Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Barefoot is the Collected Poems of Scottish poet Alastair Reid edited by Tom Pow. I found the book in Barnes & Nobles one evening while browsing the poetry section. The poems are skillful and reflective, sincere and nostalgic, but not terribly memorable, to be honest. The stakes in the poems are not raised very high. Gun Island is my first Amitav Ghosh. I bought it from Book Culture to support the bookstore. The novel is humane and well-plotted, although the writing slips into cliches at times. The protagonist, Deen a rare books dealer, remains a bit of a cipher. The two sections are interesting for me in different ways. The first section is set in the Sundarbans, a mangrove delta of the Ganges that I got to know from Rushdie's Midnight's Children . The second section is set in Venice, which we visited for the first time last summer. I could vouch from my personal experience that the Bengalis have been in that city for a long time: we had dinner at what looked like a ver...

The subtitle—An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India—provides a sober summary of the content of this memoir, but it deliberately underplays the harrowing stories told in lucid prose by the author Sujatha Gidla. The national tale is one of class-initiated and state-supported oppression of the lower castes and, in helpless response, the divisions in the Communist Party of India when it abandoned armed revolution to enter electoral politics. The family tale traces the transformation of an uncle into a famous poet and leader of a left-wing guerilla movement. The other hero of the story is a heroine, the author's mother, who comes into her own as a mother and teacher in the later part of the story. A wonderful aspect of this memoir is that it never lets you forget the impact of social upheavals on women. The author is, however, not concerned with hagiography. The different members of the family, including their circle of friends, are here depicted with warts and all. I...

So I returned from my Thanksgiving getaway to learn that my book Steep Tea has been listed by the Financial Times as one of four best books of poetry of 2015, along with the new annotated Poems of T. S. Eliot by Christopher Ricks and Kim McCue; Horace: Poems ed. by Paul Quarrie; and Citizen by Claudia Rankine. Completely unexpected, completely floored. "The Singapore-born poet’s first UK publication is disciplined yet adventurous in form, casual in tone and deeply personal in subject matter. Koh’s verse addresses the split inheritance of his postcolonial upbringing, as well as the tension between an émigré’s longing for home and rejection of nostalgia." - Maria Crawford in UK's Financial Times The time away was otherwise dominated by reading Amy Sueyoshi's study of Yone Noguchi's romantic relationships in a book aptly titled Queer Compulsions . Through the study of the correspondence between Yone and his lovers, Sueyoshi persuaded me that his most passiona...

As I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude , I kept thinking of how much Salman Rushdie owes to this novel when writing his Midnight's Children . Not just for the general method, now labeled magic realism, but also for particular incidents such as the plague of insomnia and particular characters such as the old prostitute Pilar Ternera. Was Rushdie electrified by the discovery that the language that generations of Buendias tried to decipher in the parchments of the gypsy Melquiades is Sanskrit? Did his discovery establish a personal link to the Muse of Marquez's city Macondo so that one novel directly inspired another? I felt such a connection, though in a far smaller way, when I read that Melquiades died on the sands of Singapore. The island-state is still a killer of the imagination. Rushdie's brainchild in Midnight's Children  was to dramatize the history of post-independence India through the life of one magic child Saleem. In doing s...

One day in the life of. It has been done before. Many times. Joyce. Woolf. Bellow. And more recently, three times in the same novel, The Hours by Michael Cunningham. Why did McEwan choose to follow the same scheme when he is on record for criticizing his earlier work as too schematic? When Henry Perowne--neurosurgeon, husband, son, father--returns at the end of the novel to the foot of the marital bed, the same place from which he began the novel and the day, the neatness can feel less classical than cliched.  Yes, the world has changed since 9/11 (or so Americans argue); the change demands a chronicler with a finger on its pulse. But why choose the lens of a day through which to focus one's vision of a changed world? Why make playing squash, visiting  a demented mother, and shopping for seafood bear the weight of the world?  I think McEwan does not so much want to add to this genre as to quarrel with his predecessors. In adopting a single limited point of view, instead of a stream...

Marlon Brando lovefest continued with Superman: The Movie (1978), directed by Richard Donner. Brando played Jor-El--the father of Superman--with a doomed dignity. I had seen snippets and pictures of Christopher Reeves as Superman, but they conveyed nothing of his massive charm in the movie. Margot Kidder was a newly-toughened New Yorker of a Lois Lane. Gene Hackman a rather bland and silly Lex Luthor. The music, by John Williams, is soaring and lyrical, memorable as music used to be.  The online reviews made much of the film's use of the Christ myth. In Midnight's Children , Cyrus' mum, in turn, transformed the Superman story into the origins myth of a new Indian guru. Religious to secular and back to religious again. 

from Michael Gorra's review (TLS Sep 2008) of Amit Chaudhuri's Clearing A Space: Reflections on India, literature and culture : Too often "the Eastern and Western elements in fusion have a designated static quality that they do not in their own contexts". So Chaudhuri speaks on behalf of dialectic, not fusion; on behalf of quarrel and assimilation, and not the kind of multi-culti celebration that often winds up confirming our "unexamined beliefs about identity and where we come from". * In another essay on Rushdie--"Huge Baggy Monster", first published in the TLS in 1999--he takes up the question of the imitative fallacy, the sense that a large sprawling country requires large sprawling novels . . . *** from Gordon Bowker's review (TLS Sep 2008) of The Creator as Critic: And other writings by E. M. Forster , and The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster, 1929-1960 : . . . his interest in he evolving personality inspired by reading Walter Pater and Samuel ...

Rushdie's novel Midnight's Chidren has a mysterious chapter titled "In the Sundarbans." The New Yorker article on that mangrove forest helped me make sense of the chapter's connection with Tiger, tides, kraits and widows. From Caroline Alexander's "Tigerland": At the mouth of the Ganges Delta, the Sundarbans encompasses the largest single mangrove ecosystem in the world, of which roughly forty per cent lies in India and sixty per cent in Bangladesh. . . . To the southeast lies the tiger reserve, whose swamp forest and intricate waterways are the improbable domain of the uniquely aquatic Royal Bengal tiger. * The boat arrived at the long jetty of the Saznekhali Wildlife Sanctuary. . . . The river was at very low tide, and a compound loomed above the river and fifteen feet of exposed mud banks like a fort bristling with defences, Stoutly staked at the high-tide mark, a quadruple row of bamboo pylons formed a palisade, patrolled by a tropp of rhesus ...

Two questions to ask of any idea: when it is weak, does it compromise, and when it is strong, does it conquer?