Desicritics Author: aatish

Book Review: The Assistant By Robert Walser

aatish — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 00:03:15 EDT

The Assistant was first published in 1907 in German and has been translated for the first time in English by Susan Bernofsky and published by New Directions last year.

It caught my eye when I saw a reference to Kafka in a blurb about the novel. Apparently Kafka admired Robert Walser, and looked forward to his writings each week. After a spate of novels and short stories, Walser's writing career ended quite grotesquely at the age of 31 when, in 1928, he was admitted to a mental asylum, where he was confined until his death in 1956. He is supposed to have remarked to one of his visitors that "I am not here to write, but to be mad," a statement that to my mind makes his madness suspect. As is the case of all those who blossom early but are then ill-fated, he leaves behind a sea of mournful conjectures of smothered possibilities.

The Assistant is marked by a minimalist plot. Josef Marti - an alter ego of Walser when Walser himself worked a similar job once - joins an entrepreneur to work as his assistant. A veritable Man Friday, he helps out in the household chores as well. The novel follows Marti's days as the entrepreneur falls into decrepitude, and his enterprise fails to take off. Marti is not paid for months but lives with the family and shares their bourgeois lifestyle, even if it is lived on borrowed money.

The novel is an ode to the little man, the minor character of the everyday wage worker, a clerk in Walser's time but it could be anyone who works for a living and has someone or the other for an often domineering boss.

If the plot is minimalist, the action is still more so. Indeed, the lack of action in the novel might have been nauseating were it not for Walser's exquisite prose peppered with insights into human behavior that transcend a century between when it was first published and now.

I was constantly reminded of Anton Chekhov's deep humanism while reading the book, especially of a story called The Clerk, though there are obvious differences between Chekhov's short story and Walser's novel. Chekhov's clerk Ivan Tchervyakov is a self-effacing and apologetic character who tragically dies when he is unable to get a forgiveness from a general on whom Ivan had inadvertently sneezed in a theater. Marti, on the other hand, has a series of intermittent and hesitant bouts of rebelliousness, ending in his parting of ways with his financially ruined employer.

Yet, the concern for the small man and the travails of everyday life are the same in both the stories. Vasiliy Grossman, in one of the more unworthily obscure novels of the last century, Life and Fate, had remarked that Chekhov was the most democratic writer among the Russian classic writers. Walser, at least in this work, certainly shares a similar honor.

"Wherever there are children, there will always be injustice", Walser observes at one point when describing the children in his employer's household. Elsewhere, when Marti's employer, Tobler, is presented with yet another bill that he cannot pay, Walser describes it quite imaginatively thus:

The steep amount presented in this bill was so clearly expressed in the furrows on Tobler's brow, expressed with almost mathematical precision, that one might have been asked to read the exact figure presented there.

Marti has, at one time, even had a brush with the most modern and provocative ideas of his age - socialism. They, however, hardly catch his imagination or make any impact on his mind and life. Great ideas, great movements of history, even great moments in life bypass the inhabitants of the Tobler household, yet there is a magic of life that weaves itself through the routine banter and the changing seasons.

***

Read an excellent review here, and via the same site, a wonderful blog dedicated to Robert Walser.

Book Review: Nazi Literature in the Americas... and India

aatish — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:08:15 EST

Roberto Bolano's in his recently translated novel Nazi Literature in the Americas weaves an entire literary universe filled with imaginary writers and their writings. Not all writers were, however, fans of Hitler or other Nazi leaders or even their ideology. Bolano's biographies of these imaginary writers, inspired in a way by Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings, are short - the longest runs into a few pages, the shortest about a page in length.

Marked by sharply etched portraits of the writers and of their equally imaginary writings, the novel reads like a racy potboiler, except that there is no evident plot in the novel. Only the last story (which readers of Bolano's novel Distant Stars will be familiar with because it is a summary of the same novel) is somewhat longer and has Bolano himself speaking in the first person and somewhat gives the clues to the underlying impulses behind the novel.

In this he recounts the story of Ramirez Hoffman, a Chilean air plane pilot who seemingly heralded a 'new era' in Chilean arts after the coup against Salvador Allende's socialist government and the establishment of Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship. Hoffman's poetry is written in the sky using smokes from his air plane thus announcing the new blend of technology and arts as Chile was 'recovering its manhood' under a military dispensation.Some of Hoffman's poems, all one liners written on the skies, read as follows:

"YOUTH...YOUTH"
"GOOD LUCK TO EVERYONE IN DEATH"
"LEARN FROM FIRE"
"Death is friendship"
"Death is Chile"
"Death is responsibility"
"Death is growth"
"Death is communion"
"Death is cleansing"

and so on till "Death is resurrection" and the generals themselves realize that something is amiss. It is, however, something far more macabre that leads to his downfall.

Bolano's prose is marked by the alacrity of flash fiction (which to me is one of the most important developments in literature in the internet age), but nevertheless carries forward the tradition of the serious novel. The absence of an explicit plot in the story does not mean that there is no plot as a post-modern reading would suggest. Instead, the plot is hidden below the surface, like an underground river.

The point that he makes is that Nazi-like brutality has a long lineage, and it resides perceptibly and imperceptibly in literature as well. Literature is, therefore, a battlefield in the recovery of humanity and is not outside the realm of politics, and neither is politics outside the realm of poetry and literature.

Reading the novel, I could not but relate very much to India where, interestingly, it is rather normal to have politicians, in the tradition of rulers of the past like Bahadur Shah Zafar and Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, to double up as poets and writers. It is therefore not unusual that two major contemporary politicians - Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi, former Prime Minister and a present Chief Minister of Gujarat respectively - belonging to what is easily the closest we have to a fascist political movement, the Bharatiya Janata Party, have some claim to being poets.

To look for Nazi literature in India, one does not need biographies of imaginary writers. In India, they live among us, in our times. The question of literature and politics being separate also does not arise. They are so intricately tied up that both are the same. The nightmare and the muse.

Book Review: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

aatish — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:50:56 EDT

While we were still under the spell of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a new generation of Latin American writers arrived.

A scintillating star in the galaxy of this new generation undoubtedly is Roberto Bolaño, who died at the age of 50 four years ago. Principally a poet, he increasingly has been recognized as an important contemporary novelist. Starting with By Night, in Chile to the most recently translated work The Savage Detectives, and the much awaited translation of his longest work 2066, his voice is very unique, and imploring to be heard. When The Savage Detectives was published nine years ago in its original Spanish version, it was hailed by some as the greatest thing to happen in the Spanish speaking world since Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Bolaño was born in Chile,but lived most of his life in Mexico, briefly going back to Chile when Salvadore Allende came to power, and returning after the infamous September 11 coup.

The novel is unduly long, 575 pages filled in a most unusual way, violating some of the most fundamental "rules" of writing, and especially novel writing. Except for complaining about the length of the novel- about 400 pages would have been ideal and the first part that is filled with excruciating, even nauseating details of the sexual proclivities of the "visceral realists", there is little to complain about the novel, and much to deliberate over.

Divided into three parts, the bulky middle one- titled "Mexicans Lost in Mexico"- is sandwiched between two rather thin ones. Part one introduces us to some of the central characters in the novel- Arturo Belano (an alter ego of the author) and Ulises Lima, both founder poets of the visceral realist movement that set itself the task of transforming the poetry landscape not only in Mexico, but the entire Latin America.

In a way, the novel is autobiographical, not in one, but two ways. It traces the story of Artur Belano, except that instead of him writing his autobiography, it is people that know him who write about him. Each one of the 55 people either write their personal journals at various times between 1975 and 1997, or sometimes converse directly with the reader. The long middle section novel consists of little more these entries, some short, but some rather long so that like Don Quixote, there are stories within stories, between them charting a landscape both fascinating and unexpected in its meanderings.

The other novel that comes to mind is Hopscotch by the Argentinian Julio Cortazar, a novel about a group of Bohemian Latinos in Europe. In the case of the characters in The Savage Detectives, the word Bohemian is an understatement!

There is no plot in the four hundred or so pages in the middle section. In the first section, narrated by a character - with no particular literary qualities, the two protagonists (the "savage detectives") go out in search of an unknown predecessor, Cesárea Tinajero, who after initiating a now forgotten school of poetry in the 1920s has disappeared in the northern borders of the Sonora desert. The novel returns to the theme only in the last part, when the meanderings of the middle part- the umpteen journal entries, become clearer, and the title of the novel begins to make sense.

What emerges, is the story of the "lost" generation of Latin American writers that grew up in the shadow of giants like Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Octavio Paz. While the previous generation protested against the existing political and social order they invariably also became part of that system, with those like Garcia Marquez becoming friends with political leaders like Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa himself running for the Peruvian presidential candidacy (though as a candidate of the Right) and Octavio Paz serving the PRI government in Mexico as a diplomat.

At the end, the novel leaves one with images floating across turbulent waters, a mosaic of paintings flitting past speedily. Fifty-five characters speak in their own voices - for the uniqueness of each Bolaño has to be commended. The word that occurs most frequently is "I", the breakneck speed of the narrative- not so much action as speed, and the concurrent narrative from multiple geographic places and from various dates on the calendar- in a word, the novel is very much that belongs to our age dominated as it is by accelerated communications around the globe.

Is the novel then a reflection of the senseless chaos that seems to prevail around us? Is it the post modern dystopia- all narrative and no plots, no certainties? At one level, Bolaño's novel would seem to indicate so. At another level, it pulls the rug from under the feet of such a world.

The Birth Centenary of Bhagat Singh

aatish — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:08:50 EDT

Jis marne te jag dare, mere man anand, Marne te hi paiye puran parmanand

(Death, that terrifies most in this world, is what brings me happiness. It is in Death alone that one finds eternal bliss.)

- Kabir doha recited by Bhagat Singh when conveyed the judgement on his death sentence.

September 27th is the birth centenary of Shaheed Bhagat Singh.

It may not be a false statement to assert that one hundred years after his birth, Bhagat Singh is, at best, a name to be remembered ritually. His brief life indeed finds a mention every year, generally on his death anniversary - 23 March, and then his ideas are conveniently forgotten.

In the age of trickle down economics when youngsters learn to balance college studies with a job in the BPO around the corner, his message is perhaps irrelevant to many of those who are in the same age group as he was when he climbed the gallows.

Bhagat Singh was 23 years 5 months and 25 days old when he was hanged by the British government.

Despite Mahatma Gandhi's pacifism and opposition to capital punishment he made no attempts to stop the hanging. Some consider it to be one of the worst political mistakes that he made.

But it is a tribute to the young man that his pictures are the only ones, along with Dr Ambedkar, that can be found in all parts of the country today. He is owned by the Arya Samajis as well as the Communists, by the Bollywood mucksters as well as Dalit organizations, by the Khalistanis as well as the Hindutva brigade.

It may be difficult to fully understand why Bhagat Singh, and why not Chandrasekar Azad or many of those from other movements like the Chittagong Armoury raid participants, is still given an honour that is denied to many other participants in the less pacifist strands of the Indian freedom movement.

One of these reasons is undoubtedly that Bhagat Singh personified the thinking terrorist. It is amazing to see the maturity that he brings to the table in his essay Why I am an Athiest. He was a vociferous reader and perhaps one of the few revolutionary leaders who read so profusely till the end.

His passionate embrace of death was underlined by a deep social commitment that envisaged an egalitarian society that went beyond the struggle for independence from British colonialism. Freedom may have come to some, but for many it is still a distant dream.

Which is why Bhagat Singh and Dr. Ambedkar can still be seen on dilapidated walls and off colour posters across the country.

Book Review: Ayodhya 6 December 1992, P.V. Narasimha Rao

aatish — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 13:35:30 EDT

Barring Jawaharlal Nehru, it is unusual for Indian Prime Ministers to have authored books giving their political perspectives. P.V. Narasimha Rao was an exception. He authored a novel, The Insider during his own lifetime. The book under review Ayodhya 6 December 1992 appears posthumously.

The author's objective for writing the book is stated unambiguously in the Introduction:

...this book attempts to examine the broad factual, Constitutional, judicial, legal and political aspects of the events that culminated in the tragedy of 6 December 1992. It is not intended as an exercise in self- righteousness or justification of anything done or not done.

It is a tribute to PV as a writer that he has distilled from a vast amount of material to put together a racy, 188 page book without compromising the seriousness of the topic. There are less than a dozen pages that are tedious- mainly because of the long quotes from judicial and other reports whose complete text has been incorporated in the appendices.

PV does a meticulous job in the first six chapters recounting the history of the dispute, interspersing what could have become a dry narrative with perceptive insights. He points out, for example, that the RJM was already gathering significant momentum at the time of Indira Gandhi's assassination that brought the DCM Toyota yatra to a grinding halt inflicting a temporary setback to the movement.

He is also fair enough to credit Mulayam Singh Yadav's firm handling of the Ayodhya crisis in 1989 when he effectively used Central forces to halt Advani's juggernaut.

It is in the later chapters, specially, " Ayodhya 6 December 1992" and "Why was Article 356 not invoked" that PV's book is at its weakest as it loses its initial promise of not being a self justification on the inaction of the Central government to thwart the destruction of the Babri Masjid on the fateful day.

Paragraph after paragraph, PV gets into hair splitting details as a defence for his and his government's inaction. The objectivity of the initial chapters gives way here to repetitive citing of facts, rhetorical questions posed and labyrinthine arguments.

In not too subtle a language, he indicates that he was "betrayed" by the Kalyan Singh government, that there were insincere machinations by leaders of his own party, the unique and unprecedented situation that 6 December presented in the history of the Republic, the dubious role played by the non Congress, non BJP parties and the perceived lapses on part of the Supreme court.

In other words, all the stars conspired to paralyse the government into inaction.

Even as PV swings from one argument to another, sometimes contradicting himself (for example, on the "crucial" role of logistics on page 174 only to point out, a few pages later, that it was not the crucial factor), he slips in a sentence that this reviewer feels is central to understanding the reasons for the paralysis of his government. PV here lets the cat out of the bag as it were.

He indicates that the BJP leaders stepped up the aggressiveness of the movement when they felt that PV was getting too close to the sants and the sadhus, in the four months before 6 December. These sants and sandhus constituted the vast and dispersed middle leadership that expanded the reach of the previously urban based party.

This "subtle aspect of the RJM", as PV terms it, not only indicates that PV was hobnobbing with these elements, but in the very next sentence shows his own susceptibilities to the Hindutva cause: " ... the undeniable fact that while Hindu masses were swayed by their devotion to Ram and their intense desire for the temple, the political forces behind the issue could not care less for the temple."

Earlier, he had promised to construct a Ram temple in his Independence Day speech.

In other words, he was trying to display a holier than thou attitude with the BJP and hijack its agenda. He clearly failed in his calculations or machinations, the BJP trumped him in any case. He evidently had no workable backup plan.

This political failure lies at the heart of the problem- the beginning of the 1980s was marked by Indira Gandhi's tilt away from the Left, if not to the Right, progressing during the years of Rajiv Gandhi to a confused dalliance with both Hindu and Muslim communalism.

PV's era marked a consolidation of this swing towards Hindutva- culminating in the destruction of the Babri Masjid. Interestingly, PV does not use the word "Babri Masjid" anywhere in the book (though he does in his speeches in the appendices)- it is referred to as a "structure" or as the "Babri structure".

Despite the scholarly collection of facts, that well document the main events culminating on the single biggest attack on Indian secularism after Partition, PV's defence is unconvincing and one cannot but help recall Shakespeare:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Related posts: review of "The Anatomy of a Confrontation: The Babri masjid- Ram Janmabhumi Controversy"

Technorati Tags: Hindutva, BJP, India, Ayodhya

Book Review: Distant Stars by Roberto Bolaño

aatish — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 00:06:17 EDT

Roberto Bola�o died three years ago at the relatively young age of 50 , at the pinnacle of his career as a writer and before he could be better known in the English knowing world. The translation into English of his By Night in Chile a few years ago marked his arrival in the English world. Distant Stars is the next book translated into English. His collection of short stories Last Evenings on Earth has been published recently and the translation of his most ambitious posthumous work 2666 is eagerly awaited.

The theme of Distant Stars is the same as the By Night in Chile, the over two decades of unbridled exercise of power by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet after the violent overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende on that other, less remembered, 9/11 of 1973.

The theme has been attempted by other writers, notably by Ariel Dorfman in The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, who made a vastly more experimental attempt at capturing the brutality of those years. In contrast, Distant Stars is a relatively simpler novel, closer to Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann, but less verbose and less tedious.

Mann had taken the analogy of the folk legend of Faust and Mephistopheles where a musician signs a pact with the devil (in this case Nazi Germany), to illustrate the immorality of those who had been accomplices of the Nazi regime. Bola�o, in this work, takes the case of an avant garde poet, Carlos Wieder. In the process he also offers insights into the lives of that generation of poets that was torn apart by the dictatorship: "Madness was not exceptional at that time," he remarks, when Carlos Wieder inaugurates a new form of poetry by writing one and two liners poems in the sky on an airplane.

While Carlos wins accolades from the regime, other poets meet with a different fate. "The good news was that we had been expelled from the university, the bad was that almost all of our friends have disappeared", the narrator's friend Bibiano observes. There are many incidents that recount the "melancholy folklore of exile- made up of stories that are fabrications or pale copies of what really happened".

Carlos meanwhile goes on to experiment with other forms of 'literature' till it becomes so grotesque that even the supportive regime finds it difficult to continue to stand by him. Bola�o unmasks the gory details, and Wieder's participation in the brutalization of the Chilean society during the dictatorship. Wieder's unwritten pact with the devil becomes evident.

Bola�o scores with the fact that he is able to evoke a series of sub texts that are pregnant with possibilities. The following narration, for example, by the Indian maid of one the victims of the Wieder's murderous crimes indicates a new trajectory that deserves a different treatment altogether.

The maid makes an appearance in the court against the defendant Carlos Weider when his crimes are discovered.

Over the years her Spanish had dwindled. When she spoke every second word was in Mapuche... in her memory the night of the crime was one in the long history of killing and injustice. Her account of the event was swept up in a cyclical, epic poem, which, as her dumbfounded listeners came to realize, was partly her story, the story of the Chilean citizen Amalia Maluenda, who used to work for the Garmendias, and partly the story of the Chilean nation. A story of terror.... Remembering the dark of the crime, she said she had heard the music of the Spanish. When asked to clarify what she meant by "the music of the Spanish," she replied: "Sheer rage, sir, sheer, futile rage".

Technorati Tags: Roberto Bola�o, Latin American Literature, Literature, Chile, Books

Book Review: Under the Shadow of Kamakhya by Mamoni Raisom Goswami

aatish — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 00:06:16 EDT

Mamoni Raisom Goswami (aka Indira Goswami) is most well known for her novel The Moth Eaten Saddle (Howrah) of the Tusker, where she weaved the whole tapestry of life around a Vaishnavite satara (religious institution). Her writings represent some of the finest in the much broader stream of literature from her home state of Asom (formerly Assam).

Under the Shadow of Kamakhya is a collection of eight of her short stories, some of which have appeared in other anthologies as well.

In all the stories, Mamoni Raisom enthralls one with the kaleidoscopic descriptions of her land and people. The details of the birds, the flora and fauna are vividly described with the flourish of a poet. The characters absorb the ambience of the landscape and are shaped by it:

"Her silk garmets shone like the phosphorescent foam on the turbulent waters of the Brahmaputra during the monsoon"

("Under the Stadow of Kamakhya")

Similarly, the landscape also acquires shades of the characters:

The bulbuls on the Hijol tree started chirping noisily. The sun rose above the Brahmaputra. Wreaths of violet and brown clouds clung to it, making it look like the pinched and pale face of a hapless prostitute, blushing at the thought of having to spend time with an unwanted stranger. The clouds seemed to lay bare the strange combination of helplessness and indomitable strength on this face.

The cinders of the burnout chest were scattered all over the place. In the morning sunshine this resembled the hide of a freshly butchered goat, spread out on the earth to dry.

("The Chest")

The Brahmaputra river and the Kamakhya temple occupy center stage in the stories.

The most powerful story is undoubtedly the one named in the title: Under the Shadow of Kamakhya where the chief protagonist Padmapriya is sent back to her parent's home when her husband's family wrongly suspects that she has an incurable disease. The husband finally comes back to take her home and at his moment of glory of accepting her back is shocked to know about the strands in his wife's life during the two years of his absence.

In The Chest Toradoi burns the wooden chest that belonged to the man who she believes never married because he loved her but could not marry her because of caste restrictions. Her brother's revelation about the man shatters the last flicker of a misplaced illusion.

In The Journey, Mamoni Raisom poignantly weaves the personal story of an emaciated tea shop owner and his family in the background of the liberation struggle for Asom led by the ULFA.

The Beasts is about the unpredictability of people, the capitulation of a principled man who sells his trust among a Rubha tribeswoman to an unscrupulous but powerful merchant. The story is narrated through a mute character. It is a story of betrayal.

Dwarka and his Gun shows the power of an uncertain, open ended story where the reader's imagination is left free to soar.

Mamoni Raisom displays her mastery over the craft of the short story that would rank her with some of the best in the world today. They also bring out the concerns of this extremely talented writer and illustrate the enduring place for realism.

In Parasu's Well, a greedy Kabuliwallah moneylender melts when he sees the hard work put in by the dull, almost wretched character of Parasu, and the sad condition of his sick brother. She does an uncannily meticulous job of describing the act of digging the well itself and using that as a powerful metaphor for a desperate man's struggle for existence.

Mamoni Raisom always manages to rescue humanism from the clutches of the rigmarole, the grind of daily life, misunderstandings and human failings.

Tags: Assam, Mamoni Raisom Goswami, India, Literature, Books