Seagull Books, a Calcutta-based publishing house that “focuses on publishing world literature in English translation, serious non-fiction, culture studies, performance studies, art and cinema” is offering books as PDFs, free to download from its site during this lockdown.
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The initiative titled Apart, but not alone offers free downloads in the form of PDFs. Today’s seven books include, Bengali writer Banaphool’s Wildfire, featuring “45 short, sharp, sometimes cryptic stories, representative of his uncompromising, multifaceted talent”; French-Djiboutian poet Abdourahman A Waberi’s poetry, from Naming the Dawn, “introspective and inquisitive, reflecting a deep spiritual bond—with words, with the history of Islam and its great poets, with the landscapes those poets walked”; Chandrashekar Kambar’s novel Karimayi, translated by Krishna Manavalli, “plays with the idea of an eternal India that exists between myth and reality”, among others.
The publishing house founded by Naveen Kishore in 1982 initially specialised in serious books on art, theatre and cinema, “it published plays by major Indian playwrights, monographs and essays by leading Indian artists, filmscripts from the best-known Indian and European filmmakers, along with academic titles on culture, society and the various arts. Since 2005, Seagull Books London Limited has ventured into newer fields of publishing, including English translations of fiction and non-fiction by major African, European, Asian and Latin American writers… Its hallmark ‘Africa List’ presents writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Maryse Condé, Ivan Vladislavić, William Kentridge, Kossi Efoui and Abdourrahman A. Waberi. European writers lesser known to the English-speaking world are also showcased by Seagull—Ralf Rothmann, Tilman Rammstedt, Inka Parei, Dorothee Elmiger, Tomas Espedal.”
Seagull authors include a Nobel laureate (Mo Yan for literature in 2012) a Man Booker winner (Laszlo Krasznahorkai in 2015), and an alternative Nobel winner (Maryse Condé in 2018).
Self-isolating has given me time. A lot of it. With two children under five, however, time or the having of it is an abstract concept. The only thing I am thankful for is that I work for people who empathise with this situation, and are willing to accommodate me.
Circling back to the time at hand. Once we are done negotiating with a four-year-old about it being our turn with the Alexa remote, my husband and I take turns to watch some content that features speaking adults, as opposed to the Oddbods and bless them, my favourite, Story Bots. Of late, we’ve stumbled onto Marathi movies. Among the first full-length Marathi movies we watched was Choricha Mamla (2020), a farce that’s streaming on Prime Video right now. Before this, my husband went through a Punjabi film phase (as an aside, it’s a little creepy how most of the Punjabi actresses look like Kylie Jenner). Ably aided and abetted by English subtitles, we have embarked on a journey to discover movies that we wouldn’t normally pick because we would choose either Tamil, Malayalam or Hindi.
I thoroughly enjoyed Choricha Mamla. The staging of the scenes, and the plausibility of the comedy was excellent. And it elicited a ton of belly laughs. The success of this watching experience led us to watch a few other Marathi movies. Some were interesting and some didn’t excite. The latest one that played at home was the movie YZ (2016). This movie is centered around a 33-year-old college professor of history and his existential crisis about life, his ambitions, his identity, women, marriage, etc. I barely watched the movie but did sit through some parts. The one bit I watched involved Gajanan (played by Sagar Deshmukh) going with his aunt to a match-making event. There, he runs into Parnarekha (played by Sai Tamhankar) with whom he broke off an engagement. Embarrassed by this turn of events, his aunt asks him to leave with her and goes back home to his place.
Over a cup of tea, his aunt tells him to live life on his own terms. She praises him for how he’s kept his home and his work as a history teacher. Gajanan is surprised by this conversation, and he tells his aunt as much. He shows his aunt an old book that he presumed belonged to his mother. His aunt tells him that it was her book, and her mother snatched it from her hands on the day that his uncle had come home to meet her.
Suddenly his aunt looks back on her life and tells him about how much she loved reading. How she read Fountainhead in one sitting, and how she wolfed through books in hours. But, she got married and what took her six hours was now taking her 12 and then days, and then months, and before she even realised, books had left her life. Through the years, if she had one regret, it was letting go of her books. With that example, she tells her nephew to do as his heart desires rather than letting go of everything and living a boring life that he is simply not interested in. Buoyed by this, Gajanan moves on with his life’s journey.
The aunt’s little monologue struck a chord with me. I’ve been married seven years, a mother for five of them, and the last time I read a book, I was breastfeeding my brand new baby in 2018. I’ve had to leave a couple of very interesting books halfway because I’m either dealing with snack time, or sickness, or just clingy children.
I miss uninterrupted reading time. Actually, I miss uninterrupted time. I miss it. It is not an indictment of my family. Just something I miss. I envy my daughter her hours of pretend play where she’s apparently had the time to make up a story about beanstalks and her doll Suzy and leaves that grow so big that you can walk across them and reach Paris!
I envy my toddler her hours of meandering through the house, digging dirt, destroying my pink lipstick, dunking herself in the bucket, and then walking to me like she did exactly nothing. I envy them.
I am jealous of the time I read stories to my children. It’s the most literature I have consumed since 2019! It baffles me, mostly, that we are able to rid ourselves of things we love without even realising that they’ve gone. Reading just slipped away from me, and I barely noticed.
I don’t want to blame anyone. I want to look at why, for some of us, letting these things go is so seamless, for the lack of better word. Even now, if you asked me for my definition of time well-spent, I would say sitting by the window with my nose buried in a good book. I don’t even need tea or coffee to go with it. Just good lighting.
Habits, like loves, are tough to break out of. They are so deeply imprinted into who we are that we cannot imagine who we would be without them. Thinking of the many occasions and places at which I have carried a book for company, I cannot imagine now, writing a nostalgic piece about reading, of all things.
It’s a hollow ache. To lose printed pages. Marriage, children, and responsibilities give you a starring role in the WhatsApp Wife Joke, other than that, you’re just a clueless person wondering who the new literary star is and where they came from. Once upon a time, you were the one sharing “undiscovered gems”.
For instance, I assumed Chimamanda Adichie was the Nigerian writer everyone was reading. Her TED talk did get sampled on a Beyonce track, after all. But, there are several others now. There is also a new Japanese author everyone loves? How and when did I miss the news? To the million-dollar question then, do I blame anyone? No. I don’t. I blame myself for letting my pages go without a fight. Without resistance. Without grief. I let it go, and today, I can only look back in bewilderment.
Ask any woman if she reads romantic fiction, and you’re likely to get a deflection. Most of the women I know, women who read seriously, won’t ever cop to reading a romance novel from time to time. I don’t understand what it is. If we watch chick flicks, we need the books that made the genre what it is today. And if I had to single out one author in the genre, it would have to be the one and only Nora Roberts.
The writer is worth upwards of $200 million, has sold millions of copies and is a fixture in the Bestseller list. Her profitability aside, she is proof positive that content sells. Well-written and well-thought-out content that is about building the story and telling it well is her forte and she has excited her readers more than she has upset them.
There is one thing, I single-handedly blame Nora Roberts for my fascination with Ireland. That’s a huge accusation, especially since I majored in Literature, and the Irish poets were a big part of our syllabus. And yet, an American romance novelist managed to imprint this country and its culture more decisively than anyone else.
If you’ve read her trilogies, you’ll know why. The mythology and Ireland’s culture of superstitions and beliefs are well-known. The writer takes all this and converts it into profit-making machinery with good writing, well-researched plots, and a whole lot of magic. To the point that I once looked into whether there were any conspiracy theories on if she was a witch!
At first read, I was intrigued. Here was a romance writer, so far removed from the excessive ellipses of Barbara Cartland that she had me at hello! What also drew me in, when I began reading her novels, was that she never wrote a world that was far removed from reality. Often, when you read romances or watch rom-coms, you find yourself unraveling “the big conundrum” with a simple sequence of events. Not in a Nora Roberts novel. Her witches are using those iPads and the dark web to source their secret ingredients, not to mention the abundance of back channels.
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But magicks are not the only reason I enjoy her work. During this lockdown, I find myself more inclined to pick up a Nora Roberts novel to take a break from everything. At the very least, I will be surrounded by smart, good-looking men and women who always get the happy ending. There are, to me, some key aspects to her, both, as a writer and a person, and it’s what I love about her over and above her work. And those are…
The Women
They are no withering flowers, they are not tools of the patriarchy, and they are all immensely flawed. She writes them authentically. There was one story, part of the Dream Trilogy set in Monterey, in which Kate, an accountant, antacids her way through adolescence and adulthood because of her anxiety and the pressure she puts on herself. There are very few women in literature generally who mention antacids, let alone anxiety! Roberts’ women are real. Not all of them can cook, clean, be domestic. But all of them stand up for themselves and each other, and none of them suffer the patriarchy silently. That’s saying a lot for someone in the romance genre, generally.
She Writes Her Own Work
There’s no ghostwriting, that the publishing world is notorious for, where writers farm out their content. Each of her books has been written by her. Her first novel was published in 1981. Her 39-year writing career includes more than 215 novels. When you read about her writing routine, you’ll feel like a fraud. No, she doesn’t hide out for days at end, like some of the artists in her book do. She has a highly regimented routine and it’s a little disgusting if you’re the kind of person who thinks they should write a book.
She Doesn’t Suffer Bullshit Quietly
She has fought plagiarism allegations very publicly and has always proven herself. The ugliest was the one in 2018, when a huge social media-fuelled saga erupted over one of her book titles. It got uglier on social media because the writer who accused her is a young Nigerian American YA author. If it was that the book’s plot had been borrowed there would have been something to voyeuristically admire about how such a titan of the industry is such a fraud. This entire issue was over a book title. Roberts wrote about the whole thing on her blog, and it was the classiest takedown I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Roberts’ response also put into perspective something very important in this age, even if the internet is forever, facts always win.
Sexual Trauma Is Real
When I was confined to bed with hyperemesis gravidarum in my second pregnancy, I got a lot of reading done. I didn’t want to read some heavy books, I had enough on my mind. Romance novels usually come to my rescue when I am in this kind of mind space. Then I read Come Sundown (2017). The way in which Roberts documented Alice’s abuse. Her trauma. Her healing. I was amazed that an older woman had written that. If there is something I have observed over at least two decades of reading Roberts’ fiction, it is that the torment she presents is visceral. It’s not token, it’s not inauthentic. You feel for these people. Even if they inhabit some kind of perfect fantasy world where things right themselves somehow.
Experimentation Is Everything
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When it comes to romances, authors stick to a genre and a proven template. Nora Roberts, however, chooses not to. She is a romance novelist, that hasn’t changed, but, she also writes as J.D. Robb and has published almost 30 titles in the In Death series. Mystery novels with a love story attached. She also switches between trilogies and standalone titles and does it all with aplomb. This year, she has scheduled five books for release. I cannot imagine being that prolific, and also making money, and not losing your fan base. With her experience, it is easy to get out of touch, but pick up one of her recent books and you’ll be hard-pressed to think that it has been staged.
I never thought I would be rooting for a romance novelist, but, for Nora Roberts, I’m happy to.
The Hindu Prize for Fiction and Non-fiction for 2019 have just been announced. Mirza Waheed for Tell Me Everything (Context) and Santanu Das for India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images and Songs (Cambridge University Press) have been awarded the literary prize, in the fiction and non-fiction categories, respectively, by the jury.
The citation for Waheed’s award read: “An extraordinary work of fictionwhose complexity, depth and narrative mastery would be hard to match in contemporary world literature.” According a report in The Hindu, the panel described the book as “a compelling novel, both a narrative tour de force and an exploration of a profound existential and moral conundrum.” The fiction jury panel had Navtej Sarna, Nilanjana Roy, Pradeep Sebastian, J Devika and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan.
The citation for Das’ award read “a sensitive exploration of the human dimensions of a major modern war that reshaped global politics and culture in fundamental ways,” and “helps to re-examine the scholarly and popular imaginations of the First World War which have tended to ignore the involvement of close to over a million Indians in it, and in particular, the tens of thousands among them who lost their lives.” The non-fiction jury panel included Kamini Mahadevan, Chandan Gowda, Harsh Sethi, Rustom Bharucha and Shiv Visvanathan.
The shortlist for the awards announced earlier included (apart from the winning books):
Fiction: The Assassination of Indira Gandhi by Upamanyu Chatterjee, The Queen of Jasmine Country by Sharanya Manivannan, Latitudes of Longing by Shubhangu Swarup and Heat by Poomani, tr. Kalyan Raman.
Non-fiction: Early Indians by Tony Joseph, Polio by Thomas Abraham, The Transformative Constitution by Gautam Bhatia and The Anatomy of Hate by Revati Laul.
The Hindu, in its report on the award, has also said that “The prize is usually awarded at a ceremony during The Hindu’s annual literature festival Lit For Life. However the 2020 edition had to be cancelled due to a challenging environment. An award ceremony to be held on March 28 was also cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Hindu Lit For Life will be back in January 2021″.
The AG of India, KK Venugopal, has thrown his enviable library that has a reputation for housing rare antiquarian books, open to public access now.
According to www.kkvlibrary.com, “Blessed with wanderlust, as well as an eye for the historic and the exotic, he [KK Venugopal] has acquired a large number of old and rare books, periodicals and other publications, including books from as far back in time as the early 17th century. The collection is a veritable treasure trove, with publications covering a wide range of topics, from religion, mythology and the Vedas, to Indian art and sculpture, historical battles, the British Empire in India and tales of travels across the world. The literature reveals fascinating and eye-opening facts and information, embellished with striking and eye-catching drawings and illustrations.”
The cover of a book in the collection
The advocate wants to disseminate this wealth of information to “those who share his interest in the mysteries and minutiae of the bygone eras. It is also an invitation to those who are, as yet, uninitiated, to explore the beauty, splendour and the stark realities of times past. Please feel free to browse the site.”
The books in the library are mostly in the public domain (not protected by copyright in India).
Social distancing is taking the proverbial stuffing out of the best of us. It’s one thing to share memes about how we’re all actually introverts, putting on a good show. It is another to actually sit at home knowing you cannot go anywhere because you may catch a deadly virus that is more intent than America in conquering foreign lands.
Since all of us who are reading this have good broadband, we’ve been surrendering to the almighty content providers and hoping that we don’t run out of shows to stream before our self- and government-imposed restrictions are lifted.
If screen time all the time is too much for you, let me recommend the best alternative. At times like these, when the confinement cannot be helped, you need to look for work that will immerse your mind fully, and allow for conversation that won’t stop. And for this, I prefer Haruki Murakami’s books.
If I knew Japanese, I’d read his books in original. But I need to rely on English translations, and honestly, I cannot imagine how stunning the original prose must be if the English version is so mesmerising. Murakami’s heroes are adept at social distancing, and for those who don’t know better, let me tell you that reading his descriptions of their daily life – wake up, shit, shower, shave, make food, eat, do everyday humdrum things – will have you wondering if you can replicate their behaviour.
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1.Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years Of Pilgrimage: Released worldwide, in English, in 2014, this book is peak social distancing. Tsukuru, a man with a plan, lands his dream job, and is working but his past has him baffled. When he decides to confront the people who upended everything he knew to be his reality, what unfurls is terrible for him. Here is a man who had no choice but distance himself from his people. From his support systems. He had to get on with life, and with no way of getting answers. Meanwhile, he lives an isolated life, and goes through the motions. All because of one missing link from his past. This is a long book, and the last chapter may baffle you. But, it is a scene that tells you that Tsukuru Tazaki, now in possession of answers has the luxury of finding his way back to his passion – trains and train stations.
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2.1Q84: Released in English, in 2011, this novel is of personal interest to me. I was born in 1984. So, obviously, when I was old enough, the first thing I did was borrow a copy of George Orwell’s 1984, and develop unfounded conspiracy theories about the year of my birth. So, when my favourite novelist also alluded to this particular year, I was waiting to sink my teeth into it. This book takes some getting used to. It’s not for everyone. To begin with, it is a behemoth. It traverses space and time like nothing you’ve ever read, and honestly, if you’re not into it, just let it go. I braved the elements, took breaks, discussed the heck out of it with people, and finally finished it. Immensely gratifying. Another protagonist whose social distancing will really have you rooting for the cause.
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3. Kafka On The Shore: Released in English in 2005, this book had me jumping for joy. I refused to engage with people who wanted to bury themselves into everything this book was about, or hunt for deeper meanings. Here was a novel that experimented with reality and perception well before Black Mirror did, and boy, was it worth all of the craziness. Talking cats, to strange train stops, Murakami seems determined to take us, the reader, on a guided tour of the Japanese male mind, and none of those landscapes allow for a reader to say “one day, I’m going to date/marry someone just like him”. These men, in their isolation, see the world so differently. They are each on a mission, to uncover something from their lives that may, or may not make them whole. And in Kafka On The Shore, it’s quite the twisted ride.
4. Norwegian Wood: I read Jay Rubin’s English translation (that is the authorised one to be published outside Japan in 2000). This book, if I’m being honest, left me a little shaken. A man in search, again, like all of Murakami’s men, of a lost love and a story. It seems that these men operate in a kind of social distance themselves. Their arcs all begin seemingly normally, regular people living regular lives – home, school, college, love. But something happens, as things happen, and they go from regular people, to someone so internal that it is difficult to believe that they are able to traverse the outer world with any modicum of regularness. And Norwegian Wood ends with perhaps the most existential of all question, “Where are you now?” If only we knew.
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5. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: Published in English in 1997, translated by Jay Rubin, this book finally has a young girl socially distancing herself, because she wants to. The most intriguing part of this entire book was this girl. May. She had an air about her, mystique is the word actually. For a teenager, there was so much to her. What struck me the most is that no one really writes teenage girls like that. They’re all preoccupied, in chick lit, looking for boys to love, or solving mysteries and then looking for boys to love. No one is sitting at home, conversing with adult men like some French ingenue and speaking of the world like a mystic. There is so much to this book, but May is by far the best bit of character writing.
By the time you’re done with these, I’m pretty sure the semi-lockdown will be done, and the dystopia we’re all in won’t seem quite as crazy as the meme nation is making it out to be. I, on the other hand, have an unread copy of Killing Commentadore to dive into.
Sangam House, an international writers’ residency program, located in India, is now accepting applications for its 13th season. Sangam’s residency programs “are designed for writers who have published to some acclaim but not yet enjoyed substantial commercial success. Sangam House seeks to give writers a chance to build a solid and influential network of personal and professional relationships that can deepen their own work, in effect, expanding and diversifying literature.”Sangam House is located at The Jamun, in Bengaluru.
According to www.sangamhouse.org, all applicants are automatically considered for the various fellowships on offer, including The Ammi Fellowship that supports writing in Indian languages, The Bhoomija Fellowship which supports writing in Kannada, The Bianca Pancoat Patton Fellowship that supports the work of young women writers from India, The Dhvani Fellowship (sponsored by Aditi: Foundation for the Arts) which supports the work of translators working in and out of Indian languages, The Eternal Vada Fellowship supports which the residency of an American writer, The Lavanya Sankaran Fellowship supports new writing from India, The Murasaki Fellowship which supports the residency for a fiction writer, The Nevatia Fellowship that supports non-fiction writing in English, especially in the areas of social and cultural change, The Prakriti Foundation Fellowships which support writing in Tamil and other Indian languages as well as writing by non-resident Indians, The Writer’s Side Fellowship supports a first time non-fiction writer from South Asia, and a fellowship from a donor who wishes to remain anonymous which supports contemporary writing in Hindi.
The last date to apply for the 2020-2021 residency is June 30, 2020.
Nineteenth-century poet, philosopher and Hindu-Muslim syncretic saint, Shishunala Sharif’s most famous poem starts with the words kodagana koli nungittha – the hen swallowed the monkey. The poem then talks of a goat that swallowed an elephant, the wall that swallowed the paint, and the chaff that swallowed the husk. The poem’s enduring quality is its absurdity, but also its open-ended-ness. What do these animals, plants, and objects stand for? Why are they all swallowing each other?
Perhaps the answer to this metaphorical riddle is in the poem’s most literal line, aadalu banda paataradavana maddali nungittha – the musician who came to perform was swallowed by the drum.
Is it the drum that makes the music? Or the musician?
Musician-activist-writer TM Krishna’s quest for the answer to this question is his latest book Sebastian & Sons, (Context, 2019) while another book I discovered a couple of weeks ago, Deepa Ganesh’s biography of Gangubai Hangal, A Life in Three Octaves, (Three Essays, 2014) deals indirectly with the same question. While Krishna’s book deals with mridangam makers who are largely Dalit Christians, Ganesh’s book deals with Hangal, a vocalist from the traditional (and marginalised) musician community.
The two issues where the books intersect are – what is common to artistes and those who make the instruments of art? Why is it that we value one kind of performer over the other?
What drives artistes and mridangam makers?
Deepa Ganesh writes at length of Hangal’s abiding quest for perfect ‘sur’. As Ganesh puts it, “Music, for Gangubai, was an expression of faith and the note had to be searched and discovered each time a phrase was attempted.”
Hangal was a vocalist, and her instrument was her vocal cord. Training this instrument was a task in itself. Sometimes, her guru Sawai Gandharva gave her one phrase to practice for days together. He believed in teaching her only four ragas, after which she was on her own. She spent many years of her life rocking her children’s cradles while doing kharaj sadhana, or voice exercises in the lower octaves. But when it came to her daughter, her guru said she didn’t need to do kharaj sadhana because her voice was so sweet anyway. Different kinds of instruments need different kinds of maintenance. The stories of Hangal’s relentless practice and her battles with her voice show that training yourself to control the instrument within the body is no different from training yourself to control an external instrument. They both need care, they can both be petulant. And, to attain sur, you need to allow both to swallow you.
The sub-title of Krishna’s book is “A Brief History of Mrdangam Makers”, and in tracing this history and the people who make various parts of this instrument, from the carpenters and the abattoirs to the craftsmen, Sebastian & Sons in a sense makes an argument that the instrument does swallow the performer.
What the book subtly points out is that there are two performers – the mridangam player who plays on stage, and the maker whose creation is on stage. The lifelong obsession of both these performers is the urge to extract the best ‘nadam’ (the south Indian equivalent of ‘sur’) from the mridangam. Getting this elusive nadam, whether for Gangubai Hangal, a mridangam maker or a mridangam player is a function of both training and innovation; neither works without the other.
Krishna writes about Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman, saying, “… I challenged myself: is the nadam in my hands or in theirs [the makers]?” Later in the book, we hear of Sivaraman adopting innovations to the instrument to get that exhilarating nadam he is known for. Training your hands can only take you so far – you need innovation too. Conversely, Krishna writes about Palghat Mani Iyer’s fetish for a spectacular sound from the toppi (or base head) of his mridangam. Iyer’s rival, that incomparable genius Palani Subramania Pillai had the gift of that tone, and Iyer drove Parlandu, his mridangam maker mad with innovations to the toppi that would get him the same sound. Finally, Parlandu told him, that that sound is not in the toppi, but in Pillai’s hands.
Krishna shows us that even mridangam making needs innovation and training. Tying the pinnrasattai, or the coir that holds the head of the mridangam together, is a rhythmic process and in doing it well, like playing the instrument itself, the maker must train his body and commit the process to her muscle memory. As any instrumentalist will tell you, the day the instrument feels like an extension of your body, when you are able to express your mind on the instrument without any barrier, you are ‘ready’. Interestingly, at the book launch in Chennai, a mridangam maker from Andhra used the same word; he said that his son was now ‘taiyaar’ (ready) for mridangam making. It means that the implements, the raw materials and the processes are now extensions of his body.
Why are the makers sidelined?
People often speak about the antiquity of Carnatic music, of how it has been around for millennia, some tracing its roots to the sama veda. But in doing this, people tend to forget that Carnatic music is modern, contemporary and evolving all the time. Take any ‘modern’ musician – from Bombay Jayashree to Arun Prakash – and you can immediately tell that their music is ‘newer’ than their musical ancestors. Similarly, mridangam making has undergone innovations through the decades. In not recognising these innovations, or attributing them to mridangam artistes themselves, the Carnatic discourse has pushed the makers’ contribution to the sidelines.
Krishna places the blame at the feet of caste for this – most mridangam makers are Dalit Christians. Few others work with animal skin, for working with skin puts them in the ‘impure’ side of the caste equation. As Krishna says, just a few decades ago, they were not even allowed inside the homes of the mridangam artistes. Caste, thus, makes them invisible. Their names, their stories are largely unknown. We are quicker to recognise innovations to the music – a novel raga, a new rhythmic pattern – but we take longer to recognise the improving instrument because it happens beyond our eyes. Further, Krishna rightly argues, Brahmin musicians are seen as those who provide the makers with the knowledge, and the makers are seen as mere tools.
Even Gangubai Hangal suffered at the hands of caste. Her childhood in a Brahmin Agrahara where she faced overt and covert discrimination, writes Ganesh, had a profound impact on her. She remarked to her fellow women musicians from the devadasi community that when male musicians attain greatness, they are called ‘Ustad’ or ‘Pandit’, whereas the women from the performers’ community will always remain Gangubai, Kesarbai or Hirabai. Even her “penetrating search for the note”, as Ganesh puts it, did not put her on the same pedestal as her male counterparts.
In my opinion there is also another reason for this perceived hierarchy between ‘art’ and ‘craft’. The rhythms of a mridangam artiste are ‘art’ – they exist for their own sake. But the techniques of a mridangam maker are for the instrument that produces the ‘art’. In other words, the instrument is a means to the music. Further, a musician is looking for spontaneous self-expression, whereas the craftsman is bound by the need for consistency. Each mridangam must be of the same quality, must be as similar to the previous one as possible, leaving room, of course, for customisations for individual artistes. A spontaneous craftsman is a bad one.
In the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi about legendary sushi chef Jiro Ono, there is a student of Jiro’s who’s spent years of his life in Jiro’s kitchen only learning how to make rice. Every step of the sushi making process from selecting the fish, to buying the rice from a man who will sell his rice to no one else, to cooking the rice, cutting the fish and finally making and serving the sushi itself is seen as a sacred ritual that needs years of training and repetition. Jiro does dream up new sushi, but for most of his life, he’s doing what he’s always done, honing his craft, training his hands, training his nose and his eyes in the search for perfection. Japanese culture reveres Jiro for what he does, for his labour, for his exacting standards, for his single-mindedness. Still would we consider Jiro an artist? Does he create beautiful one-of-a-kind art objects?
One way to think about this distinction is to put art and craft on a spectrum – all musicians need to be craftsmen, for they need technique and they need repetitive practice. Similarly, all instrument makers need to be artistes, for without artistry, they cannot be master craftsmen. But they are two persons who perform distinct jobs – neither can become the other. Seen from this lens, there is no hierarchy between art and craft; they are two different but allied spheres of human achievement.
The reason for the perceived hierarchy between art and craft, can be attributed to caste, but not entirely. This hierarchy exists even in societies that do not have caste. Beethoven is always more revered than Stradivarius. Even within the upper-caste Carnatic mridangam world, Krishna writes about the case of Vellore Ramabhadran, a Brahmin and one of the most famous mridangam artistes of all time. Ramabhadran’s nadam was second to none. It was sweet and pure. His rhythms were uncomplicated, but no one could deny that they had something special. His understanding of the pulse of the concert and his ability to raise its level were acknowledged by every artiste he performed with. But he did not indulge in complex mathematical patterns, his playing hid no great mysteries. In other words, he was more on the craftsman side of the spectrum. And he was derided for this, even though other mridangists could never bring his consummate skill-set to the table.
When we recognise that art and craft are two different skills, the question of placing them in some hierarchy disappears. As Sharif said two hundred years ago, when a great performer performs, she is consumed by her instrument. Whether she is performing art or craft or something in between, no one can take that away from her.
College of Engineering – somewhere in the city, a long time ago.
The professor had written a complicated looking math problem on the blackboard. Meticulously, I bent over my notebook and took the step-by-step approach in trying to solve it. One step after another. No need to panic. Just take the logical and analytical approach. Step-by-step, I arrived at a solution.
With a great sense of achievement, I looked at my final answer.
‘Now, who would like to try and solve that?’ the Professor keenly took us all in, as he surveyed the classroom with the chalk still in his hand.
‘You.’ The finger was pointing at me.
Agonisingly, I rose. With a shaking voice, in halting English, I started to explain the first step.
There was a smile on his lips. Emboldened, I went on to explain the second. The smile remained. Feeling much more confident now, in a slightly louder tone, I explained the third step.
Was the smile turning into a smirk? Could I hear someone giggle behind me in the class. Shakily, I finished with the last step and told him the final answer to the math problem. He was laughing now. The class was snickering too.
Savitribai
‘And, girls and boys, this is what happens when our country insists on giving reservations to undeserving, inept candidates.
Reservations are dragging this country down to unforeseen depths.’ He almost spat out the last bit.
The heat in the room started to stifle. My mind wandered. I had seen a goat being butchered once. The image of the gory animal carcass came to mind. I could almost smell the accompanying overpowering stink of blood and hear the cries of anguish. The room went dark.
Almost unwillingly I came out of my reverie. Now I could hear the ever-pervasive sounds of traffic somewhere behind the windows. Some happy person outside was listening to a popular song on the radio. A baby was crying somewhere.
The innocent harmless noise of everyday life. There was nowhere to look so I kept my eyes lowered.
Justifiably, I could sense the eyes of the entire classroom on me. I knew there would not be a single sympathetic gaze there. I was the only ‘reservation category’ candidate. All the others had got there on pure merit.
‘She has got the sum spectacularly wrong,’ said the Professor, smirking some more.
Thankfully, he did not bring up the topic of reservations again.
‘Neha, would you care to explain the problem to us, please?’ Neha, one of the brighter students in the class, got up.
Cheery sunshine filled the dreary classroom. In flawless English, she went on to explain each step of the problem and then stated the final solution, which was correct.
The Professor was right. I had been spectacularly off the mark. I did not raise my eyes for the remaining duration of the class. As soon as the bell rang, I bolted, away from the smirks, determined never to come back.
Excerpted with permission from Panther’s Paw Publication.
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The Hachette book group cancelled its publishing deal with Woody Allen, who’s accused of sexually abusing his daughter Dylan Farrow. The announcement came after pressure mounted on the group. Employees of Hachette staged a protest walk-out and employees of Hachette’s imprints Little Brown and Grand Central Publishing also took a public stand against the deal.
A statement from the publishers says, “Hachette Book Group has decided it will no publish Woody Allen’s memoir A Propos of Nothing, originally scheduled for sale in April 2020, and will return all rights to the author.” The publishing group said that the decision to cancel his book was a difficult one. “At HBG we take our relationships with authors very seriously, and do not cancel books lightly. As publishers, we make sure every day in our work that different voices and conflicting points of view can be heard.” The publishing house further said that after listening to various voices within the organisation it would not be feasible for it to publish the book.
Dylan Farrow said in a statement, that she is in awe and so very grateful to all the employees of Hachette US, Little Brown and Grand Central, for taking a stand.
An employee of Hachette told Refinery29, “The biggest complaint is that we feel strongly about everyone’s right to tell their own story, but we don’t agree with giving Woody Allen a platform with which to tell it that includes distribution, marketing, publicity. I think we feel he does not deserve a platform, that by publishing him we are in some way validating his story.” Refinery29 also reported that “Little, Brown and Company, another imprint of Hachette Book Group, was responsible for publishing Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s account of reporting on the sexual assault and misconduct accusations against now-convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein. Dylan Farrow, Ronan’s sister, accused Woody Allen of sexually abusing her as a child (in 1993 the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale–New Haven Hospital concluded that Allen had not sexually abused Dylan, and to this day he maintains his innocence). Ronan has repeatedly stood by his sister’s accusation, and announced on Tuesday that he is dropping Hachette Book Group as his publisher.”
Hindutva organisation Sanathan Sanstha’s civil defamation suit seeking 10 crores from Juggernaut Books has been dismissed by a court in Goa. It is pertinent to note that Sanathan Sanstha’s members have been linked to the murders of rationalists such as Gauri Lankesh, Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and MM Kalburgi.
The defamation suit filed in 2018 claimed damages against publisher Juggernaut Books and author Dhirendra K Jha for the publication and sale of a book titled Shadow Armies: Fringe Organizations and Foot Soldiers of Hindutva (2017). Advocates Satyajit Sarna and Rahul Kukreja represented the publisher and the author.
“I feel a sense of relief and vindication. Persons who feel deeply uncomfortable by my research and my work attempted to silence me by alleging defamation and unleashing a punishing process on me and my publisher. But truth is a defence against defamation and, in this case, justice and the truth have thankfully prevailed,” Dhirendra Jha said. The publisher of Juggernaut Books, Chiki Sarkar, and CEO, Simran Khara, said “At our core we believe that books, authors and ideas must be defended against attempts to silence, censor, ban and injunct. It can be intimidating to face multi-million-dollar lawsuits but in this instance at least the courts have really come through for us and we are overjoyed by the judgment.”
2020 marks the 25th anniversary of the Women’s Prize for Fiction (previously known as Bailey’s Prize and Orange Prize For Fiction) which was “inspired” by the Booker Prize of 1991. Not one of the six shortlisted books was by a woman that year. Women’s Prize carries a purse of £30,000.
In a statement on the Women’s Prize website, the chair of this year’s judges, Martha Lane Fox, said, “Ahead of the longlist meeting I was anxious that the negotiations between judges might be as arduous as Brexit, but it was an absolute delight to pick our final 16 books. Entries for the Prize’s 25th year have been spectacular and we revelled in the variety, depth, humanity, and joy of the writing – we hope everyone else will too.” Scarlett Curtis, Melanie Eusebe, Viv Groskop and Paula Hawkins were on the judging panel for 2020.
Here’s the longlist of the 16 novels: Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara, Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams, Dominicana by Angie Cruz Actress by Anne Enright, Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, Nightingale Point by Luan Goldie, A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes, How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee, The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo, The Mirrorand the Light by Hilary Mantel, Girl by Edna O’ Brien, Hamnet by Maggie O’ Farrell, Weather by Jenny Offill, The Dutch House by Ann Patchett and Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson.
A shortlist of six novels will be announced on April 22, 2020 and the 25th winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction will be announced on June 3, 2020.
It’s noteworthy that Deepa Anappara was born in Kerala and worked as a journalist in India for eleven years. A portion of her debut novel, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, won the Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize, the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award, and the Bridport/Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where she is currently studying for a Creative-Critical Writing PhD on a CHASE doctoral fellowship.
Djinn Patrol… is about a nine-year-old Jai who “drools outside sweet shops, watches too many reality police shows and considers himself to be smarter than his friends Pari and Faiz. When a classmate goes missing, Jai decides to use the crime-solving skills he has picked up from TV to find him. He asks Pari and Faiz to be his assistants, and together they draw up lists of people to interview and places to visit. But what begins as a game turns sinister as other children start disappearing from their neighbourhood. Jai, Pari and Faiz have to confront terrified parents, an indifferent police force and rumours of soul-snatching djinns. As the disappearances edge ever closer to home, the lives of Jai and his friends will never be the same again.”
Silverscreen is here at the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters in Trivandrum. The lit fest is mammoth, with over 300 speakers from across the world.
Day 1 was a packed affair with parallel sessions running across venues in the Kanakakkunnu Palace. Alexander McCall Smith and Chandrahas Choudhury spoke about ‘The Writer’s Life’s, What makes a successful writer’s life exciting? How does the writer move between genres? Susheila Nasta, Founding Editor of Wasafiri, spoke about What The World Writes, ‘As walls go up and borders are hardened, how can literature make a difference in the world?’ Her talk was a look at contemporary world literature as a form of resistance. Sagarika Ghose spoke about the importance of being a liberal. There were poetry performances, movie screenings, book readings and signings and more through the day.
In the evening at the official inauguration of the festival, Chief Minister of Kerala Pinarayi Vijayan made an impassioned speech about the urgency with which we must all resist fascism. On the need for ‘artivism’ (artist+activism); he recalled the gruesome murder of writers and journalists (like Narendra Dabholkar and Gauri Lankesh). He also spoke about the reading culture of Kerala; how world literature is often translated to Malayalam right away, about Sartre finding perhaps more readers in Kerala than even in France. He invited the Guardian newspaper’s columnist who recently wrote that Indians are not big readers. Kerala will be happy to host him so he can see our literary culture, he said.
At the inauguration, the winner of the MBIFL Book of the year award, was announced. Blue is like Blue by Vinod Kumar Shukla has won the award. It carries a purse of 5 lakh rupees, a memento sculpted by Riyas Komu and a citation. The jury comprised Shashi Tharoor, Chandrasekhara Kambar and Dr Sumana Roy. Blue is like Blue has been translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara Rai.
From the book’s blurb: “Renowned for bringing the marvellous to the ordinary, Vinod Kumar Shukla has long been recognised as one of India’s foremost writers, with a voice uniquely his own. The stories in Blue Is Like Blue deal with ‘smaller-than-life people’. They live in rented accommodation, often in single rooms, where one electric bulb does for light. There’s a nail to hang clothes from and a wall-to-wall string for the washing. When the clothes are dry, you place the carefully folded shirt under a pillow and lie down to sleep. Money is a concern, but the bazaar is the place to go and spend time in, especially if you have nothing to buy. The fear that you may be overcharged accompanies every transaction, but joy is not entirely absent. Few works of modern Indian literature come alive in English, and fewer still in the way that these stories do in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara Rai’s brilliant translation.” Vinod Kumar Shukla is a poet and novelist from Raipur, Chhattisgarh. In 1999, Shukla received the Sahitya Akademi Award for his novel Deewar Mein Ek Khidki Rehti Thi.
The winner of the Book of the year award was chosen from among seven shortlisted books; Ib’s Endless Search for Satisfaction by Roshan Ali, The City and the Sea by Raj Kamal Jha, A Secret History of Compassion by Paul Zachariah, The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, The Scent of God by Saikat Majumdar, There is Gunpowder in the Air by Manoranjan Byapari.
A truly original voice that attends India’s biggest literary festival (Jaipur Literature Festival for the uninitiated), the Twitter account, @JLFInsider is taking a break this year. Many of us have come to enjoy the JLFInsider’s hot takes on literary (and not so literary) sessions — uncensored, hilarious and spontaneous — over the years.
While last year they had signed off promising to come back, this year a more somber message awaited fans.
“Due to a variety of reasons including the current political climate in India, we have decided to give this year’s JLF a miss.
Snark during times like these just feels out of place. We’ll (hopefully) be back next year.”
The Jaipur Literature Festival has posed somewhat of a moral quandary to several writers and attendees. The longest running controversy about JLF now is the title sponsor of the festival, Zee. Several writers have over the years boycotted the festival because of Zee News’ anti minority rhetoric. Zee was also at the forefront of the fabricated news that the words ‘bharat ke tukde tukde’ were said in JNU by Kanhaiya Kumar and friends.
Historian Ram Guha, for instance, has said that he will boycott the festival until Zee sponsors it. Lawyer and writer Gautam Bhatia too has spoken about the need to boycott JLF as long as Zee sponsors it.
Due to a variety of reasons including the current political climate in India, we have decided to give this year’s JLF a miss.
Snark during times like these just feels out of place. We’ll (hopefully) be back next year.
The Insider handle that posts “Crowdsourced live tweets from the Jaipur Literature Festival where you can hear some of the brightest minds on the planet, and Suhel Seth,” though did attend the festival last year, and Zee was the sponsor then too. So that alone can’t be the reason. Protests that have erupted across the country, and the sentiment of fear that looms over the impending CAA, NRC and NPR, seem like the primary reason they felt the need to take a break.
Ramayan was an epic serial that changed the course of Indian television. The first episode aired on 25 January 1987. Within a few weeks it became a sensation and during the serial’s air time no weddings or political rallies were hosted.
The man behind the series, Ramanand Sagar was already a successful filmmaker in Bombay. His vision for a long-running TV serial is what changed everything. Ramanand Sagar began his career as a writer for Raj Kapoor in the film Barsat (1949). He also wrote, produced and directed several successful films like Ghunghat, Zindagi, Arzoo, Ankhen, Geet and Lalkar.
To commemorate this artiste, his son Prem Sagar has penned a memoir of the filmmaker’s like. Titled An Epic Life: Ramanand Sagar, From Barsaat to Ramayan, the book explores the life of the man from his birth in Kashmir in 1917 to his career in film and television.
Himself an acclaimed cinematographer and creator, Prem Sagar began his career in his father’s film Lalkar (1970) soon after graduating from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune where he also won the gold medal for the best academic student of the year and a silver medal for the best photographed student film.
He was a cinematographer or technical adviser in several popular and memorable films of his home production company Sagar Arts, including Charas, Bhagawat. He then turned director with Hum Tere Ashiq Hain.
In the eighties, Prem Sagar produced and directed Indian television’s first fantasy serial, Vikram aur Betaal. He was closely associated with many series in the fantasy and mythological genre.
What has a 19th-century Russian classic got to do with the iconic ‘Plastics’ from Tina Fey’s masterpiece Mean Girls, you ask? (For the uninitiated, in the 2004 classic, “The Plastics sort of dictate the style and behavior, and what’s cool and what’s not, and the dos and the don’ts, and what is right and what is wrong. They dictate the rules of high school which we all must follow to a T.”) And Regina George is their undisputed leader.
We were thinking of Regina George (played by the amazing Rachel McAdams), only because we saw this news report about what a learned judge asked Vernan Gonsalves in the Bhima Koregaon case. According to this report in The Quint, Justice Kotwal asked Gonsalves about the things recovered from his home, “…Why did you (Mr Gonsalves) keep objectionable material such as books like War and Peace, books and CDs at home? You will have to explain this to the court”.
India Today has published an article today explaining that the entire thing was a misunderstanding and that the media had misreported the book in question. The War and Peace found in Mr. Gonsalves’ home apparently was the one by Biswajit Roy-War and Peace in Junglemahal: People, State and Maoists. (Roy’s book hasn’t been banned in India either).
The judge should leave his Pride and Prejudice aside, and try use his Sense and Sensibility, and then he’d realise that the matter of reading War and Peace is not about Crime and Punishment, but about Power and Glory, lest his tenure will be a time for Laughter and Forgetting. https://t.co/LUkvxpez5P
‘Murderess… the word has an odour, musky and oppressive; rustles across the floor like a taffeta skirt’
– Alias Grace (1996, Margaret Atwood)
Fabrics play a huge role in Alias Grace. All through the book and the show, a distinct sub-text prevails: That of patchwork quilts and patterns, of designs and superstition, a mosaic of scenes and snippets that may or may not form a coherent whole.
Alias Grace‘s Sarah Gadon embodies the Atwood woman in spirit. She is prosaic and poetic all at once; talks of lovely evenings, so beautiful that they make her sad, of the pleasure to be had in the sight of fresh laundry rippling in the air, of apples and parsnips and beets that have a different texture when boiled. She talks of a bloody petticoat from her first period, her pretty embroidered handkerchief that was found wound around the neck of the murdered housekeeper whose household she was a part of, a sample of cloth from the gown of her corpse. She talks of fashioning lovely cuts of triangles from the clothes and weaving them all into quilt that she would make for herself. It would ripple and billow in the air someday just as the others do. The triangles would occupy the centre of the tree of paradise, a pattern she loves. Or perhaps, I would make an old maid’s puzzle, she tells the doctor who has come to review her case, and diligently takes notes of what she says. “I’m an old maid, don’t you think, sir, and I’ve been very puzzled.”
Grace sews, fiddles with the thimble as she says this, glances at the doctor from under her lashes steadily scratching away at his book, smiles. She knows he’s smitten by the tale that she weaves. And by extension, herself. At times, Grace, clad in a roomy blue pinafore with a flat Peter Pan collar, wets the thread between her lips to sharpen the edge. Dr Simon Jordan listens, a perfect sample of gentleman wardrobery – a tie and a coat. It’s classic representation of Grace’s thoughts about him – refined, avuncular, decidedly dispassionate but not entirely unfeeling. She smiles as he flinches at her miserable past, presses on in a low voice.
A textbook example of post-modernist literature, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace on screen, based on the 1843 real life murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in Upper Canada, is terrifyingly subliminal in the portrayal of its protagonist. There’s violence in the peace, a precise, clinical loveliness to the frames that works below consciousness to arouse dread.
Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant and convicted murderess, with an abusive, lovelorn and poverty-ridden past, works in the scullery of the notoriously-reputed Scottish gentleman with a snowy, clipped beard. It makes for pleasantly creepy characterisation. When she meets Mr Kinnear for the first time, he punches a man in the gut for making advances towards her. He looks thorough, light travelling coat and a well-poised hat, helps her up the carriage, sits next to her as an equal. They drive down Yonge Street to his farm. Nancy Montgomery, whose acquaintance Grace had made a few days before, is gowned in elegant peach tones when Grace sees her first. Soft muslin and a fine set of teeth, gold earrings that catch the light of the sun. She reminds Grace of a dear, dead friend. Arriving at the Kinnear household a little later, Grace is conflicted; Nancy, picking flowers in the garden, wears the pink of roses, with a bonnet cinched in elaborate satin. Flashy, jarring and worldly to her grey plaid skirt, Grace observes that she isn’t too welcoming.
Atwood, in her book, names chapters after quilting patterns, a few of which are described in great detail. She writes about cut and borders – of Wild Goose Chase and Vine – quilts for the married and quilts for the matrons. Fabrics take on a distinctive literary quality as well; they are used as metaphors like in here, to describe sounds – “There is great pleasure to be had in a wash all clean and blowing in the wind; the sound is like the host of the Heavenly Hosts applauding – though from far away. They do say cleanliness is next to godliness.” They are also employed to be evocative of a particular smell. Mrs Humphrey, Dr Jordan’s forlorn landlady who would love to have him in her bed, is said to bear a “hot dry smell like that of white linen being ironed.”
Clothing is also used a lot to reinforce character. Mary Whitney, Grace’s friend and confidante who presents her with a patterned kerchief on Christmas, has sharp eyebrows, a face not shorn of bony adolescence and a generally cheerful disposition. She’s sunny, often seen in the brightest of scenes, her apron decidedly white. George Parkinson, the son of the household, to whose advances she submits, has a gold chain twinkling over his coat. When Mary dies of a botched abortion, deliberately misled and used by George, Mrs Parkinson, his mother and the mistress of the household, is seen in a stuffy maroon gown that poufs over the arm. She bribes Grace into silence, presses a crisp note in her palm.
*****
Dr Simon Jordan, who seems both enchanted and repulsed by his patient, gradually becomes more involved in the tale she spins, needle, thread and thimble in rhythmic motion. He takes a fancy to her, begins fantasising. A risqué theme for the time the book was set in, it turns the psychologist-patient relationship on its head. Dr Jordan doesn’t quite know if he believes in her constructs; her tale seems deliberately thought-out, yet with a carefree innocence that he can’t quite place. In the novel, Atwood describes him as unpretentious. “He hates cravats and stocks and wishes them at the Devil,” she says, “he resents his trousers as well and all the stiff and proper clothing generally. Why does a civilized man see fit to torture his body by cramming it into strait-jacket of gentlemanly dress? Perhaps it’s mortification of flesh like a hair shirt. Men ought to be born in little woolen suits which would grow with them over the years thus avoiding the whole business of tailors and their endless fussing and snobberies.”
In Alias Grace, bonnets are subject to social class, too. Nancy Montgomery lends her elaborately fashioned one to Grace to wear on her birthday. Have the afternoon to yourself, she says. During other times, they make for a handy ruse. When Dr Jordan wonders why Grace doesn’t describe Mr Kinnear particularly to him, she blames it on her bonnet. “I didn’t wish to gape at him, sir,” she says, “And, I needed to turn my head because of the bonnet. I suppose you haven’t worn one, have you?”
No, says Dr Jordan, I suppose it’s very confining.
Much later, towards the end, Grace’s clothes see a dramatic transformation. In the final episode, she no longer wears blue, but a flowing black gown that fans out prettily across her lap. A dark veil over her head sets the mood for what is to come – a hypnotherapy session that seems to blow a new personality into Grace – vile, sinister, jeering. Did you help strangle Nancy, Dr Jordan asks of her. “It was my kerchief,” she twitters, “It was a shame to lose it. It was my mother’s and such a pretty pattern it had on it, too.”
Last week, The Man Booker International Prize announced the names of candidates shortlisted for the 2017 prize, which celebrates the finest works of translated fiction from around the world. Six candidates have been chosen, with the final prize to be announced on June 14 this year.
While each shortlisted author and translator receives £1,000, the winner goes home with a prize money of £50,000, which will be divided equally between its author and translator.
The shortlisting was done by a panel of five judges, chaired by Nick Barley, Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival; the others were: Daniel Hahn, an award-winning writer, editor and translator; Elif Shafak, a prize-winning novelist from Turkey; Chika Unigwe, author of four novels including On Black Sisters’ Street; and Helen Mort, a poet who has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and the Costa Prize, and has won a Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award five times.
French novelist Mathias Enard’s Compass revolves around Franz Ritter, an Austrian musicologist’s adventure in the Middle East. LA Times describes the book as more on “academics than, say, artists”.
Enard’s first novel published in English, Zone (2010), is a 500-page book that brings out the internal monologue of a French Croatian spy on a train to the Vatican to sell secrets. His second, Street of Thieves (2014), is told from the perspective of a young Moroccan caught up in the hope and chaos of the Arab Spring.
Énard teaches Arabic at the University of Barcelona and has lived for long periods of time in both Syria and Iran. He won the Prix Goncourt in 2015 for Compass.
Charlotte Mendel is a well-known literary translator from the US. She has translated many works of poetry, fiction and philosophy from French to English, including work by Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Jules Verne, Guy de Maupassant, Marcel Proust, Maurice Blanchot, Antoine de Baecque, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jonathan Littell.
Author: David Grossman (Israel); Translator: Jessica Cohen (US); Book: A Horse Walks Into a Bar (Jonathan Cape)
via Ynetnews
Israeli novelist David Grossman’s comic novel is one of the books shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize. A Horse Walks Into a Bar is set in a comedy club in a small Israeli town. An audience that has come expecting an evening of amusement instead sees a comedian falling apart on stage. The character, Dovale Gee, a veteran stand-up comic reveals a ‘wound’ he has been living with for years: a fateful and gruesome choice he had to make between the two people who were dearest to him.
Grossman’s books have been translated in more than 30 languages, and have won numerous prizes. He even addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his 2008 novel, To the End of the Land. He has also written a children’s book, an opera for children and several poems.
The translator, Jessica Cohen, was born in England, raised in Israel, and now lives in the US. She translates contemporary Israeli prose and poetry. This is the second of Grossman’s work she has translated. Her other translations include the works of Etgar Keret, Assaf Gavron, Rutu Modan, Amir Gutfreund, Yael Hedaya, Ronit Matalon, and Tom Segev, as well as screenwriters such as Ari Folman and Ron Leshem. Currently, she is a member of the American Translators Association, the Israel Translators Association, the Colorado Translators Association, and PEN American Center.
Author: Roy Jacobsen (Norway); Translators: Don Bartlett (UK); Don Shaw (UK); Book: The Unseen (Maclehose)
via Hegnar.no
Roy Jacobsen is a Norwegian novelist and short-story writer. The Unseen is about Ingrid Barrøy. Born on an island that bears her name – it’s a holdfast for a single family, their livestock, their crops, their hopes and dreams. While her father dreams of building a jetty to connect them to the mainland, her mother has dreams of her own. Tragedy strikes, and Ingrid must fight to protect the home she thought she had left behind.
Jacobsen held a number of jobs, even subsequent to his debut as a novelist in 1982. Since 1990 he has been a full-time author. His first short-story collection Fangeliv (Prison Life) won Tarjei Vesaas’ debutantpris. He is the winner of the prestigious Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and two of his novels have been nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize: Seierherrene (The Conquerors) in 1991 and Frost in 2004.
Translators Don Bartlett and Don Shaw live in England and work as freelance translators of Scandinavian literature. Together, they have translated the works of Jacobsen – Child Wonder – and Lazy Days by Erlend Yoe. Don Bartlett has translated, or co-translated, Norwegian novels by Lars Saabye Christensen, Ingvar Ambjornsen, Kjell Ola Dahl, Gunnar Staalesen, Pernille Rygg, and Jo Nesbo.
Author: Dorthe Nors (Denmark); Translators: Misha Hoekstra (US); Book: Mirror, Shoulder, Signal (Pushkin Press)
via Pushkin Press
Dorthe Nors is a Danish author and writer. She is also the first Danish author to be published in the American magazine The New Yorker. Her book Mirror, Shoulder, Signal is about Sonja, an intelligent single woman in her 40s whose life lacks focus. Sonja is also struggling with an acute case of vertigo, a sister who won’t talk to her, and a masseuse who is determined to solve her spiritual problems.
Nors worked as a translator of Swedish crime novels before becoming a writer with her book Soul in 2002. In 2015 her short story collection Karate Chop was published in English alongside her novella Minna Needs Rehearsal Space.
Misha Hoekstra is an award-winning translator living in Aarhus, where he writes and performs songs under the name Minka Hoist. In an interview with Writers Without Borders, Misha talks about how he met the author. “I first met Dorthe Nors thanks to the American novelist Thomas E Kennedy, who introduced us back in 2009, over a pitcher of beer at Rosengårdens Bodega in Copenhagen. But I didn’t know any of her work until years later, when she asked me to translate Minna Mangler et Øvelokale (Minna Needs Rehearsal Space), a novella in lines. I fell in love immediately—with Minna, with the form she inhabits—an incantatory concatenation of simple declarative clauses inspired by Facebook updates—and with the way the voice jumps from high-flown lyricism in one line to pithy vernacular in the next.”
Author: Amos Oz (Israel); Translator: Nicholas de Lange (UK); Book: Judas (Chatto & Windus)
via The Forward
Amos Oz is the second Israel writer to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year. An Israeli writer, novelist, journalist and intellectual, he is also a professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba and is regarded as Israel’s most famous living author.
His book Judas is set in the still-divided Jerusalem of 1959-60. Described as a “tragi-comic coming-of-age tale and a radical rethinking of the concept of treason” the novel trails the life of Shmuel, a young, idealistic student, who is drawn to a strange house and its mysterious occupants within. The novel addresses Jewish-Arab conflict as well.
Translator Nicholas de Lange is a Nottingham-based professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Cambridge. He has translated several works of fiction by Amos Oz, including A Tale of Love and Darkness for which he won the Risa Domb/Porjes Prize.
Samanta Schweblin is a Buenos Aires-based writer who made her writing debut in 2002 with El núcleo del Disturbio. She won the Concurso Nacional Haroldo Conti. (National Contest Haroldo Conti) for that. Since then, some of her stories have been translated into English, French, Serbian, Swedish, Dutch, and Danish, and published in magazines. An English translation of her story Killing a Dog was published in the Summer 2009 issue of the London-based quarterly newspaper The Drawbridge. She lives in Berlin.
Fever Dream is her first novel and is about a young woman named Amanda and deals with obsession, identity and motherhood. LitHub wrote about the novel, calling it a “weird hallucination of a book where reading it feels like an experience.”
Translator Megan McDowell has translated books by many contemporary South American and Spanish authors, and her translations have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Words Without Borders, and Vice, among other publications. She lives in Chile.
Ashoka Mitran, award winning writer of short stories and novels in Tamil, died in Chennai earlier today after a long ailment. He was 86 years old. Ashoka Mitran is widely considered to be one of the best Tamil writers ever. He won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1996 for Appavin Snegithar, a collection of short stories set in Hyderabad.
Unlike most writers working in Tamil, Ashoka Mitran wrote simple, understated prose, and used sly, sarcastic humour to great effect. His writing was deliciously simple, and he found humour in the most absurd of situations. This was one of the reasons his work translated so well into other languages, and more than 60 of his short stories and several of his novels have been translated into English.
Born Jagadisa Thyagarajan in Secunderabad, Ashokamitran moved to Chennai after the loss of his father. SS Vasan, the legendary Tamil filmmaker, was a friend of Ashokamitran’s dad, and offered him a job at Gemini Studios in Public Relations. During his 14 years at Vasan’s Gemini Studios, Ashokamithran started to write a regular column for the Illustrated Weekly of India. The columns were later collected into his first book, Fourteen Years With Boss.
Fourteen Years with Boss by Ashoka Mithran (Image Credit: Amazon.in)
Ashoka Mitran quit his job in 1966 to become a full-time writer. He started with the acclaimed stage-play Anbin Parisu, and wrote over 250 short stories and several novels and novellas.
He was a traditional short story writer – his stories were often compressed novels, with a traditional beginning and end; not for him the newfangled short story idioms. His style continued to be spare and simple; he told The Hindu last week that he believed in “being simple with the narration rather than trying to dazzle the readers.”
The US Library of Congress describes Ashoka Mitran as one of the “finest craftsmen” and calls his novel Thaneer an acclaimed masterpiece of Tamil writing. Writer Jeyamohan, in his short tribute, describes Ashoka Mitran as one of modern Tamil’s greats. His translator, Kalyan Raman said on Twitter, “I have such happy memories of his warmth and friendship. Go well, sir.”
In an interview earlier this month with the Tamil literary magazine Vikatan Thadam, Ashoka Mitran had said that his memory was fading, and he was plagued by several ailments related to his age. Yet he speaks with the same lucid clarity that characterised his writing about his literary inspirations and how truth is sometimes the best source of humour.
Ashoka Mitran continued to write until the very end. When asked what inspired him to write still, he said, “Possiblities. There are so many different of people in the world, so many different circumstances. I always wonder would happen if you put different people in different situations. The possibilities are endless.”
