Dear Reader,
I truly had the best of intentions of getting this to you before February ended, but it’s been a hellish month for us in India and the last week has brought home terrors like we haven’t experienced in a while.
So here I am, in March, to tell you about my February reads in the hope of distracting myself (and perhaps, you) from the nightmare — state-supported pogrom; global pandemic; which horror do you fancy more? — that is wrapping itself around us like a straitjacket.
This time, I thought I’d try something a little different so if you click on the play button, you’ll hear me reading out passages from three books that I really enjoyed. I figured this is a better way to give you an example of the writing. Hopefully, it doesn’t feel like audio word soup.
But before I talk about those books, let me start off with the book from which I haven’t read in the audio bit. The Corset, by Laura Purcell, was a decent read, but nowhere close to being the masterpiece that the blurbs on its cover promised. Not that I picked the book for the blurbs. Pro tip: Never, ever pick a book for its blurbs. They are by far the most misleading signals ever because most of the time, it’s one author doing another author a favour either out of the kindness of the first author’s heart or because the two share a relationship that makes both of them biased about the other person’s writing. Neither is a good basis for a recommendation.
Coming back to The Corset, which is a Gothic thriller, set in Victorian England, revolving around two young women. One is a teenaged seamstress named Ruth Butterham who believes her perfect stitches are harbingers of death. The other is the wealthy Dorothea Truelove, who considers herself a woman of science. Dorothea is a phrenologist and visits the women’s prison to study their skulls as part of her research. Part of the book is Ruth telling Dorothea the story of her life, which is one misfortune piled on another (but entirely credible, especially if you know the miserable conditions in which the poor survived in that era). The other part is Dorothea discovering how she herself is at the centre of a sinister plot.
Ironically for a book that’s named after a device that constricted its wearer, The Corset felt a little flabby and overwritten to me. But Purcell does come up with an absolutely brilliant term: “a gauntlet of girls”. Just for that, I’m grateful for this book because that, dear reader, is as perfect a collective for girls as anyone could imagine.
Monty Lyman’s The Remarkable Live of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Surface is the kind of science writing I love. It’s full of trivia, written in a style that’s elegant but simple, and presents the science as something that is comprehensible rather than impregnable. While telling the story of skin, Lyman picks up shiny bits from history, literature, travel — Lyman seems to have traipsed all over the world, from Nagaland to Tanzania — and creates this magpie’s nest of a book.
I’d actually expected that the skin would be the subject of an intense amount of research — the cosmetics industry is a behemoth that benefits from this research — but it turns out that the skin holds its secrets very close to its hypodermis. Also, while there is the research into anti-ageing etc, there is also curiously delightful research like the project I read about in the audio segment. Who’d have thunk that there could be a connection between your favourite pop song and your skin? Also, Cleopatra may have been onto something with her idea of bathing in donkeys’ milk. She’s believed to have had a stable of 700 donkeys that provided milk for her daily bath and a few hundred years later, science would figure out there are molecules floating around in that milk that do have a positive effect on the skin’s ageing process.
On to far grimmer topics, like murder and child sexual abuse. Usually, when I see the term “creative non-fiction”, I roll my eyes because do you really need to “create” with non-fiction? Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body is proof that sometimes there are gaps that aren’t filled by evidence and you need the imagination and creativity to light up certain shadowy bits.
The Fact of a Body is a memoir of sorts. As a young lawyer, Marzano-Lesnevich was asked to work on a death-row hearing for Ricky Langley, convicted of murder and child molestation. The case is horrible and Langley’s personal history is grotesque in its own way. One of the most haunting bits in the book is the backstory involving Langley’s parents and the circumstances under which Langley was conceived. Langley’s case is full of questions and surprises, not the least of which is the victim’s mother asking the court to show Langley mercy.
Running alongside Langley’s story is Marzano-Lesnevich’s own family history, including dark secrets that no one wants to put on record. Dead siblings, phantoms in bathtubs, abusive patriarchs — the smiling photographs of happy families mute so many stories.
There’s enough in terms of story to keep you interested in The Fact of a Body and Marzano-Lesnevich is dedicated to the cause of ending chapters and sections with devices that are intended to up the ante as far as intrigue goes. I found this need to push the reader’s buttons a little tiresome after a bit, but for most part, Marzano-Lesnevich’s prose is just beautiful. She doesn’t need to worry about holding her reader’s attention using plot devices because her language is so evocative. The images she crafts stay with you, like the idea that the police search lights make a cat’s cradle in a forest. Marzano-Lesnevich also uses long, complex sentences expertly (like in the bit that I’ve read out) and that takes a lot of skill. Not once in the book does a complex sentence become a tangle of fragments.
The personal narrative that Marzano-Lesnevich shares in The Fact of a Body is deeply painful and that she wrote it is an act of bravery because many in her family were determined to not acknowledge the facts she writes about. There’s one moment in which Marzano-Lesnevich’s father laughs and tells everyone at a Christmas party that Marzano-Lesnevich is writing about something that only she recalls — effectively saying that his daughter imagined the sexual abuse she was subjected to as a child — because he can’t admit to the shame of admitting that the young girls in his family were preyed upon by a patriarch. For Marzano-Lesnevich, it’s important that she write what happened into reality because it’s been pushed out of sight for so long.
Also, as she shows in the course of the book, lived experience doesn’t always fit simple and simplistic formulae. What do you do with an almost infantile memory of having seen your sibling drown in a bathtub? How do you process the conflict between the genuinely-affectionate grandfather who, in secret hours of the night, becomes a predator? What do you say to counter him when he says that those violations are not a big deal because he survived similar abuse and turned out fine, so why can’t you just keep your mouth shut and grow up?
It seems a little wrong to call a book that is so heavy with abuse beautiful, but that’s actually true of The Fact of a Body.
And finally, Chats With the Dead by Shehan Karunatilaka, whose debut novel Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew is still one of my favourite novels ever (and I don’t give two hoots about cricket). There isn’t much humour in literary fiction, particularly the stuff that comes out of South Asia. This isn’t surprising considering the state of most nations in this region, thanks to their politicians. Karunatilaka is one of the few writers who can pack a punch and a punchline simultaneously. It’s almost unsettling how his writing trips lightly between humour, horror and cynicism, like it’s playing a macabre version of hopscotch.
At its most superficial level, Chats with the Dead is a murder mystery. Malinda Albert Kabalana — raised by single mother; war photographer with a finger in every camp’s pie; homosexual and promiscuous — wakes up to find he’s a ghost. Now for the minor detail of figuring out who killed him and to get a spot of revenge, while offering the reader a bird’s eye view of the mangled mess that was Sri Lanka in 1989. There’s a little bit about the basic set up of the book in this interview with Karunatilaka.
There’s nothing particularly new about using ghosts to tell stories of those who have been silenced. Toni Morrison did it in Beloved; George Saunders did it in Lincoln in the Bardo (which also features ghosts in limbo, like in Chats with the Dead). But Karunatilaka’s Maal is among the funnier and more bitter ghosts you’ll encounter in literature. He’s also incredibly ambitious. Maal may be dead, but he’s going to do everything he can to expose those who have profited from Sri Lanka being plunged in chaos.
It’s a curious fact that invariably, authors who use the supernatural do so to make sense of the normal that shouldn’t be the norm. Devices like ghosts operate at a distance, familiar with the world that the living can survive only by being comfortably numb. It’s in death that these characters are finally empowered to reject the normal and acknowledge everything that’s wrong. Also wrapped in the supernatural is a sense of desperate hope. When everything goes to hell and you feel an absolute lack of agency, perhaps there is comfort in imagining things could be set right because there is something out there, looking out for us.
Chats with the Dead is spread across seven moons, with each moon being a chapter in which Maal encounters different characters and recovers fragments of his life as memories. For Maal, death is a revelation even if he can’t remember crucial details. To begin with, the afterlife turns out to be essentially a government office. Then there’s Colombo, which is a decaying but magical city of the dead, swarming with ghosts of people who have died violently because of the long-standing unrest. From the machine that stops working or the accident that can’t be prevented, there’s literally a ghost in every malfunctioning machine.
To add to his woes, Maal does have a deadline. At the end of the seven moons, if Maal doesn’t go towards the light, then he’ll be stuck in the In-Between, resigned to haunting the living world and being chased by creatures who are hungry for his soul. This gives Maal seven days to figure out what happened to him, why he was killed, say his goodbyes, and also organise an exhibition of photographs designed to expose pretty much every political hyprocrite in Sri Lanka.
Despite the supernatural crackle of Chats with the Dead, the novel is set in a meticulously-observed and unmistakably real world. I can’t say for certain that Cyril Wijeratne is modelled on Ranjan Wijeratne, the minister of defense to whom death squads reported and who eventually died in a bomb blast, but there certainly seem to be some resemblances. If I remember correctly, Ranjan Wijeratne’s son ended up going to the United States of America (Wijeratne was on his way to the office after dropping his son to the airport when his entourage was blown up), much like Maal’s boyfriend Dilan, who happens to be Minister Stanley Dharmendran’s son. (Not that Wijeratne was the only person sending his offspring to distant foreign shores for study by a long shot.) Much like in Chinaman, there is so much that is real and factual in Chats with the Dead that if this was my first Karunatilaka novel, I probably would have Googled “Malinda Kabalana, photographer”. However, having done that for one Pradeep Mathew, I am now wiser.
As Maal rode his way to different parts of Colombo, listening to and watching stories unfold, Chats with the Dead vaguely reminded me of the old Doordarshan show Vikram Aur Betaal. Not because Karunatilaka’s writing is as formulaic and melodramatic — it isn’t. His prose is exquisite — but because Betaal has a wickedness to him much like Maal. Also like Betaal, Maal wears a mask of wit and humour that obscures just how grimly determined he is. Everything may be going to hell and it may be unrealistic to hope he can make a difference, but he continues to document and plan for a future. Not even death can’t crush his desperate hopes.
Even though Chats with the Dead is set in 1989, I’m sure there’s enough in it for Sri Lankan readers to feel the novel is contemporary. The country and politics that Karunatilaka describes, full of corrupt and spineless politicians and helpless but angry citizens, certainly felt very relatable to me. This is a brave novel to write because for all the packaging of fiction, Karunatilaka is savage in his depiction of the political establishment that has nurtured war and unrest for its own selfish ends. I can’t imagine too many either writing a similar book about India or finding a publisher for it.
There’s so much carefully embroidered into Chats with the Dead that I already feel like re-reading the book even though I just finished it. However, let’s be clear: It’s not tipping Chinaman as my favourite Karunatilaka novel just yet.
In other news, my list of to-read books is piling up at a faster rate than usual. Ironically, this slump properly announced itself around the time that we released The Lit Pickers episode on kickstarting the reading habit. For those of you who have forgotten what The Lit Pickers is, it's a podcast on books on reading that Supriya Nair and I have been able to bring out thanks to the rather winsome people of Maed in India (https://www.maedinindia.in/). Our last two were on the Ramayana and Amitabh Bagchi's Half The Night is Gone (https://deepanjana.substack.com/p/half-the-night-is-gone-foxy-aesop) and the fantasy fiction of JRR Tolkien. Good fun, if I do say so myself. A new episode dropped today, on Jane Austen’s novels.
And that’s all I have for you this time. Thank you for reading.
Dear Reader will be back soon.
Share this post