatic policies, with an infallible gut and a tongue-in-cheek attitude. And in the process made Brand Amul synonymous with honesty, purity and subtlety.

Since her birth in the 60s, (...) she has remained an icon of sorts in the advertising world, surviving odds of the trade and yet being steadfastly consistent. Our impish little Amul girl today not only looks the same, but retains that crispy cheekiness with which she pranced into out hearts the first time and said naively, “Give us this day our daily bread: with Amul butter.” As a deserving tribute to Amul’s journey across five decades and a massive advertising success on its back, the book Amul’s India is an attempt to deconstruct the brand, the little things that went into making a heroic success of the Amul girl, sentiments of its makers, and of those who loved to pass by an Amul hoarding each time. Like a celebration of the memorable Amul hoardings, the book in a non-linear pattern chronicles decades of having fun with subjects such as politics, Bollywood, sports and personalities among others. (...)

The journey was of course not a seamless one as the brand landed up in a couple of legal wrangles only to emerge unfazed and stronger than ever. (...) But there were those like painter M.F. Husain who loved Amul’s ‘Heroin Addiction - Fida on you’ that had the barefoot artist paint Bollywood diva Madhuri Dixit, and requested for a personal copy for his studio. (...)

Amul’s India is another interesting way to get different perspectives on popular ads that formed an inexplicable part of our growing up years. (...) Amul through various hoardings over a period has mocked at men, celebrated female achievements or at least brought them to the fore, and depicted the rapidly changing status of women. (...) Some popular brands lost out to competition in a desperate bid to change their mascot. Time and again companies attempted to reposition themselves, but Amul never did. It didn’t have to, nor does it need to, for we prefer its unvarnished views of India in that ‘utterly butterly delicious’ manner'.

Jerry Pinto: Em and the Big Hoom (Il grande Uhm)

Vi segnalo la recensione del romanzo Em and the Big Hoom, di Jerry Pinto. La recensione è firmata da Jai Arjun Singh, e pubblicata da Hindustan Times il 18 maggio 2012:

'The easy way to describe Jerry Pinto’s autobiographical novel is to say that it is a son’s account of life with a mentally unstable mother. Imelda Mendes is called ‘Em’ by her two children, the unnamed narrator and his elder sister Susan. Their father Augustine - affectionate, dependable but taciturn - is ‘the Big Hoom’. (...) The narrator describes their lives with a heartbreaking mix of tenderness and humour. That sounds like a very particular story about a very particular person, but Em and the Big Hoom is much more universal in its appeal. Read carefully and you’ll find that it isn’t just about a “special” mother, it is about parents in a more general sense - parents as the looking glasses that we sometimes recoil from because in their aging faces and increasingly erratic behaviour we see our future selves - as well as a reminder that ‘normalcy’ and ‘madness’ are not airtight categories. 

This gentle, kaleidoscopic narrative is, among other things, a son’s assessment of the long courtship between his parents-to-be, and an attempt to understand what two people he takes for granted might have been like in a very distant time, the Mumbai of the 50s and 60s. (...) It is a litany of candid conversations - not all of them occurring beneath a facade of mental illness - and delightful pen-portraits. (...)

But this is also, in a strange but illuminating way, a book about writers and writing. Much of our understanding of Em’s state of mind comes from her journal entries, reproduced throughout the narrative, and letters such as the meandering one in which she acknowledges the seriousness of her relationship with Augustine. We are told that she was a seemingly effortless writer (...) but also that compulsive writing may be a manifestation of her condition. (...)

Given this, it is notable that the narrator himself tries to fight his genes by seeking refuge in the rigours of writing. “One of the defences I had devised against the possibility of madness was that I would explain every feeling I had to myself, track everything down to its source ... I worked it out on a piece of paper...”. He reaches for ways to convey his feelings about his mother but also recognises the impossibility of the task. (...)

This may help one understand why Pinto - a prolific, busy writer-journalist known for juggling projects with ease - took more than two decades to complete this very personal book (which, he has said in interviews, was originally 10 times its current length). And this brings me to my one quibble about Em and the Big Hoom: the fact that it is presented as a work of fiction. While it works as a novel on its own terms (the writing is consistently vivid and moving enough to appeal to a reader who approaches it as a made-up story), I think it works even better if you know who the narrator is, and what his own writing life has been like. I don’t usually spend time dwelling on how ‘autobiographical’ a novel is, but I felt it mattered here: speaking as a reader-writer envious of the quality and range of Pinto’s work, this book seems to reveal much about his own imperatives. Trivial though this might sound - and largely unconnected with the actual quality of the writing - I wish it had ‘memoir’ rather than ‘fiction’ printed on its jacket flap'.

Aggiornamento del 29 aprile 2022: nel 2016 Salani Editore ha pubblicato la traduzione italiana, intitolata Il grande Uhm. Nel sito dell'editore si legge: 'Un racconto appassionato e divertente sull’educazione sentimentale di un ragazzo, ma anche sulla vita di una famiglia divisa tra due poli, Uhm, ‘la mia roccia e il mio rifugio’, e lei, Em, madre dolcissima e molto intelligente, sboccata come un’adolescente, disinibita nella sua follia. Una vita sospesa tra pazzia e normalità, tra la lucidità dell’amore quotidiano e il tentativo di raggiungere Em oltre le nebbie della malattia. Una narrazione vivace e profonda, che riesce a superare ogni difficoltà per guardare avanti, in bilico tra il dramma e la comicità involontaria scatenata dalla vita'.

Naresh Fernandes: Taj Mahal Foxtrot

Vi segnalo la recensione di Taj Mahal Foxtrot - The story of Bombay's jazz age di Naresh Fernandes, recensione firmata da Amitava Sanyal e pubblicata da Hindustan Times il 17 febbraio 2012:

'A delightful book on Bombay’s jazz past that takes readers beyond jazz as well as Bombay.

At the stroke of the midnight hour, when India was coughing awake to light and freedom, the charmed people of Bombay and Karachi were celebrating in swing time. In Bombay’s Taj Mahal Hotel, jazz bands led by saxophonist Micky Correa and trumpeter Chic Chocolate were playing the new national anthem with a young J.R.D. Tata and Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit in audience. At the Karachi Club a night later, Ken Mac’s band played a special request by Muhammad Ali Jinnah - Paul Robeson’s ‘The End’, which the Quaid-e-Azam apparently used to hum while visiting his wife’s grave in Mazagaon, Bombay.

Such vivid snapshots take Taj Mahal Foxtrot, Naresh Fernandes’ book on jazz in Bombay, to a field larger than either jazz or Bombay. Fernandes’ eight-year transcontinental research gives the American-born genre of music a new historical home this side of the Suez. His doggedness at getting close to the likes of Ken, Chic and Micky leads to a unique portrait of Bombay musicians. In the middle is the sketch of a fad-following Brilliantined society - one that worried more about slowing down the quicksilver ‘Paris speed’ to ‘Bombay speed’ than about the morning after - that Fernandes projects as jazz loving Bombay.

Much like the music itself, Fernandes’ research goes on inspired dot-joining sprees. He dives into chapters as diverse as the role of jazz musicians in the nation-building project; on Blue Rhythm, the only Indian magazine on jazz, published by diamond merchant Niranjan Jhaveri and friends in 1952-53; and on the playing up of colour as a signifier of authenticity in bands like the Plantation Quartet. At times, the collected trivia would fall between the dots and need to be parked in footnotes or in the eponymous blog. From one such aside we learn that C. Lobo, leader of the Bengal governor’s marching band around 1900, grudgingly taught western notations and violin to his neighbour, a young boy named Allauddin Khan.

The three musicians in the August 1947 postcards loom large because of their stellar roles in the history. In Finding Carlton, a documentary researched by New York-based artist-entrepreneur Susheel Kurien at about the same time as Fernandes’ book, Ken Mac is identified as the musician who brought jazz to India in the 1920s, a time the self-proclaimed ‘pioneer of European dance bands’ was playing 40 engagements a month. 

Micky Correa provided generations of musicians sustenance through his Taj band during 1939-1961.

Chic Chocolate, on the other hand, was a shape-shifter who showed others how to survive. A Goan born as Antonio Xavier Vaz, Chic first styled himself after Louis Armstrong at the time the African American was emerging as the biggest name in swing, the jaunty form of jazz that stands for the larger genre in the book. After 1947, Chic and several other jazzmen found jobs in the burgeoning orchestras of Bollywood because of their skill with harmonies and western rhythms. In that phase, Chic helped composer C. Ramchandra with some of the biggest film hits of all times: ‘Shola jo bhadke’ in Albela and ‘Eena meena deeka’ in Aasha.

Independence signalled another kind of watershed, too. After 1947, jazz masters such as Max Roach, Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington would come by, but they would never hover for more than few weeks. Gone was the era when jazz musicians, some of them frontiersmen travelling from the racially-segregated US, would spend half a year in residence in Calcutta or Bombay.

One such travelling salesman was Teddy Weatherford, who had the most impeccable jazz pedigree in India at the time. Weatherford had mastered the piano in New Orleans, the US port where ragtime and blues blended into jazz. In Chicago, he had played with Armstrong in a pit orchestra accompanying silent films. His rendition of the Armstrong hit Basin Street Blues is included on the six-song CD that accompanies Fernandes’ book.

The burly American shifted to ‘the Orient’ in 1926. Between his first stint in Shanghai and his last in Calcutta, he played in Singapore, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Surabaya and Colombo. In Calcutta’s Grand Hotel he set up India’s best regarded jazz band of the 1940s. Among the people he hired was Nepali trumpeter Pushkar Bahadur Buddhapriti a.k.a. George Banks, whose son Louiz is a survivor of the itinerant jazz ages that followed.

During one of his Bombay stints, Weatherford was called in to record a song written by Menassch David Silas, a Baghdadi Jew born in Shanghai and settled in Bombay. The ethno-geographic mash was all too jazz-like. As was the song: a paean to the Taj Mahal Hotel, set in foxtrot'.

Naresh Fernandes pubblica testi dedicati al jazz nel sito Taj Mahal Foxtrot. A proposito: vi ricordo che Bombay Velvet, il film in progetto di Anurag Kashyap, narrerà gli sfavillanti anni del jazz nella capitale economica del Paese. Ranbir Kapoor è stato scritturato per il ruolo del protagonista, ruolo offerto in precedenza ad Aamir Khan.

Vedi anche #MumbaiMirrored: All that jazz, 19 settembre 2019.

Nasreen Munni Kabir: The Dialogue of Devdas - Bimal Roy's immortal classic

Vi segnalo la recensione del volume The Dialogue of Devdas - Bimal Roy's immortal classic a cura di Nasreen Munni Kabir. La recensione è firmata da Shohini Ghosh, e pubblicata da Hindustan Times il 9 marzo 2012. Di seguito un estratto: 

'Writing about Devdas in 1991, film critic Chidananda Dasgupta wrote: “Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote this novel at the age of 17. It is surprising that this immature piece of fiction should have created such an archetypal hero, a romantic self-indulgent weakling who finds solace in drink and the bosom of a golden-hearted prostitute.” This view of Devdas is fairly common so what explains the popularity of this character who, over the last nine decades, has been repeatedly invoked through cinematic re-makes? The Dialogue of Devdas based on Bimal Roy’s 1955 classic allows the cinephile to return to the film and ponder these questions one more time. (...)

The screenplay of Devdas is authored by Nabendu Ghosh, an acclaimed and prolific Bengali writer who wrote many screenplays for Hindi films. The dialogue is written by famous Urdu Progressive writer Rajinder Singh Bedi (...) and lyrics by the talented Sahir Ludhianvi. (...) Dilip Kumar who played Devdas in Bimal Roy’s version (...) writes that Bedi’s “syntax was so perfect” that even the simplest lines “inspired actors to build deep emotions in their rendering.”

The dialogue of Hindi films have a life of their own that spill over onto ours. (...) For many of us who grew up in states (in my case, West Bengal) hostile to the forcible imposition of Hindi as a national language, it was Bombay cinema that triumphed where government diktats failed. The elegant Hindustani of Hindi films was more alluring than the klutzy sanskritised words that masqueraded as the national language. The Dialogue books bear witness to how the language spoken in these iconic films remains indebted to the rich legacy of Urdu. Devdas stands as a splendid inter-text constituted as much by its literary source as its many cinematic versions'.

Palash Krishna Mehrotra: The butterfly generation - recensione

Vi riporto integralmente la recensione di The butterfly generation, di Palash Krishna Mehrotra. La recensione è firmata da Ishan Chaudhuri e pubblicata da Hindustan Times il 2 marzo 2012. 

'We’ve come a long way since negotiating with the silly gush of ‘India books’ best represented by City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre. In those books, ‘India’ was part-National Geographic bio-pic, part-tourist brochure where poverty and chaos served as a safari for outsiders to dip in and dip out of. Five years after Lapierre’s 1985 ‘love affair’, VS Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now brought a different kind of India book to the fore. Through proto-Facebook-style meetings with key Indians, Naipaul, in his sharp prose, presented a portrait of India in the form of a documentary programme. More than 20 years later, it is the Naipaul ‘school of India books’ that have come to rule the roost - Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City and Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Siddarth Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned, Patrick French’s India: A Portrait. Palash Krishna Mehrotra tears the pages of both these styles of ‘India books’ and chews them up in The Butterfly Generation.

Mehrotra’s book is not really an ‘India book’. It is about a young man diving into disparate corners and multiple centres of his surroundings that happen to be 21st century urban India. He is an intimate part of the portraits he presents. If some readers find this gonzo approach self-indulgent, one can only tut-tut their dogma honed from sermons about keeping the observer-observed lakshmanrekha intact.

Unlike other narrations of, say, the India call centre story, Mehrotra peels off layers to go into the lives of his characters rather than the subjects they might ‘represent’. In a book shot with comic verve - landlords barging in rooms to inspect phantom rats (‘There’s A Rat in Your Room’); dark, bad-tripped nights of the soul laced with erotic jealousy’ (‘The Twilight Zone’), the wide-eyed sexual beliefs of a drug-dealer (‘Wheeler Dealer: The World of the Autorickshaw Driver’), deconstructing women’s magazines (‘Inside the Sari’) - there’s a dark, frenetic undertow that breaks to the surface at times. In ‘Yellow Umbrella’, Mehrotra writes about his ‘relationship’ with a young corporate lawyer who recoils from his world only to later “transform into an item girl” for an evening. This is the most stunning polaroid of young urban India I have ever encountered.

Mehrotra does not strategically seek out the ‘underbelly’ of urban India. Other anatomical parts - English-speaking workers at fast food joints;  Kerala’s mysterious romance with heavy metal music; the foundation provided by Doordarshan, MTV and cassette shops in the 80s-90s for today’s urban Indian - are well represented.

In ‘The Life and Death of Bobby Brown’, we are told the story of a youngster from Bhopal moving to work in a Delhi call centre and then his downward spiral of smack addiction. Mehrotra’s description is heart-rending without being sentimental. It is this forsaking of the ‘skyscrapers vs slums’ narrative and entry into more searing, palpable terrains of atomised urban India that makes this book such a pearl.

This book is not a sociological tract. It is an intimate portrait of the world the author inhabits and the outlying zones that tumble into it. This makes it all the more authentic. Mehrotra has the poet’s eye and ear. So it’s apt that he gets to bust the myth that to write in the ‘language’ of young Indians, you have to write as ‘badly’ as, say, Chetan Bhagat. The Butterfly Generation, crackling with the death throes of clichés, is as genuine a book as it is beautiful'.

Il banchiere dei poveri - Recensione

Recensione del libro Il banchiere dei poveri di Muhammad Yunus.

Aravind Adiga: L'ultimo uomo nella torre

In questi giorni è in distribuzione in libreria L'ultimo uomo nella torre di Aravind Adiga, pubblicato da Giulio Einaudi Editore. Il 27 febbraio 2012 il Corriere della Sera ha pubblicato la recensione di Livia Manera:

'Bisogna avere rispetto per l'ingordigia umana. Soprattutto in una città come Mumbai, dove l'avidità è la benzina che fa correre il progresso, la crescita, il boom edilizio. E Aravind Adiga, che a Mumbai ci vive, sa, per esempio, che nella sua città non c'è cosa che abbia più valore della terra, oggi; che di conseguenza politici e palazzinari sono pronti a qualunque lusinga, bassezza o violenza, per strappare ai pezzenti le loro baracche; e che nulla al mondo come la promessa di ricchezza ha il potere di distruggere lo spirito di una comunità. Se oggi c'è uno scrittore in una posizione privilegiata per raccontare la nuova India delle gru che lavorano giorno e notte per costruire grattacieli scintillanti di marmo mentre squadre di straccioni demoliscono a colpi di martello edifici pieni di amianto in una nube di polveri tossiche, questo scrittore è l'ex giornalista del «Times» che ha vinto il Man Booker Prize nel 2008 con La tigre bianca (Einaudi). Questa, non quella spirituale, è l'India di Adiga: un universo in metamorfosi in cui il declino del sistema di caste non corrisponde a una crescita della giustizia sociale, in cui il vuoto del governo permette all'invidia e all'ingordigia di prosperare, e in cui la burocrazia crea l'illusione dell'ordine e della giustizia, ma nasconde l'opposto. La prima cosa che viene in mente leggendo L'ultimo uomo nella torre, il terzo romanzo di Aravind Adiga in uscita in questi giorni da Einaudi, è che la «Mumbai novel» è ormai un genere, ricco, ambizioso e con una sua storia che comincia nel 1981 con I figli della mezzanotte di Salman Rushdie (ma tutta la narrativa indiana comincia con I figli della mezzanotte di Rushdie), passa nel 1995 per il capolavoro di Rohinton Mistry Un perfetto equilibrio, nel 2006 per l'epopea di Vikram Chandra Giochi sacri, e approda ora a questo libro comico-malinconico che somiglia a un romanzo dickensiano, con i suoi poliziotti, i suoi malviventi, i suoi ricchi prepotenti, e i piccoli personaggi dalla personalità decisa. (...) In questo marasma sociale tanto demoniaco nella realtà quanto ricco di suggestioni per il romanziere, due individui contrapposti come Masterji e Shah hanno curiosamente molto in comune: entrambi vengono da fuori, entrambi sono vedovi, entrambi hanno figli maschi figli deludenti. Ma se l'eroe del romanzo è Masterji, è a Shah a cui Adiga attribuisce la riflessione più umana. «La verità», dice il costruttore-corruttore parlando degli inquilini delle torri che si appresta a cacciare dal loro quartiere, «è che anche quando dicono di no, sotto sotto vogliono i soldi. E una volta che li fai firmare, ti sono grati. Non vanno mai alla polizia. Dunque, se ci si pensa bene, tutto quello che faccio io è solo renderli consapevoli delle loro stesse intenzioni».'

S.L. Bhyrappa: Parva - Recensione di Aravind Adiga

Hindustan Times inaugura una nuova rubrica nella sezione letteraria: alcuni noti autori indiani in lingua inglese recensiranno un'opera (altrui) redatta nella loro lingua madre. Si parte con Aravind Adiga che presenta Parva (1979) di S.L. Bhyrappa, in lingua kannada, una sorta di rivisitazione in prosa del leggendario Mahābhārata.

An epic without heroes, Aravind Adiga, 27 gennaio 2012, Hindustan Times:

'Parva (...) is probably the most successful attempt made to tell the story of the Mahābhārata in the form of a novel. It is a book without gods or heroes; anthropology and psychology shape its events. (...) Bhyrappa’s Pandavas are not semi-divine heroes, but middle-aged men slowed by regret for their wasted lives. (...) Six-hundred and nineteen pages (in the Kannada original text) of such vivid detail: paragraphs that run on for pages without a break. Parva is a psychological epic, darkened by Freudian awareness. The novel moves from one interior monologue to another, getting into the minds of men and women paralysed by subconscious needs. (...) Some portraits are tragic; others are the stuff of black comedy. (...) The Pandavas win, but win nothing: their children are dead, their kingdom is ruined. Parva ends in a rhapsodic, nine-page long block of prose. Fires burn in a forest, it rains in the city, a horde of women raped during the war come to the Pandavas to ask who will look after their illegitimate children; the new king does not know how to answer. The world of the Mahābhārata is being destroyed, and if hope for renewal exists, it does so only ambiguously. Bhyrappa is a polarising figure in Karnataka. In recent years, he has been accused of Hindutva sympathies. His pronouncements on Muslim rulers and Christian missionaries have alienated many of his admirers and contributed to his obscurity outside his home state. (Little of his work has been translated into English.) Back in 1979, however, this gifted novelist’s reverence for his cultural inheritance was balanced by his ambition to modernise it. Thirty-three years after its publication, Parva dazzles: its strangeness seems fresh, and its originality permanent'.