Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace is a relatively short work. It is also quite unputdownable. This was my second reading of it, having first read it about four years ago. And it was a far more vivid experience this time.

Professor David Lurie is a University English professor with a penchant for Romantics, whose “disgraceful” sexual liaison with one of his students suddenly lands him in trouble. Though we despise this fifty year old divorce’s lust for someone so much younger, there’s something heroic in his frank admission, in the way he denies an attempt by the inquiry council to elicit an apology, disregard its self-righteous intent to make him grovel in guilt. According to him, at that moment, “I became a servant of Eros.” Yet, finding himself out of a job at the fag end of a career is only the beginning of his woes.

He leaves Cape Town, to visit his somewhat estranged daughter Lucy, who runs a farm, hoping to put his turmoils behind him. But soon after his arrival, a gruesome tragedy strikes their lives (sorry, read the book), leaves both father and daughter shattered(especially daughter). With concern for Lucy, Lurie lingers in the farm far longer than he had wanted, discovering strange solace in incinerating dead dogs (a task he performs with uncanny diligence), finding time to put together a Byronic opera he’s been wanting to write, and trying to pursue his daughter to seek the justice he thinks she must. Yet, it’s also a place where none of his old rules work. As his old world (and life) gradually spirals downhill, Lurie is forced to adapt to a new reality, in which he, remarkably, begins to find both sanity and love.

Coetzee’s prose is terse and powerful, evoking compassion and anger. The undercurrent of racial tension in Lucy’s farm in Eastern Cape is undisguised. But the book’s biggest achievement is in how it engages one to empathize with Lurie, despite his flaws, makes one see his idiosyncrasies and shortcomings, yet makes one feel at times - “that could be me.”

I eagerly await the film version. While not expecting it to match the book, I do think John Malkovich as Lurie would be captivating.

The book won the Booker in 1999 and Coetzee is one of the only two authors to have won the Booker twice.

A distant world, Part III : Siliguri

Read Part II

I am at last headed for Bengal. North Bengal, where I was born. Where I spent my growing up years. In Delhi, the plane sits on the runway, delaying our departure for almost an hour. Who cares about the North East? Backward, dilapidated, a laggard in the economic growth seizing the whole country.

As the plane prepares to land in the little airport, green fields, trees, and silvery gray of a sinewy river come closer, dotted with quaint little houses. No concrete jungle here, or an expanse of urban waste, or slums. But for how long?

Signs of change are visible here as well. A new road leading out of the airport to the highway, more vehicles and people. And of course the ubiquitous cycle rickshaws. We pass by the University campus of my childhood, its surroundings unrecognizable in the mushrooming habitations on both sides of the highway.

The small town where my parents live, is no longer that small. Besides multiplying traffic and people, the city is experiencing the same retail and construction boom going on in other parts of urban India. The town I knew is lost, hidden behind a throbbing, pulsating city of neon signs, swanky malls, newer cars and two wheelers, and people dressed more dandily than before, sporting global brands and contemporary, cosmopolitan cuts. But artifacts of the old are still visible, still vibrantly available. The decadent rickshaw wallah, lean and well muscled, but somehow never fed well enough, his hollow cheeks belying fashionable jogging trousers. The overcrowded bazaar, where one has to practice the art of skillful dodging, of humans, rickshaws and two wheelers, and at the same time balance oneself carefully in motion while ensuring not to step on a mashed fruit or rotten vegetable or discarded sputum. Roads are still quite freely used as litter grounds as much as for transportation, a thing quite common in most Indian cities. Sweep sweep sweep your own yard, and off it goes into the streets. I don’t understand how difficult it can be to collect the rubbish and dispose it in community bins. Waste bins, of course, are a scarcity. One would first have to have these set up in much greater numbers.

But there are perks. The fresh taste of Bengal, in sweets, in repasts, not easily available anywhere else. Rosogolla, misthi doi, rasmalai, singara, kochuri, rolls, chops and cutlets with rich, flavorful fillings, the list goes on. The roadside sabji market with really fresh produce at prices one could only dream of in the developed world.

 

I am home at last. After four long years. Closer to five than four. Among people whose language runs in my blood, which spread through my veins to imperceptible yet solidly permanent corners of my being, and which has not diluted by disuse. Back with my parents, who make me feel like a child, its needs easily taken care of at the drop of a hat. Their affection knows no bounds of geography or economy. Back in a country that is maturing into a fast growing economy to take its bold, confident steps in the liberal, global stage from the fledging, tottering ones that had begun over a decade ago. A country with deep roots dating back thousands of years. And myriad, complex problems of the present dogging its every progressive move. A country which, after hundreds of years of rape and plunder, is bouncing back, reshuffling its garb to emerge into its new avatar, to provide a shelter of peace and prosperity for its umpteen citizens, but being mired in conflicting forces of separatism and disintegration, for selfish political motives or genuine concern in underdeveloped sections, regions which are, should be, as much a part of any economic benefit.

It is a tough, uphill journey. But one India must see through. To honor its past. To cherish the present. To spread the vibrant, upbeat mood among more and more of its denizens in the future. I am, will be, a part of it, no matter how distant, in miles, I am.

A distant world, Part II : Delhi

Read Part I

 

I travel up north, to Delhi. Crowded city bursting at its seams. An excess of traffic and humans jostling for space in roads frequently interrupted with construction work. New roads, wider roads, flyovers, hotels. To accommodate more and more. People, motors, business. To claim more and more. Open spaces, green vistas to gray. Boom or bust?

I had been to Delhi once before, for a very short visit. And hated it. There really isn’t any genuine reason. My acquaintance with the city is too limited to pass an opinion. Perhaps it was the heat then, arid and enervating. It is cool now, being winter. But the city itself does not evoke anything conciliatory. Familiarity breeds contempt, so they say. In my case, the feelings for Delhi stem from unfamiliarity, though contempt is too strong a word to describe it. Disinclination is a closer word. Or perhaps aversion. A city I would avoid if I could. But there are places in Delhi I am eager to see, for their historical worth. Red Fort, Purana Quila, Tombs, gardens. The heritage of the great Mughals. The seat of power in the subcontinent for a thousand years. Or is it thousands? Indraprastha, the city of kings, the capital. The center of power, strategy and diplomacy. Yet somehow I feel all its heritage fails to give Delhi any character, unlike the distinctive airs of Kolkata or Mumbai. Unfamiliarity? I’ll have to wait, years or forever, to know, due to my disinclination and aversion. Certainly not in this trip, where I have about two days, which includes a Monday, when the Red Fort (and perhaps other monuments) are closed. Meanwhile, I’ll please myself with the opinion that Delhi as a city is highly overrated.

 

On Sunday, I visit a memorial originally built for the British soldiers in the 1857 uprising. This was later, in 1972, re-dedicated to the heroic revolutionaries.

 

 

On Monday, to visit India Gate, I take the Delhi Metro, which is crowded, but fast and efficient, and clean. Cleaner and newer than subways in many mega cities. It is windy, the warmth of the winter sun somewhat diluted in its sudden surges. And dust. It is hard to find a place in the subcontinent without dust. The wind blows it around in swirls as we appreciate the magnificent structure of the gate, a dedication to the soldiers who lost their lives in the first world war. They no longer allow visitors through the gate, to avoid vandalism. A 24×7 flame (Amar Jawan Jyoti) is in vigil within it, to honor the departed, which one can now only see from far.

The India Gate has come to be a symbol of India, maybe not as widely as the more illustrious Gateway of India in Mumbai, but certainly equally representative.

Read More (Part III)

A distant world - Part I : Mumbai, Pune

More than four years later. Closer to five than four. The very words I use to describe the gap after which I return to India, for a vacation.

It is a long journey, from where I reside, nestled in the temperate forests of the Pacific Northwest of America, to the subcontinent. How many thousand miles? I forget to count, as giant jet planes guzzling who knows how many hundreds of gallons carry me. Over thirty five thousand feet. Forty thousand feet. To Europe. Germany, where I find my feet on the ground between changing planes. Then onwards east. South. From cold, frigid landscapes to places, barring those with substantial gains in elevation, where summer and winter merely makes a difference in how hot and muggy it gets.

India has changed. Is changing rapidly, with a growing, booming economy. Words I hear often. In the media, from friends who made the trip earlier, between now and the time the since the boom began, soon after I left the shores of my country of birth. Of which I am still a citizen.

And what does the country of my citizenship offer me, when I return after more than four years, closer to five than four? A haze. Smoggy cityscapes in Delhi and Mumbai, where I struggle to understand if it is fog or pollution which has made things blurry. Traffic scene just as unruly as I have ever known but have, in the past several years, been reconditioned into something more orderly. Better airports in transitory states. Cleaner washrooms in the toilets (at least in Delhi), which have tissue papers, air blowers, automatic sensor flushes. Signs of a progressive economy stepping into the global scene. Massive billboards have grown like unchecked weeds along the expressway to Pune from Mumbai. They sell new homes. Real Estate industry selling promises of lush green in a world severely different from the dessicated terrain through which the highway cuts across. Through the rocky gray yellow green Deccan plateau. 2 BHK, 3 BHK. With parks, children’s play areas, club houses, in a long list of features intended to attract people with far greater spending power than before. People who are not squeamish of taking loans which they will take years and years to repay. Or maybe not, like those who are reaping the benefits of the higher pays and a booming stock market. But where is the growing, booming economy where it is most needed? I still see people scrounging for scraps in rubbish dumps, living in shanties, seeking the cover of rubble and urban waste to defecate in the open. But then, I also see the homeless with hand painted cardboard signs under expressway ramps from where I come. Perhaps the effects of this growing, booming economy are not as pervasive as they are claimed to be. Yet. How many years will it take? A question as difficult to answer as its more Epicurean counterpart: why does the mind become so easily accustomed to new order and customs, in a few years consider as foreign what has been a part of someone’s system since birth?

Knowledge and perspectives enlighten. But what is revealed is not necessarily gloriously triumphant. Bitterness goes hand in hand with truth.

So what does it feel like, when I return, after more than four years, closer to five than four? Nothing. A strange silence where I was expecting joyous uplifting trumpets. The dusty Deccan plateau does not feel like home, though that is where I had lived for years before migrating west, to temperate forests of the Pacific Northwest. I remember Bengal, where I was born, which I left behind. The lush greenery from the frame of the flight window on descent six years ago when I returned, after a shorter interval of absence from the country of my birth, whose citizenship I still possess. My joyful anticipation, the rise of an emotion I feel when dwarfed by ascending mountain peaks, by the clouds, trees and forests of a Himalayan vista. All that has become history. Soaked up by distance and time. Awaiting resurgence.

Read More (Part II)

 

The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

After plodding through the last few books, “The God of Small Things” was a refreshing change. It drew me in, into the lives of Estha and Rahel, into Kerala, Ayemenem, onto love and its fragile boundaries, easily crushed by blind traditions, by selfish, hypocritical motives.

What Arundhati Roy achieves in her debut novel, her only work to date, is quite remarkable. She has the Booker (1997) to show for that, though an award is not always well deserved, as I recently discovered. In this case though, it is. One hundred percent. May be one hundred fifty. The lyrical quality of the prose, the evocative locales, passionate, intriguing moments reaped to the fullest, all belie the fact that this was only a first work. What a first! One that masters would be proud of and imitators love to worship.

The story, strongly influenced by the writer’s own life, is set in a Kerala village, Ayemenem, where the twins Estha and Rahel, return after twenty three years. Reliving a past that had separated them and split a family terminally apart. A past where their mother, Ammu, had loved an untouchable. An affair they paid dearly for. Estha and Rahel return to the present, to a “hideous grief”, to be haunted by death. Like their mother, they break “the Love Laws. That laid down who should be loved. And how. And how much.”

 

Why a writer of such talent would forsake writing after her first work is baffling. Maybe political activism is more alluring. Maybe that was all she had to say. Maybe she is destined to be another Harper Lee. Whatever the reason, I hope she is able to repeat her tour de force. At least once, for the sake of literature.

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

It is not a badly written book. But not one that well written to deserve an award, and least of all one as prestigious as the Booker. So why did The Inheritance of Loss win the Booker award?

Answer:

a) The rest of the books in running were no better

b) The judges made a blunder

c) My perceptions are, well, questionable.

 

I hope it is option c. But reading the book I felt otherwise.

 

Sai, an orphaned teenager whose parents died tragically in Moscow, is left to the care of a reclusive and disillusioned grandfather, a retired Judge and former ICS officer of the British era, now residing in a desolate Kalimpong bungalow. The judge has a cook, whose son Biju is an illegal immigrant in the States, jumping from one small time job to another to stay afloat. The book hovers between the present life of Sai, the judge and the cook in Kalimpong in the backdrop of the Gorkhaland movement, and Biju’s struggle to find a foothold in New York, interspersed with flashbacks of the judge’s past, his cruelties and illusions of grandeur that have soured his taste for life

 

 

So why is this much vaunted book undeserving of its praise and accolades? Here I attempt a brief five point reasoning:

1. Stiltedness : The overall effect appears stilted. It seems the author has tried to force fit herself into ideas of the region and its political climate (Kalimpong, Gorkhaland), the characters, and the result has carried forth in the writing. It has lead to characters hard to empathize with, despite numerous situations where it is called for.

2. Exoticism : There seems to be a clear intent to sell this book to people who are not familiar to India. Exoticism can go beyond mangoes, guavas or chutneys. They tread into long stereotyped rituals like child marriage, subjugation of women, negativism among low level business class Indian immigrants in the USA and so son. The writer’s desire of satire, if any, falls flat, the humour impotent.

3. Incoherence : While the narrative shifts from present to past, from Kalimpong to New York, from Gorkhaland politics and marginalised victims to Saeed Saeed and his desperateness of becoming an American citizen, the transitions are ill made and jittery, hardly Booker calibre.

4. Bad dialogue : The dialogues in Inheritence are not only pathetic but also profuse, which adds to the pain.

5. Failed experimentation: Desai tries non conventional structures, like an oddly punctuated list, or expressions, in the middle of a paragraph. Or even broken half formed sentences given the fullness of whole. While this is novel and does garner some attention, it is not hard to notice the lack of any resounding effect in outcome. Experimentation for its own sake. While Rushdie creates power and Arundhati Roy almost poetry, Desai manages only a hodge podge of something needless.

 

Is the book really that bad? No, no no. You can certainly give it a try, though you might be hard pressed to finish it. Desai deserves credit for the research in hill politics and civil servant’s lives, for coming up with something substantial to say in over three hundred pages that perhaps took her years to write and can in no way be undermined by a review that has taken only minutes. My regret is that with all the content for drama and conflict, the possibility of scintillating characterization and scope, the work frizzles out to produce only something average, that someone will read and forget, with its characters hardly lasting in our memories.

That is where the book fails, and the reason why I felt that option (a) or (b), or both combined is the most plausible answer to the question I had earlier asked.

The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer

Mehring, a shrewd, successful business tycoon based in South Africa and a sexually prolific if slightly depraved man, buys a farm, somewhat on a whim. It becomes a sanctuary for him, where he escapes on weekends to get away from his stereotyped world and also supervise its functioning, Jacobus and the rest of the black workers in the farm. There’s no story as such but incidents pieced together of Mehing’s life, the farm and its workers and a small time Indian family that runs a nearby shop. Mehring wants a vent from the drudgery of his life of business meetings and social commitments, seeks something missing in his personal relationships torn by a failed marriage, an estranged son, and a left winged girlfriend who has had to flee the country for getting politically entangled. The solitude of the farm, the river running beside it, the outdoor camping, drinking, the joy of defecating in the open, is satisfying. Jacobus, and the rest of the farm boys try to please him. Poor black people. Crafty Indians. We see glimpses of their lives as well.

There is little drama in the book, but wonderful perspectives, of lives from different angles of the South African social strata. The white man, wary of the black, keeping them on a leash, always circumspect of their intent. The black, trying to hold on to the land, trying to gratify its owner, bereft of education or wealth, but not short of compassion or merriment. The Indians, cunning, instinctive, somewhere in between the white and black (brown, yes, but also in a social sense), surviving political turmoils and biased laws.

It is a hard-to-read book, requiring substantial effort to plod through the probing, frequently diverting, interrogative narrative. But patience pays. Artifacts and faculties are sharply exposed, often caustic, intense scenes captured brilliantly, like the flood and its aftereffects, the dead body that comes floating in the end (”one of them”), Mehring’s surreptitious fingering of a teenager in the plane. Draws out a lot, then draws you in. Enjoy the ride, but don’t expect a conventional resolution or climax.

So why is Mehring a Conservationist? For becoming a part time farmer from pig iron seller, for his trying to preserve the farm, not letting it grow wild and waste(as his girlfriend suggests)? Or is it because he tries to conserve pieces of his life, that though materially successful, appear to him meaningless at times?

Winner of the 1974 Booker Prize.

The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru makes a fair impression with his debut novel, which begins in the early twentieth century.Young Pran Nath Razdan, suddenly realizes that he is no longer the pampered son of a wealthy household, which upon the discovery of his dubious origins casts him out. The timing coincides with the death of Amar Nath Razdan, the father who was actually not his true father, Pran being conceived in a one off tryst between his opium afflicted licentious mother and a British official during an incredulous mating in the midst of a tropical flash flood which eventually claims the man. Identity, or the lack thereof, is the crisis that hounds Pran throughout his life, as he shifts from one persona to another, driven to some extent by his fortunes or misfortunes and the rest by his ingenuity, good looks and instinct to survive. From a Benaras brothel to Fatehpur palace, from Bombay to England, Pran’s fortunes seem to improve as he incarnates from Pran to Ruksana, Ruksana to Pretty Bobby, and finally from Bobby to Joanathan Bridgeman. Yet he feels like an empty shell, a ghost whose life is merely skin deep. While in Bombay, Bobby is fascinated by the English life and Englishness, the colour of which his skin inherits. But he doesn’t know what it is to be English.

Is there a typical English smell?…Face buried in burra mems’ smalls and burra sahibs’ dirty shirts, he finally put a name to it. Rancid butter. With perhaps a hint of raw beef. The underlying smell of empire.

Bobby does eventually land in England, in a fortuitous turn of events that enables him to become Jonathan Bridgeman, and Englishman. But Jonathan cannot fit into the English life, finding himself isolated and cornered despite fervent efforts and note taking to adopt perfect English ways. He feels like an outsider, in a place he does not belong. From school in Chopham Hall, Jonathan moves on to Oxford, to finish his University studies. Here, he is stifled amidst conventions and acceptable norms. His inherent disinclination to being English, despite his superficial adaptation of English ways and the misleading colour of his skin, comes out when he finds himself out of step, out of tune among his team mates in an anthropological expedition in Africa, which he had joined rather unwillingly, as a pretext to come close to the girl with whom he had fallen in love, Astarte Chapel, who also happened to be the daughter of the professor leading the expedition, but who actually ditches him, ironically, for his boring, predictable English nature.

Besides the theme of mixed identities and racial clashes, the pervasive imposition of colonial forces, like that of the English, on those colonized is also significant throughout the book.

As a first novel, Kunzru has chosen a complex and elaborate theme. He does satisfactorily. The first sections of the book, the origins of Pran Nath, his ousting from familial home to a Benaras brothel and eventual migration to Fatehpur as Ruksana, where he first encounters the English from up close, lacks in depth, harbouring between comic satire and incoherent pathos. But the writing is certainly much better, more consistent and serious in the later parts. My favourite is Bobby in Bombay, arguably the best parts of the book, not only in the excellent sections on the Scottish missionaries and their conflicts, but also in the transformation that Bobby undergoes trying to understand himself, his position in life.

 

My biggest complaint is that Kunzru doesn’t entirely succeed in eliciting from the reader the emotional response for the protagonist possible in his various situations. One is rarely touched by Pran or his later selves, his suffering as a child prostitute or his misfitting Oxford days. That, in my opinion, is the novel’s major drawback. As a writer, Kunzru certainly shows the talent and promise to produce better.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle

Paddy Clarke is not a funny story. The overwhelming feeling is one of palpable sadness, despite several humourous episodes, especially towards the earlier parts of the book. Ten year old Paddy, the eldest son of a large Irish family in fictitious(?) Barrytown of the sixties, thoroughly enjoys the company of his friends – Kevin, Liam, Aidan, Ian McEvoy and James O’Keefe – playing football, stealing magazines, knocking on doors to pester unsuspecting neighbours, writing names in wet cement, tussles among each other, and even the cruel Zentoga cult ritual. He also loves his younger brother, whom he endearingly calls Sinbad, though he is mostly a bully to him, giving him dead legs and showing him who’s the eldest, more out of habit, because little brothers are to be hated. There are numerous amusing incidents, one where an inspired Paddy plays Father Damien, and gets Sinbad to play a leper.

–Do it again.

Sinbad grabbed my legs.

–No, no, Kam – Kam

—Kamiano!

—I can’t remember it.

—Kamiano.

—Can I not just say Patrick?

—No, I said. Do it again and you’d better get it right.

—I don’t want to.

I gave him half a Chinese torture. He grabbed my legs.

—Lower down.

—How?

—Lower.

—You’ll kick me.

—I won’t. I will if you don’t.

Sinbad grabbed me around the ankles. He held me tight so my feet were stuck.

—No, no Kamiano! We want to stay as long as you are here.

—Okay my children, I said. —You can stay.

—Thanks very much, Kamiano, said Sinbad.

He wouldn’t let go of my feet.

 

As Paddy’s Ma and Da begin to drift apart, he becomes increasingly aware of their rift, the raised voices, slamming doors, the tense moods. He tries to reason: “Why didn’t Da like Ma?” His Ma was fine, much nicer than others’. It must be Da. “It was all him against her”. But in the end, he decides “it took two to Tango”.

There must have been a reason why he hated Ma. There must be something wrong with her, at least one thing. I couldn’t see it. I wanted to. I wanted to understand. I wanted to be on both sides. He was my da.

In the wake of the separation, Paddy’s own world begins to change. He picks a fight with his best friend Kevin, falls out of his group, finds himself isolated. But he has grown up, starting to see himself as the “man of the house”, for his father would leave. “They were only kids” — he forgives the teasing of his erstwhile friends.

Roddy Doyle’s prose is sparse, his minimalistic style revealing Paddy’s world in an unsentimental manner. He retains a narrative that is inchoate and jumbled, very appropriate for the perspective of a ten year old. The combination turns out to be a very effective one, making us powerfully aware of the cruelties we are capable of and how the bitterness of parents can cloud the lives of their children.

A Beneficiary by Nadine Gordimer

Charlotte, an attractive twenty something woman, is confronted by a secret upon her mother’s death.  In unraveling what is and what is not, the mystery surrounding her own origin, her doubts are resolved in the clarity of a father’s love.

            Gordimer’s style is succinct and incisive, frequently interrogative in this piece, probing inwards for answers. She underplays Charlotte’s emotional turmoil, but the angst is not undermined.

 
It is an irony that I should begin reading Nadine Gordimer’s works with the last published story. Nonetheless, it is a satisfying one, successful in having me want to read more of her earlier works. Titled “A Beneficiary”, this one came out in a May 2007 New Yorker issue. It is also available online:

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/05/21/070521fi_fiction_gordimer